Science and Religion: A View from an Evolutionary Creationist

Indiana Joins the Fray

2012-01-27T22:33:00.001-05:00

According to a report from the NCSE, Indiana's state senate has passed a bill that:

if enacted would allow local school districts to "require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science," was passed by the Senate Committee on Education and Career Development on January 25, 2012. The vote was 8-2, with the bill's sponsor and committee chair Dennis Kruse (R-District 14), Carlin Yoder (R-District 12), Jim Banks (R-District 17), Jim Buck (R-District 17), Luke Kenley (R-District 20), Jean Leising (R-District 42), Scott Schneider (R-District 30), and Frank Mrvan Jr. (D-District 1) voting for and Earline S. Rogers (D-District 3) and Tim Skinner (D-District 38) voting against the bill.

All but one a Republican. Natch. More and more, this whole “academic freedom” legislation is becoming a plank of the Republican party. Mitt Romney and Ulysses S. Gingrich are out of step. This is surely a procedural, academic vote since it will likely not pass constitutional muster, given the ruling handed down in Dover vs. Kitzmiller. Those that passed the bill must know this. That is what makes it even more ridiculous—that they would take time to debate something that is dead in the water. As Todd Rundgren sings: “Too little to do and too much time.” The text of the bill is remarkably brief and does not even define creation science, which is also problematic. It reads:

The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.

Are there really only two people in that committee that have decent enough backgrounds in science to know a bad idea when they see it?

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How Well Could Archaeopteryx Fly?

2012-01-26T20:38:00.005-05:00

Science Daily has a story on Archaeopteryx and its ability to fly. Quoth they:

Some secrets have been revealed by an international team of researchers led by Brown University. Through a novel analytic approach, the researchers have determined that a well-preserved feather on the raven-sized dinosaur's wing was black. The color and parts of cells that would have supplied pigment are evidence the wing feathers were rigid and durable, traits that would have helped Archaeopteryx to fly.

It is nice to have yet more information about this genus. This new information adds yet another dimension to the transitional nature of Archaeopteryx, which is regarded as having mostly theropod dinosaurian characteristics. It does not help the YEC-based arguments that Archaeopteryx was just a bird.

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Yes, the Neandertals Knew What They Were Doing...

2012-01-25T21:39:00.002-05:00

Science Daily has a report from the University of Kent, in which researchers examined large numbers of Levallois stone tools to determine just how much “engineering” took place in the making of them. From the story:

Now, an experimental study – in which a modern-day flintknapper replicated hundreds of Levallois artifacts – supports the notion that Levallois flakes were indeed engineered by prehistoric hominins. By combining experimental archaeology with morphometrics (the study of form) and multivariate statistical analysis, the Kent researchers have proved for the first time that Levallois flakes removed from these types of prepared cores are significantly more standardised than the flakes produced incidentally during Levallois core shaping (called ‘debitage flakes’). Importantly, they also identified the specific properties of Levallois flakes that would have made them preferable to past mobile hunter-gathering peoples.

Dr Metin Eren, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University’s School of Anthropology and Conservation and the flintknapper who crafted the tools, said: ‘The more we learn about the stone tool-making of the Neanderthals and their contemporaries, the more elegant it becomes. The sophistication evident in their tool-making suggests cognitive abilities more similar to our own than not.’

This is not news to most palaeoanthropologists, who regard the Levallois core technology, which is found not just in Europe but in the Levant and Russia as well, as being a sophisticated method for mass-producing stone tools. I guess it is finally nice to get confirmation that the Neandertals were more complex than some people thought, even if Dr. Erin damns them with faint praise at the end.

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More Trouble in Kentucky

2012-01-23T19:55:00.001-05:00

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear has drafted a state budget that calls for 286 million dollars in cuts, some of which will come in the form of cuts to university and community colleges, grants to local school districts and library and archive services. While these are alarming to many in the Bluegrass state, what has more than a few people riled up is that the $43 million in tax incentives for the Ark Encounter are being left alone. Were these taxes collected, it would amount to 15% of the total cuts and would probably save some important programs from being cut at all. As Daniel Koecker, of Gather Politics writes:

The budget ideas combined with the tax cuts for the religiously themed park are highly controversial. With the state facing such budget issues, granting such a generous tax break is probably not the best idea, but the fact that it's going towards a biblically themed amusement park is quite interesting. Some say that the park will create jobs, but this was based on a report from the park's developers. While the budget cuts claim to avoid layoffs, and construction will no doubt need workers, it is perhaps a mark of botched priorities when cuts are made to higher education at the same time as a multi-million dollar budget cut is given to a theme park, religious or not; Beshear has also supported the project for years.

The wisdom of preserving these tax incentives becomes even more questionable when you factor in the recent news that the park is having trouble meeting the financial goals necessary to go ahead with the project. If enough negative support can be mustered in protest of the new budget and its deference to the Ark-n-Park, it might cause the whole project to capsize.

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Chris Stringer on Modern Human Origins

2012-01-22T15:12:00.000-05:00

Chris Stringer was one of the original progenitors of the Out of Africa model of modern human origins, which posited that anatomically modern Homo sapiens arose in sub-Saharan Africa as a speciation event¹ and then replaced the archaic humans that they came into contact in other areas of the Old World. Needless to say, this perspective has been rocked by a number of astonishing studies that have come out in the last few years, including but not limited to these reports:

These have cast considerable doubt on the integrity of anatomically modern humans as a separate species but suggest, instead that despite the timing of some of these trysts, Homo sapiens was a much more polytypic species then met the eye.

Now the grand don of the replacement model is undergoing a re-think. The Edge provides us with a wonderful trek through the history of the origins of modern humans debate and the current evidence for it. He hasn't given up the ship yet, though. He notes:

In my view the Neanderthals were closely related and probably potentially able to interbreed with modern humans, but until recently I considered that while there could have been interbreeding forty or fifty thousand years ago, it was on such a small scale that all trace of it vanished in the intervening years. But it now seems from Neanderthal genome studies that that was not so. We do have a bit of Neanderthal in us, you and I—it's a small amount, but certainly not negligible..

Does that mean Neanderthals are a different species or does it mean we should include them in Homo sapiens? Well, they are still only a small part of our makeup now, reflecting something like a 2.5% input of their DNA. Physically, however, they went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They had distinct behavior and they evolved under different conditions from us, so I still think it's useful to keep them as a separate species, even if we remember that that doesn't necessarily preclude interbreeding.

The percentage of Neandertal genes ranges from a low of 2% to a high of 9%, depending on who you read. The problem here is that, while we currently only have the small percentages, what can be said of the early modern Europeans, or of the people in Europe even as late as the Neolithic? It is almost certain that they would have had much higher percentages.

Further, do these genes explain the traits that Dave Frayer has been seeing for years in the earliest modern humans, such as the extended hemi-buns of the central European sample from Předmosti or archaic characteristics of the Mladeč crania?

The talk is quite long but worth every minute to get the full understanding of how vexing the search for the origins of modern humans has been. As Glenn Reynolds would say: Read the Whole Thing.

¹Stringer, C. B., & Andrews, P. (1988). Genetic and Fossil Evidence for the Origin of Modern Humans. Science, 239(4845), 1263-1268.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1700885

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Missouri House Bill No. 1227: The Invisible Hand of The Discovery Institute

2012-01-21T11:52:00.002-05:00

This is quite something to behold. This bill, which is authored by Rick Brattin, a Republican representative mandates the equal teaching of intelligent design in classrooms in Missouri. Let's see what it says.

First, it starts out with some definitions. Among them are “Biological Evolution” and “Biological Intelligent Design.” The definition of biological evolution moves along just fine until the end when we find this:

Theory philosophically demands only naturalistic causes and denies the operation of any intelligence, supernatural event, God or theistic figure in the initial or subsequent development of life;

No, it doesn't. The theory has absolutely nothing to say about the existence or non-existence of God. It simply provides a mechanism for understanding evolution that is observable in the natural world. All Charles Darwin did was remove the necessity of explaining evolution using supernatural means. That is a very different thing. Darwin's own struggles with belief in God had little to do with his understanding of the natural world. Onward. Here is part of the definition of Biological Intelligent Design:

"Biological intelligent design", a hypothesis that the complex form and function observed in biological structures are the result of intelligence and, by inference, that the origin of biological life and the diversity of all original species on earth are the result of intelligence. Since the inception of each original species, genetic material has been lost, inherited, exchanged, mutated, and recombined to result in limited variation. Naturalistic mechanisms do not provide a means for making life from simple molecules or making sufficient new genetic material to cause ascent from microscopic organisms to large life forms.

I can't think of a single biologist who would agree with this statement. It is Discovery Institute 101 and reflects the whole “No Free Lunch” paradigm of William Dembski that has been refuted time and time again. Evolution produces enormous amounts of variation that is acted on by selection to produce a wide range of species. This process ought to be patently obvious even from our own genetic mechanisms such as crossing over of homologous chromosomes and independent assortment. A bit down, we encounter this:

The origin of life on earth is inferred to be the result of intelligence directed design and construction. There are no plausible mechanisms or present-day experiments to prove the naturalistic origin of the first independent living organism;

(b) All original species on earth are inferred to be the result of intelligence directed design and construction. There are no significant mechanisms or present-day experiments to prove the naturalistic development of earth's species from microscopic organisms;

(c) Complex forms in proteins, enzymes, DNA, and other biological structures demonstrated by their constituent molecules in regard to size, shape, quantity, orientation, sequence, chirality, and integration imply intelligent design was necessary for the first life on earth. Intelligence is capable of designing complex form;

(d) Complex functions demonstrated by growth, reproduction, repair, food metabolization, waste disposal, stimuli response, and autonomous mobility in microscopic organisms imply intelligent design was necessary for the first life on earth. Intelligence is capable of designing complex function;

(e) Within the history of human experience, all exhibits of recurring discrete symbols from a set of symbols arranged in a specific sequence which store information and can be read by human intelligence, is itself the result of intelligence. DNA contains stored information for the assembling of proteins and enzymes which can be read by humans and is the result of intelligence. The recurring discrete symbols sequenced within DNA which store information are the molecules adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine;

(f) Intelligence-directed design and construction of all original species at inception without an accompanying genetic burden is inferred rather than random mutational genetic change as a constructive mechanism. Random mutational genetic change results in an increasing genetic burden and species degradation rather than species ascent;

(g) Intelligence-directed action is necessary to exceed the limits of natural species change, which is a combination of autogenous species change and environmental effected species change. Multi-generation breeding experiments illustrate the limits of natural species change and its inadequacy for developing required genetic information found in dissimilar species;

In all of these statements, evolution is said to only bring about decay and disorder because everything is random and an increase in randomness only leads to chaos. All of these assertions about evolution reflect William Dembski's stubborn lack of understanding of how selection works. If evolution were to proceed in a completely random fashion like he thinks it does, then this statement would carry some weight but it does not behave that way.

This could all be picked apart but overall, it is clear that it is written by someone with no understanding of science. What this all amounts to is argument from negative evidence. It is inferred that there is no evidence that any of this occurred naturally, therefore it must have been done by a creator. In other words, your theory is wrong, therefore mine must be right.

The other problem that this section exhibits is that there is a subtle redefinition of science. In three instances in the above paragraph, the word “inferred” is used, as if that were enough to promote a scientific model. There is no statement that any of the above inferences can be scientifically supported. That is not what is important here. What is important is showing that evolution is a godless process and must be disposed of.

The bill continues:

(g) Intelligence-directed action is necessary to exceed the limits of natural species change, which is a combination of autogenous species change and environmental effected species change. Multi-generation breeding experiments illustrate the limits of natural species change and its inadequacy for developing required genetic information found in dissimilar species;

(h) The irreducible complexity of certain biological systems implies a completed design and construction at inception rather than step-by-step development, as indicated by the structures observed for sight, hearing, smell, balance, blood coagulation, digestion, and hormone control;

(i) The lack of significant transitional forms between diverse species existing today and in the fossil record implies all original species were completed at inception rather than by a step-by-step development from other species. A lack of transitional forms is illustrated by the appearance of large complex life forms in the Cambrian fossil record without any significant previous fossils;

The irreducible complexity argument is, of course, Behe's, but here the bill extends it to systems that have been shown to have intermediate stages, such as coagulation, sight, and hearing. The only thing missing from this laundry list is the chloroquine resistance argument.

Then the old stand-by comes out—that there are no transitional fossils. As I have mentioned before, this has been refuted so many times that it is now reasonable to call it a lie by those promoting it. There are so many examples of transitional fossils that it is difficult to keep track of them. Here is a nifty video on transitional fossils which should put any doubt to rest. Alternatively, you could look up Don Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters.

There is a section toward the end in which the concepts of scientific “laws” are delineated. Here is what Mr. Brattin thinks a theory is:

If scientific theory is taught, the theory shall be identified as theory when taught orally or in writing. Empirical data and conjecture may be presented to support taught theory where considered instructive. As used in this subsection, the term "theory" shall mean theory or hypothesis;

This definition is laughable in the extreme. The fact that he doesn't seem to know basic science is one thing. That he did not even go to the dictionary to find out what he is writing about is inexcusable. Here is the dictionary definition of hypothesis:

A supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.

Here is the dictionary definition of theory:

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.

This is a far cry from what Mr. Brattin thinks a theory is and his definition would change the understanding of how students understand the scientific method and make it more in line with common public misconception.

Toward the end, he puts in the best land mine, though:

A temporary committee shall be established and serve without compensation to develop supplemental textbook material for interim use by public schools for the teaching of biological intelligent design within two years after this section becomes law. The committee shall consist of nine individuals who are knowledgeable of science and intelligent design and reside in Missouri. Each member of the state board of education and the commissioner of education shall appoint one person to the committee. The supplemental material shall be based on subdivision (3) of subsection 2 of this section and its use by schools shall be optional. Interim supplemental material shall be accessible for copying on the department of elementary and secondary education internet website without cost or restriction.

Would this committee be composed of people as scientifically literate as those in the Texas School Board of Education, headed by Don McLeroy, who famously stated, “Someone has to stand up to experts!” before he was summarily shown the door? Would the supplemental material be young-earth creationism-based like that proposed for use in the Livingston Parrish public schools, down in Louisiana? Funny, every place where you have an “academic freedom” bill, the YEC supporters seem to pop up.

This is a bad bill from the get-go, written by a man who has little understanding or regard for the scientific process. He simply doesn't like evolution. That he has no idea what it is, is irrelevant.

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More Information on the Extinction of Neandertals

2012-01-20T21:26:00.001-05:00

Science Daily has a report on some work that has been done at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado on the process of Neandertal extinction, which is still a tad more than a minor mystery. The author writes:

The paper “Modeling Human Ecodynamics and Biocultural Interactions in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia” is co-authored by Julien Riel-Salvatore, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver; John Martin “Marty” Anderies, an associate professor of computational social science at ASU in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the School of Sustainability; and Gabriel Popescu, an anthropology doctoral student in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU.

“It’s been long believed that Neanderthals were outcompeted by fitter modern humans and they could not adapt,” said Riel-Salvatore. “We are changing the main narrative. Neanderthals were just as adaptable and in many ways, simply victims of their own success.”

The interdisciplinary team of researchers used archeological data to track behavioral changes in Western Eurasia over a period of 100,000 years and showed that human mobility increased over time, probably in response to environmental change. According to Barton, the last Ice Age saw hunter-gathers, including both Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans, range more widely across Eurasia searching for food during a major shift in the Earth’s climate.

In this scenario, modern humans did not out-compete their brethren or wipe them out by means of war, but simply that they intermixed with them and, as the climate changed and the selection pressures of maintaining the bulky Neandertal form changed, two things happened: negative selection was placed on the Neandertal genome and the influx of the modern human genome swamped that of the Neandertals. To be sure, there were likely refugia and it is possible that Zafarraya (which has a full suite of Neandertal characteristics at 26 Ky BP) represents this, but it is an explanation which has a good deal going for it.

As Dave Frayer put it, you can find individual Neandertal traits in early modern humans but no one person has the whole suite of them.

The paper can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10745-011-9433-8

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Early Evolutionary Step Replicated

2012-01-19T21:24:00.003-05:00

This from Science Daily: a story where an early evolutionary step in which single-celled organisms began to band together to form mats and communities is replicated. The author writes:

It all started about two years ago with a casual comment over coffee that bridging the famous multi-cellularity gap would be "just about the coolest thing we could do," recall postdoctoral researcher Will Ratcliff and associate professor Michael Travisano, both from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.

So they decided to give it a try. Then came the big surprise. It wasn't actually that difficult. Using yeast cells, culture media and a centrifuge, it only took them one experiment conducted over about 60 days, says Travisano, who is senior author on the PNAS paper.

"I don't think anyone had ever tried it before," says lead author Ratcliff. "There aren't many scientists doing experimental evolution, and they're trying to answer questions about evolution, not recreate it."

Although this doesn't answer all of the questions about how early life evolved, it answers some important ones.

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Explanation on Yesterday's Post about AiG

2012-01-19T12:24:00.003-05:00

The only reason that I gave Answers in Genesis a grade of “D” and not “F” is that there is some non-origins related scriptural guidance on the site. One has to be careful, though because even that will sometimes have land mines in it.

Yes, But What About the Content?

2012-01-18T23:27:00.001-05:00

Now we find that the AiG web site has been given the award of “Best Ministry Website” by the National Religious Broadcasters. The Community Press of Kentucky reports:

“With a clean, streamlined look, Answers in Genesis’ website presents all their resources in an easy to navigate format,” Frank Wright, National Religious Broadcasters President and CEO, said in a statement. “Anyone with questions pertaining to the Bible’s authority and relevance to life in today's world would be well served at their site.”

Ken Ham, co-founder and CEO of AiG praised the website staff for its efforts.

“We have a hard-working, creative team that refreshes our website every 24 hours with excellent content,” Ham said. “They are committed to proclaiming the authority of the Bible from the very first verse.”

It is unfortunate that the National Religious Broadcasters don't examine content in giving out this award (or maybe they do, which would be worse) because that grade would be a D. So much misinformation in such a streamlined site. Aren't we blessed.

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Is Noah's Ark Sinking?

2012-01-18T23:02:00.001-05:00

I missed this story when it came out in late December. It seems that the funding for the “Ark-n-Park” has run aground. Simon Brown of Americans United writes:

According to multiple reports in LEO Weekly (Louisville), AiG said in January that ground would be broken on the project in the spring of 2011. Then in May, AiG said groundbreaking would be over the summer. In June, AiG said construction would begin in August. By early August AiG still had not broken ground but promised that it would happen “in the next few months.” Then in late August, AiG bumped the timetable way back, saying groundbreaking would begin in the spring of 2012. In the meantime, AiG continues to take donations even though it is well short of the total it needs to build the “Ark Park.” According to another article in LEO Weekly, the project has received just $4.3 million of the $24.5 million sought. Donations have totaled a mere $1.3 million in the last seven months.

I can muster little if any support for this project as I think it promotes a bankrupt scriptural model. There just is not any evidence whatever that there was a world-wide flood and to tell people otherwise when there is little in the Bible to warrant only that explanation is misguided at best. I am guessing that, given the power behind this troubled venture, it will eventually get built. Oh well...one can only hope not.

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Rediscovery of a Lifetime

2012-01-17T21:23:00.001-05:00

According to a story in Planet Earth Online, a large cache of fossils has been rediscovered at the British Geological Survey, some of which produced quite a surprise. Adele Rackley writes:

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London was in the BGS archive looking for carboniferous fossil-wood specimens when he made the discovery.

"I spotted some drawers marked "unregistered fossil plants", he recalls. "I can't resist a mystery, so I pulled one open. What I found inside made my jaw drop!"Inside were hundreds of fossil plants, polished into thin translucent sheets known as 'thin sections' and captured in glass slides so they could be studied under a microscope.

Falcon-Lang's jaw dropped even further when he began to take out the slides. One of the first he looked at was labelled 'C. Darwin Esq.'

These were, in fact, some of the fossils that Charles Darwin had brought back from the trip aboard the Beagle. They had been given for safe keeping to Joseph Hooker and, somehow, just slipped through the cracks. It does give one a picture of the enormity of how much was being discovered even at that time. There is, in fact, a dirty secret in that most museums display only a fraction of what they actually have in their vaults, much of which is uncatalogued. Remember that the next time that someone tells you that the fossil record has gaps in it.

Geologically Recent Ape in Europe

2012-01-14T13:50:00.003-05:00

Deutsche Welle world has an interesting story about dental remains that have been discovered in Europe that put Miocene apes in the region as recently as 7 million years ago. According to the story:

"The latest data have shown that contrary to the hominids in Western and Central Europe (with the exception of the insular Oreopithecus), hominids from the Eastern Mediterranean may have lived up to 8 to 7.5 [million years ago], preadapted to the more open biotopes of the Balkan-Iranian zoographic province," the team wrote.

What is important to note about this story (and it threw me for a minute) is that the author is using the newer phylogenetic systematics-driven definition of “hominid.” In this scheme, “hominids” are now at the family level and include us and all of the great apes and “hominins” (us and our ancestors) are at the sub-family level.

A problem, voiced by one of the excavators, is, of course, that it is just one tooth, so we cannot say too much about it. Still, it is interesting if it bears up.

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Jay Mathews on Rick Santorum, Intelligent Design and Education

2012-01-13T21:51:00.001-05:00

Jay Mathews has a column for the Washington Post on Rick Santorum and the promotion of Intelligent Design. It is peculiar, to say the least. Mathews writes:

Advocates of intelligent design at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute have influenced Santorum. They accept many Darwinist concepts, such as the notion that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. They see a weakness in Darwinian theory because of the lack of much evidence of natural precursors to the animal body types that emerged in the Cambrian period 500 million years ago. How did we get from random chemicals to creatures with eyes and spines? They say that gap in knowledge leaves open the possibility of intervention by an outside force.

But is this really from whence his influence came? Santorum is, in fact, a very conservative man who is adamantly against the teaching of evolution. He has stated:

“I believe in Genesis 1:1 -- God created the heavens and the earth. I don't know exactly how God did it or exactly how long it took him, but I do know that He did it. If Gov. Huntsman wants to believe that he is the descendant of a monkey, then he has the right to believe that -- but I disagree with him on this and the many other liberal beliefs he shares with Democrats.”

This does not track with influence from the DI. Santorum may have gotten his “academic freedom” ideas from them, but it is not clear he got much else. What it tracks with is influence from one of the young-earth organizations such as the ICR or AiG.

That is what has people running scared. As far as they are concerned (and I think they are right), he doesn't really want equal footing for evolution and ID. He very plainly derides evolutionary theory and he wants evolution education gone. He just can't come right out and say it.

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Todd Wood on William Jennings Bryan

2012-01-11T22:49:00.001-05:00

Todd Wood, who teaches at Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan has written a glowing tribute to the late orator. He writes:

As an outspoken critic of evolution (which he called a “guess with nothing in the universe to support it”), the college’s namesake isn’t known for his love of science. In his own day, critics accused Bryan of spreading “appalling obscurantism” and “peculiar imbecilities.” Bryan—and creationists like me—are commonly believed to be antiscience. After all, how could you possibly doubt something so well established as evolution? You might as well believe the earth is flat, or so the common wisdom would have you believe.

But is this really so? Ron Numbers, in his article on the creationists in Science, writes:

Though one could scarcely have guessed it from his public pronouncements, Bryan was far from being a strict creationist. In fact, his personal beliefs regarding evolution diverged considerably from those of his more conservative supporters. Shortly before the trial he had confided to Kelly that he, too, had no objection to “evolution before man but for the fact that a concession as to the truth of evolution up to man furnishes our opponents with an argument which they are quick to use, namely, if evolution accounts for all the species up to man, does it not raise a presumption in behalf of evolution to include man?”

This puts him more in the camp of C.S. Lewis, who was accepting of evolution as a scientific discipline but not of “evolutionism” (what we would refer to as philosophical naturalism). This does not paint a picture of an anti-evolutionist at all but one concerned about the effects of evolution in society.

What is also side-stepped in this article is the fact that Bryan was not a young-earth creationist at all but rather accepted that the earth might be millions of years old. This also puts him at odds with modern creationists and, as Numbers writes, more in tune with other conservative theologians of his time. In writing about William Jennings Bryan's anti-evolutionism, these things should have been addressed.

New Hampshire Joins the Anti-Evolution Fight

2012-01-04T21:49:00.002-05:00

Legislators in New Hampshire remind us once again that politicians should not be involved in science education, since they evidently know so little about it. Two bills have been introduced, according to Ben Wolfgang of the Washington Times. He writes:

Legislators in New Hampshire have introduced a pair of anti-evolution bills, one of which calls for intelligent design to be taught as a hypothesis for how life began. The measure’s co-author, state Rep. Gary Hopper, told the Concord Monitor newspaper last week that he wants “to introduce children to the idea they have a purpose for being here.”

“I want the problems with current theories to be presented so that kids understand that science doesn’t really have all the answers. They are just guessing,” Mr. Hopper said.

You've got to be kidding me! How can you get into a position of authority such as a state representative and be that stupid??? This man has no business serving in any public capacity that deals with education whatsoever. That statement alone should produce calls for his resignation. It just gets better:

A companion bill, introduced by Rep. Jerry Bergevin, would require that evolution be taught as a theory, and that students be presented with the “godless” worldview that he believes accompanies the idea.

In one swell foop, our good representative reveals that he has no idea what a theory is or that evolutionary theory is perfectly compatible with belief in God. Did these people take ANY science courses at all?? New Hampshire deserves better, smarter politicians.

Ted Davis on Evangelicals and Fundamentalists

2012-01-03T10:54:00.002-05:00

Ted Davis, Vice-President of the ASA contacted me today and had some kind words to say about my blog. He also reminded me of a great article he wrote in 2008 about how evangelicals deal with science. A high point:

Evangelicals and fundamentalists share many core beliefs, but differ from one another mainly in attitude, especially their overall attitude toward modernity, including science. George Marsden, the leading historian of fundamentalism, defines it as “militant anti-modernism,” and both parts of that definition are crucial. Where fundamentalists have historically emphasized separation from the world and its “worldliness,” evangelicals have typically been much more willing to engage the world on its own terms, and thus their understanding of the world is negotiated to a much greater extent than that of fundamentalists

He is quite correct and I am often guilty of lumping them into the same group: science skeptics. it nonetheless continually puzzles me when many evangelicals that I know will have absolutely no trouble accepting the findings of modern chemistry, physics, cell theory, germ theory and other scientific perspectives and yet reject those of others, almost arbitrarily. He makes mention of this as being the difference between the so-called historical sciences and the "current" sciences. The problem is that the same techniques apply, something that most evangelicals don't seem to understand. Read the whole thing.

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Science Timeline in Nature

2011-12-31T15:46:00.000-05:00

Nature News has an interactive timeline of all of the major science stories of the year here. It is a good recap.

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Gee, Who Knew?

2011-12-31T11:23:00.005-05:00

Every so often, Science Daily comes out with a story that, perhaps needs to be restated but is amusing nevertheless. They write:

Climate changes profoundly influenced the rise and fall of six distinct, successive waves of mammal species diversity in North America over the last 65 million years, shows a novel statistical analysis led by Brown University evolutionary biologists. Warming and cooling periods, in two cases confounded by species migrations, marked the transition from one dominant grouping to the next.

I am quite sure that there is more to the Brown study than meets the eye since this information simply reflects what we already knew about how natural selection works in the wild. The story does, in fact, provide detailed information about mammal extinctions and radiations. It is the way in which Science Daily words the headline that is amusing.

This “lack of randomness” was the crux of a piece that I wrote for CFSI a bit back. If anti-evolutionists or ID supporters are willing to argue that evolution is a “godless, random process” then they have to be willing to argue that climate change on the planet is also a random, godless process, since that is what drives biotic change. I haven't heard any of them say that yet.

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Bad Science Stories of the Year

2011-12-29T09:12:00.005-05:00

Now that I have a working draft of my next BioLogos post done, I can, in good conscience, blog again. Science Daily has a good story on the bad science stories of the year and in there is one of my favorite scientists, Michele Bachmann, who manages to completely mangle the concept and definition of science when she can. Kate Kelland writes:

After Bachmann used an appearance on a television show to tell a story of a woman from Tampa, Florida, who said her daughter had become "mentally retarded" after getting an HPV vaccine designed to protect against cervical cancer, doctors said they feared the damage done may take many years to reverse.

"It's tempting to dismiss celebrity comments on science and health, but their views travel far and wide and, once uttered, a celebrity cancer prevention idea or environmental claim is hard to reverse," said SAS's managing director Tracey Brown.

"At a time when celebrities dominate the public realm, the pressure for sound science and evidence must keep pace."

Wow, did I really just read that? Bachmann sometimes seems like a one-woman war against sound science, one battle at a time.

Please don't vote for this woman.

This article reflects the state of scientific education. I don't think people should be able to exit high school without being able to pass a test on basic science education. That ought to be square one.

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

2011-12-24T23:35:00.003-05:00

I pray that everyone will have a safe, blessed and joyous Christmas and that the new year will be rich and rewarding.

Love, in Christ,

Jim

On the Other Hand...

2011-12-22T20:56:00.002-05:00

...it looks like they did not have as good a sense of smell. Work by Katerina Harvati suggests that Neandertals had a reduced sense of smell compared to modern humans. Philly.com/Health reports:

"The sense of smell is directly linked to memories to an extent that no other sense is. This explains why smells immediately incite strong emotions concerning past events and also strong feelings about people," Katerina Harvati, of the University of Tubingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoecology in Germany, said in a university news release.

The better sense of smell in H. sapiens may be related to the evolution of social functions such as recognition of related people, enhanced family relations, group cohesion and social learning, Harvati and colleagues suggested.

"Although traditionally olfaction in primates and humans has been considered a less important sense, our study reevaluates its potential significance for human evolution, and particularly for the social evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens," they concluded.

We also know that Neandertals had longer nasal passages and larger noses—in part to help the air, which was cold, reach body temperature when it reached the nasal membranes.To help this , the infraorbital plates swung out from the middle of the face. Whether this is related to the study by Harvati is not clear.

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iTunes Trailer for the Hobbit

2011-12-22T09:09:00.006-05:00

iTunes has a 1080p version of “The Hobbit” trailer here. It looks like, rather than being “The Hobbit”, it is actually “2941, Third Age,” since it seems to encompass quite a few of the events that led up to “The Lord of the Rings.” In this sense, it really may be a prequel.

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New CFSI Post

2011-12-22T08:56:00.004-05:00

My newest post for CFSI is up. It is loosely based on why a word-for-word interpretation of the scriptures is, very often, a bad thing.

The CFSI site will continue to operate, just with limited funding so I will continue to write for them, but perhaps more erratically. Please keep coming by the site to see what is there.

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Neandertals Lived in Houses

2011-12-21T21:43:00.000-05:00

Yahoo News Canada is reporting on research in Moldova that reveals what we already know was going on in the Russian steppes—that Neandertals were living in house-like structures. They write:

Researchers from the Museum National d'Histories Naturelle in Paris said it suggests the early human ancestors settled in areas where they built structures to live for extended periods of time.

The circular house was made up of 116 large bones, including mammoth skulls, jaws, 14 tusks and leg bones.

And inside at least 25 hearths filled with ash were also found, suggesting it had been used for some time, the Mail said.

They were every bit as intelligent as we are, just very environmentally-challenged. It is nice to find more evidence of this.

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A Trailer For the Hobbit

2011-12-21T21:37:00.001-05:00

Yay!

Christianity in Evolution

2011-12-19T19:37:00.001-05:00

The Independent has an article on a new book out by Jack Mahoney, called Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration, in which the Jesuit priest addresses the concept of evolution and how it can be incorporated into the theology of Christ. Peter Stanford writes:

Mainstream Christianity long ago dropped overt hostility to Darwin, and even manages to speak of him fondly on occasion, but it has held back from the next logical step, bringing theology and evolution into meaningful dialogue.

Oh? That is not my understanding of the modern mainstream evangelical's take on evolution. Ken Ham and John Morris oversee legions of followers who are told to have nothing whatever to do with Mr. Darwin and anything he stands for. Onward:

This time round, Christianity in Evolution risks causing similar ripples when it argues that embedding evolution in theology would necessitate a wholesale reappraisal of such time-honoured Christian concepts as Original Sin, the Incarnation and the Fall. So Mahoney presents the life of Jesus, the divine made human, not so much in terms of a sacrifice made to atone for our sins, as countless generations of Christians have been told, but as part of an evolutionary cycle. "God [in the person of Jesus] became a member of the human species in order to provide the human race with a human expression in Christ...of the divine altruism that would counter any innate evolutionary tendency to aggressive self- or tribal interest."

This is not so different from what George Murphy has written (if I have interpreted him correctly) and I have a sneaking suspicion that your average Christian will view this perspective rather dimly, as they did his. The concept of original sin is very well-grounded in modern Christianity, and, recent discussions of the genetics of modern humans notwithstanding, is viewed in more of a spiritual, emotional way than a scientific one. I will have to put this on my to-read list.

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Christopher Hitchens Has Died

2011-12-16T08:51:00.002-05:00

From the obituary in Reuters:

As a journalist, war correspondent and literary critic, Hitchens carved out a reputation for barbed repartee, scathing critiques of public figures and a fierce intelligence.

In his 2007 book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," Hitchens took on major religions with his trenchant atheism. He argued that religion was the source of all tyranny and that many of the world's evils have been done in the name of religion.

Hitchens often took on creationism, debating William Dembski, and David Berlinski along the way. While I did not share his theological leanings , he was an extraordinarily good writer and, even in his criticisms of religion, often had at least one blow that hit the target. He will be missed.

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Transgenerationally Acquired Resistance?

2011-12-15T21:26:00.001-05:00

A new article by Rechavi et al, in the journal Cell (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2011.10.042) is reporting on research involving the introduction of a flockhouse virus into a nematode, which then triggered an immune response to suppress the virus. This response, apparently was then transmitted to its offspring in a non-Mendelian fashion. As the authors put it:

We have described here a series of genetic experiments that provide support for the existence of non-Mendelian, multigenerational inheritance of extrachromosomal information. This information is transmitted in the form of small RNAs, viRNAs, which are induced by an episode of viral replication and which are propagated through the germline in a non-template-dependent manner. Our results therefore support the Lamarckian concept of the inheritance of an acquired trait.

This will, no doubt, raise eyebrows and spawn a number of independent tests to confirm the results. Cornelius Hunter hopped on the bandwagon, writing:

This is of course reminiscent of the pre Darwin theory proposed by Jean Baptiste Larmarck that evolution occurs via traits developing not via random change but in response to need, and then the passing of these traits to later generations. Evolutionists harshly criticized, ridiculed and blackballed Larmarckism in the last century but now even they are finding it difficult to deny the accumulation of evidence.

Three things Hunter overlooks here is that Lamarck came up with his theory of acquired inheritance in absence of any other model out there to explain biological descent with modification, he was looking at large order traits such as appendage length, hair color and whatnot and that, despite some growing evidence for epigenetic evolution, there is still a vast amount of evidence for evolution based on the well-heeled processes of mutation, selection, drift and flow. It should, nonetheless, be interesting to see what comes of this.

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The Meaning of “Biblical Literalism”

2011-12-09T11:42:00.004-05:00

Todd Wood points us to an article by Joshua Moritz on The Search For Adam Revisited: Evolution, Biblical Literalism, and the Question of Human Uniqueness that shows up in the journal Theology and Science. It appears to be open-access and I had no trouble securing a copy. Although the focus is on the idea of how to interpret the creation narratives in a literal, yet textually faithful fashion, Moritz, in quite concise language, points out the glaring origin of modern young-earth creationism and how different it was from the understanding of biblical literalism of the day:

Even more recently, such as at the time of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial (1925), the actual face of biblical literalism was quite different than one might expect—especially if one has in mind young earth creationism with its insistence upon a 10,000 year old recently-created earth and its focus on ‘‘flood geology’’. Around the time of the Scopes trial in the early twentieth century, there is no record of any biblical literalists within normative Christianity who interpreted the Bible as claiming a recent creation in six 24-hour days or that Noah’s flood had anything to do with how one should interpret the record of global stratigraphy. Indeed, literalists at that time saw Noah’s flood as a local phenomenon and ‘‘even the most literalistic Bible believers accepted the antiquity of life on Earth as revealed in the paleontological record.’’ The one exception to this general rule was the Seventh Day Adventists—a sect of Millerites who, after 1844 (and disillusioned by Christ’s failure to return), regrouped under the leadership and supernatural visions of the teenage prophetess Ellen G. White—a charismatic young woman ‘‘whose pronouncements Adventists placed on par with the Bible’’. White and her Seventh Day Adventist followers harbored no doubts about the correct reading of the early chapters of Genesis because in a trancelike vision White was ‘‘carried back to the creation’’ by God himself, ‘‘and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six [24 hour] days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week.’’ White likewise saw that during Noah’s flood, God created all the various geological layers of sediment and fossils by burying the organic debris and causing ‘‘a powerful wind to pass over the Earth...in some instances carrying away the tops of mountains like mighty avalanches...burying the dead bodies with trees, stones, and earth.’’ Thus, from the divine dreams of Ellen White young earth creationism was born and, ironically, it was conceived in stark opposition to the reigning biblical literalism of the day.

Most young earth creationists that I know are, I believe, unaware of this information. How, or if it would change their Christian walk is unclear. It is instructive to read Ron Numbers' The Creationists to see how dominant the Adventists were in the formation of modern-day young earth creationism.

The article is a good expose on how the scriptures would read if we really did read them literally, which is quite differently than our modern understanding of them is. He reiterates the position that is held by Paul Marston and others, that there is absolutely nothing in the passages that indicates that Adam and Eve are the only people around during the account in Genesis.

Although the paper is largely devoid of scientific observations, he ends by reminding those of us that tend to think too highly of the scientific endeavor that it is not the be all and end all that we think that it is:

While the doctrine of creation demands that Christians take science seriously, a large part of taking science seriously is to understand that science, as such, is not (and never has been) in the business of making unalterable pronouncements about the nature of reality. Because there is so much terrain in both science and theology that remains unexplored we must press onward in faith, sobered by a good dose of epistemic humility, and taking care in the meantime to not greatly exaggerate the reports of Adam’s death.

That said, if all the evidence points in one direction, how long do we ignore it?

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Archaeological Evidence: Neandertals and Modern Humans Interacted and Interbred

2011-12-06T21:25:00.001-05:00

The Newsroom at the University of Colorado has released news of a study that links the archaeological evidence in Europe with Neandertal/early modern human interaction and, probably, interbreeding. They write:

Anthropologists using computer modeling to determine how early hominins adapted to climate change during the last Ice Age, have gained new insights into why Neanderthals disappeared as a distinct population some 30,000 years ago.
The scientists believe Neanderthals interbred with more numerous modern humans until they ceased to exist as their own population.

This is called "gene swamping" and is not uncommon. The authors further argue:

“Neanderthal genes make up between one and four percent of today’s human genome, especially in those of European descent. Their legacy lives on in our genome and possibly in our cultural knowledge.”

Modern humans begin to show up in Europe during the Early Würm/Late Würm glaciation, between 35 and 40 thousand years B.P. A good representation of these hominins are those from the cave of Mladeč, which, while being classified as modern humans, have characteristics reminiscent of Neandertals. Even the later hominins such as those from the central European site of Dolní Vĕstonice, show archaic characteristics such as expanded occipital buns (a bulge at the rear of the vault). This all makes sense within the context of hybridization between the two groups of people. Fred Smith was right.

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Sightly Off-Topic: Ken Ham Comes Through

2011-12-06T09:16:00.007-05:00

Recently, a rural pastor in Pike County, Kentucky, made national news when he forebade congregation members from engaging in interracial marriage if they wanted to take part in the church. Bill Estep of Kentucky.com has this to say:

In early November, [Pastor Melvin] Thompson proposed the church go on record saying that while all people were welcome to attend public worship services there, the church did not condone interracial marriage, according to a copy of the recommendation supplied by the Harvilles.
The proposal also said "parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services" or other church functions, with the exception of funerals.
The recommendation "is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve," the copy supplied to the Herald-Leader read.

Well, as they should have, the Christian community (not to mention the secular one) rose up in arms against this as being un-Christian in spirit and theology.

Not far away, this is what Ken Ham had to say:

From a biblical perspective, all humans are descendants of one man and one woman—Adam and Eve (1 Corinthians 15:45; Genesis 3:20). Thus, if the Bible’s history is accurate, biologically, only one race of human beings exists.

Modern observational science confirms that this is the case. When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2000, scientists announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome and “the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race—the human race.

He went on:

Certainly a couple from different cultural groups needs godly counsel, as do all couples, to help ensure they understand their roles in marriage and the differences they have that could potentially cause problems. However, if a man and woman trust Christ as their Savior and believe it would please Him for them to marry, nothing in Scripture disallows this, from either a biological or a spiritual perspective.

Christians must think about marriage as God thinks about each one of us. When the prophet Samuel went to anoint the next king of Israel, he thought the oldest of Jesse’s sons was the obvious choice due to his outward appearance. However, we read in 1 Samuel 16:7, “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart’” (NKJV).

It is encouraging to see modern Christian leaders stepping up and condemning this nonsense. That is occurs at all, even in rural Kentucky is very disheartening.

P.S. It should be pointed out that the church reversed its ruling. Still, that it happened at all is quite something.

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Checking in on BIO-Complexity

2011-12-05T19:40:00.004-05:00

So, it has been a year and a half since the Center for Science and Culture, the wing of the Discovery Institute, inaugurated BIO-Complexity, the new journal devoted to objectively examining the evidence for intelligent design. At the time, I wrote the following, concerning the viability of the journal:

The only other way that this would work is if competent scholars in biological complexity were to submit papers. Then the journal would probably get a wide variety of papers, some supportive of ID (maybe) and some not. Even if some of them were not supportive, though, the board would be foolish not to publish them. If it only accepted ID friendly papers which were then reviewed by the biological community as a whole and found wanting, it would be another nail in the coffin for the scientific argument for ID.

The Discovery Institute have set themselves up a huge task here and are finally putting their cards on the table. Lets see what kind of hand they have.

Now we know what kind of hand they have. It is not very good. Since its debut, eighteen months ago, the journal has produced...

five research articles.

That is one article every 3½ months. Even brand new journals in the sciences have at least five to seven articles per month. Further, the current year, which is now in its waning days, has seen only two articles. That is slightly better than one article every six months.

It gets worse. Three of the five articles are either single-authored or co-authored by Douglas Axe, who is the managing editor and only four authors represented are not on the editorial board.

This is inbreeding if I have ever seen it. This level of production is every bit what I feared: the lack of impartiality has given rise to a journal that is slanted in one direction: support of ID. In April of this year, Todd Wood wrote the following:

In the larger scheme of things, I am sensing a discouraging pattern to BIO-Complexity publications. As I quoted above, the journal is supposed to be about "testing the scientific merit of the claim that intelligent design (ID) is a credible explanation for life," which is a great goal. But this is the fifth paper published by BIO-Complexity, and it's the fifth paper that focuses on perceived inadequacies of evolution. So when are we going to test "the scientific merit of the claim that intelligent design (ID) is a credible explanation for life?"

The number of papers that do address the merits of the ID explanation for life simply aren't there. Why not? Surely in eighteen months, at least two or three papers discussing research in this area would have been submitted for publication. Where are these papers? Where is this research?

Is it possible that the intention was never to address this laudable goal? Was it always to write papers trying to poke holes in evolutionary theory? It certainly seems that way. The problem is, based on their output and the lack of diversity in authorship, they cannot even do much of that.

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Modern Humans Out of Africa Earlier Than Thought?

2011-12-02T21:16:00.002-05:00

The Australian is reporting on the find in Arabia of stone tools purported to be crafted to modern humans that date to around 100 000 years ago (date derived by thermoluminescence). They write:

Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist with Britain's Birmingham University and head of the Dhofar Archaeological Project, said: "After a decade of searching in southern Arabia for some clue that might help us understand early human expansion, at long last we've found the smoking gun of their exit from Africa."
The discovery also challenges current thinking about the route the migrants took, say Dr Rose and his colleagues, including geochronologist Bert Roberts of Wollongong University.

The article shows up in PLoS¹. This is intriguing and certainly adds one more piece of the puzzle but I am not sure why it so earth-shattering. We already know that we have hominins in the Levant that pass, in most ways, for modern humans and are dated to between 90 and 110 000 B.P. We also have the Herto remains at 140-160 000, which are also mostly modern. A glance at the map shows that the gap between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula is very narrow here and it would not have been a problem to navigate the waters at this point. This just represents another migration route of many. The authors of the paper call the assemblage that was discovered a Nubian variant of the “Middle Stone Age,” which tracks as a post-Acheulean industry and is present in various forms in Africa from about 300 000 years B.P. down to around 40 000 or so. Here is the map from the article:

As you can see, there is Nubian in both Arabia and in the Nile valley. Interestingly, when you get to the Levantine peninsula, you run into “modern” humans creating Levantine Mousterian, another Middle Palaeolithic industry, which means they had contact with the Neandertals who were escaping the cold to come south during the early Würm glaciation. It is during the Early Würm/Late Würm interglacial period that the early moderns get the bright idea to head north, out of the Levant.

¹Rose JI, Usik VI, Marks AE, Hilbert YH, Galletti CS, et al. (2011) The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia. PLoS ONE 6(11): e28239. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0028239

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Slightly Off-Topic: Why Science Works Even When People Behave Badly

2011-11-30T15:58:00.002-05:00

Ars Technica has a fascinating story about scientific misconduct involving a retrovirus and how the whole thing came apart like a cheap suit. A cautionary tale.

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Dear Svante, I am a Neandertal

2011-11-29T21:59:00.001-05:00

The Guardian's Notes and Theories has a column on the mail that Svante Pääbo received after delivering the revelation that Neandertals and Early modern humans interbred. They write:

In the months after the paper was published, Pääbo began to receive letters and emails from people who had read about the work. He decided to keep track of the correspondence, at least until September that year, to see if any trends appeared. He wasn't disappointed.

Some 45 men wrote in to declare themselves fully or partially Neanderthal and several asked if they should provide saliva samples for Pääbo to analyse. Over the same few months, only two women wrote in to declare themselves of Neanderthal stock.

I think that it was Dave Frayer who once said that, on an individual trait basis, you could see the remnants of Neandertals in the modern European populations but that if you took the whole suite of Neandertal traits, there wasn't a person alive who had them. I wonder what led the women to think they were Neandertals? “Evening vear. Svimvear. Very nice!”

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British Muslim Students and Evolution

2011-11-28T22:21:00.001-05:00

There is, apparently, a growing problem in Great Britain right now with Muslim medical students—they are skipping the lectures on Evolution. According to the Mail Online:

Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion.

Similar to the beliefs expressed by fundamentalist Christians, Muslim opponents to Darwinism maintain that Allah created the world, mankind and all known species in a single act.

This was foreseeable given the changes that England has gone through in the last two decades, leading one author to call London “Londonistan.” Young earth creationism has been growing in importance and influence in Islamic countries. Part of the problem is Adnan Oktar, nee Harun Yahya:

Sources within the group Muslims4UK partly blame the growing popularity of creationist beliefs within Islam on Turkish author Harun Yahya who, influenced by the success of Christian creationists in America, has written several books denouncing Darwinist theory.

Yahya associates Dawinism with Nazism and his books are and videos are available at many Islamic bookshops in the UK and regularly feature on Islamic television channels.

That his books have no evidence to support them and are very pompously written does not detract from their influence. I am curious to see how the British press view this, given their reluctance to draw any negative attention to anything Islamic. When Christians reject evolution, they are considered rightwing fundamentalist nuts.

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Lynn Margulis Has Died

2011-11-28T16:16:00.003-05:00

From the University of Massachusetts at Amherst:

Margulis was best known for her theory of symbiogenesis, which challenges central tenets of neo-Darwinism. She argued that inherited variation, significant in evolution, does not come mainly from random mutations. Rather, new tissues, organs, and even new species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers. The fusion of genomes in symbioses followed by natural selection, she suggests, leads to increasingly complex levels of individuality. Margulis was also acknowledged for her contribution to James E. Lovelock’s Gaia concept. Gaia theory posits that the Earth’s surface interactions among living beings sediment, air, and water have created a vast self-regulating system.

The notion of symbiogenesis has come under some guarded acceptance in recent years, her work with Lovelock, not so much. R.I.P.

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A Short History of Humans and Vitamin D

2011-11-22T21:07:00.001-05:00

The Philadelphia Enquirer has an article on the research done by Nina Jablinski on humans’ evolution of skin color as a response to the need for vitamin D. Most of this is not unknown, the higher in latitude a population is, the lighter the skin color to maximise the amount of Vitamin D that is absorbed from the sun. In a nut shell, this is why equatorial populations are dark-skinned as well. Response to the amount of Vitamin D that is needed for a given population is subject to very high degrees of selection. Faye Flam writes:

Originally, humans made more than enough in skin, Holick said. When some of our ancestors left Africa, they adjusted their skin tone to allow in more sunlight. Penn State's Jablonski found that around the world, the skin color of native people maps almost perfectly onto a map of UV radiation; the more UV, the darker the average skin.

In 2005, Penn State professor Mark Shriver and colleagues isolated a genetic mutation that contributed to Europeans' having white skin, a mutation that in zebra fish leads to absence of the characteristic stripes.

Shriver, a professor of anthropology and genetics, said the original human skin color was probably light, because other apes are light-skinned under their fur. Dark skin became advantageous in Africa when we lost our fur.

Genetic evidence suggests that light-skin-related mutations arose recently, less than 15,000 years ago, and spread fast through Europeans.

Jablonski said that when scientists scraped bits of DNA from Neanderthal skeletons, they found a mutation of another skin-color-related gene. Neanderthals lived in Europe and the Middle East long before our ancestors left Africa, and apparently they independently evolved light skin.

In the Arctic, the Inuit never developed light skin, which scientists at first considered a paradox until they discovered how much Vitamin D is in a traditional Inuit diet, which included oily fish and whale blubber.

That Neandertals underwent a slightly different mutation and selection to the need for Vitamin D suggests that there was at least some separation between them and the incoming modern humans. One wonders what gene was involved in the Denisova DNA.

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The Mind of Neandertals

2011-11-21T22:22:00.001-05:00

Nature has a review of a book called How To Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick Coolidge. Curiously, the authors spell “Neandertal” correctly but the Nature editors do not. They still spell it the old way, with the “h” in it. The Germans dropped that over a hundred years ago. Clive Gamble writes:

Wynn and Coolidge conclude that today, Neanderthals would be commercial fishermen or mechanics, based on their enormous strength and ability to learn the motor procedures needed. Their capacity for empathy might even have made them competent physicians, the authors say, although a lack of mathematical ability means that they would never have been able to graduate from medical school. Neanderthals would also make excellent army grunts, with their high levels of pain tolerance, and would be good tacticians in small combat units. They would never rewrite the tactical manual — although tearing it up, however thick, would not be a problem.

Without having read the book (and I plan to), it is difficult for me to accept that we could know these sorts of things based on the fossil record that we have. I am also skeptical of the limitations that are attributed to Neandertals. Once again, your life would be different if you lived in the U.S. when the tundra line extended into southern Ohio and there was no Canada. I would also like to know how they have figured out that Neandertals liked “slapstick humor.”

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Neandertals Found on the Greek Islands

2011-11-19T13:32:00.002-05:00

They are sunny, tranquil and surrounded by gorgeous blue-green ocean. They are the Greek isles and now, it seems, they were also home to a population of Neandertals. The Greek Reporter writes:

Meganisi – a small and beautiful strip of land four miles south-east of Lefkada- is part of the group of small islands called Prighiponisia, among which is the famous Skorpios owned by the Onassis family.

On the basis of elements brought to light during excavations, Meganisi’s first inhabitants – according to archaeologists – were Neanderthal men and women living in that part of the Ionian Sea 100,000 years ago in a period scholars call the Mid-Paleolithic Era. The archaeological discovered on the island of Meganisi provide evidence of the presence of human beings in the Mesolithic Period, which with small intervals cover many millennia to the late Roman period.

This is not much of a surprise. The Greek islands are not very far apart and we already know that archaic Homo sapiens were in Greece some 250-300 thousand years ago as represented by the Petralona skull (below) and some other finds.

If I had the chance to live on those islands, I would, too.

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Slightly Off-Topic: The Nature of Moths

2011-11-18T21:24:00.003-05:00

Harriet Walker writes about the nature of moths in this column and, while I am convinced that God does not hate us in the least bit, I am reminded that the world in which we live is not as tame as we would like to think. After all, moths will be moths.

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What Gigantopithecus Ate

2011-11-17T20:52:00.004-05:00

A story in PhysOrg reports on research done on the diet of Gigantopithecus blacki, the immense primate that lived during the late Miocene in southern China and Vietnam. They write:

Drs. ZHAO LingXia, ZHANG LiZhao and WU XinZhi, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Achttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifademy of Sciences, and ZHANG FuSong from Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, analyze enamel stable carbon isotope values of G. blacki and the associated mammalian megafauna from two sites in South China, and find that this giant ape and other large mammals solely fed on C3 biomass, and lived in forest habitats, as reported in the journal of Chinese Science Bulletin, 2011(56), No.33:3590-3595.

C3 biomass sources are more primitive than C4, which include the canes and more open-field grains. This is not a surprise, just confirmation of what we suspected.

This was a truly unusual and majestic ape, standing some eight to ten feet tall. There were two species, G. bilasporensis and G. blacki, the latter of which lasted until around 300 k years ago. It is this form that is likely the impetus behind the Sasquatch and abominable snowman stories. Here is an artist' sketch, based on accumulated jaws and teeth.

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New BioLogos Post is Up

2011-11-16T21:20:00.003-05:00

My new post on early Homo is up at BioLogos. As always, comments are welcome here and there.

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Peter Hess is “Clearing the Middle Path”

2011-11-16T17:45:00.001-05:00

Robert Luhn, the Director of Communications for the National Center for Science Education sent me a link to an American Scientific Affiliation profile of Peter Hess. Hess is the staff theologian for the NCSE. The profile is written by Emily Ruppel. She writes:

Two years ago, ASA member Peter Hess participated in a colloquium on Intelligent Design at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He argued that science can neither discover nor rule out the existence of God. A few days later, in the online discussion sparked by this event, a blogger labeled him the Anti-Christ.

Gotta love that Christian tolerance on full display.If he is the Anti-Christ, then there are a whole bunch of us running around. Onward.

“The problem with Biblical literalists is that they are ignorant of exegetical history,” says Peter, “and are generally unaware that an insistence on a woodenly literal understanding of scripture is a relatively recent invention imposed on the Church’s traditional four-fold interpretation. They’re as ignorant of theology as they are of the sciences they presume to critique…

“On the other hand, the issue with some scientists who are atheists is that they fail to see that they are actually making a theological claim by declaring that there is nothing to believe in. Scientists who feel they are qualified to comment authoritatively on religious faith because they have apprehended some of the truths of the natural world are putting on a very ill-fitting philosophical hat.”

The four-fold sense of scripture interpretation (if I understand it correctly) is that scripture should variously be interpreted in a literal sense, where actual events have been recorded, an allegorical sense, where seemingly actual events are not meant in a literal sense but in an allegorical one, a moral sense in that all scripture is good and useful for teaching a Godly way of approaching life, and an anagogical one, in which a truth or event signifies something greater or points us to Heaven. This is yet another area of my theological education that is severely wanting.

It is also hard not to read the second part of that quote and think of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and how badly it fared at the review table. Hess, indeed, wonders why Dawkins has been so ignorant of contemporary issues in Christianity. He is so for the same reason that Ken Ham is so abysmally ignorant of basic evolutionary biology and the fossil record. It is much easier to maintain a hostile position to the other side if you perceive them as promulgating lies and misinformation. That honest, thought-provoking scriptural interpretation or education about the natural history of the earth get lost in the process is simply collateral damage.

The entire article is very good and profiles someone who is honestly struggling to find a common ground where all can discuss the issues. This is, or should be, our fervent prayer.

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New Post Up at CFSI

2011-11-15T00:03:00.003-05:00

My new post is up at CFSI. It is called Can You Practice a Science You Don't Believe? and deals with the question of whether or not you can practice science with integrity and deal honestly with the evidence and yet not believe the results it provides. As always, comments are welcome.

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John Evans — “Science and Religion: A False Divide?”

2011-11-10T20:19:00.000-05:00

I missed this when it came out. John Evans of the L.A. Times (not normally a newspaper I pick up) wrote an interesting column about the controversy between science and religion and his contention that the whole thing is overhyped. He writes:

On most issues, there is actually very little conflict between religion and science. Religion makes no claims about the speed of hummingbird wings, and there are no university departments of anti-resurrection studies — scientists generally are unconcerned with the vast majority of religious claims and vice versa.
There are, of course, a few fact claims in which conservative Protestant theology and science differ, such as the origins of humans and the universe. Here we find that typical conservative Protestants are likely to believe the teaching of their religion on the issue and not the scientific claim.
We could complain that they are being inconsistent in believing the scientific method some of the time but not always. Yet social science research has long shown that people typically are not very consistent. The people who are more consistent are those who are punished for inconsistency: philosophers, media pundits, political activists and politicians.

I have often marveled at how much emphasis this topic has taken up in the media and religious world. As I pointed out in my post on the Miss America pageant, that the contestants were asked whether or not evolution should be taught in public schools had very little relevance to them. All it did was single out the religious conservatives and also point out that science education had all but failed them in this area. For your average person, the creation-evolution controversy has little traction and most view it as a curiosity of modern society. Consequently, when my church friends ask me about it, I always ask them why it is important to them to learn the science behind the old earth model since such knowledge will needlessly complicate their lives. That doesn't seem to stop them, though.

Evans has one other nugget:

The greatest conflict between fundamentalists, evangelicals and science is not over facts but over values. While scientists like to say that their work is value-free, that is not how the public views it, and conservative Protestants especially have homed in on the moral message of science.

This is a slow realization for most scientists. I tend to view evolution in much the way that I view nuclear energy: regardless of what values we attach to it, it exists—independent of those values. David Klinghoffer, over at the Discovery Institute, argues that “Darwinism” has ruined society and caused evils of all sorts, as if somehow if we brand it as evil, it will just go away.

It is also not just that the vast majority of scientists tend to view science amorally, they view attempts to infuse scientific discourse with morality with repugnance. It is the few here and there that seek to venture beyond the bounds of science to argue for or against the existence of God and even if they are highly regarded in their fields (for example Richard Dawkins), their efforts to do this are not.

The problem is these few are very highly visible and, unfortunately, set the tone for the discourse and the understanding of the scientific enterprise. After all, if Richard Dawkins is an eminent evolutionary biologist and he claims, vociferously, that God doesn't exist, why shouldn't evangelicals attach morality to his science?

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Jonathan Dudley Wonders “Why Evangelicals Believe Weird Things”

2011-11-09T21:08:00.002-05:00

Author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, Jonathan Dudley writes:

Lay evangelicals evaluate the arguments made by “experts” in a manner different from many non-evangelicals. The latter will often ask: How prestigious is her academic pedigree? Is she representing the consensus of similarly credentialed experts? Insofar as I can understand her arguments, do they convince me? Lay evangelicals ask different questions: How good of a Christian is this guy? (Or, in evangelical parlance, “How is his walk with the LORD?”) How closely do his arguments line up with my understanding of the Bible? Is this guy one of us?

Despite the “Blunt stick” approach of this statement, comments made here and in the BioLogos comments sections seem to bear this up to some extent. Ken Ham recently also broadcast this idea far and wide in his address on the “Unbiblical teachings of BioLogos.” It is Their science, not Biblical science. He outlines the problem that is growing in political and evangelical circles as the rift between fundamental evangelicalism and the academy increases. Read the whole thing.

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Denisova Update

2011-11-02T19:35:00.005-04:00

John Hawks does not think that the recent data from the paper by Skoglund and Jakobsson holds up under scrutiny. He cites striking discrepancies between the analysis presented by these two with a paper that came out by Reich et al. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.09.005) called “Denisova admixture and the first modern human dispersals into southeast Asia and oceania.” Their salient finding is that there were very few Denisovan markers in mainland Asian populations.

Hawks suggests that the reason the two papers differ so greatly is that in the paper by Skoglund and Jakobsson, the analysis is picking up only slight differences in gene frequencies between populations, and that, while there is hybridization and migration into the area by Denisovans, it is small in amount. He writes:

We aren't very far from a more definitive answer of this question, as the data continue to accumulate every day. What I find interesting is the way that models can generate these 1% differences in ancestry proportions, depending on sampling and the pattern of migration assumed to have happened in the past. Two estimates that differ by less than a percent are not really different. This paper provides the suggestion of a more widespread Denisovan legacy, and I accept that as a possibility.

It is clear that there was some interbreeding between these populations. How much remains to be seen.

Hat tip to Paul Pavao.
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One Big, Polytypic Family

2011-11-02T00:04:00.004-04:00

Science Daily has a story on research from Uppsala University that the Denisova genome is showing up in East Asia. They write:

"Our study covers a larger part of the world than earlier studies, and it is clear that it is not as simple as we previously thought. Hybridization took place at several points in evolution, and the genetic traces of this can be found in several places in the world. We'll probably be uncovering more events like these," says Mattias Jakobsson, who conducted the study together with Pontus Skoglund.

Given that we have evidence of Neandertal hybridization as well, it is appearing as if there was a good deal of gene swapping among many late Pleistocene populations. This is certainly what many researchers think that the fossil material reflects, especially that from South East Asia and China. My guess is that, as they uncover more events, the level of hybridization between Neandertals (and other archaic Homo sapiens populations) and moderns will be found to have been higher than thought.

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Albert Mohler on Parellel Cultures, Karl Giberson, Randall Stephens and Liberal Theology

2011-10-26T21:23:00.004-04:00

Albert Mohler has also weighed in on the “parallel cultures” idea that was floated by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens in their New York Times story. Initially, I did not address the Giberson/Stephens article in the NYT but will now do so. Mohler writes:

The New York Times recently found themselves taken to task by writers presenting themselves as fellow evangelicals. Their essay reveals the central question that evangelicals must now answer: Do we really believe that the Bible is the Word of God?

Actually, that is not what Giberson and Stephens are about in the least. Mohler takes a sort of ‘Ken Hammish’ approach here (and I don't mean this in a positive way) by suggesting broadly that the concern that Giberson and Stephens are voicing is not really why evangelicals are anti-science but rather that they have rejected belief in the Bible. Let's see what Giberson and Stephens actually write:

Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary.

This sounds perfectly reasonable. Why would Mohler paint it as a rejection of the Bible? Let's read on to find out. In the original New York Times article, Giberson and Stephens argue as their central point that modern evangelicals and GOP candidates are ‘anti-science’ but then make an odd mis-step. They profile some modern leaders of the modern evangelical movement, including Ken Ham (fish? barrel?), David Barton (who rather hilariously argued that the founding fathers of the country had already addressed and rejected the theory of evolution) and James Dobson, who, they argue, has outdated ideas about homosexuality and actually agrees with spanking children and...

...(!)

Come again? What has any of that to do with their central premise? From my point of view, not much. Further, it opens them up to Dr. Mohler, who blasts away with both barrels. He writes:

Appearing on the October 20, 2011 edition of National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation program, Giberson argued that homosexuality should not be much of a concern at all. He revealed even more of his own approach to the Bible by asserting that “there’s just a handful of proof text[s] scattered throughout the Bible about homosexuality,” adding: “Jesus said absolutely nothing about it.”
That hardly represents an honest or respectful approach to dealing with the Bible’s comprehensive and consistent revelation concerning human sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. Is Romans 1, for example, just a scattered proof text? Is not all of the Bible God’s Word? Well, Giberson has already made his view of the Bible clear — it is simply “trumped” by science when describing the natural world.

For your average evangelical, who is familiar with passages in the Old Testament:

Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable. (Leviticus 18: 22)

and in the New Testament:

We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. (1 Timothy: 1:10-11)

it is pretty hard to square that what Giberson is saying is scriptural in any sense.

Why is the passage on homosexuality a problem? It is a problem because if Mohler can show that Giberson and Stephens are not scripturally sound in this area, why should they be believed on the subject of science in general and evolution in specific? Is it not just another aspect of their secular viewpoint?

Whether or not there are arguments for interpreting the above verses in a different way than the way they come across is practically irrelevant here. Giberson and Stephens might just as well have donned bright red Star Trek ‘Enterprise Security’ shirts. It does not matter that Mohler knows little about evolutionary biology, the fossil record, or the geological record. That is no longer the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the “secular knowledge” that is being espoused by Giberson and Stephens, which is at odds with the vast majority of evangelicals. In one swift move, Mohler is able to link acceptance of evolution with liberal teaching on homosexuality. After reading Giberson's and Stephens' New York Times essay, why would your average evangelical even think about changing their minds about evolution?

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Todd Wood Responds on Excellence

2011-10-25T16:31:00.005-04:00

Todd Wood has a follow-up post on the whole parallel cultures idea, in which he argues that having parallel cultures is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just that we, as Christians, can do better. He writes:

Yes, there are people out there who will look down on you for your background and your faith, but there are also folks who will not. If you do good work and keep at it, eventually people will take notice. Why should you let the bigots hold you back? Be excellent! Don't settle for a life and career of mediocrity.

That's the point. Christians don't have to settle for second best or leftovers. You can be excellent! You don't have to keep churning out sub-par dreck and whining about how the world is discriminating against your Christian values. You can be excellent with what you have. You don't have to settle.

I wish more Christians in the science arena thought this way. Given Fuz Rana's recent embarrassing post (one below this one), I am not hopeful.

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Fuz Rana on Human Evolution

2011-10-23T18:20:00.004-04:00

Fuz Rana wants to know: “Will the Real Human Ancestor Please Stand Up.” He writes:

It is commonly reported that humans and chimps share 99 percent genetic similarity. For many people, this high degree of genetic similarity means humans must have evolved from an ape-like primate, sharing a common ancestor with chimpanzees. However, it should be noted that, when comparing the full genomes of humans and chimps, around one quarter of the two genomes don’t align and the similarity of those portions that do align is between 90 and 95 percent. (Go here and here for comparisons.)
According to the evolutionary model, humans and chimps share a common ancestor with gorillas. And humans, chimps, and gorillas share a common ancestor with orangutans. These presumed evolutionary relationships should be reflected in genetic comparisons between humans and the great apes, where scientists expect to find gorillas and orangutans displaying less similarity, respectively, to humans than to chimpanzees.

Yet, this is not always the case. Researchers have recently discovered that about one percent of the human genome displays a greater genetic similarity to orangutans than it does to chimpanzees. This result follows on the heels of an earlier study that found that 23 percent of random sequences sampled from the human genome point to a primate other than chimpanzees as our closest evolutionary relative.2 In other words, depending on the region of the genome that is selected, differing “evolutionary trees” result for humans and the great apes.

He argues that a key portion of evolutionary biology is violated because these genetic trees do not completely agree with each other and don't completely agree with the fossil record. In support of this idea, he cites three articles, the first of which is called “Incomplete Lineage Sorting Patterns among Human, Chimpanzee, and Orangutan Suggest Recent Orangutan Speciation and Widespread Selection.” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/gr.114751.110). Ironically, in a section of the article to which Rana does not refer, the authors of this paper write:

The exact amount of ILS [interlineage sorting] locally in the genome depends on the recombination rate and factors such as functional constraints (Figs. 4, 5). The observed ~1% of ILS is entirely consistent with the effective population size of 50,000 inferred for the human–chimpanzee ancestor and the speciation time difference of 8 Myr inferred between human–chimpanzee and human–chimpanzee–orangutan, assuming a generation time of 20 yr [emphasis mine].

How does this not fit an evolutionary model? These authors of this paper certainly think it does, an expected one, at that. No evolutionary biologist has ever said that there has to be 100% agreement between all different kinds of trees. It has never occurred to them that this would ever be a problem. That is a straw man argument that Rana has put up. In response to the argument of discordant trees, Dennis Venema has posted a great article on this concept of incomplete lineage sorting. He writes:

The fact that gene phylogenies/trees and species phylogenies/trees don’t always match is not something that surprises scientists, since it is a well-known phenomenon and the mechanisms underlying it are understood: species arise from genetically diverse populations and that diversity does not always sort completely down to every descendant species.

The second article that Rana cites is “Mapping Human Genetic Ancestry,” by Ebersberger et al. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msm156). Once again, in a part of the article to which Rana does not refer, they write:

For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. This encompasses genes and exons to the same extent as intergenic regions. We conclude that about 1/3 of our genes started to evolve as human-specific lineages before the differentiation of human, chimps, and gorillas took place. This explains recurrent findings of very old human-specific morphological traits in the fossils record, which predate the recent emergence of the human species about 5-6 MYA. Furthermore, the sorting of such ancestral phenotypic polymorphisms in subsequent speciation events provides a parsimonious explanation why evolutionary derived characteristics are shared among species that are not each other's closest relatives [emphasis mine].

Funny, it doesn't look like the authors are proposing a non-evolutionary relationship here. Once again, it fits perfectly with what we think is going on with the fossil record, which indicates a human-chimp separation time at around 6 million years ago. In fact, this kind of scenario fits perfectly with the recent finding about the frame-shift mutation of the sugar molecule Neu5Gc, suggesting that sympatric speciation may have happened in the human fossil line (the G.G. Simpson in me just shuddered). It is, consequently, difficult to see how this article supports Rana’s conclusion.

The third article that Rana has marshaled to his argument is by Morris Goodman, one of the dons of genetic analysis. The Goodman article appears in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution¹. He quotes Goodman as writing thus:

If the biblical account of creation were true, then independent features of morphology, proteins, and DNA sequences would not be expected to be congruent with each other. Chaotic patterns, with different proteins and different DNA sequences failing to indicate any consistent set of species relationships, would contradict the theory of evolution.

Rana is using this statement by Goodman to indict evolutionary theory, since, given what he thinks he has shown, that is exactly what the evidence of the first two papers is. The problem is that a bit further in the article, Goodman says:

Human serum proteins shown only small antigenic differences from orang-utans and gibbons, and tiny differences from gorillas and chimpanzees. Given the extensive morphological evolution involved, the extent of protein evolution between humans and other hominoids is surprisingly small. Alternatively, if the 'molecular clock' is applied to immunological distances and the divergence between hominoids and old world monkeys arbitrarily set at 30 million years ago, the human-African ape split occurs at 5 million years ago [emphasis mine].

Once again, perfectly in keeping with evolutionary theory and perfectly in keeping with the results by Ebersbrerger et al, who also (twenty years later!) see the evidence as pointing to a human/ape split between five and six million years ago.

It is difficult to find anything redeeming in Rana's post. It is further difficult to derive a conclusion that these articles don't support the evolutionary paradigm, since they all clearly do. Did he simply not read them? Did he hope that none of his readers would? For someone who is trained in molecular biology to employ such a standard creationist trick is astounding and deeply, deeply disappointing. It also lends more credence to what Todd Wood recently said about RTB:

I would recommend that no one accept any of RTB's arguments without fact-checking their claims first. I do not know whether these problems are due to lazy scholarship, ignorance, intentional deception, or ideological blinders. What I do know is that you cannot trust Reasons to Believe.

I can't add much to that.

¹Goodman, Morris (1992) “Reconstructing Human Evolution from Proteins,” in Steve Jones, Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 307–13.

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Todd Wood on Parallel Cultures

2011-10-20T20:35:00.000-04:00

One of Todd Wood's readers asked him to comment on my post about the Barna Group’s results in which I opined that the problem was not with historical Christianity, but with modern evangelical Christianity, which I see as walling itself off from modern society, especially in its understanding of science. Here is a bit of what he writes:

I'm not entirely sure whether he's concerned about the very idea of a "parallel culture" itself or the quality of the evangelical culture. As for developing our own parallel cultures, I would point to the monastic culture (especially medieval monasteries) as an example from a different Christian faith tradition. A crucial difference between the medieval monastery and the modern evangelical culture is that the monastic culture was compelling and appealing to people. As I understand it (and I admit that I'm no historian), the monasteries were important sources of learning and scholarship, and to some extent helped to preserve learning through the "Dark Ages." I think especially of St. Columba's monastery on Iona, which was instrumental in Christianizing Scotland through the power of learning. (I'm going to stop talking about monasteries now before I reveal any more of my ignorance.)

It is quite true that the monasteries were very important for learning and did preserve much of the knowledge that had been passed down from their predecessors. But the monasteries were doing so largely in the absence of, and prior to, the explosion of modern science. Further, they weren't competing with the culture of the time, they were providing a completely different outlook and way of life. The modern evangelical movement, in contrast, is providing its own brand of politics, culture and science in almost exactly the same model as secular society but with a Christian basis. Where the wheels fall off the wagon (and Dr. Wood and I differ profoundly on this issue), is in the (largely) evangelical Christian interpretation of modern science, which is tied to a very strict biblical hermeneutic that dictates a 6,000 year-old creation and further, that evolution as characterized by modern evolutionary biologists, has never happened. There is little to no mainstream scientific evidence to support this interpretation of scientific findings and mountains of evidence to the contrary.

The evangelical community has fought the mainstream interpretations of modern science tooth and nail to the point where those of us that accept them are called “unbiblical.” Further, we get called that by people who have no training in modern science at all.

Dr. Wood has a short section in which he examines the Christian culture that has arisen in parallel. He argues (and I largely agree) that modern evangelical Christianity is reactive in the sense that we parrot modern, secular society and do not do it well. He further notes that this is the reason that so many leave the faith in their late teens or early twenties. Anecdotally (and I have a pretty small sample size) it does seem that those that hang on to their faith through these years hit modern culture head on instead of avoiding it.

I have always been of the (myopic) opinion that one of the key reasons that people in the their late teens or early twenties leave the faith is because they hit an understanding of how the world works, scientifically, and it conflicts with what they have been taught, usually from home school curricula. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps this is only one small part of a greater whole that we, as Christians, are not addressing. I know the challenge of raising children in a Christian home firsthand and some of my children will soon be entering their adolescent years where that struggle will become evident. I can only pray that the Holy Spirit gives us the guidance to be able to provide an attractive alternative to a completely secular culture.

Lastly, Dr. Wood writes:

What I want, and what this blog has always been about, is to improve what we have. Instead of constantly tossing potshots at evolutionary biology, we need to put up or shut up. If creationism is so much better than conventional science, where's our explanation of the pattern of radioisotopes? Or distant starlight? Or the near identity of the human and chimp genomes? And why aren't we working on answers to these questions? Why are people settling for just explaining the problems away with philosophical tricks or just distracting people from the problems by pretending like everyone else has much worse problems? Take the beam out of your own eye before you pick out the speck from someone else's. That was good advice 2000 years ago, and it's good advice today.

He is absolutely correct. And herein lies a large problem. Recently, when Dr. Wood took on Reasons to Believe's interpretation of the human/chimp genome and showed where they were wrong (and not trustworthy), a good many people who are not, to my knowledge, Christians cited this exchange quite positively, even knowing that Dr. Wood is a professed young-earth creationist. Why? Because it was about the only time in recent memory in which the secular data was examined and interpreted by someone from that point of view with complete scientific integrity.

Beginning with George MacReady Price's The New Geology, in 1923 and continuing down to the present day, the evangelical movement has made a complete hash of science. Even worse, there is a persistent evidence that those promoting this view do not even seek to get things correct. To turn the phrase that Dr. Wood used, if I hear one more evangelical non-scientist say “there are no transitional fossils” I just might scream!

Examples abound in which scientific data is skewed or twisted in such a way as to support the young earth model when, in its original form, it did exactly the opposite (Randy Isaac's response to the RATE volumes is, perhaps the best example). This leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of your average scientist.

This is a bad witness.

This is part of the reason this blog exists. Non-Christians need to know that we can confront the data in an honest fashion. If we seek to reach out to those with scientific inclinations for the cause of Christ, we must treat the data with integrity, even if it leads us down a road that we have never been down before.

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World Magazine on the Barna Group Results

2011-10-18T18:49:00.009-04:00

World Magazine has an article on the Barna Group results that adds a dimension:

Although Christians have a reputation for being anti-science, the scientific field is brimming with Christian thinkers, Peter Walhout, Wheaton's department chair and associate professor of physical chemistry, said.

"No serious Christian or scholar would ever study Christianity and its history and say it's anti-science," he said.

Many early scientists actively participated in church. Nicolas Copernicus held an office in the Catholic Church, and he was encouraged to publish his research on the planets' orbit system by high-ranking church officials. Isaac Newton, another devout believer, claimed that the laws of physics and the universe were dependant upon an intelligent designer. And the revered physicist Albert Einstein was motivated to investigate the laws of the universe by his faith in a Creator.

"I want to know how God created this world," he said.

Walhout suggested anyone wishing to express to unbelievers the amity between Christianity and science should capitalize on evidence from history.

The problem is not with historical Christianity. It is with modern evangelical Christianity, a movement that came out of the fundamentalism of the early 1900s and that has, largely, abandoned conventional scientific pursuits or results. It is this group that is largely “anti-science.” In a recent article in the New York Times (yes, I am going to quote it just this once), Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens, about modern evangelical Christianity's response to science, write:

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups. Among evangelical leaders, Ken Ham, David Barton and James C. Dobson have been particularly effective orchestrators — and beneficiaries — of this subculture.

It is this “parallel culture” that has become the de facto culture of home school curricula, evangelical churches and Christian colleges. This is the result of what Mark Noll called “The Intellectual Catastrophe of Fundamentalism.” This is not Christianity as it is practiced in either the Catholic or Eastern churches and, in many ways, it is a Christianity that is unique to the United States. It is also a Christianity that I am profoundly uncomfortable with and am becoming more so every day. One of my friends recently wrote this to me:

The academic study of Scripture does not teach people that faith is stupid; rather, that study seeks to elucidate the faiths contained in Scripture as rigorously as possible.

It is this faith and the rich tradition that is behind it that the modern evangelical church has lost.

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The Barna Group Reports on: Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church

2011-10-14T22:18:00.001-04:00

The Barna Group, which describes itself as a “private, non-partisan, for-profit organization” has done a survey on 1296 current and former church-goers between the ages of 18 and 29 and has identified six primary reasons why young people leave church. They are:

churches seem overprotective
Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow
Churches come across as antagonistic to science
Young Christians’ church experiences related to sexuality are often simplistic, judgmental
They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity and
The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt

Regarding the fourth item, the one that (obviously) caught my attention, they write:

Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in” (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that “Christianity is anti-science” (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries.

Ken Ham and Britt Beemer, authors of the book Already Gone: Why Your Kids Will Quit Church and What You Can Do To Stop It, have a different take on things. Writes one reviewer of the book:

Their research concludes that “Sunday school syndrome” is contributing to the epidemic rather than helping alleviate it. Sunday School tends to focus on inspiration and morality of Bible stories, rather than how to defend the authority of the Bible. The “Bible stories” told in Sunday school are separated from “hard facts.” As a result, children will turn to school books for facts and answers, instead of the Bible. Already Gone argues that if a child is unable to defend the historicity and fact of Genesis, then he or she will quickly be disillusioned with the church. “Ultimately, if we are unable to defend Genesis, we have allowed the enemy to attack our Christian faith and undermine the very first book of the Bible,” the book says.

I have always marveled at the fact that so much emphasis is placed on this one book of the Bible at the expense of the rest of it (including the Gospel). Ham, himself writes:

The research also showed that those young people (the two thirds group) who went to Sunday school were—surprisingly—more likely to have heard a Christian leader (pastor, Sunday school teacher, and so on) tell them they could believe in evolution and millions of years. We also found those in this group that they were more spiritually worse off than those who didn’t go to Sunday school and were more inclined to accept abortion and “gay” marriage.

I have not read this book (not sure if I could, actually) so I do not know what other questions were asked. It seems to me that a comparison between those that went to Sunday school and were exposed to “evolutionary” teaching and those that went to Sunday school and were not would be in order. I bet they would not be statistically significantly different. The message of the Barna Group, on the other hand, is that when students get to college, they find that the scientific leanings of their churches and perhaps parachurch organizations ill-prepared them for school and scientific disciplines.

In contrast to Ken Ham, Richard Colling writes:

Twenty-first-century college students are a savvy and discerning lot: They can smell a fraud a mile away. My experience is that they do not want to be “protected” from the realities of the world. They genuinely appreciate Christian educators who respect and care enough about them to speak the transparent truth regarding controversial subjects like evolution. In short, they want and deserve the real stuff including everything that modern biology and genetics can teach them about evolution and origins. Then, armed with actual factual knowledge and understanding, they can intelligently make up their own minds how to put it all together, and just as importantly, defend their faith in a secular unbelieving culture. My experience is that they accomplish things very well – resulting in a stronger more resilient personal faith.

I think that too many of them are smelling the fraud of “creation science.”

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Frame-Shift Mutation Linked to Sympatric Speciation in Early Homo?

2011-10-13T22:08:00.002-04:00

According to (new?) research from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, a mutation creating a slightly different sugar molecule may have caused a reproductive barrier between those that had it and those that didn't in our human ancestors, possibly influencing the split between early Homo and australopithecines. Stephanie Pappas of Live Science writes:

The mutation tweaked one type of sugar molecule, Neu5Gc, produced by early hominids, the first great apes. About 2 million or 3 million years ago, just as human ancestors Homo ergaster and Homo erectus emerged in Africa, a genetic mutation halted the production of this molecule, and the prehuman immune system began to recognize it as a threat. As a result, researchers find, some hominids would no longer have been able to mate and produce offspring with other populations, potentially driving early humans apart from other apes."Over time, this incompatibility would reduce and the eliminate individuals with Neu5Gc," study researcher Pascal Gagneux of the University of California, San Diego, said in a statement.

If the date is closer to three million years, it would have considerable implications for the emergence of Homo. There are many theories about where early Homo came from and what led to the transition from Australopithecus to what became the earliest members of our line. This will shed some light on these ideas and, hopefully, spur more research in this area.

Interestingly, this research is not as new as the story makes it out to be. There was a paper written by A. Varki in 2001 that dealt directly with this data. It can be found here. Varki, however, did not make the connexion with immune suppression response but focused, rather, on how the mutation affected brain evolution.

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Kraken from Hell?

2011-10-12T21:58:00.000-04:00

Science Daily has an unusual piece about some maybe evidence of a huge prehistoric beast that roamed the oceans. The lede paragraph is quite something:

Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their remains in Nevada. Now he thinks there was an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on ichthyosaurs: a kraken of such mythological proportions it would have sent Captain Nemo running for dry land.

The peculiarities ensued when a graveyard of icthyosaurs was discovered arranged in a non-random order and with odd markings on them:

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs [ichthyosaurs] were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.“Modern octopus will do this," McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”

‘What-if?’ stories are great fun and thought provoking but a great deal more evidence will have to be amassed before this can be verified/supported. Given the size of some of the creatures in the past (here, here and here) however, this is not so hard to believe.

CFSI To Cease Operations

2011-10-12T18:53:00.000-04:00

Sadly the Center for Faith and Science International will be shutting its doors at the end of the year, a casualty of the rotten economy in which we find ourselves. I will post twice more and then it will go silent. Thanks to Rob Zimmer for all of his hard work in the project.

New CFSI Post Up

2011-10-11T12:42:00.001-04:00

My new post for the Center for Faith and Science International is up. It deals, in considerably more civil fashion, with the Ken Ham/BioLogos issue that I wrote a little bit about in the pages here. As always, comments are welcome.

T.M. Moore and Aliens

2011-10-08T14:11:00.000-04:00

T.M. Moore has an excellent post on the subject of aliens and Christianity over at the Center for Faith and Science International. Amongst the good points he makes are these:

Fourth, God sent His Word to earth for the redemption and reconciliation of the cosmos (Jn. 3.16; 2 Cor. 5.18-20). What Jesus accomplished in His incarnation, death, and resurrection has significance not simply for believers but for the whole world, and not just for the earth but for the entire cosmos and everything in it. A work of reconciliation has been realized which means that now every creature can recover its rightful place before God, even if we can never figure out precisely what that rightful place might be (Eccl. 3:1-11). Indeed, a day is coming when the whole cosmos will be burned up and a new heavens and new earth will be created where righteousness dwells.

Fifth, it has not pleased God for human beings to know everything in the same way that He does (Eccl. 3:11; Deut. 29:29). Through careful study of Scripture and the work of science we may continue to increase our knowledge of the cosmos, but there will always be limits beyond which we simply cannot know and should not try to go (ask Job). We will simply have to learn what we can as we go along, always bearing in mind that there will be mysteries, enigmas, and conundrums that we can’t quite figure out, and always being content for God to be God and us to be mere mortals.

Put simply, contra Ken Ham, there is no a priori reason to think that they will not need to be healed and saved just because they are not human. They are God's creations and if they have been created with the intelligence to understand that, then they will be in need of salvation.

Limb Development and Our “Inner Fish”

2011-10-07T22:20:00.000-04:00

Science Daily has a story on research delineating the relationship between us and fish. The work, which examined some cartilaginous fish, as well as the three surviving lungfish species, was led by Peter Currie of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University. The story notes:

"We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs," said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal's body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the cartilaginous fish, a mechanism that was a stepping stone to the evolution of tetrapod physiology."Humans are just modified fish," said Professor Currie. "The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors."

The paper is in the online journal PLoS and can be found here. Another piece of the puzzle. So...is it worse that we share common ancestry with chimpanzees or with fish?

Mary Sue Asks “Did Jesus Save Alien Races, Too?”

2011-10-06T21:07:00.000-04:00

Off-Topic: the Mary Sue, a site for “Geek Girl Culture” has an article about a convention that occurred recently called the 100 year Starship Convention, sponsored by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). One of the presenters was Christian Weidemann from the Ruhr-University Bochum who wondered aloud how religion would change if we discovered proof of life on other planets. Hilarity ensued. First Weidemann stated:

The death of Christ, some 2,000 years ago, was designed to save all creation. However, the whole of creation, as defined by scientists, includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. That means that if intelligent life exists on other planets, then Jesus or God would have to have visited them too, and sacrificed himself equally for Martian-kind as well as mankind

It appears that the Vatican has already considered this. When questioned about extraterrestrial life, the Pope's astronomer conveyed the Vatican's position:

He would be “delighted” if intelligent life was found among the stars. “But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it – when you add them up it’s probably not a practical question.”Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” Would he baptise an alien? “Only if they asked.”

Some were not nearly as taken with the idea. When asked, Ken Ham had this to say:

“The person from the Vatican that was quoted in the newspaper reports, if quoted correctly, can’t truly understand the gospel—in my opinion. The Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but they can’t have salvation.…While baptizing an alien might feel good, it would have no more spiritual consequence than baptizing a chicken or a fallen angel. Baptize an alien indeed!”

Once again, it is only Ken Ham that truly understands the gospel. All other ideas have to be false. If a sentient creature from another world were to accept Christ as its savior, that wouldn't be enough? Narrow-mindedness and one-dimensionality, writ large. It is now my fervent hope that we find life on other planets, just so Ham will have to eat his words.

Yeti Hunters

2011-10-04T21:52:00.000-04:00

The Daily Mail has a story on a group of Russian and American scientists who are on the track of a group of Siberian Yeti. Will Stewart writes:

Its legend has long haunted the icy wastes of the Himalayas and Siberia.Yet for all the mysterious sightings and strange footprints in the snow, the Yeti has proved remarkably elusive to those seeking solid evidence of its existence.Now, however, the Abominable Snowman has an international team of scientists on its trail in a Russian region which one expert claims is home to around 30 of the creatures.

Out of the “international group of scientists” only one is mentioned by name, an Igor Burtsev, the head of the ‘Yeti Institute” at the University of Kemerovo. He argues that these are Neandertals that have survived to this day. Okay, that is not quite as outlandish but it is close. A map is supplied in the original story to show where the presumed location of these critters is.

As one of the commenters to the original story put it: “I reckon they're hiding under the 'R' in Kazakhstan.”

This continues to be one of those modern miracles—that people have been looking for the Yeti/Abominable Snowman/Sasquatch for decades and yet nobody has yet come up with anything that stands up to scrutiny. It is sort of like the search for Noah's ark.

Ken Ham on BioLogos and Proper Interpretation of the Scripture

2011-10-01T16:08:00.007-04:00

I have resisted posting on this, after reading Darrel's response to it but, after reflection, I think it needs some response. Ken Ham has a twenty minute “sermon” on the problems with BioLogos. Remember, this is the same Ken Ham who got into hotwater a few months back and got uninvited to a home school conference because of his caustic and uncharitable remarks about BioLogos at the time. Here is the video:

A few thoughts:

He shows a clip of Darrel talking about the age of the earth and what he would tell new students about how to integrate that information. Darrel states that he would refer the new student to some important books on geology and biology that would help them understand the evidence, to which Ham responds
“By the way, I have a book I would refer them to.”
That is snide. It assumes that anything that Darrel would provide in terms of resources would be worthless.
Concerning the evidence for age of the universe and the earth, Ham states:
This is not science, this is man's historical science, his beliefs about the past and he is going to tell us to let go of the Bible and what it says? See, belief in billions of years is science to them. It is not science, it is belief.

never

He states, about BioLogos (for whom I write) that they are starting to
infiltrate the church. In fact, they are now producing a homeschool curriculum to get home schoolers not to believe Genesis.
Maybe what they are trying to do is get kids to think intelligently about Genesis and avoid the one-dimensional reading of the scripture that Mr. Ham promotes.
Later, he argues, in response to Francis Collins' comment that the Bible is not a textbook, that it is exactly that. He states:
The Bible is not a textbook like a physics textbook, but it is a textbook of science because it is historical science that's talking, it is God's history book. That's the point. But when he says textbook of science, see they confuse these terms for people and that's what you have to understand, the difference between observational science and historical science. Where he finds the conflict, it is not because of the observational science, it is because of the historical science.
It is not clear that Ham even knows the definition of historical science. It appears that he is saying that there is historical science that is biblically-based (the bible) and historical science that isn't (scientific reconstruction).
About the whole kerfuffle surrounding the Great Home School Uninvite, he states:
“When I found out what Peter Enns believed, and that he was selling his curriculum at the home school conference, I had to, in fact, we had already told the organizers that I can't speak unless I say something about him, not him personally, but his beliefs and I did and something happened that we still don't know what happened behind the scenes but I was eliminated.He wasn't eliminated. He was allowed to continue to speak." "And he was allowed to speak at a home school conference but they didn't want me there teaching about a literal Genesis.”
This simply isn't so and Ham knows it. He was uninvited because of his "ungodly" and "mean-spirited" statements about some other speakers (Enns) and the convention. The organizers also wrote: "We believe that what Ken has said and done is un-Christian and sinful," That is pretty clear. Judging from the way that Nathan Ham, Ken Ham's son, responded, it was smack on the money too.
In the early part of the video, he disapprovingly quotes Bruce Waltke, who also had a dust-up last year regarding evolution. Waltke states:
“I think that if the data is overwhelming in favor, in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult, some odd group that’s not really interacting with the real world.”
Ironically, Ham doesn't see that this is exactly what he is doing in this video—taking his followers down an isolated road in which they are a slave to one, narrow view of scripture to the exclusion of any other and in which all who do not accept this view can only be seen as enemies.

This response is stronger than that of Darrel Falk's and my inclination is to call Ham arrogant, pompous, misguided and divisive, all of which he is. But we need to pray for those he is trying to reach. He is not a scientist and his approach is to tap into the emotions that this subject brings out. Man's science appears to be at odds with his interpretation of the scripture, but he carries the idea of man's fallenness and limited understanding in only one direction. It never occurs to him that Pete Enns has come to a different understanding of the scriptures through prayer and a desire to learn about the cultural and literary context of the book that he and Ken Ham hold so dear. It only occurs to him that if Pete Enns and Darrel Falk don't understand the scriptures the way he does, then they must not be in the spirit. If Ham's behavior and statements look “cultish” to people like Bruce Waltke, someone who has spent their entire professional life studying the scriptures, what must they look like to non-Christians?

Holy Jurassic Park, Batman!

2011-09-28T21:44:00.000-04:00

Wired has a story on “How to hatch a dinosaur” by Thomas Hayden. He writes:

Over the past several decades, paleontologists—including [Jack] Horner—have found ample evidence to prove that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, everything from the way they lay eggs in nests to the details of their bone anatomy. In fact, there are so many similarities that most scientists now agree that birds actually are dinosaurs, most closely related to two-legged meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptor.
But “closely related” means something different to evolutionary biologists than it does to, say, the people who write incest laws. It’s all relative: Human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees, but at that scale we’re also pretty hard to tell apart from, say, bats.

That's funny. Here's where the Jurassic Park comes in:

These regulatory genes—the master switches of development—contain the recipes for making certain proteins that stick to different stretches of the genome, where they function like brake shoes, controlling at what time during development, and in what part of the body, other genes (for things like growth-factor proteins or actual structural elements) get turned on. The same basic molecular components get deployed to make the six-legged architecture of an insect or fish fins or elephant trunks. Different body shapes aren’t the result of different genes, though genetic makeup certainly plays a role in evolution. They’re the result of different uses of genes during development.So making a chicken egg hatch a baby dinosaur should really just be an issue of erasing what evolution has done to make a chicken. “There are 25 years of developmental biology underlying the work that makes Horner’s thought experiment possible,” says Carroll, now a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Every cell of a turkey carries the blueprints for making a tyrannosaurus, but the way the plans get read changes over time as the species evolves.

That is one of the best definitions of hox genes that I have ever seen. The problem is that you are looking at a developmental level that is very basic. It will be interesting to see how this is applied in the next few years.

Leonard Steinhorn Wants to Know How The GOP Became the Anti-Science Party

2011-09-23T22:40:00.000-04:00

Writing for HufPo, Leonard Steinhorn has some comments on the GOP and the race for their nomination. He writes:

It would be easy to take this Republican drift from reality and rationality as evidence that the party is comprised of know-nothings and the uninformed. "Anti-knowledge" is how New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labels the GOP.But in truth there are as many educated, thoughtful Republicans as there are Democrats, people who in their lives and businesses apply strict standards of evidence and rationality to their daily decisions. Perry is certainly no rube, having governed the second largest state in the nation for ten years, and Bachmann is a former tax attorney. If higher education is any gauge, Republicans and Democrats typically split the vote of those with a college degree.

It is quite unusual to read a political commentator writing these things since it seems to be a meme in the media that Republican = ignorant. Anecdotally, it is also hard to counter this meme. Many of my friends that are democrats tend to view me as an anomaly: a thinking republican. But someone can be very intellectual and thoughtful and yet have no knowledge of a particular subject. I don't know beans about psychology and couldn't tell you a single theoretical construct in the field. This doesn't make me stupid or anti-intellectual. It does, however, make me ignorant. He mentions the GOP distrust and general disdain for liberalism in this way:

This disdain for liberalism has an interesting genesis given that so many red states have benefited from liberal governance in the form of rural electrification, water projects, and transportation infrastructure, and indeed many white southern and Great Plains politicians were once ardent New Dealers.That all changed, of course, with civil rights, which turned many white Americans from friends of liberalism to its most ardent foes. By enforcing civil rights, liberalism became a literal enemy of their way of life and a figurative threat to anyone who didn't want to accept the reality of a plural, diverse, and cosmopolitan America.

I have difficulty accepting all parts of this hypothesis. For one thing, your average Republican doesn't mind paying for infrastructure such as roads, electricity, running water and so on. They do, however, mind paying for things like Solyndra, rapid transit between large cities and the incredible expansion of the welfare state, including many benefits for illegal aliens.

For another, it flies in the face of much evidence that the conservative churches were some of the driving forces behind desegregation. For another, one is reminded of pictures taken at the time of conservative Charlton Heston marching in civil rights parades. It is more likely the association between liberalism, atheism and evolution that is driving their distrust.

Most conservative Christians that I know tend to view evolution (and maybe climate change, I am not sure) as a tag-on. They see people living what they see as good, Godly lives with proper theology and behavior and see that as desirable. If these people also happen to reject evolution and climate change, so much the better. This does not require an examination of these theoretical constructs, only an acceptance of others' perspectives on them.

Of all of the presidential candidates, only Ron Paul (who has since dropped out) and Rick Santorum openly ridiculed evolution and suggested that it was not a Godly perspective. Indeed, most candidates don't so much reject evolution as include intelligent design in an almost ecumenical fashion. Michele Bachman, for example, wants both taught so kids can choose which one they want to believe in. While this is ignorant of science, it is not caustic or hateful.

The charge of anti-intellectual populism is harder to shake. I think that there are two large issues here: the growing liberalism of academia over the last four decades, and the general contempt that many in academia feel for what they consider the uneducated masses. I spent enough time at the University of Tennessee (nineteen years) to know that, at least at that institution, both of these perspectives are entrenched. When you add to this the vocal hyperatheism of Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, all of whom are intellectuals of one sort or another, many conservatives have no problem rejecting the whole package.

He continues:

Let's be clear: science and religion are not incompatible. The Catholic Church has made its peace with evolution and has no problem with the science of climate change. The current director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis X. Collins, is a born-again Christian who accepts evolution and simply sees the hand of God in its creation.

But for many evangelical Christians it's far more convenient to reject science than to deal with the dissonance between scientific explanations and what's written in the Bible. To them, science is yet another tool in the secular assault on their religiosity. Unlike the good book, it is not to be trusted. The Scopes Trial remains very much alive for them.

It is not so much that they are rejecting science as much as they are rejecting mainstream science. Most evangelicals are quite happy with the brand of “science” that is promulgated by organizations such as Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research which teach the straight recent earth creation model. It is this brand of science that has quite literally taken over the home schooling market—crowding out any mainstream curricula. Most aspects of modern science are seen to be at odds with the evangelical mindset and many evangelicals, and those who write for these institutions have adopted the Henry Morris viewpoint: “When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.” (source unknown) This meme is so strong that many evangelicals would rather, as Steinhorn notes, avoid the science question altogether than delve into the evidence. It makes complete sense that their candidates would do the same.

“Out-of-Africa Replacement Model”: Piling On

2011-09-22T22:48:00.000-04:00

On the heels of the recent DNA arguments supporting hybridization between early modern Homo sapiens and archaic Homo sapiens in Africa comes fossil skeletal evidence. As the Telegraph reports:

A study on human remains found in the Iwo Eleru cave in Nigeria, West Africa, shows that Stone Age humans in the area shared characteristics with much older human relatives.Palaeontologists leading the study believe their findings provide evidence that modern humans and older subspecies of human might have coexisted and even crossbred in Africa.The findings add weight to theories that ancient species of human lived alongside the anatomically modern humans after they first appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago.

Quoted in the article is Chris Stringer, one of the progenitors of the Out-of-Africa replacement model of modern human origins which was based on mitochondrial DNA studies done in the late 1980s.The article continues:

Professor Stringer said: "The majority view was that once modern humans emerged in Africa 150,000 years ago, it was kind of the end of the story and modern humans took over."I think the reality is that the ancestral forms didn't just disappear but hung around alongside those that had evolved into modern humans."Somewhere lurking in bits of Africa were these more archaic people and we are starting to get a picture of that."

I suspect that it is going to get very hard to pin down exactly where Homo sapiens starts. It is becoming more and more clear that anatomically modern Homo sapiens and archaic Homo sapiens went for the occasional “roll in the hay.” If so, as I pointed out earlier, there simply was no “speciation event.” This goes more to supporting the multiregional evolution model, as it applies to Africa, in which there was selection for more modern genes. This model may also apply to Europe, with the mixing of modern humans and archaic humans there. I suspect that this will spur reexamination of the early modern material from there, such as Mladeč, where the material dates from the Early Würm/Late Würm interglacial period.

Where Did the Cretaceous Birds Go?

2011-09-21T22:48:00.000-04:00

As evidence continues to pile up supporting the theropod dinosaur-to-bird transition, the question has arisen: where did all of the Cretaceous birds that did not give rise to modern birds go? Science Daily has this report:

Now a team of paleontologists led by Yale researcher Nicholas Longrich has provided clear evidence that many primitive bird species survived right up until the time of the meteorite impact. They identified and dated a large collection of bird fossils representing a range of different species, many of which were alive within 300,000 years of the impact.
"This proves that these species went extinct very abruptly, in terms of geological time scales," said Longrich. The study appears the week of Sept. 19 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aside: the next time I see a scientist use the word “prove” I am going to strangle them. Scientists don't prove anything. They provide support for a hypothesis or they reject a hypothesis. Onward. The common consensus about the dinosaur extinction is that it was, in large part, caused by a huge meteorite that fell to earth toward the end of the Cretaceous in the Yucatan Peninsula.

The crater reflecting this impact is 110 miles across and, while it probably wasn't the entire cause of the dinosaur extinction, it wiped out a good chunk of 'em.The article continues:

Yet modern birds are very different from those that existed during the late Cretaceous, Longrich said. For instance, today's birds have developed a much wider range of specialized features and behaviors, from penguins to hummingbirds to flamingoes, while the primitive birds would have occupied a narrower range of ecological niches."The basic bird design was in place, but all of the specialized features developed after the mass extinction, when birds sort of re-evolved with all the diversity they display today," Longrich said. "It's similar to what happened with mammals after the age of the dinosaurs."

Another piece of the puzzle!

No Dinos in Heaven Screening at New York Academy of Sciences

2011-09-21T15:56:00.000-04:00

Laure Parsons writes that there will be a screening of the movie No Dinos in Heaven at the New York Academy of Sciences on October 25, 2011 at 7PM and that a discussion with Eugenie Scott and Greta Schiller will follow. If you are in the area, stop by to see this movie. Here is the press release: http://www.nodinos.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/No-Dinos-NY-PR.pdf

Agitation Against Creationism in the UK

2011-09-20T21:04:00.000-04:00

David Attenborough has joined a group of scientists who are arguing that the government must forcefully ban the teaching of creationism in schools. Duncan Geere of Wired UK has the story:

While in power, Gordon Brown's Labour government released guidance to schools that creationism shouldn't be taught in science classes, but stopped short of enshrining the recommendation into law. The coalition government hasn't acted on the subject either. Attenborough has joined three Nobel prize winners and Richard Dawkins in protesting against creationism and intelligent design, asking for it to be completely banned.

The former director of education for the Royal Society, Rev Michael Reiss, who has in the past referred to evolution as "god's work", is amongst the signatories. He told the Telegraph: “Evolution is an extremely powerful idea that lies at the heart of biology. At the same time, it's a sufficiently simple concept that there's no good reason why it should be left out of the primary curriculum.”

It is not clear how far this will go or what impact it will have. That Richard Dawkins is part of the organization will have a polarizing impact, I am sure. Attenborough has a world-wide reputation as one of this generation's greatest naturalists and has made many wonderful documentaries about life in the wild.

Svante Pääbo: DNA clues to our inner Neanderthal

2011-09-20T15:58:00.001-04:00

Here is short video in which Svante Pääbo gives a short presentation on "Your Inner Neanderthal."

Crocodile From Hell

2011-09-19T21:39:00.000-04:00

First we had the Frog From Hell, then we had the Snake From Hell and now, it seems, that we have the Crocodile From Hell. National Geographcic is reporting that a 60 million year-old crocodile has been found not far from Titanoboa. Christine Dell'Amore writes:

A Colombian coal mine where scientists found the largest known snake species has offered up another gem: A new species of 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) prehistoric croc. (See pictures of Titanoboa, the biggest snake ever found.)
The 60-million-year-old Acherontisuchus guajiraensis lived alongside the snake and a bevy of other reptiles in an Amazon-like river system, which wove through one of Earth's earliest rain forests before eventually emptying into what's now the Caribbean Sea.

There are no primates alive at this point (Plesiadapis has been demoted to tree shrew). Good thing, too. I doubt this would have been a fun place to live.

Sigmund Comments on the BioLogos/Discovery Institute Rift

2011-09-16T19:20:00.000-04:00

Jerry Coyne has a guest post on his blog by Sigmund. Sigmund has noticed the bad feelings between the Discovery Institute and BioLogos and has seen fit to comment on it. He writes:

The slow descent into irrelevancy of BioLogos continues apace. From its inception by Francis Collins in 1997, the BioLogos Foundation’s original emphasis on increasing the acceptance of science amongst evangelical Christians has been gradually replaced by a more traditional focus on ‘worship’ and an increasing defense of Christianity from the challenges of secular reason.

This is a mite peculiar since many of the posts recently that I have seen including my own don't deal with what he describes whatever. My series of posts deals with the evidence for human evolution and three days ago, Dennis Venema started a series of posts on the basics of evolutionary theory. While it is true that Pete Enns expends much energy writing excellent columns on the nature of biblical interpretation, there are quite a few posts about basic science and, ironically, Sigmund writes that BioLogos has gotten away from science yet the whole purpose of his post is to illuminate a rift between the two organizations that is science-based.

He comments on the recent reaction to Dennis Venema's review (which I thought was smack on the money) of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell by the author. Meyer argues that complex specified information such as that found in the cell can only come from intelligent causes, while Venema states that there are natural causes that can create complex specified information without the need to invoke a designer. Meyer responds to this charge (in a way that Sigmund describes as “shifting the goalposts”) by arguing that he was only writing about biopoesis, not established life. Darrel Falk responded to Meyer's article in a way that Sigmund finds baffling. Sigmund and Falk are both fully aware that Meyer moved the goal posts, however Sigmund writes:

It was at this point that the real problems with the new BioLogos strategy become apparent. Falk, needing to see the best in every Christian, comes across as the theological equivalent of Woody Allen in the aftermath of the nymphomaniac scene in ‘Play it again Sam’. Falk spends almost the entire article wondering “How did I misread those signs?” and getting sidetracked into talking about “complex specified information” an imprecise term regarding complexity, only used by ‘Intelligent Design’ supporters.
While it is clearly a case of the usual dishonest creationist tactics of trying to be vague and then shifting the goalposts when caught out, Falk doesn’t seem to be able to state the obvious.

I feel for Darrel here, because, as Christians, we are called to see the best in people, even in a scientific setting. But Darrel has been on the receiving end of questionable Discovery Institute practices before at the Vibrant Dance conference. Commenting on it at the time, Steve Matheson wrote:

The question is not whether Christians should point to the things they agree on. It's not about whether affirmations of shared belief are beneficial or appropriate when Christians find themselves in disagreement. For me and, I suspect, most of the critics that Falk was referring to, the question is whether BioLogos should cosponsor a conference on faith and science with organizations that seek to mislead people about science.

Here, Steve is referring to both the Discovery Institute and Reasons to Believe, an organization that Todd Wood has dealt with. I have written about them as well.

Those of us who follow Jesus Christ want to believe the best in our fellow Christians but the sad fact is that we have examples in Christendom where scientific evidence is very poorly treated or misrepresented outright. I would never accuse Ken Ham of not being a Christian. But I would also never state that he honestly treats the scientific evidence. It is our duty to point out these errors in the hopes of reaching our fellow Christians and informing them that honest scientific inquiry can go hand in hand with Christianity. If the goal posts get moved, it is our duty to point that out as well. Darrel has done this. We might fault the force of his response, but we should not fault his intentions.

New CFSI Post Up

2011-09-15T07:54:00.000-04:00

My new post is up over at the Center for Faith and Science International, on conservatism and evolution. Comments, as always, are welcome here and there.

David Klinghoffer, Evolution and Conspiracy Theories

2011-09-14T21:23:00.000-04:00

Give David Klinghoffer credit for tenacity, or what Linus van Pelt called “mule-headedness.” Not content to link Hitler and the Discovery Channel gunman to “Darwinism,” he now does so with the 9-11 conspirators in a new post for Evolution News and Views called “Darwinism and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.” He starts out innocently enough, describing the 9/11 conspiracy theories and how they were debunked by Popular Science. He even has a serviceable definition of conspiracy theorism:

The tendency, hardly limited to the faculty fringe, is to want to repudiate the intuitions of common sense in favor of recondite alternative understandings. These purportedly expose the true, secret inner workings behind the façade of society and nature and, in the process, cast the very sources of our intuition in the most sinister light. This is the essence of conspiracy-thinking.

He comments at length about a story in Slate by Jeremy Stahl, in which Stahl argues that it is very hard to dispel a conspiracy theory because those accepting it simply think you are part of the conspiracy. Then he drops the hammer:

What I found striking about the first installment in the Slate series, by Jeremy Stahl, is the parallels with what we know about the thought and writings of Evolution Truth activists: our ever-loving friends in the Darwin Lobby. You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with 9/11 Truth conspiracist James H. Fetzer in editing a special number of the journal Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals. That issue of the journal became so notorious for the incivility of its contributions that a whole fracas broke out and made the pages of the New York Times."

Interestingly, in typical DI fashion, the supplied link doesn't go to the New York Times. It goes to an article by Casey Luskin, who then supplies the link in paragraph five of his article. In that article, Mr. Luskin also notes that James Fetzer is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. That charge sticks like glue: James Fetzer's ideas are whackadoodle with regard to this issue and his ideas have been rebutted very soundly. But then Klinghoffer writes this:

When he burst on the scene a century and a half ago, in the Eric Hufschmid role, Darwin offered precisely a conspiracy theory: a radical overturning of common sense, in this case the understanding that nature reflects design. That was replaced now with an unseen and unseeable material mechanism that simply and comprehensively explained how everything we thought we knew about life's development was totally wrong.

This is nonsense. It would only be true if Darwin was the first one to come up with an evolutionary scenario for the diversity of life. He wasn't. Evolutionary scenarios exist as far back as John Ray and Darwin's contemporary, Jean Baptiste Lamarck and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had their own. Darwin didn't introduce a conspiracy theory, he illuminated one of the growing questions of biology: how did populations change over time. He simply provided a mechanism. The only reason Klinghoffer thinks that it is a conspiracy theory is that he has bought into one of his own: that evolutionists are covering up the fact that evolution has no empirical support. As long as he continues to believe that evolution has no empirical support, then anything they write is part and parcel of this conspiracy theory. It doesn't matter how much evidence there is. It is like trying to explain something to someone while they are holding their hands over their ears and saying “La la la, I can't hear you.”

He writes:

Once posited, it tells a story that accommodates any observation. This is the brilliance of paranoia. Though Meigs cites Marxism and fundamentalist creationism as parallels, Darwinism offers one just as apt. Whatever nature brings forth can be squeezed to fit the effectively unfalsifiable Darwinian mold, which always turns out to predict, in retrospect, whatever is found.

Interesting. Why does he not include intelligent design in this list? All he has to say is “God did it that way.” It does not matter what the observation is, that is just the way He did it. It is foolproof. This has been the constant roadblock for supporters of ID since its inception. It is completely unfalsifiable. There are no hypothesis tests you can run.

It is amazing that Klinghoffer, who plainly does not understand basic predictive historical science, would state that evolution is unfalsifiable when it clearly is (If we found a human skull in mesozoic strata or dinosaurs in the Cambrian, the party would be over for evolution), and miss the fact that ID is not.There is a conspiracy theory all right. It is just not the one that Klinghoffer envisions.

NPR on the Literal Adam and Eve

2011-09-12T22:05:00.000-04:00

In the wake of the resignation of John Schneider at Calvin College, NPR has an article on their web site on the latest Christian controversy, the literal Adam and Eve debate. Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes:

[Dennis] Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.
And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.
"Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost," Schneider says. "So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings." To many evangelicals, this is heresy.

The evangelical community certainly has its back against the wall on this one. Once upon a time, it was okay to take pot shots at young earth creationism because scientific support for that position is not well-founded. This is different. For many, an acceptance of Christianity does not hinge on how old the earth is or how the creation narratives are interpreted. Whether or not Adam and Eve exist, however, calls into question the very notion of salvation in Christ. That strikes a chord. Schneider resigned and even Daniel Harlow, who also writes in this area stated that he now has a cloud hanging over him:

"Evangelicalism has a tendency to devour its young," says Daniel Harlow, a religion professor at Calvin College, a Christian Reformed school that subscribes to the fall of Adam and Eve as a central part of its faith.
"You get evangelicals who push the envelope, maybe; they get the courage to work in sensitive, difficult areas," Harlow says. "And they get slapped down. They get fired or dismissed or pressured out."

This is the scandal of the evangelical mind of which Mark Noll wrote. As I wrote the other day, this will probably get worse before it gets better and, as the national spotlight shines down on it, it may reveal a cavernous divide in modern Christianity. I pray that this is not the case.

Trouble At Calvin College

2011-09-11T15:46:00.001-04:00

A report is coming out of Calvin College, in Michigan that a professor has left after a controversy surrounding his position on a literal Adam and Eve. Will Pavia writes:

Professor John Schneider is the latest Christian scholar to leave his post amid a controversy that is gripping America’s evangelical community. In a country where surveys suggest that four in ten people believe in the biblical account of the origins of Man, some are calling this a “Galileo moment”, akin to the agonies suffered by the Roman Catholic Church over the suggestion in the 17th century that the Earth revolved around the Sun.Professor Schneider and a colleague, Professor Daniel Harlow, had published papers noting that it was becoming ever harder to maintain that all humans were descended from Adam and Eve. He suggested that Christians needed to abandon the idea that the Fall was an historical event.

Uproar ensued. Readers and influential evangelicals all over America called for both men to be fired. Professor Schneider left his job. The college said that he had sought early retirement but Professor Harlow, in an interview with a Christian newspaper, said: “John was pressured to leave.”

Professor Harlow then announced that he would be taking a sabbatical and would no longer write on so controversial a subject. “At this point in Calvin College’s history, it cannot handle that,” he said. “I cannot handle that. It’s taken a heavy physical and emotional toll on me.”

The Christian community needs to get a grip on this because the evidence is not going to go away. It is only going to get better. Christians that take a strict literal approach to Adam and Eve are going to find themselves increasingly cornered and distrustful of modern science and its efforts to understand the history of humanity. I have used Daniel Harlow's articles in research and quoted from them in this blog before. It is sad that he is leaving this discussion because he has much to bring to the table and his absence will only hurt the dialogue.

There are a number of different viewpoints on how to tackle the literal Adam and Eve question, which was covered in Christianity Today and of which I wrote in a post for CFSI. As Darrel Falk points out, it is possible that there were two people that were hand-picked by God to begin his relationship with the human race. This is not much different than God's covenant with Abraham, although it does not address the issue of the soul. If there were other people around at the time of Adam and Eve, did they have souls? Could they see Heaven? It is difficult to reconcile the idea that there were anatomically modern human beings around that were not part of God's plan for humanity.

I do not know where this discussion is going to go. Like the case of Bruce Waltke, though, there is obviously a sizable reluctance to address the possibility that Adam and Eve were not real people but part of an allegorical tale meant to teach us what our relationship to God is, what sin is, and why we were created in the first place. This controversy will get worse before it gets better.

Nature News Story on Au. sediba

2011-09-10T15:25:00.000-04:00

Nature News has a story on the Australopithecus sediba skeleton described by Lee Berger and colleagues. Ewen Callaway writes:

At around 420 cubic centimetres, A. sediba 's puny brain compares to those of other Australopithecus specimens and chimpanzees. But a high-resolution synchrotron scan of the brain's impression on the skull shows enlarged frontal areas that are normally associated with humans and linked to higher cognitive abilities, such as planning.A. sediba's pelvis also looks wider than those of other australopiths, raising doubts about the idea that the human pelvic shape evolved to accommodate large-brained babies. "Whatever is driving a relatively human-like shape of the pelvis, it is not a big brain," says Berger.The orientations of its leg and ankle bones suggest that A. sediba walked upright, and its nearly complete ankle resembles that of a human. But its long arms, and some features of its feet and shin bones, are similar to those of a chimpanzee. Taken together, these features suggest that A. sediba was adapted for both bipedalism and tree-dwelling.

This is a wonderful mosaic. As I wrote yesterday, though, it is not clear where it fits. There are three possibilities: A. africanus gives rise to A. sediba and A. habilis and A. rudolfensis. Here, the two species of early Homo have been demoted and all three have transitional characteristics that represent a general trend toward modernity (after Walker and Wood).

The second scheme has A. africanus giving rise to A. sediba, which then goes extinct, and H. habilis and H. rudolfensis (in some fashion), one of which then gives rise to H. ergaster. This posits that the traits present in both early Homo and A. sediba represent a general trend toward modernity.

The third scheme has A. garhi giving rise to early Homo with A. africanus giving rise to A. sediba, which then goes extinct. The advantage of this is that A. garhi has modern-like limb proportions and is found in northeast Africa, not far from early Homo, while A. africanus and A. sediba are both found in south Africa.

Which one of these is right? Are any of them right? Who knows. What we do know is that these critters have relationships to each other in some way, shape or form.

Dennis Venema: Ask an Evolutionary Creationist

2011-09-09T22:18:00.000-04:00

Dennis Venema has a new post over at BioLogos that is in the form of a Q&A and touches most of the main tenets of evolutionary creationism. Check it out

More on Au. sediba From CNN

2011-09-08T22:47:00.000-04:00

CNN has a story on Australopithecus sediba with some better pictures.

Au. sediba Now Considered Possible Ancestor to Homo

2011-09-08T22:30:00.000-04:00

New research is suggesting that the overall anatomy of Australopithecus sediba makes it the best candidate for being ancestral to Homo. The article in Science Daily is quite long and delves into the specific traits that Lee Berger suggests are thought to evolving in the direction of Homo. They write:

Lee Berger, the project leader from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, explains what these new findings mean for modern humans. "The many advanced features found in the brain and body, along with the earlier date, make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus -- the genus Homo -- more so than previous discoveries, such as Homo habilis"
The age of the Au. sediba fossils has been constrained to about 1.977 million years, which predates the earliest appearances of Homo-specific traits in the fossil record. Until now, fossils dated to 1.90 million years ago -- and mostly attributed to Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis -- have been considered ancestral to Homo erectus, the earliest undisputed human ancestor. But, the older age of these Au. sediba fossils raises the possibility of a separate, older lineage from which Homo erectus may have evolved.

This position seemed odd to me at first because there is already evidence of “early Homo” dating back to 2.3 million years ago. Then it occurred to me that this article makes a tacit assumption that is not stated: Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are not really Homo, but are Australopithecus. This is an argument that has been made by Alan Walker and Bernard Wood who suggest that, despite the size differential between H. rudolfensis and the late australopithecines, they are more similar than different.This levels the playing field and then Au. sediba simply becomes the branch of Australopithecus from which Homo sprung.

Taxonomy is a black art and we run the risk of tying too much significance to our taxonomic designations. If we argue that Au. sediba gave rise to H. ergaster, despite the fact that there are already two species of Homo running around, it conjures up ideas of convergent evolution where an earlier australopithecine gave rise to Homo habilis and Au. sediba gave rise to Homo ergaster. If, however we demote earliest Homo down to australopithecine status, the difficulties vanish “like the snows of yesteryear” as Isaac Asimov would say. Look for this to be challenged as well.

R.I.P. Out-of-Africa Replacement Model?

2011-09-08T21:37:00.000-04:00

"When two groups of people meet, they may fight but they will always mate."

-J. Lawrence Angel

It now seems that the last bastion of uniqueness for modern humans as a species is crumbling. If true, this is huge news. Science Daily is reporting that even after their origination in Sub-Saharan Africa, modern humans may have interbred with archaic Homo sapiens. They write:

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by Michael Hammer, an associate professor and research scientist with the the University of Arizona's Arizona Research Labs, provides evidence that anatomically modern humans were not so unique that they remained separate."We found evidence for hybridization between modern humans and archaic forms in Africa. It looks like our lineage has always exchanged genes with their more morphologically diverged neighbors," said Hammer, who also holds appointments in the UA's department of ecology and evolutionary biology, the school of anthropology, the BIO5 Institute and the Arizona Cancer Center.

This wasn't done by comparing modern DNA with ancient DNA, however. They write:

First, the team sequenced vast regions of human genomes from samples taken from six different populations living in Africa today and tried to match up their sequences with what they expected those sequences to look like in archaic forms. The researchers focused on non-coding regions of the genome, stretches of DNA that do not contain genes, which serve as the blueprints for proteins."Then we asked ourselves what does the general pattern of variation look like in the DNA that we sequenced in those African populations, and we started to look at regions that looked unusual," Hammer said. "We discovered three different genetic regions fit the criteria for being archaic DNA still present in the genomes of sub-Saharan Africans. Interestingly, this signature was strongest in populations from central Africa."The scientists applied several criteria to tag a DNA sequence as archaic. For example, if a DNA sequence differed radically from the ones found in a modern population, it was likely to be ancient in origin. Another telltale sign is how far it extends along a chromosome. If an unusual piece is found to stretch a long portion of a chromosome, it is an indication of being brought into the population relatively recently.

Aside from the assumptions that go into such research, it will likely send shock waves through the discipline, and will certainly require the revision of some cherished models concerning the origins of our species. It certainly rules out the idea that there was a speciation event in a cladistic sense and stretches our species back much further than we had originally thought. Look for these results to be challenged soon.

New Film by Greta Schiller: No Dinosaurs in Heaven

2011-09-03T13:29:00.000-04:00

Greta Schiller has a documentary film out called No Dinosaurs in Heaven, which I think is a very odd title and is likely to add fuel to the fire that “evolutionists” regard religious conviction as insignificant and a source of humor. The link to the trailer is here.This is a section of the press release:

NO DINOSAURS IN HEAVEN explores the problem of creationists who earn science degrees in order to sneak their anti-science beliefs into the classroom. As a stunning visual counterpoint, Dr. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education leads a raft trip down the Grand Canyon, where the creationist and evolutionary explanations of this natural wonder are juxtaposed. The film moves from the Grand Canyon to the American Museum of Natural History to actual middle school science classes in New York City, where public school teachers find themselves on the front lines of this struggle.

Screenings are available from Laure Parsons at laure@nodinos.com. There is no mention of the cost on the site, itself, although the distributor has these figures: universities: $289, high schools and public libraries: $99 and private rental for $150. I doubt I will be seeing it in the foreseeable future.

Christopher Hitchens on Rick Perry

2011-09-02T18:30:00.000-04:00

I wish I wasn't such a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. The man can write better than just about anyone that I know and, even if I disagree with his religious perspectives, he is very insightful and thought-provoking. About Rick Perry, he writes:

Is there any evidence, if it comes to that, that Perry has ever studied the theory of evolution for long enough to be able to state roughly what it says? And how much textual and hermeneutic work did he do before deciding on the "inerrancy" of Jewish and Christian scripture? It should, of course, be the sincere believers and devout faithful who ask him, and themselves, these questions. But somehow, it never is. The risks of hypocrisy seem forever invisible to the politicized Christians, for whom sufficient proof of faith consists of loud and unambiguous declarations. I am always surprised that more is not heard from sincere religious believers, who have the most to lose if faith becomes a matter of poll-time dogma and lung power.

More is not heard from sincere believers because, despite his ignorance of modern science, Perry resonates with his evangelical base. He hasn't said anything that a large majority of them would disagree with. In most of rural America (fly-over country for the DNC), young earth creationism is lingua franca and this is the base he is trying to reach. He also knows, however, that he can't alienate the rest of the country so he hedges his bets by waffling on the age of the earth. I doubt he knows what that is, either.

Texas Freedom Network Chides Rick Perry

2011-09-01T18:49:00.000-04:00

The Texas Freedom Network hopped all over Rick Perry for his statement that, in Texas, they teach both creationism and evolution. Jose writes:

In a galling display of irresponsibility, Gov. Perry today once again waded into the culture wars for political gain when he told a young boy while campaigning in New Hampshire that “in Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools.”

Gov. Perry:
A) We don’t
B) Your comments could place school districts in legal peril
C) Your comments are harmful to public education
It is outrageous that Gov. Perry would erode respect for and trust in public education in Texas, simply in order to promote his political aspirations. Texans and Texas schools are working to prepare our children for college and 21st-century jobs. Gov. Perry’s irresponsible comments wrongly suggest otherwise.

I am reminded of the comment made to one of my other posts in which the writer suggested that the whole creation/evolution debate had become “politically negotiable” rather than an aspect of scientific inquiry. That is sad. Perry has already gone on record as stating that evolution has “got some gaps in it” although I doubt he would know what those were. It might be a surprise for him to know that every scientific theory has unanswered questions. The problem is that is not what he means by “gaps.”

Politics and science: bad mix.

Oldest Acheulean Site in the World

2011-09-01T17:48:00.000-04:00

Science Daily is reporting the finding of the oldest Acheulean site in the world, so far, at Kokiselei, on the west bank of Lake Turkana, six miles from where the almost complete 1.5 million year-old Nariokotome skeleton was found. They write:

The Acheulian tools at Kokiselei were found just above a sediment layer associated with a polarity interval called the "Olduvai Subchron." It is named after Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, where pioneering work in the 1930s by Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary, uncovered a goldmine of early human fossils. In a study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters last year, Lepre and Kent found that a well-preserved Homo erectus skull found on east side of Lake Turkana, at Koobi Fora Ridge, also sat above the Olduvai Subchron interval, making the skull and Acheulian tools in West Turkana about the same age.

This is not terribly unrealistic or unpredictable. We know that Homo erectus appears on the landscape between 1.78 and 1.9 million years ago and that Oldowan tools date back to almost 2.4 million years ago at the site of Gona. It does mean that cognitive jumps were being made earlier than we thought, however and broadens our understanding of the abilities of early Homo erectus.

More pieces of the puzzle.

“The Rise of Early Homo

2011-08-29T21:23:00.001-04:00

My newest BioLogos post is up called The Rise of Early Homo. Comments are welcome both there and here.

Going Dark For a Few Days

2011-08-27T22:44:00.001-04:00

I am going to a wedding in Maine and will likely not be able to post until sometime next week. In the meantime, watch for my next BioLogos post on early Homo to be up soon.

Nelson Jones: The Politics of Creationism

2011-08-26T11:06:00.000-04:00

Nelson Jones of the New Statesman has a column on the GOP's peculiar take on evolution and creationism. He writes:

A bald statement of scientific consensus, of the type Dawkins seemingly requires of Perry, Bachmann and the others, would be a political risk and an act of courage that it is perhaps unreasonable to expect of most modern politicians. At the same time, any candidate who made a clear commitment to full-blown Creationism would find it difficult to broaden their appeal beyond the Religious Right - a body of opinion which, while powerful, is not electorally decisive. It's a subtle balancing-act, albeit one that makes little sense outside the very particular atmosphere of American politics.

Americans will be electing a president, not a professor of biology. It is indeed distressing to think that the "most powerful person in the world" (is that still true, and for how much longer?) has an incomplete knowledge of the natural sciences. But is it necessarily an indication of low political or administrative capacity, as Dawkins argues? Probably not. It is quite possible to be highly competent and efficient in most areas of life while holding eccentric beliefs (see, for example, the 19th century Congressman Ignatius Donnelly, who combined far-sighted views about tax reform with wacky ideas about Atlantis and the authorship of Shakespeare).

While this is probably true, it is to the democrats' advantage to play it up because it is often hard for the electorate to separate one position from another. It is also the tendency of the mainstream media to do this. Evidence the treatment of the tea party, which is united only by one theme: limited government and lower taxes. Despite this, they were painted as whackadoodle in all of their views and treated as one lump sum.

If people outside the very conservative evangelical bloc view the GOP candidate as being a scientifically-inept, ignorant politician, I think that he or she will have trouble getting elected, no matter how strong their economic and foreign policies are.

Huffington Post Rates GOP Candidates on Evolution

2011-08-25T10:22:00.001-04:00

HufPo has an article where they rate the GOP candidates for President on their thoughts on evolution.

Notable: John Huntsman, who accepts evolution, has this to say:

"I think there's a serious problem. The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.

Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney has said that while he believes God designed the universe, he also believes "evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body." The former Massachusetts governor admitted that his beliefs are complex and was hesitant to explicitly support intelligent design.

"I'm not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design," he said. "But I believe God is intelligent, and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body."

Rick Santorum:

"I believe in Genesis 1:1 -- God created the heavens and the earth. I don't know exactly how God did it or exactly how long it took him, but I do know that He did it. If Gov. Huntsman wants to believe that he is the descendant of a monkey, then he has the right to believe that -- but I disagree with him on this and the many other liberal beliefs he shares with Democrats. For John Huntsman to categorize anyone as 'anti-science' or 'extreme' because they believe in God is ridiculous."

Santorum once proposed an amendment that would have forced the inclusion of intelligent design in public school curricula.

Ron Paul:

Ron Paul is a creationist who decried evolution publicly in December 2007 during a Q&A session at a meeting in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

"I think there is a theory, a theory of evolution, and I don't accept it," Paul said.

Paul said he thought it was "very inappropriate" for presidential candidates to be judged on a matter of science. He also defended creationism while saying that all sides of the creation debate have an element of uncertainty.

Looks like the GOP is all over the map on this one, which is good. It will be harder to caricature the party as a whole (as I probably have done) as being anti-science and anti-evolution.

GOP Candidate Opposes Ark Encounter in Kentucky

2011-08-24T10:09:00.004-04:00

This is really strange. LEO Weekly has reported that the GOP front-runner for the governorship of Kentucky, currently held by Steve Beshear has come out against the construction of the Ark-n-Park. Phillip Bailey writes:

As David Williams was speaking, he off-offhandedly mentioned — while criticizing Kentucky’s tax structure — that he did not think Ark Encounter would ever be built. The project — featuring a “replica” of Noah’s Ark that depicts a 600-year old Noah herding dinosaurs onto it a few thousand years ago — is receiving a $43 million dollar tax break from the Beshear administration, which is a big cheerleader behind the project.

I asked Williams afterward about why he is skeptical of the project:

LEO Weekly: So you don’t think the Ark is going to be built?

Williams: No, I don’t think it will ever be built.

LEO: Why not?

Williams: I don’t think there’s an economic feasibility study that indicates it will ever be feasible. And it doesn’t matter how much tax credit you give anybody, in order to get tax credits, you have to have the income in order to create it. And there’s never been a feasibility study I’ve ever seen, I don’t think there’s ever been one done. I think the governor is just playing politics with this.

I never thought I would live to see the day that a GOP candidate or office-holder would come out against something YEC or ID based. Hat's off to David Williams. He then avoids the obvious question:

LEO: What do you think about dinosaurs on the ark, or are you agnostic on that?

Williams: Well, I’m not agnostic.

LEO: Well not literally agnostic. The whole young earth, dinosaurs and humans…

Williams: (deadpan) I wasn’t there.

I suspect there is going to be a lot more controversy and political in-fighting before this is over.

Matthew Blackston on BioLogos

2011-08-23T09:13:00.003-04:00

My friend Matthew Blackston, who is a physicist here at ORNL has a post on BioLogos about cosmology, theology and God's use of time. Stop by and read it. It is very good.

AP Covers Ark-n-Park

2011-08-19T20:37:00.005-04:00

I think it was Barry Lynn that came up with the term “Ark-n-Park” and I like it. The AP has a story on the extravaganza. This story showed up everywhere. I swiped mine from Yahoo News. Dylan Lovan writes:

"The message here is, God's word is true," said Mike Zovath, project manager of the ark. "There's a lot of doubt: 'Could Noah have built a boat this big, could he have put all the animals on the boat?' Those are questions people all over the country ask."
The ark will be the centerpiece of a proposed $155 million religious theme park, called the Ark Encounter, and will include other biblical icons like the Tower of Babel and an old world-style village.
It's an expansion of the ministry's first major public attraction, the controversial Creation Museum. It opened in 2007 and attracted worldwide attention for presenting stories from the Bible as historical fact, challenging evolution and asserting that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago.

"The ark is really a different approach" than the museum, Zovath said. "It's really not about creation-evolution, it's about the authority of the Bible starting with the ark account in Genesis."

General thoughts:

The idea being put forth here is that “God's word is true” and “God's word is literal” are the same thing. This is a false dichotomy and implies that every passage in the Bible is to be taken at face value and nothing more. This is counter to hundreds of years of Biblical interpretation and study and, as I have written before, results in a completely flat understanding of scripture—something that AIG is, unfortunately, quite well-known for.
It is good to finally see AIG front and center on this in print. It brings into sharp focus their duplicity in denying their central involvement during the questions that arose regarding the tax deduction proposal presented to the Kentucky government in complete absence of an economic impact plan.
“It's really not about creation-evolution, it's about the authority of the Bible starting with the ark account in Genesis.” If Mr. Zovath believes this, he is the only one who does. Fully half of AIG’s central message is an attack on evolution. The literal ark interpretation expressly implies that all of the modern-day flora and fauna are direct descendents of what was on board the ark and not the product of millions of years of evolution. They are inextricably linked and I am quite sure that there will be anti-evolutionary messages to be found at the Ark-n-Park.

Construction begins in the spring...

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Rick Perry in the Thick of It

2011-08-18T23:15:00.006-04:00

Not content to call the printing of more money “treasonous,” (which really would be a bad idea) Rick Perry has now voiced his opinion about creationism and evolution. Wes Barrett writes for FoxNews: The battle between supporters of creationism and evolution made its way onto the 2012 campaign trail Thursday as a young boy, prompted by his mother, asked Texas Gov. Rick Perry questions on the subject, leading Perry to suggest both are taught in Texas public schools.

"How old do I think the Earth is?" Perry said repeating the boy's question. "I have no idea - it's pretty old. It goes back a long way - I'm not sure anyone knows really completely know how old it is."

But Perry continued, saying the boy's mother was really trying to get a response about creationism and evolution. While Texas public schools don't officially teach creationism, some claim Perry has pushed a weakened evolution curriculum to open the door for creationism in schools.

"I know your mom is asking about evolution," he said. "It's a theory that's out there and it's got some gaps in it. In Texas, we teach creationism and evolution because I feel you're smart enough to figure out which one is right."

Excuse me, Mr. Perry, what exactly are those “gaps” that you are talking about? Would you please tell me because I surely would love to know what they are. I've been studying the subject for almost thirty years and I don't see any. Have you ever even taken a class in it? As for teaching creationism and evolution, the recent decision by the Texas State Board of Education would seem to rain on that parade, as well.

Politics, science education: bad mix.

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New CFSI Post

2011-08-15T21:01:00.001-04:00

My new CFSI post is up titled Not So Different After All. It is my take on the new data that indicates that up to nine percent of non-African modern human DNA is, in fact, Neandertal in origin. All comments are welcome there and here.

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Ark ’n Park To Get Huge Property Tax Discounts

2011-08-11T21:21:00.001-04:00

Kentucky.com is reporting new developments in the promotion of the Ark ’n Park involving Property Tax. Linda Blackford writes:

The city of Williamstown in Grant County has agreed to give a biblically themed amusement park a property tax discount of 75 percent over the next 30 years.

Mayor Rick Skinner said the offer is laid out in a memorandum of agreement that will be followed by a formal tax-increment financing deal with Petersburg-based Ark Encounters LLC in coming months.

The tax deal is in addition to almost $200,000 given to the company by Grant County's economic development arm as an enticement to keep the project located there, along with 100 acres of reduced-price land.

And that's not counting the state's promise of $40 million worth of sales tax rebates and a possible $11 million in improvements to the interstate near the project that would be financed by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.

Gee, do you think they are excited about having it there? Answers in Genesis is now being referred to as “the developers.” Well, at least the mask is off.

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More Evidence of Hybridization

2011-08-11T20:18:00.000-04:00

Nature News is reporting more evidence of hybridization between Neandertals and their contemporaries and modern humans. In the story “Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history,” Ewen Callaway writes:

By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago. Montgomery Slatkin and Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, theoretical geneticists from the University of California, Berkeley, presented the finding at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Kyoto, Japan, held on 26–30 July.

But more information about that hybridization has recently come to light:

Interbreeding endowed humans with a 'hybrid vigour' that helped them colonize the world, said Peter Parham, an immunogeneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine, California, at the symposium.

Parham's team compared a group of diverse immune genes — the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes — in Neanderthals, Denisovans and human groups from around the world. In several cases, Neanderthals and Denisovans carried versions of HLA genes that are abundant in modern humans in parts of Europe and Asia, but less common in Africans. Varying degrees of interbreeding could explain the mismatch, Parham says. He estimates that Europeans owe 50% of variants of one class of HLA gene to interbreeding, Asians 70–80%, and Papua New Guineans up to 95%.

The Denisova genome, if you will remember, represents a slightly different strain than that of either modern humans or Neandertals, although probably not a separate species. Here is the graphic in Nature News that shows possible migration routes.

R.I.P.: Out-of-Africa Replacement model
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“Academic Freedom” in Ohio

2011-08-09T20:59:00.001-04:00

The Columbus Dispatch reports on the town of Springboro that is attempting to add “supplemental” material to their school curriculum. As the editorial writer (unsigned) points out:

There is no question that those who believe in creationism are sincere. They believe their children are being led astray, and that, taught evolution, they will question the very bedrock of their family’s faith.

Kelly Kohls, a Springboro board member pushing for creationism in the classroom, said she is doing so as a concerned parent.

“Creationism is a significant part of the history of this country,” she told the Dayton paper, “ It is an absolutely valid theory and to omit it means we are omitting part of the history of this country.”

She could take a lesson from another small community that exposed its students to “intelligent design,” a kind of creationism dressed up to look more scientific.

The reference is, of course, to the Dover, Pennsylvania trial in 2005, which was a rout for evolution education supporters.The editor fears that such a trial would come to Springboro in no time, were the materials added. They are probably right. Such a trial may be brewing in Livingston Parrish, Louisiana, as well. What is happening is that local school boards are interpreting the latitude of the academic freedom legislation to allow supplemental material as license to teach creationism.

Gee, who didn't see that coming?

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The Role of Savannahs in Human Evolution

2011-08-08T21:42:00.001-04:00

It now appears that grassland savannahs stretched further than originally thought during the critical time when human precursors became bipedal. As the Gence France Presse reports:

"There have been open habitats for all of the last six million years in the environments in eastern Africa where some of the most significant early human fossils were found," said Thure Cerling, a professor at the University of Utah and lead researcher of the study.

"Wherever we find human ancestors, we find evidence for open habitats similar to savannahs - much more open and savannah-like than forested," he said in a statement.

It still remains to be explained how Ardipithecus developed a bipedal gait within a forest environment, though.