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The happy harmony of science and faith is too often and too glibly proclaimed. The real picture is far more interesting: culture wars, religious fears, evangelical atheism, good and bad science, good and bad theology, art, books, cartoons, dogs and cats, and the unpredictable, inexhaustible grab-bag of life itself. S Word scrapes skepticism against authority, freedom against constraint, desire against logic. It goes wherever it likes in that shifty country where the relationship between science and religion is strained, funny, disturbing, suggestive, or just plain weird. Mission: trespass.


blogs :: S Word :: January 18, 2010

Tempting Science Fallacies 2: Winging It

by Larry Gilman

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Last week I looked at one form of the obviousness trap, namely, the notion that you can only do real science on stuff you can see happening.

Also worthy of mention is the half-a-wing fallacy, which is independently rediscovered about a hundred times a day and feels like a stunning revelation every time.  How could wings evolve?  You’d have to start with a perfectly good leg—that’s obvious, right?—and then keep on evolving it, warping it and messing with it, until it became, finally, a perfectly good wing.  But natural selection, as the evolutionists tell us themselves, can only produce structures that are advantageous to their possessors.   So you can’t evolve a useless, crippled half-a-wing.  And if you can’t evolve a useless half-a-wing then you can’t evolve a proper wing: ergo, you can’t evolve a wing.   Or, by similar reasoning, an eye.   Or a blood-clotting cascade.  Or an immune system.  “[I]f a leg of a reptile were to evolve into a wing of a bird, it would become a bad leg long before it became a good wing,” states über-creationist Walter T. Brown. [1]  Yet almost every biologist on the planet has somehow managed to overlook this simple point of logic.  But they can’t really be that stupid—they must be pretending to overlook it.  And that means evolution isn’t just a mistake—it’s a lie!  (Google gives 12,400 hits for the phrase “evolution is a lie,” 248,000 for “evolution is a hoax.”)  And behold, the reasoner has crossed over into full-fledged fruitcakedom.

Unevolvable? “Flügel einer Blaurake” (“Wing
 of a Blue Roller”), Albrecht Dürer, 1512. [2]

G. K. Chesterton, who was anything but dumb and on whose writings I have fed for thirty years like a jackal eating its way into a dead giraffe, made the half-a-wing argument way back in 1924.   His “ignorance of science,” he explained, was no obstacle to outwitting the biologists of the world because
this does happen to be exactly one of those questions on which, as it seems to me, the independent critic has really a right to check the specialist.  For it is a larger question of logic, and not a smaller question of fact.  It is like the difficulty of believing that a halfpenny can fall head or tail a hundred times running; which has nothing to do with the numismatic value of the coin. . . . There is a general tide of reason flowing against such improbabilities . . . And whatever the details of natural history, this thing is against the very nature of things. [3]
But alas, the “general tide of reason,” unrestrained by the nagging “details of natural history,” can—and usually does—sweep you right out to sea.  For example, Chesterton is right that in judging the likelihood of a series of coin-tosses, the value of the coin is irrelevant: but the irrelevance of one detail does not prove the irrelevance of all details.  We can’t, in reality, judge the likelihood of a series of coin tosses without knowing if the coin is fair—which depends on a “small question of fact,” namely the exact shape and composition of the coin.  Details do count.

At least Chesterton was too sensible to conclude that modern science is a gigantic, deliberate hoax.  But how he imagined that most of the world’s working biologists had overlooked the total impossibility of their field’s central concept, he did not commit to paper.

The half-a-wing argument commits the fallacy of the false dilemma, also known as the either-or fallacy.  Its claim that a wing must be either flyable or useless is false: intermediate or partial forms can serve perfectly good functions, sometimes quite different from those ultimately adopted.  Feathers, for example, first evolved in flightless dinosaurs, probably for insulation (fossils abound); feathered limbs with even slightly longer feathers would help their possessors make longer hops or glides, with obvious advantage; at which point, true wings are just a few million descendants away.  In featherless animals, broadened fringes of skin on body margins or stretched between digits or limbs can do the same job.   Flight is not all-or-nothing.  The whole zoo of gliding squirrels, snakes, lizards, and fish proves it, not to mention the astonishing Microraptor gui, a gliding (not flying) dinosaur that lived 124–128 million years ago: [4]

Are those “bad legs” or “good wings”?   If they worked, who cares?

The same flaw dooms all a priori arguments against the evolvability of eyes, immune systems, bacterial flagella, and the like. The half-a-wing or half-an-anything argument fails in all its forms, whether advanced eloquently by G. K. Chesterton, crudely by Christian websites like Faith Facts (a limb of the gigantic Gospel.Com alliance), or ultra-cleverly by Intelligent Design advocates like Michael Behe.   Beware the obvious.

So, could wings have evolved?  Yes:
Figure from “On the Origin of Avian Flight: Compromise and System
 Approaches,” by E. N. Kurochkin and I. A. Bogdanovich, Biology
 Bulletin, 2008, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 1–11.


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[1] http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/LifeSciences12.html

[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duerer_wing_of_a_blue_roller.jpg

[3] G. K. Chesterton, “Is Darwin Dead?” in Fancies Versus Fads, 1924. Available at http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Fancies_Versis_Fads.txt

[4] Art by Portia Sloan, first published in Nature but available online at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/photogalleries/dromaeosaur/ and numerous other sites. I have not obtained permission to reproduce this figure, having been unable to locate a homepage for the artist. I will take it down if asked to do so by the artist or copyright holder. Books containing illustrations by Portia Sloan are available on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=portia+sloan&x=0&y=0
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I’ll email a copy of “On the Origin of Avian Flight: Compromise and System Approaches,” by E. N. Kurochkin and I. A. Bogdanovich, Biology Bulletin, 2008, to anyone who writes to me to request one: lnpgilman [ a t ] wildblue [d o t ] net.
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