Michael Dowd has Cancer

Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, has cancer. It is apparently of the the very serious kind as he has been given a 50% chance of living 2-3 years. His newest report is here but I have had trouble getting the link to work. Please send your thoughts and prayers to him and his wife, Connie.

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Casey Luskin and Ardipithecus

Much to my chagrin, I missed this a few weeks back, when Casey Luskin put up an article on the new Ardipithecus remains. Hyperbollically titled Artificially Reconstructed “Ardi” Overturns Prevailing Evolutionary Hypotheses of Human Evolution, Luskin writes:

The missing link presently being touted in the media, Ardipithecus ramidus, has had more reconstructive surgery than Michael Jackson. Assuming that their "extensive digital reconstruction" of its "badly crushed and distorted bones" is accurate, what does A. ramidus (or “Ardi” as the fawning media is affectionately calling it) really show us that we didn’t already know? We already knew of upright walking / tree-climbing, small-brained hominids—that’s what Lucy, an australopithecine, was. We already knew that there were australopithecine fossils dating back to before 4 million years, and this fossil is only a little bit older. So what does this fossil teach us? Assuming all the reconstructions of Ardi's crushed bones are objective and accurate, this fossil teaches us at least one very important thing: prevailing evolutionary explanations about how upright walking supposedly evolved in humans, confidently taught in countless college-level anthropology classes, were basically wrong.

The Ardipithecus remains were painstakingly reconstructed over a period of ten years, during which clues about her morphology were extracted. Mr. Luskin is not correct in his assertion that we already knew about australopithecine fossils before 4 gigayears ago. The earliest clear evidence that we had for bipedality dated to around 3.6 mya. It is clear that bipedality was established by that time but we didn't have anything before that. The description of the Ardipithecus remains tells us that bipedality was incipient 4.4 mya.

He is also wrong about what was being taught. It has never been clear how bipedality arose and there have been competing models to explain its development that have been nothing more than hypothetical because we didn't have anything to test them on. The most popular model was the "forest/fringe" model in which bipedality arose as the climate cooled and the savannas expanded. The precursors of the Gorillas and Chimpanzees adapted to the forest proper, while the baboons and their ilk took to the grasslands. That left the area in between where a hominid could develop that could take advantage of both. Guess what? That model turned out to be wrong. So what? Now we know that bipedality arose in a forested environment and our models can proceed from that knowledge. That is how science works. It learns from its mistakes.

Luskin is also wrong about what else it tells us. It tells us that this early biped was also completely adapted to the trees, and was, thus, in a position to take advantage of the shrinking forests when the dessication began around 4 mya. We still don't know exactly how bipedality developed, but we know that it did.

Luskin also writes:

It’s rarely discussed, but there are a number of upright-walking, forest-dwelling ape-like species known from prior to 10 million years ago that are thought to be far removed from human ancestors. This implies that bipedalism in a hominoid does not necessarily qualify an individual as a human ancestor, and it also casts doubt on classical explanations for the evolution of bipedalism.

WHAT???? Which ape-like species is he talking about? There are absolutely no bipedal apes of any kind in the Miocene prior to seven million years ago. If there had been, this would have been huge news! He, of course, cites no information here. It isn't rarely discussed. Its not discussed at all!! I have written Mr. Luskin and asked him which remains he is referring to. I know it ain't Dryopithecus, Sivapithecus, Oreopithecus, Kenyapithecus or Gigantopithecus.

Luskin, correctly, does point out that there is some skepticism in the palaeoanthropological community about whether the case for bipedality holds up, notably from Bill Jungers at Stony Brook and Bernard Wood, at GW, in Washington, D.C., although Wood states that the head has better evidence for bipedality. This is, perhaps, true and we do need to be cautious about hanging our hats on one specimen, but the evidence, as presented by White, Asfaw and Lovejoy, is compelling. Luskin concludes thus:

So what do we have with “Ardi”? We have an extremely crushed “Irish stew” fossil that has undergone extensive reconstruction in order to become part of a PR campaign to make bold claims of ancestral status to the human line, even though at base its qualities are very similar to previously known fossils, and there's a lot of skepticism about the claims being made. In other words, we have the typical media circus that we find every time a new "missing link" is found.

For one thing, Luskin has just finished saying our models are wrong. The only reason that our models are wrong is because Ardipithecus ramidus isn't similar to other previously known fossils. That is why it is generating the buzz. The remains are completely, radically, different from the fossils that we have that come after, when bipedality is firmly established. The only reason it became part of a PR campaign at all is because it was so unusual. Hundreds of fossils have been yanked out of the ground in the last decade, none of which made the front page because they confirmed what we had already suspected about human evolution. Ardipithecus ramidus didn't. It suggested new things to think about and new models to work from. That is how science proceeds. Casey Luskin doesn't seem to like that.

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Students and Evolution

Steve Martin, over at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution, writes about a new series on evolution from the viewpoint of students. The introductory post is here. Steve writes:

In this series five evangelical students will be sharing their personal perspectives on the science-faith dialogue. This is a series by students and for students. So if you know of any students for which this topic is (or should be) of some interest, please feel free to pass the message along. (Of course, this being an open forum, everyone can participate – even those like me whose student career is but a distant memory - yikes, those 20 years went fast!).

Stay Tuned.

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Casey Luskin, Darwin's Dilemma and the First Amendment

Casey Luskin has a piece on the "brouhaha" that has erupted over the canceled presentation of the ID-promoting film Darwin's Dilemma at the California Science Center, which is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. He makes a case that the "Darwinian Thought Police" swooped in and made such a stink that the center canceled the event.

In the process of giving us some background, Luskin tells us what, at this point, can only be called a lie about the Cambrian explosion. He writes this:

There are two ways that modern evolutionists approach the Cambrian explosion, or what has been called “Darwin’s dilemma”:

A. Some freely acknowledge that the Cambrian fossil evidence essentially shows the opposite of what was expected under neo-Darwinian evolution.

B. Others deal with the Cambrian explosion by sweeping its problems under the rug and trying to change the subject.

Succumbing to pressure from Darwinian elites, the California Science Center chose option B.

If Luskin had done any research about the Cambrian explosion, he would know that this isn't true. I have posted about that here, and here. There is also a good post at Pharyngula about it. P.Z. Myers characterizes it thus:

But another important lesson, and one that creationists like to hide, is that while this was a sudden event in a geological sense, it wasn't actually all that rapid in human terms. The evolution of the canonical Cambrian forms was drawn out over tens of millions of years. They didn't just come out of nowhere, either; while individual lineages are cryptic, we see a slow aggregate increase in the complexity of multicellular animals in the fossil record that culminated in the flowering of large-animal diversity in the Cambrian.

I've had many creationists try to use the Argument from the Cambrian Explosion as a fait accompli against evolution (most recently, just this week). It's actually an argument from ignorance, though, since the data certainly does not fit a sudden creation by divine or alien fiat. It does fit with the idea of the appearance of these animals as a product of prior history, though…even though there are many mysteries about the details, the big picture does not require miracles or the supernatural.

To put this time-frame into perspective, humans weren't even on the planet ten million years ago.

So, this little fact sort of hits Luskin's credibility while he is trying to make his impassioned plea. Onward. About the Smithsonian, he writes:

The California Science Center is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, which has a long history of opposing academic freedom for ID.

In 2004, a pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific article authored by Stephen Meyer was published in a Smithsonian-affiliated biology journal. Once the Biological Society of Washington (BSW) realized it had published a pro-ID paper, it repudiated Meyer’s article, alleging the paper “does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.” Of course the BSW cited no factual errors in the paper; they just didn’t like Meyer’s conclusions.

Well, no that's quite right either. This has since become known as the "Sternberg Peer-Review Controversy," and was featured in the movie Expelled! as an instance of academic censorship. The paper by Meyer was called The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories¹ and was, according to Sternberg, peer-reviewed by himself and three other reviewers, although he has never identified who they were. A statement was released by the Council of the Biological Society of Washington disavowing the paper and its contents. Subsequently, it was criticized by a number of authors, one of which was Robert Weitzel, who argued that Meyer had improperly made use of William Dembski's specified complexity, a concept that has been roundly criticized (recently, in fact) as being both inappropriate for biological systems (here and here) and for being mathematically fuzzy. Common speculation is that Meyer's article would have not made it through the first round of review had it undergone the normal peer-review process. I have read this article. Like the recent Dembski/Marks article on specified complexity, it makes unwarranted conclusions about the nature of the data. Luskin is absolutely correct that they didn't like the conclusions of the paper. Unfortunately, he completely mischaracterizes why.

Luskin continues:

The story picks up in 2006, when a congressional staff investigation found that "Smithsonian's top officials permit[ted] the demotion and harassment of [a] scientist skeptical of Darwinian evolution.” The persecuted scientist was Smithsonian research biologist Richard Sternberg, who experienced retaliation for overseeing the publication of Meyer’s paper.

As the NCSE documents show, Sternberg was neither demoted nor harassed in this incident. He was an unpaid editor who resigned from his job six months before the publication of the article. As for ruination, his research associates position was renewed in 2006 for three more years.

For the rest of the article, Luskin asks why the center reneged on its promise and squelched freedom of speech. Interestingly, throughout the article, he never once mentions the event that might have triggered the reaction in the first place: the Dover/Kitzmiller trial. At the end of the trial, which was nothing short of disastrous for Team Intelligent Design, presiding Judge Jones addressed the concept of ID in the context of religious thought. Citing theologian John Haught, Judge Jones wrote:

Dr. Haught testified that this argument for the existence of God was advanced early in the 19th century by Reverend Paley and defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich admitted that their argument for ID based on the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is the same one that Paley made for design. (9:7-8 (Haught); Trial Tr. vol. 23, Behe Test., 55-57, Oct. 19, 2005; Trial Tr. vol. 38, Minnich Test., 44, Nov. 4, 2005).The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID’s “official position” does not acknowledge that the designer is God. However, as Dr. Haught testified, anyone familiar with Western religious thought would immediately make the association that the tactically unnamed designer is God, as the description of the designer in Of Pandas and People (hereinafter “Pandas”) is a “master intellect,” strongly suggesting a supernatural deity as opposed to any intelligent actor known to exist in the natural world. (P-11 at 85). Moreover, it is notable that both Professors Behe and Minnich admitted their personal view is that the designer is God and Professor Minnich testified that he understands many leading advocates of ID to believe the designer to be God. (21:90 (Behe); 38:36-38 (Minnich)).

Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants’ expert witnesses. (20:102-03 (Behe)). In fact, an explicit concession that the intelligent designer works outside the laws of nature and science and a direct reference to religion is Pandas’ rhetorical statement, “what kind of intelligent agent was it [the designer]” and answer: “On its own science cannot answer this question. It must leave it to religion and philosophy.” (P-11 at 7; 9:13-14 (Haught)).

Further, William Dembski has stated that Intelligent Design "is just the Logos of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."²

Therefore, the decision to not show the ID film Darwin's Dilemma might just as easily be seen as adhering to the First Amendment by not showing a film that is clearly religiously-based. It is certainly this fact that led to the protests in the first place.

CSC did not help itself in the matter by issuing no formal press release about the cancellation (at least none that I could find) although Jeff Rudolph, head of the center stated that the cancellation had to do with "contract issues, an argument that is echoed by Doc Bill over at antievolution.org (although you have to read around the sarcasm).

Either way, it is clear that this likely does not reflect a case of suppressing academic freedom as much as a case of the center acting prudently or in line with their signed contract. Luskin has blown this up way out of proportion and, in the process carefully bent the truth to suit the Discovery Institute's purposes.

¹Meyer, Stephen C. (2004) The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239

²William A. Dembski, (1999) Signs of Intelligence: A Primer on the Discernment of Intelligent Design, Touchstone, July-August, 84.

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Would You Like Another Helping of Quiche?

Anthropologist Peter McAllister is arguing that modern males are no match for our ancestors. DNAIndia.com picks up the story from The Scotsman. They write:

McAllister finds evidence he believes proves modern man is inferior to his predecessors in, among other fields, the basic Olympic athletics disciplines of running and jumping.

His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilised claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.

An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge.

Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 metres record of 9.69 seconds at last year's Beijing Olympics.

McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberised tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.

His comments about Neandertals are even more embarrassing:

McAllister said that a Neanderthal woman had 10 per cent more muscle bulk than modern European man.

Trained to capacity, she would have reached 90 per cent of Schwarzenegger's bulk at his peak in the 1970s.

However, because of the quirk of her physiology, with a much shorter lower arm, he believes Neanderthal woman would have been able to "slam him to the table without a problem", he said.

As Glenn Reynolds would say: "ouch!"

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Off Topic: the Ig Nobel Prizes

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story on another set of awards that is given out at this time every year, the Ig Nobel awards, which, as writer Gary Rotstein notes: "recognize ridiculous research":

The Ig Nobels may sound a tad silly, but there is a kernel of practicality in each, best demonstrated by this year's Public Health Prize. It went to Elena Bodnar of Chicago and partners, for an invention that might have sold like hotcakes -- or at least like a Wonder Bra -- at the Oakland street demonstrations during the G-20 summit.

Ms. Bodnar is a Ukraine native who has studied the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, during which people nearby were sickened by inhaling poisoned air. If only they'd worn brassieres capable of being converted to face masks, so many who were affected could have been protected.

That's the theory, at least, of Ms. Bodnar's U.S. patent No. 7255627, titled a "Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks." During an emergency, her version of a brassiere is capable of becoming a pair of masks used by both the bra wearer and a fortunate bystander of her choosing. Best of all, the bra size doesn't even matter.

"You have to be prepared all the time, at any place, at any moment," she said, sounding just like a Boy Scout, though Boy Scouts don't usually wear bras. (A number of their Scoutmasters might, however.)

I am sure there is a market out there somewhere.

On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition

David Quammen, a science writer who wrote one of the best books on evolution out there, The Song of the Dodo, has published an illustrated, annotated version of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the Charles Darwin classic. This volume is reviewed by John Lynch in Science Blogs. Lynch writes:

David Quammen has produced a very nice edition of Origin that relies on the first edition for its text but supplements it with extracts from The Voyage of the Beagle and Darwin's Autobiography while simultaneous profusely illustrating it with period illustrations, Darwinalia, and modern photos of species that Darwin refers to. All-in-all this is an excellent way for the Darwin neophyte to experience Origin and get some nice background into Darwin's life and time. Highly recommended!

Think of it as an antidote to the Charles Darwin Bible.

Carl Weiland of CMI on Ardipithecus

Creation Ministries International's Carl Wieland, a long time member of the old guard of creationists, has an article on the site about Ardipithecus. He writes this:

Our writings in this ministry have already pointed out for years, referring to the detailed work of evolutionist anatomists such as Charles Oxnard, that there is a broad group of fossil creatures, now extinct, that is more dissimilar to both modern apes and modern humans than these are to each other. Oxnard’s conclusion was that australopithecines (the main constituents of this group) were not in the human line. We agree with him, not surprisingly. Ardipithecus appears to belong to this group as well; in fact, when the highly fragmented specimen was first discovered in the mid 1990s, it was originally put into that same genus, and called Australopithecus ramidus. Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, says that Ardipithecus is not the common ancestor of apes and humans. But, he says, “it’s the closest we have ever been able to come”.

What is not being said here is that Mr. Wieland is still quoting the out-of-date Charles Oxnard paper about australopithecines, which was written before A. afarensis was described. Oxnard said, at the time (1975!) that although australopithecines were likely bipedal, they resembled apes more than humans. This paper was roundly criticized by many in the palaeoanthropological world because it relied on a very small set of measurements. Mr. Wieland is putting forth this evidence as if the last thirty-four years of palaeoanthropological research do not exist.

Tim White is perfectly correct about this. Ardipithecus shows us a creature that is closer to the split between humans and apes but, based on its morphology, is likely not at the split. Wieland continues to show his misunderstanding of evolution by continuing to rely on the outmoded unilineal, top-to-bottom ancestor tree idea that was abandoned by evolutionary biologists decades ago. He writes:

Did Ardi possess features which indicate a more upright stance than modern apes? Quite possibly, even likely. But then, so did the australopithecines/habilines. And both groups also possessed features making them suited for life in the trees as well. And CT scans of australopithecine skulls show that the organs of balance (the ‘semi-circular canals”) were positioned in ways quite different from that required for a creature that walks habitually upright.

In short, the significance of Ardi can be interpreted within either an evolutionary or creationist framework, and the latest analyses of these recycled bones and claims would appear to add no weight at all to the claims of either side. As cited elsewhere, a 1995 Nature article stated that it was “possible that Australopithecus [now Ardipithecus] ramidus is neither an ancestor of humanity, nor of chimpanzees … ”.¹ And indications are that nothing has really changed since then.

First off, let's be clear: Homo habilis had absolutely no specializations for living in the trees. In fact, by the time you get to Australopithecus africanus and A. robustus, those specializations are long gone. So, Wieland is completely wrong about this. He does, however, quote Henry Gee correctly. It is entirely possible that Ardipithecus ramidus was not a direct ancestor to the hominid forms that came later. This does not mean she is not transitional, nor does it mean she is unrelated to the hominids that came later. Once again, this goes to the heart of the difference between direct ancestry and collateral ancestry. One only needs to look at the diversity of australopithecines to see evidence of that. It is clear, based on the fossil record, that A. boisei became extinct somewhere around 1.2-1.5 gigayears ago. That doesn't mean that one of the other branches of australopithecines did not give rise to later hominids. It is clear that the hominids of Ardipithecus ramidus' time (be they only one species or many) were on a track to bipedality.

Ardipithecus shows us a window into an anthropological past before that of Lucy, where bipedalism has taken hold in at least one hominid species but was not fully developed. At one point, Wieland notes that this find is nothing new because the bones were discovered in 1994. What he does not say is that it took over ten years to painstakingly remove the bones from the surrounding matrix and reconstruct them. This is common for palaeoanthropological discoveries. What Wieland is calling ho-hum, is, in fact, a very exciting discovery.

¹Gee, H., Uprooting the human family tree, Nature 373(6509):15, 5 January 1995
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Ardipithecus Science Update

I stand corrected, the Science articles are available to anyone that wants to read them. Here is the link with all of the papers. Sorry for the misinformation. Grab the pdfs while you can. Even though there is no implied time limit on these papers, they take up server space and it will come down eventually.

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The Evolution of Mammalian Hearing

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has an article detailing research on early mammalian hearing. Mike Cronin writes:

Though it weighed 2 ounces and was 5 inches long, the chipmunk-like mammal that lived 123 million years ago had something its dinosaur predators didn't: middle ear bones partially independent of its jaw bone.

That evolutionary development helped Maotherium asiaticus have more sensitive hearing.

"This made it possible for mammals to be active in the night," said Dr. Zhe-Xi Luo, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History associate director of science and curator of vertebrate paleontology, in an e-mail from Germany.

"In the Mesozoic (Era), when dinosaurs dominated the world, this is a key adaptation for the survival of mammals," he said.

Neat!

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Archaeopteryx Growth Trajectory: The Dinosaur to Bird Avalance of Evidence Continues

Archaeopteryx, it seems, matured more like a dinosaur than a bird, according to a new report from ScienceDaily. How do we know this , you ask?:

That's because new, microscopic images of the ancient cells and blood vessels inside the bones of the winged, feathered, claw-handed creature show unexpectedly slow growth and maturation that took years, similar to that found in dinosaurs, from which birds evolved. In contrast, living birds grow rapidly and mature in a matter of weeks.

Also groundbreaking is the finding that the rapid bone growth common to all living birds but surprisingly absent from the Archaeopteryx was not necessary for avian dinosaur flight.

This is not good news for those arguing that Archaeopteryx was a true bird (see the ICR article here and the AIG article here), not that that position was tenable to begin with. The other notable conclusion is this:

"From these findings, we see that the physiological and metabolic transition into true birds occurred millions of years after Archaeopteryx," he said. "But, perhaps equally important, we've shown that avians were able to fly even with dinosaur physiology."

The Avalanche continues.

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P.Z. Myers Takes Russell Goldman to the Woodshed

In a post on Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers takes apart the Russell Goldman article on ABC News. Titled The Worst Article on Ardipithecus Yet, Myers, unfortunately has as much fun bashing intelligent Christians as he does bashing creationist Christians. About David Menton, he writes:

Menton is not an acclaimed anatomist. His sole claim to fame is his weird belief that the earth is only 6000 years old. Although, I must say, I agree with his sentiment here: the first page is metaphorical, poetical nonsense and should be thrown out, and the rest should be tossed right after it. But what really annoys me is the patent disrespect for knowledge in these people. Ardipithecus is a genus that lived over 4 million years ago. Shouldn't there be a little bit of awe at that? Not from the ICR.

There is much in the article that is terribly-written and worthy of scorn. The problem is that by bringing up the creationists' position, front and center, the radically strange, flat-earth science aspects of their position is emphasized, making Christians as a whole, look bad.

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Evolution of a Creationist

I spelled Mike Beidler's name wrong on his blog. Sorry, Mike.

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Kansas Biology Teachers and Evolution

The Wichita Eagle is reporting that a new survey of Kansas biology teachers reveals that they have the highest acceptance of evolution of any state in the country. As John Schrock writes:

The percentage of biology teachers from different states who thought that creation has a valid scientific foundation were: Kentucky teachers, 69 percent; Oklahoma, 48 percent; South Dakota, 39 percent; Ohio, 38 percent; Illinois, 30 percent; Georgia, 30 percent; Louisiana, 29 percent; and Kansas, 24 percent.

Creationist belief that contradicts science may actually be substantially lower than these percentages suggest. In a 1991 survey, 85 percent of Kansas biology teachers said they thought "the modern theory of evolution has a valid scientific foundation." But 25 percent also indicated that they thought "creationism has a valid scientific foundation."

After that survey, I chatted with teachers in the field. Some explained that they marked both answers because they were not literalist and saw 3.5 billion years of evolution as no problem. But they did believe in a supernatural creation of the universe in the beginning and, in some cases, a supernatural instilling of the soul on the evolutionary route from ape-men to humans. In neither case would their beliefs interfere with teaching modern evolutionary biology.

I suspect that this is more common than we think. After all, I can think of a number of people, myself included, who are committed evolutionists who also believe in a God-ordained creation. This gives one hope, although the numbers in Kentucky are a bit scary.

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New ABC Article on Ardipithecus Draws Fire

A new ABC article by Russell Goldman on Ardipithecus appears to give credence to the arguments of creationists, who argue that the discovery is nothing more than an ape, a statement that is easy to dispense with but, for some reason, Goldman can't do. Goldman is a reporter who has had his share of accuracy complaints leveled at him. This appears to be more a problem with sensationalism than with acceptance of a clearly non-scientific position. He writes:

In one camp are evolutionary scientists who last week published and hailed the discovery of an upright walking ape named Ardipithecus ramidus, or "Ardi" for short, who made Ethiopia her home nearly 5 million years ago.

But despite the excitement from the paleontology community, another group of researchers, many of them with advanced degrees in science, are unimpressed by Ardi, who they believe is just another ape -- an ape of indeterminate age, they add, and an ape who cannot be an ancestor of modern man for a range of reasons, including one of singular importance: God created man in one day, and evolution is a fallacy.

This is highly misleading. Very few of the "researchers" have advanced degrees from universities where mainstream geology and palaeontology are taught or have degrees relevant to the study of palaeontology or geology. Most have published few to no articles in mainstream science journals and their positions on matters of astronomy, geology, biology and palaeontology are far outside the mainstream for all of these and other disciplines. Goldman continues:

"What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible," said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. "The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can't live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages."

Quoting David Menton here is slightly unusual. He is the exception to the norm in creationist circles. Is he an acclaimed anatomist? Web of science lists 37 publications dating back some twenty years and he did teach at the Washington University School of Medicine, which is a mainstream university (he is now emeritus) but his expertise is the organization of cells, particularly the dermis and epidermis, rather than comparative anatomy. When he does mention the anatomical evidence, he is quoted as saying:

Menton said Ardi's skull and feet are exactly the kind of skull and feet you would expect an ape to have and have none of the features of modern humans.

"Evolutionists want to call Ardi 'ape-like.' This creature is ape-like, because she is an ape. Just call it an ape," he said.

The biggest problem Menton has with Ardi is her estimated age. The Earth, he says, is no more around 5,000 years old, a number creationists have estimated by counting the generations of man named in the Bible from Adam to Jesus.

"Evolution is supposedly based on science, but the science does not prove what they want it to. Creationism is not based on scientific observation but on God's word. God created everything in six days, and that's it."

Even eyeballing the evidence, I can tell that there are transitional traits and that the remains don't resemble an ape. This is not the first time a creationist has looked at a fossil human and proclaimed it to be an ape. On pages 112-113 of Of Pandas and People, Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon write:

Darwinists are convinced that Homo erectus was nearly human and directly ancestral to man. Design adherents, however, regard Homo erectus, as well as the other hominids discussed in this section, as little more than apes, and point instead to the abrupt appearance of the culture and patterns of behavior which distinguish man from the apes.¹

The first skull shown here is a chimpanzee skull. Below that is the Homo erectus skull from the Kenya National Museum found in East Rudolf, catalog number 3733





The anatomical differences are obvious and striking. Measurements have been taken on fossil material and compared to known apes. The results clearly indicate that Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus specimens bear no resemblance whatever to apes. Regarding Ardipithecus, is Menton's grasp of anatomy that bad that he cannot tell the difference between an ape and a human, or is he just being dishonest?

It is nothing short of amazing that Goldman chooses to end his article with the quote from Menton. It completely refocuses the attention on the creationists and away from the importance of the fossil find. It also gives no room for rebuttal to his statements, quoting one of the discoverers, Owen Lovejoy, only once. Such treatment is irresponsible and offensive. The article should have ended with a comment on David Menton's quotes, which might read something like "Sadly, there are no mainstream geologists, astronomers, astrophysists, geochemists, geneticists, palaeontologists, palaeobotanists, or anthropologists that agree with Dr. Menton's position."

¹Davis, Percival, and Kenyon, Dean. (1993) Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins. Foundation for Thought and Ethics

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Lee Meadows' Blog

Lee Meadows, who's new book The Missing Link I mentioned a few posts back has a blog called "Never Give In" about science education. The site is heavily pedagogical and approaches each new discovery from the perspective of how it can be taught as opposed to what it teaches us about evolution. Although I am sympathetic to the comments of Kent that we need to help students understand how important a role evolution plays in daily life and that, in that sense, they need to "believe it," I am also cognisant of the Kurt Wise's of the world, who will take all of it in and not believe a word of it. We can only bang our heads on the desk so many times. I know what I am going to do with my Christmas money this year. Time to add Lee's book to the list.

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Evolutionary Medicine

A short piece in Science reviews a new book by Peter Gluckman, Alan Beedle and Mark Hanson called Principles of Evolutionary Medicine. This is a matter of wondering "what took you guys so long?" The book is a treatise on how evolutionary mechanisms affect medicine and treatments. The reviewer notes the following:

In 2009, the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, evolutionary biology is still trying to earn a place in medical education. The core competencies recommended by a recent joint committee of the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute on the scientific knowledge required by future physicians include an understanding of evolution by natural selection (1). At an April meeting, "Evolution in Health and Medicine," sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, a panel of deans and faculty from leading medical schools around the world endorsed the incorporation of evolutionary principles in medical curricula (2). And yet one can probably count on the digits of a three-toed sloth the number of medical schools currently offering such instruction.

I have posted on a number of trends/discoveries that have a direct bearing on medicine, from ERVs here, and here, and exaptation here and here, as well as other germane topics. If these guidelines are adapted, it may force a number of current medical students to rethink their calling. Up until now, it was perfectly easy to be a medical doctor and not know beans about evolution. I go to Bible Study Fellowship with some that I am convinced are Young Earth Creationists. The problem is that, all you have to do is look at the evolutionary history of H1N1 to know that this is an issue who's time has come.

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LGF Equates Creationism With Global Warming Skeptics

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is writing about a "Climate of Denial" in which he argues that creationists and global warming skeptics use the same tactics to arrive at their "science." He writes:

Again, I’m struck by the similarity between the techniques of global warming deniers and creationists; they both use cherry-picked data, they both make outrageous claims couched in pseudo-scientific language that sounds convincing to gullible people, they both compile lists of skeptical “scientists” that turn out to be packed with ringers, frauds, and people who never signed in the first place, and they both use quote mining.

As I have indicated before, I am just not sure this is true. I think this for the following reasons:

• I know of very few creationists who write about an area in which they practice. The classic example of this is, obviously The Genesis Flood, written by a hydraulics engineer and a pastor—neither of whom had the slightest amount of geological or biological training. That trend continues to this day. Ken Ham, the charismatic leader of Answers in Genesis has no science training other than that which one must get in school. His training is, in fact, in the pastorship. The scientists he employs (John Whitmore, Jason Lisle, Terry Mortensen, David Menton) have degrees from creationist colleges and their science articles are never published in mainstream science journals because their research and evaluations are suspect. This is true with the ICR as well. When they attempt to produce something approaching mainstream science (The RATE Project), their arguments are prone to wild speculation and misinterpretation of scientific literature and procedures.
• While the Dissent from Darwinism list that the Discovery Institute hawks has very few scientists that actually practice in fields that are relevant to evolutionary studies, the Global Warming Petition Project is chock full of climatologists, meteorologists, geophysicists, astronomers and environmental scientists, who all other things being equal, ought to know what they are talking about. It should be noted, however that eSkeptic does not agree, based on complaints similar to those listed above for the Dissent from Darwinism list. Having said that, there are others who are not convinced that the anthropogenic model best explains the data and have the credentials to argue persuasively.

As I said in a previous post, I do not have the background necessary to evaluate the arguments for or against global warming. I can only evaluate the comparison to creationism, which I don't think is valid.

Nifty Blog to Check Out

I probably should have discovered this blog earlier. Mike Biedler is a commander in the U.S. Navy and is the brains behind the blog The Evolution of a Creationist. Unlike yours truly, Mike made the arduous trek from young earth creationism to evolutionary creationism. This is humorously recounted in his "Steps of the Journey." For anyone who has made the journey out of the desert of Young earth creationism, or is questioning their YEC leanings, his site is a must.

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Josh Rosenau and the Good Samaritan

A bit back, Josh Rosenau, the blogger behind Thoughts from Kansas lost his laptop and some other items. Recently, someone anonymously donated some money to him with a note that reads, in part:

Not that it matters, but I am one of those dreaded "creationists" that many science bloggers love to mock. My own personal views fall somewhere between id [sic] (not ID the whole DI anti-evolution political movement) and TE [theistic evolution] or EC [evolutionary creationism, the evangelical version of TE, roughly]. I love science and have a B.S. in a health-related field. I am kind of a freak in that no one else I know really seems to care much about the subject. … I do not oppose teaching good science. But I do oppose either scientism or religion being promoted in public schools, but am willing to bet that most educators know better than to cross the line. … I hate the warfare rhetoric used by the most vocal culture warriors. A lot of books and articles apparently get sold/read by capitalizing on the warfare model. I have concluded that those on the extremes have no desire to see the warfare end and achieve their purposes best by fanning the flames.

When I read that, I think of the ICR, AIG, Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and then I think about all of the rest of us caught in the middle. Here is someone willing to help out just because he can and believes that he is called to do so. A good example for all of us.

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Ardipithecus ramidus in Science Magazine

Science Magazine has a series of articles on the Ardipithecus ramidus remains that have been fully described. The articles are behind a subscription wall, so I cannot link to them. I will hit the high points, though. These quotes are necessarily short in order to conform to fair use guidelines. From Owen Lovejoy et al's Careful Climbing in the Miocene: The Forelimbs of Ardipithecus ramidus and Humans Are Primitive¹:

This discovery ends years of speculation about the course of human evolution. Our ancestors’ hands differed profoundly from those of living great apes, and therefore the two must have substantially differed in the ways they climbed, fed, and nested. It is African apes who have evolved so extensively since we shared our last common ancestor, not humans or our immediate hominid ancestors. Hands of the earliest hominids were less ape-like than ours and quite different from those of any living form.

From Combining Prehension and Propulsion: The Foot of Ardipithecus ramidus²:

One of the great advantages of our more rigid foot is that it works much better as a lever during upright walking and running (as it also does in monkeys). However, Ar. ramidus still had an opposable big toe, unlike any later hominid. Its ability to walk upright was therefore comparatively primitive. Because it had substantially modified the other four toes for upright walking, even while retaining its grasping big toe, the Ardipithecus foot was an odd mosaic that worked for both upright walking and climbing in trees. If our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee had not retained such an unspecialized foot, perhaps upright walking might never have evolved in the first place.

From The Pelvis and Femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The Emergence of Upright Walking³

Ardipithecus ramidus now unveils how our skeleton became progressively modified for bipedality. Although the foot anatomy of Ar. ramidus shows that it was still climbing trees, on the ground it walked upright. Its pelvis is a mosaic that, although far from being chimpanzee-like, is still much more primitive than that of Australopithecus.

From The Great Divides: Ardipithecus ramidus Reveals the Postcrania of Our Last Common Ancestors with African Apes⁴:

The hominid descendant of the last common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees (the CLCA), Ardipithecus, became a biped by modifying its upper pelvis without abandoning its grasping big toe. It was therefore an unpredicted and odd mosaic. It appears, unlike Au. afarensis, to have occupied the basal adaptive plateau of hominid natural history. It is so rife with anatomical surprises that no one could have imagined it without direct fossil evidence.

The takeaway message here is that just as human evolution has proceeded by fits and spurts, the science behind it has done the same, like most other scientific endeavors. Five years ago, we were looking for an ancestor that looked something like a primitive chimpanzee. Now we know that is not how it went. The other cherished model that will go by the wayside is that bipedalism was an adaptation to the expansion of the savanna and grasslands and the retreat of the forests. The morphology of Ardipithecus seems, instead, to strongly suggest that bipedalism arose while our ancestors were still living in a forest environment. When the forest retreated, however, it is clear that Ardipithecus ramidus or something like it had the necessary adaptations to survive the changes and thrive in the new environment.

Some will say that because we were so wrong about our early hominid models, we don't know much about evolution. Those arguments have been put forth before. A cursory look at Marvin Lubenow's dreadful book Bones of Contention shows that. Ardipithecus doesn't tell us that human evolution didn't happen. It tells us that some of our models were wrong. In any scientific field, each new discovery ought to result in a slight rewrite of some cherished theories. If it doesn't, the science is stagnant. This is the critical difference between science and creationism. creationism cannot change its theories or models. It has only one explanation for how things happened, which must be correct. Any evidence that does not comport with those models must be explained away, no matter the cost to intellectual or scientific integrity. We found this out first-hand with the RATE project. The discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus should be fascinating and exciting to any evolutionary biologist. It not only shows us where we were wrong, it shows us what we got right and where our models need to be adjusted. More importantly, though, it shows us a glimpse of our deep past in an breathtakingly new and exciting way.

¹Lovejoy, C.O., Simpson, Scott, White, Tim, Asfaw, B, and Suwa, G. (2009) Careful Climbing in the Miocene: The Forelimbs of Ardipithecus ramidus and Humans Are Primitive. Science 326: 70

²Lovejoy, C, Latimer, B., Suwa, G., Asfaw, B., and White, T.D.(2009) Combining Prehension and Propulsion: The Foot of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science 326: 72

³Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., Spurlock, L., Asfaw, B., White, T.D. (2009) The Pelvis and Femur of Ardipithecus ramidus: The Emergence of Upright Walking. Science 326: 71

⁴Lovejoy, C., Suwa, G., Simpson, Scott W., Matternes, Jay H., White, T.D. (2009) The Great Divides: Ardipithecus ramidus Reveals the Postcrania of Our Last Common Ancestors with African Apes. Science 326: 73

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Owen Lovejoy on Ardipithecus ramidus

Owen Lovejoy, one of the leading scholars on all things australopithecine and one of the principle describers of the new Ardipithecus finds, describes the importance of the find in terms of our understanding of human/ape relationships. In Breitbart.com, he says:

"People often think we evolved from apes, but no, apes in many ways evolved from us," Lovejoy said. "It has been a popular idea to think humans are modified chimpanzees. From studying Ardipithecus ramidus, or 'Ardi,' we learn that we cannot understand or model human evolution from chimps and gorillas."

Lovejoy (and others) are arguing that the human/ape split came about long before the modern great apes arose and, thus, we share no behavioral or morphological traits in common. If the split between apes and humans was between eight and nine million years ago, that would mean eight million years of evolution for apes to become what they are today. That's a lot of time.

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More on Ardipithecus ramidus

The NYT has a killer story by John Noble Wilford on the new Ardipithecus find (yes, I know, it is NYT but it was too good to pass up) with an associated graphic. It gives one an idea of just how transitional this find really is:

The Ardipithecus specimen, an adult female, probably stood four feet tall and weighed about 120 pounds, almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy. Its brain was no larger than a modern chimp’s. It retained an agility for tree-climbing but already walked upright on two legs, a transforming innovation in hominids, though not as efficiently as Lucy’s kin.

Ardi’s feet had yet to develop the arch-like structure that came later with Lucy and on to humans. The hands were more like those of extinct apes. And its very long arms and short legs resembled the proportions of extinct apes, or even monkeys.

Here is the accompanying graphic, from the NYT.



Every so often, a find comes around and galvanizes the scientific world. This is one such find. A. afarensis is a good case for a transitional form. Ardipithecus ramidus is so much more. It also shows, in true evolutionary fashion, that the transition to bipedalism took place over a considerable period of time and happened in mosaic fashion.

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Huge Dinosaur Prints in France

According to The Globe and Mail, a set of ginormous dinosaur prints has been discovered in France. The story notes:

The site of the find, high in the Jura mountains, was once a literal sauropod stomping ground: So far, 20 prints scattered on a 10-hectare site have been uncovered, paleontologist Jean-Michel Mazin of France's National Centre of Scientific Research said Wednesday.

Researchers believe there are hundreds, or even thousands, more still hidden, Mr. Mazin said.

The well-preserved footprints from the Late Jurassic period will help scientists learn more about sauropods, long-necked plant eaters that were giants among the dinosaurs. The hulking beasts who left their footprints in the mud 150 million years ago weighed 30 to 40 tonnes and were more than 25 metres long, the French research centre said.

Neat.

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New Mystery Find in South Africa

Lee Berger and Francis Thackeray have found "something" in South Africa. They just ain't sayin' what. Times Online has the story:

Why the secrecy? Simply, when a major scientific breakthrough is made, it is essential to first fully describe it to the scientific community. A peer-review process is completed and publication in an international scientific journal acts as a seal of authenticity and scientific rigour. Prior publication of any kind might diffuse both the significance of the discovery and the perceived veracity of the subject matter.

That’s why whatever has been discovered in South Africa must remain a secret.

Lee Berger has long worked in the field of australopithecine ancestry so I am guessing this is a find on the order of the importance of the Ardipithecus ramidus find publicized a few days ago. We shall see.

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Intelligent Alien Intervention Institute

Gordon Glover has a new video on Youtube that is a complete howl. It takes on the "academic freedom" legislation to point out that, given that we should be open to teaching "the controversy," anything can be thought of as science. In this case, it is alien technology. This eerily reflects the testimony of Michael Behe during the Dover/Kitzmiller trial, in which he stated that, under his definition of science, astrology would be included.




The best part is the picture of Seattle in the background, which is where the headquarters of the Discovery Institute is located.


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Richard Dawkins Isn't Taking it Anymore.

Newsweek, a magazine I don't ordinarily pick up, has an article by Richard Dawkins, and he is mad. On the fossil record, he writes:

We don't need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized. It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong. Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps, and creationists love them obsessively.

Dawkins then waxes on the existence of the flatworm, one of his favorite animals. He writes:

The Platyhelminthes, to a worm, are "already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history." But in this case, "the very first time they appear" is not the Cambrian but today. Do you see what this means, or at least ought to mean for creationists? Creationists believe that flatworms were created in the same week as all other creatures. They have therefore had exactly the same time in which to fossilize as all other animals. During all the centuries when all those bony or shelly animals were depositing their fossils by the millions, the flatworms must have been living happily alongside them, but without leaving the slightest trace of their presence in the rocks. What, then, is so special about gaps in the record of those animals that do fossilize, given that the past history of the flatworms is one big gap: even though the flatworms, by the creationists' own account, have been living for the same length of time? If the gap before the Cambrian Explosion is used as evidence that most animals suddenly sprang into existence in the Cambrian, exactly the same "logic" should be used to prove that the flatworms sprang into existence yesterday. Yet this contradicts the creationist's belief that flatworms were created during the same creative week as everything else. You cannot have it both ways. This argument, at a stroke, completely and finally destroys the creationist case that the Precambrian gap in the fossil record can be taken as evidence against evolution.

Here's the problem with the above argument: has Dawkins, in all of the years he has been battling creationists, not seen how often they move the goal posts? They argue, alternately, that the entire geologic column was created by Noah's deluge and then argue that the gaps in the fossil record show that evolution doesn't work. Nowhere is the cognitive dissonance of these arguments explained. Either the Cambrian Period existed, or it didn't. Dawkins is correct, you can't have one or the other. This has not stopped creationists from arguing both. The other favorite one is to argue, alternately, that there is evidence of a young earth and that the earth has the appearance of age. The logical fallacies of that are numerous but creationists flatly ignore them.

As far as the flatworms are concerned, they will simply argue that hydrodynamic sorting put them at the top of the column because they "floated" during the flood. Then they will castigate Dawkins for something else that the fossil record doesn't show. It is irrelevant that the global flood model can't explain ANYTHING that we find in the fossil record or that, despite the paucity of remains in the Cambrian, there exist mountains of evidence for evolution of other forms throughout geologic time. With regard to "missing links," Dawkins writes:

The silliest of all these "missing link" challenges are the following two (or variants of them, of which there are many). First, "If people came from monkeys via frogs and fish, then why does the fossil record not contain a 'fronkey'?" And, second, "I'll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human baby." This last one makes the same mistake as all the others, plus the additional one of thinking that major evolutionary change happens overnight.

No, but it is easy to counter with the fact that we have frogamanders and fishapods, and that evolution explains the existence of both of those. Dawkins fully understands the science behind evolution, but has yet to fully understand the logical inconsistencies that comfortably fits into the gestalt of your average creationist.

UPDATE: forgot the link. It is fixed now.

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New Book by Lee Meadows Said to Bridge the Gap Peacefully

Lee Meadows of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has written a book that he says will help in the evolution controversy. The story, in Medical News, notes:

In his book, The Missing Link: An Inquiry Approach for Teaching All Students About Evolution, Meadows, a Christian and science educator, writes: "For too long evolution has been denied its place in science curriculum. School policies driven by misunderstanding and fear regularly displace widely recognized principles of science. But without understanding evolution, students - no matter what their religious beliefs - will never achieve the level of scientific literacy they need to make sense of even everyday practicalities such as how human viruses work."

Sadly, this is lost on most people. His tactic is very simple:

"Children have to understand evolution," he says, "but they don't have to believe it, and that is the key distinction that I have laid out in the book. So if a child asks if God made the whale, it's really an opportunity to talk about natural and supernatural explanations. You are not saying that one is better than the other, only that science is limited to natural explanations."

Unfortunately, I think that he has underestimated the level of hostility that your average creationist has for evolution, not to mention the Discovery Institute, which is doing its best to foster the eradication of the teaching of evolution everywhere. Still, it sounds like a good book to read.

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Ardipithecus ramidus: The Game Has Changed!

Wired (as well as a bunch of other sources) has a new article on the Ardipithecus ramidus find that has been analyzed. This find will change models of early human origins, for which there are actually more models than fossils. Don't misread that statement; there are plenty of fossils to reconstruct big chunks of our past but there are also some areas, particularly the early years, that are still sketchy. The article states:

“This is a landmark,” said Dean Falk, a University of Florida evolutionary anthropologist who reviewed the findings. “The field will go into a frenzy.”

Falk’s assessment was echoed by paleontologists around the world, who have waited for 15 years since a handful of 4.4 million-year-old fossils, belonging to an unknown hominid species, were found in sediments along the Awash River in Ethiopia.

Even then, the fossils were clearly special. The name of the species, chosen by paleontologist discoverers Tim White, Gen Suwa and Berhane Asfaw of the Middle Awash Project, means “root ground ape” in local dialect. The fossils likely “represent a long-sought potential root species for the Hominidae,” they wrote in a 1994 Nature paper (.pdf).

Conventional wisdom is that hominids arose due to a group of Miocene apes (Kenyapithecus?) adapting to the forest/fringe environment as environmental cooling created more savannas. These early hominids then moved to the savannas permanently around 3-3.5 mya. This find suggests that the evolution of bipedal, hominid behaviour may have taken place more in a forest environment than a savanna environment. Here is a revised tree from Wired, showing Ardipithecus, which is now assumed to be the root species in the hominid lineage.


The other takeaway message here is that the split between the precursors of chimpanzees and the precursors of gorillas is further back than we thought. Ardipithecus shows extremely derived characteristics relative to chimpanzees. In the world of human palaeontology, this is huge. It clearly shows a step between the quadrupedal apes of the Miocene and the demonstratively bipedal australopithecines of the Plio-Pleistocene. Folks, this is as transitional as it gets.

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Discovery Channel Program on Ardipithecus ramidus

The Discovery Channel is going to have a program on the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus and the painstaking effort to reconstruct the morphology of this species. It will be on Sunday, October 11, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. From the story in Web Wire:

To accompany the program, Discovery today launched an extensive website, www.discovery.com/ardi, for people who want to know more about "Ardi" and her surroundings. In addition, UNDERSTANDING ARDI, a one-hour special produced in collaboration with CBS News, moderated by former CBS and CNN anchor Paula Zahn, will air at 11 PM (ET/PT). The special includes research team members Dr. Tim White, Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Dr. Giday WoldeGabriel, Dr. Owen Lovejoy, Brooks Hanson, Deputy Managing Editor for the Physical Sciences, Science and science journalist Ann Gibbons.

Set your TiVos or VCRs.

Dinosaurs in Chalk

In a story in the Harvard Crimson, it is reported that an art student has done a chalk mural of the history of life. The report states:

Yesterday, on a bright and sunny afternoon, Sidewalk Sam, a Boston-based artist most recognized for his chalked sidewalk murals, collaborated with Harvard Museum of Natural History to draw a timeline of the earth’s 4.6 billion year history and the diversity of life forms that existed during these eras.

The mural project began to materialize when a graduate student in paleontology, Ben Kotrc, met Sidewalk Sam during the summer at an event. The project attracted young children of all ages and encouraged students to marvel at the foreign life forms created by the artist and other collaborators.

Sounds neat, but, unaccountably, the story has no pictures. I wrote the Crimson the following comment:

Why would you write a story on some neat murals and not show the murals? It reminds me of the Monty Python's sketch: "For the first time on record, the 1972 eclipse of the sun."

Hopefully not too snotty but that sounds like the kind of thing that most people would want to see.

UPDATE: MuseumGoer adds a link to pictures of the sidewalk. They are here.

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It is Amazing What You Will Find Just Walking Around...

Geologists in India have stumbled (literally) upon a large cache of dinosaur eggs. The story in UPI states:

The site is part of an area rich in ancient organisms dating back 140 million years, geologists told The Times of India.

"We found clusters and clusters of spherical eggs of dinosaurs. And each cluster contained eight eggs," M.U. Ramkumar, geology lecturer of the Periyar University, said.

He said each egg was about 5 to 8 inches in diameter. They were lying in sandy nests of about four feet.

The clusters of eggs were under volcanic ash from the Deccan eruptions. Scientists have long thought the Deccan eruptions were a reason for extinctions in the area.

The eggs, which may be 65 million years old, were from both the Carnosaur, an aggressive, predatory dinosaur, and Sauropods, long-necked herbivores that became extremely large. Fossils of these reptiles were found on earlier expeditions but this is the first time so many nests and so many clusters of eggs were found, the newspaper said.

Neat.

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Tyrannosaurus Rex and Trichomonosis: The Dinosaur to Bird Avalanche of Evidence Continues

The Chicago Sun-Times has an article on what may have killed the famous Tyrannosaur named Sue, which currently resides in the Field Museum. According to the story, by David Newbart:

Theories abound on what led to the demise of the Field Museum’s most famous specimen: shortly after the Tyrannosaurus rex was found, some wondered if a series of holes in the back of her massive skull were bite marks suffered during a ferocious battle with another meat-eating dinosaur.

But researchers have honed in on a culprit far smaller: a throat infection caused by a single-celled organism.

Writing in Tuesday’s edition of the online journal of Public Library of Science One, researchers from the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere theorize that the parasitic infection could have led to an autoimmune response that eventually could have led Sue to starve to death 67 million years ago.

Now the punch line: the infection shows evidence of being caused by the Trichomonosis bacteria which is found in only one other sub-class: birds. Given all of the other palaeontological evidence that the the theropod dinosaurs and Aves share a common ancestry, what are the odds they would share the same kind of infection by chance?

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Hollywood Reporter Review of Creation

The Hollywood Reporter has a favorable review of the movie Creation, the story of Charles Darwin and his relationships with his wife and children and the struggle in writing On the Origins of Species. Ray Bennett writes:

Thanks to the writing, pacing and Bettany's nuanced performance, it is one of the best delineations of intellectual and emotional struggle seen on film in many a year. The actor's scenes with Annie and Emma have an extraordinary tenderness that grips the heart just as Darwin's scientific dilemma engages the brain. West is unaffected and winning as the girl, and Connelly, with a perfect English accent, shows the wife's anguish as well as her undying loyalty.

Sure wish I could see it.

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Symposium on Evolution by NLM/NIH

The National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health will be hosting a symposium on evolution. The announcement appears on the NLM page and states, in part:

Darwin may have finished the page proofs, but the process of persuading scientists and the public about evolution had just begun. Darwin pieced together evidence for his theory of natural selection from many sources, including studies of domestic breeding, anatomical similarities among species ("homology"), embryology, the sequential order of fossils, and the presence of vestigial organs. Bur whether this evidence ever constituted "proof" of evolution was questioned at the time and remains unsettled today, in part because of broader cultural and religious concerns about evolution. The "proofs" were far from finished in 1859.

This symposium brings together a line-up of internationally-renowned scholars, representing a cross section of disciplines, who will discuss historical, philosophical and scientific perspectives on Darwin and evolution. It has two general aims. First, it seeks to trace the different ways in which evolution has been understood in this period, and how these ways of understanding related to the changing basis of scientific evidence on evolution. Second, it seeks to explain why scientific "proofs" of Darwinian evolution have been unpersuasive to many individuals, including those who promote creationism and intelligent design. The speakers' perspectives on evolution have raised important questions about the nature of the evidence in favor of evolution, and the relationship between proof and belief. Put another way, a focus on Darwin's critics and supporters can illuminate the many ways in which "proof" has been understood in the last 150 years.

If you are in the Rockville area, stop by today.

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