A 'Modern Population Bottleneck?'

NPR has a story on the (almost) disappearance of modern humans here. It is not a hypothesis that I had heard of before. Robert Krulwich writes:

Once upon a time, says Sam [Kean], around 70,000 B.C., a volcano called Toba, on Sumatra, in Indonesia went off, blowing roughly 650 miles of vaporized rock into the air. It is the largest volcanic eruption we know of, dwarfing everything else...That eruption dropped roughly six centimeters of ash — the layer can still be seen on land — over all of South Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian and South China Sea. According to the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the Toba eruption scored an "8", which translates to "mega-colossal" — that's two orders of magnitude greater than the largest volcanic eruption in historic times at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which caused the 1816 "Year Without a Summer" in the northern hemisphere.

Although this is a provative hypothesis, it does not match modern genetic studies. Dennis Venema writes:

Studies based on SNP/LD approaches have now estimated ancestral population dynamics for various human groups over time in more detail than is possible with mutation-based estimates. African groups have a higher effective population size (~7,000) than do non-African groups (~3,000) over the last 200,000 years. This approach, though based on methods and assumptions independent of previous work, nonetheless continues to support the conclusion that humans, as a species, are descended from an ancestral population of at least several thousand individuals. More importantly, the scalability of this approach reveals that there was no significant change in human population size at the time modern humans appeared in the fossil record (~200,000 years ago), or at the time of significant cultural and religious development at ~50,000 years ago.

When the first mtDNA studies began to come out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they all supported the recent African evolution of modern humans and they all came to the same general conclusion: that modern humans had originated in sub-Saharan Africa between 140 and 280 thousand years ago. The earliest fossil evidence we have for modernity in Africa are the Herto remains at 160,000, at the site of Bouri, in the Afar Triangle. These remains bear more than a passing similarity to the modern Skhul 4 and 9 remains from the Israeli site of Skhul (dated at around 100,000) and suggest a general northern migration of these populations.

The other problem is that this does not correspond to a die-out of Neandertals either. The Neandertals didn't go away until around 30,000 and interbred with the incoming moderns anyway. Indeed, it looks as if the incoming moderns simply swamped the Neandertal genome and assimilated them. It is hard to do this if you have a very small effective population size.

I have not read this book so he may have counters for all of these arguments but I would be really curious to know what they are.

Yet Another "Beside the Point" Post From the Discovery Institute

Michael Flannery pens yet another tiring post about the theology of Charles Darwin, as if, somehow, the religious persuasions of Darwin have any bearing on evolutionary theory.  He writes:

Darwin frequently claimed to be in a theological muddle. He often assumed this posture in letters to close friends and colleagues. But when it came to taking a stand on religion, the separation of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to have emboldened him. This is evident in his staunch support of American freethinker Francis Abbot (1836-1903), founder of the Free Religious Association and editor of its radical weekly voice, The Index. In the December 23, 1871, issue Darwin gave a rare and unequivocal glimpse of his religious beliefs. Responding to Abbot's radical manifesto Truths for the Times, he wrote that he admired Abbot's "truths" "from my inmost heart; and I agree to almost every word," adding, "The points on which I doubtfully differ are unimportant." So what exactly were those "truths" to which Darwin gave his complete -- even passionate -- approval?

It is fairly well known that Darwin rejected the idea of a personal savior due, in large part to the death of his beloved daughter Anna.  Darwin made no secret of this and no secret of the fact that he thought that intelligence and religious understanding had evolved.  Flannery continues:

Darwin's secular humanism and radical materialism was no late additions to his thinking either. In the spring of 1838, long before he had unveiled his theory to the world, Darwin asked in his private notebook, "Why is thought, being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, it is our admiration of ourselves." Ironically, by dethroning god Darwin committed the greatest hubris of all: admiring only his theory and pacing his faith in man.

In light of this there would seem to be only three choices for theistic evolutionists. First, simply accept the incompatibility -- learn to live with the contradictory idea that a God of purpose and intentionality has created and sustained a universe of (in John Herschel's famous phrase) "higgledy-piggledy." After all, God can do what He wills.

His other two options are humanism and nihilism.

This is nonsense. Albert Einstein contributed more to the study of relativity and quantum physics than anybody before or since. Yet we know that, despite his belief in a higher power, he also rejected a personal God. Should all physicists adopt his theological perspectives as well? Of course not. His theological views are divorced from his studies in physics, just like our study of evolutionary biology have no bearing on our theological views, unless it is to show us the grandeur and inventiveness of God's creation. Some who accept evolution are Christians, some are deists, and some are atheists, just as there are some of each that practice physics.

He closes with this gem:

But then why trust the theory that emanated from Darwin's mind any more than those of a monkey's? Whether it's his theory of evolution or his ideas about god that emanate from it, the monkey is still on Darwin's back.

Aside from being insulting, I wonder if Mr. Flannery is aware that the idea of natural selection was co-authored by Alfred Russel Wallace. Would he also fit Wallace into his thinking?  Furthermore, I wonder if he is aware of the 150 years of evolutionary research that have not only corroborated Darwin's and Wallace's theoretical constructs but extended them to include population mathematics, genetics, biogeography and a whole host of disciplines.  Probably not.  Like David Klinghoffer and David Berlinski, also from the Discovery Institute, he seems trapped in the late 1800s. 

Off Topic: Perilous

I just picked up a (signed) copy of Glass Hammer's new CD Perilous.  After two listens through, I think it is as good as their last two, If and Cor Cordium but it is very different, having shorter song construction.  Good mystical Christian prog rock. 

A Plea From Dennis Venema

Dennis Venema, who has written many good posts for BioLogos has written an article for the Colossian Forum titled “What I Would Like To Hear A Young-Earth Creationist Say.”  Rather than wax scientifically, he focuses, instead, on the things that we should have in common:

...the most important thing I would like to hear a YEC say to someone of my views isn’t a scientific statement at all – it’s a statement of unity in Christ. It’s the simple “brother” or “sister” that says – “we’re both part of the same family.” Even if we disagree on the mechanism of creation, affirming our unity in Christ needs to be the starting point for the conversation.

For those of us who are Evolutionary creationists/theistic evolutionists, he writes about a hypothetical conversation which, for some of us, is a constant fear:

“So, what do you do for work?”
 
“I’m a biologist. I teach up at the local Christian university.”

“Oh, really? You must really love the work that (insert the individual’s favorite anti-evolution ministry) does. It’s so good to have Christians like you who fight against evolution.” 

“Well, actually…”

 I have many friends in church to which I dare not bring up the evolution/creation debate.  I remember when one of of my friends from Bible Study was looking at my poster of the Tower of Time, a small version of the one by John Gurche that hung in the Smithsonian for years.  She remarked "How can you believe any of this?"  Implicit in her comment that was the poster represented an anti-God, anti-biblical  view of the world.  How do you bring someone like my friend, who had little to no scientific background, up to speed on the evidence.  Even if you could, would it matter?

Venema suggests (and I agree) that this issue should always be of secondary importance to the call of Christ and the unity that we should feel and express with each other:

So, to my YEC brothers and sisters, I would make this request. Without minimizing the importance of the exegetical issues that the creation/evolution controversy raises, let’s first and foremost sit at the Lord’s table and break bread together, recognizing each other as brothers and sisters in Christ and members of the same body. Those of us who see things from an EC perspective may need to repent of belittling our YEC brothers and sisters as scientifically ignorant or theologically naive. Those of a YEC perspective may need to repent of condemning their EC brothers and sisters as “compromisers” or theologically liberal.

I confess that belittling is easy to do and that is where the problem lies. It is too easy to do that and not to see the unity in Christ. We enjoy arguments and we enjoy disagreements. It gets the blood flowing and the dander up. But at some point, we have to see beyond that. Are the Christians that espouse the YEC viewpoint going to heaven? Yup. Are those of us that are EC going to heaven. I certainly believe so.

Having said all of this, we do have a responsibility to honestly treat the evidence that we encounter and to learn about God's creation from it. That does not change. To point out the variances from this is a worthy cause, but we should never believe that those who espouse those positions are not saved by grace, because, when the dust settles, we are all in need of that. 

Going on Vacation

I am going on vacation with the family for the week so probably will not be able to post anything.  Keep checking NCSE, BioLogos and Panda's Thumb as well as others that may come to mind.

Wouldn't You Like To Be A Pepper Too?

Another brouhaha has erupted, this time over a Dr. Pepper commercial on Facebook that features someone becoming more human after encountering Dr. Pepper.  Here is the ad.

Here is what Time Magazine had to say:

This is, of course, still the Internet — so plenty of comments in question are loaded with snark from people who mainly appear to be provoking for the sake of provocation. Several commenters, however, expressed disapproval of Dr. Pepper — believing, apparently, that the ad showed support for the scientific theory of evolution — and vowing to boycott the product. “I ain’t no freaking chimp. No more Dr Pepper for my household. God Bless y’all,” one user wrote. Another chimed in with, “I have lost all respect for Dr Pepper and if Dr Pepper wants business from thousands of people they will need to apologize.”

Yahoo had this observation:

One person wrote, "I love Dr Pepper but hate this photo. Forget evolution." Another person wrote, "Well, there goes my support for this company." It's unclear how many of the entries were sarcastic, but the post now has more than 3,000 comments, with most of them debating evolution. Among those supporting evolution were people encouraging everyone to calm down. One person wrote, "It's just a joke. People gotta lighten up and just live life."

Ya Think?????

Is It My Imagination...

...or is the ID community slowly abandoning the fossil record as being unfruitful in promoting their arguments?

Another Republican Congressman Beclowns Himself

The Associated Press is reporting on a speech given by Georgia congressman Paul Broun, who is quoted as saying:

“God's word is true,” Broun said, according to a video posted on the church's website. “I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

Evidently, he was also quoted as believing that the earth is around 9 000 years old and was made in six days.

The truly scary thing about this is that he has a post on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. How does someone this scientifically stupid get on a committee like that?? Once again, this calls for some kind of rudimentary test of basic science knowledge and understanding to weed people out before they are appointed to these kinds of committees. In any sort of formal discourse, he will be next to useless because he doesn't accept the basic tenets of so many different scientific theories.

It is yet another example of a Republican congressman demonstrating for all to see that his education in science has completely failed him.

It is also an example of the narrow mindedness of modern fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, a movement that seeks to divorce itself from any deep historical roots or modern academic understandings of the world in which it finds itself.  I am reminded of what Bruce Waltke said about this movement:

“If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult ... some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God's Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness,...”

Amen.

Hominin Meat Eating As Early As 1.5 Mya

Science Daily has a story detailing evidence that early hominins (and by this I mean probably Homo habilis or Homo ergaster) eat meat.  Although it is almost in the form of negative evidence. They write:

The two-inch skull fragment was found at the famed Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, a site that for decades has yielded numerous clues into the evolution of modern humans and is sometimes called `the cradle of mankind.'

The fragment belonged to a 2-year-old child and showed signs of porotic hyperostosis associated with anemia. According to the study, the condition was likely caused by a diet suddenly lacking in meat.

"The presence of anemia-induced porotic hyperostosis…indicates indirectly that by at least the early Pleistocene meat had become so essential to proper hominin functioning that its paucity or lack led to deleterious pathological conditions," the study said.

This is common in dietarily compromised populations today.The general consensus is that hominins' brains expanded when they began incorporating meat into their diet, although it has been commonly thought that that did not occur until Homo erectus, for which there is direct evidence of hunting. 

A Creationist Parable: “It's a Duck”

This came from one of my email contacts and it is a great parable for the YEC point of view.

In Case You Happen To Live in Texas...

The Texas Freedom Network has released a voter's guide to the up-coming State Board of Education elections.  The astonishing thing about the first statement: "Science classes should NOT present creationism and/or "intelligent design" alongside evolution as credible scientific theories" is that, of nineteen candidates, only ONE agreed with that statement. This is a far cry from the Don McLeroy-dominated board of even a few years ago and, assuming some on the list are not prevaricating, a welcome change.

The Fossil Record According to Creationism

Popular Science usually has some outlandish articles and truly goofy science news.  They ran this howler yesterday.  It is the Geological Time Scale According to Creationists as an infographic.

My favorite part is the comment that King Henry VIII was the last king of the Devonian period.  A tad irreverent in places but very funny, nonetheless. 

Fossil Data and Genetic Data More Concurrent Than Thought

It is now coming out that the “clocks” that are used to calculate mutation rates are badly calibrated. Ewen Callaway of Nature writes:

Geneticists have previously estimated mutation rates by comparing the human genome with the sequences of other primates. On the basis of species-divergence dates gleaned—ironically—from fossil evidence, they concluded that in human DNA, each letter mutates once every billion years. “It’s a suspiciously round number,” says Linda Vigilant, a molecular anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The suspicion turned out to be justified.

Now it seems that the clock is off by half. This means that a bunch of divergence dates can be recalculated. One is particular is mentioned:

Take the 400,000–600,000-year-old Sima de Los Huesos site in Atapuerca, Spain, which yielded bones attributed to Homo heidelbergensis, the direct ancestors of Neanderthals. Genetic studies have suggested that earlier ancestors of Neanderthals split from the branch leading to modern humans much more recently, just 270,000–435,000 years ago. A slowed molecular clock pushes this back to a more comfortable 600,000 years ago.

It isn't a magic bullet, there are still some kinks to be worked out but it has remarkable potential for getting a handle on when the Denisova genome might have arisen.It might also give us a believable figure for the LCA of apes and humans since the current, 5 million year date is plainly not so.

Very Busy...

I am working on my next BioLogos post and trying to not fall behind in teaching my class, which, because of the new online format, is eating my lunch. I will try to get something up in a bit.

One of My Favorite Quotes

My wife and I have been invited to a bible study tonight and, to hear of it, the topic might be the creation/evolution debate. I think it is time to remember a favorite quote of mine by a giant in the evangelical world: Billy Graham. He once upon a time wrote:

“I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man. ... whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God.”

Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man, 1997. p. 72-74

Amen.

Nature: “Science wins over creationism in South Korea”

Nature News is reporting that the South Korean government has gone on the offensive, urging textbook makers to ignore requests to remove information on evolution from high school textbooks. Soo Bin Park writes:

The move follows a campaign earlier this year by the Society for Textbook Revise (STR), which argued that details about the evolution of the horse and of the avian ancestor Archaeopteryx should be removed from the books (see ‘South Korea surrenders to creationist demands’).

The STR, an offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research, says that students should learn “various” theories about the development of life on Earth. It argued that the textbooks used flawed examples of evolution that are under debate by evolutionary scientists.

A victory for the home team, hopefully.

Discovery Institute Science and Faith Conference

The Discovery Institute is running a conference titled Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? on October 12-13 at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. A quick look at the speakers reveals that the conference is heavy on the ID side, with Paul Nelson, Ann Gauger, Jay Richards and John West featured prominently. Attend at your own risk.

More on Modern Human Origins

Scientific American is running a story on more news from the Max Planck Institute. Now, the entire genome of the hominins represented by the material from Denisova Cave has been sequenced. Here is what we find:

Unfortunately, the Denisovan genome doesn't provide many more clues about what this hominin looked like than a pinky bone does. The researchers will only conclude that Denisovans likely had dark skin. They also note that there are alleles "consistent" with those known to call for brown hair and brown eyes. Other than that, they cannot say.

Yet the new genetic analysis does support the hypothesis that Neandertals and Denisovans were more closely related to one another than either was to modern humans. The analysis suggests that the modern human line diverged from what would become the Denisovan line as long as 700,000 years ago—but possibly as recently as 170,000 years ago.

Given the amount of genetic similarity in the three groups, it makes more sense that the number is closer to 170,000, especially since there is evidence of hybridization between the three groups. What also seems to be true is the Denisova group shows some level of founder effect in the sense that the genetic variability is more restricted than that found in modern humans. Who the population split off from is anybody's guess right now.

Bill Nye on Evolution

Here is a YouTube clip by Bill Nye on the denial of evolution.



It is short and doesn't include a whole lot of information but it is heartfelt and some of the warnings are certainly good.

ABC News covered this here. The best quote is:

“And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can - we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.”

The parents don't get this information in a vacuum. It is groups like the ICR and AiG that should be held accountable for the distortions of science. They are the ones that are doing so much harm.

Baton Rouge Advocate on Louisiana and the Loch Ness Monster

In an editorial dated August 19, the editors of the Baton Rouge Advocate address the controversy surrounding the Louisiana voucher program and the Loch Ness Monster. They write:

The state has no intention, apparently, of launching any serious investigation of the Loch Ness monster in school curriculums. Instead, it will pay and pay, for years, and — if students do poorly on science tests at some future date — the state Department of Education might raise the question of why mythology is part of a school’s curriculum.

“In the event that there is basic academic incompetence, the state (education) department can intervene,” White says. “The most effective way of testing all of this is to literally see what do the students know and what do they achieve, and we’re doing that through the state test.”

A more-effective way would be for the department to open its eyes to this kind of educational malpractice before children’s futures are endangered.

The problem, of course, is by the time you get academic incompetence, how do you go about re-educationg these kids? By then the damage is done. Then what you have is kids that go to college (if they go to a mainstream college) who get their faith rocked by the scientific “real world.”

Then supposing you do find academic incompetence because of the curricula. How do you go about getting rid of the bad curricula without lawsuits, court cases, injunctions, and other delay tactics?

“Darwin just made it up.” Great googlymoogly!

Hat Tip to Glenn Branch.

Science News: Tangled Roots

Bruce Bower of Science News has written a great column that highlights all of the current discoveries/revelations/uncertainties in modern human origins research. The article focuses on the new developments in genetics that have revealed mating patterns between Neandertals and modern humans and the existence of the third strand of humanity, the Denisovans. It is modern human origins research in a nutshell. He writes:

“The question is no longer ‘When did ancient populations such as Neandertals go extinct?’ but ‘What happened to those populations and to modern humans as a result of interbreeding?’ ” says anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Clear signs of interbreeding have left archaeologists and other students of the Stone Age scrambling to revisit existing ideas about Homo sapiens’ evolutionary past. A dominant theory holding that humans evolved in Africa and left on neat one-way routes to Asia and Europe has to be revised. Instead, these ancient people must have followed a tangled web of paths taking them to other continents and sometimes reversing course. During these travels, humans encountered Neandertals, Denisovans and probably other humanlike populations that were already traipsing interconnected avenues through Asia and Europe.

Even though it seems likely that modern humans as a whole, owe their ancestry to these African populations, it is gratifying to see genetic evidence in support of what some of us have been hanging onto for all these years—some variant of the multi-regional evolution model. I don't think that a strict center/edge model will work but it is obvious that there was considerable interbreeding between population groups, be they Neandertals, moderns or Denisovans. More and more, everyday, it looks my former adviser, Fred Smith, was right. Some form of assimilation seems to be the best model to go with.

I am also reminded that, once upon a time, Geoff Pope argued that there were traces of Neandertal characteristics in some of the Chinese archaic Homo sapiens material. If, as John Hawks remarks, Neandertals interbred on a grand scale, then Pope's position, which was largely rejected at the time, has some credence.

“Not Responsible”

A friend of mine sent me this. Here is a sign seen at a restaurant.


It reminds me of a sign I saw in Rocky Mountain National Park that read “Mountains Don't Care!” I saw a similar sign in Japanese climbing Mount Fuji. Heartless, perhaps, but true nonetheless.

Shocked! Simply Shocked!

An amusing (or not) story is coming out of Kentucky where some state representatives have discovered that students are actually being tested in evolutionary theory. Kentucky.com reports:

Kentucky's Senate Republicans pushed successfully in 2009 to tie the state's testing program to national education standards, but three years later, they're questioning the results.

Several GOP lawmakers questioned new proposed student standards and tests that delve deeply into biological evolution during a Monday meeting of the Interim Joint Committee on Education.

In an exchange with officials from ACT, the company that prepares Kentucky's new state testing program, those lawmakers discussed whether evolution was a fact and whether the biblical account of creationism also should be taught in Kentucky classrooms.

"I would hope that creationism is presented as a theory in the classroom, in a science classroom, alongside evolution," Sen. David Givens, R-Greensburg, said Tuesday in an interview.

Oh, I would certainly hope not.

This is at once an example of two things: 1. the general cluelessness of state (and national) lawmakers as to what, exactly, is in the bills that they pass and 2. the complete lack of adequate science education on the part of representatives like Mr. Givens. Two idiocies for the price of one. How can you top that? Here's how:

Another [House Education] committee member, Rep. Ben Waide, R-Madisonville, said he had a problem with evolution being an important part of biology standards.

"The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up," Waide said. "My objection is they should ensure whatever scientific material is being put forth as a standard should at least stand up to scientific method. Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny."

And Mr. Waide is a member of the House Education Committee????? How does something like that happen when he cannot even identify what a theory is or have any familiarity with the evidence for evolution? Who puts these people in office? Why is there not at least a rudimentary test for people who seek to be on these committees? Why has this ignorant individual not been asked to step down immediately for these comments? The Kentucky legislature has a mess on their hands.

Todd Wood on the Neandertal Interbreeding Question

Todd Wood has weighed in on the Neandertal hybridization results in ArXiv with some of his own thoughts and he raised the spectre of incomplete lineage sorting...something that entirely escaped my thought process when I was waxing about the ArXiv paper yesterday. But as he, himself, points out, there are problems with this explanation. He writes:

Since incomplete lineage sorting is a random process, I would not expect to see any modern human population significantly more similar to Neandertals than any other modern human population. Modern human populations diverged well after the Neandertal divergence, so whatever genes were still very similar to Neandertals should have been evenly divided. Even more interesting is the geography: the ancestors of the modern humans with Neandertal-like genes come from the same geographic region as the Neandertals. If incomplete lineage sorting is to blame for Neandertal-like genes in modern humans, that geographic pattern would just be a weird coincidence. That's not to say that one couldn't make a case for incomplete lineage sorting, but we would need some new evidence to really seal the deal (such as new samples of Eurasians that don't have Neandertal-like genes or Africans that do).

He is right. If modern humans and Neandertals diverged as much as 250 ky BP as many people think, then drift would ensure that the two genomes would be more highly divergent than they appear to be. He is also correct about the geographical coincidence. As I wrote yesterday, the interbreeding conclusion would tend to be supported by the appearance of Neandertal-reminiscent traits in the earliest moderns from the area.

The authors argue that linkage dis-equilibrium, which is when you have allele combinations that are present in two related populations in higher percentages than can be accounted for by chance, supports the recent interbreeding model, a conclusion that Wood agrees with (although how a young-earth creationist can agree with that kind of model, I will never know).

More on Neandertal Interbreeding from ArXiv

For some time, Cornell University has been running a pre-print server for physicists so they can bounce papers off of each other. It now seems that geneticists are getting into the act. As a result of this, the good folks at Max Planck have written an abstract of a forthcoming paper, in which they describe research involving more on the Neandertal genome. Here is the abstract in its entirety:

Comparisons of DNA sequences between Neandertals and present-day humans have shown that Neandertals share more genetic variants with non-Africans than with Africans. This could be due to interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans when the two groups met subsequent to the emergence of modern humans outside Africa. However, it could also be due to population structure that antedates the origin of Neandertal ancestors in Africa. We measure the extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the genomes of present-day Europeans and find that the last gene flow from Neandertals (or their relatives) into Europeans likely occurred 37,000-86,000 years before the present (BP), and most likely 47,000-65,000 years ago. This supports the recent interbreeding hypothesis, and suggests that interbreeding may have occurred when modern humans carrying Upper Paleolithic technologies encountered Neandertals as they expanded out of Africa.

This corresponds to the range of dates of the classic Neandertals from La Chapelle, La Ferrassie, Feldhofer Cave and La Quina, and may in fact partly explain the morphology of the earliest modern humans from Europe that people like Dave Frayer have been arguing for years have Neanderthal-reminiscent traits. It certainly refocuses interest on sites like Mladeč (34 ky BP), where the faces are modern but the vaults for some of the individuals are long and low, with small buns.

I think the demographic picture in central and western Europe is a whole lot more complex than we currently understand. I look forward to reading this paper when it comes out.

Not As Off-Topic As It Might Seem...

The Tennessean ran a story today about how Thomas Nelson publishers, famous for their line of bibles, is dropping a new book on Thomas Jefferson by David Barton because the book “contains historical errors.” Bob Smietana writes:

Barton’s book, The Jefferson Lies, claims to expose liberal myths about Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third president.

But a group of conservative scholars says Barton’s take on Jefferson is factually untrue. And a group of ministers from Cincinnati called on Nelson to cancel the book.

Casey Francis Harrell, director of corporate communications for Thomas Nelson, said the publisher had gotten several complaints about the book and found enough errors to cancel it.

“Because of these deficiencies, we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to cease its publication and distribution,” Harrell said.

The story goes on to detail some of the disputed information in the book, none of which I am remotely qualified to assess. That is not why this is important. I bring this up because Barton has also been active in the creation/evolution debate. Those of you who read up on that might remember this exchange:



Now, it is quite true that the idea of biological change has been around for some time but it was only with Lamarck in the very late 1700s and early 1800s that any sort of mechanism was attributed to biotic change and even then, the vast majority of people believed in fixity of species. Even Darwin did when he set out on his trip aboard the Beagle in the 1830s. But that is not what Barton is getting at here.

In his own writings on the subject, Barton consistently confuses evolution at a cosmic level with evolution at a biological level. These are not the same. Did the founding fathers debate whether or not the cosmos had a grand design? Yes they probably did. Did they debate the theory of biological evolution? No they did not. Yet that is how Barton frames his response. Subsequent to his thoughts on cosmic evolution, he writes:

As confirmed by Dr. James Rachels, professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham: Mivart [1827-1900, a professor in Belgium] became the leader of a group of dissident evolutionists who held that although man’s body might have evolved by natural selection, his rational and spiritual soul did not. At some point God had interrupted the course of human history to implant man’s soul in him, making him something more than merely a former ape. . .

Lost in the shuffle is that Dr. Rachels lived and wrote in the 1800s, quite some time after the founding fathers debated “intelligent design versus evolution.”

Barton spends a good bit of ink writing about how many of the founding fathers have argued that the universe looks designed. That is a very different thing from the idea that evolution, even in a cosmic sense, does or does not happen. I doubt that there is a person alive that does not accept evolution of some kind. One only has to look at the changes in a river's path or the location of the shoreline at Ephesus (where once Paul gave a speech but that is now twenty miles inland). Evolution, after all, is change over time.

I do think that, based on what Barton has said in public and what he has written in more in-depth fashion, that he is being misunderstood. The problem is that neither are very clear. To his credit, Barton seems to view the theistic evolution perspective in a not-unkind light, although it is not clear what, exactly, he thinks from this post. He is also quite correct that the four viewpoints he delineates have not altered much in recent years in their adherents. He just needs to articulate his viewpoints more clearly with regard to evolution in general and biological evolution in specific. He may agree with one and not the other but there is no way to tell from what he has either written or said.

This might just be my own personal take on what I find in Barton's writings. If your take is different, let me know.

The Discovery Institute vs. The Peppered Moth

The Discovery Institute claims that a new paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology has “debunked” the peppered moth icon of natural selection. They write:

A new paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology helps debunk the peppered moth icon, and cites Discovery Institute's Jonathan Wells in the process.

You wouldn't know it from the summary on PhysOrg, or from the abstract of the paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, but some South Korean scientists have joined in the cause to dismantle a celebrated "Icon of Evolution," the myth of the peppered moth. That's right; in the first paragraph, Kang, Moon, Li and Jablonski set right to work, pulling the rug out from Kettlewell (1955) and all his copycats who made the peppered moth Exhibit A for the power of natural selection.

The focus of the post is that the Korean authors observed the moths Hypomecis roboraria and Jankowskia fuscaria to see where they rested on tree trunks and concluded that once they rested, they moved around on the bark, changing their orientation in order to more carefully conceal their appearance. Thus, they argue that it is a combination of color and resting behavior that contribute to their camouflage, not just the color alone. To this, the writer of the post responds:

In the real world, as opposed to the staged peppered-moth photos we have all seen in textbooks, the moths would not have stood out like sore thumbs on the tree trunks. They would have wandered about for a place to blend in; most likely, they would not have landed in such conspicuous spots in the first place (Wells, p. 148). Letting the moths do what comes naturally is what the experimenters should have done. The old peppered moth experiments, consequently, have been invalidated (again).

First, the authors seem to forget that Majerus (whom they cite) actually conducted comprehensive experiments that did not involve nailing moths to trees and his results corroborated earlier results that wing color was highly selective. The DI post author even admits that.

The odd thing about this post is that the author(s?) have made the logical non sequitur that behavior and morphology are completely divorced from each other. I know of no evolutionary biologist that would make that claim. Behavior always plays a role in evolution. If you take any animal out of its environment, it behaves differently. Sometimes that behavior can adapt to new environments, sometimes it cannot.

When Homo ergaster started using stone tools as weapons and started hunting, it changed what they could eat (and reduced the number of animals that could eat them), which allowed them to expand their home range. It also allowed them to outcompete their neighbors, in this case Australopithecus boisei, which likely caused the latter's extinction. Behavior and selection have always been intricately linked and there are literally thousands of examples of this.

The post writers argue that supporters of natural selection have “yielded some highly significant ground.” How? We already know from Majerus' work that the earlier results, if not technically or scientifically rigorous, were corroborated. The work of the Korean scientists simply adds the explicit role of behavior. Nobody doubts that selection is acting on wing color.

The author ends by writing:

And finally, the paper shows that criticisms of Darwinism by ID writers like Dr. Wells are having an impact -- even in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

It does no such thing. Wells is cited three times, and only in passing. His work is never discussed in any depth. The author remarks that the Korean scientists have picked up the word "iconic" from Wells. So? When I write for BioLogos, I regularly cite anti-evolution authors. I might even use one of their phrases. That does not mean that I agree with them or endorse their views. To say that Wells is having an impact might be true and it might not be. From this paper, however, that, like the claim that the peppered moth research has been debunked, is not in evidence

Two Hominin Species Running Around At 1.9 Mya

Meave Leakey and some colleagues¹ have unearthed and described some new fossil hominins from Koobi Fora that seem to confirm that, yes, there were two very different critters running around 1.8 to 1.9 million years ago on the plains of eastern Africa. From the Turkana Basin Institute:

Found within a radius of just over 10 km from 1470’s location, the three new fossils are dated between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old. The face KNM-ER 62000, discovered by field crew member Elgite Lokorimudang in 2008, is very similar to that of 1470, showing that the latter is not a single “odd one out” individual. Moreover, the face’s well-preserved upper jaw has almost all of its cheek teeth still in place, which for the first time makes it possible to infer the type of lower jaw that would have fitted 1470. A particularly good match can be found in the other two new fossils, the lower jaw KNM-ER 60000, found by Cyprian Nyete in 2009, and part of another lower jaw, KNM-ER 62003, found by Robert Moru in 2007. KNM-ER 60000 stands out as the most complete lower jaw of an early member of the genus Homo yet discovered.

The skull being referenced (heavily throughout the press release) is that of KNM-ER 1470, discovered by Richard Leakey in 1972 and dated to 1.9 million years ago. 1470 has a very flat face and is large, so much so that when it was discovered and compared to the Homo habilis material that Richard's dad, Louis Leakey and Napier and Tobias were pulling out of the ground, it was felt that it represented a new species, Homo rudolfensis.

For a short run-down on the material from this time period, go to my BioLogos post, The Human Fossil Record, Part 7: The Rise of Early Homo.

Anyhow, these new fossils add a new level of what Bernard Wood² calls “complexity.” For quite some time, 1470 existed in its own little world, with no fossil remains being similar to it in size or in shape. Questions began to rise about the veracity of its reconstruction and its provenance. These new fossils fit 1470 to a “T” and it now seems clear the 1470 does, in fact, represent a different form than that represented by skulls like ER 1813, which is small and gracile and gives support to the idea that there were two competing species of hominin on the landscape even before Homo erectus/ergaster arrived on the scene some two hundred thousand years later. Below, on the top is KNM-ER1813 and below it is KNM-ER 1470















As you can see, there is considerable difference in overall size and robusticity between the two and when the new material is compared to the mandible KNM-ER 1802, which is similar to 1813, there is a considerable mismatch. What remains to be seen is where Homo ergaster came from.

¹Leakey, M. G., Spoor, F., Dean, M. C., et al. (2012). New fossils from Koobi Fora in northern Kenya confirm taxonomic diversity in early Homo. [10.1038/nature11322]. Nature, 488(7410), 201-204.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7410/abs/nature11322.html#supplementary-information

²Wood, B. (2012). Palaeoanthropology: Facing up to complexity. Nature, 488(7410), 162-163.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/488162a

Is Noah's Ark Sinking?

A reader pointed out a story in Leo Weekly about the newest troubles of the Ark-n-Park, the Noah Ark theme park being built (mostly) by Answers in Genesis next to its fabled Creation Museum. Joe Sonka writes:

The first phase of the project will cost $73 million to build, and $6 million has already been spent on land acquisition and design. So far, Answers in Genesis has raised $7.5 million, with private investors pitching in an additional $15.5 million to the LLC, leaving $22 million left to raise before they have enough money to break ground, and $44 million left to complete the project. [Joe] Boone estimates it will take 12-24 months to secure the funding to break ground, then it will take another 24 months to complete construction.

The company will then have to raise $53 million for additional phases of the park throughout next decade.

Such a delay in construction makes the potential for a full $43 million in tax incentives impossible, as the state will only rebate sales taxes for 25 percent of what they’ve spent constructing the project by May 2014. This in turn could hurt private investment for the park, as there is no longer the virtual guarantee of $4 million in rebates every year.

The loss of the tax revenue will be a serious blow to the park construction since it was the center of focus not even a year ago and raised so much controversy. It is an interesting article, with a few hair-raising anecdotes about a visit to the Creation Museum thrown in, just to show how borderline-cult this group is. I truly hope the project hits a dead end but I would bet money that the park will wind up being built. Read the whole thing.

Gee, This'll Look Good...

Another Republican has clearly aligned himself with YEC sympathies by holding his fundraiser at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Steve Daines is the politician and the truly interesting thing is that he is running his race in Montana, so he had to go pretty far afield to get support.

In other words, he is not just a local pol raising support from the area, he targeted the museum as a resource. This was noticed by Don Pogreba, who runs a blog in Montana. He proceeds to confuse the Creation Museum with the up-and-coming Ark-n-Park, which undercuts his argument, and then he makes a weird statement about tree-ring dating, but he is right to point this out and the fact that a candidate for congress is holding his fundraiser there is truly amazing.

The Republicans can't hitch their wagon to this cause...they just can't.

Johan Huibers’ Ark

I mentioned this a bit back. In Holland, Johan Huibers has built a life-size replica of Noah's Ark in Dordrecht. Robert Nisbet of SkyNews HD writes:

He used the ancient measurement of the cubit - the length of a man's arm from the elbow to the fingertips - to build the craft according to Biblical proportions.

In Genesis the ark is described as being 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high so the mammoth effort took him and his team of five just over four years to finish.

The ark is apparently a museum although they wanted to float it over to the London Olympics:

Deborah Venema-Huibers, manager of the Ark, told Sky News that they had to abandon plans to sail the ark to the London Olympics after they were asked to make the wooden boat safer for visitors.

She said: "We would like to carry three thousand people on the boat (so) you can't say: 'We'll leave it like that'. You have (to clear) everything with the fire department, as it is all wood. It took such a long time that we had to skip the Olympics."

Still, this is kinda neat and, who knows; on a local level, this might have worked.

New BioLogos Posts

The two posts on Homo erectus are up at these locations:

http://biologos.org/blog/the-human-fossil-record-part-10-homo-erectus-in-asia-1

http://biologos.org/blog/the-human-fossil-record-part-10-homo-erectus-in-asia-contd

Please stop by and comment.

Klinghoffer Responds to McBride Review

David Klinghoffer, who often writes histrionically for the Discovery Institute, has written a response to Paul McBride's review of Science & Human Origins called “Paul McBridge: Darwinist Hero of the Hour.” For some reason, he clings to this word “Darwinist,” as though it actually describes anyone who practices evolutionary biology. He really means it perjoratively, of course. He writes:

Yet there's a familiar pattern where these very same bloggers, including some scientists at reputable universities, shy from actually reading material from the intelligent-design community. At best, they'll find someone else who claims to have read it and rely on his say-so that the book or article is no good.

He could say that about me and, in this instance, be correct. I have not read the book yet. He claims that Darwinists are afraid of ID arguments. This is nonsense. There are very long reviews of Signature in the Cell by a number of “Darwinists.” I have read several Phillip Johnson books and reviewed them. The problem is that the arguments don't change.

William Dembski has written several books on how he thinks complex specified information applies to biology. When people shoot holes in the arguments, he just shuts the comments down. Further, he makes no attempt to have his articles published in biology journals.

Stephen Meyer's work Signature in the Cell is based partly on Douglas Axe's work and ideas, which are then regurgitated for the new book. Those arguments haven't changed.

Instead of getting a palaeoanthropologist to write a chapter on human origins fossils, they get a lawyer who has no training in the field to do it. I don't need to read Casey Luskin's arguments against human evolution in Science & Human Origins. I have read them before. They haven't changed—even in the face of new evidence.

I intend to read the book but for now I am content that Paul McBride has identified the principle problems. They are the same ones that were present in ID five years ago.

A Good Video on Radiometric Dating

Joy Walters has a video on BioLogos that explains in layman's terms why radiometric dating is sound and how hominin/hominid fossils have been dated. Go watch!

Science & Human Origins: A Not So Positive Review by Paul McBride

Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger and Casey Luskin have a new book out called Science & Human Origins. I have not had a chance to pick it up yet but it looks like the authors have learned nothing from the recent exchanges with folks like Dennis Venema and PZ Myers. The same faulty ideas still hold sway. Paul McBride has reviewed the book here. McBride points out an immediate problem that seems to characterize the ID camp in general. Ann Gauger writes:

I personally am convinced that unguided, unintelligent processes can’t do the job, not only because the neo-Darwinian mechanism is utterly insufficient, but also because we are beings capable of intelligence and creativity.

This is argument from personal incredulity and has no place in scientific discourse. If this is indeed how she feels, then it must color how she does her experiments and how she gathers her conclusions. If she is not open to this possibility, she has no business writing this book.

McBride remarks that chapter two, which is written by Douglas Axe, discusses his and Gauger's recent work where it was found that the time necessary to get one protein to evolve into another, contemporaneous protein is longer than the universe has existed. Other researchers have pointed out the logical error in this experiment but McBride's statement is succinct:

If Gauger and Axe couldn't get a single protein to evolve a novel function of their choosing then surely massive evolutionary changes are impossible. Actually, no. Gauger and Axe's experiment is a profound misunderstanding of evolution. The real question is not "Can X be turned into Y?" because that sense of direction requires preordination, which is not theorised to be a part of evolution. If we remove this preordination, the question becomes "Can X turn into something else?".

It is more than a little ironic that Axe and Gauger argue that, left to its own devices, evolution cannot foster new genetic material due to its randomness and then, to show that this is so, introduce an experiment in which evolution is directed and non-random. Didn't any of the editors catch this? Axe and Gauger do not seem to understand the concepts of exaptation and neutral mutations.

Casey Luskin wrote the chapter on the fossil record. McBride quotes Luskin:

There are many gaps and virtually no plausible transitional fossils that are generally accepted, even by evolutionists, to be direct human ancestors. Thus, public claims of evolutionists to the contrary, the appearance of humans in the fossil record appears to be been anything but a gradual Darwinian evolutionary process. The Darwinian belief that humans evolved from apelike species requires inferences that go beyond the evidence and is not supported by the fossil record.

Luskin isn't listening. He has shut his ears and refuses to listen to what people are saying about the evidence. As I will remark in my next BioLogos posts (and something McBride points out), the earliest Homo erectus individuals have cranial capacities of around 700 cc³, while the later ones have cranial capacities of up to 1225cc³. Does this overlap those of modern humans? Barely. And the suite of characteristics that are on display in your average Homo erectus are not modern human in any way. They are getting there, but they are not there yet. Then we have archaic Homo sapiens, such as Kabwe from what is now Zimbabwe, which is obviously evolved over Homo erectus but not quite modern human either. These people show up in Asia (Dali and Mapa in China and Ngandong in Indonesia), Europe (Petralona, Swanscombe, Steinheim, Atapuerca, to name a few) and they are obviously intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens in some way. Are they direct ancestors? Maybe, maybe not, but they are transitional. Luskin is arguing unilineal ancestry without allowing for the possibility of collateral ancestry.

The earliest modern remains that we have are from the site of Herto, on the Bouri Peninsula in the Afar triangle, in Ethiopia and they date to around 160,000. Even so, there are a few characteristics that link these remains to earlier, archaic Homo sapiens. There may be no absolute evidence that these represent our ancestors, but who is to say they aren't? We know that we have modern humans in the Near East at 100,000 that still show some signs of not being quite like us. By 40,000 they do. If these are not transitional sequences, what would qualify?

McBride's conclusion contains the following paragraph:

I have been left wondering why the Discovery Institute, or intelligent design advocates in general, or biblical literalists feel a need to try and accommodate science when they have a belief in a supernatural entity capable of breaking natural laws. In the case of this book, it has left them needing to make all kinds of awkward criticisms of fields in which the authors clearly lack expertise. A lawyer is not the right guy to challenge the world's palaeoanthropologists, nor the world's geneticists. Certainly, he shouldn't be trying to take them all on at once. It will end with him trying to smear the reputation of scientists rather than engaging with their ideas. Accusations that the entire field of palaeoanthropology is driven by personal disputes and that Francis Collins is a bad Christian are simply not compelling reading in a book that is putatively about scientific argument.

Leaving aside the issue of miracles, since I believe they can and do happen and are not restricted to the physical, observable world, McBride is partly correct in his assessment about the abilities of these authors to address the material. The problem is deeper than that, however. At least in the case of Luskin, there is an unwillingness to alter one's viewpoints in the face of additional evidence to the contrary. Here, there is a distinct similarity to the young-earth creationist camp, who have little to no scientific integrity. As McBride points out, Luskin's views have not altered since 2006. I pointed out these problems two years ago in a BioLogos post. I know that he read the post because we corresponded briefly about it. It is therefore, doubly disconcerting that he would continue to hold onto this “no transitional fossils” idea as if it were still defensible.

This is a book I clearly need to pick up and read, although I am quite certain it will just make my blood boil to do so.

BioLogos

I have two new BioLogos posts going up this weekend (hopefully). Stay tuned. These will cover Asian Homo erectus.

Louisiana Pays Attention

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a report that the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has passed stricter rules for schools that are accepting government vouchers. Writes Andrew Vanacore:

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved a new set of academic standards Tuesday for private schools participating in Louisiana's expanded voucher program. By a vote of 9-2, the 11-member panel, known as BESE, adopted a plan proposed by state Superintendent John White that will require private schools to hit roughly the same academic bar that public schools do in order to continue accepting more students through the program.

The standards exclude those schools with less than forty students, however, which has drawn criticism. It is hard not to see this as a result of widespread coverage of Louisiana school children looking for the Loch Ness Monster and being taught creationism.

Test scores aside, the program is also drawing concerns that state tax dollars could end up going to schools that reject evolution in favor of creationism. Zack Kopplin, a college student who gained notoriety in 2010 when he attacked a state law that critics saw as a backdoor endorsement of creationist ideas, turned up at the BESE meeting Tuesday with a list of schools in the voucher program that appear to promote a biblical interpretation of human origins.

Kopplin cited a line from the student handbook at Faith Academy, in Gonzalez, requiring students to "defend creationism through evidence presented by the Bible versus traditional scientific theory."

Somebody saw the handwriting on the wall and realized that if the voucher program was going to survive and not suffer a constitutional challenge, changes had to be made to make sure that creationism wasn't being taught and they weren't using curricula that trash evolution.

White's plan gives BESE responsibility for ensuring private schools "maintain a curriculum of quality at least equal to that prescribed for similar public schools," with the power to hand down penalties "including ineligibility to participate or ineligibility to accept new students."

But during a conference call Tuesday, White suggested that he would rely instead on the science portion of the state's LEAP exams to weed out schools that aren't teaching biology up to acceptable standards. "The test measures evolution," he said.

As it should.

For the Want of a Chromosome Pair

Slate has an article on how we ended up with 46 chromosomes. Despite the colloquial writing style, there is some good information about how we got one less set of chromosomes than Chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Sam Kean writes:

Around a million years ago, in some fateful man or woman in Africa, what were the 12th and 13th human chromosomes (and still are the 12th and 13th chromosomes in many primates) got entangled at their tips. Instead of separating cleanly, 12 and 13 fused together, like one belt buckled onto another. This amalgam eventually became human chromosome 2.

Fusions like this are not uncommon—one in every 1,000 babies has some sort of chromosomal fusion—and most go unnoticed because they don’t upset anyone’s health. (The ends of chromosomes contain few genes, so often nothing gets disrupted.) However, a fusion by itself can’t explain the drop from 48 to 46. A fusion leaves a person with 47 chromosomes, not 46, and the odds of two identical fusions in the same cell are remote. And even after the drop to 47, the person still has to reproduce to pass on the trait, a serious barrier.

He would have to find a person also with 47 chromosomes and, despite the possibility of many miscarriages, one in thirty-six would inherit both fused chromosomes and have 46. This must have had some sort of selective advantage because that is the form in which we find ourselves today. It has been suggested that there was a genetic bottleneck (Venema also writes about this) and it is possible that this was the point that the 46 variant took over. it is thought-provoking, if speculative. One thing is certain: we have fewer chromosomes than chimpanzees and it is because of a chromosomal fusion. The key here is that we and chimpanzees share a last common ancestor.

Musings From the Atlanta Constitution on Louisiana

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Constitution wonders “Is Louisiana the future of Georgia’s education system?” He writes:

John White, Louisiana’s school superintendent, has told the press that it should be up to parents, not the state, to gauge whether private schools are delivering a quality education. “To me, it’s a moral outrage that the government would say, ‘We know what’s best for your child,’” White said. “Who are we to tell parents we know better?”

That “who are we to judge?” question is critically important. When fully implemented, the Louisiana program has the potential to shift well over a billion dollars a year in taxpayer money out of the public system into the hands of private for-profit and non-profit schools. Surely that gives state officials not just the right but the obligation to ensure that the money is well-spent and delivers quality education. But that’s counter to the philosophy driving the school voucher movement.

The purpose of the school voucher program for kids is so that they can get a better education, not a different one. While it is certainly true that there are horror stories of schools where the school theatre department is told that they can't perform West Side Story because it is racist and puts on The Vagina Monologues instead and politically correct thought runs rampant, science education should not be up for discussion.

If the science doesn't follow what is accepted by experts all over the planet, there should be no federal money going to it, whatever. Aside from the Establishment Clause issues, it is simply promoting bad science and using the school system to do it. If I were the state, I would shut this program down immediately.

On another level, it is deeply disappointing that these schools using these curricula seem to think that they are producing kids that can ever be competitive in science fields when they get taught this nonsense. It is my sincere hope that more colleges and universities will deny entrance to students that come out of these schools and who cannot demonstrate basic knowledge of astronomy, geology, cosmology and biology.

I disagree with him about what drives the school voucher movement, though. In us and in most people that I know, the desire to seek education outside the public schools is driven by the desire to make sure our kids get the best education that they can. Of all of the public schools in my area, only a few are decent and, as I mentioned above, one does not have to go far to find horror stories of bad public school teachers and schools. In most cases, the home-schooled kids are more prepared for college academically than their public school peers—except in science.

Other dangers await, as well. I have a friend who's daughter has drifted away from the faith and in the context of this, when her parents asked her how her home school education was, she replied “I wish you had told me more about evolution.”

More on the Louisiana School Voucher Program

I have a tendency to support school vouchers because it allows students to escape horrible schools for which they are zoned and steps up the accountability of the public schools to at least try to give students a good education. Using those vouchers to promote creationism, however, is not acceptable. Change.org also thinks so and is circulating a petition to that effect. They write, in part:

Northeast Baptist School, in West Monroe, approved for 40 voucher slots and $340,000 in taxpayer dollars, uses ABeka and Bob Jones University science textbooks. Researcher and writer Rachel Tabachnick, who examined these textbooks, reports that it is “clear that no instruction is included in the text that would conflict with young earth creationism.” Using such books endangers the educational prospects of students in Christian schools. In 2010, the University of California won a federal lawsuit, ASCI [Association of Christian Schools International] v. Stearns, in which the judge ruled in favor of UC’s right to refuse to recognize high school credits for science classes taken in Christian schools that used such books. UC contended that such instruction is “inconsistent with the viewpoints and knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community."

I am actually surprised, on one level, that the UC decision has not gained more airplay, since it should have had a far-reaching impact on the home school movement. Many universities may simply not want to involve themselves at that level, however.

Between this story and the search for the Loch Ness Monster, I smell a large class-action suit in the wind that may make Dover look like a small affair. On one level, I certainly hope so. On another, I grieve for how this will hurt the voucher program. It gives those opposed to it unnecessary ammunition and if, based on this, other states torpedoed voucher programs, who could blame them? All in all, an unwise move on Jindal's part.

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One Reason Palaeoanthropology Is So Hard

The Star, from South Africa has a nice story on a hunk of rock that contains the second of the skeletons pulled from the South African cave site of Malapa, the first of which was the nice juvenile Australopithecus sediba individual. Shaun Smillie writes:

Last night, in Shanghai, China, scientists from Wits University’s Institute for Human Evolution announced the discovery of fossils buried deep in a piece of rock about a metre in diameter. They are believed to be the remains of Karabo, one of the two Australopithecus sediba skeletons that were discovered at Malapa, in the Cradle of Humankind, in 2009.

Karabo’s partial skeleton was removed from the Malapa site, but the rock appears to contain more of his bones.

One is reminded of the arduous task that awaited Raymond Dart as he sat before the stone breccia that contained the first australopithecine to be discovered in South Africa. It took him seventy three days to pry apart the limestone to extract the remains.

This is something that is often missed by the popular press and creationists: fossils are rare and complete fossils are even rarer. And, unlike the kind of archaeological work that goes on in neolithic or bronze age sites, human fossil remains are usually found in concretions—limestone or some other hard rock—and are very hard to extricate cleanly. In the case of Ardipithecus ramidus (or “Ardi”), the extraction took years because the bones were so brittle. Jamie Shreeve writes in National Geographic that as soon as bones were removed, they were doused with hardener to make sure they did not fall apart. Then, once they are removed comes the equally arduous task of trying to reconstitute the pieces. Complete skulls are rare and even the most complete ones have to be put back together. Once we have them, they are great tools for discovering how we came to be and the stages that got us here. But it takes a lot of work just to get to that point. It will be nice when we get the second A. sediba skeleton out to see how it compares to the one we already have.

Native American Migrations

USA Today reports on genetic research indicating three separate waves of migration out of Asia into the New World beginning around 15 ooo years ago. Dan Vergano writes:

North and South America were totally empty of people until the first arrivals from Siberia crossed a land bridge into Alaska, spreading in a few thousand years to the tip of South America. The genetic study may help settle a debate between a long-held view that the populating of the continents came as one event instead of the more recently supported notion, backed by this study in the journal Nature, that the migration happened in three distinct waves.

"Our study makes clear that mixing of these three ancient populations is the story of Native American arrival," says geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School, lead author of the study.

As far back as I can remember in graduate school, I was taught that there were at least two, probably three migrations. The two that I remember studying were from the Lena River Basin in Siberia and the Amur River basin, on the border of Russia and China. There were probably more than that, as there are some Native American populations that have gene fixation for certain blood types, a situation that would only occur in a drift/founder effect situation. I remember Dick Jantz teaching us this twenty years ago, at UT.

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Christianity Today: “A Tale of Two Scientists”

Christianity Today has an article by Tim Stafford on Darrel Falk and Todd Wood. Darrel is the president of BioLogos (Disclosure: I write for BioLogos) and Todd Wood is the biologist at Bryan College in Dayton Tennessee and, as far as I can tell, the only young earth creationist who honestly treats the geological and biological evidence. Of Falk he writes:

He took a postdoctoral fellowship in Southern California. On one memorable day, he was at the beach with his family when he saw a church bus arrive in the parking lot. From the lettering on the side, he could see the bus was from a Nazarene church, the denomination of his boyhood. "This church family, I reasoned, was having a picnic, just like I used to love so much." The sight prompted deep sadness, as he thought of his daughters. They would never go on a church picnic. They would never gain the richest part of his heritage. "I longed to go back, if only for the sake of my daughters. But I could not go back—the chasm that separated us was too great. One of the widest sections of the gulf was my belief in gradual creation."

When I read this, I realized that it resonated with me. I was in church one day and my pastor was giving a sermon on Genesis, in particular the pre-flood world, and it shook me. While I believe in Jesus Christ and the salvation He brings, I realized I didn't believe what my pastor was saying. What he was describing was an outgrowth of a deep, convicted faith that is unencumbered by modern science, or by racking doubts of whether anything in the first eleven chapters of Genesis is true in a literal sense or is it all myth. I can't go back to that faith. I know that it puts me at odds with a great many of my friends but, as Falk alludes to, the gulf is too great. When my friends ask me to explain why I think the evidence for an old earth and evolution is so good, I hesitate. In some ways I don't want them to lose that innocence and yet, in other ways, I am convinced that the young earth hermeneutic is wrong and can be destructive to the faith.

Wood has always struck me as someone who has a very regard for scientific integrity and the ability to correctly analyze scientific research, even if he does not believe their conclusions. In the past, I have been critical of what I perceive to be cognitive dissonance in his approach to his science. That is perhaps, unfair. I think that he truly does believe that there is evidence of change but that this points to something we just haven't fathomed yet.

Having said that, the biological/evolutionary evidence doesn't exist in a vacuum—it rests on the geological and biogeographical evidence of an ancient earth—and he has yet to properly address it and its relationship to biological diversity. As of now, he seems either unwilling to do so or feels it is irrelevant to his research. Given his approach to biological science and his general castigation of the level of research of his fellow young-earth creationists, I would be curious to know what he thinks of this evidence.

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“Dear South Korea, thank you for making us look less stupid. Sincerely, the United States of America.”

That, according to a story in TES, is a reader's comment on the story that young earth creationism is making inroads in South Korea. Michael Fitzpatrick writes:

Long thought of as an American problem among developed countries, the South Korean government recently surprised everyone by allowing school textbook publishers to leave out examples that demonstrate Darwin's theory of evolution at work.

Following a creationist campaign by one of South Korea's many vociferous Christian groups - some of whom recently tried to ban Lady Gaga from the country - Korea's education ministry unexpectedly gave the OK for the deletion. What is even more remarkable is that such removals were only "suggestions" from the government, but seven science textbook publishers forged ahead with the changes anyway. As a consequence, references to the theory of evolution, such as the avianhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif ancestor archaeopteryx and "the changes of horse over time", have disappeared from textbooks.

More surprisingly still for a country that is viewed by some in the West as a sine qua non when it comes to excellence in science education, the Society for Textbook Revise, which wants so-called "intelligent design" taught at schools, counts professors of biology and high school science teachers among its ranks. They are not alone. According to Nature magazine, a survey of trainee teachers in the country found that 40 per cent of biology teachers agreed with the statement that "much of the scientific community doubts if evolution occurs", and half disagreed that "modern humans are the product of evolutionary processes".

When one looks at the Earth at night image,
there is a sharp line between North and South Korea because of the economic development in South Korea. Further, I have read that South Korea is the most internet-connected country in the world. How has this idea that has so poisoned science education here in the United States gained traction? This will have severe consequences for science education overall and biological education in specific. Some of the most exciting areas of emerging science are biomedical and genomic research. Both rely heavily on an understanding of how selection and mutation work. Without those underpinnings, the South Korean students will fall behind. That the textbook writers were so complicit in the actions is unconscionable. As the scientists in Texas and Louisiana fought back, so must those in South Korea or soon, they will be unable to compete in these areas.

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More Trouble For the “Ark-n-Park”

The financial troubles continue for the Creation Museum's Noah's Ark display, or as Barry Lynn affectionately calls it, the “Ark-n-Park.” Yes, I used the possessive because AiG is up to their eyeballs in the project. Liz Goodwin, of Yahoo, writes:

When you walk into the Creation Museum, one of the first things you see is an exhibit of a doe-eyed human child crouched next to a velociraptor dinosaur. The two seem not at all surprised that their epochs have collided. Homo sapiens and velociraptors missed each other by a good 65 million years, according to most scientists, but in the world of the Creation Museum, humans and dinosaurs were created on the same day 6,000 years ago, coexisting peacefully in the Garden of Eden. A thousand years later, a 600-year-old man ushered them onto Noah's ark.

Velociraptors, huh? You mean these things? The ones with retractable claws and sharp teeth? The best killing machines in the dinosaur world?



She continues:

The group initially announced that it expected to break ground on the park in 2011, before eventually pushing that date back to 2014. But in June, in an interview in the Creation Museum's “Noah's Cafe,” Ark Encounter vice president Michael Zovath told Yahoo News that the group no longer has a date in mind for the construction to begin. It has been unable to raise sufficient amounts of money, despite pleas to the Creation Museum's visitors to donate to the project.

“Fundraising is really tough,” Zovath said, blaming the recession. “It's not moving so fast as we hoped.” The private LLC that is building the park would need to raise another $20 million before it can break ground, he said. So far, it's taken in $5.6 million in donations and $17 million in private investments.

To add to the bad news, the Creation Museum is having its lowest attendance year yet. Last fiscal year, 280,000 people visited, compared to 404,000 the first year it opened in 2007. Zovath thinks that potential visitors have been less willing to travel to the museum because of the poor economy.

Yah, well, that is probably true. The economy has had that kind of effect on a lot of businesses. I suspect that the project will eventually be built. After all, as Murphy once said:“No one can kill a bad idea.” She ends with:

Sometimes, the museum tackles evolution and its huge disagreement with science head-on, through exhibits on Charles Darwin and the Grand Canyon. At other times, certain displays seemed to entirely ignore the scientific consensus on an issue. A show on finches, a small type of bird that helped Darwin first hypothesize that one species of animal could turn into many different species, doesn't mention their key role in his scientific discovery. "Scientists are puzzled how so many finch species could arise, displaying such a vast array of traits," the exhibit reads. "The Bible provides the explanation. In the beginning of time, six thousand years ago, God created every kind of bird, including the finch kind, and He gave them the ability to 'multiply upon the earth.'"

No, actually, they aren't puzzled
at
all.

This is the kind of thing that makes me a very hateful person. Darwin's explanation for why the finches were different has been around for 150 years. But aside from the fact that Darwin used the finches because it was a good illustration of selection in different environments, the above statement is nothing short of a lie. A lie written with a straight face and behind which there is no compunction to tell the truth. It is this moral turpitude that allows them to say that there are no transitional fossils as well.

This is why I have no respect for Ken Ham or what he does. If the Ark-n-Park doesn't get built, that will be one less blight on the landscape.

Mount Carmel Caves Nominated to Join World Heritage List

Four caves that have extensive evidence of human Palaeolithic occupation have been placed on the World Heritage List. They are Tabun, Jamal, El-Wad and Skhul. Tabun and Skhul are near and dear to the heart of every palaeoanthropologist as being the site of the early modern and Neandertal remains described in The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, by McCown and Keith, which was published in 1937. The story, from the Jerusalem Post, notes:

The sites are “located in one of the best preserved fossilized reefs of the Mediterranean region” and contain cultural deposits filled with 500,000 years of human evolution, from the Lower Paleolithic era to the present day, said a summary document that the World Heritage Committee printed in May.

The Nahal Me’arot caves provide “a definitive chronological framework at a key period of human development,” according to the summary document. Archeological evidence found in the region indicates the appearance of modern humans who conducted deliberate burials and who were exploring early stone architecture, as well as transitioning from hunting and gathering to agricultural processes.

This is long overdue. The Mount Carmel area is also traditionally where Elijah struck down the prophets of Baal.

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More Feathered Dinosaurs

Science Daily has a story on the discovery of more feathered dinosaurs. From down in the story:

Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers. But this feathering has only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rex and birds. Sciurumimus -- identified as a megalosaur, not a coelurosaur -- is the first exception to this rule. The new species also sits deep within the evolutionary tree of theropods, much more so than coelurosaurs, meaning that the species that stem from Sciurumimus are likely to have similar characteristics.

Once again, we are seeing that, in response to changing climate, some dinosaurs are evolving feathers to keep warm. The writer alludes to this at the end of the quote. It is likely that the ancestors of both branches of theropods will have rudimentary feathers. The coelurosaurs simply took it and ran with it.

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