On The Wings of Evolution

Dan Vergano of ooh-es-ahh-heute (USAToday) has a story on how wings may have evolved in insects. They plainly have creationists in the cross-hairs:

Wings allowed bugs to become the most widespread critters on Earth, about three-quarters of all animals, but the fossil record offers no clues to their origin. Wings probably already graced the oldest known insect fossil, Rhyniognatha hirsti, about 400 million years ago.

Some religious writers — such as Matthew Vanhorn of Apologetics Press in Montgomery, Ala., who wrote that the "evolution of insect wings and subsequent flight is a concept impossible for evolutionists to explain" in a 2004 essay on the topic — have seen holes in evolutionary biology in the lack of an insect wing explanation.

But it turns out that just two genes may explain insect wings, reports a team led by Japan's Nao Niwa of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe.

According to the story, the authors used mayflies and wingless bristletail insects, which are considered to be more primitive in their genetic makeup when compared to animals like butterflies. Here is what they found:

A gene called "vestigial" and another called "wingless" (so named because it prevents wing growth when mutated in fruit flies) work together during the insects' embryonic growth to sprout wings in mayflies, and fail to fire up in the silverfish.

Both genes already were present in the wingless ancient ancestor of today's flying bugs, the researchers note, because they had other jobs to do. One plays a role in development of body shell sheets (vestigial) and the other helps limb growth (wingless). Add them together and you have a shelled limb — a wing, they conclude.

This is still a bit sketchy but it is a workable, testable model for examining this aspect of evolution.

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New Gordon Glover Design Detectives Video Up

Gordon Glover has launched another of his "Design Detectives" videos over at his YouTube channel. We are now up to number four and they are all a hoot. This video is on the "chicken or the egg" problem in intelligent design.

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Francisco Ayala Wins Templeton Award, Discovery Institute Responds

Francisco Ayala, the genetics and evolutionary biology professor at UC Irvine and former Dominican priest, has won the 2009 Templeton Award, given for work in "affirming spirituality." The story, by Mitchell Landsberg of the L.A. Times, notes:

As a young doctoral student in the 1960s, Francisco J. Ayala was surprised to learn that Darwin's theory of evolution appeared to be less widely accepted in the United States than in his native Spain, then a profoundly conservative and religious country.

Ayala brought a unique sensibility to the topic, because he had been ordained as a Catholic priest before undertaking graduate studies in evolution and genetics. What he believed then, and has spent his career espousing, is that evolution is consistent with the Christian faith.

On Thursday, Ayala, an acclaimed researcher at UC Irvine, won the 2010 Templeton Prize, awarded annually in recognition of achievements in affirming spirituality. The prize is worth $1.6 million, which Ayala said he would give to charity.

Ayala's work is very thought-provoking and deeply moving. He is an a brilliant geneticist and evolutionary biologist and has embraced both his faith in God and the science of evolution. He is also not supportive in any way of Intelligent Design. Recently, he wrote a review of Stephen Meyer's book Signature of the Cell, which appeared on the BioLogos page. His comment, in that review, is currently being echoed in Steve Matheson's ongoing review over at Quintessence of Dust. Ayala wrote:

The keystone argument of Signature of the Cell is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms. I agree. And so does every evolutionary scientist, I presume. Why, then, spend chapter after chapter and hundreds of pages of elegant prose to argue the point? It is as if in a book about New York, the author would tell us that New York is not in Europe, and then dedicate most of the book to advancing evidence that, indeed, truly, New York is not in Europe.

His award reception has caught the attention (of course) of the Discovery Institute's David Klinghoffer, who has responded. He writes:

Advocates of a supposedly religion-friendly Darwinism have seized on the idea of God’s acting through secondary causes. In his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, Ayala argues that since God acts through intermediate causation to create geological features (mountains, rivers), why may the same analysis not be applied to the evolution of life? In the latter context, he insists that the idea of God’s acting through “specific agency…amounts to blasphemy.” For such direct control would imply that God bears responsibility for all the cruelties, pains, and dysfunctions that have accompanied the unfolding of life’s history.

But there is a real and important difference between secondary causation of the kind that results in the formation of rivers and mountains, on one hand, and that which, according to the evolutionary model, results in life in all its forms. The operation of geological forces follows paths described by physical laws. Whatever role chance plays, the overall process is predictable. The religious believer may reasonably picture God, having authored those laws, as the creator of geological features, having planned and foreseen what those features would be. Similarly, He is the author of those laws that govern patterns in the weather, in the alternation of the seasons, of day and night, and so on. God could thus confidently tell Noah that “So long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:6).

Here, you can sense that Klinghoffer is setting up a dichotomy between what is real science (geology) and what is fake science (evolution). Here again is this meme that every scientist in all organized disciplines have gotten everything right and are performing honest science EXCEPT those evolutionists, who have gotten everything wrong. He even makes a point of mentioning that these geological laws are predictable. Then he brings down the hammer:

But life — including human life — is different. If Darwin and the vast majority of his modern advocates are right, then the path of life's evolution was inherently unpredictable — not wholly random, since natural selection plays its role, but generated by chance and governed by no plan, design, or teleology. Ayala himself has said this very clearly: “It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process — natural selection — without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”

This is so basically wrong as to be almost unbelievable. The sheer force of evolutionary theory is the means by which it is able to predict results. It was predicted (by Darwin) that the earliest human precursors would be found in Africa because that is where our closest relatives (gorillas and chimpanzees) live. That is exactly where they were found. It was predicted that a tetrapod intermediate would be found in the shallow-sea Devonian deposits of the Canadian arctic because that is when such a creature should have arisen. In 2005, Neil Shubin found Tiktaalik. It was predicted that the likely explanation for the chromosomal number discrepancy between the higher apes and humans would be the discovery of two fused chromosomes in humans. that is exactly what was found. The examples are almost endless. Life is not different from geological processes. Both derive from environmental changes.

A short aside on semantics: He comments that evolution is controlled by "no plan, design, or teleology." How does he know this? Did he have a "road to Damascus" moment? In this, he has confused randomness and stochasticity, a critical mistake that seems to be common in attacks on "neo-Darwinism." A process that is random is truly random—there is no plan at all. Stochasticity means that a process is non-deterministic. There might or might not be a plan but we cannot discern it. The two are very different. All evolutionary creationists agree that God is behind evolution but that it might not be possible to determine exactly what His plan is or why. Under Klinghoffer's definition, there can be no God involved at all.

But that is not the real problem here. The problem is that evolution is not random, just as geological processes are not random. The same physical laws that govern how the terrain is going to behave under the influence of wind, water and temperature govern evolutionary changes. There is measured directional selection in organisms that live in different environments, just as there are measured directional changes in those environments over time. One does not happen without the other and both yield predictions, not just about what one will see in the future but what was present in the past. Because we know what shallow-sea environments look like today, we can spot them at geological periods in the past. Because we know that there were fish in early and middle Devonian shallow-seas and tetrapods in late Devonian shallow seas, we can predict what we will find in between.

Darwin wasn't showing that there was no God. He was showing that in trying to explain "descent with modification" of animals, the same physical laws that govern geology govern biology as well. The changes could be quantified in a biological sense and the theory could be used to answer hypothetical questions. This was exactly contrary to the message of William Paley, who argued that some things could not be explained in any other way than by production through divine fiat. This is, almost to a 't' the modern message of Intelligent Design. Klinghoffer continues:

The theistic evolutionary view of those like Francisco Ayala and Kenneth Miller (when he is in that mood) is just a revived variant of Gnosticism. According to that ancient heresy, a hidden, alien, passive Supreme Being coexists with a creator Demiurge, a blind watchmaker (to borrow the title of Richard Dawkin’s book), unconscious, indifferent, and morally irrelevant.

Klinghoffer plainly hasn't met any "theistic evolutionists" (or is it "evolutionary creationists?"). If he had, he would know this is just nonsense. No EC that I am familiar with is bashful about his worship of Jesus Christ or of incorporating that faith into his or her life and including the science as well. Does Klinghoffer know the intimate details of Ayala's and Miller's relationships with God?

So Orchids to Francisco Ayala, who has shown that his Christian faith and his science can walk hand in hand and onions to David Klinghoffer, for another Discovery Institute hatchet job.

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Possible New Hominid Species Discovered in Siberia

Reuters is running with a story about genetic research being done on hominid material discovered in Siberia that, according to researchers, suggests the presence of a new species of hominid that lived until around 30 thousand years ago. The author writes:

"It really just looked like something we had never seen before," Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told a telephone briefing.

"It was a sequence that looked something like humans but really quite different."

Writing in Nature, Krause and colleagues said they sequenced DNA from the mitochondria, a part of the cell, which is passed down virtually intact from a woman to her children. They compared it to DNA from humans, Neanderthals and apes.

The sequence indicates the hominin's line diverged about a million years ago from the line that gave rise to both humans and Neanderthals and that split about 500,000 years ago.

I always have grave misgivings when geneticists, in the complete absence of diagnostic palaeontological material, proclaim that a new species has been discovered. For one thing, we don't have the genetic sequences for the intermediates between the find in Siberia and contemporary humans. How many substitutions denote a different species? This is where systematics can get away from us. If we don't have the intermediates, how do we know where the proper branch is? To be fair, the researchers, themselves, are reticent to go the 'new species' route yet but it seems they are leaning that way.

Earliest North American Bird

PR Newswire is reporting on the discovery of the earliest fossilized bird in North America. The story notes:

The new shoreline-inhabiting species bridges a gap in time and space between older enantiornithine birds found in Europe and Asia, and younger species from North and South America. Scientists had suspected these kinds of birds should have been in North America at the time, but direct evidence of their presence had been lacking until now.

More pieces of the puzzle.

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The Evolution of On the Origins of Species

Ben Fry has come up with an interesting take on how Charles Darwin's book On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection changed over time. As Mr. Fry notes:

Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin's ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.

It is a little hard to figure out exactly what is going on at first blush but if you spend some time with it, it holds a wealth of information. Each column is a chapter of the book and you can see how things were added based on the color-key at the bottom from the first through the sixth edition. Neat.

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Laetoli Footprints Those of Completely Bipedal Human

Thirty years ago, a set of footprints was discovered in an ash layer at the African site of Laetoli and dated to 3.6 million years ago. This corresponded to the time range of Australopithecus afarensis but it was not sure whether or not this reflected the gait of afarensis, which was, at the time, thought to be somewhat bent-kneed and not truly bipedal in a modern sense. Now, Science Daily news has a story that reconstruction simulation research has determined that those individuals that made the tracks walked bipedally in a modern fashion. The author writes:

Since the Laetoli tracks were discovered, scientists have debated whether they indicate a modern human-like mode of striding bipedalism, or a less-efficient type of crouched bipedalism more characteristic of chimpanzees whose knees and hips are bent when walking on two legs.

To resolve this, [David] Raichlen and his colleagues devised the first biomechanical experiment explicitly designed to address this question.

The team built a sand trackway in Raichlen's motion capture lab at the UA and filmed human subjects walking across the sand.

"Based on previous analyses of the skeletons of Australopithecus afarensis, we expected that the Laetoli footprints would resemble those of someone walking with a bent knee, bent hip gait typical of chimpanzees, and not the striding gait normally used by modern humans," Raichlen said.

"But to our surprise, the Laetoli footprints fall completely within the range of normal human footprints," he added.

This is the next step from the bipedal gait found in Ardipithecus, which may have been reflected in the earliest australopithecine, A. anamensis and, perhaps, early A. afarensis. By this point, Bipedalism was the preferred means of getting around.

New Smithsonian Human Origins Exhibit

The Smithsonian Institution has unveiled their new human origins exhibit and if ever there was a reason for a trip to D.C., this is it. Dan Vergano of USA Today has the story:

Fantastic it is. A glittering time tunnel greets entrants with its portraits of early human species from the last 6 million years. Throngs of visitors take turns pawing the real-scale model skulls of humanity's ancestors, set on swivels at the entrances.The exhibit is the Smithsonian's effort to tell the story of human evolution, from the ape-like Sahelanthropus tchadensis to Homo sapiens.

Light and airy, with the wired-in feel of an Apple store (terminals and gadgets abound) instead of a stuffy cabinet of wonders, the exhibit features original artifacts such as the first Cro-Magnon man skull discovered, cast skeletons including Homo floresiensis (a.k.a. "hobbits") and Homo erectus, interactive theaters and even a vividly-recreated "cave art" wall. "They are using everything," said curator and paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, buffeted by visitors on the exhibit's second day.

The article is descriptive but lacking in images so one is invited to imagine what the exhibits look like. As if to provoke a response where none was needed, USA Today asked Ken Ham what he thought:

As for creationists' take on the exhibit? "I haven't really paid too much attention to it," says Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. Famed for its juxtaposition of people and dinosaurs, the museum promotes a literal reading of the Old Testament in its view of human and the Earth's origins. "I'm amused how much the (Smithsonian) exhibit cost. We built a whole museum for that much," Ham says.

For anyone keeping score, the Smithsonian's Hall of Human Origins measures 15,000 square feet and the Creation Museum encompasses 70,000 square feet of exhibits.

Warming to his topic, Ham called it "child abuse" for the Smithsonian to "promote the secularist view that people are just animals. So, if you are an animal, you might as well do anything you want."

Aside from the fact that his response is simplistic in the extreme, it just wasn't necessary to include this bit of controversy in the story. Yes, controvery exists in this kind of exhibit but at least it seems that Rick Potts, the curator, is letting the exhibit speak for itself. A small video for class would be nice.

The Guardian Backpeddles

In the wake of Oliver Burkeman's ill-advised editorial in the Guardian, which was taken to the cleaners by Jerry Coyne and others, Adam Rutherford, one of the editors of Nature, has written a piece critiquing Burkeman's piece. Rutherford's tag line is appropos:

The media love to give undue coverage to flimsy attacks on evolutionary science. And leave others to clean up the mess.

Indeed. He continues:

Of course, there are plenty of things that Darwin got wrong. That is the nature of science, and indeed good scientists love to be wrong. It means that the theory will subsequently be refined to be more right. Darwin knew, as does every subsequent evolutionary biologist, that natural selection is the major, but not the only contributing factor to evolution.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini seem oblivious to this. They base their whole argument on either misunderstanding what real evolutionary biologists think, or by simply ignoring it. They describe processes in evolution that are easy to understand and are part of evolutionary theory, and quote them as a means to knock down that exact same theory. Repeating and enhancing these brainwrongs so elegantly, as Burkeman does, simply makes matters worse.

Burkeman's article, and the book from which he quotes, are just more in a long line of books and articles that are written about evolution by non-evolutionary biologists or non-palaeontologists who have no familiarity with either the data or the theory and are more interested in making names for themselves than getting the facts straight. Between nonsense like this and that created by the Discovery Institute, it is hard to know which mess to clean up first!

Australia's Fossil Graveyard

The Brisbane Times is reporting on the Billabong graveyard in western Australia that is teaming with fish. Deborah Smith writes:

DEATH came on a grand scale 360 million years ago in the state's central west.

When severe drought caused a large billabong to dry up, the fish in it expired en masse, forming a uniquely rich fossil site near Canowindra.

''There are literally thousands of fishes, crowded together like sardines in a gigantic tin,'' said Per Ahlberg, a palaeontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

The extraordinarily well-preserved fish fossils, excavated 17 years ago, have helped make Canowindra a popular tourist destination.

But the money is running out and there is much more to be found. Dr. Ahlberg believes that among the fish could be early tetrapod remains, which would make this area one of the earliest tetrapod locations.

The Testimony of a Former Young Earth Creationist

Terry Gray points to a post on the ASA site by Dr. Joshua Zorn, a former young earth creationist who went on to get a Ph.D. in physics. It is heartfelt and wrenching because, along with Glenn Morton's account, it reveals the struggles that many who discover that the young earth arguments don't have merit encounter. This post arose out of the discussion of my cross-post over on Steve Martin's blog about how to handle encounters with YEC supporters in a loving way. Joshua writes this:

While it is true that the results of the historical sciences are often tentative because we cannot go back in time to observe directly what happened, many of the results are quite secure and have impacted our lives. Success in locating oil deposits, an understanding of where earthquakes will occur, our understanding of historical passages in the Bible, a deeper understanding of human and animal behavior, and the powerful argument for the existence of a Creator based on the Big Bang (see The Creator and the Cosmos in the bibliography below) all depend on the accuracy of the results of the historical sciences such as historical geology, plate tectonics, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, history, cosmology, and behavioral ecology.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking the age of the earth is just a matter of "trusting God's Word" versus "trusting science." Christians need to, and every day do, trust both. The common error of rejecting many well-established results of science in favor of a certain biblical interpretation is not a valid Christian position. In the end, the truth will be a harmony which rejects neither the teachings of Scripture nor the well-established results of science. The results of science (properly interpreted) should never challenge the authority of Scripture, but they may cause us to reexamine our interpretation of Scripture. This is what I am pleading with young earthers to do.

Please read this article. It is very appropriate for the struggles that we as evolutionary creationists/theistic evolutionists go through every day. Even if you are not sympathetic to our position, it will help you understand where we are coming from.

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Armored Contemporary of the Trilobite

A rare fossil has been discovered in the middle of the city of Ottawa. Terra Daily reports on this amazing find:

Plumulitids were annelid worms - the group including earthworms, bristleworms and leeches, today found everywhere from the deepest sea to the soil in your yard - and although plumulitids were small they reveal important evidence of how this major group of organisms evolved.

Here is the reconstruction of what the critter is thought to have looked like. These animals likely had a kind of body armor that protected them from predators.

Another piece of the puzzle.







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Nonsense at the Guardian

It is always a bit amusing when a non-scientist uses a tired analogy to prove a point that he or she wants to make. Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian is just such a non-scientist. He has written a piece called Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong. That is an exceedingly tall order so let's see why he thinks this. He writes:

Inevitably, those of us who aren't professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn't waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin's theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

This reminds me of the simulated conversations between the student and the teacher in which the student asks a question that the teacher cannot answer and gets flustered about. What if it is wrong? Burkeman focuses on epigenetics, the idea that changes that occur to an individual during life can have an influence on their descendents in terms of their abilities to do certain things. He gives several examples, all mysteriously from Sweden, in which he mentions how this plays out in chicken populations and in children whose abilities seem to be holdovers from their parents. Here is the chicken example:

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze.

This simply isn't news. And it sure as heck isn't epigenetic. If a healthy woman undergoes a significant amount of stress, be it environmental or psychological, it affects her ability to conceive and bear a healthy child. Countless studies have shown this. What Burkeman doesn't say, and what is elucidated by Jerry Coyne, is that within two generations, the chickens had returned to normal, as had the children. The examples, therefore, demonstrate nothing whatsoever in terms of epigenetics.

It gets worse, however. He interviews one of the authors of the book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor about the inability of natural selection to power evolutionary change. Berkman writes:

I called Fodor and asked him to explain his point in language an infant school pupil could understand. "Can't be done," he shot back. "These issues really are complicated. If we're right that Darwin and Darwinists have missed the point we've been making for 150 years, that's not because it's a simple point and Darwin was stupid. It's a really complicated issue."

Fodor's objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn't "survival of the fittest" just mean "survival of those that survive", since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce? The American rightwing noisemaker Ann Coulter makes the point in her 2006 pro-creationist tirade Godless: The Church of American Liberalism. "Through the process of natural selection, the 'fittest' survive, [but] who are the 'fittest'? The ones who survive!" she sneers. "Why, look – it happens every time! The 'survival of the fittest' would be a joke if it weren't part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community."

This is facile. Every generation, there are changes that occur in any given environment and for every given generation, there are a host of mutations that express themselves in the population. Selection acts on the traits that are present in the individuals of a population in such a way that some traits are more selectively advantageous and some are not. Those that possess the advantageous traits tend to leave more offspring. This perpetuates (usually, not always) the existence of these traits in the population. This is not a hard concept.

Here is an example: in west Africa, malaria is prevalent. Recent advances have beaten back the disease but it still exists. Malarium falciparum, requires nice healthy red blood cells to do its job and it makes people with the parasite very ill. Conversely, many individuals in the area suffer from a deadly mutation that causes the red blood cells to form a "sickle" shape and, thus, not deliver enough oxygen to the cells. If you have two alleles for this trait, the trait expresses itself. If, however, you only have one allele that produces the sickle cell, you express the illness in a reduced form and it is manageable. The parasite doesn't like you, however, so you don't get malaria. Consequently, these two forms of the red blood cell gene are maintained in populations in West Africa.

During the slave trade, however, many African blacks were brought to the New World, where there is no malaria. As Darwin's theory of selection would predict, the frequency of the sickle cell allele is dropping like a rock. In the absence of selective pressure to maintain it in the population, it is being selected against. That is how selection works and that is how populations respond to selective pressures. There are countless examples of this in the natural world and even some examples of artificial selection to breed hardiness into a species of plants or animals. I have not read Fodor's and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book (too many other things to read) but if that is the gist of it, there is little point. Guardian readers would be best served by skipping this piece by Burkeman.

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New Research Pushes Back Occupation of Flores

It is now thought that the inhabitants of the island of Flores, from whence come the hominid euphemistically known as "the hobbit," may have been on the island as early as one million years ago. NewsDaily picks up the Reuters story:

In their paper, the researchers said they found 45 stone tools in Wolo Sege in the Soa basin in Flores.

Led by Adam Brumm at the Center of Archaeological Science in the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, the researchers used new dating methods and found that the stone tools were about a million years old.

"It is now clear, however, in light of the evidence from Wolo Sege, that hominins were present on Flores (a million years ago). This suggests that the non-selective, mass death of Stegondon sondaari and giant tortoise ... could represent a localized or regional extinction," they wrote in their paper.

A lot of evolution can happen in a million years.

Climate Change and Human Evolution

ScienceDaily is reporting on an initiative by the National Research Council to understand how past climatic disturbances affected human evolution. The author writes:

Climate and fossil records suggest that some events in human evolution -- such as the evolution of new species or movements out of Africa -- coincided with substantial changes in African and Eurasian climate. This raises the intriguing possibility that environmental factors affected or controlled our species' evolution. By altering the landscape, past changes in climate may have exerted pressures that led to genetic selection and innovation in humans.

This is not really a new idea. From Elizabeth Vrba's turnover pulse hypothesis in the 1980s to the notion of biocultural evolution, it is clear that humans have been affected in large ways by climatic shifts. While it is quite possible that bipedalism originated in a forest environment, with the expansion of the grasslands and savannas, it took off. Neandertals adapted to a ridiculously cold environment in Europe that saw the tundra line at Vienna and glaciers completely covering Great Britain and Scandinavia. When the weather got warmer during the Würm interstadial, the modern traits began to arise, through assimilation, replacement or hybridization.

What I think is at the root of this enterprise is a major effort to research palaeoclimatology, to see if it can be used to predict what might happen in the future. The problem I see is that there are no reasonable analogues. Neandertals were using flakes and rudimentary blades to hunt and cook food. We have had toasters for a hundred years. Research into palaeoclimatology will yield clues to how we evolved, but, perhaps, not how we would currently face an impending climate crisis—especially if we don't know what that is going to be.

Pictures of the Liang Bua Excavations

The Sacramento Bee has lots of high resolution pictures of the excavations taking place at Liang Bua, the site of the discovery of Homo floresiensis.

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The Nexus Gets More Heated

New Scientist has a story on the connection between global warming and creationism, which has everyone's dandruff up. Deborah MacKenzie writes:

SCHOOLS in three US states - Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota - have been told to teach alternatives to the scientific consensus on global warming. The moves appear to be allied to efforts to teach creationism in public schools. Such efforts have in the past been thwarted when courts ruled them unconstitutional, but those advocating the teaching of sound science may find it harder to fight misrepresentations concerning climate change.

Last week, South Dakota's state legislature adopted a bill which "urges" schools to take a "balanced approach" to teaching about climate change, because the science is "unresolved" and has been "complicated and prejudiced" by "political and philosophical viewpoints".

I can't tell if this is the "teach the controversy" ploy, the "teach the full range of scientific views" ploy, the "critical analysis/thinking" ploy or the "strengths and weaknesses" ploy. Who is telling them to do this, you ask? Why, those bastions of scientific learning, the state legislatures, of course. There is a concerted effort here that becomes plain later in the article:

Bundling warming with evolution in calls for "academic freedom" may make it harder to challenge these laws. Steve Newton of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, observes that the US constitution restricts the teaching of religious ideas in state schools, but not the teaching of bad science. A study last year found that evangelical Christians, who account for most creationists, are up to three times as likely as other Americans to deny that warming has human origins.

If this is the case, then contrary to what the Moderate Voice has to say, evolution education in this country may be in for the battle of its life. Much depends on whether the courts view the connection favorably or whether they will see this as grandstanding on the part of organizations promoting the watering-down of evolution education. It may be that if court cases arise, the plaintiffs can focus on the fact that the bill covers evolution and, therefore, is religiously-based. Hard to tell how this one is going to go.

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Growing Up Science-Literate in Japan

My guest column over at Steve Martin's blog is up, titled Growing up Science-Literate in Japan.
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Steve Matheson Takes on Signature in the Cell

Steve Matheson, professor of biology at Calvin College in Michigan has been going through Stephen Meyer's The Signature in the Cell. He is now on chapter seven. He points out something that probably bears some thinking about:

The question, it seems to me, is not whether superintelligent beings could have done this or that. It's whether we expect that they could have done this or that. And specifically, whether and when we are warranted in seriously considering their action as we formulate explanations. That's more tricky than most people seem to understand. On the one hand, superalien (aka supernatural) activity has a poor reputation as a scientific explanation, for very good reasons. On the other hand, there are situations we can imagine wherein superalien activity really is the only reasonable explanation at hand.

This is sort of a variant of "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." credited to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (one of the people suspected, by the way, of perpetrating the Piltdown forgery). The scientist in me just yelled

"yes, but it isn't testable."

This strikes at the nature of science. Is a scientific hypothesis testable or simply logical? As Steve notes, Meyer has to eliminate all possible causes for an explanation before the conclusion of Intelligent Design can be reached. As i wrote in his comments section: "Thus, while Meyer and other ID researchers can posit a supernatural design-by-fiat explanation for things like the flagellum or the blood clotting cascade, as long as there are reasonable evolutionary explanations, there is no compelling reason to consider Meyer's. Sure, you can't exclude ID from the realm of possibility but it provides no usefulness as an explanation. Such a dismissal is not necessarily simplistic. Given the current state of ID, we simply aren't warranted in considering the actions of a designer in formulating our explanations. Not yet."

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Acceptance of Human Evolution

And as if to drive home the point, UPI has a story recounting research that suggests that if students are accepting of an ancient age of the earth (conventional science), they will be more likely to accept human evolution as well. The story notes:

University of Minnesota scientists said their finding that a student who understands the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old is more likely to understand and accept human evolution could give educators a new strategy for teaching evolution.

Professors Sehoya Cotner and Randy Moore, along with D. Christopher Brooks of the university's Office of Information Technology, surveyed 400 students enrolled in several sections of an introductory biology course for non-majors.

Once one makes the jump to an old earth, the only alternative to accepting evolution is progressive creation. This presents its own problems in that a mechanism is still needed to actually put the animals on the earth progressively in a non-evolutionary way. Then the questions arise regarding junk DNA, ERVs, chromosomal fusions, and the massive amount of extinctions that have happened over the course of recorded time, for which supporters of progressive creation have no rejoinders.

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