How many fossils fit in a Prius?

A Sacred Chain story

Another Sloan Stump original

“Creationist” is an unfortunate term, because about everyone who believes in God thinks God had something to do with bringing about the existence of things. Doesn’t that make us creation-ists too? Most people don’t think so. My organization, BioLogos, has tried to reclaim and redeem the term by saying we are “evolutionary creationists” and that phrase has some currency now (maybe in another post I’ll give a defense of that term and why we prefer it to “theistic evolutionist”). But the way language works, the majority rules. The way terms are actually used determines what they mean. And there are still a lot of people who use evolution as the opposite of creation.

I spend some time in my forthcoming book trying to sympathetically explain the creationist mindset. I’m not sure I ever publicly called myself a creationist, but I certainly had my doubts about evolution and I didn’t understand it. And I came from a community where creationism was the default position. So I think I understand the mindset pretty well. It begins with the Bible. And it ends with the Bible. But in between those they have to try to do some science.

In my public school education, and in my undergraduate degree from an accredited liberal arts institution where I majored in “Science Education”, the science of evolution was never addressed — except in some of the religion courses. In those it was ridiculed as obviously foolish. There was a kind of superficial scientific critique that brought up (ironically) deeply technical objections without ever really understanding how those fit into the broader theory. The takeaway was always: can you believe how silly it is to believe such nonsense?!

I know there are serious critiques of some aspects of evolutionary theory (there are of every scientific theory). And I know there are well-meaning people who reject evolution (I know some of them personally). But my experience was primarily that it was sneered out of any serious consideration.

There is quite a subculture of ridiculing evolution. The Christian genre of movies often features a plucky young student who takes on her atheist biology teacher. She challenges him with common sense objections to evolution that he hasn’t ever really considered. If he’s not converted to creationism by the end of the movie, he has at least developed new respect for intellectual rigor of his student and considers that his allegiance to evolution is more product of secular brainwashing than it is evidence.

I saw a short film like this recently. The teacher announced to his high school biology class that he knows some of them have concerns about evolution for “religious reasons” (yes, he used air quotes), but he’s going to teach them to think for themselves. He asks if there are any questions. The heroine of the story initially just squirms in her seat but kept her mouth shut. Eventually, though, the teacher goads her into speaking up, and she sets in expressing her concerns about evolution, which have nothing to do with religion. The music starts to swell as she asks how life could come from non-life, and how information isn’t lost during mutations, and why the fossil record is so incomplete. “If evolution were true,” she claims at one point, “we’d have millions of ‘in between’ creatures running around everywhere, right? And all of the ‘in between’ fossils could fit in the back of my Prius.”

That seems like a reasonable concern… but it just doesn’t have any basis in reality. TV star Kirk Cameron thought he had definitively disproved evolution by holding up a picture of a “crocoduck” and asking why we don’t find such creatures that are “in between” two other creatures (go ahead and google that). But that is a misunderstanding of evolution along the lines of “if humans evolved from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys around?”

Evolution does not predict that for any two creatures you find today, there should be another creature today that is “in between” them. Rather, the prediction is that for any two creatures today, there must have been common ancestors in the past from which they both descended. For crocodiles and ducks, that was about 245 million years ago (see timetree.org for such predictions). And that population probably didn’t look much like either a crocodile or a duck.

But then our heroine’s concern might be framed as, “where are the transitional fossils from those common ancestors to today’s crocodiles and ducks?” That’s a legitimate question, and the first answer to it sounds like a cop out (though it happens to be true): fossilization is an extraordinarily rare event. The vast, vast majority of living things leave no trace of their existence after they’re gone (besides the DNA they might pass on to future generations). But starting in the 19th century, there were a bunch of fossils found that didn’t conform to existing categories.

I remember back during my college years that the anti-evolution crusaders would routinely ask, “where are the fossils?” I’ve come to learn since then that the objection was unfounded then, and it has only gotten more unfounded (unfoundeder?) since then. The fossil record testifies nicely to a progression of forms over time, and the most reasonable conclusion is that all life today has descended from common ancestors with modifications over time.

Consider the Valley of the Whales in the Egyptian desert. It has preserved the remains of more than 1,500 skeletons of creatures that are “in between” the land-dwelling mammals of 100 million years ago and today’s whales. These creatures lived some 40 million years ago when there was a shallow sea there, and today’s desert conditions have contributed to preserving these bones over time. Some of the species still have little back legs that were in the process of becoming obsolete. And not one of these skeletons would fit in the back of a Prius!

Or go to the Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. There is a wall of skulls on display there that have been found of creatures somewhere “in between” our species today and our last common ancestor with chimpanzees. A plaque at the display says that fossil remains of more than 5,000 individuals have been found which can be assigned to this in-between period. That number has grown considerably today, and again, you’re not going to fit all of these in the Prius. The skulls in the display are clearly not our own species, and they are clearly not from chimpanzees. They are somewhere “in between.” 

That’s me a few years ago at the Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian in DC. Photo Credit: Trevor Stump

Learning the actual science of evolution was eye-opening to me. I had been given a very selective sample of it from a community that had little actual scientific experience. There are other challenges to evolution for people of faith, and I cover several of them in my book (and will preview them here in the coming weeks). But the fossil record isn’t one of them.