Jeffrey Schwartz: Darwin's theory not evolved enough

Pitt anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz is the subject of an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Schwartz has always been somewhat of a maverick in the palaeoanthro community. This short article gives you an indication of why.

Intelligent Judging

George Annas writes an article for the New England Journal of Medicine called "Intelligent judging--evolution in the classroom and the courtroom," in which he argues that the science community needs to be prepared for a "fourth wave" of creationism in the future, to take a different form. According to Annas, the first three waves were: outlawing evolution education, creationism, and intelligent design. He believes that the fourth wave will show up in the form of the "teach the controversy" argument. As has been pointed out by many different writers, this unwittingly elevates the merits of the ID position to be on equal footing as mainstream science. As Annas notes:

Requiring public-school science teachers to teach specific religion-based alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution is just as bad, in the words of political comedian Bill Maher, as requiring obstetricians to teach medical students the alternative theory that storks deliver babies.

Indeed. Hat tip to Marilyn Savitt-Kring.

Genetics, Ya Gotta Love It!!

That last two weeks have been somewhat hellish for the Kidder family. Two weeks ago, during a routine 4-year-old check up, our pediatrician discovered a supraclavicular lump on the left side of my daughter Madeline's neck. Concerned, he did the normal blood work to see if anything was going on internally. The bloodwork came back clean, so he referred us to an orthopaedic specialist. When we got there, the specialist said "right church, wrong pew." It was his opinion that it was a lymphatic adenopathy and he set up an appointment for an MRI.

Enlarged lymph nodes under your chin are not usually a problem. Enlarged lymph nodes in your abdomen are not usually a problem. These usually reflect some kind of infection but nothing usually serious. Enlarged supraclavicular lymph nodes ALMOST ALWAYS reflect something very serious going on. If the lump is on the right side, it almost always means lymphoma.

The MRI was done last Thursday and we spent the weekend not knowing what was going on. In the meantime, my daughter played happily and was perfectly norrmal. Monday afternoon, we got the news. When they aimed the cameras at the lump, the reflection came back as healthy normal bone, but not where bone ought to be. At the follow-up visit with the orthopaedic surgeon, everybody sat down and had a good laugh.

My daughter has a cervical rib. Ordinarily, you have seven cervical vertebrae, twelve thoracic vertebrae and five lumbar vertebrae. Sometimes someone will have a sixth lumbar vertebra but that is rare. The ribs usually begin with the first thoracic vertebra. In 0.5% of the population, however, a rib grows out of the seventh cervical vertebra. That is what is going on with Madeline. So, long story short, she is fine. It is something we will have to watch to make sure it doesn't interfere with her range of motion or cause nerve damage, but all's well that ends well.

Not Quite a Clean Break

Two news outlets, the WaPo and the BBC, report on new studies involving the ape-human split. According to the story, new DNA analysis indicates that the human female X sex chromosome is 1.2 million years younger than the other human chromosomes. The money quote in the WaPo article, written by David Brown, is:

If this theory proves correct, it will mean modern people are descended from something akin to chimp-human hybrids. That is a new idea, and it challenges the prevailing view that hybrids tend to die out.

From the BBC article comes this gem:

A US team says its results hint at the possibility that interbreeding occurred between the two lines for thousands, even millions, of years. This hybridisation would have been important in swapping genes for traits that allowed the emerging species to survive in their environments, explain the scientists affiliated to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Harvard Medical School.

I think a lot of this pretty speculative and will wait for the Nature article. It certainly is provacative, however.

Tattersall's Take on the Road to Humanity

Writing in the journal Nature, Ian Tattersall reviews a new book by Ann Gibbons, called The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. In the review, he notes the following:

But to complicate matters further, palaeoanthropology is too often seen as a sort of zero-sum game, with the result that published specimens are often vigorously defended from the eyes of rival scientists, making it impossible to test the describer's published assertions. What other branch of science keeps it primary data secret?

It is this that certainly spurs on YECs like Marvin Lubenow, who argue that we deal in a world of illusory evidence. Not good.

"Evolution's Bottom Line"

Holden Thorp in an op-ed for the NYT writes of the far-reaching consequences of evolutionary theory. Two things leap off the page. One addresses the ongoing work in genetics:

Since evolution has been the dominant theory of biology for more than a century, it's a safe statement that all of the wonderful innovations in medicine and agriculture that we derive from biological research stem from the theory of evolution. Recent, exciting examples are humanized antibodies like Remicade for inflammation and Herceptin for breast cancer, both initially made in mice. Without our knowledge of the evolution of mice and humans and their immune systems, we wouldn't have such life-saving and life-improving technologies.

The other, the consequences of the debate in schools:

One Kansas biology teacher, a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers, told Popular Science magazine that students from Kansas now face tougher scrutiny when seeking admission to medical schools. And companies seeking to innovate in the life sciences could perhaps be excused for giving the Sunflower State a miss: one Web site that lists companies looking for workers in biotechnology has more than 600 hiring scientists in California and more than 240 in Massachusetts. Kansas has 11.

Its time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Hat tip to RL Macklin.

Evolution: the Lighter Side

Scott Feschuk writes for MacCleans that Evolution Theory Always Comes Back to Van Halen. An example:

Item: a massive star that exploded soon after the dawn of time has been detected and viewed by astronomers, even though the event took place 12.8 billion years ago (or, for those who hold a creationist view, last Wednesday).

He notes that this is an ongoing series. Hopefully so!

A Case in Point

Back in a previous post, I mentioned an article by Dick Fischer titled Young-earth creationism: a literal mistake. In it, he noted,

Why have so many conservative Christians adopted young-earth creationism? The answer lies in this: while YECs can be criticized for using flawed logic in this particular area, in other areas of Christian doctrine, in general, their theology is quite sound.

That particular perspective was brought home to me today when I received an advert for a new Ann Coulter book titled Godless: the Church of Liberalism," in which she reportedly tackles "Darwinism." Now, I have a tendency to enjoy Ann Coulter's columns, if nothing else because they are thought-provoking, even if I might find some of her conclusions suspect. However, as good a political analyst as she may be, I am reasonably sure that she is not an evolutionary biologist, nor does she work in the field. I probably ought to read the book before I make a snap judgment, but every blinkin' time I encounter a non-scientist tackling evolutionary biology, it goes badly. This is why I don't write about politics.

Answers in Creation web site

I have come across a huge web site called Answers in Creation. The self-proclaimed viewpoint is as follows:

The purpose of this index is to list all the claims of young earth creationists, and provide rebuttals to those claims. Although the idea for this index came from the TalkOrigins.org listing of creationist claims, this index differs in that it answers the arguments from an old earth creationist perspective.

The gentleman who runs the site is Greg Nyman, a member of the Affiliation of Christian Geologists. Many of the articles are written by Mr. Nyman, although he links to other writers, such as Hugh Ross, Glenn Morton and Kevin Henke. There is a wealth of information here.

Discovery Institute Scrambling

The Seattle Times (hometown newspaper for the Discovery Institute) reports that things are not well after Dover.

"Dover is a disaster in a sense, as a public-relations matter," said Bruce Chapman, a former Seattle city councilman and founder of the Discovery Institute, the country's primary supporter of intelligent design. "It has given a rhetorical weapon to the Darwinists to say a judge has settled this," he said.

The Times writer, David Postman, reveals that even staunch conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh have joined in.

"Let's make no mistake," Limbaugh said on his radio show. "The people pushing intelligent design believe in the biblical version of creation. Intelligent design is a way, I think, to sneak it into the curriculum and make it less offensive to the liberals."

Probably the most stinging critique came from Paul Chesser, of the John Locke Foundation, who remarked:

"Why do Christians wage combat over taking Christ out of Christmas but employ weak dodge-and-parry tactics when educating their kids about life's beginnings?" Chesser wrote in a column headlined "Cowering Christians."

Ouch.

Hat tip to Marilyn Savitt-Kring.

How Evolutionary Biologists Reconstruct History

Robert Cooper, writing a bit back for the American Biology Teacher (2004) makes a few interesting observations regarding how the predictive sciences such as geology and evolutionary biology have been deemphasized in favor of the observable (for lack of a better term) sciences such as physics and chemistry. He cites Rudolph and Stewart (1998), who argue:

The difficulties [19th century] British scientists had reconciling the explanatory success of evolution by natural selection with its apparent methodological shortcomings reveal a great deal about the gap between the nature of science as practiced and the nature of science as perceived.
Cooper notes that this is still the mindset not just of the modern creation movement but of many who practice and teach science, what he calls "widespread myths about the nature of science." (103)

According to Cooper, evolutionary studies fall into two categories, those that analyze the patterns of evolution and those that analyze the processes of evolution. In hominid studies, it could be reasonably argued, process is inferred from pattern. For example, in the studies involving the earliest hominids, we can infer the pattern of speciation based on the fossil remains over time in a particular area. As noted in a post below about the Ardipithecus to Australopithecus transition in the Middle Awash River valley, we have fossil remains that suggest in situ evolution through a range of eight species of hominids. We would then attempt to determine why the speciation occurred and what the factors might have been that triggered it.

Cooper has some recommendations for all science teachers: move beyond the simplistic notion that there is a universal scientific method, and incorporate scientific conclusions based on historical sciences. I have often thought that an analogy to a crime scene investigation is a wonderful way of teaching the historical sciences and have employed it in my teaching. Cooper also mentions this. He concludes with:

The myth that scientists usually perform controlled laboratory experiments to test hypotheses, and that this experiment work is somehow "more scientific" than historical or comparative studies, is simply incorrect. In addition, the belief that it is impossible to know anything about what happened in the past since no one was there to observe is a serious misconception about the nature of science that hinders the acceptance of evolution.

Quite true.


Literature Cited

Cooper, Robert A. 2004. How evolutionary biologists reconstruct history:

patterns and processes. The American Biology Teacher 66(2): 101-108)

Rudolph, J.L. and Stewart, J. 1998. Evolution and the nature of science: On

the historical discord and its implications for education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 35: 1069-1089.

A funny cartoon courtesy of Chris Muir

Chris Muir does the Day by Day cartoon, which tackles a range of issues from a mostly right perspective. Today, he tackled evolution. Quite humorous.

Scientific Illiteracy

Liza Gross of the Public Library of Science has written a piece entitled Scientific Literacy an the Partisan Takeover of Biology. Largely a chronicling of the career of Jon D. Miller, Director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School, the article provides some information that Miller has collected:

Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48% to 39%), as has the proportion who accept it (45% to 40%). Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.

He has also found that:

One-third of Americans think evolution is "“definitely false"”; over half lean one way or another or aren't sure. Only 14% expressed unequivocal support for evolution" a result Miller calls "shocking."”

Perhaps most depressingly:

And in a 2005 survey measuring the proportion of adults who accept evolution in 34 European countries and Japan, the United States ranked 33rd, just above Turkey. No other country has so many people who are absolutely committed to rejecting the concept of evolution, Miller says. "“We are truly out on a limb by ourselves."”

Miller suggests that the current spate of anti-evolutionism is largely Republican-driven (a conclusion that, I think, has some merit but needs more study). What I have found is that scientific illiteracy knows no political bounds. People from all walks of life tend to be remarkably ignorant of scientific knowledge. I have often thought, though, that if the Republican party links itself to pro-ID side, it will be seen as anti-scientific and anti-intellectual and lose voters like myself, who might vote independent or Libertarian. 2008 is going to be interesting.

No Free Lunch Again

Shortly after William Dembski unleashed No Free Lunch on the world, H. Allen Orr, biology professor at the University of Rochester, wrote an inciteful review of the work. In it, he notes Dembski's principle objection to evolutionary mechanics, that they are incapable of generating specified complexity. No evolutionary outcome would be any better than any other. Only a designer could make an eye or a flagella--Darwinism cannot. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. As Orr puts it:

The problem with all this is so simple that I hate to bring it up. But here goes: Darwinism isn't trying to reach a prespecified target. Darwinism, I regret to report, is sheer cold demographics. Darwinism says that my sequence has more kids than your sequence and so my sequence gets common and yours gets rare. If there's another sequence out there that has more kids than mine, it'll displace me. But there's no pre-set target in this game.

He also notes another problem with Dembski's interpretation: the lack of consideration of deep time.

But now change the environment. This shifts the landscape's topography: a sequence's fitness isn't cast in stone but depends on the environment it finds itself in. Each population may now find it's no longer at the best sequence and so can evolve somewhat even if the new landscape is still rugged. Different populations will go to different sequences as they live in different environments. Now repeat this for 3.5 billion years. Will this process yield interesting products? Will we get different looking beasts, living different kinds of lives? My guess is yes. Dembski's is no. And that is, I suppose, fine. He's entitled to his guess. But don't let him tell you that it follows ineluctably from some mathematical theorem because it doesn't.

Orr also notes the logical fallacy in the concept of irreducible complexity:

Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required.

It is a good article, full of answers to questions that very few people want to ask about the logic of the current ID focus. Read the whole thing.

Ominous News from Canada

The Journal Nature reports that a researcher seeking to address the question of Intelligent Design belief among Canadian citizens has had his granting request denied in part because members of the granting agency are unconvinced of the veracity of evolutionary theory. Hannah Hoag, writing for Nature states about the rejection:

The letter stated that, among its reasons for rejection, the committee felt there was inadequate "justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct."

To this, the researcher, Brian Alters, commented: "It illustrates how the misunderstanding of evolution and intelligent design can go to all levels of Canadian society." Another researcher, Philip Sadler, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, quipped:

"If he was trying to answer the question as to whether all this popularization had had an impact, he just saved the government $40,000. He found the evidence without doing the study."

Troubling indeed.

A New Find in the Middle Awash

A new set of finds of Australopithecus anamensis in the Middle Awash River region have filled in some gaps in the evolutionary sequence of early hominids. As Foxnews reports, notable is the fact that eight successive species are now represented in the region. Berhane Asfaw, one of the principle excavators, states:

"We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time...One form evolved to another. This is evidence of evolution in one place through time."

Palaeoanthropologist Tim White also notes:

"It's like 12 frames of a home movie, but a home movie covering 6 million years."

The corresponding Nature article (White, et al., 2006. Asa Issie, Aramis and the origin of Australopithecus. Nature, 440: 883-889) is a bit more illuminating. The photo that is provided shows maxillary and mandibular remains, associated teeth and a right femoral shaft. The teeth are larger than that of Ardipithecus ramidus but are similar to those of Au. afarensis and Au. anamensis. The authors also write:

In an assessment of fossils from Kanapoi (3.9-4.2 Myr ago), the anagenetic series Ar. ramidus, Au. anamensis and Au. afarensis has been hypothesized. The evidence reported here from the Afar Rift consitutes a strong test from a single stratigraphic succession that fails to falsify this hypothesis. Middle Awash Au. anamensis is anatomically intermediate in many characters between the earlier Ar. ramidus and the later Au. afarensis from the same study area. (White, et al. 2006)

The readers are also treated to an exposition on anagenetic speciation versus punctuated equilibrium and how each can be recognized in the fossil record. This is described by Stephen Jay Gould:

We can distinguish the punctuations of rapid anagenesis from those of branching speciation by invoking the eminently testable criterion of ancestral survival following the origin of a descendant species. If the ancestor survives, then the new species has arisen by branching. If the ancestor does not survive, then we must count the case either as indecisive, or as good evidence for rapid anagenesis--but, in any instance, not as evidence for punctuated equilibrium. (Gould, S.J. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 795)

White, et al. do not venture a guess as to which the Middle Awash deposits represent. Interestingly, according to the authors, a trigger has not been identified for the origin of the australopithecines. In other words, we have a pretty good idea when it happened. We do not, at present, know why. ID perhaps?

Catching up again: Clarence Menninga and Apparent Age

I am digging into the past almost twenty years for an article on the creationist doctrine of "apparent age" because it seems that no progress has been made since then. There are still creationists that subscribe to this position.

In 1988 Clarence Menninga (Calvin College, again!) wrote a piece called Creation, Time and "Apparent Age" in which he assesses this viewpoint. He lays it out thusly:

In the face of mounting evidence that the Earth and the universe are billions of years old, some Christians have tried to preserve the traditional notion of a recent creation of the universe by appealing to Scripture, with a highly literalistic understanding of the early chapters of Genesis, and a view of the genealogies found in the Bible as being fairly strictly continuous. Meanwhile, the conclusion that the universe is very old has become more and more firmly established on the basis of consistent and persuasive evidence from the study of our world carried on in several diverse fields of science. In an effort to preserve an interpretation of the Bible as telling us that the universe really is young and still recognize the existence of the scientific evidence of the age of the universe. some Christians have suggested what has become known as the "apparent age" view. That view holds that the universe was created recently with a built-in appearance of age, and so it looks old by whatever means of age measurement we apply to it, but in reality it is young.

Menninga lists several "objections" to the argument of apparent age. Probably the most important one, though, is the loss of confidence in God's covenant with His children. Others have complained that the argument from appearance of age puts God in the position of deceiver, a view i have sympathy with. Hugh Ross, in his book Fingerprint of God, points out that if the universe really is young but looks old, then it raises other problems. If the stars are recently created, the record of the light traveled from them to us is fabricated as well--God didn't just magically make the stars appear, but made it look as though the light took x-light years to reach us. This is deception of the highest order.

Alan Hayward takes a different tack. In Creation and Evolution, he suggests that, if the universe really does present the appearance of age, then what are we to make of all of this "evidence" that the recent earth creationists find? Does this evidence actually reflect places where God forgot to age things? God is then reduced from the omnipotent God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the bumbling, incompetent god of Time Bandits. You can hear Randall saying:

You see, to be quite frank, Kevin, the fabric of the universe is far from perfect. It was a bit of a botched job, you see. We only had seven days to make it.

Sort of takes the air out of things, doesn't it? Read the whole article.

A Voice for Evolution as Science

Once upon a time (1992) the American Scientific Evolution tackled the question of evolution in an official way. Although it doesn't actually say much, they do note:

Science teachers and scientists concerned about the future of science should (a) recognize the limited scope of science and resist exploitation of science by persons with political, philosophical, or religious agendas; and, while celebrating scientific accomplishments, (b) point out unsolved problems and encourage the investigation of such problems.

Good words of wisdom.

Bill Nye, the Science Guy!

Bill! Bill! Bill! Now we will enter our (reverb)Blog of Science! Bill Nye spoke at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas. As Tribune-Herald staff writer Tim Woods notes, apparently during a talk on all kinds of cool topics like Mars exploration, global warming and energy, he also mentioned that God had created two lights, one to rule the day and one to rule the night. He then, correctly, pointed out that the sun was the only actual light. The moon simply reflected the light of the sun. Woods states that, at that point, several of the audience left the room, irked at the notion The Science Guy thought the Bible was not word for word literal. One woman is reported to have said, as she left the room: "We believe in God."

C'MON PEOPLE!!! Is your faith that shallow?? If the moon really is a star like the sun, why is it only half there sometimes?

Slacktivist has a good commentary on the event here. I would also encourage you to read Glenn Morton's Why I Left Recent Earth Creationism. Glenn writes a good deal about this topic. Many of his pieces and other hair-raising stories can be found here.

Hat tip to Jon Reid.

WAY off topic!!

Father Jonathan Morris has written a wonderful piece in Foxnews about the "Gospel of Judas." He uses as his springboard, an execrable article on the subject (which I read) by the Grey Lady, herself. Here is a bit of what he had to say:

For all their purported progressive thinking, one would surmise the 17 centuries separating the Gnostic authors of the “Gospel of Judas” (self-proclaimed “progressives” of their day) and the editors at the Times would produce greater evolution of thought. But the paper’s Friday edition read like the diary of an anti-Christian Gnostic apologist of the late second century AD. For when it comes to Christianity, both are incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction.

As Father Morris notes, the New York Times spin machine was in full swing for the article. Typically, they got few things correct. The Times has been doing a lot of that lately. He also notes:

But on this story about the foundation of Christianity, the paper’s unwillingness to trust eyewitness accounts is baffling. I must say, the silliness of giving the same credibility to the “Gospel of Judas” as to the Christian Gospels is unworthy of the venerable tradition of my morning paper. When I read dumbed-down, ideology-driven articles like this one, the coffee, even good coffee, just doesn’t taste the same.

He has given the paper more credit than they, perhaps, deserve. The Times has become increasingly agenda-oriented and ideologically-driven in recent years.

Eugene Volokh also has some scathing words of wisdom for the media's coverage of the "Gospel of Judas" here.

I have written about Father Morris before. He wrote a nice little article on Intelligent Design in December which I linked on this blog. When I wrote to him, thanking him for it, he responded with the following:

"James,  thanks for the e-mail and for posting the link.  God bless all of your work.
Father Jonathan"

Nifty!!  Thanks again, Father Morris.