The philosophy of language, while being a little bit dry, is very important. We need to understand what words mean when we use them. When we don’t, we open ourselves up to the possibility of getting confused and even asking meaningless questions. However, there are some very interesting ways that this applies to the creation/evolution debate.
Youtuber SteveLikes2Curse put it so well that I just have to quote him: “Some creationists will say that ‘Evolution cannot create new information!'” Not realizing that the information they’re referring to is a sequence of nucleic acids and an alternation in a sequence of nucleic acids (a mutation) that results necessarily in a new sequence of nucleic acids is the definition of nucleic acids.”
A creationist might rebut this by shifting the goal posts and saying, “Oh, by the way, it has to be a new sequence that results in a new function” but even that claim is dead in the water already because we’ve observed it too. A certain bacteria was subject to an insertion mutation, and this led to its ability to digest nylon. In another case, E. Coli was observed to undergo 2 insertion mutations which allowed it to digest Salicin. Furthermore, insertion sequences have had major contributions in the evolution of primates.
Another semantic-type objection is when creationists say that one ‘kind’ of animal cannot change into another ‘kind’ of animal, thus meaning that evolution can’t happen. I’ve written a humorous dialogue to convey my thoughts on this:
Mr. Sensible: Tell Me, Mr. Creationist, what is a kind?
Mr. Creationist: Look at the Great Dane, the Collie, the Chihuaha, and the Poodle. They’re very different, but we can detect that they ought to be grouped together due to their great similarity. I call that grouping a ‘kind.’
Mr. Sensible: Tell me what the defining characteristics are for that group. Just so we can have some scientific precision.
Mr. Creationist: A dog walks on four legs, it has fur, two eyes, two ears, you get the picture.
Mr. Sensible: But what about the Peruvian hairless? Is it still a dog even though it has no hair, which you said was a defining characteristic?
Mr. Creationist: Okay, I’ll take fur off my list. How about I just use the other items?
Mr. Sensible: Not so fast. Time for a thought experiment: What if my pet dog gets pregnant and has a mutant baby with no ears. Things like this have been known to happen from time to time. Would that still be a dog?
Mr. Creationist: Sure. I see where you’re going with this, so I’ll drop ears off my list too.
Mr. Sensible: But we could do the same thing with just about any and every characteristic you’ve listed.
Mr. Creationist: Uh-oh.
Mr. Sensible: So the word ‘kind’ refers to nothing, at least given the way that you’re using it.
Mr. Creationist: I grant that you’ve got a good philosophical point, but you use ‘kind’ and other similarly vague words all the time in your own day to day life. Surely you don’t think you’re talking nonsense when you do that? I mean, these words must have meaning, even if there are some philosophical puzzles about them that we don’t know how to solve?
Mr. Sensible: Of course. However, the way that we deal with vagueness is not going to be friendly to your argument. Let me explain: suppose that we define the word ‘dog’ to include all the characteristics you mentioned, but instead of the definition being rigid and inflexible, let’s say that we treat each characteristic like a check box. Every animal that can meet most of those checkboxes counts as a ‘dog.’ We may not be able to say exactly how many checkboxes the animal in question has to have in order for it to be a ‘dog’, but we can push that problem aside if we just allow that enough checkboxes in order to match our intuitions about what the word ‘dog’ means. If we adopt this framework, the you’re whole contention that “one kind cannot change into another kind” is dissolved. If a “kind” just represents a set of checkboxes, and an animal in any given “kind” doesn’t have to meet all of them in order to be considered a member, then it’s safe to say that no evolutionist believes an animal ever gave birth to an animal of a completely different kind.
Mr. Creationist: But I thought they did. Don’t evolutionists believe that the whale kind came from the land animal kind?
Mr. Sensible: Sure they do, but the belief that whales evolved from land mammals isn’t at odds with this framework. We evolutionists think that a population of land mammals changed a little bit a time over many generations into whales. Every single generation gave birth to animals that you would say were “of the same kind.” But every few generations a characteristic or two changed. If a scientist had been able to study these whales over tens of thousands of generations, and he kept a checkbox list to describe the species, every few hundred generations he would’ve had to add a new check box or cross one off. Eventually, the check box list he would end up with would look a lot different from the one he started with. So you see, evolution can co-exist with idea that no animal ever has a child that doesn’t at least mostly match the parent’s checkbox description. All you have to do is say that the radical changes in the checkbox took place over lots of generations and not just one. And that’s what every single evolutionist, even Charles Darwin, believed.
Mr. Creationist: Wow, I’ve learned a lot. Unlike most of my logic-hating friends, I’m not going to try and wriggle out of this refutation with absurd mental gymnastics or stubborn refusal to change my mind. I accept your refutation. Thank you.
Mr. Sensible: You’re welcome. And here’s a copy of Why Evolution is True, it’ll get you up to date on the evidence for evolution.
