David Tyler
David Tyler BSc, MSc, PhD, CertEd, MinstP, CPhys, ACFI is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Food, Clothing and Hospitality at Manchester Metropolitan University in the Northwest of England.
Tyler is one of the best known creationists in British academia. He is about 50 years old, so is at the younger end of creationists with an academic background. However, other creationists have been describing Tyler as a compromiser. Now the word compromiser means something different here from its normal use in everyday life. To fundamentalist creationists, compromise is a dirty word.
It means that Tyler doesn't agree with them. It doesn't mean that he agrees with a bit of the theory of evolution they disagree with (or some such like). It’s a disagreement over some obscure wackiness within the fundamentalist movement. In particular Answers in Genesis has been screaming that Tyler is a compromiser.
Tyler is closely associated with a rival organisation, the much smaller Biblical Creation Society (not surprisingly, then, that his signatory was on the 2002 letter to Estelle Morris.
Tyler's problem with Answers in Genesis is detailed later in this article.
As this paper is aimed at an international group of people, we'll explain a little about what David Tyler does. He is, by academic background, a physicist but he does not lecture in pure science. Rather, my interpretation is that the core areas he covers are management and logistics, specialising in the textiles sector. He works at the Manchester Metropolitan University, which is an ex-Polytechnic (it is completely separate from Manchester University, btw).
The polytechnics were established in the UK to provide essentially vocational or near-vocational degrees and thus tend to be differentiated from universities. They were also owned by local authorities so they tended to have strong local links.
This no doubt is why MMU is good in the areas where Tyler is working. Whilst still shrinking, the textile trade in Northwest England remains relatively substantial.
However, during the 1990s they were given university status – this essentially allowed them to award their own degrees. They tend to be weak on research, though. In addition to honours degree and post graduate courses, MMU offers other, lower status, courses at higher education level, so many might regard it as not really a university (Roughly it would be the equivalent of a community college in the USA.)
Back to the compromiser issue: The letter to Estelle Morris not only made no mention of creationism but it also failed to mention the entire creationist movement is all over the place on “creation” science. There is no consensus between the main groups.
Well, lets see what the "scientists" at Answers in Genesis think about David Tyler, an academic scientists: Not a lot as you can see here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2006/0307recolonisation.asp.
Tyler is named by Monty White and Paul Taylor (both of AiG UK) as compromised. (Is this perhaps the reason why White's name did not appear on the 2002 Estelle Morris letter?) Andy McIntosh and Stephen Taylor have slogged it out with Tyler et al in pseudoscience papers, none of which are referenced on the web sites of the universities they teach in (does that surprise you?).
Yet the Biblical Creation Society's web site states that Tyler has "has written over 30 articles that seek to develop a Christian perspective of origins." Really? When the fundamentalists can't agree amongst themselves let alone with mainstream Christians?
For a list of Tyler's learned papers that make no mention of any of these articles see Manchester Metropolitan University's web site at http://www.hollings.mmu.ac.uk/faculty/cdt/research/staff/david_tyler.php.
Funny, isn't it, how fundamentalists claim to speak for all Christians.
What the fundamentalists are bitching about between themselves is something called Recolonisation Theory. (The term theory is theirs.)
According to Answers in Genesis, "The Recolonisers believe that the fossil record is to be understood more or less in the order in which evolutionary geologists picture it, although they dispute all the timescales. They see this fossil record as indicative of life recolonising the world after the devastation caused by the Flood of Noah’s time. They assume that the Flood itself is responsible for none of the fossil record, believing that organisms killed by the Flood have been totally obliterated, and therefore are not visible in the fossil record."
Don't worry if you don't understand this. The history of creationism is riddled with internal disputes and disagreements. It's one of the reasons why there is no peer review process for fundamentalist "scientific" papers.
However, this is Tyler's position as described on the Science Just Science web site: "Tyler is a champion of the 'recolonisation model' - the idea that the fossil record traces the post-flood redistribution of animals across the newly scoured planet. The basic idea is that after the flood, arthropods and amphibians colonised the earth while the rest were still huddled in refuges somewhere in Darkest Africa and so fossils of them are found at the bottom of the strata; these were later wiped out by the somewhat slower moving but fast-breeding dinosaurs, whose fossils are found in the middle; finally, the slow-breeding, slow-moving, terrain-restricted mammals (e.g. rabbits, cheetahs and bats; not to be confused with the fast-breeding, fast-moving, teleporting primitive mammals and mammal-like reptiles that accompanied the dinosaurs, e.g. pelycosaurs and cynodonts) emerged after a few hundred years of hiding in a very small not-yet-discovered location (which nonetheless supported dozens of species of loxodonts/rhinos/indricotheres/camels/uintatheres/titanotheres/brontotheres/giraffids) and outcompeted the dinosaurs, so their fossils are found at the top. Humans also stayed in Africa until after the world was full of mammals. Oh, and naturally the small fast k-mode plesiosaurs colonised the oceans before the dolphins, and annual wind-blown grasses couldn't keep up with the rapid spread of ginkgos and magnolias. Also pterodactyls out-colonised birds who out-colonised bats which effectively means swifts fly slower than quetzalcoatlus, while Mexican bats (who fly halfway across the USA every time they feed) fly slower than emus. The timescale for all this is conveniently ignored, to avoid having to think about whether the dinosaurs all hatched, spread, colonised and died out within a century or so, or whether they hung around for enough generations to actually fit the above scenario, i.e. until the Renaissance."
Well, of course Tyler is neither a geologist or a biologist; he's a physicist. Which, of course, might make some ponder about his claim that only Christians (presumably, he means only Christians who agree with his own opinions) can understand geology.
Indeed, Tyler seems to believe that geology isn't valid unless it is revealed by the bible.
So, we have an unqualified self-appointed expert on geology who claims that no-one who disagrees with his opinions on religion understands geology, has called for the freedom to teach his opinions to children in state schools as science, has deceived the Secretary of State for Education, can't agree on science with other signatories to the same letter and claims to be a leading educator!
So lets just look back and see what Tyler really is. The letter to Estelle Morris states that all the signatories were "academics, scientists and educationists." But David Tyler in his involvement in creation science is suggesting he is such an expert on geology, backed by NO qualifications in the subject at all, that he has developed theories that overturn the entire core of established geology. He then, as an evangelising member of the Biblical Creation Society which wants to teach this in schools, puts forward to the government he credentials in physics with the full knowledge of fourteen other people on the list also associated with the BCS. But the same letter says he is an academic, scientist and educationist!
Academics don't lie about their qualifications. Educationists don't teach subjects they are unqualified in. Scientists don't change their scientific credentials inside out according to who they are addressing.
So why should the Secretary of State for Education take any notice of David Tyler? He wants alternative views to biology and geology taught in schools but the alternative views he has put forward have never been subjected to peer review, are accepted by no one in mainstream science and are not accepted by his creationist cohorts. He is a member of an organisation, the Biblical Creation Society, which has no scientific credentials whatsoever and which hid behind anonymity in writing to the Secretary of State. He is not even a practising scientist. He's in management education.
