The attempts by Faris Sahawneh and Mark Looy to discredit Dr. Zingrone based on his emotional response simply represent another ploy by fundamentalists to advance their untenable, unsupportable positions on how the world works and what the universe is all about.
In this case, they attempted to portray themselves as the ‘reasonable’ faction, even suggesting that Dr. Zingrone was ‘intolerant.’ Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
These are the same people who would institute a Christian theocracy in America, in a flash, if they had the power, and see to it that the book of Genesis replaced all scientific evidence to the contrary in public education.
I have been a professional paleontologist for more than 40 years. I have led expeditions in America and in Europe. I am familiar with the fossil record, and I can assure readers that Dr. Zingrone was absolutely correct; there is no physical evidence for the contemporaneous existence of dinosaurs and humans.
The global fossil record preserves a rich history of life on Earth dating back more than 3.5 billion years. The last dinosaurs died out, probably at the hands of an asteroid impact, about 65 million years ago. The soft tissue in a T-rex bone is amazing (and controversial), but the bone itself is more than 65 million years old; that is not in doubt. Crocodiles did indeed live during the time of the dinosaurs, but so what? So did birds, mammals, insects, flowering plants and a zillion other organisms alive today.
Evolutionary theory has never stated that once a group originated it had to go extinct soon after. If that were the case, nothing much would be alive today, as everything around us had its origins sometime in the Paleozoic or Mesozoic, often hundreds of millions of years ago. But this is where there is a disconnect with fundamentalists, who don’t really understand the fossil record.
Although the group including the modern alligators and crocodiles was around with the dinosaurs, the living species were not. Living species are the end result of evolutionary change and are not the same species as the Mesozoic crocodilians.
Likewise, the fossil history of hominids includes a bushy tree of species beginning about 7 million years ago, culminating with the first completely anatomically modern humans (first Homo sapiens) found in Ethiopian deposits dated at about 195,000 years ago.
To most educated people (believe it or not, even many living in Kentucky), the Creation Museum is simply a strange and almost inexplicable embarrassment. It is exactly the equivalent of a museum dedicated to a flat Earth.
There is no doubt about the ancient age of the Earth; we have put a rover on Mars – how difficult do you think it is to date a rock? It takes some sophisticated sampling devices, but nothing that a clever college-level engineering student couldn’t put together with a little bit of training in about a semester.
It is sometimes difficult for college students, just beginning to question some of the doctrine they grew up with, to understand what’s going on in the so-called evolution/creationism
‘debate.’ It all begins with the understanding of one simple principle: to Christian fundamentalist creationists, the Bible is the literal word of God and the book of Genesis must therefore be taken literally. If that is the case, then all accumulated scientific evidence for evolution must be wrong. This gives creationists tremendous freedom to say and write anything they want.
‘Critical thinking,’ as Looy mentions, requires opening one’s mind to all ideas, identifying those positions that are based entirely on faith versus those that are based on observation and testing, and being able to tell the difference. Dr. Zingrone’s outrage is understandable. If creationists had their way, we would be thrown back into the Middle Ages; the same intolerance, injustice and inhumanity that characterized the Inquisition and the reign of the Borgias would likely return. America’s dominance in science and technology would come to a halt because science would no longer be practiced as a way of knowing.
Rather than castigate Dr. Zingrone for his heartfelt emotional response, we should instead embrace his anger and intensify our vigilance against irrational and primitive thinking in any form so that the light of knowledge never goes out.
Letter from Robert Martin, professor of biology.
It is interesting that Professor Zingrone calls creationism a Pseudoscience. There are many who would argue the same of Psychology. Psychoanalisis is largely dominated by ideas that lack impirical support. Transactional Analisis also lacks impirical support. The Myers-Briggs Type Inventry claims to categorize human personality types–yet again lacking impirical evidence.
Carl Jung was a noted Theosophist and occultist. Jung taught that religion is necessary to any and all psychological development, and that it is only through our religion that we can grow into what we as humans have the potential to become.
Perhaps we should also be angry at the patrons of psychology, because psychology has produced some amazing quacks and is itself is more of a religion than an actual science, divided up into various denominations.
I speak as someone whose son spent several years as a consultant to the Department of Psychology here, part of his work was to help train the Psychologists of the future. He is much more experienced in these things than I.