Off-Topic But Incredibly Cool!

A new planet has been found that is reported to be earth-like in its make-up. It is 20.5 light years distant. Read the article.

Fossilized Rain Forest

If this doesn't rain on the parade of the worldwide flood crowd, I am not sure what will.

Chimps more evolved

This is an interesting story suggesting that chimpanzees have evolved more than humans since the ape-human split 6-8 million years ago. The argument is that chimps had larger effective population sizes in the past than humans and that drift may have played a more prominent role. Not sure...

The Discovery Institute Has a Blog

The Discovery Institute's blog, called Evolution News & Views, can be found here. It covers all things ID from that perspective. I would encourage visits and comments to the site.

Oh Canada!

Brian Alters is in the news again. If you remember, he is the one who applied for a grant to determine the effect of ID in Canadian schools and was turned down because the committee felt that there was not sufficient justification for the idea that "evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct."

In an article in the Toronto Star, Alters now warns that the problem is not relegated to small town America and that many school teachers simply do not teach evolution for fear of getting flak from parents. According to the story, 1/3 of public school teachers report getting requests to teach ID or creationism from parents. The story notes:

The situation has become such a concern to scientists that an international team of biologists has put together a new journal to help teachers prepare lesson plans on evolution.

"We've got to teach the teachers," says Daniel Brooks, a University of Toronto evolutionary biologist behind the journal, to be launched in the fall by European academic publishing giant Springer.

That sounds like a good idea. The article also quotes Kent Hovind, who argues that evolution should be taken out of the schools, even if ID cannot be taught. For those of you who are not familiar with Kent Hovind, go here and here. His web page, at DrDino.com is here. As Alters puts it:

"You can't teach biology without teaching the one thing that unifies the whole discipline."

Yup. Theodosius Dobzhansky was right.

Another Transitional Form!

Foxnews has an article on the skeletal remains of an aquatic lizard that had only nubs for front limbs, filling in the link between these animals and the snakes that followed them. Quotes the story:

"It adds to the picture we have of what was happening 100 million years ago," said lead researcher Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta. "We now know that losing limbs isn't a new thing and that lizards were doing it much earlier than we originally thought."

Odd questions remains, though.

"For some oddball reason, the forelimbs were lost before the rear limbs, when you would think it would be the opposite," Caldwell said. "The front limbs would be useful for holding onto dinner or digging a hole, but it must be developmentally easier to get rid of the forelimbs."

Still, this is a good example of a transitional form and at least one evolutionary path that lizards went down.

Equal Time Bill Losing Support in Tennessee?

By way of the NCSE comes this story about the Tennessee Senate Resolution 17, which argued for the teaching of ID in public schools and on which I commented on a bit back, is losing ground. According to the story, Senator Raymond Finney is not sure that going forward with the bill is the best course of action, despite the fact that the Attorney General of Tennessee found that the bill passes constitutional muster. The story notes:

Despite the attorney general's opinion, Finney told the Associated Press (March 14, 2007), "I'm not sure I'm going forward with that ... I'm probably going to reword it anyway. This may not be the time and place for that." Finney cited a heavy legislative workload, but also suggested that he worded the resolution infelicitously, saying, "I probably made a mistake in approaching it from a creation aspect, which raises red flags ... People get so sensitive about whether children might be exposed to any sort of religious thing." But in a story in the Marysville [sic] Daily Times (March 14, 2007), he was quoted as saying, "It's not as extremist as you think it is ...What is clearly demonstrable is that evolution can be disproven using statistical methods. I can't prove religion, but evolution can be disproved."

Evolution can be disproved? This I would like to see. In fact, I would like to see any scientific theory be "disproved." This is how a little bit of knowledge can lead to bad things. Finney has likely read only the writings of William Dembski and perhaps Michael Behe and has no evolutionary biology training. It is also the height of arrogance to suggest that you can overturn 150 years of scientific study with some statistics.

New Modern Human Remains in China!

Fragments of an individual dated to between 42 and 39 thousand years ago have been found in China, filling in a gap between the more recent remains and those of Dali and Mapa, which date to between 115 and 200 kya. Erik Trinkaus thinks that the remains, which show some archaic traits, reflect hybridization between the incoming moderns from Africa and the archaic groups that were there. He notes:

"The pattern we see across the Old World is basically a modern human in terms of its newly emerged characteristics, but also a minority of traits that are absent or lost in the earliest modern humans in East Africa," Professor Trinkaus told the BBC News website.

"The question is where did they get them from? Either they re-evolved them, which is not very likely, or, to some degree, they interbred with archaic groups."

Currently, the next best thing we have is the material from the Upper Cave at Zhoukoudian, dated to around 24-26 kya. China has notoriously been a hard place to determine the pattern of human evolution. This helps a lot.

ER 1470 Gets a Nosejob!

This is potentially quite big news. According to Foxnews, a team led by Tim Bromage at NYU is undertaking a reconstruction of the face of one of the most famous of African hominids, KNM-ER 1470, discovered by Richard Leakey in 1972. Lately, it has become the hypodigm of Homo rudolfensis and I was involved in a Journal of Human Evolution paper that evaluated whether or not the big forms of Homo habilis, represented by ER 1470 and the smaller ones, represented by ER 1813 could be attributed to the same species. We said they could but that alot of assumptions had to be made.

The skull dates to around 1.9 mya which is within the habilis range of dates but looks very different from the other forms represented. I am curious to see what Bromage and his team do to the face. To say that this a controversial undertaking is an understatement. Stay tuned.

Human Evolution Continues?

It has sort of been thought that evolution of modern humans had stopped when humans with modern characteristics first appeared. Now a geneticist, Gregory Cochran, and an anthropologist, John Hawks, state that evolution has been proceeding faster in the last ten thousand years than in the presumed "origin" of modern humans 160-200 thousand years ago. In an article in World Science, they state that modern human brain cases have continued to change dramatically. According to the article:

An­thro­po­l­o­gist Jef­frey Mc­Kee of Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty said the new find­ings of ac­ce­l­er­ated evolution bear out pre­dic­tions he made in a 2000 book The Rid­dled Chain. Based on com­put­er mod­els, he ar­gued that ev­o­lu­tion should speed up as a pop­u­la­tion grows. This is be­cause pop­u­la­tion growth cre­ates more op­por­tu­ni­ties for new mu­ta­tions; al­so, the ex­pand­ed pop­u­la­tion oc­cu­pies new en­vi­ron­men­tal niches, which would drive ev­o­lu­tion in new di­rec­tions.

This is exciting, and may open doors for many different areas of research. It also puts a bit of a crimp in the "rapid replacement" model of modern humans origins. Put simply, if evolution has not slowed down with the advent of modern humans, then it is more of a continuum than was previously thought.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

This Kind of Thing Doesn't Help

According to a story in Southern AP news, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League has asked for an apology from a Georgia politician who allegedly wrote a memo stating that the theory of evolution was originally put forth in the Kabbala. Evolution doesn't seem to have been the problem, though:

"Your memo conjures up repugnant images of Judaism used for thousands of years to smear the Jewish people as cult-like and manipulative," wrote Bill Nigut, the league's Southeast regional director.

The real fun is that, while the politician, Ben Bridges, denies having written the memo, one of his "closest political allies" Marshall Hall, states that he did.

Hall runs a web site called the "Non-Moving Earth and Anti-Evolution Site of the Fair Education Foundation, Inc." which has to be seen to be believed. One quote on the site that stood out to me was this:

This "Doctrine Purification Series" has been written over a period of some twenty years in preparation for that time when all teachings are brought in line with the unquestioned Bible inerrancy and infallibility that will be manifested globally by the exposure of the most fertile deception in Satan’s vast repertoire, namely, the universally believed lie that the Earth is orbiting on an axis and going around the sun.

This all came from an Instapundit post that linked a post by Neal Boortz with the heading "Why People Think Conservatives are Idiots." This is one good reason why.

Report on the Creationist Museum

Truthdig has a report on the construction of the Creationism museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. This museum, the brainchild of Ken Ham, the Australian creationist, is described thus:

It has the appearance of a real science museum, complete with a planetarium, a gift shop and plaques on the wall with quotes from creationist “scientists” who have the title doctor conspicuously before their names. It has charts, timelines and graphs with facts and figures. It is meant to be interactive, to create, like Universal Studios, a contrived reality with an array of costly animatronic men and women as well as moving dinosaurs.

The writer reports the following:

Only 13 percent of Americans in a 2004 Gallup poll, when asked for their views on human origins, said life arose from the strictly natural process of evolution. More than 38 percent said they believed God guided evolution, and 45 percent said the Genesis account of creation was a true story.² Courses on intelligent design have been taught at Minnesota, Georgia, New Mexico and Iowa State universities, along with Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon, not to mention Christian universities that teach all science through the prism of the Bible.

Aside from the inaccurate conflation of recent earth creationism and Intelligent Design, it is not clear that if either of the first two 83% were correct, that we could tell the difference. It seems more interesting to me that 45% of those polled thought that the Genesis account was a true story. One wonders what those polled thought that "true story" meant. I think it is a true story also, just not a literal one. Truth comes in all shapes and sizes and is both literal and figurative. The Primeval History teaches spiritual and religious truth. To paraphrase Conrad Hyers, we don't need to ask any more of it. This doesn't mean that Ken Ham isn't misguided.

Having said that, the tone of the article is condescending, calling YECs "Christo-fascists" Hence the following paragraph:

They pump out articles in self-published journals to provide “evidence” that homosexuals can be cured, that global warming is a myth, that abortion can cause breast cancer, that something they call “post-abortion syndrome” leads to deep depression and suicide and that abstinence-only education is an effective form of birth control.

This has nothing to do with the evolution/creation debate and is insulting to a wide range of people who, like me, are social conservatives, but take evolution seriously. I would encourage reading the comments, as well. They range from supportive to very caustic.

FIFTY-FIVE SMACKERS??????

Sadly, I am not going to be at the Discovery Institute program here in Knoxville. I cannot justify the cover charge of fifty-five dollars, not with four hungry kids to feed. My graduate advisor, Andy Kramer, is going and will take notes. He suggested that I crash the gate at some point. I don't know. I sure know I don't want to give the Institute that kind of money, since I disagree with how they try to effect their program. I don't like deception, and have read enough to think they practice it on several levels. Oh well.

It sort of defeats the purpose of this blog not to go, but there will be plenty of press reports and interviews. Life goes on.

The Discovery Institute is Coming to Knoxville!!

Here is the press release.

By: Staff
Discovery Institute
January 15, 2007

Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture will present a
special series of conferences, Darwin vs. Design, in 2007 and 2008
exploring the growing scientific evidence that life and the universe
were intelligently designed.

These events in selected cities across America will feature leading
scientists and philosophers who are advancing the theory of
intelligent design. Check this page frequently for updated
information about upcoming conferences in your area.

Upcoming Conferences
Knoxville Darwin vs. Design Conference
March 24, 2007
Knoxville, Tennessee
Dallas Darwin vs. Design Conference
April 13-14, 2007
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas

Interestingly, this item showed up on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Technical Calendar. After quite a bit of outcry, it was removed. Nonetheless, it is possible to get discounts if you are en employee of the lab, which I am. I expect to hear alot of "Teach the Controversy."

One Kenyan speaks out against the gagging of evolution.

Well, this is kind of gross, but informative in an evolutionary sort of way.

Horned Dinosaurs

A new dinosaur has been found that has horns. Not in itself noteworthy, the horns are apparently in a family of dinosaurs that are only known for nub-like horns. The new find is called Albertosaurus nesmoi. The story relates:

The oldest known horned dinosaur in North America is called Zuniceratops. It lived 12 million years before [Michael] Ryan's find, and also had large horns.

That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives, said State of Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who with Douglas Wolfe identified Zuniceratops in New Mexico in 1998. He predicted then that something like Ryan's find would turn up.

"Lo and behold, evolutionary theory actually works," he said.

Indeed.

Its Creation Time in Tennessee!

The Nashville Post reports that State Senator Raymond Finney from Maryville is asking the state legislature to sponsor a resolution addressing some fundamental questions about science and open the door to teaching creationism as an alternate view of life. The story notes:

The resolution needs only to be passed by the Republican-controlled Senate in order to force Tennessee's Department of Education to answer on the record. A joint resolution would have to pass the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, where it would likely find itself relegated to a black hole committee and not see the light of day.

Yay rah! It never really goes away completely, does it?

Hard to believe this is the first time we've seen this...

According to a story in the WaPo, chimpanzees have been found to be making sharp weapons, which they are using to hunt small animals. According to the story,

The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust, adds credence to the idea that human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of years ago.
The landmark observation also supports the long-debated proposition that females -- the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps -- tend to be the innovators and creative problem solvers in primate culture.
Using their hands and teeth, the chimpanzees were repeatedly seen tearing the side branches off long, straight sticks, peeling back the bark and sharpening one end. Then, grasping the weapons in a "power grip," they jabbed them into tree-branch hollows where bush babies -- small, monkeylike mammals -- sleep during the day.

This has probably been going on for a long time and we just finally observed it. Neat.

Sorry about the light posting

I have been fighting an infection in the back of my neck for the last week and it seems to have reared its ugly head once again. This stems from the golf ball they pulled out two weeks ago. I will try to do better.