William Reville on Religion and Science

The Irish Times has a good post by William Reville on the nature of science and what science does to answer questions. In it, he tackles a section that is persistently misinterpreted and misunderstood by modern-day creationism: historical science. After discussing what is understood to be popular science involving experimentation and replication, He writes:

However, not all aspects of the natural world are amenable to investigation by the form of the scientific method just described. For example, phenomena and processes that have developed over historical time, such as the origin and evolution of life or the origin and evolution of the universe, must be investigated in a different manner. Here you must use numerous lines of enquiry, and conclusions can only be drawn after these converge to produce an unmistakeable conclusion. Thus, the theory of evolution through natural selection rests on the converging evidence of the history of life on earth gleaned from palaeontology, geology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, biogeography, molecular genetics, physiology, and so on.

This is what many creationists fail to understand—it is not just the fossil record or just genetics or just anything that supports evolution. It is the whole kit 'n kaboodle. He also rightly questions whether or not the existence of God could ever be shown by using science. This is something I have argued for years. Read the whole thing.

European Hand Axes Almost a Million Years Old

New dating has revealed that hand axes from two sites in Spain are close to a million years old. Yahoo UK reports:

Gary Scott and Luis Gibert of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in Berkeley, California applied a technique called magnetostratigraphy to determine that the hatchets were in fact crafted between 760,000 and 900,000 years ago.

Magnetostratigraphy is based on the periodic reversal of Earth's magnetic field.

Acting like tiny compasses, fine-grained magnetic minerals in the tools contain a record of the polarity at the time they were used. Once buried in sediment, the polarity is preserved.

"The age (of the axes) must be Early Pleistocene, the most recent period dominated by reverse polarity, 1.78-to-0.78 million years ago," the researchers concluded.

Magnetostratigraphy is also known as palaeomagnetism. It was always suspected that the hand axe use was there, it is just that there has been no concrete evidence. This changes that. There is a tool assemblage called the "Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition," that is practiced by Neandertals in southern Europe and Gibraltar but it is more advanced than the typical hand axes you find associated with Homo erectus. The transition likely took place much after this, in southern Europe.

More on the Treasure that is Angola

Louise Redvers of BBC News has a follow-up report on the new palaeontology work being done in Angola. It is promising:

Louis Jacobs is part of the "PaleoAngola" project whose biggest find to date was in 2005, when five bones from the front-left leg of a sauropod dinosaur were discovered on a cliff at Iembe, around 65 km (40 miles) north of the capital, Luanda.

Since then, the majority of the skulls and skeletons uncovered by the team have been from turtles, sharks, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, of which there is even an angolasauras species.

According to the report, this is just the beginning.

"Stupid Things Christians Say."

Michael Riley of MyCentralJersey.com has some amusing thoughts on the kinds of things that Christians say. Along the way, he hits of my favorite subject:

"I don't believe in evolution." How about gravity? Is gravity workin' out for you? Evolution isn't a matter of belief; it's a scientific fact, an accurate description of the way the world works. And proponents of Intelligent Design (and its ugly, red-headed stepchild, Creationism) forget that religion and science work different sides of the street and reveal different kinds of truth. Muddying the differences always leads to bad theology and scientific illiteracy.

Right on both accounts!

Light-Colored Skin a Recent Trait

The Times Online is reporting research that strongly suggests that light-colored skin, characteristic of northern Europeans, is a recent genetic trait. Jonathan Leake writes:

Johan Moan, of the Institute of Physics at the University of Oslo, said in a research paper: “In England, from 5,500-5,200 years ago the food changed rapidly away from fish as an important food source. This led to a rapid development of ... light skin.”

Moan, who worked with Richard Setlow, a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state, said vitamin D deficiency could be lethal. Research links it with heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and reduced immunity.

Their research says: “Cold climates and high latitudes would speed up the need for skin lightening. Agricultural food was an insufficient source of vitamin D, and solar radiation was too low to produce enough vitamin D in dark skin.”

Conventional wisdom is that the recent light pigments appeared in the last 20 to 30 ky, so this moves the evolution of light pigmentation up considerably.

Marching Bands and De-evolution

This could only happen in the United States. Sedalia, Missouri is on the map, in a way that probably nobody foresaw or wished. A Marching Band has been asked not to use their band shirts because they portray an evolutionary message. As Tonya Fennell of the Sedalia Democrat writes:

The shirts, which were designed to promote the band’s fall program, are light gray and feature an image of a monkey progressing through stages and eventually emerging as a man. Each figure holds a brass instrument. Several instruments decorate the background and the words “Smith-Cotton High School Tiger Pride Marching Band” and “Brass Evolutions 2009” are emblazoned above and below the image.

Assistant Band Director Brian Kloppenburg said the shirts were designed by him, Band Director Jordan Summers and Main Street Logo. Kloppenburg said the shirts were intended to portray how brass instruments have evolved in music from the 1960s to modern day. Summers said they chose the evolution of man because it was “recognizable.” The playlist of songs the band is slated to perform revolve around the theme “Brass Evolutions.”

In other words, it was a perfectly harmless idea that was blown way out of proportion. The story continues:

While the shirts don’t directly violate the district’s dress code, Assistant Superintendent Brad Pollitt said complaints by parents made him take action.

“I made the decision to have the band members turn the shirts in after several concerned parents brought the shirts to my attention,” Pollitt said.

Pollitt said the district is required by law to remain neutral where religion is concerned.

“If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” he said.

How bad is the science education in this country that a school superintendent thinks that portraying evolution is a "religious" issue? The comments below the story are amazingly caustic. Pharyngula has a poll on whether or not the shirts should have been pulled, as well as a picture of what the uniform looked like. The story is, as one commenter wrote, making the rounds on the science blogs.

'Creationist Zoo' Being Criticized

Chris Dade of the Digital Journal reports that the 'creationist zoo', owned and operated by husband and wife team Anthony and Christina Bush, is being targeted by secular humanists:

Promoted as a place to visit by tourist organizations such as South West England and Visit Britain the zoo, which the Daily Mail reports attracts 120,000 visitors a year, has until now seemingly steered clear of any great controversy, although it has not escaped criticism altogether. The British Centre for Science Education has been one of its critics. But now the BHA [British Humanist Association] has contacted a number of tourist organizations, South West England and Visit Britain amongst them, to request that they stop promoting Noah's Ark on the basis that the zoo is "misleading" its visitors and "threatening public understanding". It further accuses the zoo's owners of trying to discredit scientific methods and facts that include carbon dating, the fossil record and the speed of light.

Well, yes, that is what it is, indeed, doing, just like AIG and the ICR here in the United States. The problem that I have is that this campaign sounds suspiciously like censorship. If you don't like what an organization is doing, come out with your own flyers and pamphlets and contact the tourist agencies to get them to promote your organizations. Demanding that other groups be shut out because they don't support your position strikes me as rather undemocratic. If their position isn't well supported, show why it isn't. It reminds me of the abortion debate. Whatever side of the controversy you are on, it should not be a question that is decided by the courts. It should be decided by the people.

More on the Planet That Can't Exist

John Johonson Jr. over at the LA Times has a story on the new exoplanet orbiting WASP-18 that explicates a bit more on why the planet is so dang weird:

The problem is that a planet that close should be consumed by its parent star in less than a million years, say the authors at Keele University in Britain. The star Wasp-18 is believed to be about a billion years old, and because stars and the planets around them are thought to form at the same time, Wasp-18b should have been reduced to cinders ages ago.

"This planet should spiral inwards on such a short time scale that the likelihood of seeing it is very low," said Coel Hellier, an astrophysicist at Keele.

"That's a paradox," said Douglas P. Hamilton, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who wrote a commentary accompanying the report. He said there were a variety of possible explanations, none of them very satisfactory.

"It's like going to the scene of the crime and not finding the weapon," he said. "Something's happened, but a key piece of evidence is missing."

Curiouser and Curiouser. I love science in action.

Casey Luskin Wants You To Learn About Evolution

Dakota Voice has a story on Casey Luskin in which he implores students to learn about evolution:

As students step foot on campus for another school year, an intelligent design proponent has offered a few tips for the millions who will face the teaching of evolution in their science classrooms.

Tip number one, “never opt out of learning evolution,” says Casey Luskin, co-founder of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center, according to the Discovery Institute.

“In fact, learn about evolution every chance you get.”

Having attended public schools from kindergarten through his master’s degree at the University of California, San Diego, Luskin was taught a “biased and one-sided origins” curriculum – basically, the neo-Darwinian theory.

Chances are that he was taught that because there are no competing theories. Try as I might, I cannot think of a competing scientific theory to evolution. There is, of course, Intelligent Design but it isn't science as it has no testable hypotheses. Even Paul Nelson has admitted that there is no theoretical base behind ID. There is always progressive creation, but, once again, there is no way to test that except to show that organisms have changed over time in some way. Given the nature of the fossil record (especially in equines and hominids), choosing progressive creation is a step in faith because there is a known mechanism that exists to explain the changes in the fossil record, namely biologicalk evolution. I am waiting to see what alternative theories he comes up with. As Kenneth Miller says about alternative "theories":

“It is possible to come up with any number of possible explanations for anything—lost socks could be caused by extradimensional vortices which our observations prevent from forming; hiccups could be caused by evil spirits inside us trying to escape; stock market fluctuations could be caused by the secret manipulations of powerful extraterrestrials.Scientists reject such claims on the grounds of parsimony. All of those claims are possible, but they require adding complicated entities which there is no adequate evidence for.To make matters worse, the nature of those entities effectively prevents investigation of them, and the impossibility of investigation prevents us from learning anything new about them.We cannot conclude that any of those explanations are wrong. But from a scientific standpoint, they were worse than wrong; they are useless.”¹

See the post on exaptation for an example of this. What Luskin is advocating isn't bad science. It isn't science at all. If there were legitimate alternative theories to evolution, it would be different, but there aren't. Wishing there were doesn't change things.

¹Miller, Kenneth. (2008) Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul. Viking Adult. p. 11

Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity and Exaptation

Wired Magazine has an article on science that puts another nail in the coffin of irreducible complexity. The article, by Brandon Keim has this to offer:

Mitochondria are descended from free-living bacteria, which several billion years ago were swallowed by complex cells. The mitochondria soon became central to the cells’ function.

Mitochondria couldn’t have lasted in their new home without the help of a protein machine called TIM23, which delivers other proteins harvested from the cell’s body. Bacteria don’t possess TIM23, suggesting that it evolved in mitochondria. This seems to pose a cellular chicken-and-egg question: How could protein transport evolve when it was necessary to survive in the first place?

The essential paradox applies to other protein-transporting cell systems, providing disbelievers of evolution with a key part of their critique. As articulated by intelligent design proponent Michael Behe, “This constant, regulated traffic flow in the cell comprises another remarkably complex, irreducible system. All parts must function or the system breaks down.”

According to evolutionary theory, however, cellular complexity is reducible. It requires only that existing components be repurposed, with inevitable mutations providing extra ingredients as needed. Flagella, the hairlike propellers used by bacteria to move, are one example of this. Their component parts are found throughout cells, performing other tasks.

Intelligent design mavens once cited flagella as evidence of their theory. Scientific fact dispelled that illusion. The mitochondria study does the same for protein transport.

Kenneth Miller once upon a time said "Never bet against science. You will lose." So, how did the researchers figure it out?

When they analyzed the genomes of proteobacteria, the family that spawned the ancestors of mitochondria, Lithgow’s team found two of the protein parts used in mitochondria to make TIM23.

The parts are located on bacterial cell membranes, making them ideally positioned for TIM23’s eventual protein-delivering role. Only one other part, a molecule called LivH, would make a rudimentary protein-transporting machine — and LivH is commonly found in proteobacteria.

The process by which parts accumulate until they’re ready to snap together is called preadaptation[or cooption or exaptation].It’s a form of “neutral evolution,” in which the buildup of the parts provides no immediate advantage or disadvantage. Neutral evolution falls outside the descriptions of Charles Darwin. But once the pieces gather, mutation and natural selection can take care of the rest, ultimately resulting in the now-complex form of TIM23.

There are many other examples of exaptation (Google Scholar showed over 6 thousand papers on the subject). This is another example of how crippling Intelligent Design is as a scientific construct. ID purveyors were content to say that the protein transport was "designed" in place. Real scientists, by continuing to do research, found out otherwise.

Tanzania to Preserve Famous Laetoli Australopithecus Tracks

In 1973, at the site of Laetoli, in Tanzania, the tracks of two hominids, who walked next to a smoldering volcano, were exposed, giving researchers an incredible window into the gait of some of our earliest ancestors. Dated to around 3.6 million years ago, the tracks were reburied to preserve them. According to a new report in AllAfrica:

Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism, Ezekiel Maige stated in Arusha last week that the government has first to satisfy itself that once exposed the historical hominid prints will remain protected because the reason why they had to be covered in the first place was to shield them from environmental hazards.

"In about a year or two we will remove the protective layers and reveal the hominid foot prints, starting with a few then proceed gradually to expose them all. However, experts want a special sheltering structure built around them otherwise they will disappear once uncovered," he said.

Having a seventy-foot structure to protect the site would be ideal. It was truly an historic find.

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The Scopes Trial of the 21st Century

The Lost Angeles Times is reporting that the U.S. Chamber of Congress is attempting to have a trial involving the evidence for global warming. The story, by Jim Tankersley, notes:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.

Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

"It would be evolution versus creationism," said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. "It would be the science of climate change on trial."

Here's the problem I have with this comparison. If you look closely at the Dissent from Darwinism list that Discovery Institute trumpets, it becomes clear that the people that dissent from "Darwinism" don't really know what "Darwinism" is. They are mostly psychiatrists, psychologists, engineers, materials scientists, a smattering of molecular biologists and whatnot. There is one palaeontologist on the list and he hasn't published in decades. So, in other words, almost the entire list is populated by signatories who aren't qualified to sign their names.

However, if you look at a comparable list of scientists who have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, you find that many of them are atmospheric scientists, climatologists or palaeoclimatologists—individuals that have a much better understanding of climate change than the average scientist. To be sure, there are probably people on that list (the site is poorly designed) who do not have the necessary credentials to convincingly sign their names.

Let me be clear: I have taken no position on climate change. I do not know enough of the science, nor am I qualified to evaluate it intelligently. I am not objecting to the data, I am objecting to the analogy. When one debates special creation/evolution, there is clearly no evidence for the YEC model. However, if there are over nine thousand Ph.D.-holding scientists who work in atmospheric/climatology fields that don't agree with the anthropogenic global warming position, the analogy doesn't hold. Maybe the earth is warming and maybe it isn't. Maybe that warming has anthropogenic causes and maybe it doesn't. There have certainly been times in the earth's past when it was much warmer than it is now (Jurassic, Triassic) and times when it was much colder (Marinoan), but the continents were arranged differently and there were no people around.

My point is that this is not the Scopes trial of the 21st century because there is nowhere near the concensus that the earth is being ruined by people as there is that evolution has occurred.

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A Little Off-Topic But Way Cool

A planet that falls in the class known as "hot Jupiters" has been discovered orbiting a star 1000 light years away. It is being described as "The Planet That Shouldn't Exist." According to the story in PhysOrg:

The 'huge new planet', found orbiting a star 1000 light years away, was discovered by the UK's WASP project, of which St Andrews is a founding member.

Newly-christened WASP-18b, the planet is so massive and so close to its host star that it is almost certain to spiral inwards to its destruction during the lifetime of the star.

Researchers from St Andrews are currently calculating the rate at which tidal interactions between star and planet will eventually cause the planet's orbit to decay completely.

St Andrews' physicist, Professor Andrew Collier Cameron said, "This is another bizarre WASP planet discovery. The situation is analogous to the way tidal friction is gradually causing the earth's spin to slow down, and the Moon to spiral away from the earth.

"In this case, however, the spin of the star is slower than the orbit of the planet - so the star should be spinning up, and the planet spiralling in."

The planet is reported to be ten times the size of Jupiter. Way cool. Hat tip to Bill Myers.

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90-million-year-old Crocodile Bones in Manitoba

The Canadian Press reports on the find of 90 million year old crocodile bones on a river bank in Manitoba. According to the story:

A lawyer who moonlights as a part-time paleontologist recently discovered the remains of a 90-million-year-old crocodile while scouring the bank of the Wilson River in Manitoba.

Chris Tait saw a rib bone sticking out of the riverbank and then dug down about two metres to unveil the extent of his discovery. He found the legs, backbone and scales of the six-metre crocodile.

"It would have been an upper-level predator, toward the top of the food chain," Tait said. "It would have been one of the bigger animals around. It might have been attacking other large reptiles that were in the sea."

A curious question: how was it dated? Surely not on morphological grounds alone. Günter Bräuer found a hominid skull eroding out of a river bank on the shores of Lake Turkana in the early 1980s and dated it by its morphology alone. He got eaten alive by that.

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Forward Into the Past!

The idea that birds descended from dinosaurs is now commonplace in the field of palaeontology and has led to the reclassification of birds as reptiles because they are thought to share common ancestry with dinosaurs, alligators and crocodiles. Consequently, as Ken Meaney of Canwest writes:

Hans Larsson of McGill University is working to produce chicken embryos with features the dinosaur descendants share with their gigantic ancestors of millions of years ago --a longer tail, teeth and clawed fingers, for instance.

The goal is to understand and illustrate evolutionary mechanisms in birds--and by extension dinosaurs, humans and all other animal life on the planet.

Two things come to mind: if he succeeds, it will be powerful evidence backing up the bird-dinosaur transition. Two: we will have some more aggressive chickens running around.Once again, it appears that hox genes are at the root of this research:

What Larsson is doing is looking for what he calls "switchpoints" in the chicken embryo's development --periods when teeth or claws, for instance, appear and then fade away as it grows.

By manipulating the chicken's development at those points, he figures to give it characteristics of its long-dead relatives.

On a genetic level, the differences between humans and other animals are small--switchpoints are what make humans human and not a fish or a fruit fly.

The amount of information that is coming out of research like this is amazing and is a stunning validation of evolutionary theory. On the other hand, if the chicken turns into a spider (think very very very bad Star Trek Next Generation episode), we have some work to do.

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Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk: A Plea For the Middle Ground

Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk state that "We Believe in Evolution—and God." One might quibble with the title of the piece; one doesn't "believe" in evolution, and, in my opinion, God and evolution should be reversed, but the sentiment is correct. They write:

We are scientists, grateful for the freedom to earn Ph.D.s and become members of the scientific community. And we are religious believers, grateful for the freedom to celebrate our religion, without censorship. Like most scientists who believe in God, we find no contradiction between the scientific understanding of the world, and the belief that God created that world. And that includes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Of course, evolution has progressed well beyond Charles Darwin and there is a certain connotation to the term "Darwinism," that needs to be heeded. Nonetheless, there is a growing group of scientists who are coming forward, as these two have, and professing their faith. They continue:

Almost everyone in the scientific community, including its many religious believers, now accepts that life has evolved over the past 4 billion years. The concept unifies the entire science of biology. Evolution is as well-established within biology as heliocentricity is established within astronomy. So you would think that everyone would accept it. Alas, a 2008 Gallup Poll showed that 44% of Americans reject evolution, believing instead that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

Such is the state of science education in this country. Many have been taught in church that they cannot accept evolution or they will have to abandon their Christianity. Groups like Answers in Genesis rely on this and on the general lack of science education in the country to marshall support for their causes. How good is this science?:

The "science" undergirding this "young earth creationism" comes from a narrow, literalistic and relatively recent interpretation of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. This "science" is on display in the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where friendly dinosaurs — one with a saddle! — cavort with humans in the Garden of Eden. Every week these ideas spread from pulpits and Sunday School classrooms across America. On weekdays, creationism is taught in fundamentalist Christian high schools and colleges. Science faculty at schools such as Bryan College in Tennessee and Liberty University in Virginia work on "models" to shoehorn the 15 billion year history of the universe into the past 10,000 years.

Davis Young has written a great piece on the demise of "flood geology" in the 1800s. As amazing as it is, this idea gained a resurgence culminating in the 1920s with the publishing of George McCready Price's The new geology: a textbook for colleges, normal schools, and training schools; and for the general reader, which was soundly ridiculed by the geological community. Sadly, its ideas were rehashed by Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb for their book The Genesis Flood, a book that served as a model for generations of creationists to come. As the authors put it, this is not how it has been historically been:

Many biblical scholars across the centuries have not seen it that way, concluding instead that the biblical creation story is a rich and complex text with many interpretations. Putting modern scientific ideas into this ancient story distorts the meaning of the text, which is clearly about God's faithful and caring relation to the world, not the details of how that world came to be.

How has the most myopic view of scripture come to become the dominant one in the United States? How has it gained ascendancy in the private schools, the legislatures and homeschool organizations? This is especially perplexing since the vast majority of scientists who were believers in the late 1800s had rejected this view of cosmology.

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Josh Rosenau Calls Casey Luskin on the Carpet

Josh Rosenau of Thoughts from Kansas notes that Casey Luskin's recent apology for misreading Kenneth Miller comes off a bit lacking in factual integrity. Luskin wrote:

In a recent post, I noted that Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Behe’s arguments on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade in his book, Only a Theory. When I blogged at the end of last year about Miller’s similar mistakes at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Dr. Miller responded by making me aware of something I did not previously know: apparently Michael Behe wrote the section in Of Pandas and People on blood clotting.

Rosenau responds:

Under normal circumstances, it would suffice to congratulate Casey for finally acknowledging his ignorance, but alas, we must not pause to revel in that minor miracle. Like so many miraculous claims, it vanishes under investigation.

First of all, it is implausible that Casey wouldn't have been aware of Behe's involvement in Pandas. Casey, after all, has been involved with Behe, Pandas, and the broader ID movement for long enough that ignorance of any widely known fact in any of those three areas is a dubious claim.

Indeed, Casey was at the Dover trial when Behe discussed his involvement in writing parts of Pandas. He even used that involvement to browbeat reporters during the trial itself, writing:

"Behe was a contributor to Pandas, it was on the blood clotting cascade section (found in Chapter 6, "Biochemical Similarities")…"

I would like to think that Mr. Luskin forgot this little bit of information. We all forget things. Luskin's account of the differences between Behe's early work with Of Pandas and People and what showed up in Darwin's Black Box goes like this:

I contacted Behe about the differences between the two works, and he informed me that the differences between the treatment of blood clotting in Pandas (1993) and Darwin’s Black Box (1996) were the result of his refining, tightening, improving, and revising his arguments before publishing Darwin's Black Box. There's nothing wrong with Behe updating and improving his arguments.

That is fair enough. The rest of Luskin's post is an attack on the "random, undirected processes of mutation and natural selection" language that shows up in several places in Miller and Levine's textbook on biology. I do not have a copy of this book so I have no reason to doubt Luskin on this. There may be more than enough fuzzy memories to go around on this one.

Angola Opens Up

There is a report that, now that the civil war has ended in Angola, palaeontological research is finally paying off there. Louise Redvers of Google News writes:

"Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology," explained Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils.

"Due to the war, there's been little research carried out so far, but now we're getting in finally and there's so much to find.

"In some areas there are literally fossils sticking out of the rocks. It's like a museum in the ground."

The first reports of dinosaur remains in Angola were made in the 1960s, but a bloody liberation struggle against the Portuguese followed by three decades of civil war covered the country in landmines and made it a no-go zone for researchers.

Following the 2002 peace deal, however, the land is quite literally opening up to fossil hunters who are piecing together the country's Jurassic past.

The biggest find to date was made in 2005 when Octavio Mateus from the New Lisbon University, also part of the PaleoAngola project, retrieved five bones from the front left leg of a sauropod dinosaur on the coast at Iembe.

To paraphrase Glen Reynolds, "Dig faster!"

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A Brief History of the Discovery Institute

I missed this one a few years back. In 2006, Roger Downey wrote a column for the Seattle News about the history of the Discovery Institute (or "Disco. 'Tute", as Josh Rosenau has been given to calling it). The article was written a short time after the Dover-Kitzmiller trial that saw all of the gains that the intelligent design washed away. According to the story, the public attention to the Discovery Institute began with the discovery of the "Wedge Strategy" and a part-time employee by the name of Matt Duss:

Curious, Duss rifled through the 10 or so pages, eyebrows rising ever higher, then proceeded to execute his commission while reserving a copy of the treatise for himself. Within a week, he had shared his find with a friend who shared his interest in questions of evolution, ideology, and the propagation of ideas. Unlike Duss, the friend, Tim Rhodes, was technically savvy, and it took him little time to scan the document and post it to the World Wide Web, where it first appeared on Feb. 5, 1999.

The unnamed author of the document wasted no time getting down to his subject. "The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Yet little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science." Such thinkers as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and, above all, Charles Darwin promulgated a "materialistic conception of reality" that "eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and music."

This has always been one of the Achilles heels of the DI in its quest to divest intelligent design from its religious roots. It was clearly obvious from the start that the DI's Center for Science and Culture had, as one of its main goals to remake society and science in a theistic manner. ID was simply a means to that end. As the movement gained momentum (and attention), it became clear that there were a great many people that did not share their vision. Consequently, they began to change tactics:

Indeed, as more and more school boards seriously took up consideration of intelligent-design programs, the Discovery Institute became concerned that some of the people they were trying to influence might grow so enthusiastic as to push the newly moderate ideological envelope. They professed no knowledge of the origins of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture's founding Wedge document. They also dropped the loaded word "renewal" from the name and ceased demanding that intelligent design replace Darwinism in the high-school curriculum, or that it even be actively taught there. All that was asked now was that students be apprised that there was a controversy.

Then came Dover. Although several of the Discovery Institute's fellows, Michael Behe and Scott Minnich, agreed to testify, William Dembski pulled out of the trial. It has been suggested that he did so because of the withering pre-trial testimony of Jeffrey Shallit, who had originally been called to testify against Dembski's expertise. Shallit's expert rebuttal is here. It is, indeed, withering. As all reports have indicated, the trial was an unmitigated disaster for the purveyors of ID. One peculiar aspect of it, though, was that it was not clear who was using who. It is clear that the ID crowd was using Dover as a test. It is also clear that the local creationists were using the ID crowd to gain a degree of legitimacy. Eventually, the facade was discovered. As Judge jones put it:

In the realm of the lay witnesses, if you will, some of the school board witnesses were dreadful witnesses and hence the description “breathtaking inanity” and “mendacity.” In my view, they clearly lied under oath. They made a very poor account of themselves. They could not explain why they did what they did. They really didn't even know what intelligent design was. It was quite clear to me that they viewed intelligent design as a method to get creationism into the public school classroom. They were unfortunate and troublesome witnesses. Simply remarkable, in that sense.

Although the decision was rendered narrowly, no one actually thought that school boards across the country were not paying attention:

No one believes that Judge Jones' decision, even if it's replicated in courtrooms across the country, is going to stop the campaign against materialism and for a God-centered worldview. But it surely must be seen as a catastrophic defeat for the notion of intelligent design, and no single institution is so identified with it, and has more of its financial and intellectual resources tied up in it, than the Discovery Institute of Seattle. Maybe the group can regroup and make a comeback, but for now, the mighty wedge is irreparably blunted.

Since the writing of this document, the Discovery Institute has shifted its tactics once again and is now focused on "academic freedom" to the extent that it has drafted a document that is a blueprint for legislatures across the country sympathetic to the cause of ID to use. In its public relations, the DI has been increasingly vocal about its dislike for all things evolution and has come to resemble many young earth creationist organizations in the approach that it has taken, especially when arguing against the evidence for evolution. As I have written previously, this now should be considered in the realm of culpable ignorance, since the evidence has been presented and rejected for no good reasons.

The "academic freedom" legislation has fallen on rocky ground, however, with several bills falling short (Florida, New Mexico, Iowa, Missouri) and others passing with bad press, like that in Louisiana.

What will be their next move? It is hard to tell. One thing is for sure: they will not go ahead blindly like their YEC cousins, who have almost become a caricature of themselves, so academically isolated they have become. The ID crowd will certainly try a new avenue to get the message out.

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Appendix Not Vestigial?

Charles Darwin famously stated that the appendix, that irritating organ that, often, goes bad and has to be removed was a "remnant" of a past evolutionary life. Not so fast, say researchers at Duke, University of Arizona and Arizona State. As Australian Newsnet reports:

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks. Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ'," says Dr. William Parker, assistant professor of Surgical Sciences at Duke.

He revealed that his research team used a modern approach to evolutionary biology called cladistics, which utilizes genetic information in combination with a variety of other data to evaluate biological relationships that emerge over the ages, for their study.

He said that his study has shown that the appendix has evolved at least twice, once among Australian marsupials and another time among rats, lemmings and other rodents, selected primates and humans.

"We also figure that the appendix has been around for at least 80 million years, much longer than we would estimate if Darwin's ideas about the appendix were correct," he said.

Regarding Australasia, as Kenneth Miller has pointed out, the fact that the forms that show up so closely mimic those of placentals ought to suggest strongly that evolution does not proceed at random.