Vandalizing Darwin: the Kirk Cameron, Ray Comfort campaign

A new piece of Creationist drivel asks some inane questions meant to be provocative to the flummoxed “Darwinian fundamentalist”: 

 

“Can you explain which came first—the blood or the heart—and why? Did the heart in all these different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolve before there were blood vessels throughout their bodies? When did the blood evolve? Was it before the vessels evolved or after they evolved?"

 

If asked in honest curiosity by a middle school child before entering her first formal biology lessons, the questions might merit praise, and the child might be assumed to genuinely value the answers.  Alas, in the case quoted above, the questions are meant rhetorically, believed to have no plausible answer, and posed by an incurious – if outspoken – evangelical propagandist named Ray Comfort.

With these questions and more, Comfort, the co-founder (with former actor Kirk Cameron) of The Way of The Master Ministries, has decided to shamelessly advertise his ignorance of evolutionary biology in an introduction appended to a limited printing of the field’s foundational text, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.  What’s more, on Thursday, November 19, 2009, Comfort and Cameron intend to freely distribute 50,000 of the defaced scientific classic at universities across the nation.   

 

“The only reasonable answer to these questions”, Comfort declares, “is that God made the human body (and the bodies of all the other creatures) with a heart, lungs (to oxygenate the blood), kidneys (to filter wastes from the blood), blood vessels, arteries, blood, skin (to hold it all in), etc., at one moment in time, as the Bible states.”

Though it may come as no surprise that a man who does not believe in evolution may leap from point A to point Z without recognizing any intermediary stages, it does seem more than a little odd that a man who so publicly pits his Creationist fantasies against established scientific theory should be so clearly ill-versed in not only biology, but in contemporary Creationist refinements as well. 

The “Intelligent Design” movement’s argument that the human organism is too complex, with too many strictly defined interwoven components that serve no purpose apart from each other, to have evolved from simpler components, is marketed by the name of “irreducible complexity” by Comfort’s more savvy peers.  And it’s an argument that has been confronted and answered definitively by biologists.  Repeatedly.

 But, as stated, Comfort’s own unlettered suggestion that complex organs are believed by evolutionary biologists to have evolved independently of one another only later to be brought together in miraculous symbiosis at best only begins to hint at the more reasonable sounding, but debunked, notion of irreducible complexity.  In fact, the idea is closer to Comfort’s own confused concept of evolutionary biology’s “female problem” as laid out by him in an earlier article: “No male can reproduce and keep its kind alive without a female of the same species”, Comfort observed.  “If any species came into existence without a mature female present (with complimentary female components), that one male would have remained alone and in time died.” 

 

(How we were reduced to “that one male” is never clear, but never mind.)

 

“Why did hundreds of thousands of animals, fish, reptiles and birds (over millions of years) evolve a female partner (that coincidentally matured at just the right time) with each species?”  Again, without considering that there is an evolutionary answer, Comfort concluded: “…God instantaneously created man (in His own image) and woman, giving them the ability to reproduce after their kind. So the Bible and the theory of Darwinian evolution are not only opposed to one another, they are incompatible. The only commonality is that they are both miraculous, and they both require faith to believe them.”

I had the dubious honour of speaking to Ray Comfort earlier this year, at which I took the opportunity to challenge him on this issue.

Me: Simulations have been run – particularly at MSU [Michigan State University] that allow basic components to follow Darwinian patterns, and what they show is that this can cause for very complex “creations”, and cellular biology covers this – but I must say, I don’t understand your female argument. If you look at biology, and study cellular biology, back to the level of mitosis and meiosis, males and females aren’t said to develop separately -

Comfort: Then how did they get here? Why is it that every one of the 1.4 million species has a male and female, except for a few worms and things like that? Every single one of them! Giraffes, elephants, horses, male human beings have females. How did that happen? And how did they reproduce before there was male and female?

Male/Female reproduction serves a survival benefit [genetic diversity], but this really isn’t a good forum to go into the deep biology of it -

Do you know why?? Because evolution doesn’t have an answer…

It doesn’t need an answer on where the first male/female common ancestor first split under what circumstances. We can see that -

I do! I need an answer! I want to find answers!

Just because you need an answer doesn’t mean we have an answer, or that your answer is correct!

No. But as -

So is that good enough??

No. Being a skeptic, I want solid evidence. Faith is not enough. I’m not going to sit back and say I believe that Michigan State University did this, or that I believe million years ago, this. Evolution is based on a blind faith, and a pseudo science. I want facts. I used to believe evolution till I asked for facts, and I couldn’t find any.

[We argued a bit as I pointed out that answers to all of his questions are readily available, but I soon brought the female issue back]

Well… okay. I just have to get back to the female question…

(Laughs) Don’t all men feel like that?

This idea that… (sigh)… I just hope you can elaborate this more. The idea that females kind of developed — I’m actually not sure how you picture this. I’m really not sure what your concept is on the biology of male/female division.

Well, everywhere I see, I see male and female: giraffes, elephants, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, fish, birds. Everywhere! You ask the evolutionists how this happened. They’ve got no answer…

But they do.

Well, then tell me simply, what happened? Where did the female come from and how did it happen to 1.4 million species without an intelligent mind?

Okay. This goes to Cellular Biology, and they have a common ancestor, all males and females, and they’re not left in separate locations at separate times to find one another! We’re talking about a method of reproduction -

How could they reproduce without a female? They can’t just split in two.

Cells can -

When did the dog start doing the female thing? When did she come along? And the elephant, and the giraffe, and the horse, and male and female homo sapiens? It becomes a huge nightmare when you start thinking about it.

 No. You see, we have a common ancestor at the cellular level and beyond. And this does take a good deal of explanation, but my challenge to you then is if I can show you clippings from five textbooks that explain this process -

From billions of years ago. And then I have to believe this, because the professor tells me.

You don’t have to believe this, but you have to admit that you’re misrepresenting Biology.

No I’m not. Not scientific Biology. There’s a pseudoscience. A lot of these scientists should have got jobs as Disney imagineers, because their beliefs are based on imaginations of men. That’s my opinion. And I’m allowed my opinion because this is America. I don’t have to be shaped in a mould and believe the theory of evolution. And I don’t believe Evolution, even though I did once. So what we’re going to have to do is agree to differ, but that’s healthy, isn’t it?

(Read the full interview here)

And he moved swiftly on to another topic with absolutely no interest in being corrected at all.  And I was not even attempting to convince Comfort that evolution – though a fact – is true.  I was merely trying to make him understand that his own understanding of what evolutionary biology actually claims is horribly mistaken.  And this isn’t the only unique, entirely wrong, and rather embarrassing straw-man interpretation of science that Comfort has constructed so that he might boldly confront it.  In fact, Comfort’s arguments against evolution are often so simple-mindedly ridiculous that it would be easy to mistake many of them for satire of the creationist position.  Consider, for example, the “crocoduck”, a mythic creature created from fractured components of kindergarten level misinterpretations in the limitless depths of Comfort’s ignorance.  Not grasping the idea that crocodiles and ducks both share a common ancestor that surely would have looked much like neither of them, Comfort has decided that “common ancestry” means that if evolution were true, we should expect to see something that is cross between a crocodile and a duck somewhere in the fossil record.  Thus, the crocoduck.

But that’s not all! Ray Comfort is best known as the creationist clown who proposed the “banana argument” for God’s existence.   The banana, he quixotically declared, is “the atheist’s nightmare”, for it:

1.      Is shaped for the human hand

2.      Has a non-slip surface

3.      Has outward indicators of inward content: Green — not ripe enough; Yellow — just right for eating; Black — too ripe

4.      Has a tab for easy removal of its wrapper

5.      Is perforated on the wrapper for easy peeling

6.      Has a biodegradable wrapper

7.      Is shaped for the human mouth

8.      Is pleasing to the taste buds

9.      Is curved towards the face to make the eating process easy 

Unconvincing enough on its very face, it even turns out (as explained on Iron Chariots.org wiki) that the banana as we know it is a good example of evolution by artificial selection: “the bananas that we eat today were specifically bred by humans to be a size that we like. Natural bananas are much smaller and are full of cherry-pit sized seeds. Far from being evidence of God, this is actually evidence of human "design". Cultivated bananas are parthenocarpic, which makes them sterile and unable to produce viable seeds and can therefore not propagate without human intervention.” (http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Banana_argument)

This would all be so very hilarious if only everybody would share in the laughter.  Alas, it is frightening, because there are so many who actually think Ray Comfort knows what he is talking about.  Even if one is inclined to deny evolution, I would hope that one might insist that any critic at least have some idea of what it is he is criticizing.  Comfort’s utter and complete ignorance of evolutionary science should be seen as intolerable - by anybody with the slightest degree of intellectual honesty – for a man who so vocally claims to refute it.

The idea that such a churlish comedian as Comfort should be spreading vandalized copies of Species throughout American campuses has caused no small amount of consternation and outrage on the part of concerned scientists and secularists, many of who have suggested that recipients should tear the introduction out of as many copies as they can and re-distribute it.  Personally, I don’t see the point in this.  I plan on looking for my own free copy of the book on Harvard campus this November, and I intend to keep it as-it-is in hopes that it will, in my own lifetime, become a relic from a dead movement similar to Flat-Earth Society literature.  

 

 Ray Comfort by Alethea Jones