What Were They Building?

The Atlantic (and some other news outlets) is running a story about a remarkable discovery at Bruniquel Cave, in France, of a structure that was created by Neandertals living in the area.  Ed Yong writes:

Some 336 meters into the cave, the caver stumbled across something extraordinary—a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones.

These weren’t natural formations, and they weren’t the work of bears. They were built by people.

Recognizing the site’s value, the caver brought in archaeologist Francois Rouzaud. Using carbon-dating, Rouzaud estimated that a burnt bear bone found within the chamber was 47,600 years old, which meant that the stalagmite rings were older than any known cave painting. It also meant that they couldn’t have been the work of Homo sapiens. Their builders must have been the only early humans in the south of France at the time: Neanderthals.

One truly interesting thing about this find is that it was only made with the aid of torches, which means that the Neandertals who built the structure also had them.

The original discovery had taken place in 1999 but, as of yet, the stalagmites had remained undated. The story continues:

After drilling into the stalagmites and pulling out cylinders of rock, the team could see an obvious transition between two layers. On one side were old minerals that were part of the original stalagmites; on the other were newer layers that had been laid down after the fragments were broken off by the cave’s former users. By measuring uranium levels on either side of the divide, the team could accurately tell when each stalagmite had been snapped off for construction.

Their date? 176,500 years ago, give or take a few millennia.

Most of the burials and other artistic evidence we have from the Neandertals comes from between 50 and 70 thousand years ago, during the height of the “classic” Neandertals, in France and Germany. This discovery, which is thought by some researchers to be cultural or religious, pushes that back a good 100 thousand years.

We are learning a good deal about the hominins that occupied Europe during the Middle Pleistocene and it is surprising.   The recent analysis of the German site of Schöningen, was revelatory, in that it showed hominins living in a setting where there was division of labor, highly advanced communication system, the creation of advanced bone and stone implements and complex hunting 300 thousand years ago.  It is clear that, over the course of the next 200 thousand years, continued cognitive advances were made. “A plausible explanation is that this was a meeting place for some type of ritual social behavior,” says Paola Villa from the University of Colorado Museum.

More pieces of the puzzle. 

New Book Attacks Creationist Explanation of the Grand Canyon

A new book edited by Carol Hill (who has written some very good articles for the ASA journal Perspectives on the Christian Faith, here and here) and others, in the words of the Arizona Daily Sun “Takes Aim at Grand Canyon Creationism.” Emery Cowen writes:

When it comes to relaying the history of the Grand Canyon, a new book co-authored by longtime Flagstaff resident Wayne Ranney takes a different approach to one of the world's most famous geologic features.

What sets the book apart is how it places religion front and center in its discussion of the canyon’s geology. In 240 photo-rich, textbook-style pages “The Grand Canyon Monument to an Ancient Earth: Can Noah’s Flood Explain the Grand Canyon?” highlights the stark divide that continues to exist between some religious views of the canyon’s formation and the prevailing science about its more than 6 million-year-old evolutionary history.

The book does what geologists have failed to do for decades, said Ranney, a former geology professor who has written several books on Grand Canyon. It directly confronts a sector of Christian believers, called Young Earth Creationists, who maintain that the Grand Canyon’s layers were created in one year during Noah's flood and that the event happened along a timeline of Earth’s history that goes back just 6,000 to 10,000 years.

Page after page of the book is dedicated to explaining those beliefs and then showing how the canyon’s geology conflicts with and debunks them.

Lets leave aside the author's notion that this book provides a “different approach” to the formation of the canyon, since The Tusayan National Geographic Bookstore has one (count 'em, One) book espousing the creationist perspective, called The Grand Canyon, A Different View, edited by Tom Vail, while every other book takes the mainstream science approach to the formation of the canyon.

This new work is a welcome book to combat the nonsense of Tom Vail.  When I was at the Tusayan Bookstore a few years ago, I waded through the book—which has to be seen to be believed—and realized that the devotion to the young earth model causes people to concoct absolutely unbelievable geologic scenarios that simply do not stand up to any sort of scrutiny. As Geologist David Montgomery writes:

Digging deeper into the book, I read that the canyon itself was carved when the sediment that formed the rocks now exposed in its walls was still soft. I was puzzled that the authors did not try to explain how a mile-high stack of saturated sediment remained standing without slumping into the growing chasm—or how all the loose sand and clay later turned into solid rock. The book simply stated that, according to the Bible, Noah’s Flood formed the Grand Canyon and all the rocks through which it’s cut in under a year. There was no explanation for the multiple alternating layers of different rock types, the erosional gaps in the rock sequence that spoke of ages of lost time, or the remarkable order to the various fossils in the canyon walls. The story was nothing like the tale I read in the rocks I had spent the day hiking past.

That is one of so many problems with the creationist view (for example, why did the walls of the canyon not collapse, since they were composed of mud and clay and less than a year old?) that it is difficult to take it seriously.

Given that Vail's book was placed in the Science section of the Grand Canyon Bookstore, we can only hope that this one will be placed right next to it.

P.S. anyone with an interest in this area of geology should pick up David Montgomery's The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood, from which I quoted above. It is a great read.

All in the Service of a Message

A Youngstown, Ohio school district has come under fire for its inclusion of a video for tenth grade science that is produced by Adnan Oktar, also known as Harun Yahya, who was once interviewed favorably in the Intelligent Design blog Uncommon Descent (and not so favorably by The Guardian).  Yahya has a long history of being an Islamic creationist, holocaust denier and was jailed for a time in Turkey for unseemly behavior involving his organization and young girls.  

The story, by Zack Kopplin, in the Daily Beast, has this:

Youngstown, Ohio, students are learning creationism in school with materials from a Islamic, Holocaust-denying group accused of being a sex cult.

A curriculum map (PDF) recommends teachers in this public school district show a creationist video, Cambrian Fossils and the Creation of Species, as part of 10th-grade science education. The video claims that the Cambrian Explosion “totally invalidates the theory of evolution.” The Cambrian Explosion was a time period, nearly 550 million years ago, where, over the next tens of millions of years, the number of species on Earth experienced a (relatively) rapid expansion by evolutionary standards. Christian creationists regularly point to this explosion of life as evidence for creation by God and against evolution.

Blink and you’d miss the Islamic connection in the video. A black screen flashes for less than one second that says “this film is based on the works of Harun Yahya.” In the right corner, there’s a gold bubble that says, “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah” in Arabic.

As alluded to above, it seems that U.S. ID supporters and creationists are perfectly happy to hitch their wagons to people like Yahya, as long as the message is anti-evolutionary. This is disturbing, since it obscures the other poisonous aspects of Yahya's message. Kopplin continues:

Youngstown City School District is trying to “teach the controversy,” which is an old creationist argument for sneaking religion into schools, Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s Rob Boston told The Daily Beast.

“The district is doing its students a disservice by pretending that a controversy exists when none does,” Boston said. “That the district is apparently inadvertently using material produced by an evolution-denying, anti-Semitic Islamic TV preacher who has been accused of running a sex cult only makes the situation worse.”

All in the service of a message.

All Europeans of Belgian Descent?

Tech Times is reporting that all modern Europeans are descended from a population from Belgium.  James Maynard writes:

Ancient DNA left over from the last ice age shows that all Europeans, at one time, were descended from early humans living in Belgium. Analysis of genomes also suggested our distant ancestors underwent significant evolutionary changes during the Ice Age and a few thousand years following that frigid era.

A total of 51 genetic samples were examined in the latest study, a vast improvement in understanding compared with the four examples available previous to now.

The study suggests that all modern Europeans sampled could trace their ancestry back to a large population living around 37,000 years ago in what is now Belgium.

Whew!

The semester is over.  Back to posting.

What Happens When You Get Cited by Young Earth Creationists

This is an issue that has plagued Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the past, when you get misquoted by a young-earth creationist.  Now, Dave Hone has written a column for the Guardian about how this has affected him personally:

Recently, I spotted a short creationist essay that had cited a paper of mine on various recent pterosaur finds and which was supposed to be some kind of response to an article written for the Observer. The creationist piece attempted to argue that these new discoveries helped support the idea that these pterosaurs were made by a creator. Oddly enough, I was left rather unconvinced, not least because of the obvious mangling of some fairly simple and very well-known history that contradicts the arguments presented in some delightfully ironic ways.

For a long time, pterosaurs were regarded as rather inept fliers and little more than unusual gliding reptiles, but this view has been overturned with more modern studies. In his piece on how our understanding has changed with new research, palaeontologist Dr Mark Witton wrote in the Observer that in the past, pterosaurs had been regarded as little more than “gargoyles with lanky limbs”. Our valiant creation-support correspondent then asks “Was th[is] description… a result of mere evolutionary speculation? Based on seeing pterosaur fossils occur in strata below other flying vertebrates, perhaps evolutionists reasoned that pterosaurs evolved first and therefore represented evolution’s initial, clumsy attempts to produce large flyers.”

Ah. Now, you see, there are a fair few issues here. Although the idea of changing species had been around for many years, there’s a good reason that biologists give so much credit to Darwin and On the Origin of Species for laying down the foundations of natural selection and ideas about changes over time. Darwin’s work was published in 1859, but pterosaurs were discovered around 1780 (see Wellnhofer, 2008; a point made in Witton’s piece but mysteriously overlooked). Early thoughts about them could therefore hardly have been influenced by “evolutionists” as there can’t really have been many around. Indeed, early researchers had considered pterosaurs might be marsupials and amphibians, or perhaps swimming animals (Wellnhofer, 1991) before most settled on flying reptiles.

Because the writer does not have the background to properly assess the prehistory of pterosaurs, he makes rudimentary, silly mistakes that destroy his own argument. This is, sadly common in young-earth creation circles and I have dealt with it with regards to the inept posts on AiG's site by David Menton and Elizabeth Mitchell, in which, clearly not knowing anything about the fossil record, they make suspect claims about the individual fossils that do not bear up under close analysis. 

Another hatchet job by AiG.

Kansas Court Rejects Argument that Evolution is Religion

Raw Story is reporting that the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the motion of Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE) to stop the teaching of evolution in the public schools on the grounds that it constitutes religion.  David Edwards writes:

After the state of Kansas adopted Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in 2013, Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE) argued that teaching science without a religious explanation for the creation of the universe would indoctrinate children into atheism.

COPE said that teaching evolution took children “into the religious sphere by leading them to ask ultimate religious questions like what is the cause and nature of life and the universe – ‘where do we come from?’”

“The purpose of the indoctrination is to establish the religious Worldview, not to deliver to an age appropriate audience an objective and religiously neutral origins science education that seeks to inform,” the group insisted.

The court ruled that COPE could not show that any students had been harmed or that it had any evidence that the a religious perspective was being taught.

British Office of Standards and Education Weighs in on Private School Teaching

On the website Politics.co.uk, it is being reported that Ofsted, the Office of Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills has reviewed the curriculum of a private school and found it wanting:

In news that could have wide implications for the teaching of creationism in private schools, an independent religious school in London has been criticised by Ofsted for having a policy which ‘promotes the teaching of incorrect content’ on evolution and creationism, and told that it does not meet the minimum standards for an independent school. Getters Talmud Torah’s downgrading is the first time the British Humanist Association (BHA) is aware of this happening in a private school...The school’s policy states that ‘our curricula for Science, Geography and History will not reference evolution or prehistoric events that would de facto predate the creation of the world 5776 years ago’. Ofsted’s report says that as a consequence of the school’s approach to evolution and the age of the earth, ‘the curriculum still does not ensure pupils have sufficient or correct knowledge and understanding in the required areas of their education.’

The only parallel I can think of in the United States was when a student at a private school had his acceptance to the University of California school system rescinded because they felt that his science education, comprised mainly of creationism studies, was lacking.Here, private schools, even colleges, have enormous latitude in what they can teach.

New Evidence of Monkey Migration

Tech Times is reporting research that indicates that monkeys made the journey from South America to Central America much earlier than thought.  Ted Ranosa writes:

In a study featured in the journal Nature, researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) have identified the remains of an ancient species of monkey known as Panamacebus transitus, which was recovered during excavations for the Panama Canal.

Jonathan Bloch, a paleontologist from the FLMNH, explained that the Panamacebus transitus was a close relative of modern-day capuchin monkeys, or "organ-grinder" monkeys, and squirrel monkeys that are typically found in Central and South America.

An analysis of the prehistoric monkey's teeth revealed that they were encased in rocks that dated back to 21 million years ago. This suggests that the animal was somehow able to reach Panama from South America even before the two continents were connected with the formation of the Isthmus of Panama.

Monkeys are extremely resourceful and a rafting hypothesis has been floating around for quite some time, with little evidence to support it. Now we have some.

WARNING: I almost gave this story a miss because the ads on the Tech Times site are intrusive and omnipresent.  Several videos launched that I was not able to stop.  I get that there is a need to advertise, but this kind of thing is ruining the internet.  

No Extra Vacation For Kentucky Schoolchildren

 A bill that would have extended summer vacation for Kentucky school children has died.  NCSE writes:

Kentucky's Senate Bill 50 (PDF) died in the House Education Committee when the legislature adjourned on April 15, 2016. The bill would have extended the duration of summer vacation in the state's public schools in order to boost tourism — including to a creationist attraction.

[Damon] Thayer was referring to Ark Encounter, a Noah's-ark-themed attraction — now scheduled to open on July 7, 2016 — operated by the young-earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, which also operates a "museum" in Kentucky.

Just think, four extra days a year to go to the hall of misinformation. They would have to spend the next school year unlearning everything they found in the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed, although I am quite convinced that it was the practicality of implementing the law that swayed them rather than any understanding that the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter do not actually teach any real science.

Creationism in Poland?

NCSE is reporting that a creationist book has been distributed to Polish schools, even though they did not ask for them.  They write:

A controversy is smoldering over the distribution of a creationist book to schools in Poland. According to Gazeta Wyborcza (March 2, 2016), unsolicited copies of Maciej Giertych's Ewolucja, Dewolucja, Nauka (Evolution, Devolution, Science) were sent to the biology teachers in public and private secondary schools across the country in early 2016.

A dendrologist and socially conservative politician, Giertych is also a persistent critic of evolution. For example, in 2006, as Ulrich Kutschera reported in Reports of the NCSE, Giertych moderated a seminar at the European Parliament (in which he was then representing Poland) in which evolution was criticized by a number of creationists.

A critic of Giertych's remarked that the book uses very little in the way of hard evidence and is biased in presentation.  Creationism keep rising in unexpected places. 

Ken Ham Endorses Evolution

In a surprise announcement, Answers in Genesis leader Ken Ham has taken an about-face and now agrees that the theory of evolution is, in fact, the best way to explain biological diversity.  In a statement for Kentucky.com, Ham said:

“I was challenged to go to the BioLogos site by a reader and, after reading a number of articles on evolution, I realized that my understanding of it has been seriously hampered by my rigid, narrow mindset. It was really an eye-opener.”

Ham further said that he will take down all of the anti-evolution articles that are currently circulating on the site and replace them with more important articles about how to build up one's faith and reaching out to people in a secular world.

Louisiana Votes To Keep the LSEA

The Times-Picayune is reporting that the Louisiana legislature passed up an opportunity to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act.  Julia O’Donoghue writes:

State Sen. John Milkovich, D-Shreveport, made the case for teaching creationism in schools Tuesday night (March 29).

"Scientific research and developments and advances in the last 100 years -- particularly the last 15, 20, 10 years -- have validated the biblical story of creation," the freshman state senator said.

Milkovich, who is the vice chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said archeologists and scientists have verified the origin story of the Christian Bible. He said archeologists had found the remnants of Noah's ark recently. A study of rocks had verified that the earth was created in a week, Milkovich said.

Milkovich isn't the only member of Senate Education Committee who thinks creationism should be taught in schools. The panel voted 4-2 to reject legislation that would have repealed an unconstitutional -- and unenforceable -- law that requires creationism be taught in schools.

Archeologists have found the remnants of Noah's ark recently? Really? Here is what he is what he is referring to (BTW, read Todd Wood's ideas in that link of why we will never find Noah's Ark.  It is ingenious without quite rising to the level of conspiracy theory).  That boat's never going to be found.  The other thing that caught my eye was the letter in front of Milkovich's name, “D.”  This suggests that the teaching of creationism is so ingrained in this area of the south that it crosses party lines.  In fact, there is a healthy mix of Ds and Rs in the story, on both sides. 

A Tour of The Ark Construction

Brandon Ambrosino writes about a tour of the construction site of the Ark Encounter.  He remarks that he was “one of a handful of journalists being led through the empty structure by Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis, or AiG.”

The Ark Encounter (Ark-n-Park) is scheduled to open on July 7, 2016, a date that has been chosen because it corresponds to Genesis 7:7, the verse where Noah, his wife, their sons and wives entered the ark.  Ambrosino writes:

Throughout the tour, an armed guard sticks close to Ham, which, we’re told, is standard for media visits. Ham shows us where Noah’s bedroom will be as well as photos on his phone of what some of the other exhibits are expected to look like. AiG boasts that the ark is the world’s largest timber-frame building. Based on the dimensions given in the Bible, the structure is 510 feet long*, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high. If you laid all this timber end to end, it would stretch from its home in Williamstown to Philadelphia. After the ark opens its doors in July, AiG plans to eventually work on a replica of the Tower of Babel, described in Genesis 11. The entire project will cost more than $150 million, with the first phase costing $91 million. According to estimates from America’s Research Group, the Ark Encounter will host between 1.4 million and 2.2 million visitors in its first year.

Ambrosino is then treated to the general philosophy behind the Ark Encounter and a defense of young earth creationism:

In the world of creationism, any counterfactual is taken to be evidence in the creationists’ favor. When the science complements AiG’s interpretation of the Bible, the science is right. When it challenges it, the science is wrong. What is never wrong, though, is the Bible. According to one article on AiG’s website, “When a scientist’s interpretation of data does not match the clear meaning of the text in the Bible, we should never reinterpret the Bible. God knows just what He meant to say, and His understanding of science is infallible, whereas ours is fallible.”

I asked [Nathan] Jeanson why he thought virtually all scientists accept evolution and an old age of the earth. He gave me two reasons. The first, he said, is answered by Scripture, which says that wicked people suppress the truth in their ungodliness. The context of that passage from Romans, he says, speaks directly to the origins issue, since it comes from a larger Pauline discussion of nature. “Why do they believe in evolution?” asks Jeanson. “Because Romans 1 tells us they’re going to.”

The other reason he gives for the small number of creationists is that, simply, the majority of scientists haven’t read AiG’s research. Answers in Genesis has created an entire organization dedicated to studying the science and history contained in the opening chapters of Genesis. The group has spent money opening a museum, and now an Ark, and has launched peer-reviewed publications, and has hired dozens of thinkers — none of whom, it should be noted, are idiots; Jeanson is a very sharp, poised man — to demonstrate how modern-day science proves the truth of the Bible.

Jeanson says he’s pleaded with evolutionists to read AiG’s literature, but none of them want to. They’re so biased, he says, that they don’t even want to consider the arguments of creation science.

There are a few things about this passage that really bother me. First, the notion that if science comes up with a finding that doesn't agree with the narrow six-day reading of Genesis, that they are "ungodly" and committing sin by suppressing the “truth.” This cuts to the heart of AiG's core philosophy, that if you don't agree with their interpretation of scripture, you are guilty of sin. This is abhorrent. No other Christian organization that I am familiar with is this arrogant and haughty about their beliefs.  The second statement about scientists not reading their literature, is simply wrong.  There are plenty of scientists who don't want to bother with it but there are quite a few that do.  The only reason that I know that Elizabeth Mitchell's articles on human fossils are full of garbage is because I read them.  Other people do, as well, and you can find reviews of AiG's literature all over the net.  They have, indeed, considered the arguments of creation science and found that they don't have any support.  Nice try, Jeanson.

The article covers all bases, though, to its credit.  Interviewed are Pete Enns and Brad Kramer, of BioLogos, both of whom argue that creationism is harmful because it sets people up for a crisis of faith later when they encounter real science.  They are correct, and I wonder how many people have been led astray and lost their faith by the teachings of AiG.  


*Actually, this is not the correct length given in the Bible. This length is based on the Sumerian cubit.

More Evidence of Hybrization Between Archaics and Moderns in Africa

Nature's Research Highlights points to a paper written for the journal Genome Research, in which the authors, using whole genome analyses, argue that, for the first time, conclusive evidence of admixture between archaic Homo sapiens and early modern Homo sapiens occurred in Africa.  From the Nature blurb:

Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson and his team analysed the entire genomes of seven individuals from two contemporary Western African Pygmy groups. The researchers identified 265 regions of the Pygmy genomes that may have been acquired through ancient interbreeding with other species, events that could have happened as recently as 9,000 years ago.

The article, itself, points out the nature of introgression in hominin evolution, thus:

Introgression, the transfer of genetic material between closely related species through hybridization, is an important and ubiquitous evolutionary force in both plants and animals (Mallet 2007). Although hybrids are often nonviable or infertile, hybridization can be an important driving force for the origin of novel traits and new species (Mallet 2007; Zinner et al. 2011). Within our genus, Homo, there is strong evidence for multiple introgression events between our own species, H. sapiens, and now extinct sister taxa outside Africa (Pääbo 2014). Neanderthal whole-genome sequencing (Green et al. 2010; Prüfer et al. 2014) revealed that Neanderthals contributed an average of ∼2% of the genetic variation of present-day humans living outside of sub-Saharan Africa. This gene flow likely took place 37–86 thousand yr ago (kya), after early modern humans emigrated from Africa and before archaic forms went extinct in Eurasia (Sankararaman et al. 2012), and it may have occurred multiple times (Vernot and Akey 2014, 2015; Kim and Lohmueller 2015).

It has been found, for example, that aspects of our immune system owe themselves to Neandertal introgression. This is an often overlooked aspect of how evolution proceeds.  There is continual debate about whether or not Neandertals represent a separate species from modern humans but the evidence that they interbred and exchanged genes is pretty good at this point.  The authors suggest that introgression of archaic genes occurred continually from the period of one million years down to less than 5 thousand years ago. That says something about the depth of the hybridization as well as the persistence of archaic genes in the modern human genome. 

Humans and Meat

New research by Dan Lieberman and Katherine Zink strongly supports what we have suspected for quite some time, that a substantial change in diet of early hominins led to rapid evolution in brain size and social structure.  Brian Handwerk of Smithsonian writes:

After measuring chewing and biting in modern humans, scientists found that a diet that includes one-third raw meat requires far less chewing and bite force exertion than meals of tubers alone. The researchers suggest that with the advent of stone tools, ancient human relatives were able to tenderize their food and make it far easier to chew and digest.

“An important step was just using a simple stone tool to cut our meat and bash our vegetables,” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman.

The idea that fire allowed humans to cook their food and soften it that way has been around for quite some time and arguments usually point to the widespread use of fire toward the end of the Middle Pleistocene as the point where this begins to happen. This is the first time I have seen this argument extended to the early Pleistocene.The article continues:

“If I gave you a piece of raw goat, you would just chew and chew it, like a piece of bubble gum,” Lieberman explains. “Human teeth don't have the kind of shearing ability that, say, dogs' teeth have, and that is necessary to break down meat. With human chewing it just stays in a clump, and studies have shown how that makes digestion far less efficient.”

Cooking makes it easier to chew meat, but evidence suggests that the regular use of fire for cooking didn't pop up until perhaps half a million years ago—far later than the changes to H. erectus. Also, evidence from archaeological and paleontological research points to a spike in human meat consumption by at least 2.6 million years ago.

However, we have plenty of evidence that hominins had begun making stone tools some 3.3 million years ago. Those tools could have been used as pounders to tenderize foods, a practice seen in modern chimps. Flaked tools can also slice foods into easily chewable pieces or remove skin, cartilage and other bits that are harder to chew.

“It's not a coincidence that the oldest evidence for eating meat shows up around the same time as tools,” Lieberman says. “We know that the evolution of meat-eating basically required stone tools. And that had a huge effect on our biology.”

When my wife makes a dish involving chicken breasts, the first thing she does is pound them.  This makes it much softer and easier to eat. 

This is one of the principle reasons I tend to regard arguments in favor of vegetarianism somewhat warily. It is simply not in our nature or physiology to be that way. You can be one, if you wish, but that is not the natural state of things.

More Stones Thrown at the Phrase "Theistic Evolution"

Forbes has a post by John Farrell, the science and technical writer, about the inadequacy and inappropriateness of the term “Theistic Evolution.”  He points out that those who label themselves as such are often pariahs not just to modern young-earth creationists but to atheists as well.  Both sides regard them as “compromisers.” But, beyond that, he notes that there are problems with the appropriateness of the term, as well.  He quotes Stacy Tracanos, who writes: 

“Think about it. If you are a believer, it is already implied that you see all biological and physical processes as created and held in existence by God. You do not need “theistic” in front of biological terms. Who speaks of theistic reproduction? Or theistic gestation, theistic meiosis, or theistic menstruation? Plus, to qualify a biological process as ‘theistic’ implies that the opposite is possible, that God may not be involved in creating certain laws of nature.”

She is correct about this. This is why I tend to favor the term “evolutionary creationist.” It takes the emphasis off the “evolutionist” and puts it on the “creationist.”  This differentiates it from “progressive creationist” or “young earth creationist.” Farrell finishes with this:

The main point is Christian scientists who accept evolution have a much broader understanding of God than—chief engineer. And ‘theistic evolution’, as its summarized for example at Wikipedia, simply misrepresents their position.

Atheists have voiced many arguments for wondering how Christians can maintain belief in a benevolent deity in a world that features so much apparent waste and suffering ‘built in’ to the program, as science has revealed.

But ‘theistic evolution’ isn’t one of their answers, at least not among the serious scientists I know who are theists. And it’s well past its sell-by date.

Probably true.

Nuclear DNA From the Simo de los Huesos Fossil Material

Nature has a paper that focuses on DNA that has been extracted from the Sima de los Huesos fossil material from the site of Atapuerca, in northern Spain.  The letter does not appear to be behind the pay wall, at the moment.  In 2014, researchers completed a mitochondrial genome sequence for a hominin and the results were interesting, to say the least.  Here is the abstract from the 2014 paper:

Excavations of a complex of caves in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain have unearthed hominin fossils that range in age from the early Pleistocene to the Holocene¹. One of these sites, the ‘Sima de los Huesos’ (‘pit of bones’), has yielded the world’s largest assemblage of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils^{2, 3}, consisting of at least 28 individuals⁴ dated to over 300,000 years ago⁵. The skeletal remains share a number of morphological features with fossils classified as Homo heidelbergensis and also display distinct Neanderthal-derived traits^{6, 7, 8}. Here we determine an almost complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos and show that it is closely related to the lineage leading to mitochondrial genomes of Denisovans^{9, 10}, an eastern Eurasian sister group to Neanderthals. Our results pave the way for DNA research on hominins from the Middle Pleistocene.

The authors argued at the time that Denisovans and the population from Sima de los Huesos shared a common ancestor, with a split of about 700 kya, and that both are more closely related to each other than either is to Neandertals.  This strongly suggests that Neandertals are a later derivation from a common crown group that represented the progenitors of all three groups.  The authors suggest that these findings are unexpected because of the incipient Neandertal traits found in the Sima collection, including occipital bunning in the back of the head and some mid-facial prognathism (it looks like the maxilla is puffed out).  Arsuaga and others have stated previously that they thought all of the Sima de los Huesos material belonged to the Neandertal lineage. That, apparently, is not the case.  As these authors point out, there may have been more than one evolutionary lineage roaming the valleys and forests of Europe.

Now the nuclear DNA has been  sequenced and these results strongly suggest that the people represented by the SH population were, in fact, early Neandertals.  From the paper by Meyer et al:

The nuclear DNA sequences of femur AT-5431 and the incisor show that they belonged to the Neanderthal evolutionary lineage, and the limited data available for the molar suggest that the same is true for this specimen. Thus, the results show that the SH hominins were early Neanderthals or closely related to the ancestors of Neanderthals after the divergence from a common ancestor shared with Denisovans. Although it is difficult to determine the age of Middle Pleistocene sites with certainty, geological dating methods¹, as well as the length of the branches in trees relating the mtDNAs from femur XIII and an SH cave bear to other mtDNAs^{2, 12}, suggest an age of around 400,000 years for the SH fossils. This age is compatible with the population split time of 381,000–473,000 years ago estimated for Neanderthals and Denisovans on the basis of their nuclear genome sequences and using the human mutation rate of 0.5 × 10⁻⁹ per base pair per year⁷

These authors now suggest that, in combination with the MtDNA results from last year, that the SH hominins are ancestral to Neandertals and that the MtDNA found in later Neandertals is derived relative to that in the SH hominins and that the SH hominins may have had several different MtDNA strands. 

It appears that the evidence supports a model in which the classic Neandertals from France and Germany, which are dated to between 50 and 70 kya, represent a more stabilized, homogenous genome relative to that of earlier hominins.  I have always been struck by the similarities between the Atapuerca 4 cranium and Petralona, from Greece, and this suggests that there may have been extensive migration between regions and considerable gene flow between groups (J. Lawrence Angel, again).  We know that the range of Neandertals extended from the lower Iberian peninsula to Teshik-Tash, north of the Taurus Mountains and Okladnikov, in Siberia.  It does not seem like a stretch that their precursors did the same thing. 

Hat tip to Todd Wood.

Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends...

Keith Emerson, formerly of the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer, has passed away.  Reports are that he had been in spotty health and had a degenerative neurological disease in his right hand that was robbing him of his ability to play the keyboards, and there is speculation that this led him to take his own life.  That is such a great loss.

I got plugged into ELP in the early 1970s, when I was 12 and followed them through their break-ups and reunions.  Rolling Stone has put together a “Ten Essential Songs” page with commentary on each song.  Of those, probably Emerson's adaptation of Aaron Copeland's Hoedown shows off his technical skill the best.

It has been a bad last twelve months for those of us that grew up in the 1970s. Chris Squire, Paul Kantner, Glenn Frey, David Bowie, and now Keith Emerson. I saw Todd Rundgren in Atlanta last month. Who knows how many more shows he is going to do, as he is pushing 70. Going to the Steve Hackett show in April. He is 66. Time marches on.

Rest in Peace.

Klinghoffer Responds to the Retraction

David Klinghoffer followed up his initial post about the grasping hand paper with a post involving its inevitable retraction.  Called Censorship in Real Time, he writes:

That was fast. The sound of one hand clapping? Now, it's no hands. Besieged by a furious mob of censors, the editors at the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE have retracted a paper on the "architecture" of the human hand that repeatedly invoked notions of "design" and a "Creator."

This was in the works so it is not a surprise that it happened. It is true that there was a good deal of hand-waving in the process but the claims had no place in a paper of that sort. Then Klinghoffer writes this:

I must note here that the theory intelligent design does not infer a "Creator," a religious idea that goes beyond what the scientific evidence says. ID infers a source of intelligence, and leaves it to others to argue about the identity of the source.

This comment is illogical on its face and cuts to the heart of the position that the Discovery Institute has tried to take.  Something either arose by chance or it was created.  It cannot be neither.  If it did not arise by chance, which is the position of many of the DI fellows on different aspects of our anatomy (eye, blood-clotting cascade), then it was created.  If it was created, then by whom or what?  ID absolutely does infer a creator.

While it is quite true that they do their best to deflect attention away from the Christian God as the source of these creations,  it was shown pretty conclusively at Dover that the two are linked at the hip.  This is further exacerbated by public pronouncements by prominent ID proponents such as William Dembski that ID represents the Logos of John's Gospel restated in information theory (1999) as well as their preferred choice of venues for conferences.

That being said, whether or not it is the Christian God or Cosmic Muffin,  it is a “creator.”