Your Inner Fish Part 2, on PBS Tonight

Don't forget to watch part 2 of Your Inner Fish, on PBS tonight at 10:00.  The first episode was very good and is a great companion to the book.

Another Conservative Drinks From the Wrong Bottle

Granville Sewell has written a piece for Human Events, titled Intelligent Design Theories Gaining Steam in Scientific Circles.  As nearly as I can tell, he has gotten everything wrong.  Lets start with who Granville Sewell is.  He is a mathematics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and a long-time supporter of intelligent design.

First, the title is indefensible.  Whether or not he, himself, came up with it, there is no evidence whatsoever that intelligent design is gaining ground in scientific circles.  In fact, there is contra-evidence.  There have been no intelligent design-based articles published in any of the mainstream journals and the only journal that is devoted to it, Bio-Complexity, has had one article and two critical reviews published for the entire year of 2013.  The article is co-written by two members of the editorial staff, to boot.

 He writes:

Darwin thought he could explain all of this apparent design through natural selection of random variations. In spite of the fact that there is no direct evidence that natural selection can explain anything other than very minor adaptations, his theory has gained widespread popularity in the scientific world, simply because no one can come up with a more plausible theory to explain evolution, other than intelligent design, which is dismissed by most scientists as “unscientific.”

This is ignorant nonsense with an arrogant tone attached to it.  The theory of evolution has gained widespread popularity because, as a theory, it is incredibly robust, with over 150 years of evidence to back it up, coming from the fields of biology, palaeontology, biogeography, microbiology, molecular biology, geology and others.  Every year, the evidence for evolution continues to pile up as we fill in more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.  Witness recent discoveries that have shown that the first tetrapods evolved in the late Devonian in shallow seas, that feathers evolved and diversified in dinosaurs as a means of insulation before they evolved into a means of flight, or that the femur of Orrorin tugenensis shows transitional characteristics between late Miocene apes and the earliest hominins.  These are not minor adaptations.  They show selection and evolution across taxonomic levels and reflect predictions about what would be found in the fossil record IF evolution were true.

He writes: 

But, in recent years, as scientific research has continually revealed the astonishing dimensions of the complexity of life, especially at the microscopic level, support for Darwin’s implausible theory has continued to weaken, and since the publication in 1996 of Darwin’s Black Box by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, a growing minority of scientists have concluded, with Behe, that there is no possible explanation for the complexity of life other than intelligent design.

Really?

Contrast the publication record of Bio-Complexity with the journal Evolution which, in 2013 alone, published 200 articles. Furthermore, Journal Citation Reports lists 29 journals that have "evolution" in the title. This does not even count those that publish articles on evolution, such as The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Cell and Systematic Biology to name just a few.

With regard to the "growing minority of scientists,"  if he is referring to the "Dissent From Darwin" list put out by the Discovery Institute, that constitutes no evidence against evolution whatever.  When I analyzed the list a few years back, I found:

13 physicists, 1 plasma physicist, 10 biochemists, 24 chemists, 8 engineers, 7 mathematicians, 2 psychologists, 13 geneticists, and 5 medical doctors.

There are only five geologists on the list, and one lone palaeontologist on it. 

Like most ID writers such as David Berlinski, Cornelius Hunter and David Klinghoffer, he argues that there is dichotomy between accepting evolution and ID:

If you believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones, you are probably not an ID proponent, even if you believe in God. But if you believe there must have been more than unintelligent forces at work somewhere, somehow, in the whole process: congratulations, you are one of us after all!

Here is one-dimensional, reductionistic thinking on display. it is either/or. There is no third option, the evolutionary creationist, who argues that the evidence for evolution of life, in all of its 3.5 billion year existence, can be explained as the work of a fantastically inventive and creative God, who took great joy in watching his creation unfold. It is also the thinking of someone who has taken no time to actually learn the basics of evolution and what the evidence is that supports it.  As long as this is the case, we will continue to be subjected to substandard prose such as this offering by Dr. Sewell. 

Oldest Tetrapod Footprint Discovered in Poland

NewScientist has an article on the oldest tetrapod footprint yet discovered. Shanta Barley writes:

Tetrapod footprints dating back 397 million years have been discovered in the Świętokrzyskie mountains in southern Poland in what was, at the time they were made, a seashore. All previous fossil evidence for these earliest known four-limbed vertebrates has been found in river deltas and lakes.

"Our discovery suggests that the current scientific consensus is mistaken not only about when the first tetrapods evolved, but also about where they evolved," says Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki of the Department of Palaeobiology and Evolution at the University of Warsaw in Poland, who discovered the footprints in 2002 in an old quarry near the town of Kielce.

A bit later:

"It was assumed that tetrapods evolved in river deltas and lakes, partly because all previous fossil evidence has been found in these environments," says Jenny Clack, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, UK. "This research suggests that the first tetrapods that crawled onto land were, in fact, living in shallow seas."

The link to the Nature article appears to be free (for the moment). The article authors write:

Until now, the replacement of elpistostegids [animals like Tiktaalik and Panderichthys] by tetrapods in the body-fossil record during the mid–late Frasnian has appeared to reflect an evolutionary event, with the elpistostegids as a short-lived ‘transitional grade’ between fish and tetrapod morphotypes (Fig. 5a). In fact, tetrapods and elpistostegids coexisted for at least 10 million years (Fig. 5b). This implies that the elpistostegid morphology was not a brief transitional stage, but a stable adaptive position in its own right. It is reminiscent of the lengthy coexistence of non-volant but feathered and ‘winged’ theropod dinosaurs with volant stem-group birds during the Mesozoic.

One of the most exciting areas in palaeontology right now is the origin of the tetrapods. As with most scientific discoveries, this will answer a bunch of questions and pose even more.

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New Issue of Evolution Education Outreach on Transitional Forms

The new issue of Evolution Education Outreach, which is free to the public is devoted to transitional fossils. There is a very good article on the recent "fishapod" transition by Jennifer Clack, which tackles all of the transitional forms that we have and makes coherent sense of them. The conclusion hits the nail on the head:

In summary, we now have a much richer fossil record that has improved our understanding of the timing, sequence of events, and conditions in which the origin of tetrapods took place. The boundary between “fish” and “tetrapods” is becoming progressively more difficult to draw, and a more complex story is emerging in which, for example, the origin of limbs with digits, the origin of walking and terrestriality, and the origin of tetrapods in a strict sense, may be three different things.

A great article. Read the whole thing, and the other articles, as well. With more articles like this coming out, the creationist/ID lie that there are no transitional fossils is becoming hollower and hollower.