The Evolution of the Hiccup and Other Traits

TwinCities.com reproduces a Philadelphia Inquirer article on the evolution of the hiccup, why we have hernias and other lovable traits conducted with Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish. According to the story:

The sound of a hiccup echoes back to our very distant past as fish and amphibians some 375 million years ago, Shubin said. It's really just a spasm that causes a sharp intake of breath followed by a quick partial closing of our upper airway with that flap of skin known as the glottis. It's best if you can nip it in the first couple of hics, he said.

It's much harder to stop once you've let yourself get up to 10. By that point, you've reverted to an ancient breathing pattern orchestrated by the brain stem that once helped amphibians breath, letting water pass the gills without leaking into the lungs. "Tadpoles normally breathe with something like a hiccup," Shubin said.

Can't wait until the book comes.

The "God Lab" Opens

New Scientist notes that the Discovery Institute has unveiled the "Biologic Institute" in Redmond, Washington designed to search for evidence of Intelligent Design. One hopes that some sort of methodological framework will emerge. I am not holding my breath. The author writes:

The Biologic Institute in Redmond, Washington, has been shrouded in secrecy since it was established more than a year ago by the Discovery Institute, an organisation which claims ID is a scientific theory (New Scientist, 16 December 2006, p 8). Its existence was finally made public on 10 May, when details of the project were published online at www.biologicinstitute.org

More on the Darwin Exposition at the Royal Ontario Museum

Peter Calamai of the Toronto Star writes on the not-so blatant anti-creationism flavor of the Darwin exposition at the ROM:

Take this statement from a panel headed "Creationism" at the close of the exhibit:

"For 150 years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the theory of evolution by natural selection has not been seriously challenged by any other scientific explanation."

The weasel word here is "seriously," since that's very much a qualitative judgment.


It also includes this little historical tidbit:

The only obvious Canadian touch in the show is a case that contains T.H. Huxley's application to the University of Toronto for the post of professor of natural philosophy, as science was then known. Among Huxley's letters of support is one from Charles Darwin.

U of T passed Huxley over for a far less qualified man with political connections. Huxley was thus available later in England to become "Darwin's Bulldog," defending natural selection in public talks with his arm draped around a gorilla's skeleton.

Sure would be nice to get up there for it.

More Slings and Arrows for Expelled!

John Vandehey writes in the Daily Emerald that Ben Stein's movie Expelled is not well thought out. He ask what effect the adoption of ID as a workable theory would have on science:

But what would happen to religion? Intelligent design proposes the existence of an overseer, a guiding, intelligent force which directs evolution. Every deity-based religion would point to it and say, "Ho! There's proof that we are right."

And therein lies the stumbling point. The moment religion gets proof, it's not religion anymore; it's fact. There's no faith; everything is given. There's no wonder; there's just a footnote in a school biology textbook that students will read, memorize for the test, and quickly forget.

To me, the greatest gift that religion and spirituality can give is hope, the ability to do the right thing and work for good without any expected personal gain, to do it just because you have faith in the inherent goodness in the world. If we give proof to religion, then doing the right thing becomes no different from paying taxes: it becomes mechanical and without meaning. While I would love to see more people doing the right thing, I can't appreciate a good thing done just because it had to be done; if a person must endure some hardships for doing the right thing, then it shows me that he or she cares about what they do.

In some senses, this is similar to the argument I make that if the YEC supporters really got their way and had creationism taught in public schools, it would be devastating to Christianity. All of those badly-formed, out-of-date arguments would be taught in science class and held up to scientific scrutiny. The results would be catastrophic. They don't really want what they think they want.

Freedom of Expression at Salon.com

Salon has a column called "The Atheist and the Creationist" which takes the form of a letter to the editor in which a man is vexed at the thought that one of his friends might be willing to teach creationism to his children. He writes:

As my wife put it, we consider teaching young earth creationism (in any sense other than as a theology, if it must be taught at all) to be a form of child abuse. It seems bad enough that he has raised his two children with a belief system that he himself has acknowledged has serious holes in it, but it seems far worse that he is now thinking seriously about helping other children drink the Kool-Aid.

After some rumination, the response includes the following:

I believe freedom of expression is more important than the wide dissemination of correct views. I arrived at this conclusion by considering that in a democracy state power will inevitably be used to bolster, promote and enforce ideas and ideals that germinate in personal and family life. So I say in our private lives we ought to tolerate and embrace what we consider to be nutty, in the hope that this is the private behavior that will eventually filter upward into state power. For if what we value in our private lives is the dissemination of correct views, that is the value that is likely to take root in government. And that is the view that leads to tyranny, in my humble opinion.

This is an area that I struggle with constantly as well because I think that people should have the right to educate their children in the best way that they know. At the same time, I do not think that they should have the right to educate them using outdated or wrong educational material. That does the child a disservice and ill-prepares him or her for the world at large. I will have to find an answer to this soon.

My brother Dave is not a champion of states rights and argues that the education curriculum should be standardized. The reason it is not is that there are a whole bunch of people out there who would object to some of the things that the central government would put into it. I sympathize. I don't want my five-year-old taught about contraception. I also have a problem with my kids being taught that to accept the idea that homosexuality is "normal" when it is only practiced by 2-3% of the population. No other behavior that restricted in practice would be considered "normal." I also think, however, that evolution should be part of every state's curriculum. It is established science and the arguments against it are unpersuasive at best and facile at worst.

Debate at Roanoake.com

A series of post in the Roanoke Times is interesting to follow. The first one, "Evolution and Aliens," is written by Linda Whitlock, a Times columnist and adjunct English Professor. She has gone to see "Expelled!" She writes:

"Expelled" has been criticized for implying a link between evolutionary theory and Hitler's murderous policies. But the link clearly is there. Evolution provided the rationale for the eugenics movement and eugenics the justification for getting rid of the unfit, which, to the Nazis, included the Jews. For the greater good.

If evolution is true, it's true. Blinding ourselves to its possible consequences is foolhardy.

But what if it isn't true? What if something else -- some sort of intelligence, if you will -- is running the show? That's the tantalizing question some scientists have been asking. Some things just don't fit neatly into the evolutionary model. They seem, well, designed.

Actually, as I and other people have noted, the link is not there. It is inferred by many people not related to the events and people of the time. One assumes that evolution is the concept by which Hitler acted out his eugenics programs. Further, asking what if evolution is not true implies that one has done research to that effect. That is the problem. Evolution is so well backed up by evidence that it is difficult to suggest it is not.

Michael Scott, Roanoke resident, replies thus:

The problem with Intelligent Design is it has no testable theories. Proponents just don't have anything on which a scientist could hang a hat, and until they do, they will not be taken seriously by any credible scientific community. The reason they don't get any air time in science is because they don't do science.

Well put, Michael. Linda replied in "God, Science Not Exclusive":

In my early American lit classes, I sometimes ask students to explain how John Edwards and Cotton Mather, two noted Puritan theologians, could be both men of God and men of science. Mather, in fact, was a member of the British Royal Society. The students are so convinced that God and science are separate, however, most have a tough time coming up with a coherent explanation.

If science really were defined today simply as an orderly and rational investigation of the natural world, Edwards, Mather, ID theorists and evolutionists alike could all play together on the same field. A more accurate definition for today, though, is that science is an effort to explain all natural phenomena by natural causes only.

That definition pretty much rules Edwards, et al., out of bounds. But given the things we don't have answers for -- how the universe began, how life got started, where DNA originated, to name a few -- there's no way we can be sure all natural phenomena can be explained by natural causes.

Herein lies the crux of one of the misconceptions out there: evolutionary theory does not explain the origin of life or anything about the origin of the universe. It is simply not designed to do so. Many people forget that.

Expelled too Polarizing?

Jen Wulf of the South Bend Tribune has written an exceptional editorial on Expelled! The editorial deals with the scope of the movie and that it was intended to be polarizing. She is particularly critical of one aspect:

Stein, however, never interviews evolutionists who see their scientific views as either compatible with, or distinct from, their religious beliefs.

One such scientist is Kenneth Filchak, a practicing Roman Catholic and a professor of biology at the University of Notre Dame. He disagrees with the idea that the theory of evolution devalues human life, and he does not relate it to atheism.

“Darwin said probably the most profound thing that any scientist has ever said: ‘If you go far enough back in time, all things on our planet are related.’

“If you start really thinking about it, that sounds really biblical to me. It sounds like something God would do, to make everything related,” Filchak says.

Read the whole thing.

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?