RationalWiki:Kitzmiller v. Dover annotated transcript/P034
dr padian[edit]
THE COURT: Exhibits --
MR. HARVEY: Your Honor, may I make a suggestion before you begin that?
THE COURT: Yes.
MR. HARVEY: That is that we have an expert witness, Dr. Padian --
THE COURT: And you're going to tell me you want to get moving?
MR. HARVEY: That's a dangerous thing to say to the Court.
THE COURT: No, that's fine. I know you have an expert and you want to get moving on the expert. So you want to reserve the argument on the exhibits until later?
MR. HARVEY: Exactly, Your Honor.
THE COURT: I'll rely on you then to remind me so that we get those in, and let's take your witness.
MR. WALCZAK: Your Honor, plaintiffs call Dr. Kevin Padian.
KEVIN PADIAN, PH.D., called as a witness, having been duly sworn or affirmed, testified as follows:
THE CLERK: If you could state and spell your name for the record.
THE WITNESS: My name is Kevin Padian, P-a-d-i-a-n.
THE COURT: You may proceed.
DIRECT EXAMINATION
BY MR. WALCZAK:
Q. Good morning, Dr. Padian.
A. Good morning, Mr. Walczak.
Q. Where do you live?
A. I live in Berkeley, California.
Q. What do you do there?
A. I am Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California and a curator in the Museum of Paleontology.
Q. I'd like to direct your attention to what's been marked as Plaintiffs' Exhibit 292. Matt, could you put that up. Do you recognize this document?
A. It looks like my CV.
Q. Is this a reasonably accurate representation of your professional experience?
A. I believe that's a recent one, yes.
Q. I'd first like to focus on your educational background. And you have a bachelor's of arts degree from Colgate University?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And you have a master's of arts in teaching. Is that correct?
A. That is right.
Q. What does that mean?
A. It means that I have permanent certification in the State of New York and several other states to teach life science in grades 7, 12. And for this training, you take postgraduate courses in education and your subject major, whatever it happens to be, and you do intern teaching and you're certified to teach.
Q. And what was your subject major?
A. I majored in natural sciences at Colgate, and so I'm certified with life sciences.
Q. And have you ever used that degree to teach elementary or secondary school biology?
A. Yes. I've taught seventh-grade life science and biology, and I've taught two years of sixth-grade process science.
Q. And when was that?
A. That would be in the years '72 to '75.
Q. And after that, did you go back to school to get your Ph.D.?
A. I went to Yale for my Ph.D. after that, which I got in biology in 1980.
Q. And did you write a dissertation for your Ph.D.?
A. I did. That's required.
Q. And what was the topic of your dissertation?
A. The topic of my dissertation was on the evolution of flight and locomotion in the flying reptiles called pterosaurs, which lived during the age of dinosaurs.
Q. And where was your first professional appointment after graduating?
A. I went to Berkeley right after that as an assistant professor, and I've been there ever since.
Q. And what's your position there now?
A. I am a professor and curator, so a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and curator in the Museum of Paleontology there.
Q. And what do you teach, Professor Padian?
A. I teach a variety of courses over 25 years. Some I don't teach anymore because the curriculum changes, but currently I teach and coordinate half of our upper division junior/senior course in evolution. I teach an upper division course in the evolution of vertebrates. I teach a number of freshman seminars usually on dinosaurs. I teach a number of graduate seminars on topics that range from macroevolution to the history of evolutionary thought. Currently we're doing Darwin's Origin of Species.
Q. And you said a moment ago that your background and expertise is in evolutionary biology and paleontology. Could you tell us what those specialties involve?
A. Sure. Evolutionary biology is a broad field that ranges from the study of the changes through time of molecules to the changes in time of the whole history of life as it relates to the changes of the planet Earth through time, the whole solar system. And my specialty in this is what we call macroevolution. Within that, I focus principally on how major new adaptations begin in evolution.
Q. When you say "major new adaptations," what do you mean?
A. Well, about things like flight or how, for example, dinosaurs took over the earth. That's a great big change in evolution that happened about 225 million years ago. I work on problems like that.
And I also work on problems involving dinosaurs and general things about reading their footprints, their locomotion, again, how the age of dinosaurs got started. And I'm interested in the history of evolutionary thought, how people have conceived of the idea of evolution and how it's developed over time in the past 200 years.
Q. And is some aspect of what you just talked about paleontology?
A. Paleontology is the study of life of the past, generally put. And so when I say that I work on macroevolution, these are large changes that happened at a scale above the population level. So we usually have to look at them through time.
Q. And do you look at something called the fossil record?
A. Fossil record is where I spend a lot of my time.
Q. And what is the fossil record?
A. The fossil record is the record in the rocks of the remains of organic beings through time. It can take the form of bone shells, footprints, trace fossils, all sorts of things.
And what we do is, we don't -- I mean, when you look at television documentaries, it normally focuses on people going out in the field and parking the truck and walking out in the Badlands and, you know, stumbling over bones someplace and finding that it's interesting in digging up and getting a skeleton and putting it in plaster and taking it back to the lab.
That's the first stage of what we do, but that's just the beginning of the science. The science is asking the questions about how life evolves, how the changes in life have happened through time.
Q. It sounds like you have to have knowledge in many different fields.
A. Well, my department is called integrative biology for a reason, that we actually look at problems in a rather integrative way. That is, my work involves physiology, bone histology, which is the tissue form of bones and mechanics of growth, as well as fossils and geologic change through time.
So, yeah, the questions you ask could be pretty complex and integrative, and different kinds of evolutionary biologists and paleontologists work on different aspects of these problems.
Q. And are you still involved in research?
A. Oh, yes. Berkeley is a premiere research institution like Harvard or Yale or Penn State, and basically most of what we do is research and teaching. So as part of my job, I'm expected to produce a lot of peer-reviewed articles and books and things on a regular basis.
Q. And you've been doing research for 30 years now?
A. Yeah, roughly.
Q. And this is all on evolution and paleontology and the fossil record?
A. Oh, yes.
Q. And you mentioned that you've --
(White noise.)
MR. WALCZAK: Is that a hint, Your Honor?
THE COURT: No. Inadvertent button push.
BY MR. WALCZAK:
Q. You mentioned that you've published peer-reviewed research. Let me direct your attention to the top of Page 2 of your curriculum vitae, or I guess about a third of the way down. Now, it says there, Publications. What do you mean by that?
A. These are -- the list that I enclose with my CV here includes what we call peer-reviewed publications. And so these would be publications that have been sent out to our professional journals and, in some cases, to books that are edited by professionals again.
I don't know if you've gone through the concept of peer review much in the court, but by "peer review" we mean that if you publish -- if you have some research that you've produced and you want to get it published, you send it to a journal in the field, and the editor, who is an expert in the field, takes your manuscript and sends it to several experts that you can't choose and you don't know who they are. And --
Q. So you, as the author, don't know who is reviewing your articles?
A. That's correct. This is the anonymity of peer review. Ordinarily you don't know who these commentators are.
Q. What's the purpose of that?
A. Well, it's basically so that they can give a frank appraisal of what you're writing without worrying about whether they're going to offend you and, if you're a senior scientist, whether you're going to get mad at them or something. I don't know. But it's been a habit that's always been the case in the scientific field, certainly.
And the reviewers who look at your papers then decide whether you've followed the right procedures for going about the science, whether the methods you use are up to date, whether you've cited all the literature that's relevant, whether you've inferred or speculated on more than you should, or whether it's basically within the grounds of what is acceptable science.
And they will propose changes, major or minor. If they don't think that your paper is very good, they'll suggest it be rejected, and the editor takes that into consideration.
Q. And so is everything that is submitted to a peer-review journal published?
A. Oh, no. A lot submitted to peer-review journals isn't published. It depends on the journal. On the journals on which I've been an editor, you have an acceptance rate of anywhere from 50 percent upwards or downwards to 30 percent, for example, in the ones I'm familiar with.
Q. And is there a -- what you might consider a hierarchy of journals for publication?
A. Yes, there are certain journals that pretty much every scientist in the world reads every week. Two of them in particular are Nature, which is published in London by Macmillan Journals, and Science, which is published in Washington every week by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is our sort of central public science organization in America.
Everybody reads those journals because they contain good review articles, but mainly the hottest sort of new research in all fields. They will also include news about new scientific developments not just in science but in education, industry, technology, even this court case, for example.
Q. And do they have a high rejection rate?
A. Oh, yes, they have a very high rejection rate. No more than about 10 percent of what's submitted to them even gets considered for publication.
Q. Now, is there something called -- is it an impact factor?
A. Yeah, there's a -- the Institute for Scientific Information produces a measure of how important journals are basically to the fields. Journals like Nature and Science have a very high impact factor. But they're general journals that everybody reads, and they're highly selective.
Some fields are smaller fields, they don't have much of an impact because they're not cited very much simply because the fields are small, but within the fields they might be very important. So you could have an impact factor that is relatively low, but in the field it's high because it's cited a lot for that field.
Q. And the way they measure this impact factor is to see how many times an article from that publication is cited thereafter?
A. That's basically it.
Q. And what journals have you published in?
A. Well, I've published in a lot of journals. My colleagues and I try to -- you know, you always try to go for the best journal in the field that you're writing for the people who would be the most interested in the research.
Sometimes I'm writing about dinosaur footprints, and I might try to publish in a journal that publishes a lot of footprint work. Other times, for example, when we've done our work on how fast dinosaurs grow, learning about this from the fine structure of their bone tissues, we've gone to Nature, we've gone to Paleobiology, we've gone to Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, again, sort of the best journals in the field that we can target, depending on the scope and interest of what we're trying to do.
Not all the papers are gems, not all are Nobel prize quality. Sometimes they are very general, and sometimes they're a very specific interest.
Q. Now, I note that by my count, you've got eight pages of peer-reviewed publications listed here in your curriculum vitae. Do you know how many peer-reviewed publications you are either an author or coauthor on?
A. It's 8200. I don't keep a correct count.
Q. And have you included in this curriculum vitae nonpeer-reviewed publications?
A. I believe the copy that I gave the Court may have only the peer-reviewed ones. I have about another eight or ten pages of things like book reviews and popular articles, things in Scientific American and stuff like that. But I didn't include all those here. I may have included some of the books that I've authored or edited.
Q. Let's turn to -- I believe it's Page 9. And you've got a heading on books. And you are either the author or the editor or a contributor to these nine books?
A. Yes.
Q. And just pick one. Tell us about your contribution to, for instance, the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, and what is that book?
A. The Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs was published by Academic Press, I guess in 1997. It's a standard reference work for the field. And my job, along with Phil Currie, my coeditor, was to organize and solicit the contributions to make sure all the relevant entries were covered, to read the manuscripts when they came in from the authors, if they needed changes, to suggest them or to make them.
And, in fact, as it turns out, I wound up writing about a sixth or a seventh of the book before publication just because of filling in the parts that were needed, as inevitably happens with reference works.
Q. And this is a book that would be found in your public library or your school library as a reference text on dinosaurs?
A. Yes. This book is cited by other scientists in their publications. It is in libraries for ordinary people to read. We tried to write it at a level that somebody that would have a general understanding of dinosaurs would do it. And then for the dino fans and freaks, they're going to pick it up, too, and enjoy it as much as the rest of us.
Q. Now, does something become science or accepted in science because it's published in a book?
A. Well, it depends on the book. When books are published, they may have a seminal influence, but simply because something is published in a book doesn't mean that it's science. I think that that's a question of its reception by the scientific community.
If somebody writes a book and nobody reads it, is it influential? And the answer would be no. And if somebody writes a book but claims it's science and it's not cited by scientists, it doesn't stimulate scientific research and the ideas in it are never brought to peer review, then the answer is probably not much, because we depend on peer-review discussion of ideas and research results in order to further the progress of science.
Q. So anybody can write a book and proclaim that they have a new scientific theory, but the test really is whether it's ultimately accepted by a large part of the scientific community?
A. Yes. And here I think the term "theory," again, has to be looked at the way scientists consider it. A theory is not just something that we think of in the middle of the night after too much coffee and not enough sleep. That's an idea. And if you have a hypothesis, it's something that's a testable proposition, you can actually find some evidence that will help you to weigh it one way or the other.
A theory, in science, as maybe it's been pointed out in court, I don't know, in science means a very large body of information that's withstood a lot of testing. It probably consists of a number of different hypotheses, many different lines of evidence. And it's something that is very difficult to slay with an ugly fact, as Huxley once put it, because it's just a complex body of work that's been worked on through time.
Gravitation is a theory that's unlikely to be falsified even if we saw something fall up. It would make us wonder, but we'd try to figure out what was going on there rather than just immediately dismiss gravitation.
Q. Is the same true for evolution?
A. Oh, yes. Evolution has a great number of different kinds of lines of evidence that support it from, of course, the fossil record, the geologic record, comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, systematic, that is, classification work, molecular phylogenies, all of these independent lines of evidence.
Q. We're going to talk a little bit more in detail about some of those concepts in just a couple of minutes. Your expertise has been recognized by professional societies and scientific journals in a sense that you have been an officer or a committee chair on a number of prominent scientific associations?
A. Yes, if that's a measure. My work is published in the organs of scientific societies, their professional journals. I've served as an officer in a couple of societies and committee member, and I've been on the editorial board of a number of peer-reviewed journals in our field.
Q. Matt, if you could turn back to the first page of Dr. Padian's CV under Professional Service. Now, it appears that you've been an editor on the editorial board of more than a half a dozen journals. Can you tell us what it means to be an editor of a journal?
A. It generally means that when manuscripts come in, the chief editor will send them to you either for review yourself or for deciding whether they should be reviewed by people. Or if you send them out to review, you might gather the reviews from the referees and determine the merits of the manuscript in question.
Often, of course, with general editorial meetings you're looking at where the journal wants to go, what kinds of papers and research it wants to solicit, sort of things like that.
Q. And I note that you've had a couple of stints as editor of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Is that a prestigious journal in your field?
A. That is, in our field of just those paleontologists that run around the rocks and look for the remains of old animals with backbones, yes, that's our primary international scientific organization. Paleobiology is probably the premiere journal in the field of paleontology that works on macroevolution, which is one of the things that interests me.
Q. And you were the editor of Paleobiology for six years?
A. I was one of the editors on the editorial committee, yes.
Q. And you were also on the editorial board of Geology and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London?
A. Yes.
Q. Dr. Padian, have you had any experience with high school or elementary school curriculum development and teacher training?
A. Yes. Since I've been in California, since the mid 1980s, I've worked in several capacities for the State Department of Education in California on various panels and committees.
Notably, I guess, I was one of the people who wrote and edited the state science framework for K12 schools in 1990. And this is the central document that embodies science education for the state. It's the document against which districts and other organizations will develop their curricula locally.
And my role there was to write about guidelines for the -- explaining what science is, the nature of science, explaining the goals for K12 in the life sciences and for some of the earth sciences and several other parts of that.
In addition, I guess I've served three times on what we call the instructional materials evaluation panel as a scientific member. California is an adoption state, which means that it's one of 23 states for which the state actually selects which textbooks can be used by local districts and for which state funds can be spent.
And so it's kind of a quality control that educators and content area specialists like scientists or historians or mathematicians will get together and evaluate textbooks and things submitted. And then the question is whether these are -- which ones pass muster and which ones don't, and that's what you can use state funds to buy.
Q. And you've been involved in that for several years?
A. Three times.
Q. And do you have familiarity with creationism and intelligent design?
A. Yes.
Q. And just tell us a little bit about that. What's your history of involvement?
A. Well, California has an interesting history with respect to the creationist movement, I guess we might call it creation science and related fields.
The Institute for Creation Research in Southern California has been very active since the early 1980s and various kinds of legal and social processes that have come out of objections to the teaching of evolution in California have mirrored what's happened in other states, as well.
And so early on in the 1980s I was one of a number of scientists who were involved in trying to clarify evolution and related science to the public and to advise the Department of Education and other bodies about it and to talk generally to the public about what evolution was.
And these organizations and sort of committees of correspondence, as they were called then, eventually morphed into what became the National Center for Science Education which I've been president of for some years.
Q. I'm sorry, you said you're president of the National Center for Science --
A. National Center for Science Education.
Q. Dr. Padian, can you tell us a little bit about the history of paleontology and its importance to evolution?
A. Sure. Paleontology, the idea that you're finding rocks that have the remains of ancient life in it, has been around actually in some form or another since the 1500s and 1600s when people first started to understand that these were actually the remains of organisms that were dead and not simply sports of nature or some kind of sculptural-looking accident.
The understanding of fossils really began to mature in the late 1700s when people realized that these were the remains of dead creatures that were not coming back, they were extinct. And the upshot of this meant that ideas about the philosophy of nature began to change as the enlightenment developed.
By 1800, you had people in both England and France developing systems of looking at the order of the rocks through time, moving up through a section, that could be correlated from one area to another. The same sequences of rocks were appearing. These were used in England, for example, by civil engineers to dig canals and to show them where reliably they could find the right rocks to dig canals through.
Part of these indications were by the fossils that they contained which also went up in the same sequence every time. And this resulted in the first real geologic map of England, which was produced in about 1800. So we're already talking about using fossils in a very forensic sense, that is, to help dig canals, but using them as an index for mapping geologic -- we call them strata or outcrops all over England. A similar development of the idea was taking place in France at the time and also in Germany.
So the idea that there was a progression of fossils in rocks from the oldest to the youngest going up through a section of rocks is really quite old. And it was developed, in a sense, that had nothing to do with any ideas about evolution. It was just seen as the progression of fossils through time.
And then ultimately in the early 1800s people began to understand that this reflected an idea of common ancestry change through time and the fact that in the past the world was not like it is now.
Q. And so what you've just told us about is taking place before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species?
A. Oh, yes. Darwin doesn't publish the Origin of Species until 1859. The geologic map of England is being done by 1801, and already by 1846 they have a pretty good idea of the diversity of fossils through time.
Q. So was Darwin trying to explain the history of life or the fossil record?
A. No, he really wasn't. Other people were doing that at the time, including people like Richard Owen. What Darwin was doing was proposing a mechanism for how change through time could occur in a lineage of organisms, and he called that natural selection.
He made an analogy with what he called artificial selection, which is what breeders do every day in selecting plants and animals for the characteristics that we admire or want to use for various purposes.
Q. Now, we've had, I guess, testimony in this case where people seem to be using terms in different ways. Could you distinguish for us the way science uses the term "natural selection" from "evolution of life"? I mean, is there a distinction?
A. Yes. "Evolution," of course, refers to change through time in a general sense. Darwin's own definition is descent with modification, which is probably still the best one.
Natural selection is a mechanism, a process that accounts for a lot of that change, but it needs to be distinguished from evolution, per se, because there are a number of mechanisms, as Darwin noted, including sexual selection, which is another term he invented, a concept that he invented, as he did so many things, and it's just one mechanism for life to change. It's not the whole thing. Darwin was very clear on that in his writings.
Q. And can you distinguish evolution of life, the term "evolution of life," from the term "origin of life"?
A. Sure. And that's a common conflation in popular parlance. Evolution of life is essentially the whole enchilada. It's everything from the first organisms that appeared right up until the organisms that are alive today. That whole procession of things, all the patterns and processes that are involved in it, we would call the evolution of life.
"Origins" is a trickier phrase. The origin of life we expect, as Darwin said in 1859 -- the last paragraph of The Origin of Species refers to one or a few forms being the original embodiment of life. But today we look at the genetic material, DNA, RNA, and its genetic components, and scientists reason from this that they are so complex and so similar that they must have had a common origin. And this is the origin of life question.
That's separate if you talk about, like, origin of birds or origin of mammals or origin of the middle ear. Those things are part of the progression of life that's already established. They aren't something new that happens all over again that's, in other words, abruptly or specially put in there. They're just part of something that's already happening that now is modified to become something else.
Q. So as scientists would use "origin of life," that would be sort of first life?
A. Exactly.
Q. Now, it seems that genes and molecules are getting much of the attention today when you're talking about evolution. Is it still important to study comparative anatomy, fossils, geology, paleontology? I guess another way to say it, are you still relevant?
A. I'm a fossil like everybody else. No, genes and molecules get a lot of press, and deservedly so. The research on them has been amazing over the past half century. The new discovery has just come at an incredible rate. They're just revealing all sorts of new things about the world we never could have imagined. We could have hoped we could have known, but we wouldn't have known how.
But, oddly enough, the most recent great advances in biology are coming with the integration of this new molecular evidence with what we already know from comparative anatomy, from fossils, and from geology.
An example I could give you is like the hottest area in biology today is called evo-devo or evolutionary developmental biology. Evo-devo is not a rock group. And the thing about it is that the whole premise of evo-devo is that we are now understanding a lot more about the genes that actually code for the development of organisms. That is, we know the genes that make you line up in a front-to-back axis and make your limbs sprout and make you have wings instead of hoofs or whatever it happens to be.
These are under the command of a relatively well-organized system of genes that are universal among a great many organisms. And you can even transplant parts of these into other organisms, and they'll work properly, which is really amazing.
And why paleontology and evolutionary biology is relevant to this is because, for one thing, in the fossil record we see a lot of forms that are not present in any kind of shape today. Configurations of hands and wings and skulls that we can see by examination of the genetic structure and functions of development actually are produced in certain ways and they mimic what we see in the past.
So, oddly enough, paleontology, evolutionary biology are coming back front and center to be integrated in this very hot new area.
Q. So is it fair to say that molecular biology today reinforces what you find in paleontology or integrative biology?
A. Oh, yes. The molecular biology of the 1960s and '70s was very strongly what we would call reductionists. That is, they were looking for the little, tiny workings, because they were able to do so, of genes and structures in the cells and chromosomes, and that was really amazing.
But, you know, in a sense, all that work is figuring out how the carburetor goes, you know, what are all the parts here. But they don't lose sight of and it doesn't change the importance of, you know, how you drive the car, what the purpose of the car is in terms of running down the road and operating on the internal combustion engine. And that's where the evolution comes in.
Q. I want to ask you one other question coming back to natural selection, and you said that is a mechanism for driving evolution.
A. Yes.
Q. And is that a mechanism that is widely supported by the scientific community?
A. Oh, yes. Darwin proposed it at the same time that Alfred Russel Wallace came up with it in 1858. And since then natural selection has been tested in the wild and in laboratory populations by a great number of scientists. And there are many books written that summarize this research, and the understanding of natural selection is primary to understanding population biology and evolution.
Q. Now, next week an expert for the school district, Dr. Behe, are you familiar with him?
A. Yes.
Q. He's going to testify. And Dr. Behe has claimed that it is not possible to observe natural selection in the fossil record. And is that true, and, if so, is the fossil record relevant to evolution?
A. Dr. Behe and some of the ID proponents characterize evolution, Darwinism evolution, as they call it, as random mutation and natural selection alone. And natural selection is important, but it's not the only process. Random mutation is a whole other problem in language. But natural selection can be observed in the fossil record in a different way than we'd see it in populations.
When Darwin developed his idea of natural selection, he's looking at individuals running around out there. He's saying that an individual horse is going to be able better to escape a lion than another horse. That horse is going to live longer, produce more offspring with the same characteristics, and those will be passed on to the next generation. So this is an idea about individuals.
Now, the problem is, when we go out to the fossil record, if we have a nice fossil deposit here of snails or clams or whatever it happens to be and you've got, you know, many local fossils, fossil deposits which you can find things like this, you know, we can't tell whether a particular fossil clam was better adapted than the guy who is dead next to him. We can't measure how many successful offspring he had. We just simply don't know. We don't know anything about the reproduction of fossils, individual organisms. And so in that sense, we're not looking at that level of natural selection.
But as everybody knows, we have a concept in evolution called "adaptation," which is sort of the main thing that drives the origination of new sort of types of organisms, the way that they get around in the world. And this notion of adaptation, by definition, is shaped by natural selection.
And my job is to look at macroevolution, and I focus on how new adaptations get going. So I study natural selection all the time in its ramifications for the development and improvement of all these complex adaptations that click in piece by piece in fossil animals and are shaped and preserved by natural selection.
Q. So the fossil record, in fact, helps to support the whole concept of natural selection?
A. In fact, it's indispensable to it, because we could look at natural selection in populations today, but our compass for looking at populations today is on the order of years, maybe decades, in some cases centuries.
A trend that we see today might reverse itself. It might be just sort of a drift or a random fluctuation, a temporary change, but in the fossil record, you see change through the big time. This is deep time, we call it. This is like mega history.
MR. WALCZAK: Your Honor, I was thinking about taking a break now. It might be an opportune time.
THE COURT: Why don't we do that. Let's take a shorter break than we've been taking so that we can keep moving with this witness. We'll take a 15-minute break at this point, and we'll return with Mr. Walczak's continued direct examination of this witness. We'll be in recess.
(Recess taken.)
recess[edit]
THE COURT: All right, Mr. Walczak, you may continue.
MR. WALCZAK: Thank you, Your Honor.
BY MR. WALCZAK:
Q. Dr. Padian, what is intelligent design?
A. As I understand the definition, intelligent design is the proposition that there are some things, natural phenomena in the world that could not have come to being by natural means and that the design of these structures has a certain complexity and certain features that implies that they must have been produced by what is called an intelligent designer by which is understood to mean possibly some kind of unknown forces or a supernatural being.
Q. And how is intelligent design different from creation science?
A. Well, it has some similarities, and it has some differences. Creation science is a movement that flowered mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. And creation science was an attempt by certain conservative Christian people with some science or engineering degrees to attempt to explain Bible stories or to find scientific evidence for Bible stories or explain them in scientific terms, that is, to attempt to justify them on scientific grounds.
Intelligent design doesn't have as its objective to validate Bible stories or any particular religious or creation stories, but what it shares with creation science, in part, is the insistence that things were designed and could not have evolved. And so over 90 percent of the corpus of intelligent design work has to do with basically trying to undermine the evidence for evolution and the concepts associated with evolution and related sciences.
Q. And we're going to spend a good bit of time talking about the undermining attempt, the undermining of the evolutionary science.
As I understand it, the affirmative argument for design, not the criticism of evolution, but the affirmative argument for design is that it looks designed or it's so complicated we can't imagine that it couldn't have been designed. Is that your understanding?
A. That's my understanding, in an informal sense, that that's what they mean.
Q. What's wrong with this appearance of design analysis from a scientific standpoint?
A. Well, it's not particularly rigorous. Lots of things look designed, but they may not necessarily be designed. Intelligent design looks a lot like science in some respects, but it's only superficial. It doesn't operate according to the principles of science, so the resemblances are superficial.
And appearances can be deceiving. For all the world, it looks like, you know, to us normal people, that the sun goes around the Earth. And for most people, it wouldn't make a difference whether the sun went around the Earth or it went around the moon, as Sherlock Holmes famously said to Watson. But when the renaissance scholars understood, found out that, in fact, the sun does not go around the Earth but the Earth and the planets go around the sun, it changed the way we look at the whole natural world in a very important and fundamental way.
And so part of the process of science is to discover things that will make a difference to our understanding of the natural world and not simply to reinforce appearances that are very difficult to test in an objective or testable sense.
Q. Let's begin to talk about the problems that you have with how intelligent design represents science, and I want to focus on the areas of science within your expertise. What is wrong with the intelligent design arguments against evolution?
A. Well, there are a number of systemic problems with the arguments about intelligent design.
Q. I'm sorry, Professor Padian, have you prepared an exhibit to help you explain this?
A. Yes. At your request, I've done some demonstratives that I hope may be of use in illustrating some of these things.
Q. Matt, would you put up the first slide, please.
A. There are certain systemic problems with the way that intelligent design represents the scientific findings of the scientific community. And in a sense, it is really just standard anti-evolutionist special creationism. I will explain why it's special creationism in the course of things.
The ways that scientists have problems with intelligent design literature is, first of all, that it provides some misleading definitions of evolution. In doing so, it sets up a straw man. It also distorts some commonplace scientific concepts, and, as a result, it sows doubt in the minds of students who would understandably be confused, as I am, by their treatment of certain fairly standard ideas. When they --
Q. What kind of concepts do they sow doubt about?
A. Well, they begin -- if you want to begin with definitions of evolution, they define micro and macroevolution in different terms. Microevolution they're fine with. That's evolution in populations. It's just genetic variation. And creation scientists didn't have a problem with that stuff, either.
But when we study evolution, we actually look at it on several discrete levels. Microevolution is what happens in populations at the gene level and among individuals in populations within a species.
But then when populations diverge from each other geographically and genetically to the point where they become different species, different lineages that are not going to have a mixed history anymore but separate histories and diverge further and make more new species, we call this process speciation, and it's a different level of consideration than simply what happens in populations, because now you see we have the situation where we're no longer exchanging genes with each other in a population, we're actually looking at two separate or more separate entities that will be that way historically for the future.
Once we start looking at how these new lineages, new species and new species that they give rise to, interact in the environment, how they change further through time, how they adapt more to changing environmental conditions, we're now at the level that's called macroevolution. And the reason we call it macroevolution is it's just on a bigger level. We're no longer dealing with populations.
Q. And by "populations," you mean, like, people or horses or --
A. Well, like just groups of organisms. Individual organisms within a species are different populations. You can have a population in this valley, a population in that state, whatever it happens to be.
The way that scientists regard this is much like economists look at microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics is how you run the corner grocery store, you know, what the economic balance is in the small town's economy, how a company works. But macroeconomics has more to do with things like the Federal Reserve, the international balance of trade. The common thing that -- the thread between this is, of course, money. It's all about currency. It's cash at some level.
And with evolution, we've got genes that are very similar because everything is hereditary. It's transmitted. And the genetic transmission of this works one way within populations when organisms can exchange genes, but when you get above the species level, they're no longer exchanging genes. We're working at different species disporting themselves through time. And then you get the whole process of the evolution of new adaptations and major groups of animals and plants.
And the intelligent design people define macroevolution as a major change that has to happen to make a major group, and they say that this is a completely different process than what happens at the microevolutionary level. And scientists just don't think so.
Q. And are some of the other concepts that they don't quite represent accurately homology and cladistics and classifications?
A. Yes, the basic principles of classification, the principles also by which you can compare organisms in order to say things in comparative biology are very problematic for intelligent design creationists. They have a hard time explaining these in the terms that scientists use. And so a lot of what they do is to try to cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the basis of doing these things as scientists understand them.
Q. I'm sorry, continue. I believe you were on Number 3.
A. One of the problems with the ways that intelligent design creationists present scientific evidence is that they present only part of it. They present the part that might suit their cause, but they really leave out an awful lot of important research. And in so doing, they say that scientists don't know this or they can't know this. And this creates the sense of ridicule for students.
Now, you know, we'll be the first people to admit that science doesn't know everything and can't know everything. But on the other hand, we would like a fair and accurate representation of what we do know.
I would also like to show in the course of explaining some of these things today that most of the claims that the ID proponents make are directly inherited from the old-time scientific creationism claims in the evolution bashing that they do. Many of the same arguments are used, the same kinds of evidence are used.
And, finally, the conclusion that is raised is that if you can mount some kind of alleged evidence against evolution, which is most of what the ID proponents do, as the scientific creationists did, then this is evidence for intelligent design. In so doing, they set up this false dichotomy or contrived dualism of religion and science that is disturbing to scientists who have religious backgrounds, as well as to those who don't have religious backgrounds because it isn't part of science to do that.
Q. Now, you said that ID proponents mischaracterize evolution as just a starting point. Matt, could you put up the next slide.
A. Yes, calling macroevolution the origin of new types, this is not a definition that scientists would recognize. Macroevolution, as I mentioned, is looking at the patterns and processes of organisms above the level of species.
So we're trying to figure out a lot of the major patterns of evolutionary change, but the origin of new types, again, that word "origins" comes in, and scientists just don't talk about origins in that sort of cataclysmic sense.
The proponents of intelligent design, as you see here embodied in these quotes from Of Pandas and People, claim that it's a mistake to claim from macroevolution the status of fact. And, again, this confuses for students what facts mean in science.
In contrast, from Pandas, again from Page 99 to 100, they state, quote, that intelligent design means that various forms of life begin abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact. And this tells you two things, first of all, that everything was already the way it was when things first appeared, so there's no transitions, and that an intelligent agency did this.
Now, that's a perfectly fine idea, but it's not scientific to claim this in advance of any kind of evidence that could be adduced to the contrary.
Q. But in order for this to be true, you have to show that evolution is false?
A. Yes, or at least you have to exclude the possibility of considering it in advance, which is a philosophical rather than an empirical consideration.
Q. If we could go to the next slide. You say that there are other definitions that intelligent design proponents confuse.
A. Yes. I would just like to clarify what we mean when we talk about speciation, macroevolution, which really differs from how it's treated in texts like Pandas. We call speciation what happens when new lineages are formed. They diverge from parent populations. That is, from old species new species bud off, if you will.
And this can happen in many different ways. You can have changes in behavior, in structure, in ecological adaptation, in physiology, in geography, and all these things may lead to the historical differentiation of these lineages. That's how we get new species. It's been happening ever since life was first running around on the planet.
Intelligent design proponents claim, for example, in Pandas that when speciation occurs, it actually limits variation, and so it's really unlikely that the kinds of changes we see in populations can actually lead to speciation.
I find this statement surprising because there's no evidence that I know of that when a new species forms, that genetic variability is necessarily reduced. It doesn't seem to be the case. Species that are closely related to each other, you don't find one with a lot less genetic variability than another that has ascribed to this process.
And so we regard speciation, in fact, as the raw material for the big changes through time. It's like births in a population are the starting point for populational change and development and the way that new species are formed. Without new species, we wouldn't get any kind of new developments in evolution.
Q. And that's contrasted with macroevolution how?
A. Well, the macroevolution -- then the speciation becomes the raw material for macroevolution, because macroevolution would be the study of what happens to those species after they're formed and as they deploy themselves through time, space, and ecology.
Q. And, Matt, if you could turn to the next slide. And you're familiar with the textbook Of Pandas and People?
A. Yes.
Q. And do you believe that Pandas is a good representation of intelligent design theory or thinking?
A. I think it is. And I believe that the ID proponents also attest to this.
Q. And here we have a slide. We pulled out a passage from Page 85. This is what they say about speciation?
A. Yes.
Q. And could you read the highlighted passage?
A. The whole thing?
Q. Please.
A. It says, Does speciation fit with the theory that species were originally designed? If the intelligent design explanation is true, there may be species on the face of the earth that have undergone no substantial change since their beginning. On the other hand, the idea of intelligent design does not preclude the possibility that variation within species occurs or that new species are formed from existing populations as illustrated by the previous discussion of squirrels. The theory of intelligent design does suggest that there are limits to the amount of variation that natural selection and random change mechanisms can produce.
Q. So according to intelligent design, speciation is what?
A. Well, speciation is, for them, mostly unlikely on the basis of the kind of genetic variation that occurs. They're happy with genetic variation occurring within species. That's perfectly okay with them. That doesn't lead to much of anything. They say that speciation can occur, but it doesn't involve new innovations and that some species have not changed since their beginning. Now, we'll have to examine what we mean by "some."
But they do state that the known natural mechanisms are too limited to account for the important biological change and the adaptive diversity that we see through time.
Q. And if science's concept of speciation is, in fact, accurate, then that would mean that there's no abrupt appearance of organisms already intact?
A. Well, it certainly would mean that we are not finding new complex adaptations appearing all at once in major groups of organisms with no possibility of their evolution step by step from other kinds of creatures out there, and that's a point on which books like Pandas is quite adamant. They consistently say this does not occur.
Q. And is this argument from Pandas and by intelligent design proponents similar to the argument that creation scientists made?
A. Yes. It's quite similar in its ramifications.
Q. Could you put up the next slide, please, Matt. Could you tell us what this is, Professor Padian?
A. The slide is some text from a publication from the Institute for Creation Research called Impact Number 43 by Duane Gish. Duane Gish is vice president of the Institute for Creation Research, a famous creation scientist speaker who has been giving presentations against evolution for several decades now.
And what I'd like to show by this quotation included in the record is that the ideas of intelligent design reflect exactly what special creationists, what scientific creationists, so-called, were saying decades ago.
Here, for example, outlined in yellow on the top paragraph, Duane Gish says that natural selection would be powerless to generate increasing complexity and to originate something new or novel and thus powerless to change one kind of animal into another.
Now, by that is understood, at least, the basis of speciation, and this is very close to what the Pandas text says, and I think the idea really conveys the same message. In the bottom paragraph, Mr. Gish notes that such a process could only produce variance within an established kind and could never produce new and novel structures.
Q. I want to start talking about some of the areas of evolutionary biology and evolution that Pandas discusses and get your understanding of whether they are accurate representations of current scientific thought.
I've asked you to pick several examples out of Pandas where you believe that they do not accurately represent the science. And does the first one involve something called cladistics?
A. Yes. I wanted to talk a bit to explain, if I could, the basis for classification in science.
Q. And when you say "classification," what do you mean by that?
A. I mean precisely how we study the relationships of organisms. The basis of classification, since Darwin, has been the relationships that organisms have to each other.
And the concepts of how classification is done, how we, in other words, understand and construct the tree of life, the whole idea of who ancestors and what ancestors are and the relationships of organisms to each other are problems that works such as Pandas really do not reflect accurately the way that science understands these processes, procedures and methods.
Q. And have you prepared a demonstrative exhibit to help explain this?
A. Yes. I'd like to do just a basic showing of what some of the principles are, if I could have the next slide to talk about that. In their texts, intelligent design proponents either do not understand or they don't accept how scientists establish relationships among organisms because most of this is left out of what their discussions are.
Despite a lot of popular impression, when we try to establish relationships among living and extinct organisms, it's not a never-ending search for direct ancestors. We don't go out in the fossil record, I don't go out looking for dinosaurs or whatever I'm doing in the summer in the field season looking for the ancestor of something else I know. I don't expect to find a direct ancestor of anything. The chances of that are really small. But I want to show you what we do try to look for.
Paleontologists, in other words, are not searching the rocks for the missing links. Instead, when we, like all biologists, establish organisms, living and extinct, whether we work on bacteria or mosses or hoofed animals, it doesn't matter, we all do this according to the same methods in biology, and it doesn't matter whether we use molecules or fossils.
What we do is we look for shared characteristics. These are uniquely shared characteristics shared by certain organisms and not others. And by identifying these characteristics, we identify the pathway of evolution, that is, the order, the sequence, the genealogy of evolution. We want to find out who is most closely related to whom.
And the reasoning is that if an organism acquires a new trait and passes it on to its descendents, then those descendents will be more closely related to each other because they possess that new trait than anybody else in the world will be. And that's the principle that we use.
And this is a fairly simple concept to get across, and it's revolutionized the way that people do what we call systematics or to assemble the tree of life. But, in fact, this began in the 1960s and 1970s, and so for decades it's been the standard.
There are two concepts of ancestry that are important to point out here. One is lineal, and the other is called collateral. Lineal ancestors are the ones that are directly in your path, that is, your parents, your grandparents, your great grandparents, your great, great, great, and all the times you can say great, those are your direct ancestors.
But collateral ancestors are a little broader than that. They would include your aunts and uncles, your great aunt, your cousin twice removed on your mother's side, and that guy with the funny hat in the civil war picture on the wall in the dining room, whatever it happens to be. These are what we call collateral ancestors. They are individuals who are not directly in your ancestral line, but they still share so many of your features that they can tell us a lot about who you were -- who you are.
If you know, for example, that your family came from Sweden in the 1800s, you can return to Sweden to the approximate place where they came. Maybe you can't find their bones in the church yard, but you can find the relics and the remains and the museum's evidence for many other aspects of their culture and their biology. You know what they ate, you know what they wore, you know the language they spoke. You may know from photographs and drawings what they looked like, what their features were. You may be able to recognize your ancestral features, as well. All these things are properties of collateral ancestors, not just lineal or direct ancestors.
So when we look to assemble the relationships of organisms, we don't have to find every direct ancestor. In fact, in the fossil record, it's really hard to say that somebody was anybody's direct ancestor, as I mentioned before with the fossil clams. We don't know what offspring any individual left. It's too hard for us to figure out. But we can still tell a great deal about it. And this is how we assemble the tree of life.
The next slide I have here is a preparation of a kind of diagram that we call a cladogram. And it's very similar to a phylogenetic tree, that is to say a tree of relationships. But the logic of this, I want to point out, is not something that's arbitrary. It's not simply assembled by art or by anything that's subjective. Rather, it is a diagram that reflects the grouping of organisms according to these new evolutionary features, these shared characteristics I mentioned before.
And if you can see the red marks along this -- the basic spine of the hat rack running from the lower left to the upper right -- these things always look like hat racks to me. I don't know what else you'd describe them as. But each one of those red bars represents a feature that was a new evolutionary feature that we reasoned was a new evolutionary feature because it suddenly is something that now all the animals above it share and the animals below it do not share.
So, for example, at the top here, the human and gorilla are united by a great many features, and we've only listed a few here because it would just really crowd things, and I think it's fairly obvious. Things that the human and gorilla share are a prehensile hand and a large brain. That is not the case for the cow, the lion, the marsupials, and the other animals on this slide.
We reason that on the basis of this and many other shared characteristics that these features were inherited from a common ancestor. It's the best natural explanation we can come up with. And as we go down this diagram even more, what we find is that at each juncture -- and if we can just stop it there for a second -- we find an increasing number of things that all these groups have.
And so if you look at the level put here on the chart that's indicated, there's a shared feature called an amnion, which is a property of one of the membranes of the egg around the embryo, that is shared by birds, marsupials, and placental mammals, but frogs and sharks and fishes don't have it. And so these hierarchically nested sets of features are the logical structure by which scientists establish the relationships of life.
Q. I'm sorry, Professor Padian. Matt, if you could go back just a couple of slides. So you talked about how -- and I guess we read from left to right up the line is how you read this?
A. Well, all we can say is this is a depiction of how all these organisms are related. We don't look on this as a ladder of life. We don't look at it as fish give rise to frogs which give rise to birds. It's not like that.
Q. But, for instance, where you have the stirrup-shaped ear bone --
A. Yes.
Q. -- and you have that line, so it would be the organisms above that that share that particular feature?
A. That's correct. That would be something that unites them to the exclusion of all the other critters on the slide. And that's the logic of cladograms, pure and simple.
I'd like to stress that we can use physical features like this, we can use them on fossils or on living animals, we can use them on molecules or we can use them on skeletal features or egg shell proteins or anything else that we want to do. Whatever works, we use. It's very practical.
Q. And is this a -- could you say it's a universal approach used by scientists?
A. Since the 1960s, it has become the dominant form of understanding relationships in the scientific community around the world.
I would go so far as to say that if you were going to apply to the National Science Foundation to ask for money to work on the classification of a group of organisms, whether it was dinosaurs or a group of bacteria or mosses or liverworts, you would have to show the review panel that you understood the principles that I'm discussing here and that you were going to use this kind of analysis in your work if you wanted to convince them that you knew what you were doing.
Q. And is this method somehow validated quantitatively or statistically?
A. Yes. And I'm glad you raised that point, because I've only put a couple of the features on this chart. But, in fact, there are hundreds that are represented in this analysis. And it's obviously too many for us to arrange by hand.
And so all the characters that we're talking about and all the animals that we're trying to analyze, we have ways of putting these into a data matrix and asking the computer essentially to sort this out for us to produce the simplest to the most, basically, complicated trees that you could possibly get. And we try to start with the simplest trees for further work, which is a principle in science called parsimony.
Q. And do intelligent design proponents use this type of cladogram?
A. I haven't seen them use any type of analysis like this in any of their works.
Q. And if you could advance to the intelligent design slide. Is this a copy of a chart found in Of Pandas and People?
A. Yes. This is Figure 4 from Pandas, second edition.
Q. And can you tell us what this is?
A. Well, the caption says that it's the pattern of phylogenetic origins, according to the face value interpretation of the fossil record.
Q. And can you make heads or tails of this?
A. I have trouble. I'm not sure -- I guess I understand that time is the axis from top to bottom. That's perfectly fine, although there are no particular periods listed. I understand that they're looking at variation in morphology, and that's perfectly fine. But there are no names of organisms there, so I don't know exactly what they're talking about.
Also, the presence of these bars as straight bars without variation suggests quite strongly that organisms suddenly appear quite recognizable as what they are and do not vary in morphology all the way up through the geologic column until they peter out.
Q. So this chart would show that there's abrupt creation and then there's no change in those organisms throughout their lifetimes?
A. That would be the face-value interpretation that they say the fossil record shows. Now, I just want to point out that this implies that there is no substantial change in any fossil lineages because they have drawn only bars that go straight up with no change, no diversification, no anything.
Q. And if you represented a classification system in a grant application to the National Science Foundation like this, you don't believe you would get a grant?
A. Well, no, but, of course, this is not meant to represent any kind of research, it's meant to be a didactic device for teaching. I should also note that if we're talking about phylogeny in relationships, this wouldn't qualify because it doesn't draw any lines between those lines. It doesn't admit the possibility that any of those lines evolved from any of the others.
Q. I'm going to talk about the use of the term "irreducible complexity" and "adaptational packages" as it's used by intelligent design proponents.
Can you explain to us how Pandas uses the term "adaptational packages"?
A. Well, the last slide showed you lineages of organisms that seem to have a sudden appearance and no substantial change during their histories and of no relationship to any other lineages in this diagram.
This suggests quite strongly, and the Pandas authors are making this point, that organisms that they regard as major types of organisms suddenly appear with all their major features intact and that they do not change. These are characterized in works like Pandas as adaptational packages, which they say cannot be separated into simpler components without destroying the functional advantage that they provide to the organisms that have them.
And so these adaptational packages for ID proponents represent the concept called irreducible complexity, which means that they can't evolve by known natural means, they're too complex to do so, and so they must be specially created by a designer.
Q. Now, that term "irreducible complexity," is that one, to your knowledge, that's found in Pandas?
A. To my knowledge, the exact words are not found in Pandas. I believe the first place where that is really brought out as a major term is in Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box in 1996. But in 1993, when I believe Professor Behe was working on the second edition of Pandas, these concepts are brought out in the second edition of that text.
Q. So Dr. Behe's concept of irreducible complexity is contained in Pandas even though that term is not used?
A. Yes. And before, even in the first edition, these adaptational packages are represented. They are essentially one of these ideas that, again, has a long pedigree, that there are such complex forms out there they couldn't possibly have evolved. We've heard these arguments since the 1800s, so they do have a long history.
Q. Perhaps you could help explain to us these adaptational packages and irreducible complexity.
A. Well, there seems to be some conflict among the ID proponents about this. Dr. Behe claims that irreducible complexity applies only to cells and molecules, and that's his specialty, of course, he's a biochemist, and that it does not apply to adaptive features in organs or to major groups of organisms.
But if you look at the whole corpus of intelligent design work, including Pandas, on which Dr. Behe worked, the implications of irreducible complexity are extended time and time again to large-scale tissue and organ adaptations and, indeed, to whole organisms.
And so if we're going to accept this, we have to accept that Dr. Behe had no knowledge that his coauthors were going to take his concept above the cell and molecular level, or irreducible complexity is, in fact, not only a molecular concept and we cannot accept Dr. Behe's view on that point.
Q. And have you identified an example to show how this irreducible complexity does apply above the molecular level?
A. Yes. I'll give a number of them from Pandas just to show that they actually are there. The next slide, I believe, shows several quotations from Pandas that indicate that it applies to levels above simply molecules. A quote from Page 72 indicates that multi-functional adaptations where a single structure or trait achieves two or more functions at once. This is not restricted to the cell level.
A quote from Page 71 talks about, quote, the total engineering requirements of an organism like the giraffe, unquote. So here they are talking about the whole organism, a giraffe, not simply a cell or a molecule.
The quote from Page 66 says, quote, It has not been demonstrated that mutations are able to produce the highly-coordinated parts of novel structures needed again and again by macroevolution.
Now, recall here that macroevolution, to intelligent designers, is the origin of new types of organisms, not of new cells, not of new molecules. So they are really looking at the large-scale structural tissue, organ, individual organism level. And, finally, the quotation from Page 25, which I believe is maybe even repeated more or less on Page 99 --
Q. So that's not an error, that is on Page 25?
A. Oh, yes, it's 25, as well.
Q. And this is from the introduction, overview of the book?
A. Yes, it's from the overview of the book. It says, quote, that design theories suggest that various forms of life began with their distinctive features already intact, fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, et cetera. So they are talking about various forms of life, not molecules, not cells.
And here's an example, just to show you a page from Pandas, that does this with respect not to the giraffe as a whole, I've already showed you how they've dealt with the consummate engineering requirements of the giraffe as a whole, but this is just a set of structures in the giraffe's head, neck, and brain.
Q. And could you identify the figure and page number?
A. Oh, yes, I'm sorry. This is Figure 2.5 from Pages 69 and 70.
Q. And that's in Pandas?
A. In Pandas, second edition. And so they are talking about an adaptational package in the caption that protects the giraffe from hemorrhaging in the brain. And this is all perfectly reasonable. Pressure sensors along the arteries, muscle fibers in the artery walls, heavily valved veins, and the arteries that approach the head they say correctly branch into what's called rete mirabile, which is a network of capillaries that prevents the brain from exploding when it gets a flood of blood coming up to it suddenly.
These are correctly understood by physiologists as part of an adaptation of the giraffe, but I just want to point out here that this is not a discussion of cells and molecules, this is a discussion of tissues and organs.
Q. Now, I want to turn to the fossil record, and I've asked you to identify from the book Of Pandas and People various examples where they claim that certain types of organisms could not have evolved naturally.
Can you show us where you believe that Pandas misrepresents the science? I believe you want to start with the Cambrian explosion?
A. Well, I'd like to start with a few examples that are of some concern to scientists because the representation of the science in these pages is really quite different from what scientists understand and understood when Pandas was written.
The next slide, I guess, starts with several quotations from Pandas about the Cambrian explosion. Now, I should explain that what is meant by the Cambrian explosion is a sudden appearance of organisms that are shelled marine organisms within a geologically rapid time, relatively speaking, 10 to 30 million years as the smallest possible increment, which seems like a long time to us as humans. If my testimony goes very long, I think it's going to seem like several million years, but --
THE COURT: You're doing fine so far.
THE WITNESS: You know, time to paleontologists means something quite different than it means to ecologists and normal people. But these organisms appear over 500 million years ago. And we find records mainly of these shelled sea creatures, marine invertebrates we call them, snails and clams and their relatives back in that time.
Before this the record is a bit more difficult. It preserves different kinds of fossils that are a little bit harder to suss out. And this has been a really interesting area of study for paleontologists, biologists, geochemists, geophysicists for many, many years.
The way that Pandas treats this is to say that organisms appear with these adaptational packages intact at the Cambrian boundary, multicellular life first flowers here. No evidence whatsoever of fossil ancestors.
BY MR. WALCZAK:
Q. Now, I'm sorry, is that a direct quote from Pandas?
A. This is a direct quote from Pandas, Page 71 and 72. They go on to infer directly that only an intelligent designer could do this. They state, on Page 94 and 95, that the great majority of these animal phyla, by which is meant sort of these major groups of invertebrates, the arthropods and the annelids and the echinoderms and the mollusks and so forth, brachiopods, appear in a remarkably brief period of time, again, 10 to 30 million years.
We'll have recourse to that 10 to 30 figure in a second. But they say they're not connected by evolutionary intermediates, and there's an unexpected lack of fossils bridging the evolutionary distance between these phyla to document evolutionary origins for them.
Q. What does that mean?
A. I'm not sure. There are some code words there. I would agree that the fossil record is not complete. It will never be complete. On the other hand, how many intermediates do you need to suggest relationships, and what do you accept as intermediate?
And in the previous paragraph, there is some text that's even more worrisome because they say that these are adaptational packages that appear at the Cambrian boundary, by which they mean the boundary between the pre-Cambrian and the Cambrian. They say that multicellular life first flowers there, whatever that means, but they say there's no evidence whatsoever of fossil ancestors.
Q. And is that true?
A. Well, I think the record will show us something different. Before we go to the next slide, however, I want to point out at the bottom that after talking about phyla, groups of phyla, these major divisions of animals that are apparently having no bridges between them and no ancestors, they then go on to say that categories of classification are largely artificial human groupings.
I would agree with that, but it contradicts what they say in the previous passages, because if you treat phyla as somehow real entities that you cannot bridge, then how can you also say that these categories are largely artificial?
The next slide shows a bit of this pedigree, again from scientific creationism. A quote here from Henry Morris, who is head of the Institute for Scientific Creationism outside San Diego, from his textbook of more than three decades ago claiming that all of these kingdoms, phyla and classes unchanged since life began, that things appear suddenly, no incipient forms leading up to them. There may have been changes within kinds, but they haven't varied since the beginning except for those that have become extinct.
Q. And that's what Henry Morris said?
A. That's what Henry Morris said as a scientific creationist. This language is, I think, identical to what you see in Pandas. And, again, the statement from Pandas that I just read is below that.
Q. And that's from Page 71 and 72 of Pandas?
A. Yes.
Q. And is that accurate?
A. Is it an accurate representation of science?
Q. Yes.
A. I believe it's a little more complex than that. The next slide is another quotation from Duane Gish, who we've seen before as the vice president for the Institute for Creation Research. Duane Gish is talking about the Cambrian geological strata, a sudden great outburst of fossils, and he says that what is found in rocks supposedly older than the Cambrian, that is, in the so-called pre-Cambrian rocks, he says not a single indisputable fossil, unquote. This is very reminiscent of the language we've just seen in Pandas where they say there aren't any ancestors.
And if I could show the next slide. This quotation, also from Pandas, implies quite directly that there are no chains of fossils leading from lower organisms to higher ones. They stress that we can only accept evolution if we assume that only natural causes were at work to explain these things.
But then they say there's another possibility that science leaves open to us, and that is that an intelligent cause made fully formed and functional creatures which later left their traces in the rocks. This is as close a definition as I could come to special creation. I don't see how else you could interpret that as the possibility that natural processes could have gotten you from one form to another.
Q. And you are just quoting from Pages 25 and 26 of Pandas?
A. This is Pages 25-26 of Pandas.
Q. And what is this slide, Professor Padian?
A. This diagram comes from Page 95 of the second edition of Pandas. It's Figure 4.2. I can best describe it by the caption provided, their own caption, which says, This is a generalized schematic of the fossil record that's designed to show the Cambrian origins of nearly all animal phyla. Dotted lines represent the presumed existence of phyla, not the fossil record.
Again, I'm not sure what this chart is meant to represent, because what students are not being shown here or, indeed, any readers, there's no real time scale on here, so the implication clearly is that the vast majority of these things appeared all at once at the Cambrian/pre-Cambrian boundary. Boom, there they are. And if you look at that line below the Cambrian, where it says pre-Cambrian, there is no record whatsoever. There are no fossils as far as they're concerned.
They say in the caption this is a generalized schematic of the fossil record. They don't tell you which animal groups they're talking about, and they don't give you any idea that there could be any possible relationships among these organisms.
And so the question of whether that's an accurate depiction of the fossil record may be illustrated by this diagram from Kevin Peterson and his colleagues in Paleobiology earlier this year.
Q. I'm sorry, what is that text?
A. Paleobiology is a peer-review journal in our field.
Q. And that's 2005?
A. 2005. What the authors have done here is essentially to turn the rock column on its side, so time is now going from the lower left to the lower right as we move up into the Cambrian early and late. And you can see the boundary here between the Cambrian and the Ediacaran period right before that.
Q. Professor Padian, you have a pointer, a laser pointer there. It might be helpful to show that.
A. Okay. We'll see if it works. I can see that there. Okay, I can kind of see it myself. I'm not sure if that's visible to you.
THE COURT: We can see it.
THE WITNESS: Okay. The dark bars here, the dark black bars, are the actual fossil records of organisms. The gray bars you see here, these are cases where there are fossils that are supposed to be this old, but they haven't been verified yet.
The lighter colored black bars here are inferred existences that are inferred by a different line of evidence. These red boxes with numbers in them are dates by which scientists estimate when the divergences between -- that is, the separations between lines like this took place, the annelids and the mollusks.
You may ask, how is this done? And the answer is, well, molecular biology looks at the configurations of genes on chromosomes. By lining up the genes, the sequences of the genes are homologized and matched up with each other, and the closest matches and the more derived similarities, the unusual features of evolution, tell us which groups are most related to which.
Now, in the Pandas diagram, all of the names on the right-hand side in these various colors, the names of the major groups of organisms were not given, and there was no indication that we had any idea that these lines could be related to each other.
But, in fact, we had morphological ideas based on fossils, on embryology, and on the shells and tissues of these animals. Molecular biology has now come through with a whole other wealth of data. And this is --
BY MR. WALCZAK:
Q. I'm sorry, in the red boxes, those are dates?
A. The red boxes are numbers that are estimated dates of when each of the lines in question would have separated from each other based on how much their molecules differ or resemble each other.
Q. So that would be the age of the fossils?
A. That would be the age of the splits of the lineages. The fossils may not extend back that far. Sometimes they get nearly that far, and sometimes they don't.
The fossils are represented by the little purple boxes below the slide here. There you see the purple boxes at the bottom. And, for example, here at about 600, we have listed the oldest metazoans. Metazoans are multicellular animals with several distinct tissue layers, so they would include actually all the animals here on this slide except the bottom two, and the bottom two, as their names suggest, are sponges.
And it turns out that the molecular date shows a divergence time at about 604 years. The oldest metazoans are dated, estimated in the fossil record at this date, as well.
Q. I'm sorry, you said 604 years. That's 604 million years?
A. Million years, yeah. The next slide I think will give an indication of not so much the relationships of these organisms, but of the fact that, indeed, before the so-called Cambrian explosion, there was a lot of evolution.
For example, the Cambrian explosion listed here in yellow -- and I'm not sure if I can make this -- yeah. The Cambrian explosion here of skeletonized animals is seen by scientists as really mostly a preservational artifact, although a lot of evolution is going on. But this is the point in history in which a lot of skeletons begin to be preserved, where before this we're not getting that much.
So the Cambrian explosion here is occurring along this yellow bar from about the Cambrian boundary well up into over 520 million years ago. It's not a single abrupt process but rather it's a process that takes quite a long time.
Even after this so-called Cambrian explosion, there are amazing preservations of fossils, soft-bodied critters that show us remains that we don't find earlier just because they're not preserved. It's very difficult to preserve fossils.
And at this Cambrian boundary where, according to works like Pandas, there are no fossils before that, there are no transitions, there are no possible ancestors, well, one of the things I pointed out before is that, you know, we're not always looking for direct ancestors, we're finding things that have the same features as the organisms that we're trying to understand the relationships of.
And so this pre-Cambrian record is actually quite interesting. We have fossilized animal burrows, and the burrows of these animals go in sort of all sorts of curvy lines and wavy lines that indicate that the animals were proceeding front to back, so they were what we call bilaterian, that is, two-sided things like us, like snails, like worms, like things that are -- have a left and a right side. This is the way they walk.
So even though we didn't have their shells or other remains of them, we have their burrows that could only have been made by complex metazoans that were also bilaterians, that is, two-sided animals. We can even go back --
Q. I'm sorry, and those have been dated before the Cambrian boundary?
A. Oh, yes. Everything that you see at the Cambrian boundary is over 540 million years old, and these are things that are still older than that.
Q. And on the right-hand side of this slide, there are several photographs. Can you tell us what those are?
A. These are photographs of the actual fossils. This is the actual fossil evidence that is preserved. These are taken from, in some cases, peer-reviewed books and journals and in some cases Web sites where the specimens are well known from other sources.
I want to point out that at about 590 million years there's a little dot there where it says "fossil metazoan embryos" at the bottom of the slide, and there's a picture of one of them.
This is a really amazing find because it shows us that some 50 million years before the Cambrian boundary and even longer before some of the Cambrian explosion took place, we have evidence of metazoan embryos. By that we mean the embryos of organisms that belong to one of the groups I showed in the previous slide.
How do we know this? We know this because the embryos themselves have characteristics of metazoans. They are not simply one-celled organisms. And if there are these embryos then, then there are metazoans present. That doesn't mean that there are full-blown trilobites and snails and brachiopods and so forth, but it does mean that there was some kind of metazoan life.
Q. And is this well established in science?
A. Oh, yes. It's the subject of countless articles and books and papers. And a few of them just are here, along with a recent book by Jim Valentine, who is emeritus professor in my department, member of the National Academy of Science, and one of the four or five most important paleobiologists of the last century, and he treated this problem and all its ramifications in depth.
Q. And if you could just read the titles and the journals from which they came into the record.
A. The top one is, Fossils, Molecules, and Embryos: New Perspectives on the Cambrian Explosion. This comes from a journal called Development.
Now, Development is about developmental biology. Would you expect to see fossils in developmental biology? Well, as I said before, this is the new age of integrative biology. Fossils are really important to all kinds of evolutionary study. They're incredibly indispensable to this sort of work.
A paper below that from Integrative and Comparative Biology, which is, again, not a paleontological journal, by Nick Butterfield called, Exceptional Fossil Preservation and the Cambrian Explosion, because we see this as a problem of preservation, not just of quick evolution. Both things are going on here.
And, finally, below in a journal called Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, again, not a journal you'd think the average rock hound would be publishing in, but we have Current Advances in the Phylogenetic Reconstruction of Metazoan Evolution, a New Paradigm for the Cambrian Explosion?
And these are all journals and articles that show the integration of molecular techniques with the fossil record, with developmental biology, and this is why it's one of the most exciting areas you'll find.
Q. And so the statements you've read to us a few minutes ago about the way Pandas characterizes the Cambrian boundary and says that there are no fossil ancestors before that boundary, that's not supported by the state of science today?
A. Well, as we can see, there are some metazoans that appear well before the Cambrian boundary. If you are looking for direct ancestors, if you insist on an unbroken stream of intermediate fossils to document a case, I'm afraid that that's going to be difficult to get under any circumstances, but it's also equally impossible for the historical record of humans.
If we had to come up with evidence of every one of our direct linear or collateral ancestors and know everything about them, it would be impossible, yet we don't question the parentage of our friends and neighbors because they can't do that.
Q. Now, we talked about the evolution of invertebrates. Can you talk to us about how Pandas portrays the evolution of vertebrates?
A. Yes, I would like to talk a bit about some of the major transitions that are discussed in Pandas that relate to backboned animals, which are closer to home, as far as we're concerned, because we belong among the backboned vertebrates. The text from Pandas says that fossil types are --
Q. I'm sorry, are you quoting?
A. I'm quoting from Page 22. Fossil types are fully formed and functional when they first appear in the fossil record. For example, we don't find creatures that are partly fish and partly something else leading to today's fish.
They say, Instead, fish have all the characteristics of today's fish from the earliest known fish fossils, reptiles in the record have all the characteristics of present-day reptiles, and so on. This is, again, the abrupt appearance theory, sudden appearance complex adaptive packages, irreducible complexity argument.
Q. So this says fish were formed intact?
A. Yeah, pretty much, yep. Here is their treatment of amphibians.
Q. And this is a slide from Page 104 of Pandas?
A. Page 104, yes. They say at the upper left column, Darwinists believe that the first amphibians evolved from early fish. "Darwinists believe," that's problematic language. It suggests to students that these are just matters of faith without any evidence. And for myself, I'd prefer to reserve matters of belief and faith for things that are not tested empirically.
The Pandas authors say in the next paragraph that if Crossopterygians, by which they mean the fish-like things, really did evolve into amphibians, by which they mean the first animals that came on land, tremendous changes must have taken place. Fins must have been transformed into four limbs, the skull had to change from two parts to a single solid piece. The hipbones had to enlarge and become attached to the backbone. Numerous changes must also have occurred in other soft tissues and so on.
They say in the next paragraph, How many different transitional species were required to bridge the gap? Hundreds even thousands? We don't know, but we do know that no such transitional species have been recovered.
Q. The next slide, is this a diagram from Pandas?
A. This is a diagram from Pandas of two forms from the fossil record. Eusthenopteron, which they take to be a fish, and Icthyostega, which they take to be an amphibian. Eusthenopteron doesn't look much like any fish you know. Neither does Icthyostega look much like any living amphibian. But in naming them like this, the editors, authors of Pandas are really giving them assignments to different whole groups of organisms and suggesting that the transition between them would be very difficult to achieve.
Certainly there are differences between these two skeletons. There are differences in the way they're drawn, as well as many features of their specimens that we find in the fossil record. And the next slide --
Q. I'm sorry, and that was from Page 103 of Pandas?
A. Yes. We've prepared some slides that show a bit more accurately the way that scientists understand this fossil record. What we've done here is to take the text from Pandas on Pages 103 and 104, but to illustrate our illustration of some of the major fossil animals that are known that move from aquatic, fish-like critters, up into the first animals that appear on land.
We're including in this Eusthenopteron, which is the second guy from the bottom left, and Icthyostega, which is three more guys up to the right from him, which are the two animals you saw in the last slide in Pandas. Pandas is giving you two animals and inviting you to draw contrasts between them. What we'd like to do is show the evidence that scientists have to show comparisons and to show the transitional features that the Pandas authors say do not exist.
So, for example, the text in the upper left taken again from Pandas insists in blue that no transitional species have been recovered.
Q. Could you read that please, that quote?
A. It says, How many different transitional species were required to bridge this gap? We don't know, but we do know that no such transitional species have been recovered.
Now, here, of course, we're going to focus on what are you defining as a transitional species? Does it have to be a direct ancestor, does it have to be intermediate in all features? Do you have to know that it had the same genetic antecedent composition and therefore could only have been the great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather of the next animal along the way?
That seems like a very difficult standard of evidence to live up to. We can't do that with humans most of the time, and I'd be surprised if we could do it with animals that are 350, 400 million years old.
The next slide looks a lot like the one you just saw. The Pandas authors say in blue that there are two large gaps in the fossil record that we're talking about here. One is between ordinary fish and Crossopterygians, what they would regard as the organisms that are closest to the land animals, and an even larger second gap between these lobed-finned fish and amphibians, again, the transition to life on land.
This slide just points out where the ray-finned fish are on the left. Ray-finned fish include the 25,000-odd species of fish that live today that we would all think of as fish, that is, tunas, trout, salmon, monkfish, angler fish, catfish. It would not include sharks, for example, which are cartilaginous animals. And it doesn't include any of the animals you see running along the right side of this slide. No one thinks that an animal like a trout directly gave rise to an animal like a frog.
Q. When you say "no one," no one in science?
A. No one in science, but I don't think any creationist obviously wouldn't think so, either. But scientists don't think this. Rather, we find that ray-finned fishes, this great radiation of 25,000 species today reaching back into the remote past, have a long history that's independent from the other watery creatures, so to speak. And, in fact, their histories are quite separate.
The two little crosses below the ray-finned fish and the two little crosses to the left of the lungfish are representations of two pairs of fossil species are that listed on the right-hand side. We call them stem taxa because they are ancient relatives. Their names here, just for a couple of examples, Moythomasia and Howqualepis. The names are really unimportant. And on the other side, Psarolepis and Achoania. Again, the names are unimportant.
But it just goes to show you that we have extinct relatives outside the lungfish. We have extinct relatives outside the ray-finned fishes that indicate that the ray-fins are not directly ancestral to the lungfish and all the other animals on the right side. They are rather a separate evolutionary branch, and they have been since way back in the Devonian, 400 or so million years ago.
The next slide talks a bit about another transition here where the Pandas authors note that fins must have transformed into four limbs, which is certainly fair enough, but they say that no such transitional species have been recovered.
Well, again, here is this cladogram that you see here. And I want to stress, as I did before, that the cladogram in question, that is, the way that we have -- the way that we have developed the relationships of the lungfish, the Eusthenopteron, Panderichthys, and all the other animals on this slide are not just based on a couple of features, they're based on dozens and dozens and dozens of skeletal characters of which we're only going to show a few. But this is backed up by a lot more evidence in peer-reviewed publications that I'll show you at the end of this.
The Pandas authors say that no such transitional species have been recovered, but, in fact, we have indications here, beginning with Eusthenopteron, of a limb that is a very interesting limb with branching bones in it.
Q. I'm sorry, the photograph just below the blue text on Pandas there, what is that?
A. That's a photograph of a limb of Eusthenopteron. And you'll have to excuse me, I'm showing you some Paleozoic road-kill. That's the best way I can describe it. It's pretty ugly. But I wanted to show you the actual fossils so you could see that we have them and then to show you next to that a drawing of what these bones actually are.
This doesn't look much like an arm of any animal today, but scientists have been able to compare the elements, which we've put here in the same colors, by the process of homology, which I'll talk to you about later. And there really is no dispute about the fact that these are, in fact, the precursors of limbs that we see in animals today, the same kinds of structures, the humerus here in yellow, the radius, and ulna, which are, I guess, in green, and then some of the features that become parts of the hand and the other digits in a darker color there.
You can also see that in the course of evolution, animals that begin having eight digits, such as Acanthostega here, reduce to seven digits, to six digits, and to five digits. I don't know how we could find anything more in the way of transitional forms or features unless we went to six and three-quarters or five and a half digits. But, I mean, that may be as good as we'll get in the fossil record in terms of a transition.
So we do have a very clear change, not just in the reductions of digits, but you'll also notice that they look a lot more digital-like the closer you get to the animals that we recognize as living amphibians and so forth.
In contrast, above, when Pandas teaches this to students, it gives them two animals and invites them to draw contrasts. It essentially does not identify any of the bones, does not indicate that you could have any identification between those two bones, places them in different positions, reconstructs an outline for them that may not be unreasonable, but it's certainly in a different orientation.
And its function, the cumulative effect is really to sort of confuse students, and certainly I'm confused looking at it about what I'm supposed to take out of a diagram like this, except the fact that, boy, these are different, and I don't see how we could get from one way to the other. It would have been so much nicer if they had used a diagram like the one at the bottom or acknowledged that we did at least have some transitional features that we could discuss.
Q. And that's Figure 4.9 from Pandas at the top of the slide?
A. That is Figure 4.9. The next slide is another feature. The Pandas authors, as noted before, said the skull had to change from two parts to a single solid piece, but, again, no such transitional species have been recovered.
Q. And, I'm sorry, that's what Pandas authors say?
A. That's what Pandas says, yeah. But as you can see, on this slide we can go easily from two mobile parts to two immobile parts to two parts that are fused and lack a ventral gap, that is, a one-part skull, to all the remaining vertebrates which have a one-part skull. This is a perfectly reasonable transition, morphologically and physically, and it's difficult to see how you could become any more transitional than this.
Q. So these are transitional fossil forms that have --
A. These are drawings of actual specimens and reconstructions of them from the scientific literature.
The next slide I think will indicate that although the Pandas authors say that the hipbones had to enlarge and become attached to the backbone, no such transitional species have been recovered, according to the Pandas authors.
But we can see, moving from Eusthenopteron up through Acanthostega and Icthyostega, that, in fact, you can go from small, unattached hind limbs and hipbones to become somewhat larger as you can see in Acanthostega and attached to the backbone by what we call a sacral rib. Our sacroiliac is the human equivalent of that.
And as you can see in Icthyostega and other animals, it gets even larger, expanded and attached to the backbone as these animals begin to use their limbs more in support of the skeleton. And as they come out on land, this will be even more important, as it is, of course, in the living animals which -- almost all of which have at least two sacral ribs attaching to their backbones.
So I think the next slide is just a depiction of some of the references from the scientific peer-reviewed literature from which the slides I've just shown you have given us the information.
Q. Could you just maybe read a couple of the titles into the record, please?
A. Yes. Fins to Limbs, What the Fossils Say, that appeared in Evolution & Development. Again, you can see where paleontology and developmental biology are seeing a great cooperation and a great number of new insights. From Fins to Fingers, again, a paper published in Science by Jenny Clack, who is a paleontologist at Cambridge. Fish-Like Gills and Breathing in the Earliest Known Tetrapod. So we can actually find fossil evidence even of some soft tissues which tell us a bit about these sorts of things. And I'd like to point out that these works are published in Nature, in Science, in the Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History, and in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, among other publications.
Q. Dr. Padian, I note that some of these articles appear to be pretty old, for instance, Fins to Limbs appears to have been published in 1969, Bulletin of the British Museum is 1984. These were published before Pandas was written.
A. Yes.
Q. So the fact that there were, in fact, transitional fossils is something that was known to scientists at the time Pandas was being written and was published?
A. Yes. There were many fossils that had transitional features that were available in the scientific literature, as scientists understood them. And so for whatever reason, these were not included by the authors of Pandas. Perhaps they didn't accept it as evidence.
Q. And do you know why in Pandas they would misrepresent, it seems, or not accurately portray the state of scientific knowledge at the time?
A. Well, the Pandas book, as noted, promotes the view of intelligent design, which they state here means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact, fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, et cetera. I believe this is from maybe Page 99.
Q. That's right. And what you've just shown us is an evolutionary pathway?
A. Well, this is sort of worrisome, because scientists would interpret this as an evolutionary pathway, and intelligent design seems to be excluding the possibility that you can actually get those pathways. Now, we should note that as you pointed out, some of those publications I just showed were available when Pandas was written and some of them appeared afterward.
But it worries me that students would be told that they have to make a conclusion in advance of all the evidence that you can't get from A to B, essentially, by natural means. This quotation from Pandas says, Should we close our minds to the possibility that the various types of plants and animals were intelligently designed? This alternative suggests that a reasonable natural cause explanation for origins may never be found and that intelligent design best fits the data.
And so the question I would have is, what is a kid supposed to think when you tell him that you can't get from Point A to Point B and then evidence is uncovered that shows that, well, in fact, it looks pretty conceivable you can get from Point A to Point B and we're not making up this stuff.
Is a student supposed to say, well, gee, I guess there's no designer? Or is the student supposed to say, well, I guess the methods of intelligent design are really not very good? Or is he supposed to conclude something else? The intelligent design proponents provide no guidance on this.
Q. So when Pandas asserts that fish must have been created abruptly intact with fins and scales, really science has refuted that proposition?
A. Yes.
Q. And in the passage which I think virtually every expert witness has focused on in this trial, Page 99 to 100, when they talk about fish being formed abruptly and the other animal that's mentioned there is birds with wings, feathers, and beaks already intact, can you talk to us about whether or not there is an evolutionary pathway, natural explanation for the evolution of birds?
A. Well, I'd be delighted to, if I can look at the next slide. As it turns out, when I went to graduate school, my advisor there, John Ostrom, is the person who actually established the origin of birds from carnivorous dinosaurs. And this became very well accepted over the next several years. We are now 30 years on into that, and it is one of the great achievements of 20th Century paleontology and that kind of science.
And I did work on this myself in the course of 30 years of research, the origin of birds and the origin of flight and of feathers. And so I'd like to show a little bit about what science has understood about this.
The next slide, I believe, gives you two quotes from Pandas, along with a picture of Archaeopteryx, which is the first known bird. It's about 150 million years old. It comes from Germany. It's a beautiful fossil. This is the Berlin specimen. It's known from a number of specimens, seven or eight now.
And as you can see, it's got beautiful wings, feathers, look very modern in their appearance, and yet Archaeopteryx has a long bony tail, its skull still has teeth, it's got various configurations of bones that we don't find in birds today. Many of the bones of its hand and foot are not fused like the bones of living birds. And so it's been known since its discovery in the 1860s, the time of the Civil War, right after Darwin published the Origin of Species, that scientists have accepted this as an animal that shows a lot of intermediate characteristics between birds and other animals, particularly certain kinds of reptiles.
Q. And what does Pandas say about this?
A. Well, Pandas says that there is no gradual series of fossils that lead from fish to amphibians or from reptiles to birds, rather these animals are fully formed.
Q. And you were quoting from Page 106 of Pandas?
A. 106, yeah. And that's one problem that they come up with. And a second problem that they talk about on Page 22 is that -- is their bemoaning the lack of fossils that show scales developing the property of feathers. They say, then we would have more to go on, but the fossil record gives no evidence for such changes.
I've picked out these two quotes because I want to emphasize that in the first case, there was very good evidence for the evolution of birds from dinosaurs when they wrote Pandas. And in the second case, they were right at the time, we did not have very many fossils that showed anything about the origin of feathers.
But in the past decade, we've had a bunch of remarkable fossils that have. And so this raises the question again of, if you tell children that you can't get there from here and then evidence is found, what are you going to do?
The next slide, I believe, talks about some of the -- this is really just a montage of a few, I mean, it's just a very few of the papers about feathered dinosaurs, dinosaurs that are not birds, they didn't fly, but they had various kinds of very rudimentary feathers.
And these have been discovered in a remarkable deposit in Northeastern China, the first one in 1996, so this was after Pandas was written. And so we wouldn't expect those authors to know anything about these discoveries, but it just goes to show that there are some really interesting things that crop up.
Q. And could you just read into the record the titles of some of these?
A. An Exceptionally Well-Preserved Theropod Dinosaur from the Yixian Formation of China. This is a dinosaur with feathers. The next one is Two Feathered Dinosaurs from Northeastern China. Another one here is Branched Integumental Structures in Sinornithosaurus and the Origin of Feathers.
Q. In what type of journals were these published in?
A. These happen to be taken all from the journal Nature, which is one of those two magazines that I noted that all scientists are going to read every week. They're the most prestigious journals to publish in.
Q. And what you're going to show us now about the evolution of feathers is taken based on these peer-reviewed --
A. These and many others, yes. In the next series of slides, if I may, I'd like to show you three things going on at once, because I want to tell you that this is not simply a matter of speculation or of isolated observation and inference, that this comes from independent lines of evidence, not just the fossil record.
What I've done in this series of slides is to take, on the left, one of those hat rack cladograms that show you the relationships of organisms, and again I've turned it on its side. So you can see that Archaeopteryx and modern birds are on the bottom, and that successively the groups above them are various dinosaur groups that are closely related to them.
I want to stress that this scheme of relationships, again, is based on dozens and dozens of characteristics that are not controversial to any extent in the scientific community, and whereas we do have uncertainties about some of the minor relationships among these animals, this is the scheme that is generally accepted by paleontologists.
On the upper right, I want to show you a series of pictures that were taken from an article in Scientific American that reflects the work of Rick Prum at Yale and Alan Brush and Scott Williamson and their coauthors on the development of feathers, that is, how feathers develop in living birds.
And the reason for doing this is to couple this with a series of slides I'm going to show you on the bottom, which are of fossils of feathered dinosaurs, that is, dinosaurs that are not birds but that have feathers or some structures that are rudimentary feathers.
And what I want to show you is that as we proceed on the left up the tree leading to birds, we will also see that the feathers that are found in these little carnivorous dinosaurs in the lower right are becoming more and more complex and that they are reflecting the complexification of feather structure seen in the series of diagrams in the upper right as feathers develop embryologically.
So we're actually looking at phylogeny or relationships on the left, we're looking at fossils on the right, and we're looking at developmental structures and embryology on the upper left -- upper right, I mean. Fair enough? Okay.
Then in this stage, we see a little animal in the lower right, and that black fuzz that seems to be going along its backbone is recognized as the most basal traces of things that are going to become feathers. And these structures are hair-like. They look like the structures in the upper right. There has been observation suggesting that they are even hollow in their structure. And we find these at that point in the cladogram noted at Stage 1 on the left-hand side.
The next slide should show us Stage 2. Now we've just jumped up a notch in the cladogram. And here we're beginning to find not just these single filamentous features, but also feathers that begin to branch and begin to have different kinds of tufts involved with them. The specimen on the lower right I realize is a road-kill and it's difficult to interpret, but let me see if I can just give you a sense of -- there we go. Down here we have bones of the backbone, tail. And these black and white marks up in here are remnants of these branched, feathery structures that appear in these dinosaurs.
The next slide shows a further complexification of feathers in the next step up on the cladogram toward birds in which we have a gaggle of feathers there in the center. These are just a group of feathers that have, as you might be able to see, a central sort of stalk where you can see all these things gather in the middle. You can see this happening in the early development of a feather in the upper right. And then you see the feather differentiating into veins along a central stalk, just like you see in the next stage of the development of a feather in a bird that lives today.
The next slide, again, at this stage we also see another kind of feather that is a feather that is organized very well into veins on each side. And these veins are very well organized along the central stalk. In this fossil I've shown you in the middle, you can see perhaps faintly the outline of these black and white structures radiating off along this white stripe, which is the central axis of the feathers.
And so these are several feathers from the tail of one of these animals that are just bunched up right next to each other in one of these fossils. And, again, this is mirrored also in the progress of development from the feather from a single follicle bud up to a complete feather that we'd see today.
The final stages I want to show you as we get closer to birds is a feather in which the veins are asymmetrical, that is, one side of the feather is bigger and the other side is smaller. And this is seen in birds today, but it's also seen in some of the other carnivorous dinosaurs that are close to birds, but not in all of them.
So, again, what we're seeing is as we move up the cladogram towards birds, we go from the simplest filamentous feathers up to more complex structures that are then gathered and around a central stalk that produce veins. These are interlocked by barbs and barbules, and they eventually become the aerodynamic structures that birds use in their wings.
But I'd like to point out, if I can, in the next slide that the obvious question is, what are they doing with these feathers before they're flying? And the evidence that we found in the fossil record in the last ten years indicates beyond any reasonable question that feathers did not evolve for flight. Flight was an afterthought for birds. They somehow acquired that adaptation later on.
What do we know about those first little hairy feathers that we're looking at? Well, one thing we know is, if you put a fur coat on somebody, they're going to stay warmer. And this little covering of dense fibers is going to give you insulation. That tells us something about the metabolic status of these animals even then.
Another thing is, you may have noticed some dark and light color patterns on those feathers. The fossils preserve this. What good are color patterns? Well, on these animals, they could serve as camouflage, as display, or even to help them recognize species.
I'm going to show you another function in a second that indicates that these animals were also using the feathers to shelter the eggs as they brooded their young. And these are all examples of what we call exaptation and evolution. And by that I mean that a structure evolves for one purpose, but it's selected, in turn, to acquire a second purpose, without, of course, losing the first one instantly. It will retain the first one.
And as it develops the second one, because it has the ecological opportunity or the pressure to do so, that second structure, that second function, may become more and more important to the structure, it may be selected to change more to accommodate this new function. And this is how exaptation works to change one kind of function into another through evolution.
Q. You have at the top there, What good is a half wing? What do you mean by that?
A. Well, if you just -- this is the question that has always been asked of evolutionists. St. George Mivart asked this of Darwin in the 1870s, what good is half a wing?
And the answer is, well, if you don't think of it as something you have to use to fly with, you can find out other functions if you just let the evidence tell you. And these are some of the lines of evidence. I will briefly show, if I may, a couple of these other functions.
The next slide provides some additional evidence of the other problem we talked about, not so much feathers, but the question of the evolution of birds. We have tremendous evidence on this, but one line of evidence comes from the hand itself. If you look at the hand of crocodiles, they have got five fingers. If you go all the way over to the left, you see Archaeopteryx, the first bird, that has only three.
Well, again, here's a cladogram of relationship diagrams of how these organisms are related based on many, many characteristics. And as we move up from the crocodiles through the various kinds of dinosaurs, we see that the fourth and the fifth finger, first the fifth and then the fourth, become reduced and finally lost, until, when you get up to animals like Allosaurus, Deinonicus, and Archaeopteryx, they have only three fingers, and those are the first three fingers. The second finger is the longest, and you can see that through time, these fingers and the hand bones become even longer and more gracile.
Those three fingers that you see in Archaeopteryx at the end are still separate fingers, but in birds today, they're fused up. You would know them better as the pointy part of the wing in the Kentucky fried chicken.
So if you were to dissect your Kentucky fried chicken, which I don't recommend, but I can tell you about turkeys and Thanksgiving, which is a lot of fun, you will find that you can get to the individual hand bones, we can watch the bird develop, and these are individual bones that later become fused. And this is because the bird is no longer using its hand for anything except flight. It's not using its fingers to pick up things or claw or scratch anymore.
And early in the evolution of birds, when they dedicated themselves to flying with the four limbs and very little else, there was no further need to use these fingers for anything, and it made more sense to fuse them into position rather than use muscles to hold them there. And this is the evidence that we have of how these organs evolve.
The next slide, I believe, will give us one more thing about feathers and behavior, too. This is a dinosaur, an extraordinary ostrich dinosaur relative. It's an Oviraptor dinosaur. The name isn't important. But one thing you can see about this specimen, which is very beautiful, it comes from the Cretaceous of Mongolia, is that in the photograph at the top, I'm going to show you, here is the right arm, here is the humerus, the bones of the forearm, and three clawed fingers of the right hand. Moving over to the other side, the arm comes out here, and here are the three clawed fingers of the left hand.
These white objects you see in this specimen are eggs. And here is the hind limb and the foot on the left side. Here is the hind limb and foot of the right side. Here is part of the tail. And the animal's rib cage is in here. There are more eggs underneath this animal. This critter was brooding its eggs in exactly the same position that hens brood their eggs today.
Furthermore -- well, one thing to draw from this is that some behaviors that we associate with birds did not evolve with birds, they actually apparently were already present in the dinosaurian relatives of birds, and they simply were passed on to birds as they evolved.
But the other thing this shows is a funny thing. The fingers, you'll notice, are spread so as to cover the eggs. And in the fossil relatives of this particular dinosaur, not this specimen because they aren't preserved, but we have feathers in other Oviraptor dinosaurs that come off the fingers that are long and gracile. And if this particular dinosaur had preserved its feathers, it would have been using them to shelter the eggs as it brooded them. This is evidence of behavior, not just of structure, that we can find very anciently in the fossil record.
The next slide, I believe, shows an equally extraordinary find. And this is of a dinosaur, not a bird. He looks a lot like a bird, but he's in a sleeping position. And what is unusual about this critter is that here's its skull here with its big eye right here, and here's its little beak and its tail, bones like this. Up here are the arm bones of the left arm. And what this animal is doing -- his tail end is back this way and his front end is really to the left, but he's tucked his head and neck underneath his left arm. In other words, he's sleeping like a bird does. This is not a bird. This is a little carnivorous dinosaur that's close to birds.
So, again, there is remarkable evidence that not just the structures of birds, but the behaviors of birds can sometimes be found in the fossil record and they precede birds. They actually are more general. They apply to the fossil record of many dinosaurs, as well.
Q. And, again, this is all based on peer-reviewed research?
A. The paper you see there is from Nature.
Q. And so do scientists today understand that, in fact, birds evolved and were not created abruptly?
A. In fact, that they evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs sometime in the middle or late Jurassic period about 150 million years ago.
MR. WALCZAK: You Honor, I know there have been a number of references to food here. I have one more very short topic that I'd like to cover with Professor Padian, and that will be a good place to break.
THE COURT: After that point?
MR. WALCZAK: Yes.
THE COURT: That's fine. I thought we'd go to about no later than 12:15, but if it takes longer than that, that's fine. Let's break at whatever point you think is logical so that we don't break up the testimony unnecessarily.
BY MR. WALCZAK:
Q. Professor Padian, you talked about this change of function, and I think you used the term "exaptation."
A. Yes.
Q. Is that a biological concept that's well established?
A. Yes, it is.
Q. And how do intelligent design proponents deal with exaptation?
A. Well, as far as I can tell, they don't really. It's very difficult for them to deal with exaptation because it implies that you can take a structure and change its function to a new function. And the whole purpose of intelligent design is to identify structures and functions that are too complex to have changed naturally from an antecedent state to a new state.
I believe that the evidence that I'm providing here is trying to show that we have, piece by piece, assembly of major adaptations. I believe that we've shown that with the transition of swimming animals up into the animals that came onto land, for example, a very good transition of features step by step by step, and that it isn't like an adaptational package of land animals that had to be assembled abruptly, but rather that structures are changed in their function.
So, for example, the fin of a fish moves up and down and helps it to negotiate the water, that is, to push water, pass it or to steer and do things like that in a medium that's a thousand times denser than air.
How do you get from that to an animal that puts its limbs under its body and stands on this limb? Well, as we've seen, what happens in the evolution of limbs from basic fins is that these bones become stouter and stronger. Their articulations change. They begin to be able to be much more able to support weight, and they change from having a lot of those individual sort of rays that you see in any fish fin to a fewer number of things that are covered by flesh. In fact, these are the fleshy fins that we have, our hands. They're exactly the same structures.
And we saw from the slides that these structures, the numbers of fingers, how they articulate, change in a very step-like pattern, not in an abrupt way at all. So the answer is that intelligent design proponents, this is the last thing they want to hear, because it would indicate to them that there are ways of getting from Point A to Point B when they want to talk about abrupt appearance and irreducible complexity.
MR. WALCZAK: I'd like to end abruptly now so we could get some lunch.
THE COURT: I don't know if there will be a run on chicken. But we'll break here until -- how are you proceeding time-wise?
We could take an abbreviated lunch, take an hour rather than the longer lunch, or we can go to 1:30, which might be a little bit more reasonable. I'll give you a crack at that because you know how much more you have on direct and you want to save time -- I know you don't want to bring this witness back -- you want to save time, reserve time for appropriate cross.
MR. WALCZAK: I'm guessing an hour, maybe a little bit more. We've got mammals, we've got whales.
THE COURT: Mr. Muise, if we stopped at 2:30 or if we gave Mr. Walczak until 2:30, if we reconvened at 1:30, would that give you enough time to cross-examine?
MR. MUISE: 2:30 and stop at 4:00, Your Honor?
THE COURT: Well, no, we'd stop at 4:30-ish. That would give you two full hours. But if you don't think that that's going to be enough, I want to try to regulate what we're doing here.
MR. MUISE: It's always hard to judge, Your Honor, you know, for cross-examination, depending on, you know, how the responses come, obviously.
THE COURT: Well, I'm saying I would hold Mr. Walczak, because I know there's an issue -- this witness has come a great distance. I would hold him to 2:30. You've got to keep it within two. Now, you may not use two, but I'm saying, is that enough? Now, if you want a little over, that's fine. I'm just trying to get a fix on --
MR. MUISE: Let's do an abbreviated lunch since we want to make sure we get done.
THE COURT: Let's take precisely an hour. We'll come back at 1:15. And then why don't you have a conversation during the lunch break about how you want to carve up the afternoon, because I think that's the appropriate thing to do.
So, Mr. Walczak, if you don't go too deeply into the afternoon and not give Mr. Muise enough time, in the interest of not bringing this witness back -- which I think is what you're striving to do. Am I correct?
MR. WALCZAK: That's right, Your Honor.
THE COURT: So as a courtesy, make sure he's got enough time. All right?
MR. WALCZAK: Yes, Your Honor.
THE COURT: We'll be in recess until 1:15.
(A luncheon recess was taken.)
lunch[edit]
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 9 (October 14), PM Session, Part 1
THE COURT: Be seated, please. All right, Mr. Walczak, you'll continue with the direct examination.
MR. WALCZAK: Your Honor, one of the things we did not do was formally move Professor Padian's as an expert, and I know that defendants have stipulated to his expertise.
THE COURT: Why don't you put the, I understand that, and I could refer back to this but it's easier for you to do it, state the exact purpose for which his testimony is being offered in the expert realm.
MR. WALCZAK: We would proffer Dr. Kevin Padian as an expert in paleontology, evolutionary biology, integrated biology, and macroevolution.
THE COURT: And then pursuant to the stipulation I assume you have no objections, Mr. Muise, is that correct?
MR. MUISE: That's correct, Your Honor.
THE COURT: All right. Then he's admitted obviously for that purpose nunc pro tunc. So let me ask you before you start your questioning, do you have an agreement as to how long you're going to go in order to reserve --
MR. WALCZAK: Oh, I'm guessing we have an hour to an hour and fifteen. As I told Mr. Muise, if we have to bring Professor Padian back on Monday, then it's not the end of the world and we certainly don't want to cut them short on their cross.
MR. MUISE: And I'll do my best to get it done before the end of the day.
THE COURT: All right. Well, we'll work with that, and you may proceed.
CONTINUED DIRECT BY MR. WALCZAK:
Q. When we finished we were talking about the evolution of birds, and just one last point I want to make on that before we move on to mammals. On page 99 to 100 of Pandas it makes the statement there that I think has been read previously in this trial that, "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact," and it says, "birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc." Now, in fact does the fossil record show whether birds evolved with those features intact?
A. You have a thing about the birds today. Dinosaur for lunch? To answer your question, it definitely doesn't show that these features evolved all at once intact, but rather in a step-like progression of features.
Q. So did the birds at first have just feathers and then the other features evolved?
A. We saw the simplification, we saw from a very simplified picture of all the feature that evolve in birds, but they start with very simple filamentous hair-like structures that are feathers, but if I had shown all the features of birds evolving we would have seen the wishbone appear very early before birds evolved and become a very boomerang shaped structure well before birds evolved or take flight. So that evolved for completely different purposes anyway, but birds do use the wishbone today as an anchor of some of the flight muscles. That wasn't the case originally for birds. There's just lots of features like that we could go through, sure.
Q. Let's talk about mammals. One of the examples that's referenced in Pandas is the mammalian ear, inner ear. Could you talk to us about how Pandas discusses the mammalian ear and what science shows about that? And you've prepared a demonstrative for this?
A. I put a couple of slides together about the transition in the evolution of the mammal ear, which is unusual compared to all the other vertebrates. The next slide I think shows a bit about this. This is going to get a little complex anatomically, but I hope it will only hurt for a minute. The bones of the middle ear, mammals have three of them. You might have heard of them as the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup.
The stirrup is a bone that's always in the ear, but the mammals have this anvil and hammer thing which are just outside that stirrup bone. These anvil and hammer bones actually correspond to bones that previously made up the upper and lower jaw joint in all the other animals, not just reptiles or anything like them, but everybody pretty much. So the Pandas authors claim that to make this correspondence is really stretching it, because they said there's no fossil record of this amazing process.
Consider, that to make this change one of these bones had to cross the hinge from the lower jaw into the middle ear region of the skull. Again this is from Pandas page 121. So they're saying there's no record of this process and it would be an amazing thing to have to change. The next slide shows that there are actually many sources going back several decades that differ, and there are just a few of them there.
The first one was actually an article by Romer, who was the dean of American vertebrate paleontology for half the century about a sinodaun that has an incipient mammalian jaw articulation, and I'll show you what that is in a minute. That comes from the journal Science in 1969. Here's a somewhat later paper by Edgar Allen of Madison, and now it's Chicago, on the evolution of the mammalian middle ear, and then a third one I put there is very recent piece, a little piece in Science by Thomas Marin from Germany and Gigi Lowe, who's curator at the Carnegie museum here in Pittsburgh just a few hours away, one of the great museums in the country, and they are talking about the evolution of these bones in the middle ear something that is uncontroversial as a principle in comparative anatomy of vertebrates in paleontology.
Q. Now, I note that first article I believe was from 1969.
A. Was.
Q. So this isn't a new development?
A. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's been known for decades.
Q. So what you're going to show us is something that was known 25 years before Pandas was published?
A. Yes, and they discuss it. Sure. The next slide I think gives some detail of what's going on here. Trying to make this as painless as possible, there are essentially two sets of bones that are involved in one animal or another in the hinge between the upper and the lower jaw, and outlined in different colors in the skull on top I think you can see an orange bone and maybe a purplish type bone, and in the lower jaw you can see a red one and a blue one.
Now, this is an animal that is not a mammal. It's an ancient relative of mammals, and the jaw joint in this animal is formed by two bones, that blue one marked by a "Q" in the top jaw and the red one, which is called the articulator, in the lower jaw. So the quadrate and the articular are the two bones that in all other animals except mammals make up the jaw.
The next image is of a critter called probanigmasis, which again is not a mammal. It's a little bit closer to mammals than the first guy is, and in this animal you will see that now not only do we have the articulation between the Q bone and the art bone, which is the quadrate and the articular in the upper and lower jaws, but also there is an articulation between the bone in the lower jaw marked with a "D" called the dentary and the squamosal in the skull, and this can be seen perhaps if I can rouse it, sort of in this area here where the dentary and the squamosal would meet right next to the quadrate and the articular.
So these animals actually have what we call a dual jaw joint of two pairs of bones that are actually articulating next to each other on the upper and lower sides of the skull. The next slide is of morogenucidaun, which is another animal, again slightly closer to mammals, that also shares this dual jaw joint of the two bones, and the top of the two bones with the bottom I won't bother with the details, and finally the fourth slide is of a typical garden variety, garbage pail variety possum, which has now changed this articulation so that only the dentary and the squamosal bones are connected.
The quadrate and the articular are no longer part of the jaw joint. So we have gone from a quadrate articular joint in which the dentary and squamosal don't participate to two animals, the second and third I showed, there are others like diarthrodnatus I could have shown, in which you have two pairs of bones sitting next to each other and articulating, making that jaw joint, to a situation in mammals, the possum is an example, but many, many mammals in the fossil record would do as well as all the mammals today in which just the new articulation the dentary squamosal is made.
So you might ask what happened to the quadrate and the articular bones, and the next slide shows that actually in the course of time you can see that, again just to summarize this, this transition, the next indication is of the original condition of the quadrate articular joint only to the next condition of having both the quadrate articular and the dentary squamosal joints which is present in these two animals to only the dentary squamosal joint, and this is the way that scientists understand this transition to have taken place.
The next slide gives you a sense of what this anatomy is on the inside of the ear. Now what you're looking at in the top is a depiction of the ear bones in some of early mammals. Now, if you can see where the pointer is pointing here on this upper right diagram, this long structure here with a big hole in the middle is called the stapes, and this is an ear bone that connects up to the eardrum in the inner ear, this little funny snail shaped thing, this bone, the stapes, has been in animals ever since they came out on land.
In fact, even the watery ancestors of land animals have this in one form or another. Next to this you'll see a little "Q" and a little "A" which are the quadrate and the articular. These are the two parts that usually that before just made up the jaw joint, but now they are making up part of the ear bone. They are connecting up to it. On the bottom when you look at this, here is this stirrup shaped bone here which we would call the stirrup next to a bone marked by an "I", which is the anvil, and the bone next to it marked by an "M", which is the malleus, or hammer.
So malleus and the incus, or the hammer and the anvil, are actually the quadrate and the articular that used to be in the jaw joint, and now they are hooked up to the stapes here of the ear. They always were connected to the stapes, but now they are moved so that the hammer, or the articular, is now moved into the skull rather than being part of the lower jaw.
Now, Pandas says this is a very difficult transition to make, and yet we see it embryologically and we see this in the fossil record in the transition of the jaw joints. I think the next indication on the slide will give you a picture if I may, the next I think indication is the Pandas version of this, which identifies these bones as the incus and the states. The stapes as I have already shown is the stirrup. That's always been in the ear.
I'm not really sure why they call this a relocation as the incus and the stapes when it's been there when actually what is relocated is really the articular bone which used to be in the lower jaw and now is in part of the ear. So the anatomy here is a little bit confused, and I'm sure they didn't mean to do this purposely, but again if they get this wrong, how much else is wrong that we don't know about or that is not being shown to students or has not been obviously corrected in the second edition or in any subsequent work as far as I know?
I think the next slide shows where the stapes is in both things. That's just so you can see where the stapes is the comparable structures. They may look different. One is much more stirrup shaped than the other, which is more rod shaped, but they're the same bone. They hook up to the same structures.
Q. So again here the point that Pandas makes is that there cannot be and have not been natural processes that account for this evolution?
A. And this is just an example of the kind of argumentation that's made to try to say that these transitions are difficult to make and we have no evidence for them, but as I have shown and as you have seen there has been fossil evidence going back decades that show us animals with dual pairs of bones in the jaw joints which is perfect intermediate form. It's kind of like if you had a cup in this hand and you want to transfer it to this hand, well, you could go like that, just toss it from one to the other. But if you take it in both hands and then move it this way, but for a while you've got it in both hands. That's sort of what the mammal jaw was doing.
Q. Now, you've pointed out that what you have just testified about was well known 25 years before Pandas was written. I mean, that those articles were from the late 1960's. Are you familiar with qualifications or backgrounds of the authors of Pandas?
A. I know them as the authors of Pandas. I know very little else about them from firsthand experience.
Q. So that would be Dean Kenyon, Percival Davis, Nancy Pearcey, and Charles Thaxton. Have you ever encountered them at any meetings, paleobiology, evolutionary biology, seen any peer reviewed publications? What can you tell us about these authors?
A. I can say that none of those authors or the other people I know as consulting people on their masthead, I have never seen them at scientific meetings in my fields as far as I know. I've never known them to give papers at those meetings. I've never known them to publish in the peer reviewed literature of any of the fields related to evolutionary biology or paleontology if you want to go to specifics or anything else in related fields, and I haven't seen their work cited by scientists in those fields when discussing advances in science.
Q. Let me ask you the same question about two experts who will be testifying in the coming weeks for the school district. One is Michael Behe, and the other is professor Scott Minnick. Same question, are these folks who are recognized in the field?
A. Not in any of the fields in which I'm familiar, but it would hold they, like the authors of Pandas, may be qualified in other fields, but as far as I understand their experience, accomplishments in the fields related to evolutionary biology, I know of no particular work that they have done that would provide expertise.
Q. So you haven't seen any peer reviewed publications from these individuals involving evolutionary biology or paleontology?
A. Not in those fields, no. Although I don't doubt in their own fold they might produce perfectly good work.
Q. Let's take one, just more example of the evolution of mammals, and one that Pandas identifies as not being able to evolve naturally is whales, and I'm wondering if, you've prepared a demonstrative to show us how Pandas treats the whales and then explain what science knows about the evolutionary process?
A. I would like to discuss this a bit if I may have the next set of slides. In Pandas, here on page 101 and 102 --
Q. Could you read that passage?
A. The whole passage?
Q. Yes, please.
A. "The absence of unambiguous transitional fossils is illustrated by the fossil record of whales. The earliest forms of whales occur in the rocks of the Eocene age, dated some fifty million years ago, but little is known of their possible ancestors. By and large, Darwinists believe that whales evolved from a land mammal. The problem is that there are no clear transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales. If whales did have land dwelling ancestors it's reasonable to expect to find some transitional fossils."
Q. End quote?
A. End quote.
Q. And in fact what does the science show?
A. Well, some of the disturbing things about that quote is apparently that the evolution of whales is something that Darwinists believe, and again it's sort of a faith based proposition that seems to have no real evidence. The Pandas authors then go on to say that there are no clear transitional fossils. It raises the question of what they might accept as a transitional fossil, but what I'd like to show you is what some of the evidence is accepted by fossils in ways of making these transitions of features.
Again on the screen here you saw some peer reviewed publications from Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the US A.
Q. Could you just read a couple of the titles and journal articles into the record?
A.
A title here is Skeletons of Terrestrial Cetaceans, which are whales, and The Relationship of Whales to Artiodactyls, which are the hoofed mammals.
Q. And what publication is that from?
A. That comes from Nature I believe. Another article here from Science is called Origin of Whales From Early Artiodactyls, which again are the hoofed mammals, Hands and Feet of Eocene Protocedite, which is an early group of whales from Pakistan. Those are couple of examples.
Q. So now the testimony you're about to give about whales, does this come from this and other peer reviewed studies?
A. Yes. If I could have the next slide I can show you a bit about this. Once again we're going to use this hat rack cladogram relationship diagram, and again it's turned on its side so that you've got living cetacea, whales, on the bottom in blue. That group of whales and dolphins has a bunch of fossil relatives. The closest one are called basilosaurids. Outside them are protocetids, and there's a couple of forms from the Eocene called ambulocetis and pachycetis, and outside that are hippos, which are the closest living relatives of whales, and outside of that we've just listed some early Eocene artiodactyls, or hoofed mammals, from which we have recognized certain characteristics that are shared between hippos and whale, as odd as it might seem.
The skeletons you see there are some fossils from the Eocene of hoofed mammals, members of the group artiodachtyl, the ones with the even toes, and we just put them up there to show that we do have fossils of such things. The next slide gives you a sense of hippos, which no one needs any introduction to, so we'll pass to the next slide, which is a particularly interesting set of photographic views of a skull, or a partial skull and brain case of an animal called pachycetis, the critter in the yellow, well, orange or whatever that is, outlined term, that is again closer to whales of today than hippos and the other Eocene artiodachtyls are.
This is a another of some of the oldest whales which come from Pakistan, India, Egypt, that area of the world, which once was the edge of an ancient sea in the early part of the Tertiary period, fifty, sixty million years ago when all this was happening. The images on the right are photographs of one of the brain cases and skulls of pachycetis, and the reason for showing this is just to let you know, although I won't go into any detail, that what pachycetis shares with whales that live today are not that it has a blow hole or flukes or anything like that, but that it has an ear region with features that are only found in whales.
And by this we infer that they share a common ancestor with the first whales. That would be fairly tenuous evidence if we didn't have other evidence, but the next slide will show you that the evidence of this animal does not make it look a lot like a whale either. It's obviously a four-legged critter. It is happy running around on the ground. It looks like a garden variety quadruped, four-footed critter that runs around doing its business, whatever it does, and except for this funny ear region you might not really get a sense of its relationship to whales.
And so we note that they are quadrupedal, or four-legged, but the next slide shows you something interesting about them. That stop slide has now changed to just admit a little bit of the insights that we get from isotopes. These are isotopes of oxygen, and oxygen comes in different kind of molecular forms, and the percentage of those forms varies between terrestrial and aquatic horizons, environments, so that when we find bones that are made with oxygen elements that contain this isotopic signal, we can get an idea of whether these animals were primarily terrestrial or aquatic.
In the next slide there's a little indication on this slide there, you can see that the isotopes for pachycetis demonstrates that it falls in the fresh water marine kind of realm. So we think if this evidence is correct that this animal was spending at least part of its time in water, including brackish or marine water. So it's already getting out there somewhere, but it's still a quadrupedal critter.
The next slide I think is going to give you a sense of ambulocetis, which means walking whale. Again it still has legs, and as the restoration at the top shows it looks like it's perfectly okay getting around on land, but the next indication on this slide will show you that the limbs are large and paddle like. So the hands and the feet are clearly already being broadened and are apparently some use to the animal in getting around in the water, and these are actual skeletons again from the Eocene.
The next slide shows you protocetids, which are ancient whale relatives that are a little bit closer than the last one was to the whales of today, and protocetids are kind of interesting. If you, the next indication I think will show that the hips on these animals have been decoupled from the backbone. That is they are no longer connected to the spinal column.
Why this would be might be difficult to fathom, pardon the pun, except that these animals are probably using their backbone, moving it up and down the way whales swim in the water, and if you have your limbs encumbered to your backbone it's just going to be that much more difficult to do it. This may be part of the reason why the decoupling is there, and yet these animals, as you'll see from the next indication, still have skulls in which they're getting some increasingly whale-like characteristics, including the nostrils, which are beginning to move backward along the skull.
As you know, in whales the blow hole is right up close to the eyes. The next slide I think shows that even though these animals are quite aquatic and have a lot of whale features, they still have ankle bones that are very much like the ankle bones in the hoofed mammals from which they evolved, including ankles with a double pulley joint and a lever arm off the end.
Even though these animals are spending more and more time in water, they can still deal okay on lands. The next slide I think will show a basilosaurid, which is the next step toward living whales, and this is quite a different proposition. The next indication will show you where the nostrils are, they're moving even farther up along the skull, and the next indication shows you about the hind limb bones, which are again the next indication is a close-up of this, the hind limbs are now not just decoupled from the back bone, they've become extremely reduced.
But as you'll notice, right in the middle of that slide is that pulley shaped bone with a little hook off it. That is the ankle. And so the ankle is still like the ankle of a terrestrial animal, a hoofed mammal, from which they evolved, even though this animal couldn't any more walk on land than it could fly. So what we're seeing here is the progression of features more and more whale-like from animals that are terrestrial and conventional land going animals through some really minor features beginning in such odd regions as the ear, which you might not expect to be one of the first things that would change, all the way down to this, the final thing we have here is the living cetacean, which looks, you know, very much like the whales of today because they are the whales of today, and they've almost completely lost the hind limbs. So this is the situation as paleontologists know it in a kind of a, you know, very vague general nutshell.
Q. And this is completely contradictory to which Pandas has said?
A. Well, you look at the treatment that they've given us and that we've just seen, they've told us that there are no clear transitional fossils and that the fossil record of whales is a poster child for the absence of unambiguous transitional fossils, but we think the transition is pretty good.
Q. Now, most of these fossils that you have just pointed to were in fact discovered after the publication of Pandas in 1993?
A. Many of them were. Some of them were still around. Basilosaurids, the last, second to last guys I showed, have been known since the Civil War.
Q. Does the fact that Pandas suggests that there are no transitional fossils and kind of insert an intelligent designer as the cause because of that, what's the implication of finding new evidence where Pandas asserts a designer?
A. Well, again I think it sets a very confusing message to students as well as to everybody, the public included, that I don't know what you're supposed to think from this. Either there is no designer or the methods of intelligent design are very badly flawed, but in each case it confuses rather than advances the educational purpose.
Q. Well, does it also not show up a flaw in the logic of intelligent design, so the fact that we don't have transitional fossils today means the only other possibility is there must have been a designer, whereas in fact what we have no found is no, there are other possibilities we may actually find natural causes for?
A. And so the fallacy is that if we don't have enough evidence for evolution, we must therefore conclude that these things had a supernatural origin.
Q. What's homology? Last concept, Your Honor.
A. Homology is the central concept of comparative biology. It's the idea that allows you to compare structures in different animals, the kinds of structures that enable you to say that the bone you have here that we call a humerus is a humerus in a human, it's a humerus in a bat or a goat or a bird or a frog, and this is a very old concept. The notion of homology, the ability to compare comparable parts among organisms, goes back to the 1700's. Goethe was one of the first people who developed this concept in vertebrates as well as in plants because he was besides being the author of Faust and a great poet he was also a great morphologist.
He worked on plants and animals and was a great contributor to these ideas of morphology. Goethe, many of the other German scholars who worked with him, some of French scholars in days, and many of the scholars in Britain at this same time, contributed to this, including notably Sir Richard Owen, who was a little bit older than Darwin but really contemporary with him, but a complete anti-Darwinist in the sense of not accepting natural selection and not accepting the possibility of change from one species to the others in ways that Darwin and the evolutionists proposed.
What is so interesting about the presentation of homology by intelligent design advocates as with creation science, scientists and so on, is that they take a concept that isn't even evolutionary and they manage to completely destroy the fundamental basis on which it's built. Let's go back to the thinking of Richard Owen. In 1846 and 1848 a man who is Darwin's bitterest enemy, he is the only man that Darwin was ever said to have hated, so he's not exactly a big fan, these guys do not form a mutual admiration society, but Owen is a cosmic morphologist, he's the greatest paleontologist and comparative anatomist of his generation, and Owen said look, we have to be able to compare structures, and we can do it on a number of different criteria.
And he's not talking about evolution as saying look, this bone is a humerus because it connects to the same bones in all the animals we're looking at. Connects to the shoulder joint on the one hand, on the one arm, and it connects to the forearm bones on the other side, and that's the way we find it and that's how we can tell that this is a humerus, and this is the same in a goat.
So it's in the same position, that's the first thing. The second thing is it's made of the same stuff, it's bone, and this bone -- so it's not muscle or it's not glass, it's not anything else. It's made from the same stuff, and that's another way you can tell it's the same thing. Another criterion he used is that it develops in the same way. So for example it develops along the arm primordium and it's first beginning to be formed in cartilage and the cartilage is largely replaced by bone as the bone develops in its place.
So you have criteria of position, of what it's made of, and how it develops, and these are only a few of the criteria that people use. This is before people talk about evolution in connection to homology. Now, what Darwin did by publishing The Origin of Species, many more people accepted that organisms had common ancestors, that common ancestry explained the diversity of life. And now homology had a second dimension to it. That is that homology, the resemblances that Owen had talked about and many other morphologists had talked about, why were they similar? Because they were inherited from common ancestors. So common ancestry is not the rationale for homology. It's an explanation of the similarities that we see that is, that were actually established in pre-Darwinian terms by most classical scholars that we have.
Q. And so homology is a very well established concept within biology?
A. Yeah, and when I started by talking about how we classify things, how we make up these cladograms, we have to make sure that we're using homologous features, this is features that actually be compared and not just random features that aren't correlated to each other. Otherwise our classification systems would be invalid.
Q. And what you're talking about is something that's been established not just for a few years but for a really long time?
A. Hundreds of years.
Q. And what does Pandas do with homology?
A. It's really weird. If I can give you an example, this one here comes from their figure 5-2. This is their drawing of a dog, a wolf, and an animal called the Tasmanian wolf, which is considered by all scientists to be a marsupial and not a placental mammal. Marsupial are animals like possums and kangaroos and phalangers and koalas and wombats that are a quite a different branch from the placental mammals, humans, primates, bats, wolves, things like that.
The caption here seems to make very little of the similarity between the dog and the wolf and a lot of the supposed identity between the Tasmanian wolf on the bottom, which they say in the caption is allegedly only distantly related to it. If I could have the next slide, this is what they're talking about in making these comparisons.
Q. And now this is from page 29 of Pandas?
A. It is. It says, "Despite these close parallels, because the two animals, that is the Tasmanian wolf and the conventional wolf, differ in a few features, the standard approach is to classify them in widely different categories." So the wolf with the dog and Tasmanian wolf with the kangaroo as a marsupial. Okay, and they're saying if similarity is the basis for classification, what do we do when these similarities conflict?
The marsupial wolf is strikingly similar to the placental wolf in most features. Yet it's like the kangaroo in one significant feature, by which they mean the pouch. Upon which similarity do we build our classification scheme? Should we use the pouch or should we use everything else they're saying. So in other words, they're trying to say that the resemblances between the wolf and the dog are simply superficial, and that just because those other marsupials have pouches doesn't mean we should always classify them together.
I don't think there's ever been any doubt about this since marsupials were discovered. I don't think that there has been mass confusion about marsupials versus placentals. But the next slide I think I would, if I may I would like to show you how a morphologist would look at this question.
Q. I'm sorry, are those these photos taken from Pandas?
A. No. These are photos taken from literature.
Q. And are these reasonable depictions of what these animals look like?
A. Yes. I think as mug shots they're okay. The Tasmanian wolf, the last one died in a zoo in the 1930's. I don't think we know of any living population since then. The dogs and the North American wolf of course are still around. The Tasmanian wolf is a very strange animal. You can see its stripes, its funny ears, its snout and so forth, but superficial similarities as we have seen are not the basis on which we establish science. Let's take a look at next set of slides. What we've done here is to take actual skulls from our museum. Here's a dog and a wolf.
Q. And this is how scientists, real scientists would make these comparisons?
A. Oh, yeah, and in each case we have taken features of the jaws and teeth just to show you the comparability among them. I don't need to run through all the features. I just want you to take a look and see that on this slide the no's and the yes's and the numbers line up pretty well between the dog and the wolf. Do you want me to go through the similarities? Okay, it's close enough for government work.
Then the next one here is the North American wolf and the so-called Tasmanian wolf, and in these features again every one of them is opposite, where you get no's, you get yes's, the numbers are wrong, and the carnassial tooth we see in the wolf above is missing in the Tasmanian wolf. So in these features they're completely different.
Let's go to the next slide, just looking at it the front way, which was not shown in Pandas, but the dog and the wolf, just to show that they both have nasal bones that are narrow or pinched in shape, with three incisors. The next slide contrasts the wolf with the Tasmanian wolf. The Tasmanian wolf has wide nasals and it has four incisors, which you wouldn't see from the side shot that the Pandas authors showed.
The next slide shows you a few of these skulls from underneath. The Tasmanian wolf has holes in the roof of its mouth, or palatal holes, which are lacked by the dog and the North American wolf. And the next slide shows the jawbones of these animals which have an opposite number of molars and premolar teeth between the Tasmanian wolf, and the dog and wolf.
Also you'll see that Tasmanian wolf has a couple of structures at the back of the jaw which we call the reflected lamina. The term is not important, but it's just a significant feature that's not present in the dog and the wolf. Well, let's do our next comparison and look at the Tasmanian wolf as it relates to the kangaroo, which we know is a marsupial.
In all the features that we've been looking at so far the kangaroo and the Tasmanian wolf correspond exactly with one exception, which is that the kangaroo doesn't have three premolars, and it doesn't have three premolars because the front of its face is modified in a way that many plant eating animals are modified. They lose those front cheek teeth and they developed the very most front teeth in the skull into a cropping organism that they use to, a cropping organ that they use to crop grass and other plants. Except for that, the features of the two skulls correspond. The next one, if you like that here's the Tasmanian wolf against the possum, and although --
Q. That's another marsupial?
A. Another marsupial, yeah, our garden variety possum here, and although we saw that the kangaroo didn't have those first three premolars in front, the possum does. And the possum corresponds in all respects to those features in the Tasmanian wolf. Let's go a little bit further and look at then from the front. In each case all three, the kangaroo, the possum, and the Tasmanian wolf, have wide nasals. They have a different number of incisors, but they don't have three, except the kangaroo, which has very strange front incisors.
The next slide shows these three marsupials from the bottom. So I can just go back one, thank you. Shows these three skulls from the bottom. You can see that they all have palatal holes, holes in the roof of the mouth, which the dog and the wolf don't have. And the next slide I believe shows the jaws of these three animals, which everyone classifies as marsupials, which all have four molars, three premolars, except the kangaroo for reasons explained before, and they all have this reflected lamina in the back of the jaw.
So what are we to conclude from this? As the next slide shows -- oh, there are genetic similarities as well. I should mention that there have been several molecular studies that leave no doubt that marsupials are not just united by the pouch. They're even united by many molecular similarities that have nothing to do with the pouch as far as we can tell.
Q. Can you just read into the record the name of these articles and journals they're from?
A. Sure. One is from Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Its title is, "Nuclear Gene Sequences Provide Evidence that a Monophyly of Australodelphian Marsupials" by which monophyly means that they all come from the same ancestors, the australodelphian marsupials means the guys that we know that are down there in Australia and some South American mammals.
Here's "An Analysis of Marsupial Interordinal Relationships," that means the relationships within the marsupials, "Based on 12-S RNA, TRN A Valine, 16-SR RNA, and Cytochrome B Sequences." So here are four different molecules essentially, and this is in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution.
Here's a paper from the Royal Society of London on mitochondrial genomes. Again these are DN A that comes out of the mitochondria of cells, on a bandicoot, a brush tailed possum, confirm the monophyly of australodelphian marsupials once again.
Q. Are these just a representative sample of the peer reviewed literature that's out there?
A. Yes.
Q. So there's many more than this?
A. Yes.
Q. So --
A. I think the next slide might give us an indication that in summary it's not just the pouch. It's all these similarities here that link the Tasmanian wolf to the other marsupials and exclude them from the placentals, and that probably should be brought out to students. I believe the next slide gives us an indication of --
Q. Well, let me just stop you there. So from what you have just explained to us, this homology is used to kind of systematically compare animals?
A. Yes. It's a method as I said that goes back to the 1700's, looking for unusual similarities, listing all of them, putting them all together, and seeing which array of features makes the most sense.
Q. And is this widely accepted in science?
A. Yes. As I noted before, it's the basis by which we can do classification. Those shared features that we use for classification would not be anywhere if we didn't use the concept of homology.
Q. And as we saw, Pandas seems to suggest that the classification and comparisons are arbitrary. How does Pandas use this misrepresentation of homology?
A. I think the next slide might give some indication of that. It seems quite clear from their text that they prefer the explanation of special creation over descent. The highlighted passages here from page 125 of Pandas ask if there is any alternative explanation. They say yes, another theory is that marsupials were all designed with these reproductive structures.
An intelligent designer they say might reasonably be expected to use a variety, if a limited variety, of design approaches to produce a single engineering solution. They say that even if we assume that an intelligent designer had a good reason for all these decisions, it doesn't follow that such reasons will be obvious to us. That's a perplexing statement, because it means that even though we have not been able to find a convincing pattern, and even though we do not know what the overarching plan is, we can still conclude that something was designed and could not have evolved.
They go on to say that, "These questions can nevertheless generate research in areas we might never investigate." I think as a scientist I'd be very concerned about how you can generate research questions when you have closed off an empirical avenue of, a very conventional empirical avenue of investigation, which is that these similarities are the result of common ancestry and provide no program for analyzing what intelligent design is, what the nature of the designer is, what the rules of design are by that designer, and this is I think classically a science stopper, especially when you tell students that these ideas should be considered but then you forbid discussion, you forbid questions.
Q. Now, it says in there that intelligent design should generate research. Are you aware of a significant body of scientific research on intelligent design?
A. Well, before I left I checked our electronic database in biology that's available through our library that surveys thousands of peer reviewed scientific journals, and I looked for intelligent design in the field of biology and all I could find were instances where humans had for example designed ergonomic chairs. And they wanted this to be intelligent design. Okay? But they didn't say anything about a creator or that these had evolved, and obviously we don't think chairs have evolved, we know that they are designed by humans.
Other instances referred to for example DN A splicing, where people are designing DNA if you will. They want to do it intelligently. Things like that, but I never saw a single instance where intelligent design had been used as a research program or even as a scientific concept. And similar studies made by other people have I believe turned up the same lack of stimulation of research in any scientific field.
Q. So we hear intelligent design proponents claim that some of their propositions are testable. How do you square that?
A. Well, they began by claiming that intelligent design should be considered on the same playing field with conventional science. They've had a couple of decades now to show that it should be. They don't seem terribly interested in producing reports, peer reviewed literature that will actually document that and change the scientific paradigm. So I'm not really sure what efforts they're trying to make to change the science.
Q. I guess what I'm asking about is that intelligent design makes claims that are testable, and those are claims that they have made about evolution.
A. I don't think any scientific society that's weighed in on this has accepted intelligent design as testable. Speaking for myself, I don't regard intelligent design as a testable idea scientifically. I regard it as a proposition of things that can't be tested scientifically but you recourse to when scientific explanations have failed. Parts of the things that are alleged to make up intelligent design or that are associated with it, such as irreducible complexity, may be a testable proposition, but let's take a look at that.
Irreducible complexity on its face is a simple statement about a machine or some kind of structure that has several parts. If you take away one of those parts, then it stops functioning. Well, any 8-year-old with a broken bicycle chain knows that he can't ride around anymore with a broken bicycle chain, if that part is broken it's not going to work. No one's got a Nobel prize for that proposition. This only makes sense in the context of intelligent design when irreducible complexity is invoked as a way to assert that no structure could have evolved by natural means.
Therefore, it is irreducibly complex. And as we've seen in cases where works like Pandas have asserted this, we've often found that there is evidence to the contrary that we can produce transitional sequences of things, or that the intelligent design advocates have simply left out a lot of the information probably because they do not accept it.
Q. So an essential component of the intelligent design argument is that evolution doesn't work?
A. That's correct.
Q. And they've given a number of examples involving the fossil record, involving your fields of expertise, whether it's no pre-Cambrian ancestors or the inability of fish to have evolved or birds to have evolved or we saw whales to have evolved, and in fact what has science done with all of the scientific predictions or those assertions where evolution doesn't work or that Pandas comes --
A. Well, they've been tested by the discovery of new evidence such as fossils, such as molecular evidence, such as new evidence in developmental biology, and in a great many cases we found that the proceeding difficulties or absences of evidence have disappeared. It's an important principle in philosophy that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Q. But in fact the examples that Pandas has given to show that in fact evolution doesn't work have been refuted by the scientific community?
A. I believe that would be the interpretation of the scientific community, yes.
Q. And in fact the examples that Pandas has selected are only a very few of far more evidence that's out there supporting evolution?
A. Yes.
Q. And they haven't attacked those other bits of evidence?
A. No.
Q. But even those few bits of evidence that they have selected to argue that evolution doesn't work have largely been invalidated by empirical studies?
A. In many cases we would say that we've got a much better resolution to this. I certainly don't want to present we've solved every problem. Otherwise I'd have to go home and retire.
Q. We are going to try to get you home this weekend. Turn to the last slide we have here. Would you say intelligent design is a scientific proposition?
A. I don't think there's anything scientific about intelligent design. As I say, I think it's a sort of idea that you recur to when your scientific explanations fail.
Q. Do you think it's a religious proposition? And I direct your attention to page 122 of Pandas, and perhaps if you can read this passage into the record.
A. Well, this concerns me. They say, "For the design proponent, there is another explanation of the origin of analogous features and unrelated groups." They say, "For example, the skulls of marsupial wolves and of placental wolves are similar because one particular skull best suited the requirements of both organisms." We call this idea teleology. That is, they define this as organism that's designed for certain functions or purposes.
Now, when they say an organism is designed, that's maybe a statement, a static statement, it may be in the passive voice, but did someone design it. Again and again in Pandas they say that an intelligent designer has designed this for certain functions or purposes. This indeed is teleology, that things are there for, created for a certain end or purpose, and this is a philosophical and overtly religious notion that is absent from ideas of evolutionary biology.
Q. So teleology is not a scientific term?
A. No, not in the sense they're using it at all.
Q. Dr. Padian, you are familiar with the four-paragraph statement that the Dover school district is reading to students?
A. I've read it before.
Q. I'm not going to ask you to critique it paragraph by paragraph, other witnesses have done that. Let me just ask you, the Dover school district's response has been it's a one-minute statement, students don't have to stay in the classroom to listen to it, you know, what's the big deal? Why are we fighting this? Why are students harmed? Why is anybody harmed by reading this one-minute statement to the students?
A. Well, in my view, having educated students for thirty years, and so at a variety of levels from middle school up to graduate students my sense is that it's very difficult to constrain inquiry just by saying you're going to cut it off, and it's very difficult to say that if you just read a statement it's not going to harm anybody. It's quite clear from the evidence that's been given and from the fact that we're sitting here and by the situation that's developed in Dover, clear from news reports of people arguing with each other, parents arguing with other parents and teachers, teachers arguing with the school board, school board members arguing with each other and quitting, who knows how many bitter conversations have taken place in supermarket aisles and across telephone wires.
MR. MUISE: I'm going to object, Your Honor. This is going far down the road of speculation.
THE COURT: I'll overrule the objection to the extent that I'm not hearing anything that I haven't heard before, but why don't you interject a question at this point.
Q. So as a science educator, as somebody who has educated students for thirty years, why is this statement a problem?
A. It's clearly caused a great division in students, a great confusion. If some students are allowed to -- well, if students are required or allowed to hear a statement that is not read by their teacher, and unlike any other statement in the curriculum they may not ask questions about this and they may not discuss it further, this roping off of this kind of a statement means that it's to be treated differently.
It essentially ostracizes this area of study. It makes students confused, and they do ask questions. My students ask me questions about this kind of thing all the time. I don't think you can say that by cutting off inquiry you're going to stop people from asking questions. There are questions that intelligent design raises for students, and not just about science.
They are going to ask about if we have a situation where certain structures cannot evolve, that the natural processes that were perhaps created by a creator aren't sufficient to accomplish things, then what does this say about the perfection of the creation or the creator? What does this say about the ability of the creator to intervene in natural processes? If the creator can intervene, why doesn't he do so more often to relieve pain and suffering? And if this is a problem, of what good is prayer?
These concern me as someone who educates students in the science realm because they're not just asking questions about science. And if we close off inquiry to students and say that something cannot be anymore discussed in science, just accept it this way, or if we make religious propositions part of the science curriculum, then you cannot prevent them from being scrutinized in ways that are completely inappropriate in my view, in the purview of natural science, which never claims to answer such kinds of questions.
Q. And from your perspective as a scientist, what's the problem with this one-minute statement?
A. I think it makes people stupid. I think essentially it makes them ignorant. It confuses them unnecessarily about things that are well understood in science, about which there is no controversy, about ideas that have existed since the 1700's, about a broad body of scientific knowledge that's been developed over centuries by people with religious backgrounds and all walks of life, from all countries and faiths, on which everyone can understand.
I can do paleontology with people in Morocco, in Zimbabwe, in South Africa, in China, in India, any place around the world. I have co-authors in many countries around the world. We don't all share the same religious faith. We don't share the same philosophical outlook, but one thing is clear, and that is when we sit down at the table and do science, we put the rest of the stuff behind.
MR ROTHSCHILD: I have no further questions.
THE COURT: Why don't we get started, we've only been at it about an hour. So we can get started with your cross, and then we'll take a break.
MR. MUISE: Thank you, Your Honor.