Sid Galloway, speaker, biology teacher and former zookeeper, delivered a two-hour lecture Sunday on the merits of young earth creationism at the Chapel on the Campus.
While I was unable to attend Galloway’s lecture, I have since investigated his website, including his 300-slide PowerPoint presentation. I’d like to offer counterarguments to a few of his outrageous claims.
Galloway asserts mutations cannot add any beneficial traits to genomes. A simple counterexample is lactose tolerance in humans. Humans naturally lose the ability to digest lactose after childhood. Around the time animal husbandry was being developed in Europe and other regions, a mutation allowing continued production of lactose digesting enzymes emerged in these populations.
This trait proved beneficial to survival and reproduction, so it spread throughout those populations, making them lactose tolerant. Meanwhile, cultures historically without cows or other milk bearing livestock such as those found in South America or South Africa have remained overwhelmingly lactose intolerant.
During his speech, Galloway claimed DNA is far too complex to have arisen by random chance. Luckily, the theory of evolution doesn’t rely on random chance nearly as much as creationists like Galloway seem to believe.
Biologists do not believe DNA magically sprang from the primordial soup in its current form. They believe it evolved from a more rudimentary, self-replicating polypeptide chain through advantageous mutations culled by natural selection. How this original polypeptide formed is a more difficult question, but it is a question of abiogenesis, not evolution.
Galloway goes on to blame a buildup of deleterious genes for the relatively short life span of modern humans compared to biblical patriarchs like Adam and Noah. He then graphed the life spans of these men and fit them with an exponential decay curve.
Galloway’s hypothesis not only completely ignores increases in human life expectancy in the last few hundred years, but also assumes the patriarchs actually lived for hundreds of years and all people in biblical times had similar lifespans to their contemporary patriarchs.
Even more damning, if we roughly extrapolate Galloway’s model to the modern era, we find modern humans should only live about 35 years because of our overabundance of harmful mutations.
Eventually, Galloway transitions from simply being incorrect to downright offensive with his assertion, “At the core of Hitler’s belief was evolution.”
Hitler’s views on evolution and human breeding revolved mostly around the concepts of microevolution, which has been observed for centuries and has even been accepted by creationists like Galloway. Hitler believed in God and some form of intelligent design and never directly attributed any of his views to the works of Charles Darwin. By contrast, in his work “Mein Kampf,” Hitler proclaimed Martin Luther to be one of history’s greatest reformers due in large part to his anti-Semitism.
Luther, arguably the father of Protestantism, penned “On the Jews and Their Lies” in 1543, in which he urged Christians to enslave the Jews and burn their homes, schools and synagogues to the ground. Luther believed it was every Christian’s duty to take revenge on the Jews for the death of Jesus and wrote, “We are at fault in not slaying them.”
I am not blaming Hitler or the Holocaust on Christianity. I am just trying to point out the difference between Darwin and a real inspiration for Hitler.
Finally, Galloway believes religion and evolution are incompatible. I agree his fundamentalist views are irreconcilable not only with evolution but also reality in general. However, I don’t understand the desire to completely replace religion with scientific thought or why so many religious people feel the need to actively deny scientific explanations for observable phenomena.
We still don’t know plenty about the universe, and much of this may defy any scientific explanation. So why can’t religion stick to those questions rather than the ones science has already answered?
Andrew Shockey is a 20-year-old biological engineering sophomore from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Ashockey.