Nathaniel Jeanson, newly of the Institute for Creation Research, gave a lecture in Boston last night entitled “Evolution: Bankrupt Science, Creationism: Science You Can Bank On.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with how creationist arguments work, but there was absolutely nothing new about his talk. As a freshly-minted doctoral graduate from Harvard’s molecular biology program, Jeanson is the embodiment of the very bleeding edge of so-called creation science: a dull intellectual wasteland rehashing decades-old arguments long since refuted, unable to be fertilized even by graduate-level training at an Ivy league university.
I attended the lecture with the Boston Skeptics. It was was mostly one stale, nonsensical creationist talking point after another, spanning everything from geology to astronomy to biology (in case you hadn’t guessed, by “evolution” he meant “every field of secular science that challenges Young Earth Creationism”), with bits of pieces of pure absurdity sprinkled in for flavor. I had to chuckle a bit when he brought up Irreducible Complexity; and here I had though Behe had gone out of style. There was, however, one claim he made late in his talk that caught my interest as a biologist: he suggested that the variation between species in a protein called cytochrome c (“cytC”) actually refutes common descent.
I hadn’t heard this particular talking point before, but apparently even this is nothing new. In fact, one of the first hits that come up when you Google “cytochrome c homology” is to a creationist webpage that cites a book called Evolution: A Theory In Crisis by Michael Denton, published in 1986. (Denton’s argument also apparently appears in the infamous creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People.) Denton compared the amino acid sequence of a bacterial version of cytC to the cytC sequences of several fungi, plants, and animals, and found that across the proteins had roughly the same degree of shared sequence across the board. From this, creationists assert:
If evolution were true, then the further organisms have evolved from bacteria, the greater change there should be in Cytochrome C. . . . From the data in table above it is evident that the amino acid sequence of the Cytochrome c molecules of all of the species in all of the groups of organisms are equally isolated from that of the bacterium Rhodospirillum rubrum. Thus there is no basis in this data to indicate that any group is intermediate between other groups. All are equally isolated from all other groups. This data supports the biblical record of creation of each “kind” separate from all other “kinds.”
Jeanson tried to make essentially the same point, but with so much additional obfuscation as to lead me to believe he wasn’t merely profoundly ignorant, but downright blatantly dishonest. He first presented a chart similar to the following that shows how cytC from several species compare to human cytC1:
| Species | Human |
|---|---|
| Human (Homo sapiens) | 100% |
| Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) | 100% |
| Dog (Canis lupus familiaris) | 89% |
| Zebra fish (Danio rerio) | 84% |
| Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) | 78% |
| Yeast (Candida albicans) | 66% |
CytC is a very old, highly conserved protein, appearing in animals, plants, fungi, and even many unicellular organisms. Since it’s so prevalent, it’s an excellent protein to choose when we want to compare protein sequences between two different organisms like this. These are exactly the kinds of numbers we would predict based on what we know about evolution. Humans and chimps, being very closely related, have identical cytC. Dogs, our fellow mammals, have less shared identity than chimps, but more than fish. Our fellow vertebrates all match us more closely than does the invertebrate Drosophila, which in turn, being a fellow animal, matches us more closely than does the fungus Candida.
We can represent these relationships using a branching figure called a “dendrogram”:
Note that, the more closely two species are related, the less distance you have to trace back along the dendrogram before you reach a common horizontal. And Jeanson baited the audience by freely admitting that this was a fair interpretation of the data presented. However, he followed up his single-column chart with an expanded chart similar to this:
| Species | Human | Chimp | Dog | Fish | Fly | Yeast |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human | 100% | |||||
| Chimpanzee | 100% | |||||
| Dog | 89% | 89% | ||||
| Zebra fish | 84% | 84% | 90% | |||
| Fruit fly | 78% | 78% | 84% | 85% | ||
| Yeast | 66% | 66% | 66% | 66% | 67% |
This chart, Jeanson claimed, refutes the evolutionary model and necessitates the creationist hypothesis of discontinuous species. It’s the same flawed argument as seen above, wherein each row of this table is akin to the Denton table. Each species is approximately “equidistant” from all the species above it, which supposedly discredits evolution (nothing could be further from the truth, as we shall see).
But that wasn’t enough for Jeanson. To further confuse the audience, he replaced the dendrogram with a deliberately obfuscatory “model” in which every species eventually has a line drawn to every other species signifying the percent shared identity. After 3 iterations, his so-called “n-dimensional model” would look like a triangular pyramid (use your imaginations to get the 3D effect):
He claims, then, that since you have to add a new dimension for each species you add to the “model,” it ultimately becomes unwieldy, and it makes more sense to think of the species as discontinuous rather than inter-related. The problem is, his “model” is nothing of the sort. It tells us absolutely nothing new. It’s simply a confusing way of illustrating the data presented in the chart, with no effort made to actually interpret the data. The only reason it requires multiple dimensions to illustrate is because he made the completely arbitrary decision not to let the connecting lines overlap. He could just have easily used crisscrossing lines, or (hey!) left it in chart format! Same data, no added value, just different means of visualizing it.
Why, then, mangle the presentation of the data? To hide the truth that the data fits our earlier dendrogram beautifully! In fact, this additional data is precisely what makes our dendrogram possible in the first place.
The creationist cytC argument fails because it falls for the Great Chain of Being fallacy. They imagine fruit flies as being more primitive than zebra fish, which are in turn less evolved than dogs, etc, with humans being the most “highly evolved.” But all of the species being studied here are extant species, alive in the here and now. Zebra fish are not an intermediate species between humans and yeast, though the last common ancestor between humans and fish is. The human lineage has changed a lot since that common ancestor, but so has the fish lineage!
The measure of shared identity between cytC tells us roughly how long the proteins have had to change since they diverged. The point at which the human and yeast lineage diverged is the exact same point at which all fungi and all animals diverged, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see that the similarity between yeast and fish is similar to between yeast and dogs. Similarly, the point at which the human lineage diverged from fruit flies is the exact same point at which all vertebrates diverged from all invertebrates. And since the vertebrate-invertebrate divergence shows less change (~81% match) than the animal-fungus divergence (~66%), it fits our model with the animal-fungus divergence occurring further in the past.
This analysis of the data is precisely where the dendrogram comes from. You can’t get a very accurate tree structure just by looking at how all species relate to a single organism. You need to compare as many species as possible. This is where Jeanson’s table completely backfires; whereas Denton only ever looked at one divergence (prokaryotes-eukaryotes), Jeanson was kind enough to present us with data from five (animal-fungus, vertebrate-invertebrate, fish-mammal, canine-primate, human-chimpanzee), making for a much more interesting dendrogram.
And I suspect that Jeanson knows all this, which is why he insisted on being deliberately confusing. I kinda botched my attempt to challenge him during the Q&A session (at that point I was still struggling to discern just how he was getting it so wrong), but I had the opportunity to approach him afterward and press him on the fact that the data supports the evolutionary model. First he tried (as he did during the Q&A) to say that the dendrogram was a 2-D projection of his n-dimensional model, which was pure nonsense. The two diagrams have nothing in common, the lines drawn mean completely different things. And after some further discussion, when I (repeatedly) asked him whether he would admit that the data presented fits the evolutionary model, he refused to give a yes-or-no answer. If that’s the lot he’s chosen, then fine. It’s his life. I’ll be content to marvel in how the science really works.
And it really is a marvel. CytC is a prime example to use when tracing evolutionary heritage. But the really remarkable thing is that, when we take similar approaches to other proteins, they confirm the same evolutionary heritage! Disparate proteins fall along similar dendrograms, indicating that the inter-relatedness is not an accident, but follows an overarching pattern of common descent. Furthermore, we can use the amount of divergence in these proteins’ sequences as a very rough estimate of time since species diverged, and we can compare that with the account given by the fossil record.
Evolution has absolutely no problem interpreting the data that Jeanson presented. In fact, it thrives upon such data. If Jeanson wants to lie and obfuscate about that, I’m sure the ICR will pay him handsomely to do so. But I prefer the truth.
(For more on Jeanson’s talk, see Rebecca’s post at Boston Skeptics)
1: Whereas Jeanson gave values of percentage difference between proteins in his lecture, I list here percent identity. Numbers were obtained by hastily copying cytC sequences from NCBI Entrez Protein and comparing them using NCBI BLAST.
Aaron Golas is a microbial geneticist and Jack-of-all-trades currently living in Cambridge, MA.
“He claims, then, that since you have to add a new dimension for each species you add to the “model,” it ultimately becomes unwieldy, and it makes more sense to think of the species as discontinuous rather than inter-related.”
Srsly? If that is an accurate account, then the unwieldiness is a product only of the number of points being compared, and has nothing to do with their similarity or dissimilarity, or the relationship responsible for that similarity. We could compare the number of legs on a group of housecats, and sure enough, once we got about 5 or so cats, the diagram would be unwieldy.
If anyone wants to look up the original arguments, that is Chapter 12 in Michael Denton’s book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis; and the argument is reproduced in Chapter 6 of Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon.
I have heard that Denton repudiated his argument in a later book and climbed aboard the cosmological fine-tuning bandwagon. But since Evolution: ATIC touts his expertise in molecular biology, he deserves any embarrassment the earlier episode causes him.
Of all the gobbeldygook he laid down yesterday, his discussion of cytochrome c and cladistics was the worst — excellent discussion, Aaron.
Two more accounts of the lecture can be found at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/08/a_first-hand_report_of_nathani.php and at http://bostonatheists.blogspot.com/2009/08/report-on-nathaniel-jeansons.html.
Aaron,
Wonderful reproductions of the pyramids. The same thing happened in the morning session, btw – he was challenged on cytC, and was forced to acknowledge that the evidence supports evolution.
I guess it didn’t occur to him that people from the morning and evening sessions would be comparing notes!
The same thing happened in the morning session, btw – he was challenged on cytC, and was forced to acknowledge that the evidence supports evolution.
So he repeated an argument which he knew had been refuted? I see he’s adjusting nicely to the life of a professional Creationist.
@Reginald: Oh yes. Not just the cytochrone c business, but he also admitted under considerable pressure that irreducible complexity is a meaningless concept — and, lo and behold, it made another appearance in the evening session.
Even if his laughably inadequate and obfuscatory model were the only way to represent the data, n-dimensional spaces are easily operated on in linear algebra, a fairly basic undergraduate math course. It’s not a new or abstract field, and is applied with great precision in quantum mechanics and EE/signal processing.
Furthermore, linear algebra appears to be a requirement for, or at least included in the Molecular Biology program at Harvard:
Molecular Biology Course List @Harvard
MCB 111: Mathematics in Biology
Develops the mathematics needed for quantitative understanding of biological phenomena including data analysis, simple models, and framing quantitative questions. Topics include probability, transforms and linear algebra, and dynamical systems, each motivated by current biological research.
MATH 153: Mathematical Biology-Evolutionary Dynamics
Introduces basic concepts of mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics: evolution of genomes, quasi-species, finite and infinite population dynamics, chaos, game dynamics, evolution of cooperation and language, spatial models, evolutionary graph theory, infection dynamics, somatic evolution of cancer.
Still, it’s perhaps possible that he skipped both courses… But it’s somehow doubtful that the kind of shoddy modelling he used here would have flown in his coursework. Between this and the fact that he reused /at least/ two debunked arguments between sessions, I think a conclusion can be drawn about his integrity…
Looks like I may have gotten his department wrong, despite reportedly having a PhD in Molecular Bio.:
A Harvard alumnus examines course requirements
Wow… it sounds like Jeanson truly is a Liar for Jesus. Given all the coverage coming from skeptics who attended the lectures, I wonder whether his fledgling lecture career will survive the exposure.
@Discombobulated: It wouldn’t really surprise me if a course like that is where Jeanson got the n-dimension idea in the first place. If there’s anything a Harvard education can contribute to a creationist lecture, it’s a bigger vocabulary and more complex diagrams (all used, naturally, to confuse rather than enlighten).
@Aaron:
True, but as always, creationists are slippery, often being careful to keep plausible deniability on their sides. Since only Harvard can answer to his actual course list, and there’s further contention even on which department he was in, I’m hesitant to call that part definitive. However, the reports above of him repeating refuted claims between sessions is obviously more damning.
Regardless, great review. Thanks for sharing it with everyone.
I was at the evening talk and Nathaniel Jeanson is just another liar for Jesus. He deliberately distorted every “fact” he used to base his reasoning on. I spoke with him immediately after Aaron did, and about his use of the cytochrome c data. He took a table showing differences in cytochrome c sequences and was surprised that extant yeast was ~39% different than other extant organisms. He didn’t want to look at the sequences the way that evolutionary theory predicts they should be related, via the common ancestor. That would predict that extant yeast would have very similar differences to all extant animals because the common ancestor of both (and from which all of them inherited their ancestral cytochrome c sequence) was so long ago.
When I explained to him that the correct way to look at it was by comparing common ancestors and not by comparing extant organisms, he was unwilling to go there. He said he didn’t want to look at it that way, to which I replied that the only reason he didn’t look at it that way was because he didn’t want to look at it that way because he was unable to accept the conclusion that the correct way of data analysis showed. I said he only wanted to dispute a straw man idea of evolution, not real evolution. That when entire genomes are looked at, each and every sequence of each and every sequenced organism fits into the phylogenetic tree that evolution predicts. I then said that hundreds of whole genomes had been sequenced with tens of thousands of genes with each and every one of them fitting exactly where evolution predicts them to fit.
I did get the pastor of the church to admit that the Bible was not an “eye-witness” account. Adam did not write his autobiography. The pastor even said that Moses probably wrote the first several books of the OT, and that Moses wasn’t around during creation or during the other events that pre-dated his life, so he couldn’t be an eye-witness to them. The best that could be said is that God told Moses to write it this way, which at best makes it hearsay evidence and not admissible in a court of law.
Scientific evidence is not the same as legal evidence (my beef about Johnson’s book “Darwin on Trial”).
However, Moses could have got it all wrong. Because of “Free Will”, God could not dictate scripture to Moses or use automatic writing, but could only “inspire” him. And there are no corrective footnotes in the Bible when someone got it scrambled.
(Umm, not that Moses actually did write the books attributed to him.)
Given all the coverage coming from skeptics who attended the lectures, I wonder whether his fledgling lecture career will survive the exposure.
Aaron,
I’m not sure he plans on having one. I think he might have done this as a favor to the pastor. This might have been his church, as they meet down the block from Harvard Med School, where he worked. Also, I suspect he didn’t think that many scientists would show up.
If he does intend to lecture publicly, he’ll probably choose friendlier venues. He’s just moved to Dallas; he’ll have no problems finding like minds there!
I’ve always admired the intellectual dishonesty the creationists exemplify. I’m sure that, to the unwashed creationists in Dallas, he’ll look really, really smart. But the phrase “liar for Jesus” is a good one, as what better way to preserve the message of the God of Truth than by lying about things, eh?
These links may be useful to you.
Here’s the excerpt from Jeanson’s talk on cytochrome c:
Also, part of his talk about calcium regulation and irreducible complexity:
My bad, here it goes again:
These links may be useful to you.
Here’s the excerpt from Jeanson’s talk
on cytochrome c.
Also, part of his talk about calcium regulation and irreducible complexity.
Around 9 minutes into the video: “We can’t say that we are closer to (let’s say) chimps than we are to yeast … because chimps and humans are equally distant from yeast.”
Yes, we can say that. The question is human-chimp distance vs. human-yeast distance, not human-yeast distance vs. chimp-yeast distance. Lying SOB.
Exactly. According to Jeanson’s reasoning, Philadelphia and Baltimore couldn’t possibly be within 100 miles of each other, because each is about 2500 miles from San Francisco.
Thanks for the video links, Liulian! I didn’t notice before, but Jeanson actually quoted Michael Denton in one of his slides.