There is Deeper Meaning Here

The Age is reporting that a rare, first printing of Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species has been found in a collection of books used as reading material in a bathroom. The author writes:

The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought by a family for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, Christie's auction house said.

The family has since kept the work on a bookcase in the guest lavatory at their home in the Oxford area, it said.

The book will go under the hammer in London on Tuesday, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of the father of the theory of evolution's famous work.

The book, about 1,250 copies of which were first printed, is expected to fetch STG60,000 ($A108,254).

Well, at least they were reading it.

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Dayton, Tennessee: Ground Zero

Allen Abel, of Canwest News Service has written an article about the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Such is the media climate surrounding the anniversary of the publishing of On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin, which came out 150 years ago, tomorrow. The article is more of a description of how the town and university that bear the name of William Jennings Bryan respond to the theory. He writes:

Across town, on the Bryan College campus, I meet the prelate of laboratory anti-Darwinism. Todd Charles Wood is a ``young-Earth creationist,'' strict Biblical literalist and holder of a doctorate in biochemistry from Thomas Jefferson's own University of Virginia. He acknowledges that there are difficulties involved in proving that Darwin and his disciples - the list would include virtually every reputable scientist since 1859 - are incorrect.

The interview with Wood continues, in which the following exchange is quoted:

Wood concedes that ``theories are needed'' in the pursuit of a rigorous creationist biology. He cites a number of perplexities that such a theory would have to explain: feathered dinosaurs; fossil whales with both teeth and baleen; the fact that human beings share 99 per cent of their genome with the chimpanzee.

``That may be the big one,'' says Wood.

``The theory is already written,'' I suggest, holding up a copy of The Origin of Species.

``Why would God create anthrax?'' the scholar wonders out loud.

``Why would God create Darwin?'' I reply.

``I don't have a theory from which to work,'' Wood admits. ``Once Darwin hit on natural selection, he had a theory with which to work. Evolution is well- supported. It is not bogus. It is not a failure. It is not in crisis. I just happen to think it's wrong.''

These are the words of a scientist? He has no evidence to demonstrate that evolution is wrong, he just thinks it is? Perhaps the most damning statement here is the lack of theory that creationists work from. It is the same lack of theory that plagues Intelligent Design.

Small-town America.

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How Did the Mammoths Die Off?

The Los Angeles Times has an article by John Johnson Jr. about why the woolly mammoths died out. He writes:

To track the population of large herbivores, scientists analyzed the pollen, charcoal and fungus in ancient sediments beneath Appleman Lake, a 35-foot-deep body of water left behind when the last ice age ended 20,000 years ago. The research focused on the amounts of the fungus Sporormiella present in the sediments, according to Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a co-author of the paper appearing in today's issue of the journal Science.

Because the fungus is commonly found in the dung of large plant-eaters, its prevalence in the fossil record should be a direct measure of population density, Gill said. The research team found that the decline of the large mammals started about 14,800 years ago -- and was virtually complete a thousand years later.

"About 13.8 thousand years ago, the number of [fungus] spores drops dramatically," Gill said.

In the end, a total of 34 types of large animal disappeared.

This, it is said, refutes the current hypothesis that a bolide of some kind was responsible, leaving humans the likely culprit.

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More on H. floresiensis from the Independent.

Here is an article from the Independent that sheds more light on the whole speciation question:

Professor [William ]Jungers suggested that the hobbit had evolved from a more primitive ancestral human species with a similar body plan, rather than belonging to an evolutionary branch-line of H. sapiens that had regressed to a more primitive form. "It is difficult to believe an evolutionary change would lead to less economical movement," Professor Jungers said. "It makes little sense that this species re-evolved shorter thighs and legs because long hind limbs improve bipedal walking. We suspect that these are primitive retentions instead," he said.

Read the whole thing.

Homo floresiensis: Not Homo

Peter Brown, the discoverer of the "Hobbit" (don't know about you but I just hate that name) is now arguing that the species does not belong in the genus Homo. In an article by Cheryl Jones for the Australian, she writes:

In a paper accepted for publication in an upcoming special Homo floresiensis edition of the Journal of Human Evolution, Brown and colleague Tomoko Maeda, also of UNE, say the hobbits' lineage left Africa "possibly before the evolution of the genus Homo". (The root of the human family tree stretches back about two million years to Homo habilis, or Handy Man, in Africa.)

Brown says assigning the Flores hominin to a different genus would worry some scholars. "They will think it somehow marginalises Homo floresiensis; that it's a clear statement that it is not a member of our genus, and it's extinct, so we don't have to worry about it any more," he says. "That's nonsense, because it's part of the broader evolutionary story of our species."

I am reminded of the late Grover Kranz arguing that australopithecines could be found in Indonesia or Don Tyler's Meganthropus argument. Brown's argument also, as the article notes, addresses the two warring camps in later human palaeoanthropology—the Out-of-Africa camp and the Multiregional Evolution camp. The first group advocates largely a replacement model of modern human origins, while the latter, as the name implies, suggests that modern humans originated in different areas of the Old World through a complex interaction of regional gene flow and evolution. The size of the populations and the gene flow between them kept speciation from occurring.

Read the whole thing.

Crocodiles From Hell

Yahoo News has a story originating from Agence France Press about new crocodile fossils that have been discovered in the Sahara Desert. The author notes:

The fossils of five hitherto unknown bizarre-looking crocodiles which roamed the world 100 million years ago have been unearthed in the Sahara desert, US scientists revealed Thursday.

The five now extinct species -- dubbed BoarCroc, RatCroc, DogCroc, DuckCroc and PancakeCroc because of their strange appearances -- were ancestors of the modern-day reptiles and evolved at the same time as dinosaurs.

"These species open a window on a croc world completely foreign to what was living on northern continents," said National Geographic explorer-in-residence Paul Sereno.

Funny names aside, these were evidently no animals to be taken lightly. The story continues:

Significantly, Sereno's team found the five oddball crocs had long legs allowing them to walk upright like mammals rather than slither with their bellies to the ground.

That gave them speed during hunting and when they fled from danger to seek refuge in the water.

Another piece of the puzzle.

You Can Never Go Back Home

ScienceDaily has a report of research from the University of Oregon in which it has been shown that evolution is a one-way trip. The author writes:

The team used computational reconstruction of ancestral gene sequences, DNA synthesis, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography to resurrect and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein's structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor's primordial form.

This seems to indicate that once evolution in a species has proceeded down a particular path, it doesn't go back. Once upon a time, the ancestors of humans had four premolars (bicuspids, if you are a dentist). We now have two because the first two have been lost along the way. I remember my advisor Fred Smith remarking once upon a time that once a trait has been lost evolutionarily, it never comes back. A species might follow a different path than the one it originally took to get to a similar place, however. This explains why whales and icthyosaurs don't look the same, even though they are both exploiting an aquatic niche. Read the whole thing.

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Muslims Rejecting Evolution

Ruth Gledhill, the religion correspondent for the Times Online writes an article examining current Muslim attitudes toward evolution. She writes:

Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, told the conference, being held in Egypt by the British Council, that in too many places students and academics believed they had to make a “binary choice” between evolution and creationism, rather than understanding that one could believe both in God and in Darwin’s theory.

Such is the understanding of many Christians today in the United States and Europe. This is largely promoted by both militant atheists and militant creationists. She continues:

Addressing the conference in Alexandria, organised for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, he said that concerns among Muslims about evolution were being fuelled by Christian creationists. People in Muslim countries would find creationist theses on the internet and, not realising that these were on the fringes of scientific debate, assume that creationism had scientific credibility in the West.

“It is a serious problem,” he said. “It would be like going to my students and telling them the planets are not related to the stars, there is no relationship between them and gravitational pull or radiation, and they were all created on one day. We would not dream of describing the cosmos in such a ridiculous manner ... We cannot allow people to go into the 21st century with no understanding of science.”

He would not think of it and yet that is exactly what young earth creationists believe—without a shred of evidence to support it. Groups like the ICR that strive for scientific credibility have used the Internet as a tool to spread the creationist message.

The one thing that I teach my students in Information Literacy is that the Internet is a double-edged sword. It is great for finding all kinds of information that you would, ordinarily have to go to print resources to find but, because there is no editing or accountability, anybody can publish anything they want on the Internet without the slightest bit of academic integrity. Less-suspecting individuals will then take this information and incorporate it into their thought structure without realizing that it has no academic merit. That is why this blog (and many others) exists—to combat that in some small way. That I have to try to counter the lack of academic integrity of many other Christians is more than a little troubling.

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Steve Dutch Is Mad

Steve Dutch, professor of natural and applied sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, has written a column for the Green Bay Press Gazette in which he scolds Christian organizations for deception when attacking evolution:

The lies told by opponents of evolution are practically endless.

There are no intermediate fossil forms between major groups? A lie.

Methods for dating rocks are unreliable and give contradictory results? A lie.

Many scientists are beginning to doubt evolution? A lie.

These are not mere differences of opinion; they are deliberate misrepresentations or outright denials of published facts.

I have read more anti-evolution literature than just about anyone in this area, and I have done something most other readers have not — check it against real science. I can tell you flatly it is all junk.

Duane Gish? Ken Ham? Answers in Genesis? Discovery Institute? Philip Johnson? Michael Behe? Junk, all of it, with not a shred of scientific value.

I am often reminded of Ken Ham's smug response to scientists that confront him with data. He simply responds that we both have the same data, we just interpret it differently. The catch is that he does so without any scientific testing, rendering his conclusions scientifically invalid.

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Dennis Sewell and the Abuse of Darwinism

Someone else has noticed Dennis Sewell's book. Simon Underdown of the Guardian writes a review that is not too kind. First, he corrects a misunderstanding:

For evolutionary scientists there is no such thing as "Darwinism". Instead we have a scientific theory that, in combination with Mendel's work, provides the modern or neo-Darwinian synthesis, which explains the development of life on Earth. Although this is a rather succinct definition it effectively sets the limits of the usefulness of Darwin's theory. However, in the last 150 years, there have been many attempts to take Darwin's idea and apply it outside of the context for which it was developed, hence the influence of social "Darwinism" on concepts such as eugenics and a more recent Darwinian nihilism that absolves the individual of any moral or social responsibility.

As I wrote in post a bit back, these have ranged from the tragic starvation of the Sans Cullots in Soviet Russia in the 1930s under Stalin to the Holocaust under Hitler. That there is not a shred of evidence to support either position is immaterial. Darwin was evil and Hitler was evil, therefore the two must be related in some way. Underdown also castigates Sewell for his acceptance of these extrapolations:

This inherent danger of using Darwin's theory outside of its biological context has lead to attempts to portray Darwin as the de facto cause of 20th century genocide: see, for example, Andre Pichot's book The Pure Society. There is a fallacy at the core of this line of thinking – can scientists really be held responsible for what is done with their ideas when they are misunderstood and corrupted by groups such as the Nazis? I would argue that they cannot: the actions of criminals do not need such highbrow justification and trying to do so merely lends a pseudo-scientific veneer the actions of the Third Reich.

This analysis, which is correct, also doesn't mention the fact that long before Darwin came on the scene, genocide and slavery were alive and well. If you need a primer of men behaving badly, try reading the later chapters of Genesis.

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The Dividing Line?

Peter Lindsay has written an op-ed for the Atlanta Constitution-Journal in which he tackles the confluence of evolution and religion. He writes:

That people do not accept widely held scientific conclusions is troubling. More troubling still, however, is that so many seem so unclear on what science even is. With this thought in mind — and in the spirit of the month — perhaps it’s time for supporters of Darwin to take the offensive with a different sort of public policy, one inspired by the Cobb County school district.

What if the state mandated that stickers with the following disclaimer be affixed to Bibles distributed by any tax-exempt Christian organization? “The existence of God is just one theory among many about the origin and purpose of the universe.” Or better yet: “There is no scientific evidence for the existence of God.” Both statements are, after all, accurate. There are many theories about the origin of the universe, and there is absolutely no scientific evidence for the existence of any deity, Christian or otherwise.

So what do we think? Good idea? Well, perhaps not. These stickers ignore boundaries that exist between two quite distinct ways of knowing the world, the religious and the scientific.

This is another take on the bumper sticker "Keep your stickers out of my science books. I don't paste crap in your Bibles!" that I have seen. Kind of makes me wonder what the Charles Darwin Bible has to say about that (No, i still haven't picked up my copy!). He continues:

To know something in a scientific sense is not to have faith in it. It’s to look at what we think we know and do our level best to disprove it. In a sense, the security of scientific knowledge rests, somewhat paradoxically, on the ultimate insecurity of its claims.

While this means there can be no complete certainty, it certainly does not rule out high degrees of it. The more a claim conforms to the way we understand the world, and the more that our repeated and persistent attempts to refute it fail, the greater our certainty about it. Such is the case with scientific conclusions about the shape of our planet, the laws of thermodynamics and, gulp, evolution.

On this last claim we need to be quite clear: It is simply not the case that evolution is disputed in the scientific community. There is debate within evolutionary theory — about the rate at which species arise, about the precise mechanisms of natural selection, about the validity of evolutionary psychology, about the role of contingent events — but on the general claim that species evolve through natural selection there is no scientific disagreement.

It doesn't help that there are some people who argue vociferously that evolution is all fact. Some is, to be sure, but some is conjecture and some is probably fact. As we fail to refute a theory like evolution, the probability that it is correct increases. That is as far as science can go.

The last bit is quite correct. The only folks who dispute the theory of evolution are creationists, some ID proponents (not Michael Behe, though) and scientists who are very far removed from either biology or geology (the Dissent from Darwin list). This is often over-exaggerated by these individuals and organizations to the point where evolution is thought of as a "theory in crisis." Read the whole thing.

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Of Evolution and Population Migration

An article by Riazat Butt in the Guardian relays an interview with Michael Reiss who, if you will recall, was the Director of Education at the Royal Society before he, innocently enough, suggested that creationism should be explained in the public schools as an unscientific alternative to real science rather than not discussed at all. Reiss argues that creationism is marching across Europe, the product of migration. Butt writes:

"These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries. In London, where I work, there are increasingly quite large numbers of highly intelligent 16, 17 and 18-year-olds doing Advanced Level biology who do not accept evolution. That's either because they come from a fundamentalist Christian background or from Muslim backgrounds."

This rejection of evolution even extended to young people training for the medical profession. "Around 10% of UK undergraduates in some medical schools are creationists. Some people think this is unacceptable and that such students are not worthy to become doctors."

But when asked if their patients should be concerned, he said: "I am quite comfortable with people being first-rate doctors but not accepting evolution."

Here, I think that Dr. Reiss is wrong. I am not sure you can be both. One needs only recall the tragic circumstances of Baby Fae, recounted by Donald Prothero:

A more concrete example [of scientific illiteracy] happened in 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked. But under the cover of religion, his unscientific beliefs caused an innocent baby to die of immune rejection, when other alternatives might have been available.¹

Read the Whole Thing.

¹Prothero, D. (2007) Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. New York: Columbia University Press. P. 356.

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Charles Darwin, Social Darwinism and Columbine

Dennis Sewell has an article for Times Online about the link between Darwin and the recent spate of high school massacres. He writes:

In America, where Darwin’s writings on morality and race have come under particularly intense critical scrutiny because of the enduring creationist debate, he has been accused of fostering moral nihilism and scientific racism, and even of promoting an ethic that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. Most startling of all, a connection has now been drawn between Darwin’s theories and a rash of school shootings.

Morality? Race? Darwin not only failed to express some of the views against racism that were prevalent in his culture but was an outspoken opponent of slavery. The rest of the article painstakingly recounts all of the events that led up to each high school shooting and the fact that each of the shooters wanted to rid the world of people they thought were inferior and in the way. While interesting in its own right, it is not clear how much it actually has to do with Darwin's concept of natural selection, in which the environment plays a role in how species change over time.

It has been shown time and again that Darwin's views were not shared by either Hitler or Stalin and had nothing to do with the Holocaust. This meme is getting so old, it has whiskers, but creationists and ID supporters keep using it. Sewell also writes:

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

This is a complete misread of Darwin's understanding of morality. While it is certain that, by the end of his life, Darwin was not a Christian, he did believe in a God and did have a high opinion of morality. In his autobiography, he wrote:

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

Darwin clearly understood the good of being kind to his fellow humans. In fact, without this understanding of morality, his kindness to his wife or love for his children and his opposition to slavery would have made little to no sense. "Let them die!" would have been a more appropriate response if, in fact, he thought that everyone should have his own morality.

Klebold and Harris were clearly not acting in anybody's best interest, even their own. Darwin never used the term "survival of the fittest." It was attributed to him much later when the misguided notion of "Social Darwinism" arose. Darwin's contribution to the scientific world was the theory that organisms in any given population expressed a variety of traits and that the environment acted on those traits in a way that some variations were positively selected, some were negatively selected and some were not selected either way. Over the course of many generations there was "descent with modification." That's it.

Sewell ends thus:

The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called “Darwinism” — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it — are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions [sic]

This misses the central point about evolution, though. When nuclear power was harnessed in the 1930s and used in the 1940s to devastating effect, it ushered in the nuclear age and the raging debates about whether nuclear energy should be used, even for beneficial purposes.

I remember seeing Peter, Paul and Mary perform in 1985, here in Knoxville. Ever the protest singers, they sang one song called "Power." One of the lyrics was "Take all of your atomic poison power away." Above the protests, sat nuclear power, oblivious to all of it. It simply was. It existed. As Shel Silverstein put it: "Its all the same to the clam."

The same is true of evolution. It exists. It is observable and its effects can be quantified. Not only do we see evidence of speciation in modern-day organisms, we see evidence of it in the fossil record (fishapod, frogamander). How Darwin's theory, and the extrapolations from it, have been misused is irrespective of the actual processes, themselves. The implications may be part of the story of "Darwinism" but they are not a part of evolution.

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Of Asteroid Impacts, Oxygen and Early Life Models

Sid Perkins of Science News writes that The Sudbury Meteor impact may have had a much more marked effect on our planet than first thought. He writes:

About 1.85 billion years ago, Earth’s now separate landmasses were joined in a single supercontinent. That also means there was one large ocean, says Cannon. Many scientists suggest that the object that slammed into Earth then — probably an asteroid abut 10 kilometers across — splashed down in that ocean, in waters about 1 kilometer deep on the shallow shelf surrounding the supercontinent. Models hint that the tsunami spawned by the event would have been 1 kilometer tall at the impact site and remained at least 100 meters tall about 3,000 kilometers away, Cannon adds.

Those immense waves and large underwater landslides triggered by the impact stirred the ocean, bringing oxygenated waters from the surface down to the ocean floor, the researchers propose.

Its all pretty hypothetical stuff and needs to be examined much more carefully to see if the model holds up to further observations. As Mr. Spock would say "All we have is a theory which happens to fit the facts." Still, it is more than we had.

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New Dinosaur Find the Bridge Between Bipedal and Quadrupedal Forms?

The Daily Mail has an article by Emily Miller on the discovery, in South Africa, of Aardonyx celestae, a dinosaur that may bridge the gap between the early bipedal forms and the later, larger quadrupeds. She writes:

Walking on four limbs allowed the dinosaurs to support more weight and grow bigger - often their best defence against predators, especially for herbivores like the diplodocus or the brontosaurus.

The fossil reveals a dinosaur with strong back legs and two stumpy front arms that are understood to have gradually grown with evolution.

The seven-metre long vegetarian lived around 200 million years ago.

And a bit later:

Fellow paleobiologist Dr Matthew Bonnan said that although earlier discoveries showed some form of development from two to four legs, this latest find marked a clearer mid-point between the two bodies than ever seen before.
Enlarge Exciting: Dr Adam Yates, who led the research team, arranges the bones of the new dinosaur at a press conference in Johannesburg yesterday

Exciting: Dr Adam Yates, who led the research team, arranges the bones of the new dinosaur at a press conference in Johannesburg yesterday

He said: 'What Aardonyx shows us is that walking quadrupedally and bearing weight on the inside of the foot is a trend that started very early in these dinosaurs, much earlier than previously hypothesised.

'The bones of the forearm are shaped so that the forearm and hand could bear weight and that Aardonyx could drop onto all-fours as well as walk bipedally.'

Another piece of the puzzle. Neat!

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Possible Solution

I just enabled word verification. Sorry for the draconian move but, hopefully, it will stop the spam.

Spam!

Beginning sometime about a week ago, I started getting spam in my comments moderation field. This is mostly in the form of viagra and porn movie ads. I have a hard time believing that anyone would be stupid enough to think I would post them. It is probably a bot that has latched onto my blog address. If anyone has a solution to this problem, please let me know. Thanks.

New Chinese Hominid Fossil Supports Multiregional Evolution?

China National News has a story about a hominid find in Guangxi that suggests that there was not replacement of archaic humans by modern humans in this area. The author writes:

The mandible has a protruding chin like that of Homo sapiens, but the thickness of the jaw is indicative of more primitive hominins, suggesting that the fossil could derive from interbreeding.

If confirmed, the finding would lend support to the "multiregional hypothesis", which says that modern humans descend from Homo sapiens coming out of Africa who then interbred with more primitive humans on other continents.

In contrast, the prevailing "out of Africa" hypothesis holds that modern humans are the direct descendants of people who spread out of Africa to other continents around 100,000 years ago.

"This paper acts to reject the theory that modern humans are of uniquely African origin and supports the notion that emerging African populations mixed with natives they encountered," said Milford Wolpoff, a proponent of the multiregional hypothesis at the University of Michigan.

Most Chinese Palaeoanthropologists, pointing to the unique features of remains like Dali and Maba have long believed that there is a continuous line from Homo erectus to the later remains and going to the material found in the Upper Cave at Zhoukoudian, which is dated at around 30 ky BP. This should prove interesting.

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Neandertals "Doomed" to Extinction?

Yes, according to Clive Finlayson, an ecologist. In a story in Sindhtoday, the argument is put forth that:

Finlayson argues that it was a deadly combination of bad luck and climate change that caused the demise of the Neanderthals.

They were a species caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in a rapidly changing world, he said. “By the time the classic Neanderthals had emerged, they were already a people doomed to extinction,” he said.

A series of ice ages ate away the forest habitats where Neanderthals and their predecessors, Homo heidelbergensis, made a living sneaking up on big game. As their numbers declined, those who remained took refuge in warmer parts of Europe, nearer the Mediterranean. But, a final drop in temperatures that began around 50,000 years ago made even this meager living unsustainable.

Here's the problem that I have with this interpretation: Neandertals appear in the fossil record around 100-150 ky BP and are even found in Southwest Asia around 125 Ky BP (Zuttiyeh). The early Würm glaciation begins around 110 Ky BP and goes roughly up until 34-37 Ky BP. Are we really to believe that for some 70 thousand years, Neandertals adapted to the landscape just fine and then, suddenly, couldn't cut the mustard? It is much more likely that their disappearance had something to do with the arrival of modern humans around 35-40 ky BP. The Aurignacian first appears in the Balkans, at Bacho Kiro Cave around 43 ky and, whether one wants to go the admixture route, the assimilation route or the replacement route, there was clearly contact there and it clearly had an effect on the local Neandertal populations. Maybe he writes about this in the forthcoming (assumedly) paper but nothing of that is clear from this story.

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Just Plain Strange

Wired has a story about evolution gone strange. Titled World’s Freakiest Worm Gets Expanded Family Tree, the story is about a worm that lives on the bottom of the ocean in the bones of dead whales. The author, Brandon Keim, writes:

The worms, found in a gray whale skeleton off the coast of California, prompted scientists to designate them as representatives of an entirely new genus, dubbed Osedax. They belonged to a taxonomic family of marine worms that lack mouths and anuses, and rely entirely on bacteria to absorb and excrete nutrients. But Osedax was unique: Adult males were extremely small, and lived in colonies inside the females. Even more strikingly, they occupied an evolutionary niche comprised entirely of fallen whales.

As Arthur Eddington wrote: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

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The British Primary Curriculum and Evolution

According to a story by Polly Curtis in the Guardian, evolution will finally be added to the curriculum for primary school education. She writes:

The schools minister, Diana Johnson, has confirmed the plans will be included in a blueprint for a new curriculum to be published in the next few weeks.

It follows a letter signed by scientists and science educators calling on the government to make the change after draft versions of the new curriculum failed to mention evolution explicitly.

The open letter sent in July to Ed Balls, the children's secretary, was signed by 25 leading figures from science and education, who urged the government to rewrite the curriculum before it was finalised.

There is no mention in the article about push back but I am sure it will come.

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Creationism at Christian Colleges

According to David Olson of the aforementioned Riverside Press Enterprise, creationism teaching appears to vary widely depending on which Christian university you attend. He writes:

Nearly 70 U.S. colleges and universities endorse or teach biblical creation philosophy, according to a list compiled by Northwest Creation Network, a Mountlake Terrace, Wash.-based group that supports creation teaching.

The only Inland-based [California, I assume] institution on the list is Calvary Chapel Bible College in Murrieta, a two-year, unaccredited college that offers degrees in only biblical studies and theology.

Liberty University, an evangelical Baptist institution in Lynchburg, Va., offers a minor in creation studies and teaches the biblical six-day, 24-hour explanation for creation alongside evolution in biology classes, said David DeWitt, a professor of biology at Liberty. Students discuss what DeWitt views as the flaws in evolutionary theory and in the way most scientists measure the age of fossils.

Steven Newton, a project director for the National Center for Science Education, which defends evolution instruction, said only a tiny minority of scientists doubt that evolution occurred.

I would, personally, like to see data on that last statement. I think the figure is somewhere around 3 to 4%. Not sure.

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Discord Among Seventh-Day Adventists

According to an article in the Riverside Press-Enterprise, a petition has been submitted to stop evolution from being taught at La Sierra University, an Adventist school. The author, David Olson, writes:

The ultimate goal of the petition drive is to require Adventist teaching on creation in La Sierra biology classes, said Shane Hilde, the Beaumont man and La Sierra graduate spearheading the petition drive. If that doesn't happen, petition supporters may push La Sierra to disassociate itself from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, he said.

The petition does not single out La Sierra, but Hilde said it is the target. Evolution opponents are looking into allegations of pro-evolution biases at other Adventist universities, he said.

The petition does not call for the dismissal of the three La Sierra biology professors who are at the center of the controversy. But Hilde said "that ultimately is what happens in these situations."

What I find unusual about this story in the first place is that evolution is taught at an SDA university at all! A large number of creationists that began the movement were Adventists. Jerry Bergman has a short article on the origin of the American creationist movement and, of course, Ronald Numbers' book The Creationists, is loaded with information of this sort. It is clear from the article that these three professors have an uphill battle in front of them.

UPDATE: sorry, forgot the link. It is there now.

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Evolution is Too Good??

EarthTimes has a book review/story from the PR Newswire called 'Evolution's Fatal Flaw: The Inevitable Consequence of the Need to Ensure Species Survival': New Book Challenges Creationist Beliefs and Warns of the Dangerous Results of Human Evolution. It is not quite what you think. The reviewer writes:

So, what is evolution's "fatal flaw"? "Evolution has been too successful," says Wood. Evolution's solution to ensuring a species' survival - sexual desire and reproduction - has led to population explosions. While strong sexual desire cannot be reduced, there are readily available means for reducing its effects.

So the argument boils down to "Darwin is dangerous because humans are too successful?" Part of the problem, of course, stems from the fact that humans do not experience estrus. We can mate any old time we want—and we do! No other animal on the planet can do that.

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More Disturbing News From Turkey

Recently, there was a conversation over at Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution in which a reader debated the validity of the argument that much of the spark for creationism in other countries originated in the United States. I wrote the following:

I think of people like Ken Ham with AiG who wants to reach out to the whole world and Carl Wieland's group Creation Ministries International, which has a strong evangelical (missionary?) component. When you read creationist tracts from other countries, they have been plainly influenced by these individuals and groups. I am sure there are some home-grown groups wherever you go, but they have the backing an support of these organizations.

As if to support the point, this morning, Marc Kaufman of the WaPo has an article on the growing creationism movement in Turkey. He writes:

Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students' ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.

But she was taken aback when several of her Marmara University students recently accused her of being an atheist, or worse, for teaching anything but the doctrine that God created the Earth and everything on it.

"They said I was a liar if I called myself a Muslim because I also accepted evolution," she said.

What especially disturbed -- and amused -- the veteran professor was that the arguments for creationism presented by some of the students came directly from the country where she was educated in the biological sciences years before -- the United States. Translated and adapted for a Muslim society, the purported proofs that Darwinism and evolution were wrong came directly from American proponents of Christian creationism and its less overtly religious offshoot, intelligent design.

I also wrote, in that conversation:

Isn't it sad that where ever the Gospel takes root and thrives, not long after, the "stinkweed of creationism" (as Richard Young puts it) appears?

It certainly doesn't help that they have Harun Yahya, one of the loudest advocates of creationism in Turkey.

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Rereading Neil Shubin: Buildings and Heads

I am rereading Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish. Why in the Wide World of Sports am I doing this when I have a gazillion other books to read, I will never know but...this time around I was struck by his building analogy to the cranial nerves of the head:

I am reminded of my first days here in Chicago in 2001. I had been given space for a research laboratory in a hundred-year-old building and the lab needed new utility cables, plumbing, and air handling. I remember the day when the contractors first opened the walls to get access to the innards of the building. Their reaction to the plumbing and wiring inside my wall was almost exactly like mine when I opened the human head and saw the trigeminal and facial nerves for the first time. The wires, cables, and pipes inside the wall were a jumble. Nobody in his right mind would have designed a building from scratch this way, with cables and pipes taking bizarre loops and turns throughout the building.

And that is exactly the point. My building was constructed in 1896, and the utilities reflect an old design that has been jury-rigged further with each renovation. If you want to understand the wiring and plumbing in my building, you have to understand its history, how it was renovated for each new generation of scientists. My head has a long history also, and that history explains complicated nerves like the trigeminal and the facial.¹

I reread the passage and thought of the progressive creationist' position. Sure, it is possible that God intentionally and by divine fiat created the trigeminal and facial pathways like that, along with a whole host of other oddities that are present in not just the human body but in all sorts of different animals (not to mention the shared viral DNA). Anything is possible but given that you can see how these things develop, why make the extra logical leaps necessary to explain them as "quirks of the creator" when there is a perfectly good explanation for them lying around in the form of evolutionary theory, unless you really really don't like evolution?

¹Shubin, Neil (2008) Your Inner Fish. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 85-86.
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Still no return response from Casey Luskin. I might not get one. He has had his say and I have had mine. That may be all that is necessary.

A Sad Story at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution

Over at Steve Martin's site, another student, Emiliano Carneiro Monteiro has posted a story about the tensions and frustrations of accepting evolution and the reaction from the Christian community. He writes, in part:

I’m extremely grateful to those who helped me grow in my Christian faith. Still, it breaks my heart to see so many honest followers of Jesus believe that one must deny evolution in order to be a Christian. That is due partly because of a lack of information, but also due to the spreading of misinformation (for example, the ministry of Dr. Adauto Lourenço). I continue to find the subject of evolution completely fascinating, and learn more and more everyday. I do not think that the knowledge of the theory of evolution should interfere in a destructive way with anyone’s beliefs.

It breaks my heart as well.

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Casey Luskin Corrects a Misinterpretation

At the tail end of a post that I did on the Texas School Board science curriculum ruckus, I make the following statement:

Make no mistake: this was a loss for Luskin and the DI, and his response is, in a sense, disingenuous. He is correct that all students should analyze and critically evaluate scientific theories. It is just that he doesn't care about any theory except evolution, which he has fought to keep out of public education.

This is incorrect. As Mr. Luskin, who was entirely gracious in his note, pointed out, he does not wish evolution to be removed from the public school curriculum, just that Intelligent Design be added. I attributed a position to Mr. Luskin that he does not hold, and I apologize for the mischaracterization. I should have been more careful.

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Ardipithecus Video

Science Magazine has a ten minute video on Ardipithecus that boils down the find into an easily-digestible summary.




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Gordon Glover on Alien Intervention

There is a guest post over at Science and the Sacred by Gordon Glover. It dates back to the beginning of the month and I meant to post about it then but it got away from me. Gordon is, as usual, very thoughtful in the essay as he tackles the logic of Intelligent Design, using the same tactics one of the professors on my dissertation committee used: posit something perfectly harmless and then blow it full of holes. He writes:

On the surface, Intelligent Design seems to be a perfectly reasonable approach to studying complexity. In our everyday experience, there is certainly nothing controversial about attributing the purposeful arrangement of components to an intelligent agent.

This is often the idea that sucks most people into the acceptance of intelligent design. It is the argument that William Paley made in the 1820s—that so many things in nature showed the unmistakable signs of having been designed. This is the idea that Charles Darwin reverse-engineered once Charles Lyell provided him with all the time in the world, and Thomas Malthus provided him with a biological imperative.

Gordon uses the creation of Stonehenge to illustrate the problem of admitting ID into the arena of science. Problems in explaining how the stones got where they are abound and easy solutions are not forthcoming. That does not stop modern archaeologists from using the best available science to solve the problem. So where does ID enter?

But mainstream archaeology is content to treat these knowledge gaps in our understanding of the past as simply that, and NOT as proof that primitive man had some outside help. Besides, who or what else could possibly have intervened during the building of these ancient structures?

Oh, ye narrow-minded expert! Hath not thou considered the alien? Why bias your investigation of archaeological complexity towards earth-bound engineers?

Enter the alien enthusiasts. Not the dispassionate ones who merely concede the possibility of life outside of our solar system (a viewpoint that many scientists would share), but the hardcore fanatics. You know who I'm talking about. The ones who spend their summer vacations dressed up as aliens in Roswell, New Mexico. The true believer wants the world to acknowledge not just the probability of extra-terrestrial life, but that intelligent beings from outer space have physically visited earth and made contact with mankind. So they search out the mysteries of the ancient world looking for opportunities to preach their UFO gospel. There might not be any credible evidence of UFO visitations to planet Earth, but if there are questions that mainstream archaeology can't sufficiently answer, you can guarantee that alien believers will plug E.T. into these gaps. Does this strategy sound familiar?

Why, yes it does. It is the primary strategy that is used by those promoting Intelligent Design. This is the same strategy that allows a scientist like Michael Behe, one of the primary supporters of teaching Intelligent Design, to sit in front of a judge and say that under his definition of science, astrology would qualify. Just because we don't know why something happened, does not mean that we can posit an explanation that cannot be hypothetically tested and call it science.

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Ida May Not Be Related to Humans After All

The Guardian is reporting work being published in Nature suggesting that Ida is not on the line that gave rise to the higher primates. The story, by Ian Sample states:

"Our analysis and results have convinced us that Ida was not an ancestor of monkeys, apes, or humans, and if anything has more relevance for our understanding of lemur and loris origins," said Erik Seiffert, a fossil hunter at Stony Brook University in New York who led the Nature study.

Researchers behind the Ida fossil, known formally as Darwinius masillae, immediately defended their own interpretation, which is based on two years of meticulous measurements of the remains.

"We expected a challenge like this and it's interesting it has taken five months for the first attack to come," said Jørn Hurum, a palaeontologist at Oslo University's Natural History Museum where the fossil is now lodged. "What we claim about Ida is really quite controversial."

So controversial, in fact, that it might be wrong. Which ever way this one goes, it will be a classic example of science in action. Palaeoanthropologists have no vested interest in whether or not Ida is an ancestor to humans. This research will, however, provide us with a good example of a primate that was running around c. 50 million years ago. Hopefully, more discoveries will allow us to see how she fit into the grand scheme of things.

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Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum

Donna Healy of the AP writes about a museum out in Montana that is giving the Creation Museum in Kentucky a run for its money. From the story:

The head and monstrous jaws of a tyrannosaurus rex sculpture poke through the outer wall of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum.

Inside, life-size castings of dinosaur skeletons offer the polished look of a big-city science museum. But a quote from Genesis clues in visitors that the 20,000-square-foot building, which opened in Glendive this summer, is not your standard natural-history museum.

Instead, the museum, located in an area of Montana known for world-class dinosaur fossils, offers a literal, biblical account of creation.

What follows is a lengthy description of the museum and how it came about. The focus is clear:

"We approach evolution on the basis that it's basically not possible," Kline said. "There is no scientific proof whatsoever that evolution has ever taken place. There's also no scientific proof that creation has taken place because they both are faith-based."

Nearby is a replica of a protostega gigas, a giant sea turtle measuring 16 feet from flipper to flipper. Similar fossils have been found in Kansas.

"There's two ways these fossils could get to Kansas, and one is the evolutionary way; the other is the biblical creation way," Kline said.

"The evolutionary way says there was an inland sea that came from the Gulf of Mexico. But the biblical creation way says it was the flood of Noah's day."

As I and so many before me have mentioned, the evidence that Noah's flood was never a world-wide event is so overwhelming as to be almost certain. And, if everything did die in the flood except the pair on the ark, how did the sea turtle get to Kansas, especially if, as it says in Genesis 8:13: "the water had dried up from the earth?" So much misinformation, spread to so many people.

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...And the Small Ones

Analysis out of Germany has identified the smallest known dinosaur. An article in the BBC notes:

Fruitadens haagarorum, researchers say, is one of the smallest dinosaurs known to science.

In the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, the researchers say that the dinosaur weighed less that 1kg.

The fossils have been housed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County since being discovered in Colorado in 1979.

According to the researchers, the tiny dinosaur was agile and a fast runner. It lived in the Upper Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago.

It was a member of a group of dinosaurs called the ornithischians, which were largely plant-eating creatures that included the far more imposing Triceratops and Stegosaurus.

Here is the picture of the jaw from the BBC article:



Neat!

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More on the Burgess Shale.

After my post on the work that is being done on the Burgess Shale, a reader wrote to accuse me of dishonesty in providing the story. I was going to reply within the comments section but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it probably needs to be a post. This is what the reader wrote:

You didn't tell the whole truth. The Cambrian has starfish, jellyfish, sponges and clams to name a few have not change a bit in 530 million years.

The fact that some of the other species are now extinct is beside the point.

The argument by Creationists is that life sprang into existence! There is nothing that has been found in the pre-Cambrian that can explain the explosion of life in the Cambrian.

Why are Darwinians so dishonest?

Thanks for the article even though it is very misleading.

Dear reader, my point was not to say that there are some forms of life that have remained unchanged. My point was to show that the life in the Cambrian appears over the course of some 30-50 million years. This is not exactly springing into existence. As I mentioned in another post, to put this into perspective, 30-50 million years ago there were no whales, no bears, no modern cats, no modern dogs and no humans. In fact, humans aren't even recognizable 10 million years ago. 30-50 million years in geological terms is a short period. For biological organisms, it is a pile of years. As far as your argument that life "sprang into existence," lets see what Duane Gish has to say:

In the Cambrian geological strata there occurs a sudden, great outburst of fossils of animals on a highly developed level of complexity. In the Cambrian rocks are found billions of fossils of animals so complex that the evolutionists estimate they would have required one and a half billion years to evolve. Trilobites, brachiopods, sponges, corals, jellyfish, in fact every one of the major invertebrate forms of life are found in the Cambrian. What is found in rocks supposedly older than the Cambrian, that is in the so-called pre-Cambrian rocks? Not a single indisputable fossil! Certainly it can be said without fear of contradiction, the evolutionary predecessors of the Cambrian fauna have never been found.

Gish is absolutely incorrect about what is found in the pre-Cambrian rocks. There are extremely well-described fossils, many of which (but not all) can be shown to be ancestral to Cambrian forms. While it is true that Trilobites appear in the early Cambrian, they do not diversify into the nearly 17 000 species they eventually become until late in the Cambrian.

Regarding your comment about nothing being found in pre-Cambrian sediments that can explain the explosion of life in the Cambrian, I found over 1700 articles arguing to the contrary in one pass. Here is what just one, Peterson et al. (2008) has to say about it:

Despite the presence of many different stem-group taxa, the Ediacaran is still a transitional ecology, with these organisms confined to a two-dimensional mat world. This stands in dramatic contrast to the Early Cambrian where the multi-tiered food webs that so typify the Phanerozoic were established with the eumetazoan invasion of both the pelagos and the infaunal benthos (Butterfield 1997, 2001; Vannier & Chen 2000, 2005; Dzik 2005; Peterson et al. 2005; Vannier et al. 2007). Hence, although the Ediacaran is an apparent quantum leap in ecological complexity as compared with the ‘boring billions’ that characterize Earth before the Ediacaran, it is still relatively simple when compared with the Cambrian, yet another quantum leap in organismal and ecological evolution. Thus, the Ediacaran stands as the transition interval between the ‘Precambrian’ and the Phanerozoic.¹

So the question I have to ask is, after reading the article about someone who is out in the field, actually examining the data, how can you accuse him of dishonesty? Furthermore, why would I believe someone who has never actually looked at the data over someone who is intimately involved with it and publishing about it? Now who is being dishonest?


¹Peterson, K.J., Cotton J.A., Gehling, J.G. and Pisani, D. (2008) The Ediacaran emergence of bilaterians: congruence between the genetic and the geological fossil records. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 1435-1443

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Evolution and Evangelical Theology

Steve Martin, over at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution, has a post about the acceptance of evolution by evangelican theologians. In it, he mentions a survey that was done for the BioLogos Foundation by Bruce Waltke in which acceptance of evolutionary and intelligent design explanations were polled. According to the survey, which is quite long, 264 evangelical professors rang in and answered the questions. Among the more surprising findings:

Fifth Barrier: Evolution is bad science because of YEC theory
Only 19% of the participants accept the scientific evidence such as those presented by ICR to defend a straight-forward reading of Genesis. This is especially surprising since some evangelical schools, such as Liberty University, require their faculty to adhere to YEC.

I, also, would have thought that this number would be higher, given the overwhelming prevalence of the YEC position in evangelical churches, school curricula and the evangelical public.

Seventh Barrier: ID refutes evolution
Those who contend for the theory of creation by the process of evolution must address the 37% that find intelligent design refutes evolution at the least on the molecular [sic—the word "level" is omitted here]. This position presumably garnered the support of a relatively larger ratio of the respondents than the arguments of ICR and RTB for several reasons: 1.) ID presents more credible scientific arguments, 2) is a better apologetic against naturalistic evolution; and 3) comports better with the Biblical data as a whole, such as belief in a Creator, the fixed speciation and the uniqueness of humankind.

On the other hand, that means that 63% have issues with the argument of Intelligent Design as made by I.D. purveyors. The author concludes thus:

First, this survey and the survey by Badger and Tenneson (see Appendix II) shatter the caricature of evangelicalism in the media and the populace as demanding the theory of YEC.
Correlatively, the fact that 46% can accept the theory of creation by evolution confirms my suspicion that on the issue of evolution one cannot speak of a typical evangelical theologian.
Third, the organizations seeking to refute evolution and/or to narrow the gap between creation and evolution must address one another with respect and openness to be optimally effective. The gap between BioLogos and ID, I suggest, can best be narrowed by open dialogue, not by entrenched confrontation.

It is easy for those of us that accept evolution to paint the entire evangelical community as being monolithic in this regard. It seems evident that the new atheists see it as such. This is refreshing and hopeful. Just as I said yesterday that, as an evolutionist, Richard Dawkins does not speak for me, I can also say today that, as a Christian, Henry Morris does not speak for me, either!

Cretaceous Extinction: The Smoking Gun?

Canwest is reporting on research by Sankar Chatterjee, of Texas Tech University, who claims to have found the impact crater that led to the dinosaur extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. They write:

The area is about 500 kilometres in diameter and encircles a peak about five kilometres high known as the Bombay High. It is also a spot mined extensively for oil and gas by companies that tend to keep their geological data secret, which has delayed the ability of researchers to do any in-depth research of the suspected crater.

A bit later, they write:

Chatterjee said the crater is likely the largest on the planet and was caused by an object about 40 kilometres in diameter. The energy released on impact would dwarf the detonation of all nuclear weapons on Earth combined, he said. The impact caused what's known as the "KT Extinction Event," a combination of blast effects that killed off 70 per cent of life on the planet 65 million years ago. Other researchers say more study is needed.

This will rattle some cages. Common consensus is that the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatan peninsula is the impact point for the KT extinction event. Others still argue that the dinosaurs were in steep decline even before either of these impacts took place.

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Work at the Burgess Shale Formation

Siobhan Roberts of Smithsonian.com is reporting on work that is going on at the Burgess Shale formation in Canada. They write:

The Burgess Shale is Mecca for paleontologists. Charles Doolittle Walcott, the fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered this rich fossil bed a century ago, in the summer of 1909, and named it for nearby Mount Burgess. At the end of his first field season here, Walcott wrote in a letter to a colleague that he had "found some very interesting things." Talk about understatement. The Burgess fossils tell nothing less than the story of the Cambrian explosion—evolution's Big Bang—when relatively simple organisms rapidly diversified into the sorts of animals that live today. The exquisitely preserved Burgess specimens (most likely entombed by underwater mudslides) include the remnants of soft-bodied organisms, which are rare in the fossil record. The animals inhabited the ocean floor 505 million years ago, near the end of the Cambrian Period.

"Most of the phyla we know today we can see already in the Cambrian and the animals of the Burgess Shale," said Caron. But the fossils still look very strange. "They certainly show evidence of evolution," Caron said. "The animals that you see there don't look like the ones we have today."

This is critical to an understanding of the Cambrian Explosion, that the animals alive during this time largely don't resemble animals alive today. How strange were they?

In 1989, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould popularized Burgess' "weird wonders" in his bestselling book Wonderful Life. But he argued that Walcott [the discoverer of the formation] had erroneously shoehorned the fossils into existing taxonomic groups. He suggested that the curious "problematica" fossils that had long defied scientific identification—such as Hallucigenia, an inch-long creature with two rows of spines on its back—deserved their own taxonomic groupings.

Things to keep in mind the next time a creationist says that all of the modern phyla arrived fully formed at the beginning of the Cambrian.

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Money for Footprints

ABC News of Australia is reporting that a fossil site yielding a trove of dinosaur footprints is getting a financial boost from the government to continue the work at the site. That is good news. Chrissy Arthur writes:

Lark Quarry, near Winton, attracts about 20,000 visitors a year to see thousands of fossilised dinosaur footprints - believed to be 95 million-years-old.

Heritage Minister Peter Garrett has announced funding for the quarry's conservation park to improve toilets and waste management at the site.

Winton Mayor Ed Warren says it is long overdue.

"It's the only preserved site in the world that's a recording of dinosaur footprints and we've got to have strategies in place to try and look after it and preserve the area for people to come and view this wonderful expanse of dinosaur footprints," he said.

So, the question that is lurking at the back of my mind is "how do flood geologists explain all of those footprints?"

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Darwin's Dilemma Is On!

The film Darwin's Dilemma, which was originally going to be shown at the California Science Center is now going to be shown at the University of Southern California.

Guess that shoots the First Amendment argument in the head, doesn't it?

The press release from the Discovery Institute is here. It is still full of nonsense, however:

Filmed on four continents, Darwin's Dilemma examines some of the most important fossil discoveries ever made and with them, a mystery deeper than Charles Darwin ever imagined. For the fossil record of the Cambrian Explosion does not reveal the gradual development of life forms as Darwin posited in his work, but a period in which compound eyes, articulated limbs, sophisticated sensory organs and skeletal frames burst into existence seemingly out of nowhere. Produced by Illustra Films Directed by Lad Allen. To read more about the movie go to www.darwinsdilemma.org. Following the premiere will be a panel discussion featuring Lad Allen (director), Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, and David Berlinski, author of The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

It would be fun to go to it but I don't have 1500 dollars just lying around so I will have to catch it in reruns.
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Yes, but Why Do They Have to Be Evolutionary Biologists?

NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty has a piece on the problems that the new atheism is creating. Witness this:

Last month, atheists marked Blasphemy Day at gatherings around the world, and celebrated the freedom to denigrate and insult religion.

Some offered to trade pornography for Bibles. Others de-baptized people with hair dryers. And in Washington, D.C., an art exhibit opened that shows, among other paintings, one entitled Divine Wine, where Jesus, on the cross, has blood flowing from his wound into a wine bottle.

Another, Jesus Paints His Nails, shows an effeminate Jesus after the crucifixion, applying polish to the nails that attach his hands to the cross.

How juvenile. That is the problem that some atheists are having with the movement and where it is going. The article continues:

"I wouldn't want this on my wall," says Stuart Jordan, an atheist who advises the evidence-based group Center for Inquiry on policy issues. The Center for Inquiry hosted the art show.

Jordan says the exhibit created a firestorm from offended believers, and he can understand why. But, he says, the controversy over this exhibit goes way beyond Blasphemy Day. It's about the future of the atheist movement — and whether to adopt the "new atheist" approach — a more aggressive, often belittling posture toward religious believers.

One of the problems that I see is that many of these atheists are being led by people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and P.Z. Myers, two of which are influential evolutionary biologists. This becomes the public face of evolution, not the people like Francis Collins, Francisco Ayala, Kenneth Miller (who is a tad adversarial, himself) and others.

Okay, here's where I get into trouble. I look at people like Myers, Dawkins and Hitchens and can see why they have said "enough is enough!" They see Christianity not as the "love the Lord your God with all your heart, World Vision, Mother Theresa, feed the homeless, Sermon on the Mount, and care for the needy" entity that it should be and often is. They see it as (As Michael Dowd would say) the "flat-earth religion of scientifically illiterate school boards and conservative politicians, the purveyors of bad home school education, and the uneducated masses"; something to be done away with. I still think that they are wrong to do this and I pray that some of them will come to know the Lord, but the reaction was predictable.

As I said in another post, though, what this does is entrench Christians in their beliefs and they turn and focus their anger on the one thing they can see: evolution. This is where Steve Martin's Evangelical Statement on Evolution becomes absolutely essential. Somehow, the word has to get out that there are scientists out there for whom Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers do not speak.


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More Problems for the Dembski/Marks Paper

The Metropolis Sample takes the most recent swipe at the Dembski/Marks paper here. The paper is extraordinarily mathematical (imagine that!) and way over my pay grade, but the conclusions are clear:

The fundamental lesson here is that the Dembski-Marks approach to evaluating model assumptions is both arbitrary and a poor reflection of scientific reasoning. Model assumptions are not accepted or rejected based on a numerical measure of how many logical possibilities that are ruled out or how far probability distributions deviate from uniform measures. Rather, model assumptions are accepted or rejected based on predictive and descriptive accuracy, domain of applicability, ability to unify existing models and empirical knowledge, and so on. Merely talking about target sets requires assumptions that impose structure on the search space and processes related to it. Dembski and Marks (2009a) mention “a simple self-replicating molecule, an autocatalytic set, or a lipid membrane” as examples of biological targets. However, these chemical concepts presuppose model assumptions from physics, chemistry and biochemistry and they could hardly be independent of the chemical processes by which they are thought to arise.

As others have stated, Dembski and Marks do not understand how biological systems operate and how selection operates. This hampers their ability to correctly model a biosphere.

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