Evolution Exhibit in Toronto

The Toronto Star has a story on a new exhibit on Charles Darwin and evolution at the Royal Ontario Museum. The exhibit dwells not just on Darwin but on the controversy surrounding his theory on natural selection. As the Star writer Geoff Pevere notes:

Small wonder Darwin himself sat on the revelation for years before publishing it. He knew what was coming. As he wrote in a letter, he felt like he was "committing murder."

While there remains much dispute as to just what Darwin killed or how effectively he did so, at the very least he strangled the notion that history might have contained that fabulously dramatic moment when men went spear to talon with T-rex. Never happened. At least not in nature. But who needs nature (or Charles Darwin) when you've got movies?

Yet there may be no country in the world other than America where a movie featuring both dinosaurs and people would be regarded as the truth.

Consider the statistics. According to Susan Jacoby's recent book The Age of American Unreason, which singles out certain anti-Darwinian strains in American culture as an especially egregious example of the country's drift away from rationalism, "Fewer than half of Americans – 48 per cent – accept any form of evolution (even guided by God), and just 26 per cent accept Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Fully 42 per cent say that all living beings, including humans, have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

Yup. The continual problem. Much like the clerics who would not look into Galileo's telescope, it isn't that most people don't know anything about evolution, most people don't want to know anything about it. The exhibit opened on March 8.

Einstein and God

Lest any of you out there think that Albert Einstein was a Christian, Bloomsbury Auctions is selling a letter written by Einstein a year before his death in which he states that belief in the Bible is "childish." He says other things as well:

The letter up for sale, written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, suggests his views on religion did not mellow with age.

In it, Einstein said that "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

Richard Dawkins would be proud. For me, it is another example of where science and religion just don't mix.

Trouble in Maine

According to Articles of Interest, there is a debate in Maine School Administrative District 59 over the teaching of evolution. The story notes:

Director Matthew Linkletter argues that evolution is an unprovable theory and shouldn't be taught as fact. He's urged the SAD 59 Board of Directors to consider his view during its May 19 meeting in Madison, with a goal of removing evolution from science classrooms.

But David Connerty-Marin, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, says evolution must be taught because, in the state's view, it's a proven science.

My brother Dave lives with his wife in Maine and he says that the population is composed of two very different socio-economic groups, one very affluent and educated and the other, shall we say, less so. Maine was once known for textile mills and manufacturing and most of those jobs have evaporated or moved away but many of the people stayed.

Off-Topic

A German archaeologist has claimed to have found the palace of the Queen of Sheba and, hence, the possible place of the lost Ark of the Covenant. According to the story:

"From the dating, its position and the details that we have found, I am sure that this is the palace," he said. The palace, that is, of the Queen of Sheba, who is believed to have lived in the 10th century B.C. After she died, her son and successor, Menelek, replaced the palace with a temple dedicated to Sirius. The German researchers believe that the Ark was taken from Jerusalem by the queen — who had a liaison with King Solomon — and built into the altar to Sirius.

"The results we have suggest that a Cult of Sothis developed in Ethiopia with the arrival of Judaism and the Ark of the Covenant, and continued until 600 A.D.," an announcement by the University of Hamburg on behalf of the research team said.

I dunno. Sounds a tad funny. As they say, you can find enough wood from the original cross of Jesus to build an ark.

Maryann Johanson on "Expelled!"

Maryann Johanson of the Colorado Independent suggests that scientists and the public need to go on the offensive regarding the new Ben Stein-narrated movie "Expelled!" She writes:

We cannot dismiss this movie, because all those who care about public discourse in America and the ongoing war on scientific literacy need to see it in order to arm themselves against the idiocy. The film — written by Stein, Kevin Miller and Walt Ruloff, and directed by Nathan Frankowski — shows just how insidious the "intelligent design" proponents are.

Aside from the Darwin/Hitler connexion, there are other insights:

Since Stein is unable to adequately critique evolutionary science, he resorts to a kind of name-calling that is purposely designed to mislead his audience. He constantly refers to those who accept evolution as "Darwinists," which is akin to referring to quantum physicists as "Newtonians" or "Copernicans." He does this even though one of his own ID proponents notes that biological science has moved on from Darwin just as physical science has moved on from Newton.

While Darwin's concept of Natural Selection is clearly the driving force behind evolution, it is important to remember that Darwin did not know of the existence of genes and by extension, could not formulate the concepts of genetic drift, flow mutation, and the various forms of speciation that occur. The negative review are building up.

The Fuzzy Black Box

My mother had a stroke over the weekend. It seems to have burned out her speech center. For quite some time, all she could get out was "yes" or "no." It was clear that she was all there, she just could not communicate. That was Saturday. By Monday night, she was speaking in phrases. What a strange thing the brain is.

Expelled!: A Review from Blogcritic

Michael Clayton of Blogcritic writes a piece called "An Analysis of the Arguments Presented in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed!" The problem is that he doesn't really get around to doing so until the third page, and then in half-hearted fashion. The article largely just recapitulates the narrative of the film, with little added insight for the first two pages. His only real analysis is that the film is "certainly a one-sided affair." Beyond that, there are the usual problems. For example, he writes:

According to the information presented in the film, there have been active efforts to remove the theory of intelligent design from the consciousness of educational institutions nationwide, and to exalt the theory of evolution as the only rational explanation for the origin and development of life. In my opinion, this process is fraught with flaws. It seems that these institutions have gradually lost sight of one of the most prominent characteristic of evolutionary theory: it is ultimately just a theory. Yet in many scientific circles, it is no longer considered a theory, but fervently argued as completely factual.

Note to all those who wish to write about these topics--Learn what a theory is first!! He goes on:

Another astounding trend outlined in the film is the fact that the theory of intelligent design is repeatedly identified as a code word for creationism. Stein conducts a series of interviews with many of the most outspoken opponents of intelligent design, and many of them attempt to use the discussion as a platform to slander Christianity and similar beliefs.

While it is certainly true that some, like Dawkins, do exactly that, there is ample justification for the connexion between Christianity and ID, as was starkly brought out in the Dover trial, where the school board trucked in copies of the execrable book Of Pandas and People, reviewed here, here and here. As far as the origin of life is concerned, he writes this:

At the same time, evolutionists have yet to present a reasonable alternative argument as to how life began. Rather than producing further research and analysis on evolutionary theory in order to provide their own conclusion to this process, it would appear that many evolutionists have sought to target and eliminate all traces of intelligent design from modern scientific theory.

Not their job to do so. Evolutionary theory does not deal with origin of life questions. Finally, in the third page, he gets to his objections to how the film was put together. Even here, though, he blunts his criticisms by saying the following:

Another concern I had relating to the presentation of the film was the way in which some of the information was acquired for the film. A number of the figures involved with the production, including Richard Dawkins, claimed they were misled about the purpose of the film, and were not aware that it was a film advocating the instruction of intelligent design. While I do not necessarily approve of this method in regards to acquiring information, it should be noted that the comments made by Richard Dawkins are similar to comments made by the man himself consistently on his own website. Therefore, while the way in which his involvement was enlisted is questionable, his responses in the film seem to be pretty representative of his personal ideology.

This is specious reasoning. Richard Dawkins' ideology doesn't enter into it. If someone were to come up to me and tell me they were making a movie about the strengths of evolutionary biology and interviewed me to that extent and then when the film came out, it promoted the six-day creation model, I would be pretty hacked off. Not because my views weren't properly expressed but because the interviewer lied about why he was interviewing me. The question is not about my views or those of Richard Dawkins. The question is about the motives of the interviewer. Not a useful review.

Editorial: Academic Freedom Act is a Bad Idea

An argument against the "Academic Freedom Bill" from the Destin Log's Fraser Sherman. It is concisely written and covers most of the the rebuttal points. For example:

•“Intelligent design has nothing whatsoever to do with religion.” The ID-supporters of the Discovery Institute have admitted ID is a “wedge” for putting “Christ-centered” science into schools. And one religious publisher put out an ID textbook, “Pandas and People,” by reprinting a creationist text with “ID” where “creationism” used to go.
•“Creation science is science.” No more than “flat earth geography” would be geography. You can put lipstick on a pig, but ...
•”Darwin’s theory of evolution remains a theory with no scientific conclusions on the origin of life.” Which is why he called his book “The Origin of Species,” not “of Life.” Evolution is about how life changes, not how it started — and the proof that life has been evolving for millennia is overwhelming. The origin of life is a separate question, as witness that even some devout creationists have conceded evolution does work at least sometimes (it explains why bacteria become immune to antibiotics, for instance) without changing their views on Genesis.

A good read.

ID Part of a Surge in Evangelicalism at Universities?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece recounting the rise of evangelicalism in today's colleges and universities. The writer, D. Michael Lindsey, notes changes from past movements:

Unlike fundamentalists who retreat from pluralistic environments, evangelicals relish the chance to engage people who hold different beliefs. This could present an opportunity for deeper understanding on our campuses, but it will happen only if we bring evangelicals into our classroom discussions. Just as the debate surrounding intelligent design has forced many biologists to engage religious topics in the classroom, so will rising religious pluralism. As we make greater progress in medicine and genomics, we should expect the number of moral issues surrounding those developments to multiply. That, joined with the rising number of evangelical students on our campuses, will demand of us at least a basic understanding of what this religious community believes.

Read the whole thing.

On the other hand...

Reading the reviews of Expelled, it seems to me that most of them are even-handed. For example, Matt McKilop suggests more than a few similarities to Michael Moore films. He writes:

Expelled then goes on to interview a number of proponents of intelligent design. Each of them sounds smart, obviously more knowledgeable about science and the origin of life than I am, but the film fails to define exactly what these men think and what they're proposing. I understand they reject the theory of evolution. I understand that intelligent design involves a "designer." But what else? What would intelligent design research contribute to the body of science literature? How would intelligent design researchers test their claims? Unfortunately, the film doesn't bother to provide answers to these questions.

Perhaps the worst part of Expelled comes when Stein tries to connect the theory of evolution and Nazism. While it's true that Hitler used Darwin's theories to support his ideology, it's intellectually dishonest to associate, however tenuously, today's scientific community with Nazism. Too often in today's public discourse, people feel it's not enough merely to assert that their ideological opponent is wrong -- they must also claim he's evil. This is shameless demagoguery, and it's not persuasive or constructive.

Check out the reviews.

Expelled on RT

Rottentomatoes.com has corralled the available reviews of Expelled. They are harsh. Now, it is not clear to me that movie reviewers are notably different from Hollyweird in general so you might take the reviews with a grain of salt.

The Great Off-Ramp of Evolution

The Australian has a story about research coming out of Argentina that suggests that Neandertals were not part of modern human ancestry:

The team [led by Rolando Gonzalez-Jose of the Patagonian National Centre at Puerto Madryn, Argentina] goes back over the same well-known set of specimens, but uses a different analytical approach, focusing on a set of fundamental, yet long-term, changes in skull shape. They took 3D images of the casts of 17 hominid specimens, and from a gorilla, chimpanzee and Homo sapiens. These were crunched through a computer model to compare four variables; the skull's roundness and base, the protrusion of the jaw, and facial retraction, or position of the face relative to the cranial base.

That is a pretty bald conclusion based on four variables, when there are over 60 that can be taken on the head alone. It sounds like they have used prosthion radius and a few other ones--don't know what "roundness and base" are. Time to pick up the paper.

What did the Old Man Eat?

According to Eurekalert, Peter Ungar, Fred Grine and Mark Teaford are arguing that Australopithecus/Paranthropus boisei did not have a hard nut-based diet after all.

The findings showed that P. boisei teeth had light wear, suggesting that none of the individuals ate extremely hard or tough foods in the days leading up to death. The pattern was more consistent with modern-day fruit-eating animals than with most modern-day primates.

"It looks more like they were eating Jell-O," Ungar said.

Hey, it killed the dinosaurs didn't it?

The Derb on Expelled!

John Derbeyshire has written a piece on the movie Expelled for National Review. He is not complimentary:

So what’s going on here with this stupid Expelled movie? No, I haven’t seen the dang thing. I’ve been reading about it steadily for weeks now though, both pro (including the pieces by David Klinghoffer and Dave Berg on National Review Online) and con, and I can’t believe it would yield up many surprises on an actual viewing. It’s pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism. How could a guy like this [Ben Stein] do a thing like that?

He has further harsh words for creationism in general:

These dishonesties do not surprise me. When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot.

Although he suggests that the earlier creationist movement shows more integrity than the modern ID movement, there are plenty of creationists who behaved as badly as any Dawkins or Meyers ever did, and hid behind the idea of doing "God's word" while they were doing it.



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Now playing: Anthony Phillips - Sunrise And Sea Monsters
via FoxyTunes

Sorry, been SUPER busy.

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Now playing: Anthony Phillips - Sunrise And Sea Monsters
via FoxyTunes

"Won't Ya Be My Yoko Ono"

Yoko Ono is suing Premise Media and Ben Stein for using the John Lennon song "Imagine" in the film Expelled! without permission. According to the story:

"Defendants have intentionally and willfully used the song without authorization because they knew that they would likely be unable to secure permission from plaintiffs," Ono, 75, said in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in New York.

The story additionally notes:

Ono has tightly controlled Lennon's intellectual property rights since the Beatles member was assassinated in 1980. On April 30, a preliminary hearing will begin in Boston federal court in her lawsuit to stop footage of Lennon from being used in a World Wide Video film called "3 Days in the Life."

Since I haven't seen the film, I don't know how much of the song was used. It is a good bet that any of it was too much.

Carrying Babies Not the Driving Force Behind Bipedalism

The Bignews Network is airing a story detailing research by folks at the University of Manchester on bipedalism. The story notes:

For long, researchers have proposed that carrying babies that could no longer use their feet to cling to their parents in the way that young apes can is what made humans bipedal.

But University of Manchester researchers investigating the energy involved in carrying a child say the physical expense to the mother does not support the idea that walking upright was an evolutionary response to child transportation.

Back to visual predation?

Humans on the Brink of Extinction

According to a story on Foxnews, humans neared the brink of extinction a scant 70 000 years ago. According to one of the authors of the study:

"This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history," Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence, said in a statement.

"Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world," he added. "Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA."

Well, that is somewhat melodramatic, if a tad overstated. The story also notes:

The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa, formerly known as Hottentots and Bushmen, who appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

The researchers, led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Tel Aviv University, concluded that humans separated into small populations prior to the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.

This will probably be news to most archaeologists who have quite a bit of material worldwide from this general time period. It also flies in the face of the fossil remains dated to between 50-90 ky in Europe and the Mediterranean. If those fossils represent only a fraction of the population alive at the time, then there were a bunch more people around than this study would want to admit.

"Expelled" Rakes It In!

Biz of Showbiz has an article on just how well Expelled is doing at the Box Office. How well?

The film is already one of the top documentaries ever, just after the first weekend, where it averaged $2,997 per venue. While it ended up in the No. 10 spot for the weekend box office, it was fifth as far as average taken in per theater.

Cool. Take that, Richard Dawkins!!

Reading a Newspaper is Good For You

The Saskatoon Star Phoenix has an article suggesting that, in order to be better educated, one should read the newspaper. They write:

In fact, newspaper readers are one of just two groups in society likely to reject belief in the paranormal, says Lou Manza, chair of the psychology department at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania. The other group is people who think everything has a scientific explanation.

Manza surveyed college students on about 20 different paranormal beliefs such as near-death experiences and psychics.

What is also interesting is how much of a cross-cut of society is involved. When controlling for income, ethnicity and other factors, the team found that:

Almost none of it seemed to matter. Religious and non-religious people were about equally likely to believe in ghosts, astrology, and the rest. So were rich and poor, all political parties, ethnic groups, believers in "alternative spiritualism" -- even, stunningly, those with and without science courses in high school and in college.

Yup. Keep reading the newspaper.