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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