Frame-Shift Mutation Linked to Sympatric Speciation in Early Homo?

According to (new?) research from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, a mutation creating a slightly different sugar molecule may have caused a reproductive barrier between those that had it and those that didn't in our human ancestors, possibly influencing the split between early Homo and australopithecines. Stephanie Pappas of Live Science writes:

The mutation tweaked one type of sugar molecule, Neu5Gc, produced by early hominids, the first great apes. About 2 million or 3 million years ago, just as human ancestors Homo ergaster and Homo erectus emerged in Africa, a genetic mutation halted the production of this molecule, and the prehuman immune system began to recognize it as a threat. As a result, researchers find, some hominids would no longer have been able to mate and produce offspring with other populations, potentially driving early humans apart from other apes."Over time, this incompatibility would reduce and the eliminate individuals with Neu5Gc," study researcher Pascal Gagneux of the University of California, San Diego, said in a statement.

If the date is closer to three million years, it would have considerable implications for the emergence of Homo. There are many theories about where early Homo came from and what led to the transition from Australopithecus to what became the earliest members of our line. This will shed some light on these ideas and, hopefully, spur more research in this area.

Interestingly, this research is not as new as the story makes it out to be. There was a paper written by A. Varki in 2001 that dealt directly with this data. It can be found here. Varki, however, did not make the connexion with immune suppression response but focused, rather, on how the mutation affected brain evolution.

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Kraken from Hell?

Science Daily has an unusual piece about some maybe evidence of a huge prehistoric beast that roamed the oceans.  The lede paragraph is quite something:

Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their remains in Nevada. Now he thinks there was an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on ichthyosaurs: a kraken of such mythological proportions it would have sent Captain Nemo running for dry land.

The peculiarities ensued when a graveyard of icthyosaurs was discovered arranged in a non-random order and with odd markings on them:

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs [ichthyosaurs] were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones. “Modern octopus will do this," McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”

‘What-if?’ stories are great fun and thought provoking but a great deal more evidence will have to be amassed before this can be verified/supported. Given the size of some of the creatures in the past (here, here and here) however, this is not so hard to believe.

CFSI To Cease Operations

Sadly the Center for Faith and Science International will be shutting its doors at the end of the year, a casualty of the rotten economy in which we find ourselves.  I will post twice more and then it will go silent.  Thanks to Rob Zimmer for all of his hard work in the project. 

New CFSI Post Up

My new post for the Center for Faith and Science International is up.  It deals, in considerably more civil fashion, with the Ken Ham/BioLogos issue that I wrote a little bit about in the pages here.  As always, comments are welcome.

T.M. Moore and Aliens

T.M. Moore has an excellent post on the subject of aliens and Christianity over at the Center for Faith and Science International.  Amongst the good points he makes are these:

Fourth, God sent His Word to earth for the redemption and reconciliation of the cosmos (Jn. 3.16; 2 Cor. 5.18-20). What Jesus accomplished in His incarnation, death, and resurrection has significance not simply for believers but for the whole world, and not just for the earth but for the entire cosmos and everything in it. A work of reconciliation has been realized which means that now every creature can recover its rightful place before God, even if we can never figure out precisely what that rightful place might be (Eccl. 3:1-11). Indeed, a day is coming when the whole cosmos will be burned up and a new heavens and new earth will be created where righteousness dwells.

Fifth, it has not pleased God for human beings to know everything in the same way that He does (Eccl. 3:11; Deut. 29:29). Through careful study of Scripture and the work of science we may continue to increase our knowledge of the cosmos, but there will always be limits beyond which we simply cannot know and should not try to go (ask Job). We will simply have to learn what we can as we go along, always bearing in mind that there will be mysteries, enigmas, and conundrums that we can’t quite figure out, and always being content for God to be God and us to be mere mortals.

Put simply, contra Ken Ham, there is no a priori reason to think that they will not need to be healed and saved just because they are not human.  They are God's creations and if they have been created with the intelligence to understand that, then they will be in need of salvation. 

Limb Development and Our “Inner Fish”

Science Daily has a story on research delineating the relationship between us and fish.  The work, which examined some cartilaginous fish, as well as the three surviving lungfish species, was led by Peter Currie of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University. The story notes:

"We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs," said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal's body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the cartilaginous fish, a mechanism that was a stepping stone to the evolution of tetrapod physiology. "Humans are just modified fish," said Professor Currie. "The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors."

The paper is in the online journal PLoS and can be found here.  Another piece of the puzzle.  So...is it worse that we share common ancestry with chimpanzees or with fish?

Mary Sue Asks “Did Jesus Save Alien Races, Too?”

Off-Topic: the Mary Sue, a site for “Geek Girl Culture” has an article about a convention that occurred recently called the 100 year Starship Convention, sponsored by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). One of the presenters was Christian Weidemann from the Ruhr-University Bochum who wondered aloud how religion would change if we discovered proof of life on other planets. Hilarity ensued. First Weidemann stated:

The death of Christ, some 2,000 years ago, was designed to save all creation. However, the whole of creation, as defined by scientists, includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy. That means that if intelligent life exists on other planets, then Jesus or God would have to have visited them too, and sacrificed himself equally for Martian-kind as well as mankind

It appears that the Vatican has already considered this. When questioned about extraterrestrial life, the Pope's astronomer conveyed the Vatican's position:

He would be “delighted” if intelligent life was found among the stars. “But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it – when you add them up it’s probably not a practical question.” Speaking ahead of a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham tomorrow, he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” Would he baptise an alien? “Only if they asked.”

Some were not nearly as taken with the idea. When asked, Ken Ham had this to say:

“The person from the Vatican that was quoted in the newspaper reports, if quoted correctly, can’t truly understand the gospel—in my opinion. The Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but they can’t have salvation. … While baptizing an alien might feel good, it would have no more spiritual consequence than baptizing a chicken or a fallen angel. Baptize an alien indeed!”

Once again, it is only Ken Ham that truly understands the gospel.  All other ideas have to be false.  If a sentient creature from another world were to accept Christ as its savior, that wouldn't be enough?  Narrow-mindedness and one-dimensionality, writ large.  It is now my fervent hope that we find life on other planets, just so Ham will have to eat his words. 

Yeti Hunters

The Daily Mail has a story on a group of Russian and American scientists who are on the track of a group of Siberian Yeti.  Will Stewart writes:

Its legend has long haunted the icy wastes of the Himalayas and Siberia. Yet for all the mysterious sightings and strange footprints in the snow, the Yeti has proved remarkably elusive to those seeking solid evidence of its existence. Now, however, the Abominable Snowman has an international team of scientists on its trail in a Russian region which one expert claims is home to around 30 of the creatures.

Out of the “international group of scientists” only one is mentioned by name, an Igor Burtsev, the head of the ‘Yeti Institute” at the University of Kemerovo.  He argues that these are Neandertals that have survived to this day.  Okay, that is not quite as outlandish but it is close.  A map is supplied in the original story to show where the presumed location of these critters is. 


 

As one of the commenters to the original story put it: “I reckon they're hiding under the 'R' in Kazakhstan.”

This continues to be one of those modern miracles—that people have been looking for the Yeti/Abominable Snowman/Sasquatch for decades and yet nobody has yet come up with anything that stands up to scrutiny.  It is sort of like the search for Noah's ark.

Ken Ham on BioLogos and Proper Interpretation of the Scripture

I have resisted posting on this, after reading Darrel's response to it but, after reflection, I think it needs some response. Ken Ham has a twenty minute “sermon” on the problems with BioLogos. Remember, this is the same Ken Ham who got into hotwater a few months back and got uninvited to a home school conference because of his caustic and uncharitable remarks about BioLogos at the time. Here is the video:




A few thoughts:

• He shows a clip of Darrel talking about the age of the earth and what he would tell new students about how to integrate that information. Darrel states that he would refer the new student to some important books on geology and biology that would help them understand the evidence, to which Ham responds

  “By the way, I have a book I would refer them to.”

  That is snide. It assumes that anything that Darrel would provide in terms of resources would be worthless.
• Concerning the evidence for age of the universe and the earth, Ham states:

  This is not science, this is man's historical science, his beliefs about the past and he is going to tell us to let go of the Bible and what it says? See, belief in billions of years is science to them. It is not science, it is belief.

This idea that we cannot know our past (a variant of his "were you there?" statement) presents some cognitively dissonant problems. What if Mr. Ham walks into his breakfast room in the morning and finds a half-eaten bowl of cereal? By his own admission, he will never be able to determine what happened the night before because it would involve the use of historical science. While this is probably an overstatement of what Ham actually thinks, he never makes it clear that there is a problem here—that the same logical processes that one uses to reconstruct a murder investigation or an archaeological site are the same to reconstruct the prehistory of this planet. He never addresses this contradiction because to do so would reveal the logical error of his thought process.
• He states, about BioLogos (for whom I write) that they are starting to

  infiltrate the church. In fact, they are now producing a homeschool curriculum to get home schoolers not to believe Genesis.

  Maybe what they are trying to do is get kids to think intelligently about Genesis and avoid the one-dimensional reading of the scripture that Mr. Ham promotes.
• Later, he argues, in response to Francis Collins' comment that the Bible is not a textbook, that it is exactly that. He states:

  The Bible is not a textbook like a physics textbook, but it is a textbook of science because it is historical science that's talking, it is God's history book. That's the point. But when he says textbook of science, see they confuse these terms for people and that's what you have to understand, the difference between observational science and historical science. Where he finds the conflict, it is not because of the observational science, it is because of the historical science.

  It is not clear that Ham even knows the definition of historical science. It appears that he is saying that there is historical science that is biblically-based (the bible) and historical science that isn't (scientific reconstruction).
• About the whole kerfuffle surrounding the Great Home School Uninvite, he states:

  “When I found out what Peter Enns believed, and that he was selling his curriculum at the home school conference, I had to, in fact, we had already told the organizers that I can't speak unless I say something about him, not him personally, but his beliefs and I did and something happened that we still don't know what happened behind the scenes but I was eliminated.He wasn't eliminated. He was allowed to continue to speak." "And he was allowed to speak at a home school conference but they didn't want me there teaching about a literal Genesis.”

  This simply isn't so and Ham knows it. He was uninvited because of his "ungodly" and "mean-spirited" statements about some other speakers (Enns) and the convention. The organizers also wrote: "We believe that what Ken has said and done is un-Christian and sinful," That is pretty clear. Judging from the way that Nathan Ham, Ken Ham's son, responded, it was smack on the money too.
• In the early part of the video, he disapprovingly quotes Bruce Waltke, who also had a dust-up last year regarding evolution. Waltke states:

  “I think that if the data is overwhelming in favor, in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult, some odd group that’s not really interacting with the real world.”

  Ironically, Ham doesn't see that this is exactly what he is doing in this video—taking his followers down an isolated road in which they are a slave to one, narrow view of scripture to the exclusion of any other and in which all who do not accept this view can only be seen as enemies.

This response is stronger than that of Darrel Falk's and my inclination is to call Ham arrogant, pompous, misguided and divisive, all of which he is. But we need to pray for those he is trying to reach. He is not a scientist and his approach is to tap into the emotions that this subject brings out. Man's science appears to be at odds with his interpretation of the scripture, but he carries the idea of man's fallenness and limited understanding in only one direction. It never occurs to him that Pete Enns has come to a different understanding of the scriptures through prayer and a desire to learn about the cultural and literary context of the book that he and Ken Ham hold so dear. It only occurs to him that if Pete Enns and Darrel Falk don't understand the scriptures the way he does, then they must not be in the spirit. If Ham's behavior and statements look “cultish” to people like Bruce Waltke, someone who has spent their entire professional life studying the scriptures, what must they look like to non-Christians?

Holy Jurassic Park, Batman!

Wired has a story on “How to hatch a dinosaur” by Thomas Hayden. He writes:

Over the past several decades, paleontologists—including [Jack] Horner—have found ample evidence to prove that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, everything from the way they lay eggs in nests to the details of their bone anatomy. In fact, there are so many similarities that most scientists now agree that birds actually are dinosaurs, most closely related to two-legged meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptor.
But “closely related” means something different to evolutionary biologists than it does to, say, the people who write incest laws. It’s all relative: Human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees, but at that scale we’re also pretty hard to tell apart from, say, bats.

That's funny. Here's where the Jurassic Park comes in:

These regulatory genes—the master switches of development—contain the recipes for making certain proteins that stick to different stretches of the genome, where they function like brake shoes, controlling at what time during development, and in what part of the body, other genes (for things like growth-factor proteins or actual structural elements) get turned on. The same basic molecular components get deployed to make the six-legged architecture of an insect or fish fins or elephant trunks. Different body shapes aren’t the result of different genes, though genetic makeup certainly plays a role in evolution. They’re the result of different uses of genes during development. So making a chicken egg hatch a baby dinosaur should really just be an issue of erasing what evolution has done to make a chicken. “There are 25 years of developmental biology underlying the work that makes Horner’s thought experiment possible,” says Carroll, now a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Every cell of a turkey carries the blueprints for making a tyrannosaurus, but the way the plans get read changes over time as the species evolves.

That is one of the best definitions of hox genes that I have ever seen. The problem is that you are looking at a developmental level that is very basic.  It will be interesting to see how this is applied in the next few years.

Leonard Steinhorn Wants to Know How The GOP Became the Anti-Science Party

Writing for HufPo, Leonard Steinhorn has some comments on the GOP and the race for their nomination.  He writes:

It would be easy to take this Republican drift from reality and rationality as evidence that the party is comprised of know-nothings and the uninformed. "Anti-knowledge" is how New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labels the GOP. But in truth there are as many educated, thoughtful Republicans as there are Democrats, people who in their lives and businesses apply strict standards of evidence and rationality to their daily decisions. Perry is certainly no rube, having governed the second largest state in the nation for ten years, and Bachmann is a former tax attorney. If higher education is any gauge, Republicans and Democrats typically split the vote of those with a college degree.

It is quite unusual to read a political commentator writing these things since it seems to be a meme in the media that Republican = ignorant. Anecdotally, it is also hard to counter this meme.  Many of my friends that are democrats tend to view me as an anomaly: a thinking republican.  But someone can be very intellectual and thoughtful and yet have no knowledge of a particular subject.  I don't know beans about psychology and couldn't tell you a single theoretical construct in the field. This doesn't make me stupid or anti-intellectual. It does, however, make me ignorant.  He mentions the GOP distrust and general disdain for liberalism in this way:

This disdain for liberalism has an interesting genesis given that so many red states have benefited from liberal governance in the form of rural electrification, water projects, and transportation infrastructure, and indeed many white southern and Great Plains politicians were once ardent New Dealers. That all changed, of course, with civil rights, which turned many white Americans from friends of liberalism to its most ardent foes. By enforcing civil rights, liberalism became a literal enemy of their way of life and a figurative threat to anyone who didn't want to accept the reality of a plural, diverse, and cosmopolitan America.

I have difficulty accepting all parts of this hypothesis.  For one thing, your average Republican doesn't mind paying for infrastructure such as roads, electricity, running water and so on.  They do, however, mind paying for things like Solyndra, rapid transit between large cities and the incredible expansion of the welfare state, including many benefits for illegal aliens.

For another, it flies in the face of much evidence that the conservative churches were some of the driving forces behind desegregation. For another, one is reminded of pictures taken at the time of conservative Charlton Heston marching in civil rights parades.  It is more likely the association between liberalism, atheism and evolution that is driving their distrust.

Most conservative Christians that I know tend to view evolution (and maybe climate change, I am not sure) as a tag-on.  They see people living what they see as good, Godly lives with proper theology and behavior and see that as desirable.  If these people also happen to reject evolution and climate change, so much the better.  This does not require an examination of these theoretical constructs, only an acceptance of others' perspectives on them.

Of all of the presidential candidates, only Ron Paul (who has since dropped out) and Rick Santorum openly ridiculed evolution and suggested that it was not a Godly perspective.  Indeed, most candidates don't so much reject evolution as include intelligent design in an almost ecumenical fashion.  Michele Bachman, for example, wants both taught so kids can choose which one they want to believe in.  While this is ignorant of science, it is not caustic or hateful.

The charge of anti-intellectual populism is harder to shake.  I think that there are two large issues here: the growing liberalism of academia over the last four decades, and the general contempt that many in academia feel for what they consider the uneducated masses.  I spent enough time at the University of Tennessee (nineteen years) to know that, at least at that institution, both of these perspectives are entrenched.  When you add to this the vocal hyperatheism of Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, all of whom are intellectuals of one sort or another, many conservatives have no problem rejecting the whole package.

He continues:

Let's be clear: science and religion are not incompatible. The Catholic Church has made its peace with evolution and has no problem with the science of climate change. The current director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis X. Collins, is a born-again Christian who accepts evolution and simply sees the hand of God in its creation.

But for many evangelical Christians it's far more convenient to reject science than to deal with the dissonance between scientific explanations and what's written in the Bible. To them, science is yet another tool in the secular assault on their religiosity. Unlike the good book, it is not to be trusted. The Scopes Trial remains very much alive for them.

It is not so much that they are rejecting science as much as they are rejecting mainstream science.  Most evangelicals are quite happy with the brand of “science” that is promulgated by organizations such as Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research which teach the straight recent earth creation model.  It is this brand of science that has quite literally taken over the home schooling market—crowding out any mainstream curricula.  Most aspects of modern science are seen to be at odds with the evangelical mindset and many evangelicals, and those who write for these institutions have adopted the Henry Morris viewpoint: “When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.” (source unknown) This meme is so strong that many evangelicals would rather, as Steinhorn notes, avoid the science question altogether than delve into the evidence.  It makes complete sense that their candidates would do the same.

 

“Out-of-Africa Replacement Model”: Piling On

On the heels of the recent DNA arguments supporting hybridization between early modern Homo sapiens and archaic Homo sapiens in Africa comes fossil skeletal evidence.  As the Telegraph reports:

A study on human remains found in the Iwo Eleru cave in Nigeria, West Africa, shows that Stone Age humans in the area shared characteristics with much older human relatives. Palaeontologists leading the study believe their findings provide evidence that modern humans and older subspecies of human might have coexisted and even crossbred in Africa. The findings add weight to theories that ancient species of human lived alongside the anatomically modern humans after they first appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago.

Quoted in the article is Chris Stringer, one of the progenitors of the Out-of-Africa replacement model of modern human origins which was based on mitochondrial DNA studies done in the late 1980s.The article continues:

Professor Stringer said: "The majority view was that once modern humans emerged in Africa 150,000 years ago, it was kind of the end of the story and modern humans took over. "I think the reality is that the ancestral forms didn't just disappear but hung around alongside those that had evolved into modern humans. "Somewhere lurking in bits of Africa were these more archaic people and we are starting to get a picture of that."

I suspect that it is going to get very hard to pin down exactly where Homo sapiens starts. It is becoming more and more clear that anatomically modern Homo sapiens and archaic Homo sapiens went for the occasional “roll in the hay.” If so, as I pointed out earlier, there simply was no “speciation event.” This goes more to supporting the multiregional evolution model, as it applies to Africa, in which there was selection for more modern genes. This model may also apply to Europe, with the mixing of modern humans and archaic humans there. I suspect that this will spur reexamination of the early modern material from there, such as Mladeč, where the material dates from the Early Würm/Late Würm interglacial period.

Where Did the Cretaceous Birds Go?

As evidence continues to pile up supporting the theropod dinosaur-to-bird transition, the question has arisen: where did all of the Cretaceous birds that did not give rise to modern birds go?  Science Daily has this report:

Now a team of paleontologists led by Yale researcher Nicholas Longrich has provided clear evidence that many primitive bird species survived right up until the time of the meteorite impact. They identified and dated a large collection of bird fossils representing a range of different species, many of which were alive within 300,000 years of the impact.
"This proves that these species went extinct very abruptly, in terms of geological time scales," said Longrich. The study appears the week of Sept. 19 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aside: the next time I see a scientist use the word “prove” I am going to strangle them. Scientists don't prove anything. They provide support for a hypothesis or they reject a hypothesis.  Onward.  The common consensus about the dinosaur extinction is that it was, in large part, caused by a huge meteorite that fell to earth toward the end of the Cretaceous in the Yucatan Peninsula.

The crater reflecting this impact is 110 miles across and, while it probably wasn't the entire cause of the dinosaur extinction, it wiped out a good chunk of 'em.The article continues:

Yet modern birds are very different from those that existed during the late Cretaceous, Longrich said. For instance, today's birds have developed a much wider range of specialized features and behaviors, from penguins to hummingbirds to flamingoes, while the primitive birds would have occupied a narrower range of ecological niches. "The basic bird design was in place, but all of the specialized features developed after the mass extinction, when birds sort of re-evolved with all the diversity they display today," Longrich said. "It's similar to what happened with mammals after the age of the dinosaurs."

Another piece of the puzzle!

No Dinos in Heaven Screening at New York Academy of Sciences

Laure Parsons writes that there will be a screening of the movie No Dinos in Heaven at the New York Academy of Sciences on October 25, 2011 at 7PM and that a discussion with Eugenie Scott and Greta Schiller will follow. If you are in the area, stop by to see this movie. Here is the press release: http://www.nodinos.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/No-Dinos-NY-PR.pdf

Agitation Against Creationism in the UK

David Attenborough has joined a group of scientists who are arguing that the government must forcefully ban the teaching of creationism in schools.  Duncan Geere of Wired UK has the story:

While in power, Gordon Brown's Labour government released guidance to schools that creationism shouldn't be taught in science classes, but stopped short of enshrining the recommendation into law. The coalition government hasn't acted on the subject either. Attenborough has joined three Nobel prize winners and Richard Dawkins in protesting against creationism and intelligent design, asking for it to be completely banned.

The former director of education for the Royal Society, Rev Michael Reiss, who has in the past referred to evolution as "god's work", is amongst the signatories. He told the Telegraph: “Evolution is an extremely powerful idea that lies at the heart of biology. At the same time, it's a sufficiently simple concept that there's no good reason why it should be left out of the primary curriculum.”

It is not clear how far this will go or what impact it will have. That Richard Dawkins is part of the organization will have a polarizing impact, I am sure.  Attenborough has a world-wide reputation as one of this generation's greatest naturalists and has made many wonderful documentaries about life in the wild. 

Svante Pääbo: DNA clues to our inner Neanderthal

Here is short video in which Svante Pääbo gives a short presentation on "Your Inner Neanderthal."

Crocodile From Hell

First we had the Frog From Hell, then we had the Snake From Hell and now, it seems, that we have the Crocodile From Hell.   National Geographcic is reporting that a 60 million year-old crocodile has been found not far from Titanoboa.  Christine Dell'Amore writes:

A Colombian coal mine where scientists found the largest known snake species has offered up another gem: A new species of 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) prehistoric croc. (See pictures of Titanoboa, the biggest snake ever found.)
The 60-million-year-old Acherontisuchus guajiraensis lived alongside the snake and a bevy of other reptiles in an Amazon-like river system, which wove through one of Earth's earliest rain forests before eventually emptying into what's now the Caribbean Sea.

There are no primates alive at this point (Plesiadapis has been demoted to tree shrew). Good thing, too. I doubt this would have been a fun place to live.

Sigmund Comments on the BioLogos/Discovery Institute Rift

Jerry Coyne has a guest post on his blog by Sigmund.  Sigmund has noticed the bad feelings between the Discovery Institute and BioLogos and has seen fit to comment on it.  He writes:

The slow descent into irrelevancy of BioLogos continues apace. From its inception by Francis Collins in 1997, the BioLogos Foundation’s original emphasis on increasing the acceptance of science amongst evangelical Christians has been gradually replaced by a more traditional focus on ‘worship’ and an increasing defense of Christianity from the challenges of secular reason.

This is a mite peculiar since many of the posts recently that I have seen including my own don't deal with what he describes whatever. My series of posts deals with the evidence for human evolution and three days ago, Dennis Venema started a series of posts on the basics of evolutionary theory. While it is true that Pete Enns expends much energy writing excellent columns on the nature of biblical interpretation, there are quite a few posts about basic science and, ironically, Sigmund writes that BioLogos has gotten away from science yet the whole purpose of his post is to illuminate a rift between the two organizations that is science-based.

He comments on the recent reaction to Dennis Venema's review (which I thought was smack on the money) of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell by the author.  Meyer argues that complex specified information such as that found in the cell can only come from intelligent causes, while Venema states that there are natural causes that can create complex specified information without the need to invoke a designer.  Meyer responds to this charge (in a way that Sigmund describes as “shifting the goalposts”) by arguing that he was only writing about biopoesis, not established life.  Darrel Falk responded to Meyer's article in a way that Sigmund finds baffling. Sigmund and Falk are both fully aware that Meyer moved the goal posts, however Sigmund writes: 

It was at this point that the real problems with the new BioLogos strategy become apparent. Falk, needing to see the best in every Christian, comes across as the theological equivalent of Woody Allen in the aftermath of the nymphomaniac scene in ‘Play it again Sam’. Falk spends almost the entire article wondering “How did I misread those signs?” and getting sidetracked into talking about “complex specified information” an imprecise term regarding complexity, only used by ‘Intelligent Design’ supporters.
While it is clearly a case of the usual dishonest creationist tactics of trying to be vague and then shifting the goalposts when caught out, Falk doesn’t seem to be able to state the obvious.

I feel for Darrel here, because, as Christians, we are called to see the best in people, even in a scientific setting. But Darrel has been on the receiving end of questionable Discovery Institute practices before at the Vibrant Dance conference.  Commenting on it at the time, Steve Matheson wrote: 

The question is not whether Christians should point to the things they agree on. It's not about whether affirmations of shared belief are beneficial or appropriate when Christians find themselves in disagreement. For me and, I suspect, most of the critics that Falk was referring to, the question is whether BioLogos should cosponsor a conference on faith and science with organizations that seek to mislead people about science.

Here, Steve is referring to both the Discovery Institute and Reasons to Believe, an organization that Todd Wood has dealt with. I have written about them as well.

Those of us who follow Jesus Christ want to believe the best in our fellow Christians but the sad fact is that we have examples in Christendom where scientific evidence is very poorly treated or misrepresented outright. I would never accuse Ken Ham of not being a Christian. But I would also never state that he honestly treats the scientific evidence.  It is our duty to point out these errors in the hopes of reaching our fellow Christians and informing them that honest scientific inquiry can go hand in hand with Christianity.  If the goal posts get moved, it is our duty to point that out as well.  Darrel has done this.  We might fault the force of his response, but we should not fault his intentions.   

New CFSI Post Up

My new post is up over at the Center for Faith and Science International, on conservatism and evolution.  Comments, as always, are welcome here and there.

David Klinghoffer, Evolution and Conspiracy Theories

Give David Klinghoffer credit for tenacity, or what Linus van Pelt called “mule-headedness.”  Not content to link Hitler and the Discovery Channel gunman to “Darwinism,” he now does so with the 9-11 conspirators in a new post for Evolution News and Views called “Darwinism and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.”  He starts out innocently enough, describing the 9/11 conspiracy theories and how they were debunked by Popular Science.  He even has a serviceable definition of conspiracy theorism:

The tendency, hardly limited to the faculty fringe, is to want to repudiate the intuitions of common sense in favor of recondite alternative understandings. These purportedly expose the true, secret inner workings behind the façade of society and nature and, in the process, cast the very sources of our intuition in the most sinister light. This is the essence of conspiracy-thinking.

He comments at length about a story in Slate by Jeremy Stahl, in which Stahl argues that it is very hard to dispel a conspiracy theory because those accepting it simply think you are part of the conspiracy. Then he drops the hammer:

What I found striking about the first installment in the Slate series, by Jeremy Stahl, is the parallels with what we know about the thought and writings of Evolution Truth activists: our ever-loving friends in the Darwin Lobby. You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with 9/11 Truth conspiracist James H. Fetzer in editing a special number of the journal Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals. That issue of the journal became so notorious for the incivility of its contributions that a whole fracas broke out and made the pages of the New York Times."

Interestingly, in typical DI fashion, the supplied link doesn't go to the New York Times.  It goes to an article by Casey Luskin, who then supplies the link in paragraph five of his article.  In that article, Mr. Luskin also notes that James Fetzer is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  That charge sticks like glue: James Fetzer's ideas are whackadoodle with regard to this issue and his ideas have been rebutted very soundly. But then Klinghoffer writes this:

When he burst on the scene a century and a half ago, in the Eric Hufschmid role, Darwin offered precisely a conspiracy theory: a radical overturning of common sense, in this case the understanding that nature reflects design. That was replaced now with an unseen and unseeable material mechanism that simply and comprehensively explained how everything we thought we knew about life's development was totally wrong.

This is nonsense. It would only be true if Darwin was the first one to come up with an evolutionary scenario for the diversity of life. He wasn't. Evolutionary scenarios exist as far back as John Ray and Darwin's contemporary, Jean Baptiste Lamarck and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had their own.  Darwin didn't introduce a conspiracy theory, he illuminated one of the growing questions of biology: how did populations change over time.  He simply provided a mechanism.  The only reason Klinghoffer thinks that it is a conspiracy theory is that he has bought into one of his own: that evolutionists are covering up the fact that evolution has no empirical support.  As long as he continues to believe that evolution has no empirical support, then anything they write is part and parcel of this conspiracy theory.  It doesn't matter how much evidence there is.  It is like trying to explain something to someone while they are  holding their hands over their ears and saying “La la la, I can't hear you.”

He writes:

Once posited, it tells a story that accommodates any observation. This is the brilliance of paranoia. Though Meigs cites Marxism and fundamentalist creationism as parallels, Darwinism offers one just as apt. Whatever nature brings forth can be squeezed to fit the effectively unfalsifiable Darwinian mold, which always turns out to predict, in retrospect, whatever is found.

Interesting. Why does he not include intelligent design in this list? All he has to say is “God did it that way.” It does not matter what the observation is, that is just the way He did it. It is foolproof. This has been the constant roadblock for supporters of ID since its inception.  It is completely unfalsifiable.  There are no hypothesis tests you can run.

It is amazing that Klinghoffer, who plainly does not understand basic predictive historical science, would state that evolution is unfalsifiable when it clearly is (If we found a human skull in mesozoic strata or dinosaurs in the Cambrian, the party would be over for evolution), and miss the fact that ID is not.There is a conspiracy theory all right.  It is just not the one that Klinghoffer envisions.