I am in a weeklong summer teaching institute so I probably will not get a chance to post this week. In the meantime, have a look at a new Gallup poll on acceptance of evolution. HuffPo has a post by Michael Dowd. It is disappointing.

Hat Tip to the best man at my wedding, Jon Reid.

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More From Josh Rosenau on the Miss USA Pageant

Josh Rosenau guest-writing for Scientific American has more thoughts on the Miss USA pageant and the evolution question. He has a different take than mine. He writes:

Miss USA certainly doesn't set education policy, but the state pageant winners – especially the one wearing the Miss USA crown – have broad reach into households that may not read Scientific American, but who do vote for school boards and press their children's teachers on the coverage of evolution. Knowing how these role models think about evolution is important not just because these women have a bully pulpit, but because they are chosen to represent their states, and it is rare that we can see a national cross-section of how the non-scientist public views evolution (even as self-selected heavily vetted a cross-section as this group of pageant-winners). Indeed, understanding how Miss USA contestants talk about evolution can help us better understand how politicians talk about evolution, and how we can better promote science education.

In retrospect, he is probably right in some ways about the pageant giving us a cross-section of views on evolution. It certainly reinforced how badly evolution education really is in this country, a point also noted by Dr. Rosenau.He also writes:

Like the Miss USA contestants, most politicians (excluding those on local school boards or state boards of education) will have little opportunity to influence how evolution is taught. In answering questions about evolution during campaigns, their goal is rarely to indicate a clear conception of how science works and why evolution is central to modern biology. Instead, they must alienate as few constituents as possible, keep their base happy, and avoid an embarrassing misstep that could draw harmful national mockery.

I am not so sure this is true. It may be true on the democrat side but, increasingly, it is not true on the Republican side, as the recent examples of Michelle Bachmann's endorsement of Intelligent Design and the spate of “academic freedom” bills that have been pushed by politicians in Louisiana, Indiana, New Mexico, and Tennessee to name just a few. In all, there are eleven states that currently or have recently had academic freedom legislation promoted. Louisiana drew nationalwide condemnation from science organizations for its LSEA last year and it didn't phase them. A recent attempt to have the bill repealed failed by a 5-to-1 margin. I think these politicians are trying to keep their constituents happy. The problem is that many of their constituents are young earth creationists. The problem is not that they don't have much influence. The problem is that they have too much.

Next BioLogos Post is Up

Part two of the Dispersal of the Australopithecines is up over at BioLogos. This covers the south African forms as well as the extinction/disappearance of the australopithecines as a whole. Comments welcome.

New Child's Skull Can Cast Light on Key Evolutionary Period

A child's skull discovered last year in Morocco may provide much needed insight to the evolution of modern humans in north Africa. UPI reports:

A team led by Harold Dibble, a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, unearthed the child's skull and upper body in Morocco last year.

Even though the skull hasn't been released to the scientific community and the team hasn't published any peer-reviewed papers, information about the find will be aired on television by National Geographic, which funded the dig, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday.

By analyzing teeth, Dibble's team estimated the child was 6- to 8 years old. Dibble named the remains "Bouchra," Arabic for "good news," the newspaper said. While the name is feminine, Dibble said it more likely is a boy.

More information on the find has not yet been released but it should prove to be very exciting.

Richard Dawkins: Not So Bad After All?

The independent has an article on Richard Dawkins which casts him not as the devil incarnate but rather, not such a bad guy. As Kevin Myers writes:

The popular meme of Dawkins The Bigot is the creation of the Christian Creationist Right, who loathe him for the power of his advocacy of the idea that Darwinian natural selection is the sole creator of our living world.

The focus of the article, however, is the idea that natural selection can work wonders over the vast amounts of time. He writes:

The key element here is not the emerging species, but the mutating genes guiding them. One of many delightful revelations that Dawkins makes in his latest book, 'The Greatest Show on Earth', is that the gene which makes haemoglobin is a mutation of the same gene that makes the root-pod in legumes, wherein bacteria fix nitrogen: and what they visibly retained in common, across millions of years of separation, is their colour. Yes, both the ultimate sources of pea and pee are blood-red.

Dawkins is simply not the austere and proselytising dogmatist of myth. Such people expect and almost seek confrontation, whereas he merely wishes to make his case.

Moreover, he is quite clearly baffled by the extraordinary vituperation to which has been subjected, usually by the nameless thugs and religious skinheads who stalk the lightless slum-corners of that strange and troubled city, the internet. Take my advice. Forget the meme. Buy the books.

All well and good, but this sidesteps a whole host of absolutely nasty things that Dawkins has said about Christianity and parents who bring up their children in a religious home, comparing the latter to sexual abuse. To portray him as a scientist only interested in the science of natural selection is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst. Nobody that is only interested in the science puts out a book called The God Delusion. The meme is there for a reason.

Complexity Can Evolve Without High Cost

Was R.A. Fisher wrong? It has always been thought that with complexity comes a general lack of evolutionary adaptability. The consensus about human evolution is that early primates were able to exploit their environments because they had a generalized bauplan and could adapt to whatever came down the road. This was true from the teeth to the skeletal structure. Now, in an article for Phys.Org, research by Jianzhi "George" Zhang and colleagues has challenged the idea that the evolution of complexity carries a high cost:

When Fisher first wrote about the cost of complexity, he argued that random mutations---which, along with natural selection, drive evolution---are more likely to benefit simple organisms than complex organisms.

"Think of a hammer and a microscope," Zhang said. "One is complex, one is simple. If you change the length of an arbitrary component of the system by an inch, for example, you're more likely to break the microscope than the hammer."

Looking at pleiotropy, the idea that individual genes can affect a range of traits, the authors found something surprising:

For simplicity, mathematical models of pleiotropy have assumed that all genes in an organism affect all of its traits to some extent. But Zhang's group found that most genes affect only a small number of traits, while relatively few genes affect large numbers of traits.

What's more, they found a "modular" pattern of organization, with genes and traits grouped into sets. Genes in a particular set affect a particular group of traits, but not traits in other groups.

In addition, the researchers learned that the more traits a gene affects, the stronger its effect on each trait.

And how does this relate to the topic of this blog? The author writes:

The new findings help buffer evolutionary biology against the criticisms of intelligent design proponents, Zhang said. "The evolution of complexity is one thing that they often target. Admittedly, there were some theoretical difficulties in explaining the evolution of complexity because of the notion of the cost of complexity, but with our findings these difficulties are now removed."

One of the general complaints that has been made against those who espouse ID is that there is either a persistently simplistic model of evolution employed or an incorrect one. Recent works by Michael Behe, William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have focused on the presumed inability of evolutionary models to account for "specified complexity." They also make the specious argument that there can never be an increase in information under these models. Studies like these, which operate out of a predictive model, show otherwise.

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Christopher Hitchens Takes On David Berlinski

Christopher Hitchens, the outspoken atheist, who is battling esophageal cancer reserved special energy for a debate with the Discovery Institute's David Berlinski. Berlinski occupies that niche that is even stranger than evolutionary creationism: an anti-Darwinian secular Jew. The account, by Greg Garrison, is in Al.com. He writes:When

Berlinski linked Nazism and Darwinism while connecting atheism with violent government regimes of the 20th Century, Hitchens bristled and went on the attack in his next turn at the podium.

Connecting Nazism with Darwinism "is a filthy slander," Hitchens said. "Darwinism was derided in Germany."

Hitchens said Adolf Hitler claimed in "Mein Kampf" that he was doing God's work with his policies against the Jews and that the first Nazi treaty was with the Vatican.

"To say that there is something fascistic about my beliefs, I won't hear said, and you shouldn't believe," Hitchens said to the audience, almost thundering despite his diminished voice.

Berlinski responded that fascist and Communist governments including Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia held in common the proposition that "No power was greater than their own, and they acted on that." They were godless governments, despite some "infiltrations of religious thought," he said.

This seems to be a particular sticking point with the Discovery Institute and several posts here and elsewhere have dealt with this subject. Writers such as Berlinski and David Klinghoffer (and here, also) seem compelled to ascribe all of the world's evil to evolution and they do not seem to care how much they get correct or how much academic and intellectual dishonesty they commit in the process.

It has been established that Hitler did not use Darwinian principles during the Third Reich. The problem is that if the Discovery Institute admits that, then it is hard to paint evolution in a moral light. It becomes what it should have always been: a scientific theory. Nothing more, nothing less. I am not a fan of Hitchens' theology. In many ways, he gets exactly the same things wrong for different reasons. He accuses Berlinski of using Darwin as a scapegoat for the world's evils then proceeds to argue the same thing for religion. The truth is that violence is committed both for secular and religious purposes and it is simplistic to point to one or the other as the culprit.

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Todd Wood and the Neandertal Genome

Todd Wood has written a post on the Neandertal genome and what it means for the origins of modern humans. His post is called the Neandertal Non sequitur and the title refers to his reaction to Fuz Rana's analysis over at Reasons to Believe. But that is not subject of this post.

I should note that he is almost alone in spelling the word "Neandertal" the way the Germans have been spelling it for the last hundred years. Hats off. On to the post. He writes:

In my hominid baraminology paper, I merely cite Darwin's claim that similarities form a pattern that looks like a genealogy, thus supporting the inference of common ancestry.

I've been criticized for this stance, but I'm not going to address those criticisms today. I'll just assert that I'm correct, which I am. The fact of similarity is easy to account for. Being created by one God would be a good reason for some degree of similarity to exist. Likewise, being created to occupy the same world or to participate in the same ecosystem would also necessitate some biological similarity. These types of considerations could explain why all living things use the same basic biochemical building blocks (amino acids, nucleotides, etc.), for example.

And if that were the only thing that supported common ancestry, that would be a defensible position. But it is not. One of the principle reasons that the trees derived from genetic data hold up is that we can look at the fossil record and see corroboration of where those the branches lie. It is not just that we have a record of some Neandertal genes being present in the modern genome. We also have the observed evidence of the morphological similarities between Neandertals and modern humans. In addition, in many places in which these two hominid forms appear, their behavior is hard to distinguish. There are countless other examples.

Genetic evidence suggests a diversification between fish and tetrapods several hundred million years back. Lo and behold, we find fishapods in the Devonian—animals, to quote Sir Arthur Keith, "In the throes of transition." Put simply, the further we go back in the fossil record, the fewer branches we find. This is exactly what you would expect with universal common descent based on evolution. Similarity might be easy to account for in the creationist perspective. When the fossil record is factored in, it is not.

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Jerry Coyne on Religious America

Jerry Coyne wonders: Do religious Americans accept evolution? He writes:

Well, now I’ve seen it all. There are many ways that accommodationists try to show that faith and science are compatible, but never before have I seen a scientist with this aim play so fast and loose with the data. Dr. Joel Martin, the Curator of Crustacea and chief of the Division of Invertebrate Studies at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, has written an astonishing article in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach, “Compatibility of major U.S. Christian Denominations with Evolution”.

He fails to mention that this article is now behind a subscription wall. This journal was offered free for two years by Springer but now the article costs 34 dollars. Onward. Even though Coyne has it in mind to ridicule scientists who have religious convictions, he makes a valid point with his analysis of Dr. Martin's paper:

When Martin totals up the number of American Christians who belong to evolution-accepting faiths versus evolution-denying faiths, he gets 94,050,000 Americans in the former class and 45,850,000 in the latter, with 9,800,000 belonging to the “unclear” category. Voila! Nearly 63% of American Christians are of evolution-accepting faith! (This is, of course, heavily weighted with Catholics, who represent 71% of the “evolution-accepters).

The problem is obvious: the proportion of faiths that accept evolution is not the same as the proportion of believers who accept evolution.

Coyne is quite correct. Poll after poll have shown that a large percentage of all polled Americans do not accept evolution and that the correlation between lack of acceptance of evolution to religious expression is very high. In fact, recent earth creationism has taken hold in evangelical Christianity so much so that, as the Internet Monk put it a bit back:

Creationism has become a main plank in the platform of conservative Christian culture warriors. As a result, this issue has become more than a debate among Bible scholars who differ on their interpretations of Genesis. It has become a “litmus test” issue for many, identifying who is and who is not a faithful Christian.

So, unfortunately, despite the fact that Bruce Waltke’s views on these matters have been published in his writings for years, the BioLogos video was too provocative in the culture of fear that marks today’s climate in American Christianity.

As we have found out, now that we are home schooling once again, if one prowls the Home schooling resources, the YEC position is not just popular, it is the de facto position. Coyne ends by writing:

It is individuals who reject evolution, fight science textbooks, and make trouble for evolution—many of these in opposition to the “official” positions of their faiths.

I believe that he is correct.

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New Early Reptile Identified

A find that was originally thought to be an early dinosaur has now been identified as an early reptile. A University of California Santa Barbara news release has this to say:

After scientists pieced together an entire skull of this 230-million-year-old azendohsaur –– a group known previously from just teeth and jaws –– these animals have now been aligned with a very early branch of the reptile evolutionary tree.

In a study published in the journal Palaeontology, UC Santa Barbara Earth Science professor Andre Wyss and other scientists concluded that many aspects of Azendohsaurus are far more primitive than previously assumed, which means that its plant-eating adaptations –– similar to those found in some early dinosaurs –– were developed independently.

This shows that the early reptiles diversified and adaptively radiated along side the dinosaurs. It also shows that as reptiles adapted and radiated to different niches, some adaptations were common in both dinosaurs and reptiles. This "adaptation" is common in biological organisms and shows up in the fossil record in numerous places.






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