...creationism, intelligent design and the skeptic scene in America in a special live edition recorded at the QED Conference.You can subscribe to it either on RSS feed or through iTunes.
Found among the bones of around 28 people at a site called Sima de los Huesos – “pit of bones” – in northern Spain, the lumbar spine was reconstructed from fragments discovered by scientists from the Centro Mixto de Evolución Humana in Burgos.
The lumbar spine comes from the same man as a pelvis found in 1994. It is thought he was aged 45, and lived more than half a million years ago.
The way in which the bones developed and the way they changed due to wear and tear show he was likely to have suffered severe back pain.
Dr Gomez-Olivencia said: “It appears that we are looking at the spine of a man who had several different problems, including inversion of the curvature of the back, spondylolisthesis, and Baastrup disease – which are associated with pain today.”
Homo heidelbergensis were nomadic hunter gatherers, relying on animals such as red deer for food, and a damaged spine would have made hunting impossible.
This is not so unusual. With bipedalism comes all sorts of issues with the back. We put an incredible amount of strain on the lower vertebrae, which often causes herniation of the discs. As we get larger and heavier (read: fatter), these get exacerbated.
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Now playing: Rick Wakeman - Statue Of Justice
via FoxyTunes
just came in the mail. I am looking forward to reading it. My nine-year-old girl Madeline just peered at it and took in the title, then said “You've been
looking forward to this, haven't you?” We haven't had that conversation yet. Of course, my four-year-old is running around singing “I am a paleontologist!” by They Might Be Giants. One thing at a time.
As Ms. Lebo writes, Louisiana is the only state that passed one of these bills that was proposed but a whole mess of them were proposed in different states across the nation. Given what happened in Livingston Parrish a few months back, I hope he succeeds.I’ve long had a soft spot for young people standing up to religious bullying. So I want to give a shout out to Zack Kopplin, a Baton Rouge Magnet High School Senior. Kopplin is leading a campaign to repeal the stealth creationist law that is the 2008 Louisiana Science Eduction Act.
In December, Kopplin stood up to the Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian organization that had been trying to get creationist-language inserted into state public school textbooks. LFF members had argued that the proposed textbooks were biased in favor of evolution. (Reality is just so unfair!) Kopplin led a campaign to lobby the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to side with sound science. Due in large part to his efforts, board members, by an 8-2 vote, agreed to proceed with the purchase of biology textbooks.
MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE that according to the Bible, there has been a cosmic Fall as a result of the sin of the first humans, and death was a consequence of this supposed Fall. Many such approaches to scripture are lamentably lacking in theological sophistication. In certain respects, some of the approaches recommended by no doubt sincere religious believers are more consonant with atheism than with the orthodox Christian tradition of scriptural interpretation.As those of you that read this blog know, this is something that I have been struggling with for quite some time—the idea that modern protestant fundamentalist evangelical Christianity has really gone off the rails and is flirting with some very unsound doctrine. That frustration really came home to me a few weeks ago.
“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—”However, according to Cunningham, the original Greek reads:
“Death came to all insofar as all sinned”When we add the first part of the passage to the text, it takes on completely new meaning, firmly rooting Adam in a place and time. Without that preface, original sin takes on a more generally Eastern Orthodox flavor in which all are born with the capacity and inclination to sin but not actually “in sin” as protestant theology has generally come to understand the concept. Sin was separation from God, which leads to decay.
Not sure what the appeal will bring up that the case did not, but I will be curious to find out.John Freshwater has appealed last month's decision by the Mount Vernon school board to fire him for teaching creationism and religious doctrine in his middle-school science classroom.
The 33-page appeal, filed in Mount Vernon Common Pleas Court on Tuesday, argues that state laws and school procedures protecting Freshwater's rights were violated, a hearing referee's conclusions were flawed and the school's principal contributed to confusion and poor communication of school rules.
The team — headed up by the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg — had to call off work just 29 meters [95-foot] short of the end goal because the Antarctic winter is fast closing in. News that they plan to fill the 3,749-meter [12,300-foot] borehole with kerosene to prevent it from freezing will further trouble groups who fear continued research will contaminate the lake.Yup, God only knows what drilling into that would release.
Now, many will say that they are not anti-science per se, just against the science that clashes with their religious beliefs. So, antibiotics are fine, but the theory of evolution is not. If only they'd take the time to learn about how antibiotics work and about how over-prescribing can result in germ mutations that render some antibiotics ineffective. It's is a real-time illustration of the theory of evolution at work.It is one of so many examples of how evolution works in our lives. I just finished up a CFSI post that delves into the evidence from pseudogenes and ERVs that is dang near impossible to explain using an ID or YEC framework. If we live in a God-created universe that works on principles established by Him billions of years ago and that behaves in an orderly, knowable fashion, then what we know is that science is real.
Anne Gebhardt’s kids are learning about geography -- in her dining room in Bedford, Texas. It’s not your typical schoolhouse, but it’s one that Gebhardt says is serving her six children well. "We can teach our religious values to our children freely,” says Gebhardt. “We can teach anything that we want."Yes, we can teach that a flood once covered the entire earth, even though there is not a scrap of evidence for it. We can teach that the earth was created six thousand years ago, even though there is not a scrap of evidence for it. See, we can teach anything we want!
Once upon a time, there lived a stupid giant. The giant had not always been stupid.I am reminded of the great line in the movie Ladyhawke, where the evil cardinal, when told of the seemingly insignificant escape of a thief he had jailed, remarked: “Great storms announce themselves with a single breeze...”
Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say the giant had once revered intelligence, reason and the byproducts thereof.
Indeed, the giant was renowned for an ingenuity and standard of living that made it the envy of the world.
But much of the world did more than envy the giant.
Much of the world admired and respected it.
Its basic decency, along with its strength and intelligence, set it apart.
There came a time, however, when, though the giant retained its strength and arguably even its decency , it lost its intelligence.
No one can say exactly how and when the loss occurred.
There was no great blast of thunder and lightning to herald it, no sudden instant when the giant's intelligence plummeted dramatically from the instant before.
No, stupidity crept over the giant with the stealth of twilight, a product less of one abrupt moment than of a thousand moments of complacency , of resting on laurels, of allowing curiosity to be teased and bullied out of bright children, of dumbing down textbooks so kids could get better grades with less work, of using "elite" like a curse word.
And, of behaving as if knowing things, and being able to extrapolate from and otherwise make critical use of, the things one knows, was a betrayal of some fundamental human authenticity -some need to keep it real.
Stupidity stole over the giant until it could no longer tell science from faith, or conven tional wisdom from actual wisdom and in any event, valued ideological purity above them all.
Stupidity snaked over the giant until science teachers shrank from teaching sci ence, history books con tained history that wasn't history , late-night comics got easy laughs from people on the street who could not say when the War of 1812 was fought, political leaders told outright lies with blithe smiles and no fear of being caught, and you would not have been surprised to hear that someone had fixed mathematics, so that 2+2 could now equal 17, thus preserving the all-important self-esteem of secondgrade kids.
Some regarded the giant's stupidity as a danger.
They reasoned that when one is so big that one's merest movement or slightest utterance affects the entire world, it's a good idea if those movements and utterances are animated by something more than autonomic function.
Others saw the giant's stupidity as an opportunity .
They learned eagerly until they surpassed the giant's intellect.
They grew until they rivaled the giant's size and strength.
They did not attempt to match the giant's decency .
They considered decency a hindrance.
And the giant?
It sat on its haunches in the mud as the world changed about it and new giants rose and shook their fists.
The giant did not notice.
It was watching "The Jersey Shore" on MTV..
Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds of Instpundit, who writes:“Admit it, it sounds just like a thousand horror-movie setups.”
With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out on February 6. “It's minus 40 (Fahrenheit) outside,” said Turkeyev. “But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon.”
Scientists are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved [sic] in the times before the ice age. The lake could also offer scientists a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extremes on Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.
[Coppedge]... filed suit with the Los Angeles Superior in April of last year, claiming he was demoted at JPL for propagating his beliefs at work, citing protection under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.Here is the WaPo story on the NASA vs. Nelson ruling, which involved whether or not the federal government had the right to conduct background checks for prospective employees even if they were subcontractors. But Eugene Volokh writes:
A JPL spokeswoman said Coppedge's "suit is without merit."
But while the original lawsuit rested on claims of discrimination under California's Fair Employment and Housing Act, Coppedge's legal team is now considering a new tactics - including taking a page from the Supreme Court's Jan. 19 in NASA v. Nelson.
Two weeks ago the high court ruled against JPL employees who sought to terminate background checks at the facility. The employees claimed those checks violated their civil rights.
"David was terminated and the NASA v. Nelson decision came down
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... which changes the case in material ways," said Coppedge's attorney, Bill Becker.
Becker said he would seek to amend the complaint within the next two weeks to include a wrongful termination claim - adding that a First Amendment claim might also be on the table.
"The real question is who is making the decision - that was clear in (NASA v. Nelson), but not so clear here. Just because a research center is federally funded is not enough to make it a government actor," Volokh said of JPL, which is managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA.Read the whole thing.
The state is set to buy a tract of land next to the Gray Fossil site.Here is the website for the museum. My family and I visited the site a year or so ago and had a great time. They have a nice museum and active excavations of Miocene sediments on the grounds.The Johnson City Press reports the parcel in Gray contains just over 14 acres.
Site museum director Jeanne Zavada has been discussing the purchase since 2006 with the family who owns it.
Zavada says the Tennessee Board of Regents negotiated with the family, and the state will pay the appraised value of the property. It was recently appraised at $178,000.
The Regents are involved because East Tennessee State University operates the site where the current digs and the museum are located.
The fossil site now includes less than five acres.
Despite warnings from great thinkers such as Pascal, Newman and Barth4, the idea that an unbiased observer should be able to use science to find unambiguous evidence for God’s existence is remarkably resilient among Christians. Furthermore, many attempts at natural theology rely heavily on value-laden metaphors that come from popularizations of science. This cuts both ways. On the one hand Archdeacon Paley saw the hand of God in the intricate watch-like “contrivances of nature”, while on the other hand Richard Dawkins sees a pitiless and indifferent “blind watchmaker” in what he believes are the wasteful and purposeless processes of evolution. Although their conclusions couldn’t be more different, both are engaging in a natural theology based on similar rationalistic assumptions.He argues, as I have argued, that it is an improper use of science to construct an apologetic position for the existence of God. Ultimately, such an argument can only rise to the level of “personal incredulity” that such a finely tuned universe can be the product of chance. The point is that we can, from a scientific perspective, never know whether or not God exists. This position is deeply uncomfortable for your average Christian who, intuitively, want to be able to hang their hat on something tangible to bolster their faith in an invisible God. It is this perspective that has largely fueled the Intelligent Design movement which, because of the limitations of this model has run up against a brick wall called ‘lack of testable hypotheses.’
"Considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America's classrooms," write Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at Penn State, in today's (Jan. 28) issue of Science.I think that a lot of teachers are running scared because of the shift in political climate in the country and the increasing prevalence of “academic freedom” legislation that has been passed. It is easier to not make waves then to risk the ire of a parent that doesn't agree with the teaching of evolution. The principle problem is, however worse:
The researchers examined data from the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors. They found only about 28 percent of those teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred, and craft lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking disparate topics in biology.
[Authors] Berkman and Plutzer conclude that “the cautious 60 percent fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments.” As a result, “they may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists.”This allows students to graduate from high school without the necessary biological science understanding without being challenged until they get to college. As a result, the overall level of scientific knowledge of the discipline declines every year.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) just dumped a lot of fuel on the fire of David Coppedge's discrimination lawsuit by firing him on Monday. Coppedge's lawsuit against JPL alleges discrimination because he was prevented from talking about intelligent design (ID).This certainly makes it look bad for JPL and Caltech in terms of how they treated Coppedge for seemingly exercising his First Amendment rights. Luskin contines:This could potentially expose JPL to a claim of wrongful termination and increase the merits of Coppedge's claim that JPL retaliated against him. According to Coppedge's attorney William Becker, JPL claims the firing resulted from downsizing in the face of budget issues, but Coppedge is the most senior member of the team that oversees the computers on NASA and JPL's Cassini Mission to Saturn. Coppedge doesn't seem at all like the first person who would normally be forced to leave in such a situation, but obviously, JPL has other considerations.
Those other considerations began in 2009 when the administration found out that Coppedge had occasionally had friendly discussions about ID with fellow employees. Coppedge was not pushy in these conversations; if a colleague wasn't interested, Coppedge dropped the matter. Nonetheless, one administrator yelled at Coppedge and ordered him to stop "pushing religion," which led to Coppedge filing a claim of harassment.We will have to wait for more information from the trial, itself before more can be said. This may, in fact, be an incidence of discrimination. That would be sad, not just for David Coppedge, but for those of us who think that scientists ought to behave better.
Early human ancestors stopped swinging in trees and started walking on the ground sometime between 4.2 and 3.5 million years ago, according to a new study.This follows on the heels (sorry) of the recent studies on Ardipithecus, where it was found that this hominid had a skeletal pattern that was adapted not just for the trees but for bipedal walking as well. How long was this pattern maintained? Viegas continues:
This key moment, when our ancestors became anatomically and behaviorally less ape-like, coincides with increased cooling, more defined seasonality, and a grassland growth spurt. All transformed former forest habitats into more varied ones, forcing our very early relatives to change their ways.
"With the trees being farther apart, it became energetically advantageous for hominids to cross the gaps bipedally," said Gabriele Macho, lead author of the study that was published in the latest issue of Folia Primatologica.
The scientists observed that the Australopithecus anamensis wrist bones exhibited pressure loads associated with modern arboreal animals. The analyzed Australopithecus afarensis bones conversely showed stress loads comparable to those of more terrestrial species, including modern humans.A. anamensis is the form that followed, at least chronologically, Ardipithecus ramidus. Whether or not there is a direct ancestor/descendant relationship there, it is clear that the transitional elements in Ardipithecus were continued in the hominid line and that A. anamensis maintained a similar adaptation to the environment. The true changes in bipedalism and adaptation came with A. afarensis. This is yet another piece of the puzzle at this critical point in our history.
The researchers concluded that the important shift in early hominid lifestyle happened around the time when A. afarensis first emerged.
