Gallup has a poll on evolution and creation here. The opening paragraph sets the tone of the article:

PRINCETON, NJ -- The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.

The poll is heavily oriented toward the idea that humans did or did not evolve--presumably to spark a more visceral response from those questioned. This is, in fact, admitted later in the article. After all, evolution is okay as long as it happens over there. The other paragraph that struck me was this one, in which the stellar record of science education in this country is put on spectacular display:

It might seem contradictory to believe that humans were created in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years and at the same time believe that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. But, based on an analysis of the two side-by-side questions asked this month about evolution and creationism, it appears that a substantial number of Americans hold these conflicting views.

ya boy!

George Gilder's Take on Evolution

Realising somewhat after the fact that the George Gilder article is a year old and still not quite sure why my "up to the minute" search strategy retrieved it, it did provide an interesting, if somewhat disappointing read.

He makes a number of peculiar errors that, had he actually been familiar with either the literature of evolution or the workings of the biological world, he likely would not have made. For example, he states that evolution (what he calls "Darwinism," which ought to be a red flag right there) is "...tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives." This is too simplistic a criticism to be useful. It is like saying "he burns easily because he has red hair; he has red hair, so he burns easily." It is only tautological on the surface. It doesn't change the fact that people with red hair burn easily. He continues:

As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said that whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.

One wonders why he did not include Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood under the umbrella of eugenics, which it certainly was/is. Indeed, "Darwinism" could, and perhaps did inspire these movements. That does not make it bad science.

His arguments against the science of evolution take the form of those of William Dembski, the mathematician that is attached to the Discovery Institute:

I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer's materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations.

He then notes about DNA:

But even here, the deoxyribonucleic acid that bears the word is not itself the word. Like a sheet of paper or a computer memory chip, DNA bears messages but is chemistry is irrelevant to its content.

This is patently silly. He is arguing that the computer can be used to convey content of any conceivable kind and it is irrespective of the content itself. The problem is that the computer hardware is more than one level removed from the content. I have used the hardware to open a web page so I can type this post. There is no biological analogue to this. The closest thing might be the world/universe in which organisms (programs) reside. At the content level, however (the web page) every single word that I have written on this page results in a message. Indeed, if you reorder the words or sentences or even letters, the message is very different. At times, if I have mistakenly ordered a word ('osme' instead of 'some'), the resulting meaning is gibberish (can you say 'mutation?'). This is a mathematical, not biological understanding of reality. The world as a whole, does not care a whit whether a particular organism does or does not survive. It simply exerts the influence on that organism that either helps or hinders its survival. At the informational level, this is an elementary biological concept: the difference between genotype and phenotype. Genotype is the genetic underpinning of the organism, phenotype is how it is expressed in the organism (what it looks like). The organism, if it survives, then reproduces, imparting its genotype to its offspring, which will partly code for how the offspring will look, warts and all.

Over an over, he retreats to mathematical models to state that 64 codons cannot result from 20 amino acids, despite clear evidence that that is exactly what happens in the biological world. He states:

DNA can inform the creation of a brain, but a brain as an aggregation of proteins cannot generate the information in DNA. Wherever there is information, there is a preceding intelligence.

This is something along the lines of Romans 9:

"20But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' "

The catch is that Gilder is using an either-or argument when there is no a priori reason for doing so. DNA is perfectly capable of coding for the formation of a brain. It does so with ease. Whether or not there is a guiding intelligence behind this coding is a theological question, not a biological one. In this sense, like the arguments of William Dembski, the use of mathematics is just a smokescreen to sidestep proximate causation versus ultimate causation and is poor model for the biological world.

Okay...so it was a year ago that George Gilder wrote the article. I picked up the article and will see what Gilder was up to.

Here's my own poll.

Would you vote for a presidential candidate who subscribes to the Young Earth Creation model?
	Yes
	No
pollcode.com free polls

USA Today has a poll on evolution in today's online and print versions. Here are the actual results. Interestingly, the poll questions were phrased in an 'either-or' way--either old-earth evolutionism or recent earth creationism. There was not a question asking whether people believed in God and found evolution a good theory. That would have been interesting. The STRIKING result is that when asked if presidential candidates' views on evolution or creationism mattered in how they would, the vast majority of those polled said 'no.' Further, most of those polled answered that whether or not a candidate believed in creationism likely had no bearing on how good a president they would be. I would encourage you to look at all of the poll results.

24 new animal species have been found in Suriname. That's neat.

John Derbyshire and Evolution

The new issue of National Review has an article entitled "Evolution and Me," by George Gilder. I haven't picked up a copy of it yet. John Derbyshire comments on it here in what can only be termed an excellent, smack-on-the-money essay. He is not complementary of Gilder's reasoning. He also very succintly points out one of the principle problems in the debate:

It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.

He also notes the elephant in the living room:

George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing — published or not — I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.

Please, please, please read the whole thing.

The Chesterfield, Virginia School Board is endorsing ID.

Michael Behe has written a new book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Michael Ruse thinks it is the same old stuff. His review can be found in the most recent issue of Science. Since it is behind a subscription wall, I can only quote a small amount. He says:

I am afraid, though, that The Edge of Evolution is a bit of a sad sack. Nothing very much new, old arguments repeated, opposition ignored or dismissed without argument. What does surprise me is how emphatic Behe now is in putting a distance between himself and the older Creationists. For a start, he stresses his commitment to evolution. He thinks the world of life is as old as is claimed by any more conventional biologist. He also wants to give natural processes of change a role in life's history. For instance, the genetic mechanisms that led to the production of anti-freeze in fish that live in Arctic conditions are explicitly acknowledged to be those of random mutation sifted through the processes of natural selection, the survival of the fittest.

Not sure if I will pick it up or not.

...and the Irish Independent comments on the new museum.

The Guardian has an uncharacteristically level-headed piece on ID and creationism. A good read.

Peter Hitchens Speaks Out

Kind of off-topic but interesting nonetheless, Peter Hitchens has an editorial in the Daily Mail that is a reflection of the contrast of his brother Christopher's atheistic beliefs and his own, that of Christianity. A short quote:

Did the Supper at Emmaus really take place? How I hope that it did, but I do not know that it did, in the way that I know a British soldier has recently been flown home dead from Basra or Helmand, or even in the way that I know that another such soldier will soon make the same sad journey.

Many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did. Rather more recently I have realised the great warning against human arrogance that is contained in it, the serpent’s silky promise that if we reject the supposedly foolish, trivial restrictions imposed on us by an interfering, jealous nuisance of a God, then we shall be liberated.

As the serpent promises: "Ye shall be as gods." These may be the most important words in the whole Bible.

Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world.

I read Christopher Hitchens quite regularly. Ordinarily, he is a clear and concise thinker. Read the whole thing.

The Coalition for Excellence in Science and Math Education has a web site. Check it out.

GOP presidential candidate Sam Brownback weighs into the evolution/creation fray and (mostly) gets it right. It seems clear that he has read YEC literature and doesn't understand the differences and connections between microevolution and macroevolution, but his heart is in the right place. I realize that it is an NYT article and, as much as I despise the newspaper, this was a bit too good to pass up.

The University of Cincinnati goes on the offensive with classes on evolution for local area schools.

More bad news for Iowa State in a PR Newswire story.

Its open!

Cognitive Dissonance or Intellectual Dishonesty?

The Virginia Pilot has an intriguing story of a man named Marcus Ross who wrote a PhD dissertation at the University of Rhode Island in the subject of geosciences and doesn't believe a word of what he wrote.

Science tells Ross that the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago in a spectacular supernova explosion. Ross believes God created the Earth in seven days in 4004 B.C., a date many creationists reached by tracing biblical events backward .

The flood, according to Ross, occurred around 2300 B.C. and likely destroyed dinosaurs. He says the impregnation of broken fossils into rocks suggests the bones were slammed by a cataclysmic force of water.

Widely accepted methods of dating fossils may be flawed, according to Ross and other creationists. They say scientists derive dates from carbon-14 and potassium-argon testing based on an unproven assumption that the rate of decay remains constant over time.

The question being asked is whether someone who believes this and writes something entirely different in their dissertation is guilty of intellectual dishonesty or has internalized an almost insurmountable level of cognitive dissonance. How many geologists out there could stand up in front of a classroom and tell the class that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. with a straight face?

"We believe Dr. Ross is doing a tremendous disservice to his students and the public," Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education, a non profit group located in Oakland, Calif., that promotes the teaching of evolution, said in a telephone interview.

Michael Dini, a professor of biology education at Texas Tech University, said Ross should not have been awarded a doctorate. "Anyone who uses religious scripture or theological doctrine as a litmus test to gauge the validity of a scientific theory is no scientist," he wrote in an e-mail. "Is this discrimination? Yes! It's discrimination against bad science."

Dini, in 2003, made news by refusing to write letters of recommendation to graduate schools for students who would not offer a "scientific answer" for how the human race began. Writing recommendations "is a favor I grant only to those I respect," he said.

Read the whole thing.

...and in the Columbus Dispatch...

And in the Ottawa Citizen...

More on the creationism museum in Kentucky from the Times of London.

Meanwhile, Back in Canada...

The Big Valley Creation Science Museum is set to open its doors in June in Big Valley, Alberta, near the town of Drumheller. As the report in the Calgary Herald notes:

There are no crucifixes, no copies of the Bible and no enlarged quotations from scripture to be seen -- although there is a miniature "replica" of Noah's Ark.

"This is a scientific museum," says founder Harry Nibourg. "This is compelling evidence for a Creator. We're not trying to force this on anybody. We want people to come take a look at it for themselves and make up their own minds."

I guess that is all one can ask.

Not Sure this is a Constitutional Question

Foxnews reports on a petition that is being circulated by the Campaign to Defend the Constitution. The petition itself can be found here. This takes the form of a call for Answers in Genesis, the group that Ken Ham is connected with, to "cease their war on science and we call on educators, media, and citizens to exercise critical thinking", rather than a boycott or any sort of demand to have the museum closed. So, in that sense, it is not anti first amendment. Having said that, it clearly is not a constitutional issue and its placement on their page is somewhat peculiar. It would seem that they are reacting to statements like this by Ken Ham:

"We use the same science they do...What they're really saying is they disagree with our beliefs about history, about the Bible, but we use the same science and genetics they do."

Even if you have had your head in the sand for the last hundred years, you know this simply isn't so. As Henry Morris once said:

"No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture."¹

There is clearly a need to interpret palaeogeological and palaeontological data within a scriptural framework. Therefore, creationism proceeds deductively--with a fixed conclusion. This is antithetical to science, which has no fixed conclusions. Ken Ham knows this. His response is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

The problem that I see is that if children go to this museum and believe what they see and hear, and then grow up learning about mainstream scientific approaches to the data, most if not all of them will say to themselves, "what a bunch of hooey!" and reject Christianity altogether. I fear that little good can come of this.

¹Biblical Cosmology, page 33

More Bad News from Turkey

This is not encouraging. I am going to have to get my hands on the Atlas of Creation just to see what's in it.

Uh oh. The GOP's Achilles' Heel.

It never fails. Whenever there is a general election, the GOP candidate is invariably at some point asked about their "belief" in evolution (as if it were part of a belief structure). Ken Blackwell of Townhall.com has addressed the issue by raising the old false dichotomy of micro versus macroevolution. It is false because processes that operate today can be seen to have operated in the fossil record. He suggests that GOP candidates should answer thus:

“Well, if you mean microevolution, where an organism adapts to its environment with the flexibility inherent in its DNA, then yes I believe in that; we see it every day in nature. But if you mean macroevolution, where mutations stack on one another to create entirely new organ systems and transform one species into a totally different species, then I, along with many scientists, have serious issues with that theory.”

There are several problems with this response. First, it assumes a separate process for macroevolution apart from microevolution, a stance many biologists would oppose. Second, his description of macroevolution is muddled at best and incoherent at worst, and third, his statement that many scientists have serious issues with the theory is flat-out wrong. I have been working in evolutionary biology for 20 years now and I can think of very few field biologists or palaeontologists who doubt the ability of evolution to explain biotic diversity or the fossil record.

He states that a "99% evolved eye is useless." Since when? It is 99% better than nothing. Evolution is not all or nothing. His grasp of the material suggests that he has been only reading Michael Behe and William Dembski, instead of people who work in the field. I would not encourage any GOP candidate to respond like this. I would encourage them to learn what evolution is and what it isn't and respond accordingly. The GOP tends to have an "anti-science" tag hanging around its neck. This kind of response does not help.

More from Kentucky

The Christian Science Monitor has weighed in on the new Creationism museum opening in Petersburg, Kentucky. As the author, Melanie Stetson, notes:

Yet the main mission isn't entertainment; it's presenting a particular "biblical worldview" in which Genesis stands as literal history and true science.

"Genesis gives an account of the history of all basic entities ... from the One who knows everything," [Ken] Ham says. "If you don't know everything, there could always be evidence that will lead to wrong conclusions."

And wrong conclusions is what AiG claims is behind evolution. Dividing science into "observational science" and "historical science," its theme is that the latter is simply interpretation based on one's presuppositions. In one exhibit, for instance, two paleontologists (a creationist and an evolutionist) are digging up a dinosaur skeleton, but they have two different interpretations – one from a perspective of thousands of years and the other, millions of years.

"Fossils don't have labels," Ham says. "You have different interpretations because you have different starting points – one starts with God's Word, one with human reason."

Dismissing the observational/historical dichotomy, Dr. [Eugenie] Scott says "it's nonsense ... Nobody really thinks astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology ... go about testing their explanations in a way substantially different from other sciences."

I refer you to the Onion's smack-on-the-money take on this argument. A permanent Howler-fest. I may have to make a trip up there when it opens.

Okay. About time for a poll

I suppose I should know what my readers think. Here is a poll.

Do you think evolution explains the fossil record and biotic diversity?
	Yes
	No
	Don't have enough information to answer.
pollcode.com free polls

Thanks.

More on Iowa State

Guillermo Gonzalez was initially one of three astronomers who proposed the "Galactic Habitable Zone" or GHZ. This is a ring around the center of a galaxy where life as we know it can exist and thrive. Here is a graphic taken from http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/G/galactic_habitable_zone.html which shows the zone. Whether or not this dove-tailed into Dr. Gonzalez' ID thoughts, there is nothing squishy about this science.

And on the other side of the universe...

The LA Times reports on the Creationism museum opening in Kentucky. Here is a description:

The 60,000-square-foot museum, near Cincinnati on 49 acres of lush Kentucky countryside, is the work of Answers in Genesis, a leader in the "young Earth" creationist movement. Unlike proponents of "intelligent design" — who question aspects of evolutionary theory but may accept that the universe is billions of years old — members of "young Earth" groups insist that the Book of Genesis is an accurate historical record.

Because the world began only 6,000 years ago, they argue, dinosaurs discovered in the fossil record must have coexisted with humans. In the diorama that greets museum visitors, models of baby tyrannosaurs cavort among animatronic children clad in buckskin.

Devastatingly, the article ends with the following interview with a local pastor:

Michael Jones, pastor of Big Bone Baptist Church, a few miles away, got a sneak peek at the museum early last week, and said he would encourage his flock of 350 to attend often.

His church, he said, is near Big Bone Lick State Park, where scientists discovered remains of wooly [sic] mammoths and mastodons believed to be from the Pleistocene epoch, more than 10,000 years ago.

The bones are on display at a small park museum that Jones has never visited.

"I'm just a simple person," he said, "but I could never believe we came from goo."

And once again, Christians are seen as fools.

More on Iowa State

More on the Iowa State problem here.

This is Bad.

Iowa State faculty have admitted that the decision to deny Guillermo Gonzalez' tenure application was based partly on the fact that he supported Intelligent Design. Noting that an astronomer's "reputatation" was a factor and that by supporting ID, Gonzalez' reputation had been tarnished. This article comes from the Discovery Institute and I have not tracked down the World Magazine article yet.

The ACLU Rears its ugly head

The Beaumont Enterprise reports that the ACLU has filed its fifth religion based lawsuit in 13 years against the same school district. In a nutshell:

The lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of the parents of a fifth-grader at Loranger Middle School in Tangipahoa Parish, who were upset that Gideons Bibles were being given to students on school property during class hours.

"School officials in Tangipahoa Parish habitually show disdain for the Constitution, while disrespecting the right of parents, who happen to be Catholic in this case, to choose the religious tradition in which to raise their children," said Joe Cook, the ACLU executive director for Louisiana.

Given the way that courts have done their level best to legislate religion out of the public schools it is refreshing to see people fight back. On the other hand, if it had been me, I probably would have put them on a table and invited the students to take one if they wanted to. That probably would not have raised the ire of the ACLU, although just about anything does these days.

Probably not what Noah had in mind...

Greepeace is building a replica of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat in an appeal for action on global warming." The finishing of the ark will be followed by a ceremony at the end of May. Never ones to do anything half-way, a spokesman was quoted as saying:

"Climate change is real, it's happening now and unless world leaders take urgent, decisive and far-reaching action, the next decades will see human misery on a scale not experienced in modern times," said Greenpeace activist Hilal Atici. "Those leaders have a mandate from the people ... to massively cut greenhouse gas emissions and to do it now."

It is difficult for me to see how building an ark on Ararat will help to stop global warming since the wood will have to be trucked up there, causing greenhouse emissions, not to mention those that are created by the ceremony itself. It is kind of interesting that the official term is now "climate change" instead of global warming. As any student of the earth's prehistory knows, climate change is the rule. Oh well.

Neandertals and Climate Change

It is now being suggested that Neandertals died out during a marked shift in the earth's climate, specifically the Iberian peninsula. What makes this climate shift different from those that preceded it is that modern humans were on the landscape and could out-compete the Neandertals, so the story goes. It is clear that there was selection for modern genes and that by 25 000 years ago, Neandertals were a thing of the past but I am still with the hybridization crowd.

Cryogenian Theory on Ice?

The "Snowball Earth" theory has been challenged by new evidence from Oman.

The research team measured the amount of water-induced weathering in sedimentary rocks from Oman.

The results, described in the April issue of Geology magazine, indicate that the Cryogenian climate swung several times between warm-wet and dry-cold, which the authors say is inconsistent with a deep freeze.

"Although [Snowball Earth] is a great idea, I am convinced it didn't happen," [Phillip] Allen said.

Previous work has discovered other problems with the theory, Allen continued.

For example, wave ripples in sandstone from the same period could only have formed in the presence of open water.

There is also no evidence for the big chill causing any mass extinctions.

Ocean-bound microorganisms, which were the dominant life forms back then, "carried on more or less business as usual," Allen said.

I still think the idea is neat, even if it can be demonstrated to be not well supported.

And if you are having a stressful day...

It is always fun to see what these guys have been up to.

More Fossil Trees

More forest remains in Illinois, some of which are around 315 million years old.

Are Apes People Too?

Foxnews reports of an interesting case in which a case is being made in Viennese court to grant basic human rights to a chimpanzee.

The campaign was launched earlier this year after the animal sanctuary where Hiasl (pronounced HEE-zul) and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for the past 25 years went bankrupt.

Activists want to ensure the two apes don't wind up homeless if the shelter closes. Both have already suffered trauma: They were captured as babies in Sierra Leone in 1982 and smuggled in a crate to Austria for use in experiments at a pharmaceutical research laboratory. Customs officers intercepted the shipment and turned the chimps over to the shelter.

Apparently, this is a growing trend.

Austria isn't the only country where primate rights are being debated. Spain's parliament is considering a bill that would endorse the Great Ape Project, a Seattle-based international initiative to extend "fundamental moral and legal protections" to apes.

It would certainly set an interesting historical precedent.

Off-Topic But Incredibly Cool!

A new planet has been found that is reported to be earth-like in its make-up. It is 20.5 light years distant. Read the article.

Fossilized Rain Forest

If this doesn't rain on the parade of the worldwide flood crowd, I am not sure what will.

Chimps more evolved

This is an interesting story suggesting that chimpanzees have evolved more than humans since the ape-human split 6-8 million years ago. The argument is that chimps had larger effective population sizes in the past than humans and that drift may have played a more prominent role. Not sure...

The Discovery Institute Has a Blog

The Discovery Institute's blog, called Evolution News & Views, can be found here. It covers all things ID from that perspective. I would encourage visits and comments to the site.

Oh Canada!

Brian Alters is in the news again. If you remember, he is the one who applied for a grant to determine the effect of ID in Canadian schools and was turned down because the committee felt that there was not sufficient justification for the idea that "evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct."

In an article in the Toronto Star, Alters now warns that the problem is not relegated to small town America and that many school teachers simply do not teach evolution for fear of getting flak from parents. According to the story, 1/3 of public school teachers report getting requests to teach ID or creationism from parents. The story notes:

The situation has become such a concern to scientists that an international team of biologists has put together a new journal to help teachers prepare lesson plans on evolution.

"We've got to teach the teachers," says Daniel Brooks, a University of Toronto evolutionary biologist behind the journal, to be launched in the fall by European academic publishing giant Springer.

That sounds like a good idea. The article also quotes Kent Hovind, who argues that evolution should be taken out of the schools, even if ID cannot be taught. For those of you who are not familiar with Kent Hovind, go here and here. His web page, at DrDino.com is here. As Alters puts it:

"You can't teach biology without teaching the one thing that unifies the whole discipline."

Yup. Theodosius Dobzhansky was right.

Another Transitional Form!

Foxnews has an article on the skeletal remains of an aquatic lizard that had only nubs for front limbs, filling in the link between these animals and the snakes that followed them. Quotes the story:

"It adds to the picture we have of what was happening 100 million years ago," said lead researcher Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta. "We now know that losing limbs isn't a new thing and that lizards were doing it much earlier than we originally thought."

Odd questions remains, though.

"For some oddball reason, the forelimbs were lost before the rear limbs, when you would think it would be the opposite," Caldwell said. "The front limbs would be useful for holding onto dinner or digging a hole, but it must be developmentally easier to get rid of the forelimbs."

Still, this is a good example of a transitional form and at least one evolutionary path that lizards went down.

Equal Time Bill Losing Support in Tennessee?

By way of the NCSE comes this story about the Tennessee Senate Resolution 17, which argued for the teaching of ID in public schools and on which I commented on a bit back, is losing ground. According to the story, Senator Raymond Finney is not sure that going forward with the bill is the best course of action, despite the fact that the Attorney General of Tennessee found that the bill passes constitutional muster. The story notes:

Despite the attorney general's opinion, Finney told the Associated Press (March 14, 2007), "I'm not sure I'm going forward with that ... I'm probably going to reword it anyway. This may not be the time and place for that." Finney cited a heavy legislative workload, but also suggested that he worded the resolution infelicitously, saying, "I probably made a mistake in approaching it from a creation aspect, which raises red flags ... People get so sensitive about whether children might be exposed to any sort of religious thing." But in a story in the Marysville [sic] Daily Times (March 14, 2007), he was quoted as saying, "It's not as extremist as you think it is ...What is clearly demonstrable is that evolution can be disproven using statistical methods. I can't prove religion, but evolution can be disproved."

Evolution can be disproved? This I would like to see. In fact, I would like to see any scientific theory be "disproved." This is how a little bit of knowledge can lead to bad things. Finney has likely read only the writings of William Dembski and perhaps Michael Behe and has no evolutionary biology training. It is also the height of arrogance to suggest that you can overturn 150 years of scientific study with some statistics.

New Modern Human Remains in China!

Fragments of an individual dated to between 42 and 39 thousand years ago have been found in China, filling in a gap between the more recent remains and those of Dali and Mapa, which date to between 115 and 200 kya. Erik Trinkaus thinks that the remains, which show some archaic traits, reflect hybridization between the incoming moderns from Africa and the archaic groups that were there. He notes:

"The pattern we see across the Old World is basically a modern human in terms of its newly emerged characteristics, but also a minority of traits that are absent or lost in the earliest modern humans in East Africa," Professor Trinkaus told the BBC News website.

"The question is where did they get them from? Either they re-evolved them, which is not very likely, or, to some degree, they interbred with archaic groups."

Currently, the next best thing we have is the material from the Upper Cave at Zhoukoudian, dated to around 24-26 kya. China has notoriously been a hard place to determine the pattern of human evolution. This helps a lot.

ER 1470 Gets a Nosejob!

This is potentially quite big news. According to Foxnews, a team led by Tim Bromage at NYU is undertaking a reconstruction of the face of one of the most famous of African hominids, KNM-ER 1470, discovered by Richard Leakey in 1972. Lately, it has become the hypodigm of Homo rudolfensis and I was involved in a Journal of Human Evolution paper that evaluated whether or not the big forms of Homo habilis, represented by ER 1470 and the smaller ones, represented by ER 1813 could be attributed to the same species. We said they could but that alot of assumptions had to be made.

The skull dates to around 1.9 mya which is within the habilis range of dates but looks very different from the other forms represented. I am curious to see what Bromage and his team do to the face. To say that this a controversial undertaking is an understatement. Stay tuned.

Human Evolution Continues?

It has sort of been thought that evolution of modern humans had stopped when humans with modern characteristics first appeared. Now a geneticist, Gregory Cochran, and an anthropologist, John Hawks, state that evolution has been proceeding faster in the last ten thousand years than in the presumed "origin" of modern humans 160-200 thousand years ago. In an article in World Science, they state that modern human brain cases have continued to change dramatically. According to the article:

An­thro­po­l­o­gist Jef­frey Mc­Kee of Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty said the new find­ings of ac­ce­l­er­ated evolution bear out pre­dic­tions he made in a 2000 book The Rid­dled Chain. Based on com­put­er mod­els, he ar­gued that ev­o­lu­tion should speed up as a pop­u­la­tion grows. This is be­cause pop­u­la­tion growth cre­ates more op­por­tu­ni­ties for new mu­ta­tions; al­so, the ex­pand­ed pop­u­la­tion oc­cu­pies new en­vi­ron­men­tal niches, which would drive ev­o­lu­tion in new di­rec­tions.

This is exciting, and may open doors for many different areas of research. It also puts a bit of a crimp in the "rapid replacement" model of modern humans origins. Put simply, if evolution has not slowed down with the advent of modern humans, then it is more of a continuum than was previously thought.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

This Kind of Thing Doesn't Help

According to a story in Southern AP news, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League has asked for an apology from a Georgia politician who allegedly wrote a memo stating that the theory of evolution was originally put forth in the Kabbala. Evolution doesn't seem to have been the problem, though:

"Your memo conjures up repugnant images of Judaism used for thousands of years to smear the Jewish people as cult-like and manipulative," wrote Bill Nigut, the league's Southeast regional director.

The real fun is that, while the politician, Ben Bridges, denies having written the memo, one of his "closest political allies" Marshall Hall, states that he did.

Hall runs a web site called the "Non-Moving Earth and Anti-Evolution Site of the Fair Education Foundation, Inc." which has to be seen to be believed. One quote on the site that stood out to me was this:

This "Doctrine Purification Series" has been written over a period of some twenty years in preparation for that time when all teachings are brought in line with the unquestioned Bible inerrancy and infallibility that will be manifested globally by the exposure of the most fertile deception in Satan’s vast repertoire, namely, the universally believed lie that the Earth is orbiting on an axis and going around the sun.

This all came from an Instapundit post that linked a post by Neal Boortz with the heading "Why People Think Conservatives are Idiots." This is one good reason why.

Report on the Creationist Museum

Truthdig has a report on the construction of the Creationism museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. This museum, the brainchild of Ken Ham, the Australian creationist, is described thus:

It has the appearance of a real science museum, complete with a planetarium, a gift shop and plaques on the wall with quotes from creationist “scientists” who have the title doctor conspicuously before their names. It has charts, timelines and graphs with facts and figures. It is meant to be interactive, to create, like Universal Studios, a contrived reality with an array of costly animatronic men and women as well as moving dinosaurs.

The writer reports the following:

Only 13 percent of Americans in a 2004 Gallup poll, when asked for their views on human origins, said life arose from the strictly natural process of evolution. More than 38 percent said they believed God guided evolution, and 45 percent said the Genesis account of creation was a true story.² Courses on intelligent design have been taught at Minnesota, Georgia, New Mexico and Iowa State universities, along with Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon, not to mention Christian universities that teach all science through the prism of the Bible.

Aside from the inaccurate conflation of recent earth creationism and Intelligent Design, it is not clear that if either of the first two 83% were correct, that we could tell the difference. It seems more interesting to me that 45% of those polled thought that the Genesis account was a true story. One wonders what those polled thought that "true story" meant. I think it is a true story also, just not a literal one. Truth comes in all shapes and sizes and is both literal and figurative. The Primeval History teaches spiritual and religious truth. To paraphrase Conrad Hyers, we don't need to ask any more of it. This doesn't mean that Ken Ham isn't misguided.

Having said that, the tone of the article is condescending, calling YECs "Christo-fascists" Hence the following paragraph:

They pump out articles in self-published journals to provide “evidence” that homosexuals can be cured, that global warming is a myth, that abortion can cause breast cancer, that something they call “post-abortion syndrome” leads to deep depression and suicide and that abstinence-only education is an effective form of birth control.

This has nothing to do with the evolution/creation debate and is insulting to a wide range of people who, like me, are social conservatives, but take evolution seriously. I would encourage reading the comments, as well. They range from supportive to very caustic.

FIFTY-FIVE SMACKERS??????

Sadly, I am not going to be at the Discovery Institute program here in Knoxville. I cannot justify the cover charge of fifty-five dollars, not with four hungry kids to feed. My graduate advisor, Andy Kramer, is going and will take notes. He suggested that I crash the gate at some point. I don't know. I sure know I don't want to give the Institute that kind of money, since I disagree with how they try to effect their program. I don't like deception, and have read enough to think they practice it on several levels. Oh well.

It sort of defeats the purpose of this blog not to go, but there will be plenty of press reports and interviews. Life goes on.

The Discovery Institute is Coming to Knoxville!!

Here is the press release.

By: Staff
Discovery Institute
January 15, 2007

Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture will present a
special series of conferences, Darwin vs. Design, in 2007 and 2008
exploring the growing scientific evidence that life and the universe
were intelligently designed.

These events in selected cities across America will feature leading
scientists and philosophers who are advancing the theory of
intelligent design. Check this page frequently for updated
information about upcoming conferences in your area.

Upcoming Conferences
Knoxville Darwin vs. Design Conference
March 24, 2007
Knoxville, Tennessee
Dallas Darwin vs. Design Conference
April 13-14, 2007
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas

Interestingly, this item showed up on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Technical Calendar. After quite a bit of outcry, it was removed. Nonetheless, it is possible to get discounts if you are en employee of the lab, which I am. I expect to hear alot of "Teach the Controversy."

One Kenyan speaks out against the gagging of evolution.

Well, this is kind of gross, but informative in an evolutionary sort of way.

Horned Dinosaurs

A new dinosaur has been found that has horns. Not in itself noteworthy, the horns are apparently in a family of dinosaurs that are only known for nub-like horns. The new find is called Albertosaurus nesmoi. The story relates:

The oldest known horned dinosaur in North America is called Zuniceratops. It lived 12 million years before [Michael] Ryan's find, and also had large horns.

That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives, said State of Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who with Douglas Wolfe identified Zuniceratops in New Mexico in 1998. He predicted then that something like Ryan's find would turn up.

"Lo and behold, evolutionary theory actually works," he said.

Indeed.

Its Creation Time in Tennessee!

The Nashville Post reports that State Senator Raymond Finney from Maryville is asking the state legislature to sponsor a resolution addressing some fundamental questions about science and open the door to teaching creationism as an alternate view of life. The story notes:

The resolution needs only to be passed by the Republican-controlled Senate in order to force Tennessee's Department of Education to answer on the record. A joint resolution would have to pass the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, where it would likely find itself relegated to a black hole committee and not see the light of day.

Yay rah! It never really goes away completely, does it?

Hard to believe this is the first time we've seen this...

According to a story in the WaPo, chimpanzees have been found to be making sharp weapons, which they are using to hunt small animals. According to the story,

The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of years ago.
The landmark observation also supports the long-debated proposition that females -- the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps -- tend to be the innovators and creative problem solvers in primate culture.
Using their hands and teeth, the chimpanzees were repeatedly seen tearing the side branches off long, straight sticks, peeling back the bark and sharpening one end. Then, grasping the weapons in a "power grip," they jabbed them into tree-branch hollows where bush babies -- small, monkeylike mammals -- sleep during the day.

This has probably been going on for a long time and we just finally observed it. Neat.

Sorry about the light posting

I have been fighting an infection in the back of my neck for the last week and it seems to have reared its ugly head once again. This stems from the golf ball they pulled out two weeks ago. I will try to do better.

Kansas...again

ABC news reports that Kansas has rewritten their education guidelines to reflect the changing demographics of the school board, which is largely evolution-friendly right now. The key paragraph is:

Some scientists and science groups believed the board's latest action was significant because it turned back a subtle attack on evolution that encouraged schools to teach about an evolution "controversy," rather than mandating that creationism or intelligent design be taught. Intelligent design says an intelligent cause is the best way to explain some complex and orderly features of the universe.

The catch is that there is no controversy. From a scientific perspective, there are mountains of evidence supporting both microevolution and macroevolution and no evidence supporting any other model. The ball is in ID's court. If there is a mechanism that can be postulated that would explain current and past biotic diversity, why have they not presented it? You cannot teach a controversy in a vacuum. Teaching the "controversy" is a smokescreen and most scientists can see through it.

The marvels of Modern Medicine

Well, after quite a bit of pain over the weekend and a very fat neck, i went back to the surgeon yesterday, who confirmed my fears that an infection had set in at the incision site. Without going into a lot of detail, when the surgeon removed the top stitch, the wound "popped." Think: adolescence and you will get the idea. I was sent home with some very high-powered antibiotics and pain killers. It feels better now but is still draining...

Good ol' Genetics

I just had a benign tumor removed from the back of my neck the size of a golf ball! How did this happen? I am not a tree and it is not a burl. Nor am I an oyster and it a pearl. It is just simply a tumor that my body thought to grow at that location. Nice. I'd forgotten what surgical pain was like.

Didn't See This Coming

Foxnews reports that Kenyan Christians are complaining and organizing against the Kenya National Museum's public display of the Turkana Boy (known to the palaeoanthropological community as KNM WT15000) and its evolutionary conclusions.

"I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it," says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of Kenya's 35 evangelical denominations, which he claims have 10 million followers. "These sorts of silly views are killing our faith."

Richard Leakey is just as adamant:

"Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his," Leakey, who founded the museum's prehistory department, told The Associated Press. "The bishop is descended from the apes and these fossils tell how he evolved."

A more conciliatory approach is taken by head of palaeontology at the museum, Emma Mbua:

Mbua, a Protestant, is a little taken aback at the controversy but has no problems reconciling her own faith to the scientific evidence. "Evolution is a fact," adds Mbua, who has run the department for the last five years. "Turkana Boy is our jewel," she said. "For the first time, we will be taking him out of the strong room and showing our heritage to the world."

I am still waiting for a creationist to come along and explain just what, exactly, KNM WT15000 is, since it obviously ain't modern human and just as obviously ain't an ape.

First its microcephalic, now its not! Or is it?

A new article on the H. floresiensis remains by Dean Falk and colleagues indicates that the remains that the press have dubbed "Hobbits" from the island of Flores in Indonesia are actually not microcephalic, after all. It is just plain strange:

While the new technique suggests LB1 was not a microcephalic, it does not rule out that it was not a Homo sapiens.

As evidence of that, Falk points to what she says are several advanced features of LB1's brain that are unlike those of modern humans or any other known hominid species.

"What we have is a little tiny brain that has four features that you can see with your eyes that are advanced and distributed from front to middle to back," Falk said. "In other words, this thing appears to be globally rewired. Those are really advanced features. They're not like humans, they're not like anything.

Some are not convinced:

Robert Martin, curator of biological anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, is not convinced by the new evidence.

One of his major criticisms has to do with the sample of microcephalic skulls the team used. "They're being a bit naughty about this," Martin said in a telephone interview. "Four of the nine microcephalics were not adults."

Falk's team maintains its inclusion of young skulls is justified because microcephalics are generally believed to achieve maximum cranial capacity by around four years of age. Martin, who criticized a similar comparison done by Falk's team in 2005 as flawed, again disagrees. "What we're saying is LB1 was definitely an adult. If LB1 was a microcephalic, he was one with a mild condition who managed to survive into adulthood," he said. "So the proper comparison is with microcephalics with a mild condition who were adults."

"I don't have any problems with having new hominid species," Martin added. "I just don't think this is one of them."

I am looking forward to how this plays out. We have not seen the last of this controversy, given the significance of the H. floresiensis remains.

Forward into the Palaeocene!

New primate fossils have been found pushing the existence of these critters back to the Palaeocene. In an article in Foxnews, two new skeletons of plesiadapiforms have been found. These forms were originally thought to be primates but then reclassified as primate-like mammals. Now it seems, that designation may have been wrong.

[Jonathan] Bloch recently caught a lucky break when he made the rare discovery of nearly complete skeletons of two plesiadapiform species, now named Ignacius clarkforkensis and Dryomomys szalayi, embedded in limestone outside Yellowstone National Park.

By analyzing the skeletons and comparing them to more than 85 modern and extinct primate species, the researchers showed that plesiadapiforms look a lot more like primates than paleoanthropologists had imagined — and look nothing like flying lemurs, Bloch said.

This is exciting because it addresses the origin of our first precursors at a time when the dinosaurs had finally given way to the mammals. The article goes on to say:

Primates must have acquired their traits gradually, because plesiadapiforms have some, but not all, of the characteristics of later primates, Bloch and Sargis said.

"In the past, people had hypothesized that all of these kinds of primate features evolved as a single complex of features at one time, whereas what we're finding is throughout those first 10 million years of primate evolution, these features were evolving piecemeal, kind of one-by-one, accruing through time," Sargis said.

Bloch and Sargis's skeletal analysis shows that flying lemurs and another modern, non-primate mammal, the tree shrew, are primates' closest living relatives.

DNA studies of all three types of mammals — primates, flying lemurs, and tree shrews — confirm Bloch and Sargis's finding.

"So all three of those groups," Sargis said, "you can trace back to a single common ancestor.

Islamic Creationism

Apparently, there is a new movement afoot in France, Islamic creationism. According to a story in Direland, a gentleman by the name of Harun Yahya has written a book on the evils of Darwinism:

The book's pseudonymous author, a Turk named Harun Yahya ( photo left -- real name: Adnan Oktar), makes a number of astonishing claims -- including that Charles Darwin is "the real source of terrorism." For example, a photo of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers carries a caption reading, "Those who perpetuate terror in the world are in reality the Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy which validates and encourages conflict." Yahya also pretends to portray "the secret links between Darwinism and the bloody ideologies of fascism and communism."

It is creationism with a twist, however:

Contrary to the fundamentalist Christian Creationists in the U.S. who have been attacking the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in local school boards and many state legislatures, and demanding with an alarming degree of success that Creationism be taught in the public schools, Yahya's Qur'an-based attack on Darwinism does not claim that the world and those who inhabit it were created only 6,000 years ago. Instead, Yahya admits that Earth is really 4.6 billion years old, but his "Atlas" uses hundreds of photos of fossils found over several centuries to "prove" that "the species have never changed" [sic]. This pseudo-scientific clap-trap, says noted French biologist Hervé Le Guyeder, makes this "new form of creationism even more insidious than the Christian-inspired one wreaking havoc in North America."

One wonders how the mainstream media, which typically handles anything Islamic with kid gloves, will handle this.

Islamic Devolution

Glenn Reynolds reports on British Muslims not inoculating their children against childhood illnesses because they contain substances that Muslims should not ingest.

Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, says almost all vaccines contain un-Islamic "haram" derivatives of animal or human tissue, and that Muslim parents are better off letting childrens' immune systems develop on their own.

Dr. Reynolds calls it "Evolution in action."

It is worth noting that this will likely not have much effect one way or another. I didn't get any of the childhood disease inoculations and neither did my wife. In fact, the population of the earth reached 4 billion people just fine without them. Having said that, the purity issue is a bit rigid and cult-ish. The story relates that some other Muslim groups think it is ridiculous as well.

The Neandertal/Modern Human confluence, Part ?

In an article entitled "Skull shows possible human/Neanderthal breeding," Al-Reuters reports that a skull found in a Romanian cave shows exactly that. It reads in part:

DNA samples taken from Neanderthal bones suggest there was no mixing, or at least that any Neanderthal genetic contribution did not make it to the modern DNA pool.

But Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis has in the past found bones that he believes show both modern human and Neanderthal traits, and now he and colleagues have found a skull.

What the article does not recound is the eruption that occurred the last time there was a "hybrid" discovery, which occurred at a cave at Lagar Velho, Portugal. Trinkaus demonstrated what he thought were hybrid characteristics, while Ian Tattersall viewed it as nothing more than a chunky Gravettian kid. Trinkaus' response was nothing short of apalling, calling into question Tattersall's scientific abilities, his upbringing and his ancestry. Tattersall's original article on the Lagar Velho child is here and his response to Trinkaus' screed is here. I have been unable to find Trinkaus' vitriolic response to the article anywhere on the net. That is, perhaps, just as well.

Glenn Morton, writing for the ASA, commented on the Lagar Velho remains at the time. Lets hope this new find does not generate the kind of responses that the Lagar Velho child did.

Well, this is depressing...

According to a CNN story, the Viking explorer may have found life--and killed it.

Flock of Dodos

Hard to tell exactly what the point is here but, in honor of the new decisions of the Kansas school board, A National Dodos Darwin Day event is being organized to coincide with Darwin Day in various parts of the country this year. A contest of sorts, contestants are to show up dressed as Charles Darwin, a Dodo bird or Muffy Moose. Knoxville's contest is at McClung Museum on February 12, 2007. Time to think up a costume, I guess.

The Biologic Institute

Celeste Biever of the New Scientist went to the Biologic Institute in Seattle, Washington and was not welcomed with open arms. Here is her account. If this link does not work or is behind a subscription wall, try the NCSE review. As Ms. Biever notes:

The message is clear. If ID supporters can bolster their case by citing more experimental research, another judge at some future date might conclude that ID does qualify as science, and is therefore a legitimate topic for discussion in American science classrooms. This is precisely the kind of scientific respectability that research at the Biologic Institute is attempting to provide. "We need all the input we can get in the sciences," Weber told me. "What we are doing is necessary to move ID along."

This will be ID's greatest challenge. All along, the founders and promoters of ID have resisted calls to operationalize the science behind it. For evidence of this see the post below about William Dembski. This is a problem that was examined at length by Howard van Till.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution Weigh In

In what can only be described as a heavy-handed editorial, Maureen Downey had written a column on the recent Cobb County decision:

To see evidence of evolution, look no further than the Cobb County Board of Education. From a tax-frittering, pseudo-science muddle, the board seems to be evolving into a deliberate and engaged panel capable of putting the reputation and credibility of the district ahead of politics or personal creeds.

While it is probably true that the decision was correct, the evolution sticker side acted in good faith and with good motives. Ms. Downey makes no attempt to hide her contempt for them. Not professional.

Man the Hunter

A new report in Foxnews indicates that humans may have wiped out the megafauna in Australia some 10k years ago. This is what is also been suggested to have happened in the New World around the same time period.

We like to romaticize the Native Americans and Native Australians and think that they were "close to the land." The fact of the matter is that, as humans, we haven't changed much over time.

YouTube

Getting onto the bandwagon a bit slowly. I discovered that if you type in "Intelligent Design" into the search engine at YouTube, you get a bunch of videos, including some lectures. Nifty.

Daphne Michelle Kidder

Another reason that I have posted lightly is that our fourth child, Daphne Michelle Kidder, was born on Wednesday, December 20, at 2:23. Everybody is doing very well.

Sorry for the light posting

I have torn some muscles in my back and have not been able to sit for any period of time for about two weeks. Sorry for the light posting.

One thing did cross my path in the last week. In a press release by the organization Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (an organization I can throw a little bit further than I can the ACLU, but not much), the Cobb County Georgia sticker brouhaha seems to have been settled. Part of the release states,

In an agreement announced today, Cobb County school officials state that they will not order the placement of “any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers bearing language substantially similar to that used on the sticker that is the subject of this action.” School officials also agreed not to take other actions that would undermine the teaching of evolution in biology classes.

Sounds like unilateral surrender to me.

ID on a Grand Scale

For years, ID folks like Hugh Ross have been championing the "Anthropic Principle," which states, in somewhat simplified terms, that the universe is tweaked in such a way to make life possible and that if certain parameters (such as the age of the universe, the electromagnetic and gravitational forces) were a hair off, life would not exist. The Constant is the force that drives the universal expansion. As the story notes:

Quantum physics predicts the cosmological constant should be far larger than what is actually seen: roughly 10 to the 120th power larger, a number represented by 1 with 120 zeroes behind it. By comparison, [Steven] Weinberg's original estimate was off just by roughly a hundredfold, and refined versions of this argument claim greater accuracy, suggesting anthropic reasoning could provide answers quantum physics currently cannot.

Others are not convinced.

However, theoretical physicist Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and cosmologist Roberto Trotta at Oxford University in England take issue with how anthropic reasoning predicts the cosmological constant.

"The specifications used to allow life are rather arbitrary and can lead to very different expected values for fundamental constants," Starkman told SPACE.com.

Seems to me that you still have the other 28 dimensionless variables to deal with, though.

A Very Old Meteorite

This will get all the "origins of life" people hopping. A meteorite that fell in the Yukon and northern BC appears to have organic material in it. According to the National Geographic story by Brian Handwerk:


The meteorite likely formed in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, but the organic material it contains probably had a far more distant origin.

The globules could have originated in the Kuiper Belt group of icy planetary remnants orbiting beyond Neptune. Or they could have been created even farther afield.

Whether this lends credence to the hypotheses that life on earth is extraterrestrial in origin remains unclear. Stay Tuned!

Kansas Outlaws Evolution!!

That paragon of intrepid reporting, the Onion, has revealed that Kansas lawmakers have outlawed evolution. As the report notes:

"Barn swallows that develop lighter, more streamlined builds to enable faster migration, for example, could live out the rest of their brief lives in prison," said Indiana University chemist and pro-intelligent-design author Robert Hellenbaum, who helped compose the language of the law. "And butterflies who mimic the wing patterns and colors of other butterflies for an adaptive advantage, well, their days of flaunting God's will are over."

This is truly a major step in legislation.

Hat tip to Jon Reid.

William Dembski at the Panda's Thumb

The Panda's Thumb relates an exchange with William Dembski in which he is asked to operationalize ID in terms of probability calculations. His answer is nothing short of astounding:

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.

If it is not a mechanistic theory, what kind of theory is it? How does it rise above the charge of "just so story" that he claims for Darwinian evolution? Once again, how is ID operationalized? How would these discontinuities manifest themselves? ID seems repeatedly unable to address, and hopes no one will notice, this elephant in the living room.

Origins of Life

Although it is not a subject that evolutionary theory can address, origin of life questions are fascinating. In a short article appearing in Physicsweb, it is suggested that organic solids may have rained down on the early earth for millions of years, eventually leading to life as we know it. Interesting.

A View From the Jerusalem Post

Natan Slifkin wonders where all the Jews are that oppose ID? In a November 16 article for the Jerusalem Post (subscription required), he laments:

The prophets said that "the Heavens declare the glory of God." Some of the ancients interpreted this to mean that since (in their time) there was no explanation as to why the planets move in the way that they do they attest to a Designer. But now that physics and astronomy have explained planetary motion does this mean that the Heavens no longer declare the glory of God? Of course they do; and the unavoidable position for the religious person is that God's grandeur is seen in the laws of nature.

Good point. And, in a stab at "irreducible complexity," he writes:

So where does that leave the rest of the universe? What about all those structures that do not even by the admission of the ID camp present irreducible complexity? The unstated implication of their position is that these things do not attest to a Creator. Don't have a grasp of cellular biology? Sorry you won't be able to perceive that the universe was created by God.

Either God is everywhere or He is nowhere. But He is certainly not limiting His appearance in the universe to the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting system.

Ah, kids will be kids.

This amusing story showed up in the WaPo today.

Neandertal DNA part II

The issue of Science has arrived with the stories involving the study of the Neandertal DNA. The new test, called "metagenomics," has so far identified 65 250 base pairs of what is believed to be Neandertal DNA. The article is behind a subscription wall, so I cannot quote liberally. Here are the high points:

- Neandertals and modern humans share a common ancestor back c. 706 000 years ago
- The Neandertal/modern human split was c. 370 000 years ago, although it varies for different populations tested.
- This predates the appearance of modern humans in Africa which occurred c. 195 000 years ago.
- There is a lack of evidence supporting admixture of Neandertals and modern humans.

Not everyone thinks the results are fool-proof, however. Genomicist Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University State College is quoted in a companion article by Elizabeth Pennisi as saying:

“The divergence [between living people and Neandertals] is so small compared to the DNA damage and the sequencing error” that it’s hard to be confident of any results. If we’ve learned anything, it is that we generally haven’t perceived the full extent of the problems and complexities of ancient DNA research. We’re still very much in the learning curve."

We haven't heard the last of this one. Stay tuned.

Neandertal DNA

According to a report in the WaPo, a new genetic test may unravel the mystery behind the Neandertal DNA code. The story begins:

Unleashing a new kind of DNA analyzer on a 38,000-year-old fragment of fossilized Neanderthal bone, scientists have reconstructed a portion of that creature's genetic code -- a technological tour de force that has researchers convinced they will soon know the entire DNA sequence of the closest cousin humans ever had.

Heady stuff, indeed. These are things the fossil record simply cannot tell us. The study will appear in this week's Science and is sure to touch off a firestorm between the continuity folks and the replacement folks.

"Clearly, we are at the dawn of Neanderthal genomics," said Edward M. Rubin of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Read the whole thing.

Set Your VCR's (Or TiVo's or whatever)

Nova is doing a story on bipedalism, focusing on a family in Turkey that walks quadrupedally. The show will air tomorrow night, Nov. 14 at 8:00.

Cultural History Washing Away

Foxnews reports that many archaeological sites are falling prey to "global warming." The reports suggests that climate changes caused by global warming. I am not sure how much is due to human action and how much is "programmed" into the life of the planet, but it is a problem when your cultural history starts washing away.

Dolphins and Legs

And in case you missed this, Japanese fishermen caught a dolphin with a vestigial pair of limbs. As the article points out:

Fossil remains show dolphins and whales were four-footed land animals about 50 million years ago and share common ancestors with hippopotamuses and deer. Scientists believe they later transitioned to an aquatic lifestyle.

Much like the Tiktaalik fossil that was found in the arctic a few months back, this shows evidence of an evolutionary lineage. Cool!!

Australopithecine Diet

Foxnews reports that robust australopithecines may have had a more varied diet than was originally thought. According to the article, if the diet was more varied than thought, then the hypothesis that the robusts went extinct because of an ecological shift might need to be rethought. Interesting.

Sorry for the light posts

I have started a new job at ORNL and am settling in. I will get back into the swing of things shortly.

Compatabilism and Libertarianism

David Siemens thinks J.P. Moreland is wrong. Moreland argues the human mind is part of nature and is endowed with libertarian capacities, such that it is capable of true choice. Siemans believes that this is a capacity that only God has. He notes:

Moreland has produced a straw man, but one with a curious consequence. If, as he claims, physics is not self-contained, that is, if there are nonphysical causes of physical phenomena, where does he draw the line? Psychokinesis? Energy vortexes, like those claimed to exist near Sedona, AZ? Crystals? Pyramidology? Alien intelligences exerting forces we cannot detect or measure? Astral influences?


He argues that Moreland has conflated terms for different disciplines:

"Mass" is obviously an important scientific term, from Newton's [f = ma] to Einstein's [E = mc^2]. This does not mean that I can insist that it be applied by psychologists to determine the mass of anger when someone loses his temper. Conversely, I cannot ask how angry a uranium nucleus is when it spalls.

Read the whole thing.

The notion of complementarity

I have always sort of axiomatically taken it that science exists to describe the natural world and cannot resort to supernatural explanations. J.P. Moreland seems surprised that anyone would take that position.

Science quotes

I am preparing for my second forum on ID and theistic evolution. The first one went well and one of the attendants said she will try to fill the room next time. Along the way, I have been reading up on teleology. Here are a few quotes I came across:

Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live.  Yet he is ashamed to show himself with
her in public.
 -- Ernst Wilhem von Brücke (German physiologist, 1819-1892)

"The species of whale known as the black right whale has four kilos
of brains and 1,000 kilos of testicles. If it thinks at all, we know what it is thinking about."
--Jon Lien, "Whale Professor" at St. John's University, Newfoundland,
speaking to the Norwegian Telegram
   Agency (spring 1995).

Then, there is the famous one by J.B.S. Haldane:

"If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of
creation, it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars
and beetles." (1951)

Foxnews Page

Fox News has divided its science section into various categories, one of which is "Evolution and Paleontology" and is devoted to recent news of the field. This sounds promising.

SEFORA

The recent problems that the Republican party has had with science has not gone unnoticed. Scientists and Engineers for America is a new organization devoted to supporting "science friendly" candidates in the political arena. Part of the preamble to the SEFORA Bill of Rights reads:

Science demands an open, transparent process of review and access to the best scholars from around the nation and the world. Mistakes dangerous to the nation’s welfare and security have been made when governments prevent scientists from presenting the best evidence and analysis.

This is probably a good idea. Politicians make bad scientists and I, for one, have been embarrassed to claim the Republican party on this issue. Time will tell whether or not it makes the same mistake that other organizations with laudable goals have made by venturing into areas of the political arena (such as abortion or human rights) that are, at best, peripheral to the scientific endeavor.

Hat Tip to Marilyn Savitt-Kring.

Winds of Change

Blogging might be a bit funny over the next few weeks. I have accepted a professional position in the library at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will begin the new job on November 6. With a fourth child on the way, there wasn't much debate about this.

• Same benefits
  
• Better vacation
  
• Much better pay (equivalent to an assistant professor salary)
  
• No ugly, hideous relocation: my wife and I don't have to move a foot.

I will continue to write (one article in revision, one planned by the end of the year), teach online for UT and blog, but this seems like to great an opportunity to pass up. Just ta let ya know.

Time Magazine

Time Magazine is doing an issue on "What Makes Us Human?" CNN has a short blurb about it. I intend to pick the issue up and have a look. I haven't read Time in years because it tends to take a leftist approach to things but this will be worth a look.

A public forum on evolution and ID

I have been asked to participate in a public forum at the Baptist Student Union here at UT on October 10, 17, and 24 with a retired physicist and ID supporter by the name of Neal Caldwell. We will discuss the nature of science, evolutionary theory and how theology should or should not play a role in scientific discourse. The proceedings will be moderated by Julian Reese.

Along the way, we will try to define Intelligent Design and distinguish it from "creationism" and what the evidence for macroevolution really is. It should be fun. If you are local, please swing by. It will be at noon on each Tuesday.

Flores again

An article has appeared in the September 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2006, vol. 103(36): 13421-13426) by Jacob et al. called "Pygmoid Australomelanesian Homo sapiens skeletal remains from Liang Bua, Flores: Population affinities and pathological abnormalities," arguing that the hominid remains from the island of Flores are not the remains of a new hominid/hominin species (whew!) . I can't provide a link because this article is behind a subscription wall. The authors write:

Our reexamination of the original skeletal material shows that there is insufficient morphological or metric evidence for a new hominin species on Flores, where evolution over millenia in total isolation is unproved, unlikely, and at variance with Stegodon migrations and glacial geology.

The authors further remark that the morphology of the remains:

...exhibits a combination of characters that are not primitive but instead regional, not unique but found in other modern human populations, particularly some still living on Flores, and not derived but strikingly disordered developmentally.

This will make Jonathan Hawks happy. I am guessing there will be rebuttals to this paper, especially given the bad blood between Jacob and the original discovery team.

Hat tip to Art Durband.