I Am a Paleontologist

As alluded to in the previous post, here is a delightful video by They Might Be Giants off of their recent CD Here Comes Science called “I Am A Paleontologist.” Enjoy.

William Reville on Religion and Science

The Irish Times has a good post by William Reville on the nature of science and what science does to answer questions. In it, he tackles a section that is persistently misinterpreted and misunderstood by modern-day creationism: historical science. After discussing what is understood to be popular science involving experimentation and replication, He writes:

However, not all aspects of the natural world are amenable to investigation by the form of the scientific method just described. For example, phenomena and processes that have developed over historical time, such as the origin and evolution of life or the origin and evolution of the universe, must be investigated in a different manner. Here you must use numerous lines of enquiry, and conclusions can only be drawn after these converge to produce an unmistakeable conclusion. Thus, the theory of evolution through natural selection rests on the converging evidence of the history of life on earth gleaned from palaeontology, geology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, biogeography, molecular genetics, physiology, and so on.

This is what many creationists fail to understand—it is not just the fossil record or just genetics or just anything that supports evolution. It is the whole kit 'n kaboodle. He also rightly questions whether or not the existence of God could ever be shown by using science. This is something I have argued for years. Read the whole thing.

More on the Treasure that is Angola

Louise Redvers of BBC News has a follow-up report on the new palaeontology work being done in Angola. It is promising:

Louis Jacobs is part of the "PaleoAngola" project whose biggest find to date was in 2005, when five bones from the front-left leg of a sauropod dinosaur were discovered on a cliff at Iembe, around 65 km (40 miles) north of the capital, Luanda.

Since then, the majority of the skulls and skeletons uncovered by the team have been from turtles, sharks, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, of which there is even an angolasauras species.

According to the report, this is just the beginning.

Forward Into the Past!

The idea that birds descended from dinosaurs is now commonplace in the field of palaeontology and has led to the reclassification of birds as reptiles because they are thought to share common ancestry with dinosaurs, alligators and crocodiles. Consequently, as Ken Meaney of Canwest writes:

Hans Larsson of McGill University is working to produce chicken embryos with features the dinosaur descendants share with their gigantic ancestors of millions of years ago --a longer tail, teeth and clawed fingers, for instance.

The goal is to understand and illustrate evolutionary mechanisms in birds--and by extension dinosaurs, humans and all other animal life on the planet.

Two things come to mind: if he succeeds, it will be powerful evidence backing up the bird-dinosaur transition. Two: we will have some more aggressive chickens running around.Once again, it appears that hox genes are at the root of this research:

What Larsson is doing is looking for what he calls "switchpoints" in the chicken embryo's development --periods when teeth or claws, for instance, appear and then fade away as it grows.

By manipulating the chicken's development at those points, he figures to give it characteristics of its long-dead relatives.

On a genetic level, the differences between humans and other animals are small--switchpoints are what make humans human and not a fish or a fruit fly.

The amount of information that is coming out of research like this is amazing and is a stunning validation of evolutionary theory. On the other hand, if the chicken turns into a spider (think very very very bad Star Trek Next Generation episode), we have some work to do.

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Now playing: The Alan Parsons Project - Don't Answer Me
via FoxyTunes

Angola Opens Up

There is a report that, now that the civil war has ended in Angola, palaeontological research is finally paying off there. Louise Redvers of Google News writes:

"Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology," explained Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils.

"Due to the war, there's been little research carried out so far, but now we're getting in finally and there's so much to find.

"In some areas there are literally fossils sticking out of the rocks. It's like a museum in the ground."

The first reports of dinosaur remains in Angola were made in the 1960s, but a bloody liberation struggle against the Portuguese followed by three decades of civil war covered the country in landmines and made it a no-go zone for researchers.

Following the 2002 peace deal, however, the land is quite literally opening up to fossil hunters who are piecing together the country's Jurassic past.

The biggest find to date was made in 2005 when Octavio Mateus from the New Lisbon University, also part of the PaleoAngola project, retrieved five bones from the front left leg of a sauropod dinosaur on the coast at Iembe.

To paraphrase Glen Reynolds, "Dig faster!"

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Now playing: Michael W. Smith - Somewhere Somehow
via FoxyTunes

Science, Ken Ham and Common Ground

Shelly Emling of the Atlanta Journal Constitution profiles Ken Ham of the Creation Museum in Kentucky as part of a larger article on the gap between science and creationism. Of Ham, she says this:

Ken Ham, whose Creation Museum in Kentucky just celebrated its second anniversary this weekend, has never been more sure that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that God created everything in six divinely ordered 24-hour time slots.

To Ham, it doesn’t matter that scientists have recently unveiled Ida —- the 47-million-year-old fossil hailed as the evolutionary link between modern primates and more distant species —- the latest in a string of significant fossils to be hyped by the media.

“No other book gives an account of origins as specifically as the Bible,” said Ham, whose museum just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati has attracted 720,000 visitors since opening in 2007.

Herein lies part of the problem, of course. It should matter. How much evidence does Ken Ham just ignore or dismiss out of hand? Here we have a primate fossil that is 95% complete, represents a primate that doesn't exist today, has not existed in the last two thousand years and is unlike any living primate. Is the thinking here that this simply represents yet another fossil that was resident on the Ark? How many species does that make, now?

The article continues with a discussion of different approaches to the problem, including the views of Francisco Ayala and Simon Conway-Morris but then ends with this howler:

Perhaps one day the debate over evolution and creationism will be settled. But I doubt it. The arguments on both sides are too persuasive. Still, one can hope.

The arguments on the creationism side are persuasive only if one knows absolutely nothing about geology, palaeontology or biology. That's what they're counting on.