A while back, I mentioned that the Twin Cities Creation Science Association was doing an online creation/evolution debate on the 26th and that maybe I’d tune in and see what they had to say. I didn’t. I knew the creationist, Brian Lauer, would natter on about the kinds of arguments Kent Hovind makes, and that he’d misrepresent the science, and that he’d do nothing but trot out oft-refuted nonsense, and I decided to wait until today, when I could play it back at a faster speed and skip over the stupid bits, of which there were many.
Lauer turned out to be worse than I thought. He’s an acolyte of Walt Brown’s hydroplate theory, the idea the “fountains of the deep” blasted massive amounts of material during the flood that shot out into space, so when scientists find amino acids in meteorites, that’s because they all originated on Earth, and were subsequently launched skyward during the flood catastrophe. There isn’t a single crackpot explanation some fringe doofus could mention that Lauer wouldn’t bring out in the debate…and then he’d cherry-pick headlines from scientific sources to show that science was in the Bible.
Mark Reid, his opponent, was batting these claims down as fast as Lauer would make them, but nothing was penetrating the creationist’s smug smirk. I was falling asleep when, surprisingly, my name was brought up, at about the 1:36:00 minute.
Oh boy! This was Bob Enyart’s Trochlear Challenge, where he demanded that I explain the evolutionary origin of a specific ocular muscle. Lauer brought it up so he could crow about the fact that I said “I don’t know”.
OK, but Enyart has challenged me to explain how this feature evolved. I have an answer. It’s easy.
I don’t know.
I don’t see any obvious obstacle to an arrangement of muscles evolving, but I don’t know the details of this particular set. And there’s actually a very good reason for that.
This is a case where you have to step back from the creationist and look at the big picture. Don’t get bogged down in the details. Take a look at the whole context of the question.
We don’t know exactly how this evolved because all living vertebrates, with the exception of the lamprey, have the same arrangement of extra-ocular muscles. This is a primitive and very highly conserved condition, with no extant intermediates. We’ve seen the arrangement of these muscles in 400 million year old placoderm fossils, and they’re the same; these muscles probably evolved 450 million or more years ago, and we have no record of any intermediate state. So I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
But that’s where we have to look at the big picture: Bob Enyart, a raving loon and young earth creationist who thinks the whole planet is less than 10,000 years old, is asking me to recount the details of an event that occurred almost half a billion years ago. I should think it’s enough to shatter his position and show that he’s wrong to simply note that however it evolved, it happened in animals 75,000 times older than he claims the planet is. Has he even noticed this little problem with his question?
How nice of Lauer to remember part of what I said. But as was typical of all of his arguments, he only mentioned part of the answer, the part he could twist to fit his beliefs, and not the whole of the answer, which shot down the greater YEC thesis.
I haven’t encountered Lauer until now, and he’s based in St Cloud, where my son lives. He’s one of the many shames of Minnesota.
