Curt Schilling, ESPN's Law, and evolution

Retired major league baseball pitcher Curt Schilling has had a rough three years—business failure, oral cancer from using smokeless tobacco—but the 48-year-old professed Christian is staying true to what he told me in a spring training interview nearly 10 years ago: “I’ve learned that you should never hide your faith.”

Schilling, an active Twitter user (@gehrig38), last month threw a brushback pitch to move Charles Darwin off the plate. In defending microevolution (within species) but opposing macroevolution (species to new species), Schilling pointed out the lack of transitional fossils. “… Show me the fossils of the beings that became humans … ,” he demanded in one tweet. “Where are the fossils … ?” he asked in another.

ESPN’s Keith Law (@keithlaw) was one of many who responded: “There are hundreds of transitional fossils on record, Curt.” Law offered a list posted at Wikipedia as evidence, and later tweeted, “Seriously, if someone says evolution is wrong because there aren’t fossils between monkeys and men, find a monkey and hit him with it.” Others chimed in, apparently seeing this as a battle between science and faith.

That portrayal is not accurate, though. I asked Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute about that Wikipedia page, and Luskin called it “largely an exercise in bluffing. You’ll note there’s very little discussion for each fossil explaining exactly why they’re ‘transitional.’ I know enough about many of those fossils to know that whoever made the page is defining ‘transitional’ in a loose manner—they’re using cladistic analysis, which is a slippery and dodgy methodology.”

Luskin is right. Cladistic analysis typically assumes that species have a common lineage, so if they have a similar anatomical character, they are related. Thus, birds are the descendants of two-legged dinosaurs. Critics of cladism, though, say birds may have evolved independently, or God may have created them.

That discussion gets us into deep weeds, so here’s something more reader-friendly: specific detail about the supposed “transitional fossils” that rebuts Keith Law’s Wikipedia analysis. Take a look at some of these, starting with purported missing links between ape-like creatures and man, and then proceeding through birds, whales, and horses, to lesser forms of life:

Man

Birds (offspring of dinosaurs?)

Whales

Horses

Tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates)

I hope you won’t skip by the specific analyses, but if you want one overall piece suggesting the limits of Wikipedia research, read: “Fact-Checking Wikipedia on Common Descent: The Evidence from Paleontology.”

There’s more on the internet, but books such as Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, published by HarperOne in 2013, will help to put these articles in context.

Schilling said he was “stunned” by the “anger, hatred and vile tweets” he received. I’ve read a bunch of those tweets, and their very low common denominator is the assumption that any criticism of macroevolution is evidence of stupidity.

That’s sad. We should have a civil discussion of this, one to which both Schilling and Law could contribute. It appears that Law’s superiors at ESPN told him to hold off tweeting for a while, and that’s too bad. I’d prefer both of them to tweet, then study what their opponents have said, and come back for combat the next day. Kind of like the World Series.