Creationism in South Florida Politics

TampaOnline has a story about St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Bill Foster and whether his creationism will become a factor in the race. Some think that it is relevant:

"This city is trying to increase its employment base with respect to scientific organizations and trying to recruit scientific concerns to come here,'' said St. Petersburg architect Michael Dailey, who supports Kathleen Ford, Foster's opponent. "If our mayor has a belief system that basically rejects science, how can people take him seriously?"

So what exactly does he believe?

Foster, a member of Starkey Road Baptist Church in Seminole, dismissed the suggestion that each of those "days" could represent a period of thousands of years.

"In the Genesis account, it's timed by the sun and the moon,'' he responded.

Normally, candidates in the Tampa Bay area are not asked about dinosaurs or whether they believe the world is billions of years old or thousands, as some creationists maintain. (Ford said billions, Foster declined to answer.)

But in this election Foster has been dogged by questions about his religious beliefs after he sent a controversial letter to the Pinellas School Board, urging members to allow discussion about alternatives to the theory of evolution, such as the Genesis account. His letter suggested that Darwin contributed to the rise of Hitler and the Columbine massacre.

Another person for which science education has utterly failed.

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Video on Transitional Fossils

A video on Tangle, a community for Christians, by Agent Orange goes through the evidence for transitional fossils, with musical accompaniment. There is no way to embed it so here is the link.
http://www.tangle.com/view_video?viewkey=30f3c826e7d8c017176a. There are a number of other videos there. The quality is iffy but the presentation is good.

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More on the ERV - Human Interaction

The Irish Times has a story on how Endogenous Retroviruses have become part of the human genome. They write:

If you think that viruses have played no part in human evolution think again. Up to 46 per cent of our DNA was actually provided some time in the past by invading viruses, Ryan says. In comparison, just 1.5 per cent of our genomes arise from the genes we inherit from our primate and animal ancestors.

Ryan argues that Human Endogenous Retroviruses, or Hervs, are a viral integration process integral to the genome of all mammals. It came about by an extensive series of retroviral epidemics that infected our ancestors over tens of millions of years. This means that the virus is something more than just a pest.

ERVs have been used extensively as evidence for evolution, since we share a large number of ERVs with the higher primates and the insertion points are always the same. But as evil as they are, they also play continuous roles in our genome:

Ryan suggests that certain viruses play vital roles in human activity. “There are eight full-length viruses in the human placenta playing different roles, such as a human virus that codes for syncytin 1, which fuses cells together to create a protective layer between mother and baby,” says Ryan. “Proof of the symbiotic inclusion of such viruses as part of our DNA is the fact they have been conserved throughout evolution.”

ID has difficulty explaining ERVs because they cause such harm to any given generation and they are clearly detrimental to health in the short term. Here is a reminder of how important ERVs are to evolutionary studies.

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The New Humanist Takes on Adnan Oktar

Creationist extraordinaire Adnan Oktar (neé Harun Yahya) has a profile in the New Humanist. It is not pretty. The piece, entitled Sex, Flies and Videotape, by Halil Arda, follows the rise of the young Oktar through the ranks of Turkish society. Along the way, some truly scary things emerge:

While Oktar was building a public profile through his books, the real work was taking place backstage, as he began to assemble a group of followers dedicated to his twisted vision. Combining his undoubted charisma (something even his most ardent opponents concede) with a gift for manipulation, Oktar set out to build a cult around himself, drawing extensively on the techniques pioneered by messianic gurus like Charles Manson and Jim Jones, and in particular employing the strategies of the Moonies, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Scientology in targeting disaffected but affluent and educated young people, insisting they turn their worldly goods over to the cult, and vigorously enforcing rigid hierarchies and punitive rules.

Creationism and Islamic fundamentalism—what a combination. We also learn something about the scholarship of the man, himself:

It is highly doubtful whether any of these books – or indeed any of the 150 books he claims to have written – were actually written by Oktar. Berk, who was part of the inner circle at the time, confirms this: “There is a group of followers who are commissioned to write the books. For every book, they will take a few key sources written by Christian creationist authors, mostly from the US. They plagiarise the chapters and paragraphs that agree with their creationist approach. Then they add the photos, a few ayat from the Koran, and sometimes a bit of a commentary. None of the ideas belong to Oktar.”

As much as anything, it is his connexions to creationism in the United States that are troubling. In the past the Discovery Institute has accepted the outstretched arm of Oktar, in the mistaken belief that what they don't have in common is unimportant. Read the whole thing.

Another Exoplanet

Too bad its too hot. USA Heute is reporting on a planet that circles its parent star every 20 hours—that's kind of fast, I think—but is so hot it can't sustain life. The difference is that it is a rocky planet:

This is a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe, said outside expert Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution. It was the buzz of a conference on finding an Earth-like planet outside our solar system, held in Barcelona, Spain, where the discovery was presented Wednesday morning. The find is also being published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The planet is called Corot-7b. It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then watched it dozens of times to measure its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth. It's in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

Oh well. Next time.


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Creation Not Coming to the United States

This could only happen in the U.S. The film Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly has not been picked up by distributors in this country because of its subject matter. I was looking forward to seeing the film. Now, I might not get the chance! The article in the Telegraph hints at why this has happened:

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

There is so much nonsense packed into that one paragraph that I doubt I will ever look at the site again. If their judgement and research is that bad about a film like this, I doubt it would be good about other films.

To say that the film makers were surprised is an understatement:

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

"That's what we're up against. In 2009. It's amazing," he said.

"The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.

And I doubt anyone will. What a shame.

UPDATE: John Scalzi doesn't think its the creationists that are keeping the film from coming to the U.S. He writes:

Alternately, and leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view.

I don't buy it. Miramax thrives on such films and they have a huge market in this country. Currently in production or advertised are all kinds of film about dissolving relationships and general dysfunction. Furthermore, Lars von Trier's new film Anti-Christ, a movie about a husband and wife who lose a young son and try to get their lives back together, is getting extensive airplay, partly due to its extremely graphic sex scenes between the leads.

Along the way, Scalzi makes a somewhat cynical comment on the perceived sensibilities of the U.S. theatre-going public:

Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio.

I still don't buy it.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

New Scientist Reviews The Greatest Show on Earth

Randy Olson of The New Scientist has a review of Richard Dawkins' latest book The Greatest Show on Earth. Olson is not so taken:

It's really kind of comical. If "spot the condescensions" is a new drinking game, then bottoms up! There's one in just about every chapter. Though Dawkins says from the outset, "This is not an anti-religious book", he can't help but knock religion throughout, For instance, he writes: "God, to repeat this point, which ought to be obvious, but isn't, never made a tiny wing in his eternal life." Young Earth creationists are, he writes, "deluded to the point of perversity". You get the sense that Dawkins just can't control it. It's as if he suffers from an anti-religious form of Tourette's syndrome.

This does not serve Dawkins in good stead. As he is seen increasingly as irrational about religion, the very people he is trying to convert increasingly ignore what he is saying because they are tired of being insulted. I know I am.

A New Kind of Geology Class

I think that if more people took a class like this, flood geology wouldn't be quite so well accepted. Clay Farris Naff of The Humanist (a magazine that I don't ordinarily read) has a good article on how geologist David Harwood, of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, teaches his students to understand geology. Naff writes:

What would happen if the pro-science side quit trying to win over young people with words and instead let them discover science for themselves? That is what geologist David Harwood, holder of the Stout Chair in Stratigraphy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), decided to find out. Together with his former doctoral student, Richard Levy, he has created a unique geology field course for future teachers. The idea is simple: In the rocky wilderness of Wyoming, a dozen students are pressed into teams and tasked with recapitulating centuries’ worth of geological discovery in a matter of days.

It really isn't very simple. It took quite some time to understand the geology of the Rockies. Still, interesting things happen along the way. He writes about a particular student:

It soon becomes clear that everything he knows about science comes from the standard creationist cant. He brushes Harwood’s idea of science aside as “a lot of this’s and that’s. It all comes down to one word—theory.” It turns out that his main objection in this class is to the geological column, which sets the Earth’s age at billions of years. “It’s a hypothesis that can’t be proven or hasn’t been proven,” he says. “It’s not a fact.” To avoid the possibility of heresy, David avoids writing any dates at all in his field journal.

And yet, within a week, David’s mind opens up to new ways of thinking, and he becomes a vigorous advocate of the inquiry method of learning. That is not to say he drops his lifelong commitment to fundamentalist Christianity. That would be too much to expect. But change washes over him all the same like a baptism in broad-mindedness.

This is sad because it reminds me a bit of Glenn Morton's "conversion" from flood geology, which almost cost him his faith. If the church would simply teach good science to start with, then discoveries like this would not be so jarring for the average Christian who takes a class in geology. I wonder how many people who are "jarred" by information like this never find their way back to their faith.

Eagle From Hell

According to research coming out of Australia, a giant eagle may have been carnivorous after all. The story, in PhysOrg states:

Ken Ashwell of the University of New South Wales in Australia and Paul Scofield of the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand wrote their conclusions in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Using computed axial tomography, or CAT, the researchers scanned several skulls, a pelvis and a beak in an effort to reconstruct the size of the bird's brain, eyes, ears and spinal cord.

They compared their data on the Haast's eagle to characteristics of modern predator birds and scavenger birds to determine that the bird was a fearsome predator that ate the flightless moa birds and even humans.

Paul Scofield? Canterbury? What are the odds? Oh well, back to the story:

Scientists believe the Haast's eagle became extinct about 500 years ago, most likely due to habitat destruction and the extinction of its prey species at the hands of early Polynesian settlers. Before the humans colonized New Zealand about 750 years ago, the largest inhabitants were birds like the Haast's eagle and the moa.

Scofield said the findings are similar to what he found in Maori folk tales. "The science supports Maori mythology of the legendary pouakai or hokioi, a huge bird that could swoop down on people in the mountains and was capable of killing a small child," he said.

Although perhaps sensationalized, the story reminds one that the birds of the air are not the birds of yesteryear. The article doesn't say what the wingspan was but it must have been huge.

Ben Stein Being Sincere and Not So Sincere

Ben Stein, speechwriter for presidents, host of the great game show "Win Ben Stein's Money," which, sadly, is not still on, and narrator of the movie Expelled! has been fired from his gig writing for the New York Times. As if William Kristol's example wasn't enough of a warning to other conservative writers, the Grey Lady will simply broach no conservatism. I am convinced that David Brooks puts his job on the line every time he writes a column. There are also some unanswered questions about why Stein was fired and it is reasonable to conclude that the reasons that were given are not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Along the way, however, he says some things that simply are not so. About the movie Expelled!, he writes the following:

Expelled was a plea for open discussion of the possibility that life might have started with an Intelligent Designer. This idea, that freedom of academic discussion on an issue as to which there is avid scientific disagreement has value, seems obvious to me. But it drives the atheists and neo-Darwinists crazy and they responded viciously.

No, it wasn't a plea for open discussion. Expelled! was a vicious diatribe against any and all things evolutionary, ending with the bald, unsupported claim that Darwin's views directly informed Hitler about how he was to treat people. This was complete with scenes of concentration camps, lest any viewer be unclear about just how evil evolution actually was. Furthermore, some of the cases that Mr. Stein profiled were not quite as he profiled them. See the excellent article "Expelled Exposed" for a recap of all of the claims and the holes in them. For added information about how dishonest the movie was, read this article by John Rennie and Steve Mirsky on "Six things in Expelled that Ben Stein doesn't want you to know." Does the end of destroying "Darwinism" really justify the means, especially when the means aren't very different from those that you decry?

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Mountain Building and Human Evolution

Did the uplift of mountains around the East African Rift Valley lead to the evolution of the earliest humans? Research by Royhan and Nahid Gani of the University of Utah, Energy and Geoscience Institute. As the article, in the University of Utah News Center notes:

They argue that the accelerated uplift of mountains and highlands stretching from Ethiopia to South Africa blocked much ocean moisture, converting lush tropical forests into an arid patchwork of woodlands and savannah grasslands that gradually favored human ancestors who came down from the trees and started walking on two feet - an energy-efficient way to search larger areas for food in an arid environment.

In their Geotimes article, the Ganis - a husband-and-wife research team who met in college in their native Bangladesh - describe this 3,700-mile-long stretch of highlands and mountains as "the Wall of Africa." It parallels the famed East African Rift valley, where many fossils of human ancestors were found.

"Because of the crustal movement or tectonism in East Africa, the landscape drastically changed over the last 7 million years," says Royhan Gani (pronounced rye-hawn Go-knee), a research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. "That landscape controlled climate on a local to regional scale. That climate change spurred human ancestors to evolve from apes."

We know that the earliest hominids begin showing up around five to six million years ago (Orrorin tugenensis, Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus anamensis) and that this coincides with increased aridity and expansion of grasslands. This piece of information dovetails nicely into that theory.

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The Long Arm of the Discovery Institute

The topic of evolution and creationism seems to be a common thread in the Roanoke Times. Today, guest writer David Clark claims that "Evolution isn't even a good theory." Clark, according to the introduction, is on the staff of the Campus Bible Fellowship, at Virginia Tech. He writes:

The other major issue I see is the relationship between science and evolution. Some assume that evolution is science-based fact, but it is far from that. Evolution is a theory -- and not even a good scientific theory, because it is contrary to science. Evolution has never been observed. Micro-evolution has been observed, and from that scientists have theorized the possibility of macro-evolution by extrapolation, which is a huge stretch. Micro-evolution results in the loss of information while macro-evolution requires the creation of new information.

Evolution may have sounded reasonable in Darwin's day, but since the discoveries of the complexity of the simplest living cell and of DNA, plus the development of information science, amoeba-to-human gradual evolution is demonstrably false.

Sound familiar? This is the long arm of the Discovery Institute, pumping out misinformation faster than oil through a pipeline. Not a bit of the above is true. Mr. Clark first writes that evolution has never been observed. Then he writes that "micro-evolution" has been observed. Well, which is it? Since microevolution is evolution, clearly it has been observed. The idea that microevolution results in a loss of information only makes sense if you don't understand how evolution works (and it is not clear that anyone on the staff of the Discovery Institute does). In every generation, random mutations occur and then selection acts upon them depending on what sort of trait they confer and what the environmental impact on the trait is. Some are beneficial, quite a few are harmful, but the vast majority of them are selectively neutral. Consequently, they add to the genetic variability of any given population. Whether or not selection works on those traits in the future depends on how the environment or population changes.

He makes the claim that gradual evolution is demonstrably false. Aside from the fact that this is a bit of a straw man—evolution proceeds both quickly and slowly depending on the environment/selection interaction—I would like to know how he supports that claim, since the fossil record is filled with transitional forms at every major level. These include fossils that show the transition from land animals to whales, from dinosaurs to birds (lots of those: from Sinosauropteryx prima to Protarchaeopteryx to Archaeopteryx to Shenzhouraptor through a number of other forms to modern birds), from lobe-finned fish (crossopterygians) to early tetrapods (such as Icthyostega and Cassinaria). To be sure, it may very well be that there is no direct ancestor/descendent relationship in any of the above examples. That does not mean they are not transitional or that the trends were not heading in a particular direction. Dinosaurs exist in the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous that have feathers but were non-flying. They had feathers because feathers are marvelous insulators. Evidence exists for the evolution of five different kinds of feathers over time, culminating in the form we see in modern birds. Since evolution proceeds more like a bush than a tree, this is understandable. It is a mix of direct and collateral ancestry.

He closes with the following:

I'm in good company. Dr. Henry Morris, who was head of the Department of Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech from 1957 to 1970, authored more than 45 books on the Bible and creation. In 1970, he founded the Institute for Creation Research, which continues to promote six-day creation through literature and seminars. Some years ago, 25 professors at Tech signed a letter saying they did not accept evolution.

How is this good company? Henry Morris had no standing within the scientific community because he espoused ideas that were outside his areas of expertise and had been dismissed by scientists over a hundred years before he was born. Henry Morris, who along with John Whitcomb, wrote The Genesis Flood, believed that there had been a world-wide deluge that had created the fossil and geological record and had inundated the entire earth. As Christian geologist Davis Young put it in his History of the Collapse of "Flood Geology" and a Young Earth:

Just what are those extrabiblical data? In summary, several centuries of effort to locate physical remnants of the biblical deluge have completely failed. Any physical evidence that has been claimed to support a global flood has eventually been demonstrated to have a different explanation. The idea that the flood deposited the world's stratified rocks has been thoroughly discredited by numerous lines of evidence. Many of the individual strata give evidence of having been deposited in such non-flood environments as rivers, beaches, deltas, lakes, glaciers, deserts, and shallow oceanic platforms. Many strata, such as lake deposits and fossil reefs, contain abundant indicators of very slow deposition under environmentally sensitive conditions quite incompatible with a catastrophic deluge. Many strata are overlain by fossil soils and separated from higher strata by erosional breaks that could only have been produced over extensive lengths of time. The fossils themselves are arrayed in progressive order in the geologic column. Many of the organisms lived in environments utterly unlike flooded terrains. Radiometric dating of volcanic ash or lava flows interbedded with fossiliferous strata show that they are millions of years old. Some large masses of igneous rocks injected into the strata took hundreds of thousands of years to cool and crystallize. Many fossiliferous rocks have been metamorphosed, indicating extreme burial that could not possibly have occurred during a year-long deluge.

All the evidence of the rocks tells us that they were not produced or arranged by a flood. The views of earth history offered by Woodward, Catcott, G.M. Price, Whitcomb and Morris, and John R. Rice are simply and obviously incorrect.

I implore those like Mr. Clark to go out and read the actual geological and palaeontological literature. It is in these pages that evolution lives or dies as a theory, not in the pages of a book written by someone who has never examined the data. As Saint Augustine put it:

Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,… and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.¹

It was true when Augustine said it, it is true sixteen centuries later.

¹ St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)



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Looking in the Wrong Place?

Research out of the University of Copenhagen suggests that we have been looking in the wrong place for a source of oxygen that had to have been present for life to evolve on earth at the end of the Proterozoic eon. The story, in ThaiIndian states:

By analysing the isotopes of chromium in iron-rich sediments formed in the ancient oceans, a scientific team, led by Professor Robert Frei at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has found that a rise in atmospheric oxygen levels 580 million years ago was closely followed by the evolution of animal life.

The data offers new insight into how animal life - and ultimately humans - first came to roam the planet.

“Because animals evolved in the sea, most previous research has focussed on oceanic oxygen levels,” explained Newcastle University’s Dr Simon Poulton, one of the authors of the research paper.

“Our research confirms for the first time that a rise in atmospheric oxygen was the driving force for oxygenation of the oceans 580 million years ago, and that this was the catalyst for the evolution of large complex animals,” he added.

Distinctive chromium isotope signals occur when continental rocks are altered and weathered as a result of oxygen levels rising in the atmosphere.

According to the research, oxygen levels began to rise around 2.8 Gya but dropped again and did not experience its second rise until around 580 Mya. This would put it after the the most recent (Kaigas) of the "snowball earth" periods (assuming that is a viable theory).

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Off-Topic

There are new images from the revamped Hubble Telescope that are breath-taking. What a universe!

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Darwin's Dilemma

And as if on cue...I get a circular from the Discovery Institute advertising a new film called Darwin's Dilemma, which has this as part of its tag line:

This major documentary, the third in Illustra’s internationally-acclaimed intelligent design series, probes one of the great mysteries of science, the Cambrian explosion, when in a moment of geological time complex animals first appeared on earth fully formed, without evidence of any evolutionary ancestors.

No,

they

didn't.

As one of my readers commented on a similar post: "My default in the 'malice/ignorance' question with respect to creationists used to be ignorance. Over the last 10 years it has shifted to malice." It is difficult not to think that, given that they do not seem to care whether or not the information that they disseminate is correct, as long as it fits the narrative. As Donald Prothero writes:

The problem with the creationists' fascination with the Cambrian explosion is that its all wrong! The major groups of invertebrate fossils do not all appear suddenly at the base of the Cambrian but are spaced out over strata spanning 80 million years—hardly an instantaneous "explosion"! Some groups appear tens of millions of years earlier than others. And preceding the "Cambrian Explosion" was a long slow buildup to the first appearance of typical Cambrian shelled invertebrates."¹

I can't wait to watch the film.

¹Prothero, D. (2007) Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. Columbia University Press. p. 161

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Simon Barnes Goes on a Tear

Simon Barnes of the TimesOnline is peeved at both the fundamentalists and at Richard Dawkins. In a post titled Caw, is that black thing a bird or a pterodactyl? he laments that the use of science by both sides is causing more problems than solutions:

He [Dawkins] says that evolution is a fact. Fine. He also holds up the non-existence of God as a fact, but that can never be the case. If you believe in an ineffable God who started the whole business of evolution, that’s your business. It can’t be proved or disproved — and therefore, it’s beyond the scientist’s scope. You can’t prove you have a soul; you can’t disprove it either. You can believe that life continues after death, and all that anyone can say is good old you, I wish I did.

Dawkins is right to point out that biblical literalism is wrong. Religion has no more business interfering with fact than science has in messing about with belief. It is not religion’s place to tell us that God created light and then a couple of days later He created the Sun as an after-thought, and if you don’t believe that you will go to Hell.

And it is not the place of science to tell us that Christ did not die for our sins. Science deals in fact; religion deals with belief and faith. Throughout history, when science has revealed facts that contradict religious belief, belief has shifted its ground. These days, nothing remains but faith — but faith is unshakable, at least by science.

Amen!

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The ESE Gains More Momentum

The Evangelical Statement on Evolution, which is being spear-headed by Steve Martin is gaining steam. He has put an update on his site: An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution.


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New Pterosaur Print Discovered

A very large footprint of a pterosaur has been discovered in Korea. According to Discoveryon:

The footprint was discovered in geological stratum dating back 100 million years and is 35.4 centimeters in length and 17.3 centimeters wide.

There is a trace of three asymmetrical spurs, the typical appearance of a pterosaur.

Before the discovery, the largest pterosaur footprint was that of the Haenamichnus, which was found in the southwestern city of Haenam, South Jeolla Province.

For you Troy folks out there, that is more than a foot long by about half a foot wide. Neat.


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Modern Human Evolution

Daily Galaxy has an article on how human evolution has proceeded in the recent past and how it might continue into the future.

A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone -dating back to the Stone Age - has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

"In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations," says Hawks. "And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time."

While the correlation between population size and natural selection is nothing new - it was a core premise of Charles Darwin, Hawks says - the ability to bring quantifiable evidence to the table is a new and exciting outgrowth of the Human Genome Project.

This is the convergence of population genetics, comparative anatomy and palaeontology to explain how humans have evolved. About natural selection, he writes:

Another recently discovered gene, CCR5, originated about 4,000 years ago and now exists in about 10 percent of the European population. It was discovered recently because it makes people resistant to HIV/AIDS. But its original value might have come from obstructing the pathway for smallpox.

"There are many things under selection that are making it harder for pathogens to kill us," Hawks says.

Population growth is making all of this change occur much faster, Hawks says, giving a tribute to Charles Darwin. When Darwin wrote in "Origin of the Species" about challenges in animal breeding, he always emphasized that herd size "is of the highest importance for success" because large populations have more genetic variation, Hawks says.

This is contrary to popular wisdom that shows that evolution proceeds faster in smaller populations because traits are expressed more often. Typically, larger populations slow evolution down because they are much closer to Hardy-Weinberg equlibrium. I also wonder about the statement that human evolution is proceeding faster now than at any time in the past. I do not think we have the resolution to determine that, even genetically. The human "bush" has gone through some remarkable changes even in the last 200 thousand years, with the successive appearance of archaic Homo sapiens and modern Homo sapiens, with regional characteristics present in many populations. It is doubtful that any of these changes would have happened had the population been as global as it now is.


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More Nonsense From the Discovery Institute

For some people and some organizations, it doesn't matter how often you correct their misunderstandings, they go right on believing in them. A new post from (lawyer) Casey Luskin on the Burgess Shale is just this kind of piece. He writes:

These fossils revealed a mystery: like other Cambrian fauna, these strange soft-bodied fossils appeared in the fossil record abruptly, without evolutionary precursors.

Darwin himself was aware of this problem in his own day, writing that the lack of fossil evidence for the evolution of Cambrian trilobites "must at present remain inexplicable; and may be truely urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained." Nearly 150 years after Darwin penned those words, biology textbooks are still observing things like, "Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear, 'fully formed,' in the Cambrian." Indeed, the striking appearance of animals in the Cambrian explosion is captured in a recent article in Nature article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Wolcott's discovery, stating that "virtually all animal groups alive today were present in Cambrian seas."

How is this remotely a problem? What does Luskin think that Collins means when he says "groups?" In the previous sentence Collins refers to chordates as a group. That's some group! The phylum Chordata consists of all animals that have either a true vertebral column or a notochord. In the Cambrian you see the first few examples of chordates. Today, chordates number over 44 000 species and consist of cephalochords, urochords and vertebrates, none of which had diversified by this point. Within the vertebrates alone are Reptilia, Mammalia, the sub-class Aves (recall that Aves has been subsumed within Reptilia because of the shared ancestry of birds with dinosaurs, crocodiles and alligators) and a host of other classes. Absolutely none of the animals that make up the later fossil record show up in the Cambrian. Animals like bears and whales date to the last fifty million years.

The Cambrian "explosion" took place over the course of some 60-70 million years and included the appearance of the first hard-shelled organisms. Before the Cambrian, all the way back to the Archean, there is evidence of animal tracks. Luskin and other creationists continue to peddle this nonsense about how life in all of its grandeur simply appeared out of thin air in the Cambrian. I am no longer sure whether is it because they are ignorant or mendacious.

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