Hello from Athens Ohio, home of Ohio University

Hovind Asks Pseudo-Questions of Evolutionists

Feedback, discussion, comments, questions: Chris Cogan, ccogan@ou.edu

Following is a list of "questions" from Kent Hovind about evolution and a large number of questions irrelevant not just to evolution but even to biology generally, with my answers to most of them (including the irrelevant ones, to demonstrate to anyone why they are irrelevant). For examples of the irrelevancy just mentioned, consider just the first six questions, none of which is about anything that the theory of evolution has anything to say about, and only the last one is even relevant to biology (how did life originate?) Where space and matter came from (if, indeed, they came from anything) tells us nothing about whether the theory of evolution is true. Even the sixth question, about the origin of life, is not relevant, because the theory of evolution is not about the origin of life, but solely about what happened and happens with life after it comes into existence. More on this issue below when I deal specifically with this question. The first six questions should be a clue to the reader that Hovind is not honest, and that his purpose is not rational persuasion but propagandistic persuasion, tricking the uninformed or excessively eager into accepting his views. His "questions" are thus designed not to educate or inform but to damage the mind of the reader, by leading the reader into egregiously bad and self-destructive habits of "thought" (i.e., mechanical reaction to information on the basis of prejudices).

And, whether the theory of evolution is true or false makes no difference at all to these six questions. That is, whether the theory of evolution is true or false makes no difference whatever to these six questions, which are independent of the theory.

Also included are "questions" of a specifically technical nature, some of which we don't have answers to but which, like the question about space, are irrelevant to whether the theory is true. We haven't answered every question in physics, either, but we don’t reject Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity merely because some questions are not yet answered. Further, in other cases the general answers are fairly obvious to anyone who actually knows about the theory of evolution. This means that Hovind is deliberately aiming his questions not at evolutionists, as he pretends, but at those who are uninformed about evolution, and for the purpose of insinuating that there is some great difficulty in answering the questions, some difficulty that is not a reflection on limited research resources but a reflection on the theory of evolution itself. That is, he is taking advantage of his intended audience's lack of knowledge about the theory in order to discredit it before they have even studied it.

Incidentally, "studying" the theory of evolution by reading only what its opponents say is a sure-fire way of getting even the most basic rudiments of the theory wrong -- about the only truth that one will get this way is that it's a naturalistic theory that conflicts with the myth of creation in Genesis. This is true, but nearly everything else one "learns" about the theory this way will very likely be wrong. For example, one is likely to "learn" that, according to the theory of evolution, life just "poofed" into existence one day. This is false: The theory makes no such claims and has no such implications, but this claim is still being repeated by creationists.

At the end is a bit on the Bombardier beetle from someone named James Harmison. I found it at TalkOrigins along with Hovind's "questions," and, since it also repeats a claim made by creationists who shoot from the lip and never ask questions later, I have left it attached and given my answer to it as well.

I apologize for how short this piece is. To provide full answers to all of the questions would, quite literally, require an entire book. And, in any case, there are other answers to many or all of the questions readily available on the Internet. Some seem quite detailed (and, in fact, large enough to actually require a book to publish them in print). I looked at one or two of these briefly, with the idea of "stealing" parts of them (with full citations and credit, of course), but decided against any further expansion of what I've already written. I apologize for leaving so many of Hovind's bizarre "questions" unanswered (I don’t deal at all with the question of how amphibians "changed" to reptiles, for example), but there are reasons for me not to try:

1. This piece is already fairly large.

2. I don’t know the specific answers to several of them. My purpose has not been to answer the infinitely many questions that a fool can raise (because the fool in question is too stupid to do his own thinking or studying?), but rather mainly to expose his propaganda methods.

3. Even assuming that I knew the answers to all of the questions, it would take too long to write them all out. Can't Hovind use the Internet? Or go to a library and pick up a book on biology? Or just do a little thinking? Is that too much to ask?

In what follows, I have bracketed my own remarks with [-- and --] to make it easy to distinguish them from Hovind's.

We start with what I assume are his own introductory remarks and claims. Since they are as propagandistic and disingenuous as his "questions," I will treat them the same way I do the questions.

Questions for Evolutionists

Various

The test of any theory is whether or not it provides answers to basic questions.

[-- Not exactly. The primary test of any theory (any scientific theory) is whether it provides possible answers of questions (not necessarily basic) and whether it can be empirically tested against reality by observational means. Any absolute idiot can "answer" questions the way Hovind does: By simply making things up or mindlessly parroting what other people have made up. Scientific theories, like those of physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology, and even history, must stand up to various kinds of tests against the observable world, by having empirical implications that must be in agreement with what we can or might observe. General Relativity is accepted in physics because it has implications about the way things in the universe behave that are different from those of the older Newtonian theory, and which are found by observation to be factual (light bending by a certain amount and in certain direction as light passes by the Sun, for just one of many examples). --]

Some well-meaning, but misguided, people think evolution is a reasonable theory to explain man’s questions about the universe.

[-- Not exactly. Some people think it is a reasonable theory to explain a range of facts about life on Earth, which is considerably less than explaining "man's questions about the universe." For example, it explains various aspects of the history of life on Earth, such as geographical grouping of related species (why there were no naturally occurring zebras in South America, for example), temporal grouping of related species (i.e., the occurrence of proto-horses and other horse-precursors only after a certain point in the history of life on Earth), why there is a "tree of life" pattern to the relationships among species, why bacteria adapt to antibiotics, why there are no camels living in the wild in Arctic regions (natural selection), why there are no polar bears living in the Sahara desert (natural selection again), why there are so many thousands of what would be flaws in design if living organisms were designed, and so on. As to explaining "man's questions about the universe," those are mostly dealt with by basic physics, cosmology, and philosophy, not the theory of evolution. Creationism, by the way, has no better answers than physics, cosmology, and philosophy do.

At one time, there were some people who tried to expand the theory of evolution into a general philosophical theory, but it doesn't stretch that far. It's a biological theory, not a metaphysical theory. --]

Evolution is not a good theory—it is just a pagan religion masquerading as science.

[-- Not exactly. Pagans have never developed such a theory, and have generally not scientific enough to do so, though they might have intuitively grasped that natural selection and natural variations (that could be passed on) might lead to new species. Only with Wallace and Darwin do we have anything like a fully developed scientific theory of evolution, and Darwin was hardly a pagan. Evolution has nothing to say about any religious beliefs except those that conflict with it, such as creationism. And, what it has to say is purely negative: They aren't true because they are incompatible with observable facts and any rational interpretation of them. Billions of possible religious views are perfectly compatible with the theory of evolution, which, after all, is not about any religious topic; it is about how life on Earth changes over long periods of time. It is not even about the origin of life on Earth, so it is even compatible with at least one kind of creationism, in which the first life-form(s) were "created" by some outside agency (such as aliens or some supernatural twit experimenting with the physical world). The theory of evolution is about physical facts. It only conflicts with conventional creationism because it is a religious belief about physical facts. A proper religion is careful not to adopt ideas that may be in conflict with the real world, because having "religious" ideas about the specifics of physical reality is a nearly certain guarantee that some of them will conflict with reality.

Gould's idea of non-overlapping magisteria is a little silly in many respects, precisely because so many religions, such as Hovind's, insist on trying to answer questions that they have no business trying to answer. The theory that is not a good theory is creationism, which has no physical basis at all, and which contradicts facts as well-established as the existence of the Moon. It has physical implications, none of which have proven to be true. Some variants of it even claim that recorded human history is fundamentally wrong because there is no record of a worldwide flood 4400 years ago, and the physical evidence is flatly against such a flood, as is archaeological evidence (that shows that there has been continuous cultures existing since thousands of years before the time of the flood, uninterrupted through the many months that the flood is supposed to have lasted. This single fact alone is enough to cause any reasonable person to reject any such form of creationism. But, even those forms of young-earth creationism that do not require the occurrence of a worldwide Biblical flood cannot stand up in the face of the physical facts and even a moderately rational understanding of them.

Hovind's approach in these matters is to evade the facts, to try to explain them away, or to try to deny them outright, or to discount their significance, or to overplay trivia (such as the idiotic question about coelacanth's below), as if the continued existence of some ancient species somehow refuted the idea that most ancient species are now extinct (over 99 percent of all species that have ever lived are extinct).

But, science does not work by denial, distortion, evasion, and explaining away. The fact is that evolution does a great job of providing actual explanations for the facts that it deals with, and creationism provides a scientifically useless pseudo-theory that, physically, makes no sense at all.

(And, of course, the Biblical creation story was never intended by its authors to be taken as literal truth. It is an allegorical story, not a literal representation of what was actually believed to have happened. You can tell this simply by the way it is written. It is written as a story, not as a journalistic report on historical events. If Hovind were not nearly illiterate, he could tell this himself by simply reading them in the Bible.) --]

[-- Okay, here come the questions themselves. --]

The following questions were distributed to the 750-plus people who attended my debate at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, on January 9, 1993. (The videotaped debate is #6, $9.95.) Questions added since the debate remarked with an asterisk (*).

1. Where did the space for the universe come from?

[-- What does Hovind mean by "space"? Do he mean "space" the way it is used in modern physics (as a kind of replacement for the old "luminiferous ether")? Or does he mean it in the sense of a true physical void in which there is nothing at all? If he means the first, then it comes whatever ultimate substance the universe is made of. If he means the second, it is simply a lack of anything, and so it doesn't have to "come" from anything.

Nothingness does not have to have an origin, because it is not a funny kind of "something," and even something that is something need not have an origin (according to theists themselves, who claim that God exists and yet had no origin). Therefore, in an ultimate sense, the ultimate basic "stuff" of the universe need not have an origin (and, in fact, can't have one). --]

2. Where did matter come from?

[-- Space, or at least, from the same material or stuff that space came from. If you want an ultimate origin other than "Existence," there isn't one, and can't be one; something must always have existed, and that something is simply the basic material of Existence, whatever it is. --]

3. Where did the laws of the universe come from (gravity, inertia, etc.)?

[-- From the nature of the things it is made of. For an example of how this works, consider a cube of iron. It behaves like a cube of iron instead of a sphere of ice. Both the cube and the sphere behave the way they do because of their natures, their identities. A cube acts like a cube because of its shape, as does a sphere, and iron and ice both behave they way they do because of their nature. If you want to know where the things the universe is made of came from (which would provide a more-remote source for the laws, in that the source of the things the universe is made of would determine their nature and thus the laws of the universe.

One error implicit in your question is that it assumes that the laws are separate and have a separate basis from that of the things the universe is made of, as if we could have a universe made of exactly the same things but with different laws. This is impossible. Not merely metaphysically impossible, but logically impossible. However, your error is not entirely stupid; it is a common error, even among physicists. Bit, it is an error, and it is a variant or relative of Platonism, which holds that ideas can have their own existence independent of minds. In this case, it is the idea that there can be such a thing as a law of nature or of the universe that has its own existence separate from the things that it is a law of, as if cubes could be made to behave exactly like spheres merely by applying a new set of these laws.

Aside from nearly total lack of thought about the nature of Existence, existence, logic, identity, consciousness, universals, and the nature of reason, the kind of error Hovind exposes here is primarily motivated by a desire to confuse or misdirect. If he can get people to focus on the non-question of where laws of nature come as if they came from something separate from the things that they are laws of, they will be more likely to accept his fraudulent non-answer: God as the source of these laws.

The problem for Hovind is that he has to maintain the illusion of a problem where there is one (this problem is roughly like the "problem" of why regular hexagons of all the same size can fit together snugly while circles will always have spaces between them; it's only a "problem" if you get misdirected from the nature of the hexagons and circles). This generally requires more than merely stating the "problem." Hovind must also reinforce the confusion and misdirection by means of other "suggestions" to the audience, such as are included in several of his other "questions." --]

4. How did matter get so perfectly organized?

[-- It didn't, and isn't. But, insofar as it got organized at all, you'd have to specify what kind of organization you have in mind. Much of matter is self-organizing, in that, given a mixture of electrons, protons and neutrons, and suitable density and temperature (average activity level), atoms will form spontaneously, without any outside organizing force or agency. Other kinds of organization occur under the influence of gravitation, light, heat, cooling (cooling can increase order, as is shown by the crystals that form when chaotic water vapor turns to symmetrical snowflakes), magnetic fields (which organize many materials in alignment with the fields), chemical processes, and so on. --]

5. Where did the energy come from to do all the organizing?

[-- It's a false (and stupid) assumption that energy is needed to organize matter, as indicated above. Indeed, the addition of energy often disorganizes matter. The removal of energy can also organize matter. Energy is, in any case, inherent in the universe, so the question is really a reformulation of the question of where the universe came from. The answer to that is two-fold:

a. If you mean where did the basic stuff of the universe come from, it didn't come from anywhere. Even if God exists, and even if the material comes from God, it still always existed as part of God. God can no more create matter from nothing than he can draw a Euclidean circular triangle.

c. If you mean, where did it come from at the time the universe we know was formed, we don't know, beyond that it came from substance that already existed (or is a formation in some substance, etc.). --]

6. When, where, why, and how did life come from non-living matter?

[-- Living things are dead matter. Every electron, every proton, every neutron, every photon, etc., in a living organism is dead. At the deepest level, there is not the slightest difference between the matter of a living thing and the matter of a rock, just as there is no fundamental difference between oxygen involved in combustion and oxygen that happens to be compressed and stored in a tank. Life is a process, which arises like other processes. Your question is like asking, How does burning come from dead matter? In the case of burning, we have considerable knowledge. In the case of how life arises, we don't have as much knowledge, but burning gives us clues, as do other ongoing processes. Burning is a self-sustaining process that continues as long as the fuels and suitable conditions are present. Life is a process that continues as long as its "fuels" and suitable conditions are present. But, life is more complex than mere combustion, which is one of the reasons we don't know as much about how it originated, and why it's harder to create life ourselves technologically. However, the fact that metabolism is a defining characteristic of life (another being that it occurs in an "entity" (not merely in a transitory flow of fuels as in the case of a flame) gives us further clues.

More specifically, life probably arose as an evolutionary response to natural selection occurring with non-living replicators, systems that replicated but which were not living (as some molecules, and all viruses and prions do). At some point, one of these non-living replicators began a small bit of metabolic activity that gave it a survival advantage, and which thus started the process of evolution from mere replicators to actually living organisms, though we probably would not call the first such organism a living organism because its use of metabolic processes was probably so little and so incidental that it would not be sufficient to make it into a truly living organism. It would, instead, be a quasi-living replicator, a transitional between non-living replicators and truly living organisms that use metabolic processes as central to their continued existence and eventual reproduction.

Hovind's formulation of the question betrays his ignorance or dishonesty, because it assumes as fact that there is something basically different from the nature of life and the nature of other processes that occur in the physical world. It also assumes that evolution holds that life evolved from matter, which it doesn't. It assumes that life originated somehow (that being a good question but not one that the theory of evolution deals with), and then proceeds to explain how it changes over time. --]

7. When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself?

[-- It didn't. Life didn't ”learn" to reproduce. Figures of speech are fine in many contexts, where there is context. But Hovind is offering us a question without context. Are we supposed to think that he means that life literally learned to reproduce, or is it just a figure of speech? He has set up the question so that, regardless of the answer, he can bellyache that the answer doesn't ”really" answer the question. If it's taken literally, he will say that it was a figure of speech. If it is taken as a figure of speech, he will claim that the answer misrepresents his question (yes, he does this routinely, as in his famous "challenge" to evolutionists).

Reproduction occurs in some simple molecules, and so almost certainly occurred before life arose. An enzyme-like molecule that catalyzes the production of more copies of itself (by joining two other molecules together) would be self-reproducing, but not living. The better question is: When did reproducing things learn to live?

The answer to that is currently unknown, except in a general way as indicated above. --]

8. With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?

[-- This question is idiotic: Individual cells don't reproduce sexually. Larger organisms reproduce sexually. The first organism to reproduce "sexually" probably merely exchanged some genetic material with each other. --]

9. Why would any plant or animal want to reproduce more of its kind since this would only make more mouths to feed and decrease the chances of survival? (Does the individual have a drive to survive, or the species? How do you explain this?)

[-- It doesn't want to reproduce, unless it’s a human being (which is the only known species that even knows what reproduction is). Other species reproduce because that's their function: To reproduce. Those that didn't reproduce are no longer with us, as Hovind himself could have figured out with a few seconds of clear thought.

Why would anyone suppose that animals want to reproduce? Does Hovind really mean to ask this question? Or is he merely talking figuratively? Is he really asking: Why would any plant or animal act to reproduce more of its kind [ etc .]?

No, apparently not, because a figurative interpretation conflicts with the rest of the sentence. That is, if we interpret him literally, the rest of the question makes no sense, because there is no reason why anyone would think that an organism that is about to reproduce has any way of considering whether doing so will make more mouths to feed. Unless animals are able to consider such questions (which, in general, is a stupid supposition), it makes no sense to ask why they would want to reproduce.

Life itself is not the "goal." Perpetuation of the genes is the "goal," insofar as there can be (in a metaphorical sense) said to be a goal. Neither individuals nor species have a drive to survive. They have various other drives that have been selected because they were the ones that promoted survival of the genes.

Thus, if an organism had a small drive to eat foods that were better for it than what others of its species were eating, there would be a tendency for it and its progeny to be healthy enough to reproduce more frequently than there would be for other organisms of the same species that did not have this "drive." To the extent that this drive promoted reproductive success (by promoting the health of the organism), it would tend to become more and more common in the species, so that those genes responsible for it would win out, statistically, over those alternative genes that did not code for this propensity.

There is no drive, among non-human animals, to reproduce. There is, in those that have drives, a drive to copulate. The effect of this is reproduction, but there is no drive to reproduce. Even calling the propensity to copulate a drive may be going too far, because the actual drives may be only to engage in certain activities under certain conditions, each of which changes the conditions so that a new drive is activated, which in turn leads to actions that lead to new conditions, until, finally, copulation occurs, with one of the consequences being reproduction.

Even humans don't have a drive to reproduce, in a biological sense of drive. Some humans have a desire to reproduce, but that desire is learned, not biologically inbuilt. We use the term "drive" rather loosely in ordinary talk, and, in that sense, we have a sex drive. --]

10. How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new, improved varieties? (Recombining English letters will never produce Chinese books.)

[-- The same way recombining letters of two words can make a new word.

As formulated, this is another stupid question. There is no need to produce "Chinese" from "English" letters, but, in fact, it can be done, by recombining smaller pieces of English letters to form Chinese characters. In any case, as even a first-year student of biology knows, this has virtually nothing to do with genetic recombination, which works differently, and it never produces the equivalent of Chinese from an English book, and it never has to. The DNA "language" is universal to all known living organisms (with a few tiny variations in a few rare species), so all that is ever required is the equivalent of producing a different book in English from two existing books in English, both of which are almost identical (that is, they have nearly the same "DNA," as the parents of an organism always do), but with a few differences from both of them, some of the differences being such as combining a paragraph of text in one with a different illustration that's better than the illustration that was originally associated with that same paragraph, or adding a better metaphor in a paragraph that had a poor one, or adding a new chapter between two other chapters, so the cognitive flow of the reader from the first to the third is better than it would be without the middle chapter, etc.

Since, in considering just English text, it is possible to transform any English text to any other English text by a series of one-character modifications, there is no difficulty, except for the number of steps in some cases, in going from any book of such English text to any other, especially if we also allow larger modifications (as genetics does). We simply keep making substitutions, deletions, and additions at the right places until the transformation is complete.

For books, this would not generally work, because we humans don't have much interest in minor variations on books, so we would not, generally, be interested in constructing new books by taking existing books and slightly modifying them, even if we knew of some modifications that would make them better.

But, Nature is much more than just us humans. If two skunks make a better skunk (for its environment), that skunk will be more likely to survive long enough to become a new "baseline" for the future evolution of skunks (at least in that locale, and for a while). The world of Nature does not mind billions and billions of minor variations on a theme, and so we see them all around us, generation after generation, gradually "morphing" a population of one species into a new species, gradually turning a mere fluid-transfer tube into a entire blood circulation system, gradually turning a reactive cell or two into a cluster of neurons, and a cluster of neurons into a large ganglium, and a cluster of ganglia into a brain, so that a brain like a human brain can derive, bit by bit, from nothing more than a cell that happened to react to a stimulus in such a way as itself to stimulate another cell into doing something biologically useful. --]

11. Is it possible that similarities in design between different animals prove a common Creator instead of a common ancestor?

[-- No, it is not. Even if they are the result of common design, they don't prove it.

But, in any case, other information contradicts this quaint fantasy, unless the designer is an idiot or virtually impotent. If design is present, it is either metaphorical, or not very competent, because there are so many flaws and idiocies in the "design." Finally, if there is only common design, then we have no explanation for many geological and temporal groupings of related species. Common ancestry can explain not only the commonalities, but it can explain also the design flaws, the geological groupings, and the temporal groupings, all with a single idea. Common design requires the introduction of yet more arbitrary hypotheses to handle each of these other features of life and the history of life on Earth. For example, incredible straining and groaning occurs in the non-evolutionary attempts at explaining (or explaining away) the design flaws (or what would be design flaws if they were the product of design). Further grinding of intellectual gears is required to explain or explain away the geographical groupings of related species. And there is much snapping and breaking of belts and pulley's as attempts are made to explain temporal sequences of related species (either by denying the evidence that they are temporally sequenced -- as in YEC, or by imputing bizarre goals and purposes to the designer). --]

12. Natural selection only works with the genetic information available and tends only to keep a species stable. How would you explain the increasing complexity in the genetic code that must have occurred if evolution were true?

[-- False on both counts. Natural selection tends to keep a species stable if the conditions under which it lives are stable, or if it can move easily to its preferred conditions when local conditions change. Since, in all cases, natural selection tends to select for the best-reproduces (including those that are the best reproducers simply because they live long enough to reproduce), it can and often does select for changes in the organism. Higher temperatures, for example, will select for those organisms that can tolerate higher temperatures. Only when an equilibrium has been reached will there be a tendency for selection to promote stability around a local optimum. And even this is not really stability, but merely "tracking" that optimality, which itself happens not to be changing much at the moment.

In the long run, natural selection will eventually "break" even most such "stable" situations by eventually introducing, in some species, a change that benefits it and thus gives it an advantage that then requires adaptation in other species, so that what had been optimal is no longer optimal, and what had been a deleterious mutation or variation now becomes something that is selected for rather than against.

Incidentally, Hovind should have known better. The fact that he asks the question the way he does indicates his disingenuousness. He should have known, without us having to tell him for the billionth time, that the stabilizing effect only occurs in certain conditions, and that, in others it can't occur without making the organism go extinct entirely. Many species do go extinct because they can't evolve fast enough to keep up (or, when they do, they are no longer the same species), but the key point here is that natural selection tends not towards stability as such, but towards local optimization when a species is not already at that optimum for its environment.

There is no inherent tendency of natural selection to favor stability, except insofar as this favors retaining what already works.

The increasing complexity of the genetic code needs no special explanation. It is a side effect of the fact that evolution started simple. It had no place to go but towards complexity (i.e., away from simplicity). Complexity arises partly because there is no designer to keep things simple. A really intelligent designer would have produced the same effective results with, usually, far simpler designs. But evolution does have to work with what is already present, and so it often must introduce complexity because there is no simple path to any simple alternative that works. For example, suppose it turns out that there is an entirely different molecule that would have been much better than DNA, but which has never evolved. One reason for that failure would likely be that there is no evolutionary way to get from DNA to that other molecule.

Similarly, their might be a much better way to build brains, but if there is no evolutionary pathway between what already exists and such brains, then they won't occur. What may well occur instead, is increased elaborations on existing brains to incorporate the same functionality as the improved design would have incorporated.

Further, the inherent defects and failings of many of evolution's "design" choices has lead to still more increases in complexity, as modifications and additional complications were added to compensate for the flaws.

Finally, I note that evolution has no inherent direction. There is no essential progressiveness toward any remote goal or destination. Every step in evolution is tested by the environment, and kept or discarded on a purely pragmatic basis. Pragmatism, whatever its advantages may be, does not necessarily tend towards simplicity, because, in its purest forms, there is no overall evaluation of what is already working beyond that it is already working. A purely pragmatic approach of the sort that evolution must take (because it has no foresight), cannot involve stepping back, looking at what there is, and saying, "Hmmm. You know, we could remove this and this and replace those two items with just one of these gizmos, and the whole structure would be a lot simpler, a lot more efficient, and a lot more reliable." Evolution has no such oversight, so complexity evolves in many places where alternatives would be found by a truly intelligent and knowledgeable designer. --]

13. When, where, why, and how did:

o Single-celled plants become multi-celled? (Where are the two and three-celled intermediates?)

[-- When two of them stuck together instead of going their separate ways. There are no longer any two- and three-celled intermediates because there are no major advantages that can be gained by two- and three-celled groupings that are not greater in larger groupings, or in a single-celled alternative. There are no such intermediates because they are (or were) intermediates. That's what the term "intermediate" means. If they were still around in large numbers, they wouldn't be intermediates. They would be a class unto themselves. If there was some environment that selected for two-celled organisms but not for organisms (or cell-clusters) with larger numbers of cells, that's where we would find these organisms (or clusters). Does Hovind know of any such environments? --]

o Single-celled animals evolve?

[-- The same way as any others. Can you be more specific? Do you mean, "How did the first single-celled animal evolve? If so, the answer is: We don't know, yet, but I've already indicated that it would just about have to be from a simpler self-reproducing system that would not be called an animal or even an organism, because of its lack of metabolic processes. --]

o Fish change to amphibians?

o Amphibians change to reptiles?

o Reptiles change to birds? (The lungs, bones, eyes, reproductive organs, heart, method of locomotion, body covering, etc., are all very different!) How did the intermediate forms live?

[-- Why all these questions about such non-issues? Look them up in a book. If you can't read, get someone else to do it for you (after all, you're having them read this to you, aren't you). None of these questions are particularly difficult, except for the amount of detail they require.

Even the one about birds, which I think is the most difficult one (eyes, heart, locomotion, body coverings, etc., are all pretty easy) is not that difficult. The so-called "flying" squirrel gives us a clue: It doesn't fly, but it uses a "web" of skin to enable it to glide, and it uses its forelegs and hind legs to control its direction and speed of descent. Currently, we may not know how birds actually evolved, but the point of the question is to try to suggest that it is a big problem, when, in fact, there is nothing about the problem to suggest that it is anything other than a matter of finding fossils that show how it occurred. Science is empirical, so we sometimes have to look at actual organisms or their fossils to see what actually happens or happened, because, unlike creationists, scientists cannot long get away with just making things up or getting them from some old book. --]

o How did the intermediate forms live?

14. When, where, why, how, and from what did:

o Whales evolve?

o Sea horses evolve?

o Bats evolve?

o Eyes evolve?

o Ears evolve?

o Hair, skin, feathers, scales, nails, claws, etc., evolve?

[-- I don't know, except in general respects. Again, Hovind should be looking these things up in books -- if he is honestly seeking answers -- because, for most of them, a large amount of technical detail is involved. Eyes, for example, have evolved about forty different times, and in somewhat different ways, and they exist today at all levels of evolutionary development, from mere light-sensitive spots to the best eyes of today's animals. Dawkins and others have covered all of the details about eyes in considerable detail. The general pattern is that something occurs in some primitive form (a light-sensitive spot, for example, which enables a simple organism to detect if it is in light or shade, and to respond accordingly) which then evolves to a more sophisticated form or to a much different form. Skin is obviously a matter of evolving a protective boundary that keeps outside things out (mostly) and inside things in (mostly). It would evolve when a multi-celled organism first developed slightly different external cells in an environment where this helped it succeed reproductively. These slightly different cells would then be favored as long as the environment favored them, and they would be enhanced as long as such enhancements helped the organism.

I don't really see the problem, except for idiots and people who can't pick up a book but who can spend many hours on the Internet, because none of these things are especially evolutionarily mysterious, no matter how much creationists try to make them evolutionarily mysterious. No important question about evolution in general is answered by answering these questions, so the only point in asking them in this context is that the attempt to answer them requires so much detail as to deter most people (including me) from attempting to answer them all. The purpose is to allow Hovind to say, "See? I asked these simple little questions, and the evolutionists didn't answer them."

Further, creationism has no answers for any of these questions, except the arbitrary assertion: "God did it, period." Scientifically, that's an utterly useless "answer," like answering the question of how a computer works by saying, "little ghosties do it." Scientists and rational people generally want better answers than either of these, and creationism has no better answers. Science does, in both cases. --]

15. Which evolved first (how, and how long; did it work without the others)?

o The digestive system, the food to be digested, the appetite, the ability to find and eat the food, the digestive juices, or the body’s resistance to its own digestive juice (stomach, intestines, etc.)?

o The drive to reproduce or the ability to reproduce?

o The lungs, the mucus lining to protect them, the throat, or the perfect mixture of gases to be breathed into the lungs?

o DNA or RNA to carry the DNA message to cell parts?

o The termite or the flagella in its intestines that actually digest the cellulose?

o The plants or the insects that live on and pollinate the plants?

o The bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or muscles to move the bones?

o The nervous system, repair system, or hormone system?

o The immune system or the need for it?

[-- The basic answer in most of these cases is: Neither, except at the very beginning of the evolution of these traits. That is, in cases where one trait arises first, it arises in a primitive form, and then any other traits that must evolve for further development of it begin to evolve. Plants evolved before pollination, but once they began to evolve, there arose opportunities for insects, and taking advantage of some of those led to primitive pollination, which then led to adaptation of plants specifically for pollination, which in turn provided more ecological niches for pollinating insects, etc., with each slight improvement in one aspect of this process paving the way for further improvements in other aspects.

And: Is Hovind really too illiterate to study biology? Above, he's demanding almost an entire biology course (or at least what could easily take an entire slightly specialized biology course). Those questions, among others, are largely what biology courses should be about, and what they would largely be about if the textbook writers were not generally afraid to include them in their books because they involve dealing with evolution. Biology courses tend to stick to questions like, How does digestion work? and shy away from questions like, How did digestion arise?

Not a single one of these questions is in the slightest difficult for evolution, as Hovind himself surely knows, even though his degree is fake. But take a look at the number and depth of detail that is required to answer each point: If that is not enough material for an entire course in biology, what would it take to be an entire course in biology (actually, college biology courses sometimes deal with these issues-- again, as Hovind must know). Why is he asking these questions, if he already has ready access to the answers? Because he knows that the average reader of his questions will not know the answers, and will want "sound bite" type answers, and because he knows that few people will bother to try to answer a crackpot's questions if they involve lots of detail and explanation of things that such crackpot questions demonstrate at least a pretended ignorance of.

In two "questions" now, Hovind has basically gone berserk and asked many questions as if they were a single question. They aren't, but it helps make it unlikely that anyone will bother to try to answer them all. This is one of Hovind's favorite ploys (which he has used routinely for many years for propaganda purposes) to enable him later to say, "See? I asked the evolutionists a few simple questions, and they couldn't give me answers." That the questions are primarily of a sort that needs to be answered in quite technical terms, and that, in any case, the answers (or the current lack of answers, in some cases) don't reflect negatively on the theory of evolution, any more than our lack of knowledge of the exact genealogy of every human on Earth implies that there is some flaw in the idea that people do (or do) in fact have ancestors, even if we don't know who they were.

Finally, let me note that creationism has no answers at all for any of these questions. It can give no explanation for why God would create life (or anything else) at all, let alone explanations of specific features of living things. There is no detailed account of the origin of immune systems in the Bible or in even the most "scientific" of creation "science." These are all questions that require actual observational study of living organisms and the evidence left by dead organisms. They are not questions that the Bible deals with at all.

To indicate how easy the questions are in principle -- and how detailed the work of answering them fully must be, I'll briefly discuss the case of digestion. One main idea of evolution is that complex or well-developed processes do not occur in one fell swoop. Digestion, like eyes or anything else of some sophistication in living organisms, starts out as something simple or as a side-effect of some other system (or multiple systems) and then gradually becomes the specific system we see today. I don't know if the scenario I'm going give has occurred or not. I'm only giving it to show that these questions are not fundamentally difficult questions.

We start with an organism that doesn't digest but which simply absorbs some sort of nutrients that it is able to use directly, without intermediate modifications. If there is a molecule that has some use in the body as is and also some use as via breakdown products, and if there is a process going on in the organism which sometimes breaks that molecule down, then we have the beginnings of a process of digestion. A modification may arise that improves the ability to break down this molecule into the useful components, and this modification may be beneficial to the organism. However, let us suppose that this modification also causes some negative side effects, such as occasionally breaking down molecules that are best kept whole.

Now, all we need is a further modification that provides some protection against this side effect of the first modification while still allowing that first modification to break down the molecule that does have useful breakdown products. Now, assuming that this modification itself is not too costly in biological terms, the organism has both improved access to "food" (i.e., the molecule we began with) and a means of protecting itself against the negative side effects of that breakdown process.

As I said, I don't know if this is what did occur, ever, but it's the kind of thing to look for, scientifically. Other sequences are possible.

In some cases, the correct answer might be:

We don't know, but neither does Hovind, since, once again, creationism has nothing to offer scientists in answering these questions. --]

16. There are many thousands of examples of symbiosis that defy an evolutionary explanation. Why must we teach students that evolution is the only explanation for these relationships?

[-- No there aren't "many thousands." There's not even one, which may be why Hovind doesn't attempt to provide an example. Symbiosis, by definition, evolves because some form of "cooperative" relationship between species helps each survive and reproduce.

The rest is all details. Since Hovind doesn't give even one example, it is hard even to know what wacky instance of symbiosis he has in mind, or why he supposes it to be a problem for evolutionary theory.

I will not pursue this further, considering the vacuousness and deliberate misrepresentation of the question (making a false claim without a single supporting fact or argument), but I will point out that some instances of symbiosis probably start out as parasitism. Parasitism surely needs no such explanation, since it obviously helps the parasite survive and ultimately reproduce. But the thing about it is that it is self-limiting and partly self-defeating. If the parasite kills the host organism, it will die, too (which is not a good idea, unless its reproductive life is over). Thus, there is a tendency of parasites to become symbiotic because doing so, if they can do so while still keeping all the advantages of parasitism, is advantages to the parasite. Thus, if mosquitoes could produce a chemical that would make their hosts long-lived and healthy produces of the best blood mosquitoes could want, they would make themselves better off by making us better off. Alternatively, if every mosquito bite instantly killed the host and caused its blood to coagulate in one second, it would not only be bad for the host animal, but also for the mosquito.

Symbiosis can be viewed as parasitism that happened to evolve into symbiosis, or what would have been parasitism that just happened to be beneficial to both organisms.

So: Why must we teach students that evolution is the only explanation for these relationships?

Because it is. Creationism has no answer for this same question, and other "answers" have all been failures. Of course, we might devise a designer who thought parasitism was a good idea, but you can't have a creationist "explanation" for symbiosis without a creationist explanation for parasitism as well. But, creationism does not have an explanation for anything at all, let alone both symbiosis and parasitism. Simply saying, "It's that way because God did it that way," is no explanation. It's an attempt to avoid explanation entirely. --]

17. How would evolution explain mimicry? Did the plants and animals develop mimicry by chance, by their intelligent choice, or by design?

[-- Plants and animals begin developing mimicry by chance, but then capitalize on it (in a metaphorical sense) when it helps them live long enough to reproduce. The genes for a little bit of mimicry then become the baseline from which further mimicry can arise.

Intelligent design would explain mimicry in a weak way, because it would not explain why there was mimicry at all. That is, it has no explanation for why the alleged designer designed mimicry. --]

18. When, where, why, and how did man evolve feelings? Love, mercy, guilt, etc. would never evolve in the theory of evolution.

[-- Man didn't evolve feelings. They are present in all other primates and nearly all mammals (at least). Love, mercy, guilt, certainly would evolve under the theory of evolution, as any evolutionary psychologist will point out. They all have survival value, or are expressions of other things that have survival value (for the genes). Animals that experience various forms of love are social animals, animals that benefit from banding together to hunt, forage, defend themselves, build shelters, or raise offspring. Cooperative behavior can preserve life and promotes reproductive success, under the right conditions, so any organism that begins to evolve the traits of such cooperativeness will continue to evolve them as long as the conditions are such as to make them valuable for producing further generations that carry the same genes. Exceptions often don't survive for long. Really sociopathic children may not make it to adulthood, for example, because they alienate people around them so much that they get themselves killed. Sociopathic traits generally do as well as they manage to only because the sociopathic personality learns skills for hiding his psychology from most other people, but this often does not work. That's why, all in all, there are relatively few sociopathic people: It is not a survival trait for humans except in special circumstances. --]

19. *How did photosynthesis evolve?

[-- From light hitting proto-plants. The tiniest bit of useful photosynthesis would cause it to be favored as long as it provides more benefit than it costs. Thus, a plant-like organism that can do some photosynthesis to help it process its nutrients in useful ways will tend to evolve towards doing more photosynthesis as long as it is beneficial in this way. --]

20. *How did thought evolve?

[-- A little at a time. Thought is an elaboration of much simpler processes, such as (relatively) simple perceptual recognition that one splotch of color is similar to another. Most details are largely unknown at present. Creationism offers no answer at all, except, "God chose to create thinking creatures," -- with no science involved at all. There is no observational basis for the creationist's "answer" to this question. Empirically, there is much that is known, or supposed, on the basis of the apparent cognitive processes of other animals. In particular, other primates share many of the basics with us, but lack the more-advanced conceptual thought processes such as even a dishonest slug like Hovind demonstrates (via his use of language at a level that is well above that of even the most advanced non-human primates -- though Hovind's use of these processes is still way below that of a well-developed human mind, of course, as we can see from the relative thoughtlessness and of many of his "questions").

Susan Blackmore suggests that human though evolved largely as a process of evolving the ability to imitate the behavior of others. If a proto-human living with many other proto-humans imitates the behavior of those higher in the pecking order (or grooming order, perhaps), he is likely to be imitating behavior that will help his genes survive (because the proto-human that he is imitating is still alive, suggesting that, at worst, the behavior is relatively harmless). The genes for imitating would therefore be "selected" for evolutionarily. Since more advanced forms of imitation require more advanced cognitive processes, the cognitive processes must evolve as part of this evolution of imitation.

Note that Blackmore's theory also explains why, even today, when blind imitation is often fatal, we still see so much of it, as in the case of those who follow creationists without bothering to learn even the basic facts that they would need to enable them to decide intelligently whether the creationist leaders are correct or not. The tendency of humans to imitate (or emulate) others is obviously nearly universal, even among those of us who, like myself, are individualists.

I can't say whether Blackmore's theory is true, but it is certainly a better theory than: "God made humans with this ability, period, so stop thinking right there."

21. *How did flowering plants evolve, and from that?

[-- In the usual ways, and from non-flowering plants, of course. Hovind should try to ask better questions, or at least try to formulate them more usefully. Trading genes arose long before plants did, at the bacterial level (if not sooner). The question is, Why sex in plants? The answer is, for the same reasons as in other organisms: It produces variations that are likely to be valuable because they are variations on traits that have already been successful for at least one generation (otherwise, there would be no plants to do the gene-trading, silly). This means that a new combination can be "tried out" (perhaps many times, and repeatedly, over many generations). If it works, then it will tend to be preserved (because it will have a better chance of having offspring). If it doesn't, well, that's okay, too, because the remaining plants can "try" again, producing still more variations.

Flowering itself evolved, typically at least, from such things as being pollinated by insects that, among other things, happened to pollinate when they went from plant to plant. If they carried a bit of leaf to another plant, it made no difference, but if they carried a bit of pollen, it could start a new generation, so there would be a tendency to evolve insect-attractive parts that were associated with pollen, so that insects would pollinate while questing for food.

Pollination itself probably started from simple release of gene-carriers among plants that grew in such close proximity to each other that this would be an effective means of re-combining genes and thus of finding combinations that would have the best chances of further reproduction. If it happened that this proto-pollen was attractive to insects, a plant could do two things: Evolve unattractive pollen, or evolve a means of getting the insects to transport it to other plants. Since pollen probably wasn't especially attractive in its own right, I'd guess that the second approach would be the more likely.

But, this, like many of Hovind's "questions," is really something for a biology class, not a question-and-answer sort of thing, because a full and really strong answer would depend on observational data and on rigorous analysis of that data, neither of which is well-handled in this kind of format. Observation is necessary at all levels in biology because, despite Hovind's pretenses, the questions are not answered by the Bible. There is no explanation at all in the Bible for pollination. Saying that there was a designer who instituted it is no explanation either, unless we can interview him in person, and get his explanation as to why he instituted it, when he instituted it, and how he instituted it. Creationists have been far weaker in this respect than scientists have. There is no known and verified conversation, text, or e-mails from the designer they allege to exist, nor any observational data that independently supports his existence, either now or in the remote past (and, if he existed in the past, there is no reason to suppose that he necessarily exists now). --]

22. *What kind of evolutionist are you? Why are you not one of the other eight or ten kinds?

[-- There's only one theory of evolution that is the theory of evolution. The others either are not theories of evolution at all, or they are variations on the theory, or they are crackpot theories like Lamarckism. Hovind is pretending that there are "eight or ten" kinds, but neglects to mention that they are mostly minor variations on specific issues within the theory of evolution. For example, while it is largely accepted now, Lynn Margulis' theory of genetic transfer of genes among bacteria was once such an issue. Margulis did not deny the theory of evolution; she merely disagreed with the common assumption that genetic transfers only occurred through sexual recombination.

Now, her view is pretty much part of the standard view. That's how science works: New ideas are brought up, tested, and, if they hold up, are adopted into common acceptance (among scientists, at least). If they are radical enough, they amount to replacing the existing theory (as is the case with General Relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics as the theory of mechanics of space, time, mass, and energy, at least at macroscopic scales). If they are radical, but only about one issue, the existing theory is simply modified to include the necessary changes, and the theory as a whole remains. Evolution has had one major change, which was the incorporation of genetics, due largely to Fischer's work several decades ago, and several smaller changes since then (once, for example, after DNA was discovered and came to be more or less understood). One of these smaller changes was incorporating the gene-exchange idea from Margulis.

If, by chance, one of the "eight or ten" other theories turns out to be both sound and genuinely novel, and sufficiently radical, it will replace the theory of evolution. So far, however, the reports of the death of neo-Darwinism have been greatly exaggerated, sometimes by people with a good idea but who wanted to make it seem even better than it really was by making it seem like an overturning of the entire Darwinian view when in fact it was only a different view on one aspect of the theory.

And, of course, there is little chance of any of the truly crackpot theories having much merit, because most of them are so massively contradicted by the evidence that whatever might be of value in them would have to be some one or two ideas that might be extracted from them and incorporated into the theory of evolution. Lamarckism is still advocated by some non-biologists, typically people who have little grasp of neo-Darwinism (people like the idiot Hovind pretends to be), but, at least since 1900 (when genetics and Mendel's work were re-discovered), it has had progressively less and less plausibility because progressively more and more of the things it was supposed to explain have been explained by ordinary evolutionary theory.

Retrovirus genetic inclusions in our genes don't count as Lamarckism because they are actual genetic material, not acquired phenotypical traits or derived from the phenotypical traits.

Anyone who is any other kind of evolutionist than Darwinian/neo-Darwinian and who doesn't make this clear is being dishonest. Anyone who claims to be an adherent of the theory of General Relativity but whose theory is only remotely similar to Einstein's would be dishonest for the same reason.

Willfully keeping oneself ignorant of the status of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution in the world today, and especially in science, is no excuse for not knowing that the neo-Darwinian type of theory is the theory of evolution. It is simply another way of excusing dishonesty, one of Hovind's favorites. --]

23. What would you have said fifty years ago if I told you I had a living coelacanth in my aquarium?

[-- The same thing I'd say today: That Hovind was lying or kidding. He don't have one. If he did, it would be public knowledge: Newspapers would have headlines: Hovind has a coelacanth in his aquarium! Also, I think coelacanths only live at considerable depths, so Hovind would likely have to have a highly pressurized aquarium.

However, I'm not sure what the point of the question is. That is, if it isn't solely to somehow vaguely insinuate that there is something wrong with the theory of evolution, what is the point of the question?

I suppose it has to do with whether the coelacanth was "really" extinct or not, though he apparently didn't think to specify. Of course, that particular species was not extinct, and I imagine that most biologists thought it was, before a living one was found. But, that biologists were wrong on such an observational issue hardly impugns the theory of evolution, since the theory decidedly does not require that coelacanths be extinct. We only thought they were because, before we found the first living one, we had found only fossils and no evidence of ones still living.

That is, like nearly all of Hovind's "questions" (thinly disguised propaganda), this question is irrelevant to the question of whether the theory of evolution is true. --]

24. *Is there one clear prediction of macroevolution that has proved true?

[-- Yes. All that have been tested, at least since the "neo" was added to "Darwinism." More seriously, this depends on the specific, and probably arbitrary, definition of "macroevolution." Since the entire idea of macroevolution has only minor use in the theory of evolution or biology generally, and since all evolution is microevolution (and only macroevolution by aggregation, at a higher level of abstraction), I'm not sure what would count as the answer to such a fuzzy question. I hope Hovind learns to formulate better questions. He should specify, in objectively-determinable terms, what he means by "macroevolution."

I don't use the idea myself, since I regard all evolution from tiniest self-replicating molecule system (an "autocatalytic set" in Kauffmann's terminology) to all the higher animals as being merely large amounts of microevolution carried out over a long period of time. At what point in this proposed evolutionary process does microevolution become "macroevolution," and why at that point rather than, say, one microevolutionary step later or earlier? Unless the creationists can answer some of these questions coherently and in an empirically meaningful way, the idea of macroevolution is really only useful as a loose way of saying, "lots of microevolutionary steps leading from one phenotype to another that is different in some way that we would regard as being a "large" change. As long as it is used as a form of shorthand for much longer expressions, it has some value. If it is used as a claim of something fundamentally different from microevolution, then it is baseless. At best, there may be aspects of long-term evolution that are not readily visible within the span of a few microevolutionary steps. --]

25. *What is so scientific about the idea of hydrogen as becoming human?

[-- Nothing. No one claims that it did, in any literal sense. No one has ever made such a claim except in a figurative sense (i.e., ignoring all the intermediate steps that result in the production of all of the heavier elements needed for life to form on Earth). Hydrogen gas never did become human. If it did, it would have to wear a special suit to keep it from dissipating the way the hydrogen from a hydrogen balloon does when it is released.

Hovind offers this question because he is hoping that some reader will be ignorant enough to think that it represents and actual view held by evolutionists, rather than, at best, merely a poetic description of the fact that hydrogen gas was the main element of the universe, from which all the other elements came (via fusion processes in stars), including the ones, such as oxygen, carbon, calcium, etc., that our bodies are made of (and, we do contain some hydrogen, bound up in water).

I also note that this has nothing to do with the theory of evolution, which says nothing about hydrogen gas, except by implication, and nothing about hydrogen gas, as such, becoming human. How ignorant of evolution does a person have to be to make this mistake?

Extremely. Far more ignorant than Hovind is. So why does he claim it? --]

26. *Do you honestly believe that everything came from nothing?

[-- No. But then, that's not part of the theory of evolution, anyway. Evolution says absolutely nothing to that effect. Although it is possible that a few evolutionists have made such claims, they can't do it as evolutionists, because the theory of evolution makes no such claims, and has no such implications. It only deals with life, and only with life after it somehow comes to exist. That is, Hovind is, once again, making things up to suit his propaganda purposes (or copying someone else). --]

After you have answered the preceding questions, please look carefully at your answers and thoughtfully consider the following questions.

1. Are you sure your answers are reasonable, right, and scientifically provable, or do you just believe that it may have happened the way you have answered? (Do these answers reflect your religion or your science?)

2. Do your answers show more or less faith than the person who says, "God must have designed it"?

3. Is it possible that an unseen Creator designed this universe? If God is excluded at the beginning of the discussion by your definition of science, how could it be shown that He did create the universe if He did?

4. Is it wise and fair to present the theory of evolution to students as fact?

5. What is the end result of a belief in evolution (lifestyle, society, attitude about others, eternal destiny, etc.)?

6. Do people accept evolution because of the following factors?

o It is all they have been taught.

o They like the freedom from God (no moral absolutes, etc.).

o They are bound to support the theory for fear of losing their job or status or grade point average.

o They are too proud to admit they are wrong.

o Evolution is the only philosophy that can be used to justify their political agenda.

[-- These are different questions. I think the things I've stated as fact are scientifically provable (i.e., that they have the evidence on their side and no good evidence against them -- simple claims of such evidence don't count). Further, many of the statements made are fundamentally irrelevant to the theory of evolution, because many of the questions are irrelevant to the theory of evolution. For example, there is no connection between the theory of evolution and the logically bizarre notion "that everything came from nothing." Similarly, there is no connection between the coelacanth question and the theory of evolution, since the theory is neither brought into question by, nor significantly supported by the existence in modern times of a coelacanth. That is, the theory of evolution does not imply that the coelacanth must exist or that it must not exist.

The answers to the questions have no relation to religious believes except for those beliefs held by people who insist on holding religious beliefs that are incompatible with the facts of physical reality. No one else's religious beliefs are incompatible with the theory of evolution. This is an important fact: Out of all the thousands of religions world wide, only a small minority of them insist on denying the clear implications of the physical evidence of evolution. The stupidest possible basis for denying them is words printed in a book written thousands of years ago by people who had virtually none of the evidence we have today and none of the scientific background in physics, chemistry, general biology, mathematics, astronomy, and so on, that either provides direct support for evolution or which is in conflict with creationism. For example, while it is possible that the speed of light has decreased very slightly, for it to have decreased enough to allow light from galaxies twelve billion light years away to have reached Earth in just the last six thousand years (a decrease in speed of two million times, minimum).

The fact that creationists try to make it a religious question instead of a question about physical evidence (which Hovind pretends to be nearly totally ignorant of in order to persuade readers that if he doesn't know about it, it must not exist) indicates the true nature of their claims: Religious dogmatism overriding science, and overriding reason generally, since no rational person can reject something as well-established as the law of gravitation or the core idea of the theory of evolution or the basic observational facts of quantum mechanics. These are too well-established to deny. The best Hovind and his gangs of cave-people can do is bring up questions about the interpretation of such facts, but it is sheer stupidity to deny the facts. Gravitation is a real fact, whether General Relativity is the final theory on the matter or not (it isn't). Quantum energy release by electrons in atoms is an observational fact, and the equations of Quantum Mechanics accurately describe relationships among observational facts, whether the most popular interpretation of these relationships is sound or not (it isn't). And, the basic fact of evolution is that the theory of evolution accurately describes relationships among facts, and no other theory either accurately describes them or describes them in rational, coherent ways without introducing bizarre additional postulates (some of which contradict all Biblical forms of creationism (but they might make for a good science fiction novel). --]

2. Do your answers show more or less faith than the person who says, "God must have designed it"?

[-- Faith in what, and faith how defined? If you mean religious faith in a psychotic ax-murderer God from the Old Testament, then I have no faith in that at all. If you mean, rationally based confidence in the nature of Existence, the theory of evolution is perfectly compatible with it.

The person who says, "God must have designed it" exhibits a lack of knowledge and of careful, rational thought, so that faith in a ancient myth is all that such a person has. --]

[-- In one sense, it is definitely possible that an unseen creator designed this universe. However, this only means that I don't know of any reason do claim that it is proven to be impossible. However, there is no reason to suppose that that creator, if any, was God, or that it was created out of nothing. Further, this is absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether the theory of evolution is true, since it is purely a theory about the development of some early living things to the life we see today. This is another one of Hovind's dishonest ploys to misdirect attention and to grossly misrepresent the theory of evolution, so as to make it seem to claim things that it cannot rationally claim, and thus to make it seem less than fully rational.

God does not need to be excluded for the theory of evolution to be true. What is excluded is any God that is incompatible with the theory of evolution. All other imaginable Gods or goddesses or "forces" or whatever are untouched by it; only this one form of irrational rejection of science is affected. --]

4. Is it wise and fair to present the theory of evolution to students as fact?

[-- Yes, just as it is fair to teach the theory of gravitation or the second law of thermodynamics (without which evolution would be impossible, by the way). It should be taught as a fact in the same way, and to about the same degree, and it should be taught with the specifications of the general types of conditions and facts that would be required to falsify it and make some other theory a better theory (incidentally, that would never be Biblical creationism). --]

5. What is the end result of a belief in evolution (lifestyle, society, attitude about others, eternal destiny, etc.)?

[-- What is the end result of the belief in gravitation(lifestyle, society, attitude about others, eternal destiny, etc.)? The theory of evolution is a biological theory, not a theory about society, morality, religion, or lifestyle. So, first, there is no end result, because the main results are ongoing, such as advances in medicine, better understanding of both animal and human history and society, improvements in technology, and so on.

The theory of evolution is not mainly about lifestyle, how to live in society, attitude about others, or eternal destiny. It has no implications for morality at all, except insofar as it suggests lines of inquiry into human nature that might have secondary moral implications (no moral primaries depend on anything except facts of human nature that have been blatantly obvious throughout all of human history).

As to eternal destiny, it also makes no difference, at least not in a general sense, since whatever our eternal destiny was before the theory was developed has probably not changed since the theory was developed, and certainly not because of the theory of evolution. Some ideas become more plausible and others become less plausible, but are technically unaffected. The religious ideas about "eternal destiny" usually held by creationists were stupid and extremely egotistical ideas long before the theory of evolution came along.

Some particular theories about "eternal destiny" become less plausible given the truth of evolution, but such theories had no basis in fact at all to begin with, so they were merely superstitions. How can we argue that a theory that helps dispel superstition is therefore a false theory, or a bad theory in some other sense? (It might be a bad theory, but it would have to be for other reasons.)

The reason the theory of evolution has so little effects in a technical sense (i.e., in terms of positive implications for philosophy and religion is that it is an empirical theory about how life works and changes, not a theory about "eternal destiny," about the existence of God, morality, or any other such issues. The theory has had tremendous effects culturally because it refutes crude fundamentalist religious ideas (while, sadly, leaving more "liberal" religious ideas untouched -- sadly, because they are wrong, too -- but not in ways that have anything to do with evolution, thankfully). --]

6. Do people accept evolution because of the following factors?

o It is all they have been taught.

o They like the freedom from God (no moral absolutes, etc.).

o They are bound to support the theory for fear of losing their job or status or grade point average.

o They are too proud to admit they are wrong.

o Evolution is the only philosophy that can be used to justify their political agenda.

Some people may. More's the pity. But:

a. Most people have not been taught it. I was not taught it ever except for page or so in a high-school biology text. I had to learn it on my own, decades after I left school. Many people have come to accept it because it's what biologists accept (not counting a few nutcases).

b. People have no need of evolution to be "free" from God, philosophically. Many atheists existed long before the theory of evolution was published. Being "free" from God is simply a matter of rationality. There is no evidence that any God (especially of the Biblical sorts) exists, regardless of the theory of evolution, and regardless of how one interprets the Bible (unless one interprets it so liberally as to have little connection with conventional Christianity or Judaism or even theism). Further, not even moral absolutes depend on God, any more than the laws of mathematics depend on God. Moral absolutes depend on the fact that morality is implicit in the objective facts of human nature and human needs, neither of which are "relative." Is the law of gravitation "relative" just because it depends on the nature of matter.

c. I doubt that any significant number of people support the theory because they fear bad grades or losing their jobs. For one thing, virtually no teacher would give a student a bad grade for disagreeing with the theory (if it was even on tests), but only for not knowing what the theory says and what it is supposed to be based on. In any case, most of the advocates of the theory are not in such situations. That is not why nearly all biologists support the theory of evolution, and sometimes will even go out of their way to defend it, when, if they didn’t accept it, they could just remain silent about it. Hovind surely knows this, as well, but pretends not to for propaganda purposes.

d. Certainly, most supporters of the theory are not afraid to admit they are wrong (or, at least, not especially so). Indeed, many evolutionists have admitted they were wrong, that they were wrong to have accepted creationism until they actually studied the subject carefully and objectively. It is creationists who have an abnormal fear of admitting that they are wrong, and so must resort to the most bizarre kinds of argument and misrepresentation of the theory in order to protect against its truth. Further, many evolutionists have had to change significant (though admittedly not fundamental) ideas about evolution over the decades since 1859, when Origin was published. For example, when Lynn Margulis' views were first published, many evolutionists rejected it, but have since come to accept it (partly, I suppose, because of the evidence provided by retroviruses that shows that "non-standard" forms of gene transfer definitely do occur).

e. Evolution is not the only theory that can be used to justify any political agenda. It has no political agenda, and does not imply any political agenda. It is only perversions of the theory (such as Social Darwinism) that even try. Creationists, on the other hand, routinely use creationism to justify a political agenda. Evolution has no political implications at all: It neither supports socialism, nor fascism, nor fee-enterprise Capitalism, nor prayers in public schools (led by and/or instigated by school officials or teachers, not students praying to get a good grade on a test). I wish it did support a political agenda (mine, that is), but it doesn't. I'd love to be able to argue for my libertarian political views on the basis that they are supported by a scientific theory. But, no such luck.

Nor should any such luck be expected, precisely because it is a scientific theory. Political theory is based on philosophical premises, not the results of the latest scientific theories. There is no way to rationally base a political theory on the basis of a scientific theory. A scientific theory can refute or contradict a political theory -- in special cases, but it cannot directly support any political theory.

That is, despite Hovind's absurd claim, the theory of evolution is not a philosophy. It is not even part of a philosophy. It is a theory about physical processes in the natural world, not an epistemological, metaphysical, moral, political, or esthetic theory. It's about the changes of genetic material and the organisms based on it, over time, in the physical world.

I note that none of the reasons Hovind offers are good ones for accepting any theory, even though similar reasons are the reasons why creationists accept creationism, without exception. This includes the "freedom" from moral absolutes that believing in God brings. Since people construct or adopt whatever God they find compatible with their moral beliefs, there is no objectivity involved at all. Even children who have religious ideas of morality imposed on them merely end up believing what they have been told (if they don't rebel or learn to think on their own in this area), with the result that there is still no objective basis for there moral views (at least, none that they know of).

If morality has no objective basis in the basic facts of human nature, then anything goes.

Without a grasp of the moral limits imposed by human nature, there is nothing to stop a person from just believing in any God who will excuse whatever moral ideas he already holds.

Thus, if a person wants to live by stealing from others, he will simply construct or adopt a God who supports such a way of living (or, who, at least, does not punish it severely). If a person wants to slaughter thousands of people he has a prejudice toward, he simply makes sure that his God allows such slaughter. That was how we got the Inquisition, and that was how we got the Salem witch trials, and that is, today, how we came to have right-wing theocrats who claim the right to murder homosexuals or "heretics."

There is not, and cannot be, any objective basis for a morality that has a basis in some God, and not just because there is no basis for any belief in such a God (though that, too is a fundamental problem with theistic moralities). The real problem is that, because morality is for human must be suited to human beings, it must be based on human nature and objective human needs. We may try to live down to a religious morality out of fear, or even, stupidly, out of love, of a God, but, either way, it's not moral and this is not morality. Morality is tied to the nature of the actions that we take in their own right, not to the claims made about them by Gods or other people, and not to the threats or rewards offered by Gods or other people. We have to deal with such threats and rewards, but doing so is, rationally, the application of ideas that have their basis in human nature and the resulting human needs.

In short, trying to live according to a religious morality is the abandonment of objectivity in moral theory, because, objectively, no morality can be based on whatever we may think about what any God (or gods) decrees. Whether God exists or doesn't, murder is still wrong (something the theocratic right seems perfectly willing to ignore). Whether one's imagined God supports or doesn't support murder is morally irrelevant; murder is wrong regardless of what God says or is imagined to have said.

I would also like to comment on the stupid idea that evolution can be used to justify a political agenda: It can't. Evolution is about biology, about how life has changed and continues to change over the generations, not about how government must be structured or not, not about what laws government should or shouldn't make, and so on. Evolution, unlike most forms of religious fundamentalism, is politically neutral. It tells us something about how we got to be the way we are, but not about how we should live, either individually or socially.

Technically, even creationism is politically neutral, because it only provides a "theory" of how we came to be the way we are, and, as such, has nothing whatever to say about political or other social issues.

However, just as some people have tried to "cash in" on evolution for political purposes, so many have tried to use creationism for political purposes. This is fostered by the association of creationism with the Bible, which is full of the most vicious political theory one can imagine (even Hitler and the Communists were barely to match the Biblical atrocities for sheer malevolence and barbarism, even though they managed to kill more people -- because there were more people, not because they were more evil in general nature). Christians need to face up to the fact that the various versions of God of the Bible are mostly psychotic ax-murderer Gods (which also throws some light on the question of whether God can be used as an objective basis for morality). --]

7. Should we continue to use outdated, disproved, questionable, or inconclusive evidences to support the theory of evolution because we don’t have a suitable substitute (Piltdown man, recapitulation, archaeopteryx, Lucy, Java man, Neanderthal man, horse evolution, vestigial organs, etc.)?

[-- Piltdown man has not been used by evolutionary scientists as evidence for evolution by knowledgeable people since it was proven to be a hoax, decades ago. If anyone is still using it as evidence for evolution, he's an ignoramus.

Recapitulation is not literally or strictly true, but the general pattern of recapitulation is too well established by microphotographs (Hovind seems not to realize that scientific technology has come a long way since Haeckel's drawings) and genetics.

The rest of Hovind's items are not any more questionable than any physical evidence for scientific conclusions.

Some specific evidential claims and conclusions have had to be changed because of discoveries of hoaxes or frauds like Piltdown man, but these are few and far between (especially in comparison to the Big Lie technique of people like Hovind, who rarely tell the truth unless it happens to be convenient or something that he cannot trust his intended audience not to know about).

What does Hovind think is wrong with Archaeopteryx? It's a possible transition between bird precursors and true modern birds, and that's all that's ever been claimed for it in the scientific literature (unless someone got too enthusiastic). It shows that transitions are possible between the two, in that it has both birdlike and dinosaur-like features.

Or does Hovind think that the fossil is not even a real fossil? I don't know. I do know that it's irrelevant what Hovind thinks, as long as what he thinks has so little basis in observable facts.

Further, most of the evidence he lists is "questionable" only to those who know virtually nothing about it, or who have a vested interest in "questioning" it (i.e., in denying the obvious implications of it). Java man is claimed by creationists to have been a gibbon. But it had a braincase nearly ten times as large, which would, proportionately, make Java man three times as tall as a gibbon. That would be one huge gibbon. Further, the skull is shaped very much like many other possible pre-human skulls, even though, compared to modern human standards, it is distinctly ape-like.

Finally, vestigial organs are perfectly good evidence for evolution, just as are organs and structures exapted from earlier organs and structures that served other functions. Sometimes the remaining organ is not purely vestigial, but that doesn't vitiate their evidentiary value, since, even though they may still have some function, they are still clearly descended from organs that had other functions. The human appendix is an example. If it is not purely vestigial, it might as well be, because a. It contributes to the death of some people who have one, and, b. people without one remain as healthy as ever and live as long.

It clearly does not serve any digestive function as it may once have. It's evidence for evolution because it is a feature that once had a significant function but that is now being naturally selected against (via appendicitis), though modern medicine has largely eliminated this selective pressure in developed nations. In general, vestigial features are evidence of a link to earlier species that had non-vestigial forms of these features. A similar type of evidence is that of features that have only begun to evolve, and so are at the other end of the spectrum. They are useful but, if allowed to, will probably become more fully developed in some of the species (or some populations of some species) that have them. An example would be the progressive adaptation of legs toward the flukes that modern whales have. In the early stages of this transition, these legs were still obviously legs, but on their way to becoming flippers. The hind legs were lost altogether, except for vestigial pelvic and leg bones buried deep in the flesh of whales. Thus, early in the evolution of whales we had creatures with rear legs beginning to become vestigial and front legs beginning to become flippers. At some point some whale-like creature may have had both vestigial hind legs and pre-flipper front-legs. --]

8. Should parents be allowed to require that evolution not be taught as fact in their school system unless equal time is given to other theories of origins (like divine creation)?

[-- No, but there is a problem here. There are really multiple questions involved in this seemingly simple question. One is educational and factual: Should our children be required (by parents) to learn about evolution? The other is political: Should government be allowed to forcibly require the teaching of anything to our children?

As long as creationists support public, government-financed, forcibly imposed schooling, public schooling should teach only the lowest common denominator topics, if such an institution is allowed to exist at all. Unfortunately, it does exist, because people mistakenly believe that public schooling is more educational (especially for poor children) than a genuinely competitive private school system would be (though private schooling now competes mainly only with religious issues, and so has little incentive to provide better education.

Further, there is the omission in the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment protects against exactly the kind of intrusive religious teaching that so many creationists (such as Hovind) seek to impose on us all. That is, the Bill of Rights gives us church and state separation. However, it failed to give us something just as important: School and state separation, so we have a lopsided situation in which evolution may be taught in the public schools (because it is both scientifically well-supported and absolutely religion-neutral), but creationism is not allowed to be taught as fact, and especially not as science (which it isn't so that's just as well).

You might think that I would be happy with this arrangement, considering that my own views get the official support of the public school system, and creationism's views are forbidden in the public school system (at least as science).

But, I'm not. I think there should be the same kind of separation between school and state as there is between church and state, and for exactly the same reasons. Government should not have control of our minds, even if it is to teach views that I personally really believe to be true. In fact, this lack of separation of school and state is one of the main complaints of the creationists, though they formulate it much differently, and with different emphasis, and hold it for largely the wrong reasons.

They can't consistently object to evolution though, without shooting themselves in the foot, because, if evolution may be banned, so may creationism, and it is one of their contentions that creationism shouldn't be banned.

However, given that we have a tax-financed, coercive school system, we really have no choice but to exclude creationism, even if the teaching of evolution is only a page or two in most high-school biology textbooks.

Ironically, much of the success of creationism in getting support is due to the fact that we do not have a state religion like England or Sweden, so religions become very competitive and active in "selling" their wares. What makes it especially ironic is that the evolution-in-public-schools supporters both recognize that creationism has prospered because of religious freedom but they don't see that evolution would also prosper if we had educational freedom, because evolution would not be essentially ignored in the schools as it is now. Instead, it could be taught fully, deeply, and comprehensively, in private schools that would not have any reason to water it down, to leave it out, or to do little more than mention it in passing. Further, it could be taught in comparison to creationism, which is an almost absolutely perfect way to teach it and get it accepted. An honest comparison chart can fail to work on only the most mentally incompetent of those who are old enough to understand the comparison at all.

But, I don't think that parents should be allowed to require that evolution not be taught as fact in the public school system. If it is to be taught via that institution at all (and it barely is) it should be taught as fact, but with enough of the evidence so students can grasp why it is being taught as fact. This same rule should apply to physics, mathematics, chemistry, and history, as well: Evidence, not too highly "filtered," should be presented in all cases. --]

9. What are you risking if you are wrong? "Either there is a God or there is not. Both possibilities are frightening."

[-- No, neither possibility is frightening to a rational person.

But, neither possibility is relevant. Evolution is about how life changes over time via genetic modifications. It is not about whether God exists or not. I cannot imagine how either possibility is relevant. The fact is, I'm not risking anything except the usual consequences of being wrong. God, were He to exist, would not punish honest belief in evolution, although He might not be too fond of people who, like Hovind, systematically lie to support creationism, and do things like asking people: "What are you risking if you are wrong," followed by an implied threat of God's retribution. Actually, a God who punishes people the way Hovind suggests is an RSI, a Really Stupid Idea, which has value for keeping unthinking people in line, but, philosophically, is witless beyond all reckoning. Such a God, were God possible at all, would be logically impossible, since an omnipotent and omniscient being could not have any reason, even in principle, for maintaining a Hell or any other kind of punitive institution. He would simply repair the mental defects of such people (if people have an afterlife at all*), and be done with it. There could not be any conceivable point or purpose to Hell or any other such thing.

[But this, itself, verges on the impossible, since an omnipotent and omniscient God could not have reason for ever doing anything at all; all of His wants would be eternally "already" satisfied, and He could not have any needs or desires that could possibly require us to help Him -- the theist's idea of a God who would even bother to create a universe is grotesquely egotistical, on a par with the lame idea that God made the Earth as the exact center of the universe and us as the main purpose of the universe.] --]

10. Why are many evolutionists afraid of the idea of creationism being presented in public schools? If we are not supposed to teach religion in schools, then why not get evolution out of the textbooks? It is just a religious worldview.

[-- Some are afraid, but many are not. What they are afraid of is the use of government to teach religion. And, not without good reason. Government religions are always someone's religion, not just religion in the abstract. If we are to teach creationism, especially as science, we'd have to teach literally dozens of other religious theories of creation, and any other theories, such as Raelianism and various other non-evolutionary, non-creationist theories. There is not enough time for all of these theories to be taught the way creationists want creationism to be taught. It would require that the students be nailed to their desks, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, and that they be taught nothing but one crazy theory about the nature and origin of life on Earth after another, for their entire time in school.

Sorry (not!), but that's not acceptable. The reason I tolerate teaching evolution in school is that it is at least a scientific theory, not a religious theory. If we are to teach anything in public schools, let it be only the best knowledge and understanding we have, and not the religions of thousands of years ago as if they were objective science. --]

11. Aren’t you tired of faith in a system that cannot be true? Wouldn’t it be great to know the God who made you, and to accept His love and forgiveness?

[-- Hmm. What system is it that cannot be true? Evolution? Ah, but how would you know, Mr. Hovind, when, if we are to take your claims as honest beliefs, you have virtually no knowledge of either the theory of evolution or of its evidence?

Would it be great to know the God who made me? If a God did, yes, it would (presumably) be great to know Him. So what? This has nothing whatever to do with evolution (since I could believe in, or deny the existence of, a God with or without evolution being true), so why ask the question, if it is not intended purely as propaganda against evolution?

Ah, it comes clear now: Hovind asks that question for precisely that reason: Propaganda against evolution. Lacking anything like science or facts, Hovind resorts to cheap rhetorical tricks.

Of course, it can be true, which is exactly what Hovind has against it. It has billions of pounds of evidence to support it, along with the way evolution integrates with other sciences such as geology, cosmology, physics, chemistry, and even information theory (despite the lame attempts of Dembski and others to deform information theory against evolution). Creationism, on the other hand, really can't be true, and Hovind is surely aware of this. Creationism not only has no supporting evidence, but there are vast mountains (both literally and figuratively) of evidence against it, as well as incompatibilities with physics, chemistry, geology, and, as suggested above, information theory.

Evolution has a physical, observational basis. Creationism has a basis primarily in the imaginations of some people, with no physical observational basis at all.

I get angry with people like Hovind because of their gross dishonesty and their attempts at deceiving the uninformed, but this would probably be a good point at which to point out that I also feel a lot of pity for them. They have latched onto a theory that not only contradicts science, but which has no basis of its own except in their own imaginations. Imagine how it must feel to have such a pitiful "foundation" for a theory that one feels compelled to believe (if we are to believe that Hovind actually believes it at all, of course), but a theory which has no observational basis in the real world. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this point is with the theory that the Earth is flat, like a disk, and that travelers to the other side have to go around the edge to get to the other side, like flies walking from the top to the bottom of a pancake by crawling around the edge. Imagine being a believer in this theory and yet also being a world traveler, or perhaps trying to be an international airline pilot. Or an astronaut. Or just looking at the circular shadow of the Earth on the Moon during an eclipse (no matter what time of day the eclipse occurs, the shadow is always round; if the Earth were a disk, there would have to be times when the shadow was bar-shaped, the way the shadow of a Frisbee becomes a line on the ground when the Frisbee is held with the edge towards the Sun). Imagine trying to hold onto and publicly support such a theory, and you can imagine what it must be like for creationists who really believe in creationism.

I have doubts about whether to feel sorry for Hovind himself in this way, because his claims are too stupid to be things that he actually believes. He is at least dishonest in refusing to learn anything about the theory of evolution, if he is not deliberately misrepresenting it. An honest creationist would not be making the kinds of claims he makes, because an honest creationist would have been honest enough to have actually studied evolution well enough to know that these claims are false, and so would not be using them. At least, he would if he were devoting himself as much as Hovind does to attacks on the theory.

How can a man honestly claim to be honest when he has not made any effort at all to learn the truth? Hovind clearly either knows his claims are false or he has not made any such effort. Either way, he is dishonest. In one case, it's in asserting facts about the world that he knows to be false, and in the other, its in asserting, by implication, that he has taken the time and effort to learn the facts when he has not.

Of course, he could merely be mentally ill and not know what the hell he is doing, I suppose, so I will at least allow as a caveat that I am not certain that he is dishonest, since he could merely be insane. Or could he? I find that hard to believe, but, at least as a theoretical possibility, I have to allow it, I guess.

--]

12. Would you be interested, if I showed you from the Bible, how to have your sins forgiven and how to know for sure that you are going to Heaven? If so, call or e-mail me.

[-- Of course, what you suggest is not possible, since the Bible is merely a book of some people's religious writings. It cannot prove, even in principle, that God will forgive my sins and take me into heaven (sins or no sins). Further, I don't really care what lame claims are in the Bible; if there is a God (and there isn't), I have no reason to fear for my future. If I'm to have an afterlife decided by God, He will know perfectly well what I believe and why I believe it, so that, even if I'm wrong, I'm home free in that respect. He would know that, given the information I have, I can't possibly believe anything other than what I do believe. He would also know how diligently and rigorously I have worked to teach myself to think rationally and clearly even about complex issues (many of which are far more difficult than the evolution issue, by the way).

If there is a God and if He is truly omniscient, my sins, such as they have been, are already forgiven. If there is not a God, He can't forgive my sins anyway. As for going to Heaven, I'd want to know something about it. Heaven is nearly always portrayed as something I'd rather not be a part of, except for a day or so, like a trip to a theme park. Would those animals who have been my pets be there, despite supposedly not having souls? Would Hovind be there? If I could be suitably protected from him, I might consider it, but the presence of a man who is either insane or severely dishonest and deeply malevolent would not be a good sign. Hovind should be at the other place, or, at least, there should be some safeguards to protect the rest of us from him (and others like him, of course).

Conclusions (mine, not Hovind's)

a. Hovind proves beyond a conceivable reasonable doubt that he has no honest interest in the answers to his "questions." If he did, he'd get rid of several of them as grotesquely redundant, reformulate the rest, and, most importantly, simply read up on the topics he raises. All of his questions, including the few that actually have something to do with evolution, are dealt with in excruciating detail and depth and breadth in literally thousands of books. People who actually want answers to questions that they cannot answer directly do two main things: They think (and, if their thinking skills are as bad as Hovind pretends his are, they devote a significant amount of time and work on improving their thinking skills to the level required by the subject matter), and they read. There are, as I said, thousands of books that deal with every one of his questions, so there is no excuse for the kind of monumental ignorance and lack of understanding that Hovind contrives to exhibit.

b. Hovind proves, once again (for the billion-and-first time) that he has nothing at all of any significance with which to challenge evolution, so he has to make up things, he has to pretend that the theory of evolution claims all sorts of things that it has nothing to say about, such as the origin of the universe, where space came from, where the laws of the universe came from, and so on. The idea here, as elsewhere, is to misrepresent the theory of evolution and pretend that it is unable to answer important questions that, in his pretensions, it should answer if it is to be acceptable. I wonder why he doesn't also attack General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, since neither of them can answer these questions either (at least not in an ultimate sense). Could it be that his goal is not to get actual answers, but merely to try to make the theory of evolution look bad?

It could be. And is.

c. I note that he doesn't have answers to any of the philosophical questions either, except in the sense that a child can "answer" such questions by simply making things up or parroting what he/she found in some book. That's all Hovind can do, because he is not only incompetent about biology. He is also a philosophical dunce beyond belief (some high-schoolers have a better grasp of philosophical issues than Hovind has). I suppose that, lacking answers, the best he can manage is a mechanical, robot like answer of "God" for any question regarding origins. It does of course, have the advantage of not requiring any effort or significant knowledge (even a three-year-old with no education in these topics at all can repeat the word "God" as intelligently as (and much more honestly than) Hovind does.

d. Notice that the answer "God" as the answer to how any biological feature arose is not a very interesting answer, because, unlike a genuine biological explanation, it does not tell us anything about how the feature got to be the way it is. A biologist might, after a lot of study, be able to tell us, more or less precisely, how the Bombardier beetle developed its remarkable defense.

But the creationist can give us nothing at all of equal interest. All he can say is, "God chose to do it that way, period." Having been told that, can we use that information to make predictions about what we might find as ancestors to this beetle? No: In Hovind's view, it has no ancestors. Can we tell something about the conditions under which this trait evolved? No, because, in Hovind's view, it didn't evolve, so there are no facts to be found.

Can we use this information to predict what we might find in the way of variations on this defense mechanism in other species? No, because, in Hovind's view, each species is designed, and designed by a being who provides no relevant design principles.

Note that even the assumption that it was a mere alien species in our universe who did the designing is better in this respect, because we can plausibly assume that such designers, if any, would have the same abstract physical limitations as we do, that they have to cope with conservation laws, entropy, costs, and so on. Answering "God" for every question for which Hovind doesn't have an answer is almost singularly uninteresting and uninformative, on a par with answering "Santa Claus" for all of the same questions.

It would be different if the repeated answer was a useful equation, or causal principle that could be used to relate one set of facts to another, but positing "God" for everything is pointless (except for propaganda purposes, of course.

Hovind's "answers" are no better than if an evolutionist simply answered "Evolution" for every question, with no further explanation. If the evolutionist claimed that we got eyes by simply saying, "evolution," would we know how eyes came about? No; this is why there are many pages in the evolution literature (which Hovind has had access to for decades, by the way) dealing in detail with how eyes evolved in different cases (eyes evolved from scratch in about forty distinctly separate instances). Where, in all of the "literature" of creationism is there a similarly detailed analysis of any issue of how some specific biological feature came about? The answer, "God" for each such question doesn't cut it.

The following was found, along with the above questions at TalkOrigins. It's from someone named Jeffrey Harmison: --]

P.S. I almost forgot......Have you ever heard of the Bombardier Beetle? A fascinating example of Divine design... When in danger, this little critter shoots chemical flames out of it's behind. It stores and mixes two chemicals to create the reaction. While stored, the beetle uses a special agent to prevent premature explosions. The instant the chemicals are released, the beetle injects another chemical the subdue the first preventive chemical, thus allowing a chemical reaction-explosion. This is not something that could have been worked out over millions of years. If so, there would have been little beetles blowing themselves up all over the place looking for that right combination of chemicals and timing. Are these beetles super-chemists with special knowledge of explosives? No....logic and science clearly show that this was no accident.

[-- I hope I'm not the only one to understand that, of course, this is the sort of thing that could evolve over millions of years. Its first instance would be of something no more than releasing an irritant. Modifications over time would introduce changes, such as mixing chemicals to make the irritant right at the time of release (so it wouldn't irritate the beetle itself), and then gradually modifying the system to make an explosive mixture at the time of release. Harmison gives no good reason why this could not happen. The idea that they would just blow themselves up is silly. A very few (relatively) might do just that, but they aren't around to tell us about it, are they. The ones who didn't do that would be the ones with the best chance of surviving. The effectiveness of this trait would guarantee that it would be selected for as long as the potential risks could be minimized. Selection would guarantee also that the risks would be minimized, at least to the point where the value of the mechanism would still outweigh the risks.

The beetles don't have to be super-chemists. The chemicals used derived from other chemicals that occurred naturally in the beetles, and which were modified slowly over time to become progressively more effective as protection while remaining safe enough for the beetles themselves. It's certainly true that "logic and science clearly show that this was no accident." But evolution is not mainly about accidents, but about incremental improvements relative to an environment. It is even, I suppose, possible that no beetle ever blew itself up because of a "mistake" in chemistry, because all that is needed to make evolution work is relative successes and failures. If some beetles merely made themselves sick by not having an adequate buffering mechanism, they would tend to reproduce less than the ones who got it most nearly right.

But, my point is that, even if some beetles did blow themselves up, so what? The ones who didn't blow themselves up are the ones with the genes for the working version of this mechanism.

Evolution works by gradually modifying what's already present, and making a lot of "mistakes" (dead organisms that don't reproduce) along the way. Out of billions and billions, only a tiny few have to get it right in each generation to make for progressive improvement of a trait like the beetle's chemical defense, starting from merely releasing an irritant and gradually modifying the irritant system until a working "explosive" was developed (at first, it probably just sizzled a little, I'd guess). I could easily work out dozens of possible evolutionary pathways, but, of course, ultimately we'd need to study the actual beetles and their relatives to work out the specific evolutionary pathways that actually occurred to give them this wonderful ability. I don’t know if this has been done or not, but it is clear that Harmison has not bothered with anything as "silly" (in his view) as actual logic and science. It was enough (in his view) that he already had "the" answer in his creationism, so logic and science were (to him) simply unnecessary.

Or, horrifying thought, maybe he thinks that his "reasoning" in this case is "logic and science." Sadly, this is probably true; he probably doesn't even grasp that his argument is about as "logical" and "scientific" as that of an average fortune teller claiming that patterns of tea leaves in the bottom of the cup foretell one's future.

In any case, the Bombardier beetle's self-defense mechanism is clearly not the sort of thing that requires design. It requires a number of small microevolutionary steps, each of which provides an increase in relative fitness (relative to the environment).

This is what logic and science say. But Harmison was so overzealously eager to have something to support his creationism that he didn't bother with either logic or science, or is so poorly informed that he thinks such an argument as his is logical and scientific. Scary thought.

This brings us to one of the most generally-used ploy's of creationists, which is to find some remarkable fact about something and basically simply assert that it must have been consciously designed that way, without doing even the slightest research to find out if that's true, or to consider how it might actually have evolved. The eye is probably the most famous of these silly arguments.

What Harmison and others actually end up demonstrating with these incredibly lame arguments is just how amazingly ignorant and/or unthinking they are. Can Harmison give us any reason at all to think that the beetles would be exploding all over the place? No. Instead, he invokes the stupidly irrelevant image of a chemist randomly trying one combination after another to find the "right" combination. Even Harmison must know that's not how evolution works or is supposed to work. Evolution is a matter of small steps, not a matter of randomly choosing from an infinite range of all possible combinations of traits. It's more like walking up a hill, but Harmison treats it like it was a matter of randomly teleporting here and there until one just happens to re-materialize on the top of the hill.

Harmison, far from refuting evolution by such lameness, demonstrates only his failure to learn about what the theory claims, or to apply it in such cases as the Bombardier beetle. Twenty or thirty minutes of reading a good book on evolution would have enabled him to make such a stupid mistake, but he chose to go ahead and make a public fool of himself rather than bother with all that reading.

You might think that a person who could read well enough to read about the beetle he describes, would also be able to read well enough to get at least the absolute basics of the theory of evolution right.

But that would have been too much to hope for, as it seems to be with most creationists. Would it kill them to take the effort to at least know what they are talking about?

Apparently they at least think it would kill them, judging from the frequency of such idiocies spewing from them.

I suppose I should just accept that such remarkable feats of ignorance and unreason are a natural part of human social living, and, mostly, I do accept it.

But, because such massive and willful irrationality is very harmful to human life, this is sometimes hard to do. --]

Feedback, discussion, comments, questions: Chris Cogan, ccogan@ou.edu