Jesuit Review: Creationism Isn't About Science, it’s about theology (and it’s really bad theology).

Eric Sundrup has an editorial in the Jesuit Review about what is wrong with young earth creationism.  He has some very good observations: He begins:

The Creation Museum is a $27 million example of how Christians can lose their way fighting the culture wars. After spending time there this Christmas, I left convinced that as wrong as the museum’s science is, the most frightening driver of its “logic” is an impoverished theology, which is coupled with a desire to win moral arguments. This toxic combination propels devout people into strange and unnecessary battles with modern science.

This is a point that I and many different researchers have made over the years: young earth creationism misses the broader picture. It reduces the majesty, glory and awe of the Bible and the message that God is telling us in favor of a flat, sterile, superficial understanding of the passages in Genesis. He continues:

Mr. Ham’s motivations for founding the museum and its parent organization clearly grew out of the culture wars. Answers in Genesis argues for the inerrancy of the Bible and specifically for a literal interpretation of Genesis because they think this provides them a strong footing in public discussions. And that, I think, is exactly how this group of Christians got lost. They are trying to win moral and theological debates with what look like scientific arguments.

Strangely, in their attempt to provide definitive empirical answers to moral and theological questions, creationists like Mr. Ham have more in common with some of their most strident scientific opponents than with the broader Christian tradition. They are proponents of the strictest form of biblical inerrancy and literalism. And in this mode they are actually advancing a mirror-image of scientism, in which God’s revelation, both in Scripture and in creation, is meant to convey a list of facts.

I think that this is one of the reasons that young people are leaving the church. Not only do they discover that they have been fed bogus science that doesn't stand up to even the barest scrutiny, when they have issues that require them to reach deeply into their faith, there is nothing there, just cold, impersonal facts. 

Mr. Sundrup's analysis is also not so unlike Joel Edmund Anderson's, in that, in his book The Heresy of Ham, Anderson notes that by focusing on science (or their understanding of science, anyway), Ham and other young earth creationists have, like their atheist counterparts, held up science as the ultimate arbiter of faith.  Modern science HAS to conform to the biblical passages.  If it does not, we are all lost.  This is nonsense for one simple reason: if biblical scripture in Genesis conforms to our understanding of 21st century science, then they are necessarily out of step with 20th century science, 19th century science, 18th century science and so on.  Since young earth creationist arguments don't change (except to move the goalposts), every new scientific discovery has to be shoehorned, manipulated, mangled and adjusted to fit the prevailing narrative. Scientific integrity be damned.  It never occurs to them that the narrative, itself might be wrong.

Indian Site of Attirampakkam Pushes Middle Palaeolithic of India Back to 385 Kya

Great Googlymoogly!  Fresh on the heels of the discovery of the Misliya site (upcoming BioLogos post) that the Middle Palaeolithic Levallois technology was present in Israel as early as 194 thousand years ago, we now have news from India that places the emergence of the same technology as early as 385 thousand years ago.  From Malcolm Ritter at the site PhysOrg:

Homo sapiens arose in Africa at least 300,000 years ago and left to colonize the globe. Scientists think there were several dispersals from Africa, not all equally successful. Last week's report of a human jaw showed some members of our species had reached Israel by 177,000 to 194,000 years ago.

Now comes a discovery in India of stone tools, showing a style that has been associated elsewhere with our species. They were fashioned from 385,000 years ago to 172,000 years ago, showing evidence of continuity and development over that time. That starting point is a lot earlier than scientists generally think Homo sapiens left Africa.

This tool style has also been attributed to Neanderthals and possibly other species. So it's impossible to say whether the tools were made by Homo sapiens or some evolutionary cousin, say researchers who reported the finding Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Nowhere is there any indication that modern humans are associated with the tools at Attirampakkam (ATM). In fact, there are no hominin remains whatsoever at ATM. The Indian subcontinent has always had a paucity of human remains, the most notable of which is the Narmada Homo erectus cranium.  In Europe, the Levallois technology, which also shows up at ATM, is almost exclusively associated with Neandertals and in the Levant, at the Skhul, Qafzeh, Tabun and Amud sites in the Mt. Carmel region, it is used by both Neandertals and early moderns. Consequently, while someone was using early Middle Palaeolithic tools at ATM, we don't know who.

What is incredibly striking about the ATM site is that, from 385 ky down to 172 ky, there is continuous technological evolution, beginning with what the describers call the “terminal Acheulean,” through a punch flake industry with points, to knives.  Another point made by the authors is that this Middle Palaeolithic industry appears and flourishes during a time where other sites in India are still using Acheulean technology.  This suggests “that spatial variability among Palaeolithic cultural sequences is larger than previously thought.”  From the Nature article¹:

The behavioural transformations that mark the advent of the Indian Middle Palaeolithic at ATM are summarized by the following diagnostic features: the obsolescence of Acheulian large-flake reduction sequences, with a directional shift towards smaller tool components; the adoption and continuance of Levallois recurrent and preferential strategies; a gradual intensification of blade reduction; and an increased use of finer grained quartzite during phase II than during A gradual discontinuation of biface use—which becomes definite at ATM after approximately 172 ± 41 ka—has been reported at other Middle Palaeolithic and Middle Stone Age sites worldwide (see Supplementary Information and references therein).

This is an astounding find for so many reasons. It establishes the appearance of the Levallois technology, one we know originated in Africa, outside Africa over 150 thousand years earlier than we thought. This is a technology that was considered to have originated some 400 thousand years ago. We may now have to revise this date further into the past.

It shows a clear progression of human cultural evolution, from the late Acheulean hand axes, through Middle Palaeolithic Levallois technology to a more blade-oriented technology.  Sadly, it appears as though the site began to fall into disuse and the sequence stops cold around 74 kya.  This is not surprising since it coincides with the Toba supervolcano eruption in Indonesia.  Nonetheless, as the authors point out, it suggests multiple migrations out of Africa of first archaic Homo sapiens, then modern Homo sapiens, such as those in Misliya and that these groups interacted with the Archaic hominins they encountered along the way.

¹Akhilesh, K., Pappu, S., Rajapara, H. M., Gunnell, Y., Shukla, A. D., & Singhvi, A. K. (2018). Early Middle Palaeolithic culture in India around 385–172 ka reframes Out of Africa models. Nature, 554, 97. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25444

Just When You Had Forgotten About Adnan Oktar...

Adnan Oktar, otherwise known as Harun Yahya is back in the news.  The Hurriyet Daily News recounts the lurid tale:

An Istanbul court has issued a temporary restraining order against controversial TV personality Adnan Oktar and Gülperi Koçak, the mother of two young women, after a father claimed his two daughters were “forced” to be on Oktar’s program.

The Istanbul Anatolian 20th Family Court ruled for Oktar, known abroad as Harun Yahya, and Koçak to stay away from the 19-year-old and 17-year-old women for six months.

The court ruling came after the father, who lives in Austria, had not heard from his two daughters for a long time. The young women were then spotted on Oktar’s show.

Adnan, who has been described as the “most notorious cult leader in Turkey,” credits himself as a creationist and has written numerous books on the subject. On his TV program, he sits around with a group of plastic surgery-enhanced women, who he refers to as his “kittens,” discussing religion and social incidents.

Oktar, if you will remember, was responsible for sending out, unsolicited, copies of his anti-evolution book to hundreds of academic researchers.  I have posted several pieces over the years on this mercurial, flamboyant personality, including several interviews.  His books are, of course, worthless and, according to one source, often plagiarized.  Still, it is is amusing to see this larger-than-life figure at work. 

Meanwhile, Over in Scotland...

Scotland seems to be having its own experiences with young earth creationism.  From Paul Hutcheon of the Sunday Herald:

A MEDICAL doctor described as one of Europe’s most active creationists has been reappointed to sit on the education committee of South Lanarkshire council.

Dr Nagy Iskander, who has claimed that a key tenet of evolution is “really illogical”, will be allowed to vote at meetings even though he is unelected.

Gordon MacRae, Chief Executive of Humanist Society Scotland, said: “Parents will be disturbed that unelected and unaccountable religious representatives from fringe groups continue to take decisions on their children's education.”

Local authorities are legally required to appoint three members, representing churches, to their education committees. In practice, the three individuals have equal standing to councillors but they are not accountable to voters.

A bid by Green MSP John Finnie to scrap the system in the last parliamentary term fizzled out and unelected religious figures maintain their privileged role.

This is what happens when you elect people to an education committee who have no background or interest in science.  In order to be on the education committee, new nominees should have to pass a basic test in science.  It is pretty clear from reading the rest of the article that Mr. Iskander has absolutely no idea what evolution is.  That doesn't seem to stop him (or anyone else for that matter) from having strong opinions on it. 

Meanwhile, Over in India...

There has been swift reaction to the statement of India's Union human resource development minister Satyapal Singh’s remarks that evolution is not a scientific theory and should not be taught in India's schools.  He also wrote that the theory of evolution had been disproved over thirty years ago and that we did not evolve from monkeys.  The Wire staff writes:

Singh had made his claims when he was at the All India Vaidik Sammelan, Aurangabad, Maharashtra, on January 20. Shortly after, Ram Madhav, the national secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party, issued a tweet in support of Singh and drawing his followers’ attention to a campaign organised by supporters of the idea of ‘intelligent design’ to cast doubt on the popular theory bearing Darwin’s name.

Reaction was swift. Scientists produced and circulated the following (in part):

We, the Scientists, science communicators and scientifically oriented members of public, are deeply pained by your claim. It is factually incorrect to state that the evolutionary principle has been rejected by the scientific community. On the contrary, every new discovery adds support to Darwin’s insights. One should also note that it is no longer merely a mechanism for organic evolution, but several other evolutionary phenomena in nature. Statements such as ‘humans did / did not evolve from monkeys’ is an overly simplistic and misleading representation of evolution. There is plentiful and undeniable scientific evidence to the fact that humans and the other great apes and monkeys had a common ancestor.

You have also supposedly claimed that Vedas contain answers to all questions. Such an exaggerated claim cannot be substantiated with the evidence available and is an insult to the genuine research work on history of Indian scientific traditions. Vedic traditions through the Mimamsa discipline teach us ways of analysing Vedas through rationality and logical reasoning. Your claims are at odds with the very traditions you claim to uphold.

When a minister working for Human Resource Development in the country makes such claims, it harms the scientific community’s efforts to propagate scientific thoughts and rationality through critical education and modern scientific research. It also diminishes the image of the country at the global level and reduces faith of the international historical research community in the genuine research by the Indian researchers.

Therefore, we urge you to retract the reported speech at the All India [Vaidik] Sammelan with immediate effect and issue a clarification about the Ministry’s policy towards teaching the theory of evolution.

Singh stated that no Veddic writer has ever seen an ape turn into a man, therefore evolution did not happen. The sheer ignorance of the evolutionary process in this statement is so overwhelming that it is difficult to know how to correct it.That is is religiously-based is not a surprise. 

Aside: I have often thought to issue a challenge to young earth creationists of all stripes.  The challenge is this: find me a person who is firmly convinced that evolutionary theory is wrong and that the earth was created six thousand years ago...but who is a confirmed atheist.  This would be someone who is convinced of these ideas, based on what they see as the scientific evidence for them, AND that there is absolutely no God.  Every argument that I have ever seen promoting a young earth and no evolution has been religiously-based, whether it be Christian, Islamic, Veddic or other less well-known groups. 

Go on.  I dare ya..  If this person can be found,  I will contribute $25 to Answers in Genesis. 

"They Are Digging in the Wrong Place"

Bodie Hodge has a post on the AiG website that is nothing short of astounding.  AiG is, once again, moving the goalposts.  And who is Bodie Hodge?  He is, according to the site: "A speaker, writer, and researcher for Answers in Genesis, Bodie Hodge has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale."  Hodge writes:

Each year there are many headlines, books, technical articles, and videos about another supposed missing link—a supposed link between a land mammal and whale, a dinosaur and bird, an ape and human, and so forth. Usually, these are quite easy to refute by anatomical features.

For example, alleged missing links turn out to be anything but—for example, either ape, human, or a fake (e.g., Piltdown man) or dinosaur, bird, or a fake (e.g., Archaeoraptor).

Nevertheless, these alleged missing links rarely make creationists cringe. I think it frustrates some of the evolutionists because they think they have found some sort of knock-out evidence that they interpret as support for evolution. But creationists rarely bat an eye.

Well, I’m going to let you in on a secret as to why creationists rarely take notice of these alleged missing links. It is because the evolutionists are digging in the wrong place—just like the bad guys in Indiana Jones. When you don’t have the correct information, you can miss the mark significantly.

So evolutionists are just like "the bad guys" in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Did you catch that?  A casual trip through the fossil record indicates that there are, in fact, many, many transitional forms present.  We now have very detailed sequences from Devonian crossopterygians to early tetrapods, from land mammals to whales, from maniraptoran dinosaurs to birds and, of course, from late Miocene/early Pliocene apes to humans.

But this isn't even the central focus of his post. First, he lists the conventional geological stratigraphy.  He bungles this early on.  He writes: "In a general sense, evolutionists look for alleged dinosaur-to-bird missing links in the Cretaceous and Paleocene (bolded)."  Wrong.  The dinosaur-to-bird sequence dates to the late Jurassic.  Furthermore, the presence of feathers on non-avian dinosaurs suggests that feathers evolved even before the late Jurassic.  By the early Cretaceous, birds were numerous.  The transition had long since ended by the Palaeocene.  Had he done any study of the transition from dinosaurs to birds, he would have known this.

He then writes:

But here is the problem. The rock layers from Cambrian to Miocene—at least mapped in the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:4)—were from the Flood.2 Miocene and Eocene rock is intricately part of the makeup of the mountains of Ararat, as is Cretaceous and Triassic (many times inverted, lying above the Miocene and Eocene). Since that time, the upper strata are post-Flood strata—such as Ice Age layers and recent volcanic flows. I understand creationists debate about tertiary sediment (Paleocene through Miocene) and encourage you study this further.

He gives absolutely no justification for this viewpoint. No evidence is presented indicating why pre-Pliocene sediments are flood and Pliocene sediments on up are not.  There is no event to mark this transition, no sedimentary layer that is distinctive.

Nothing. He simply says that it is so, therefore it is. It gets worse:

So when evolutionists say they found a transitional form between an ape and a human in Pliocene rock, creationists hardly flinch. Evolutionists are looking at the rock strata and the age of the earth incorrectly because humans were around long before that rock was ever laid down! Furthermore, humans existed when the Cambrian rock was laid down during the Flood. To go one more step, mankind had dominated the earth for over 1,600 years before the Cambrian rock was laid down!

When someone says that they found a transitional form between a dinosaur and a bird in the Paleocene, again, creationists hardly think twice. Both specimens died the same year in the same Flood and are not related. This is why finding feathers in the rock layers “before the dinosaurs” is not a problem for creationists.4 Nor is it a problem when we find theropod dinosaurs (which supposedly evolved into birds in the evolutionary story) that had eaten birds in lower Cretaceous rock.5

Birds were made on Day Five, which is a day before the dinosaurs; land animals, like dinosaurs, were made on Day Six. Having both buried in Flood sediment isn’t a big deal.

So many questions...

• If humans were around before the rocks were laid down, how is it that we find no humans at the base of the geological/flood column?  In fact, why aren't human remains found throughout the column, if they predate the Cambrian?
• How is it that all of the fossil species that are supposed to be in flood deposits are perfectly sorted, even to the point of brachipods being sorted by crinulation number and trilobites being sorted  by number of compound eye segments?  What about the detailed fossil sequences mentioned above? 
• if humans had ship-building capacity during the time of Noah and existed in towns and settlements, why is there no evidence of this at the bottom of the geological column?
• If humans did, in fact, predate the Cambrian, why do we find a detailed, clear sequence from prehuman hominoids through human precursors to archaic and them modern humans beginning in the Pliocene?  
• If the sediments from the Miocene back to the Precambrian reflect flood deposits, why do we find the largest land mammals, dinosaurs three quarters of the way up the column, when they should have sunk to the bottom?  
• If the sediments from the Miocene back to the Precambrian reflect flood deposits, why do we find features throughout the geological record that could only have happened on the surface, such as rain drops, footprints, hatched dinosaur eggs, cave systems, sand dunes, burned forests, swamps, etc. 

So why aren't any of these things problems for the creationists?

Biblical creationists presuppose the Bible’s truth and subsequently the true history of the earth—including Noah’s Flood. Evolutionists have presuppositions too, albeit, false ones, but presuppositions nonetheless. This is why when evolutionists look at Flood rock they unwittingly believe that the rock was actually laid down slowly and gradually over long ages. I suggest they have been indoctrinated to believe such stories as gradual rock accumulation over millions of years which has never been observed or repeated. Thus, the concept of millions of years is not in the realm of science but interpretation.

The reason that "evolutionists" do this is because every bit of the palaeontological and geological evidence points to a long depositional history with evolutionary diversity.  It is not a matter of indoctrination.  It is a matter of going where the evidence leads.  One might reasonably argue that if you put on young earth creationist blinders, you do not see the vast stretches of time and the changes that the earth has gone through in its long history, but, instead, a flat earth. 

It is common to find nonsense on the AiG site, but this rises to a new level of inanity. This post is terribly written, incorrect, pompous and insulting.  The writer provides no evidence for the position he takes, insults the hard work of scientists who have spent decades piecing together the geological and fossil records, and betrays complete ignorance of basic geology and palaentology.  It is hard to be charitable to Mr. Hodge, who plainly knows nothing of which he writes and, as a result, produces pure drivel. 
 

New Ancestral Native American Population Discovered: The YEC Interpretation

On the heels of the discovery of the new ancestral Native American DNA, several young earth creationists have claimed that the discovery supports the global flood model and a young earth.

Uh huh.

From the Baptist Press:

After scientists extracted the DNA, they dated it to approximately 11,500 years ago, according to common evolutionary dating methods, and discovered commonalties between the harvested genome and the DNA of modern Native Americans. Researchers also found the ancient infant girl had ancestors in East Asia some 35,000 years ago according to evolutionary dating methods.

The finding marks the second oldest human genome ever discovered in North America, The New York Times reported.

Nathaniel Jeanson, a Harvard-trained research biologist with Answers in Genesis (AiG), told Baptist Press the dating of the Alaska DNA seems to be inaccurate. But other details of the find, he noted, corroborate the account in Genesis 11 of mass human migration following attempted construction of the Tower of Babel.

The Nature study, Jeanson said, is “more evidence for people in the Americas from Asia -- East Asia, Central Asia" and "is consistent with Scripture.”

It is also consistent with every single model of population movement into the New World since the 1970s. It may be the oldest DNA found in the New World, but it still supports all of the previous models.  And, on what basis is the dating wrong?  Jeanson is willing to take everything else at face value, including the idea that this represents the first peopling of the New World.

How would he know this if the dates are wrong?  Again, from the article:

Kurt Wise, a Southern Baptist and Harvard-trained paleontologist, told BP in written comments the 11,500 "radiocarbon years" cited by Nature "amount to many fewer true (chronological) years (probably closer to 4,000-4,100 years)."

"If one considers the ages" given by Nature “in relative terms, the new findings are consistent with a dispersion of humans from Babel,” said Wise, professor of natural history at Truett McConnell University, “people making it to western-most Europe, southern-most Africa, and eastern-most Asia first, then coming through the Bering Strait from western Asia into what is now Alaska ... and spreading from there into northern, central, and southern South America.

“So, these remains,” Wise said, "are most probably of a population of people spreading out from Babel” -- a reality he termed “rather exciting!”

How does one take the dates ”in relative terms?”  That is why they call it absolute dating.  Relative dating is when something is older than something else based on its position in the geological column.   Additionally, the reason that we can identify it as a population that is ancestral to later Native Americans (some of them, anyway) is because of the genetic similarities to very-eastern Siberian and north Chinese populations that existed some 30 to 40 thousand years ago in those areas and who's descendants migrated over the Bering Strait.

If the flood really had happened sometime between 2400 and 2500 B.C., there would be no such genetic diversity.  Everyone would have very similar DNA and it would be traceable to some area around northeastern Turkey/southern Armenia/Black Sea.  Yet those people are very distinct, genetically from east Asians and Europeans. 

In short, this DNA strand constitutes no evidence, whatsoever, for a migration of people after the Noachian Flood.   

New Ancestral Native American Population Discovered

Science Alerts is running a story about genetic research done to reveal ancestral populations.  Peter Dockrill writes:

Sunrise girl-child ("Xach'itee'aanenh T'eede Gaay") lived some 11,500 years ago in what is now called Alaska, and her ancient DNA reveals not only the origins of Native American society, but reminds the world of a whole population of people forgotten by history millennia ago.

"We didn't know this population existed," says anthropologist Ben Potter from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

"It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this newly revealed people to our understanding of how ancient populations came to inhabit the Americas."

When I was in graduate school, the common understanding was that Meadowcroft Rockshelter was occupied as early as 23ky. Although this date was disputed, on the basis of presumed groundwater contamination, a paper by Paul Goldberg and Trina Arpin, from 1999, seems to confirm the early date. Meadowcroft is in Pennsylvania and likely was within 50 miles of the maximum edge of the Cordilleran Ice sheet.

Still, this is a neat find.

Ken Ham's Comments on SES National Conference on Christian Apologetics Called "Unhelpful"

Ken Ham attacking other Christians?  Gee, who knew?  An article that is running in the Christian Post recounts an exchange between Ham and Southern Evangelical Seminary president emeritus Richard Howe.  The irony is that they are both young-earth creationists.  Michael Gryboski writes:

Ham was part of a dialogue event at the SES National Conference on Christian Apologetics in October, titled "God's Word or Man's Word: From Where Must Apologetics Begin?" He insisted that unwavering belief in God's Word must be the beginning of any apologetics discussion and criticized SES Professor Emeritus Richard Howe for arguing that a defense of the faith can begin with a discussion of natural law.

Ham said in his assessment of the event that Howe "seemed rather weak in his convictions and not very knowledgeable of the biblical and scientific arguments in favor of young-earth creation. And he is very opposed to the way that I, and AiG in general, defend Genesis."

SES President Richard Land, calling the young-earth creationist's comments "unfair and unhelpful," asserted in a statement, "One will be hard pressed to find a more conservative and steadfast seminary dedicated to teaching and defending the foundational doctrines of the historic Christian faith. SES is one of the last bastions of a robust view of biblical inerrancy."

At issue, apparently, is the way in which the Bible is used to determine truth. The suppositional, or classical model supporters argue that one must “marshall” evidence for a position on whether or not the Bible is true. The presuppositional model supporters argue that the Bible is de facto true and that this perspective precedes any understanding or reasoning about the nature of reality. Ham takes the latter position.  Gryboski further writes:

“Compromise positions on Genesis are permeating our seminaries and other Christian institutions. Academics have come up with all sorts of fanciful ways to twist the Scriptures to try to fit in millions of years,” wrote Ham.

Land clarified that all SES trustees, faculty, and staff, which include both young-earth and old-earth creationists, believe the Bible is infallible and inerrant. The issue of the age of the earth — which was not the focus of the conference dialogue — is a matter of interpretation, he noted.

Despite Ham's letter, Land said SES is “committed to furthering this dialogue,” so much so that they have extended an invitation to Ham to participate in a formal debate at next year's conference.

There is a large, unspoken philosophical problem with the presuppositional model in what Ken Ham writes, and it is this: adopting the presuppositional model ‘presupposes’ that you not only have the correct translation of the Bible but that you have correctly interpreted every single passage, down to the last word. A cursory check of the literature, past and present strongly suggests that such a task is beyond that of mortal man. The fact that there were varied interpretations of the the creation account even in the first couple of centuries after the time of Christ drives this home.  1 Corinthians 13:12 admonishes us thus:

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (KJV)

Howe refers to this in his statement:

“We should all remember that our understanding of God's Word never carries the same authority as God's Word itself does. Believers should always approach God's Word with humility and never equate their understanding of God's Word as being as comprehensive or as infallible as God's Word itself is," he stated. "[W]e believe that the question of the age of the earth is a question of what the Bible is saying not what the Bible is.”

And herein lies the heart of Ham's arrogance: in his mind, He has done these things.

Ham believes he has correctly interpreted the bible to the point where he now feels perfectly at home criticizing anyone who does not do so exactly the same way he does. Ancient and current commentaries be hanged. In his mind, they are simply wrong.

There is no humility in this position.  This arrogance allows him to say that other Christians are not Christians and thus, to preach heresy.  Just like the kerfuffle about the Great Home School convention, Peter Enns was, in Ham's mind, completely wrong and needed to be silenced.  This led the organizers to call his actions “unChristian and sinful.”

As Dan Wilkinson wrote, back in 2014, in response to Ham's assertion that people were leaving the church because of evolution:

No, Mr. Ham, no one’s leaving the church because evolution shows that “the Bible could not be trusted.”

Mr. Ham, they’re leaving the church because of people like you: people who fervently create walls, erect barriers, establish rigid rules for what one must believe in order to be a Christian. They’re leaving the church because your version of Christianity has nothing whatsoever to do with right practice, and everything to do with “right” belief. They’re leaving the church because by essentially demonizing everyone who doesn’t agree with you, you’ve made believing in Young Earth Creationism* more important than Jesus’ explicit explicit commandment to love God and neighbor.

With Ken Ham comes all kinds of mischief, controversy, ill-will and self-righteousness.  His actions are the very opposite of “Christ-like.”

A New Darwin Biography Gets Fisked

Jerry Coyne, a somewhat outspoken atheist and author of the book Why Evolution is True, has written a review of a new book on Darwin titled Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker by A.N. Wilson.  Coyne is baffled:

Given that many of Wilson’s earlier biographies have been admired for their style and insight, and not criticized for pervasive errors, this new project is baffling. Where Darwin’s other biographers have seen a sensitive and kindly man, a scrupulous scientist who willingly credited his predecessors, Wilson finds a greedy “self-mythologizer” desperate to become famous, even if it required ignoring or plagiarizing his forerunners and fellow naturalists.

In every portrayal of Darwin I have ever read, he is constantly generous, respectful, and professional. Coyne suggests that the problem does not lie with Darwin but with Wilson, who evidently makes many errors in this book:

In the most embarrassing error, Wilson claims that the first 50 pages of an important Darwin notebook have been lost forever, asserting that Darwin destroyed them to hide his intellectual cribbing from his contemporary Edward Blyth. In reality, Darwin simply placed those pages in a folder for later use, and they can easily be found online. Whatever Wilson was doing during the five years he spent researching and writing this book, it bears little relation to what we call “scholarship.”

According to Coyne, the same problem that lies at the heart of the book is the same philosophical problem that affects every anti-evolutionist: Darwin simply had to be incorrect about his ideas.  He simply had to be:

Why the sustained animus against Darwin? I think Wilson’s issue is not really Darwin but his ideas. “Darwin was wrong,” is how he opens the book, referring to the theory of evolution. Wilson plainly dislikes evolutionary biology, but, lacking scientific credentials, is not in a position to provide a thorough scientific critique of the field. Instead, he seems to have written a biography — a task he is at least in principle qualified for, having written 20 books on history — as a platform to launch an assault on evolution. Darwin’s character is simply collateral damage.

This kind of book is frustrating on so many levels.  The author has no knowledge of the subject matter so he makes unsophisticated attacks, and he is philosophically opposed to the subject matter so he deems it “bad.”

I once likened this sort of thing to bugs and a bug zapper.  Evolution is such a tempting target that even people that are absolutely unqualified to address it simply can't stay away.  We have seen this with Nancy Pearcey, Eric Metaxas, and others.  It is unfortunate that the reading public find these people informative on the topic.  As someone (probably not Mark Twain) once said: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  Are these people absolutely lying?  Maybe not, but if they continue to repeat the same misinformation time and time again, even after they have been corrected, what difference does it make?

Has Noah's Ark Been Found?

Short answer: no.  But a story in Web Top News would have you believing otherwise. 

More than 100 researchers from around the world recently came together as part of a three-day international symposium on Mt Ararat and Noah’s Ark in Agrı in Turkey to see if they can find the ark’s final resting place.

“My purpose is to visit the sites around the mountain to find clues about catastrophic events in the past,” said Professor Raul Esperante from the Seventh-day Adventist Church-sponsored Geoscience Research Institute.

Their website states their mission is to “discover and share an understanding of nature and its relationship with the Biblical revelation of the Creator God”.

In 2010, a group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers set out to explore the region and find the vessel’s remains.

After a few weeks, they claimed to have found wooden specimens from an ark-like structure 4000m up the mountain.

The mountain is the highest peak in Turkey, standing more than 5100 metres tall.

The team claimed they carbon dated the wood, which proved it was 4800 years old, around the time the ark is said to have been afloat.

Some are not convinced:

Nicholas Purcell, a lecturer in ancient history at Oxford University told MailOnline the claims were the “usual nonsense”.

“If floodwaters covered Eurasia 12,000ft [3700m] deep in 2800BC, how did the complex societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia, already many centuries old, keep right on regardless?”

One of the things that is pointed out by conventional geologists (and by young-earth creationist Andrew Snelling, later in the article) is that Mt. Ararat was a volcano and, if all of the vulcanism that is evident in the geological record really did occur during the year-long flood, it is difficult to imagine how the Ark would have been able to land on Mt. Ararat, which would surely have still been scalding hot. There are other problems with the idea that the vulcanism all occurred in one year but this is not the place for that.

It has always intrigued me why explorer after explorer assumes that the ark is specifically on this mountain.  There is no biblical mandate that the ark has to be here.  In fact, it plainly states that the ark came to rest in the "mountains of Urartu," which is an area of some 400,000 square miles, any one of which would have been just as likely.

But all of this sidesteps the other major problem:

Talking after the initial claims in 2010, Mike Pitt, a British archaeologist, said the evangelical explorers had yet to produce compelling evidence.

He said: “If there had been a flood capable of lifting a huge ship 4km up the side of a mountain 4800 years ago, I think there would be substantial geological evidence for this flood around the world. And there isn’t.”

It is not just that there is no evidence for a world-wide flood, there is a mountain of evidence suggesting that something like that could not have happened.

Goin' on another snipe hunt.  

Newsweek Dabbles in Young Earth Creationism

Kastalia Medrano, of Newsweek, has written a post describing the discovery of a fossilized Antarctic Forest.  The piece starts off innocuously enough:

Scientists announced the discovery of the fossilized trees in Antarctica’s Transantarctic Mountains in November. They believe the forest is the oldest one known to exist in the southern polar region, according to Breaking News Israel. They proposed that the ancient trees preserved a record of a large-scale global die-off event, which raised the planet’s temperature to dangerous extremes and turned its oceans acidic, and ultimately wiped out 95 percent of species on Earth. But they were left with the question of what exactly was the catalyst for those changes.

Then comes the sharp turn:

At least one biblical scholar believes he has the answer: The die-off event was the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis.

“This discovery should be no surprise to those who take Genesis as literal history,” Tim Clarey, a geologist from the Institute for Creation Research, wrote on the ICR website. “The Bible clearly describes a global flood that affected all land masses—why should Antarctica be an exception?”

The problem, of course, is that the Permian extinction is only one of five mass extinction events, and it is not even the first one. It is the third, behind the Ordovician and late Devonian extinctions.The one that took out the dinosaurs was the late Cretaceous extinction.  Furthermore, there are many, many layers of sediment between each extinction event.  So the question: why would this particular extinction event signify the flood?  Why not the most recent one?  Also, isn't it generally thought by young earth creationists that the ENTIRE geologic column represents the flood deposits?  Clarey does not mention this at all in his column.

Part of the interpretation hinges on the discovery of fossil cells, which are explained by an extremely rapid burial, an explanation that Clarey doesn't buy.

Clarey then received a critique from a biblical scholar, Brent Landau, as Medrano writes: 

If you’re not persuaded by the secular community, take it from the religious community. Brent Landau, a biblical scholar from the University of Texas at Austin, told Newsweek that Clarey is “espousing a form of religiously motivated pseudoscience, and a relatively unsophisticated one at that.”

Landau explained that Young Earth Creationists arrive at the idea that the planet is only 10,000 years old through methods like adding up the ages of people written about in the Book of Genesis, and that there’s no need for religious scholars to take that kind of evidence more seriously than the “vast amount of scientific data” pointing to the Earth being around 4.6 billion years old.

“Notice that he links the destruction in Antarctica to the Flood, but insists that the scientists’ date for this catastrophe of 280 million years ago must be incorrect,” Landau wrote to Newsweek over email.

As Carol Hill pointed out, there simply isn't any defensible evidence for a world-wide flood. Even if the fossilized trees were entombed very rapidly, there are many other natural formations that show clear signs of slow deposition. You simply cannot extrapolate one localized area to the entire world, yet this what young-earth creationists continually do.

Modern Humans Came Out of Africa Earlier Than Thought and Did So Multiple Times

If you have been studying human evolution, this story is not new.We have suspected for some time that humans migrated out of Africa in waves, beginning with Homo heidelbergensis, up through archaic Homo sapiens and, now, modern Homo sapiens.  As the story notes, there have likely been multiple migrations of Homo sapiens, as well. 

From the story in Science Daily:

A review of recent research on dispersals by early modern humans from Africa to Asia by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa confirms that the traditional view of a single dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa around 60,000 years ago can no longer be seen as the full story. The analysis, published in the journal Science, reviews the plethora of new discoveries being reported from Asia over the past decade, which were made possible by technological advances and interdisciplinary collaborations, and shows that Homo sapiens reached distant parts of the Asian continent, as well as Near Oceania, much earlier than previously thought. Additionally, evidence that modern humans interbred with other hominins already present in Asia, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, complicates the evolutionary history of our species.

Here is the graphic from the story:

 
What is only hinted at in the article is that when these waves of moderns came out of Africa, they interbred with the archaic hominins that they encountered. Further, this genome was remarkably stable, since there is genetic evidence that there was at least 500 thousand years of separation between them.Also missing from the story is the range of variation that these hybridizations display.  For example, as noted by the triangle on the map, the Xuchang fossils from China seem to show a mix of modern, Neandertal and late Homo erectus morphologies.  As I noted at the time:

The implications of these skulls are stark: there has been widespread population mixing and regional continuity in Europe and Asia for at least 400 thousand years. Not only did the Neandertals feel enough cultural kinship to mate and have children with these East Asian people, the early modern humans coming out of Africa did, as well.

The other peculiar thing about the graphic is that there seems to be no migration pattern through the strait of Gibraltar. This seems odd since this is likely at least one of the routes that were taken by H. ergaster between 1.5 and 2.0 mya, and since it is thought that the Levallois tool technology comes from the Middle Stone Age of Africa, this would have been a likely route of introduction.  There may have been a barrier of sorts, suggested by the fact that the latest surviving Neandertals are from Spain. 

Penguin From Hell

Okay, probably not nearly on the level of the Frog From Hell or the Snake From Hell, but coming into contact with a six-foot penguin would be quite something.  From the NPR Story:
An international team of scientists have announced the discovery of a previously unknown species of prehistoric penguin.

The bird waddled around off the east coast of New Zealand between 55 and 60 million years ago. And it was a giant as far as penguins go. The researchers estimate that it probably weighed about 220 pounds and was around 5 feet 10 inches tall.

"That's about as tall as a medium-sized man," says Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Franfurt, Germany, and the lead author of the new study published today in Nature Communications. "This particular specimen is one of the largest known fossil penguins."

The largest living penguin, on the other hand, the Emperor penguin, is a good bit shorter — around 4 feet.

The scientists have named the new species Kumimanu biceae, which means 'monster bird' in the Maori language. (Kumi is the name of a monster in Maori mythology and manu means bird.)

Here is the image from the story:

(Image credit: Gerald Mayr)

New Jebel Irhoud Date Causes Rethink of Chinese Dali Skull

Newsweek (Yes, that Newsweek) has a story on the reexamination of the Chinese Dali cranium, in light of the revised dates for the Jebel Irhoud skulls.  Kastalia Medrano writes:

Known as the Dali skull, it was discovered nearly 40 years ago in China’s Shaanxi province. It belonged to a member of the early hominin species Homo erectus. Its facial structure and brain case are intact, despite being dated to around 260,000 years ago. The Dali skull is so old that archaeologists initially didn’t believe it could share features with the modern Homo sapiens.

But Xinzhi Wu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing believed that due to the overwhelming physical similarities, Homo erectus must have shared DNA with Homo sapiens. After decades of this idea being dismissed by mainstream academia, Wu and a colleague, Sheela Athreya of Texas A&M University, recently reanalyzed the Dali skull and found it may force us to rewrite our evolutionary history after all. It’s incredibly similar to two separate Homo sapiens skulls previously found in Morocco. “I really wasn’t expecting that,” Athreya told New Scientist.

If we’d found only the Moroccan skulls, and not the Dali skull, it would make sense to keep believing all modern humans evolved in Africa. But the similarities show that early modern humans may not have been genetically isolated from other parts of the world, like what we know today as China.

“I think gene flow could have been multidirectional, so some of the traits seen in Europe or Africa could have originated in Asia,” Athreya told New Scientist.

Okay, now the nuts and bolts.Dali has always been thought to occupy that rarified space between Homo erectus  and early modern Homo sapiens.  It was always thought to be between 200 and 250 kya, and optically-stimulated luminescence dating (a variant of thermoluminescence) places it between 258 and 267 kya.  My analyses of the skull suggested that it was, in no way, shape or form, a modern human but it did not tend to cluster with the Neandertals in terms of head shape.  Athreya and Wu have done an extensive multivariate analysis and conclude (from the article, likely behind a paywall:

When just the facial skeleton is considered, Dali aligns with Middle Paleolithic H. sapiens and is clearly more derived than African or Eurasian Middle Pleistocene Homo. When just the neurocranium is considered, Dali is most similar to African and Eastern Eurasian but not Western European Middle Pleistocene Homo. When both sets of variables are considered together, Dali exhibits a unique morphology that is most closely aligned with the earliest H. sapiens from North Africa and the Levant.

These results add perspective to our previous view of as Dali a “transitional” form between Chinese H. erectus and H. sapiens. Athough no taxonomic allocation is appropriate at this time for Dali, it appears to represent a population that played a more central role in the origin of Chinese H. sapiens. Dali's affinities can be understood in the context of Wu's Continuity with Hybridization scenario and a braided-stream network model of gene flow. Specifically, we propose that Pleistocene populations in China were shaped by periods of isolated evolutionary change within local lineages at certain times, and gene flow between local lineages or between Eastern and Western Eurasia, and Africa at other times, resulting in contributions being made in different capacities to different regions at different times.

In combination with the Xuchang remains, the reanalysis of this skull suggests that, indeed, there is a long and complex interrelationship between different hominin groups that dates back some 400 thousand years. From the paper:

In the braided-stream network model, evolutionary change in China was the result of a shifting network of gene flow among distinct regional Chinese populations, as well as between Chinese and Western Eurasian populations. These were not isolated evolutionary lineages; gene flow both within China and between Eastern Eurasia, Western Eurasia and Africa was intermittent and could explain the similarities in aspects of the neurocranium found here between Dali and Western Eurasian Middle Pleistocene humans. Gene flow would best be described as a braided stream network with periods of isolated evolutionary change within a local lineage at times, and periods of gene flow between local lineages or paleo-demes at other times, resulting in contributions being made in different capacities to different regions at different times.

It is pretty clear that our simplistic models of Recent African Replacement and Multiregional Evolution need to be reworked. It is becoming more apparent that what we are looking at either a polytypic species with a huge geographical range or a syngamion of related species that intermixed regularly. The Xuchang skulls were, apparently, not unique.

Flat Earth Convention in North Carolina

Nuts, I wish I could have gone to this. Stephanie Pappas, at Live Science writes:

A conference aimed at disputing the idea that the world is round just wrapped up in North Carolina.  The first-ever 2017 Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) was held in Raleigh on Nov. 9 and 10, featuring some of the big names in round-Earth denial. Among the speakers were Darryle Marble, who once took a level on a plane to "prove" the Earth doesn't curve; Mark Sargent, the creator of the Flat Earth Clues YouTube Series, who believes all life is enclosed in a "Truman Show"-like dome structure; and Jeran Campanella, a YouTube and online radio personality, who makes flat-Earth, 9/11 Truther and other conspiracy theory videos. [7 Ways to Prove the Earth Is Round]

Apparently, it was quite a smorgasbord of conspiracy theoreticians.  It is always great fun to see how the science is twisted and one can never quite tell if they are serious or not. 

ID Supporter Has Wikipedia Page Erased

Okay, this is just snotty.  Günter Bechly is a palaeontologist who was at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.  Recently, Dr. Bechly came out in favor of Intelligent Design.  For this crime, he has had his Wikipedia erased.  According to David Klinghoffer, at Evolution and Science Today (used to be Evolution News and Views):

Our distinguished paleontologist colleague Günter Bechly was erased from Wikipedia after he came out as a proponent of the theory of intelligent design. That, in turn, was after he had already been pushed out of his curator role at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, for the same reason. The editors at Wikipedia obscured their treatment of Günter, a world-class expert on dragonflies, by claiming his heresy on ID had nothing to do with the decision to excise him. Instead, they innocently proclaimed that it was due to the realization that he isn’t “notable” enough for the online encyclopedia.

I’ve already pointed out the problems with this contention, and noted that the editors of Bechly’s page and of the grossly distorted Intelligent Design page itself make little effort to hide the ideological axes they grind. There’s little mystery about what happened to Dr. Bechly, or to another ID advocate, Walter Bradley at Baylor University, whose Wiki entry was shredded to near nothing. This is one way the scientific consensus on evolution is maintained, by threatening dissenters. For a scientist, having your accomplishments erased is the ultimate punishment. Wiki editors meanwhile indulge atheist nobodies with extensive biography entries.

Aside from Klinghoffer's usual histrionic bluster about silencing people who disagree with “Darwinism,” (Ken Ham, Henry Morris, John Morris, Stephen Myer, Michael Behe and, yes, even Klinghoffer, himself, have Wikipedia pages) the timing is very suspicious.  Additionally, if you thought he was well-known enough to have a Wikipedia page, why is he suddenly not so?  His page needs to be restored. This just makes Wikipedia look bad and smacks of censorship.

Neandertal to Modern Transition Full of Fits and Spurts

New evidence suggests that Neandertals survived longer on the Iberian peninsula than elsewhere in Europe.  The redating of the Zafarraya Neandertal from the late 20k's to between 38 and 40 ky saw a revision of theories about Neandertal extinction. Now more evidence has been unearthed suggesting that this window is more secure.   From The Statesman:

Neanderthals may have survived at least 3,000 years longer than thought in what is now Spain – much after the species had died out everywhere else, a study has found.

The findings suggest that the process of modern human populations absorbing Neanderthal populations through interbreeding was not a regular, gradual wave-of-advance but a “stop-and-go, punctuated, geographically uneven history.”

Over more than ten years of fieldwork, researchers excavated three new sites in southern Spain, where they discovered evidence of distinctly Neanderthal materials dating until 37,000 years ago.

“Technology from the Middle Paleolithic in Europe is exclusively associated with the Neanderthals,” said Joao Zilhao, from the University of Barcelona in Spain.

“In three new excavation sites, we found Neanderthal artefacts dated to thousands of years later than anywhere else in Western Europe,” said Zilhao, lead author of the study published in the journal Heliyon.

It seems pretty clear now that the model of rapid replacement of Neandertals does not hold. This kind of evidence, along with sites such as Lagar Velho, suggest that the transition, at least in this region was long-term, with much hybridization.  We still do not know exactly how long Neandertals persisted in this region.  It makes perfect sense that they would have been the last ones to undergo the transition (however that happened) because the earliest Aurignacian sites, associated with modern humans, occur in far eastern Europe as the wave of moderns came through during the Würm I/Würm II interglacial.

The question that I have is why didn't the earliest modern humans, represented by the Jebel Irhoud remains, come through the Strait of Gibraltar?  North of that, all you find are archaic, all the way down to the Zafarraya remains.  I wonder why this is.

And, Apparently, The Stolen Bone is Only One Problem...

The journal Nature is reporting on a scandal of sizable proportions involving a site of early human occupation in Europe.  Ewen Callaway reports:

Serious concerns have surfaced about three research papers claiming evidence for one of the earliest human occupations of Europe.

In an extraordinary letter posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint server on 31 October1, archaeologists allege that the papers, published in 2013, 2016 and 2017, included material of questionable provenance, and that results reported in the 2016 paper were based on at least one stolen bone. Editors at the journals concerned are publishing expressions of concern about the papers.

The bioRxiv paper is available from the site and, since it is a preprint server, is accessible to anyone wishing to read the story. Here is the bombshell from the paper:

A series of recent papers on the Early Pleistocene palaeontological site of Untermassfeld (Germany) makes claims that are of great interest for studies of earliest Europe and are at odds with the described pattern: the papers suggest that Untermassfeld has yielded stone tools and humanly modified faunal remains, evidence for a one million years old hominin presence in European continental mid-latitudes, and additional evidence that hominins were well-established in Europe already around that time period. Here we evaluate these claims and demonstrate that these studies are severely flawed in terms of data on provenance of the materials studied and in the interpretation of faunal remains and lithics as testifying to a hominin presence at the site. In actual fact any reference to the Untermassfeld site as an archaeological one is unwarranted.

The site is said to have been occupied beginning around a million years ago, which was an astounding claim when it was made.  Critical, however, is that, despite the wealth of archaeological, taphonomic, faunal and floral evidence from the site, there have never been any hominin remains found. 

The article is lengthy but is a fascinating account of a palaeontological mystery and sleuthing.  If the accusations are true, it is blow for the study of early human European occupation and puts a stain on the whole proceedings. 

Ken Ham Comes to Alberta

Young earth creationism is ubiquitous in home school curricula here in the United States.  Ken Ham is trying to make that the case in Canada, as well.  There has been pushback. Bill Kaufmann of the Calgary Herald writes:

Australian-born Ken Ham, a leading Christian fundamentalist proponent of creationism over evolution, is scheduled as a keynote speaker at the Alberta Home Education Association (AHEA) convention in Red Deer next April.

Ham spearheaded the building of a Noah’s Ark-centred creationist museum in Kentucky, and the educational books he’s authored includes Dinosaurs of Eden: Did Adam and Eve live with dinosaurs?

“Those who believe that only the uneducated reject evolution perhaps do not realize that evolution, far from fact, does not even qualify as a theory,” states an entry on his Answers in Genesis website.

“Evolution is a belief system about the past.”

It also offers a line of textbooks in areas of biology, geology and “creation apologetics.”

This is total nonsense. I would quote Todd Wood at this point, but he is probably tired of me quoting him. Suffice it to say, evolution is one of the most well-tested theories on the planet.  If you choose not to “believe” it, that is fine but to say that it is not a theory is just ignorant and foolish.  The more Ken Ham writes, the less I think he knows about how science works.   And now the pushback:

But Alberta Liberal Leader David Khan said while home schoolers have every right to invite speakers like Ham, it raises questions about what those children are being taught as science.

“None of that belongs in science curriculum, which should be mandatory for everyone regardless of whether they’re funded by Alberta Education or not,” said Khan.

“Having a bunch of kids lacking in basic science education is a problem for society writ large.”

He questioned whether Education Minister David Eggen is doing enough to ensure real science is being taught outside conventional classrooms.

While the AHEA doesn’t receive provincial funding, they’re expected to teach fact-based science, said Eggen’s spokeswoman Lindsay Harvey.

“All students, no matter what format of education they receive, are expected to learn from the current Alberta curriculum,” said Harvey.

I am generally not in favor of government oversight in home schooling. When that happens, you tend to get an agenda that seems to be tolerant of everything except “conservative” values.  Having said that, I wonder about all of these kids who wind up going to secular universities and having their faith blown apart by grounded, empirical science.  You can't mandate to homeschoolers what they should and should not teach unless you force a specific curriculum on them but stories like this shine a spotlight on home schooling that might be detrimental in the long run.

I wonder if Ken Ham is even aware of the damage that he is causing.  As Joel Edmund Anderson put it in his book The Heresy of Ham:

I believe that the paranoia, divisiveness, and frustration that the young earth creationist movement fosters wherever it goes should serve as an indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with it. This is not simply a case of Christians having a difference of opinion on a certain topic.  This is a case of a movement willing to declare war on everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, who does not capitulate to what they have unilaterally declared to be true.

I couldn't agree more.

Book Purchase: Adam's Quest

I hate it when books come out that escape my attention.  Such is the case with a book titled Adam's Quest, by Tim Stafford.  In it, Stafford has interviewed eleven scientists who have struggled with their understanding of how their faith fits in with their pursuit of science.  In a sense, this is like the book Four Views on the Historical Adam, in that it surveys Christians from different perspectives.  He has interviewed young earth creationists, supporters of intelligent design and evolutionary creationists.

As readers of this blog will note, I have been extremely critical of young earth creationists and intelligent design supporters, not so much for their beliefs (which I also find issue with, though) but for their ham-handed and often deceptive way in which they treat the scientific evidence for an ancient earth and evolution.  At least Todd Wood, one of the assembled scientists, has also had issue with this and, from what little I have read of Kurt Wise, he has as well.

Patheos has a short introduction to the book, which focuses on the first group, the young earth creationists, and some of their consternation at the way that science is examined.  There is a passage with a particularly damning quote from Kurt Wise about this:

After that, Wise lost interest in creationist apologetics, especially as he began to realize that many of the creationist evidences from his reading were wrong. “At first I thought it was ignorance.” As he learned more though, he became convinced that the mistakes in creationist literature were willful. … Wise concluded that for many creationists the end justifies the means. For them, “it doesn’t matter if what you say is true. It matters if it brings people to the right conclusion.” (p. 15-16)

This is, perhaps, why I find people like Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis so contemptible. They pretend to address the scientific concerns in an honest way but misinterpret evidence, arrive at faulty conclusions and smear hard-working scientists as a matter of course.  As i just told my oldest child, I am not going to come right out say they are lying, but it sure looks like it. 

Perhaps one of the scariest parts of the book and one of the principle reasons that I picked it up are in the sample that is available from Amazon, in which the author recounts his upbringing, which is almost word-for-word what I experienced growing up.  He then recounts every Christian parents' nightmare: the falling away from the faith of one of his children, in part because of the strains of learning correct science and being told that he could not be part of his circle of church friends if he continued to accept an old earth. 

Right now my children are in a home school group that is heavily young earth creation-based and I know that several of the parents of their friends would be horrified if they knew that I was an evolutionary creationist.  I simply don't advertise it. One of them thinks of Ken Ham as a hero of the faith.  How would it be of value for me to confront her with the notion that I think he is a charlatan and a heretic? 

As of yet, my oldest child does not seem to be tracking in any scientific direction so I doubt that this will have a huge impact on his life.  The same does not seem to be true with my second child, who is enamored with botany.  She will hit evolutionary biology head-on in college and I will have to prepare her for that and how to hold onto her faith throughout.  That will be, perhaps the greatest challenge that faces me. 

I look forward to reading this book with interest and would encourage downloading the sample.

Uh Oh

Answers in Genesis is expanding into Canada, according the its leader, Ken Ham.  Patheos reports the following:

Answers in Genesis, the Creationist ministry run by Ken Ham, is evolving. Ham says that an Answers in Genesis–Canada is scheduled to open in 2018, with an online store launching earlier. It’ll be run by Calvin Smith, an Ontario native who has spoken about Creationism at churches across the nation since 2001.

From the Answers in Genesis website:

According to a recent study, a mere 15% of Canadians have any kind of creationist belief. The church there desperately needs AiG resources to be equipped to stand on the authority of the Word of God and boldly preach the gospel. We’re excited to be part of encouraging and equipping our Canadian brothers and sisters through speaking events, resources, conferences, and more.

AiG produces the world’s leading creation-apologetics resources including books, DVDs, curricula, the Answers Bible Curriculum (used in over 10,000 churches), and one of the top Vacation Bible School (VBS) programs used by over 5,000 churches last year.

For those of us who view Ken Ham's efforts in this direction with great apprehension, this is not good news. As Joel Edmund Anderson and Ted Davis note, Ken Ham preaches heresy and revisionist history. The more I read of the AiG site, the more I am convinced this is true.It is worth quoting Anderson again, here:

The heresy of Ham that is actively “subverting, destabilizing, and destroying” the core of the Christian faith is the claim that a modern, scientific interpretation of Genesis 1-11 as literal history is fundamental prerequisite for the trustworthiness of the Gospel of Christ. It is the claim that if the universe is not 6,000 years old, if there was no historical Adam and Eve, and if there was no worldwide flood 4,000 years ago, then that would make God a liar, that would mean there is no such thing as sin, and that would mean Christ died for nothing. Such a message is heresy, and that message has subverted, destabilized, and destroyed the Christian faith of many people, has destroyed careers, and unfortunately, has taken root within a significant portion of Evangelical Christianity.

Amen.

Taboo on Incest May Go Back at Least 34K Years

ZME Science is reporting on a study done from the site of Sunghir, in Russia that preserves “complex social structures,” indicating that, even at 34,000 years ago, there were precautions against inbreeding. Why do we think this?

The Upper Paleolithic burial site contains the complete remains of an adult male, the symbolically incomplete remains of another male, as well as those of two younger individuals. All of these people lived at this site during the same time. Unusual for similar finds from this period, all the four males were buried together.

When a team of scientists at the Cambridge University and the University of Copenhagen analyzed the genomes of these individuals, they were surprised to find they were not closely related. At most, one of the adults was no more related to the boys than a great-great-grandfather.

The researchers speculate that artifacts found at this location, which includes pieces of jewelry, may have been used in ceremonies and rituals that celebrated the exchange of mates between groups. Perhaps such exchanges foreshadowed modern marriage ceremonies.

In addition to the evidence that modern humans formed close-knit communities more than 30,000 years ago, this evidence also indicates that they deliberately sought mates beyond their immediate family.

Humans changed from a promiscuity-based relational strategy to pair-bonding at some point in their evolutionary history, which resulted in more stability.  Read the whole thing. 

The Effect of Neandertal DNA on Modern Humans

After the 2013 sequencing of the Neandertal DNA, Janet Kelso, of the Max Planck Institute undertook a study to see what genes present in Neandertals still had an effect on modern humans.  The study employed the data from a genotyping project done by UK Biobank, which surveyed 500,000 people.  What did they find? 

Kelso and her team first narrowed the sample to include only the 112,338 individuals with white European ancestry (whose genomes contain Neanderthal DNA), and used these data to tease out which traits are influenced by Neanderthal genetic variants. The traits they identified included those that affect hair color, skin color, skin tanning and burning, sleeping patterns, mood, and tobacco use.

For example, being a self-described night owl and being prone to daytime napping were both traits positively influenced by Neanderthal variants, as were loneliness, low mood, and smoking. Genetic loci associated with having red hair were found to be devoid of Neanderthal variants, suggesting red-headed Neanderthals were either rare or non-existent. The new study also supports Capra and colleagues’ previous observations that Neanderthal variants are associated with sun-induced skin lesions, mood disorders, and smoking.

That traits such as skin color, sun-burning, and sleep patterns were identified by the analyses might be explained by the Neanderthals’ adaptations to life at more northern latitudes, suggests Capra. But for other traits, he notes, determining how the effects seen in present-day people might once have affected Neanderthals themselves “is one of our crucial challenges.” For example, he says, “of course, Neanderthals were not smoking.”

Maybe I am behind the times but I did not know there was a “trait” for tobacco use. I figured you either did that or you didn't. Like Robin Williams says in Dead Again: either be a smoker or don't be a smoker. Choose it and be it.

I suspect we will continue to find effects of the Neandertal genome, especially since our understanding of how much interbreeding there was continues to change.  It is also a testament to the stability of the human genome that, even after a separation of some several hundred thousand years, interbreeding was still possible.  

Creation Museum Having Positive Impact on Economy of Florence, KY

Cincinnati.com is running a story about the impact that the Creation Museum is having on the economy of a nearby town, Florence, Kentucky.  Chris Mayhew writes:

Comfort Suites opened 84 rooms off Houston Road at 5905 Merchant St., Florence, in July. A busload of tourists from Alabama visiting the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter filled 24 Comfort Suites rooms for three days Sept. 27-29.

Tourism for Newport on the Levee, Downtown Cincinnati and the Creation Museum bring regular visitors, owner Ravi Narsinghani said.

Comfort Suites was Narsinghani's second hotel in Florence he owns with his brother. The brothers will open a third Florence hotel soon.

"We have an upscale extended stay coming," he said.

It is good that the local economies are getting a needed boost from this, even if it is for the wrong reasons.

NCSE Post Reflecting on Kitzmiller, Twelve Years Later, by Eugenie Scott

NCSE has a guest post by Eugenie Scott, in which she remembers some of the points about Kitzmiller that might not have been public at the time.  It is part one of two.  In the run-up to the Kitzmiller trial, the plaintiffs did not know who the judge would be:

Well, the case was assigned to John E. Jones III, a fiftyish Republican who had been appointed by George W. Bush to the federal bench a few years before. “Intelligent design” proponents were delighted! In their blogs, they were quick to point out that Jones was a mover and shaker in Pennsylvania GOP politics, was a self-described conservative Republican, and was a church-going Lutheran, who certainly would be likely to find the ID policy constitutional.

I must say, our lawyers, who pay attention to judges more than we science types do, were a little apprehensive. What was this guy going to do? He’d only been a federal judge for a couple of years, so there wasn’t much of a record to go on.

His being a person of faith wasn’t an automatic concern. It’s so easy to misconstrue the creationism/evolution controversy falsely as “science versus religion,” when really it is one particular religious perspective versus everyone else’s. People are sometimes surprised to learn that our best allies in support of teaching evolution are other Christians: Catholics and mainstream Protestants— such as Disciples of Christ [with which Transylvania University is affiliated]—don’t want children taught Monday through Friday in science class that God specially created the universe in its present form 6,000 years ago, and then have to straighten them out on Sunday—because their theology is that God created through evolution.

One of the things that came out of the trial was how much the defense lied about what their true motives were. Although her post does not mention these events, it is an interesting account.

Why Is Homo floresiensis Still Such a Mystery?

Cosmos Magazine has an article by Debbie Argue, biological anthropologist from Australian National University, about Homo floresiensis and why it has been a struggle to accurately and adequately place this hominin within the framework of human evolution.

 Here was the initial assessment:

Peter Brown and colleagues originally proposed two competing hypotheses about the origins of H. floresiensis. One is that the species is an early hominin similar to the earliest identified in the Homo genus. The fossils for these species are known only from Africa and are between one and two million years old. This implies that the ancestors of H. floresiensis could have got to Flores Island in the vicinity of a million years ago and survived there until at least 60,000 years ago.

Their alternative hypothesis was that H. floresiensis is a dwarfed descendant of Homo erectus, which is the only known non-sapiens hominin to once have existed in Indonesia. Its remains have been found on the island of Java. According to this view, the dwarfing of H. erectus was an evolutionary response to being isolated on an island with a limited food supply. Just as the Asian elephant evolved into the dwarfed Flores stegodon after becoming marooned on the island, H. erectus could have met a similar fate.

It was also proposed that this hominin might have expressed microcephaly.  This idea failed to explain other aspects of the skeleton, however, such as its diminutive height (around 3 feet), long arms and feet and primitive skull features. Here is an image of H. floresiensis compared to a modern human, who had been running around the landscape for at least 100k years while H. floresiensis was extant.

This all saw at least some resolution with the discovery and description of some remains  on another areas of the island Flores that were very similar to the H. floresiensis remains but dated to some 600 thousand years earlier than the remains in Liang Bu.  This lent more credence to the idea that H. floresiensis was, in fact, an offshoot of Homo erectus.

So, Argue, along with Colin Groves, Bill Jungers and Mike Lee, performed statistical tests (this story does not say which kind, a peculiar omission) on a number of different hominin species, comparing them to H. floresiensis.  What did they find?

We therefore hypothesise that H. floresiensis shared a common ancestor with H. habilis. We do not know who that ancestor was or when it lived, but it would have to be older than the oldest H. habilis specimen known, so older than 1.75 million years. The implication is that the H. floresiensis ancestor evolved before that time in Africa, dispersed from that continent, and arrived on Flores earlier than 700,000 years ago, judging by the age of the jaw and teeth found at Soa Basin. This represents a hitherto unknown movement of very early hominins out of Africa.

Presently, the earliest evidence for hominins outside of Africa come from Europe, the Near East and Asia, and date to between 1.5 and 1.8 million years ago. Argue's hypothesis would suggest that H. floresiensis appearance in east Asia represents a separate migration out of African sometime either before or after the wave that saw Homo erectus show up in Trinil and Sangiran, in Indonesia.

Questions still abound as to why this species never saw the evolutionary trajectory that other hominins went through in terms of cranial expansion, increase in height and changes in brachial and crural indices. On the other hand, if evolution proceeds through what we have termed systematics, then advanced traits will show up in related species and if the ancestors of H. floresiensis were cut off, they would just go on their merry way.  We know that such a pattern holds for H. naledi, in South Africa, which coexisted with archaic Homo sapiens, in some way, shape or form. 

The article ends on a very peculiar note, in which she suggests the remote possibility that H. floresiensis is still alive out there, somewhere:

Could the Hobbit still exist in the wild mountain forests of Flores? When H. floresiensis was announced, the media picked up on the local folklore that small human-like creatures roam the forests. Descriptions of sightings are well recorded and quite detailed. The similarity to H. floresiensis is intriguing. But most researchers would say ‘show me the bones!’

This reminds one of the stories involving the Yeti/Sasquatch/Abominable Snowman, which likely derive from the finding of the bones of the Miocene ape Gigantopithecus, which was close to ten feet tall, when standing.  Is H. floresiensis still out there?  Probably not, but I am sure that the cryptozoologists haven't given up hope. 

Genetic Model Identifies Paranthropus boisei as Vector For Transmission of Herpes Virus

CNN (usual caveats) reports on a study that identifies Paranthropus boisei as the likely transmission vector of genital HSV-1.  From the story:

Herpes has been around a long time, to say the least.

Ancient chimpanzees genetically passed oral herpes (herpes simplex 1, or HSV-1) to the earliest humans millions of years ago when our lineage split. And we almost missed out on catching that other scourge, genital herpes (HSV-2) -- almost. Unlike HSV-1, HSV-2 didn't make the leap to early humans on its own.

Unfortunately for modern humans, millions of years ago, an early human ancestor was in the right place at the right time to catch HSV-2. And it might not have happened if it weren't for that meddling hominin species Paranthropus boisei, according to a new study in the journal Virus Evolution.

Why Paranthropus boisei, you ask? After all, P. boisei was not even on the main line of human evolution, coexisting with all manner of early Homo species at the same time, who likely out-competed them into extinction.  From the article, which is highly technical:

Paranthropus boisei would have been well placed to act as an intermediate host for HSV2. It most likely contracted the infection through hunting or more likely scavenging infected ancestral-chimpanzee meat. Processing (with or without tools) and consumption of raw meat would act as a simple path for ChHV1 to have crossed into P.boisei via open cuts or sores. Tropical refugia during hot dry periods may have driven chimpanzees into higher concentrations in certain areas, driving them into contact and competition with P.boisei and H.habilis as the margins of tropical forest blended into more open savannah-like habitats (Julier et al. 2017). Violent confrontation or hunting/scavenging and butchery practices would have provided a viable path of transmission for HSV2. Homo habilis remains have been recovered from the same layers as stone tools and bones carrying evidence of butchery, supporting a possible transmission–through-hunting/scavenging hypothesis for the initial anc-chimp to H.habilis transmission (Clarke 2012). Paranthropus aethiopicus, P. boisei, and P. robustus are associated with the Oldowan stone tool complex (De Heinzelin et al. 1999), and P.boisei explicitly with butchery (Domínguez-Rodrigo et al. 2013) lending support to the hypothesis that bushmeat hunting/scavenging and butchery may have led to the initial transmission of HSV2 to the hominins.

The entire exercise is very mathematical and relies on somewhat limited evidence of P. boisei behavior. It is, nonetheless, intriguing since it posits considerable interaction between the various hominin groups. 

Here is a mugshot of one of the perpetrators, the Zinj skull from Olduvai Gorge, found in 1959. 

Did Humans Become a Distinct Species 350, 000 Years Ago?

The hits just keep on coming.  On the heels of the discovery in Morocco, at Jebel Irhoud, of a skull with some modern characteristics dated to 315 thousand years ago, we now have a genetic study that proposes that our species emerged between 350 and 260 thousand years ago.  How did a genetic study reveal this?  Science News reports:

The trick was retrieving a complete version of the ancient boy’s DNA from his skeleton to compare with DNA from people today and from Stone Age Neandertals and Denisovans. Previously documented migrations of West African farmers to East Africa around 2,000 years ago, and then to southern Africa around 1,500 years ago, reshaped Africans’ genetics — and obscured ancient ancestry patterns — more than has been known, the researchers report online September 28 in Science.

The ancient boy’s DNA was not affected by those migrations. As a result, it provides the best benchmark so far for gauging when Homo sapiens originated in Africa, evolutionary geneticist Carina Schlebusch of Uppsala University in Sweden and her colleagues conclude.

In line with the new genetically derived age estimate for human origins, another team has proposed that approximately 300,000-year-old fossils found in northwestern Africa belonged to H. sapiens (SN: 7/8/17, p. 6). Some researchers suspect a skull from South Africa’s Florisbad site, dated to around 260,000 years ago, qualifies as H. sapiens. But investigators often place our species’ origins close to 200,000 years ago (SN: 2/26/05, p. 141). There is broad consensus that several fossils from that time represent H. sapiens.

What is important to understand is that we have the fossils from Herto and Omo that date to between 150 and 200 thousand but that does not mean that is the earliest time that our species may have actually showed up. The Jebel Irhoud material is only partly modern—in the face mostly—and we do not know how the genetics for this population would look. It is possible that, as some investigators are saying, the Jebel Irhoud material represents the earliest fossil representation of our clade and that over the next 100 thousand years, the modern form fully evolved.