Ken Ham to Give Public School Students a Huge Discount for Ark Encounter

When I saw the eye-popping ticket price for Ken Ham's Ark Encounter, it pretty much cemented my initial decision to not attend, even as a curiosity trip.  Adults 13 and over: $40, children 5-12: $28.  This came in concert with an announcement that the entrance fee for the Creation Museum, itself, would rise from $24.95 to $29.95 to “cover costs.”  As has been pointed out, one only needs to raise ticket prices to cover costs if attendance is flagging or inflationary costs of materials rises dramatically.  Since there have been o significant changes to the CPI in recent memory, it is largely possible that the former is happening.

But now, it seems, that Ham has made an offer of $1 admission to all public school children.  Brad Reed of Raw Story writes:

Hopefully, any school that actually takes advantage of this offer will go there to have students point and laugh at exhibits of Noah’s family rounding up dinosaurs onto an ark.

That said, there is sadly a chance that schools will see the Ark Encounter as a legitimate “educational” exercise, which is why groups like the FFRF are sounding the alarm to parents who don’t want their kids coming home from school believing the Earth was created 6,000 years ago and that Jesus used to heal lepers while riding around on a triceratops.

I will be curious to see if this moves the needle in terms of attendance, which may not be as good as was indicated by Ham.

Ken Ham, Evolutionary Creationism and Reality

Ken Ham has recently taken to the airwaves to lambast those of us who accept the science of evolution but also profess a faith in Jesus Christ as savior and Lord.  This was reported in the Christian Post a few weeks back and I am just now getting around to commenting on it.  Stoyan Zaimov writes:

Young-Earth Creationist Ken Ham, who is getting ready for the opening of the Ark Encounter in Kentucky on July 7, has accused Christians who support the theory of evolution as being people who follow a "religion of death."

"Christians who accept millions of years are mixing the religion of death with the religion of life — death came after sin, Jesus conquered it. Evolution requires death over millions of years, death is a 'friend' that produces life and death ends it all," Ham wrote in a Facebook post over the weekend.

"The Bible describes death as an enemy that will one day be destroyed — through Christ's death and resurrection we are offered life with God. Creation is a religion of life — death is a result of sin, our Creator paid the penalty for sin and offers the free gift of salvation — it's all about life. Christianity vs. secularism is really a battle between the religion of life and the religion of death," he added.

This notion that physical death is the direct result of the fall is a pervasive teaching in modern evangelical Christianity. Has it always been this way, though? Leaving aside all of the genetic and palaeontological evidence that humanity cannot be traced back to a single pair of individuals, is the notion of no physical death before the fall a tenable idea? It isn't from a population standpoint as a world such as that would be massively overpopulated in very short order. As one person wrote about that post: “Was God bad at math?”  Another commented: “How would the threat of death have meant anything to Adam had he not been acquainted with it?”

Theologically, the doctrine of original sin has also been the recipient of much scholarship over the centuries such that Ham's perspective is but one of many.

The current construct of original sin owes much of its formation to Augustine, who, Otten argues, misread Romans 5:12.  He writes:

The RSV reads the following: ‘Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned’. Yet unlike contemporary exegetes Augustine does not read that death spread to all men because all men sinned, as has the Greek original behind the RSV, but ‘because all men sinned in this one man’. All emphasis is therefore on Adam as the progenitor of the human race, whose role is synecdochical for all humanity. Hence we find the human race thrown or
‘lumped’ together as a doomed mass (massa damnata), as it depends entirely on God’s grace for its redemption. If we pursue this line of thought, Calvin’s teaching of double predestination, to the effect that before creation God has elected some for salvation and others for damnation, does not seem that far away, given that it operates on a similar idea that the genealogy of the entire human race can be telescoped into the one figure of Adam in Paradise.

Otten is not the only one who argues for an alternate understanding of original sin. Duffy notes, for example, that there is no actual doctrine of original sin in scripture. He writes:

Notwithstanding, the classical doctrine emerged from reflection on Genesis 2-3. The Adamic myth, however, is not primarily speculation about the first humans committing the first sin, the guilt and consequences of which mark all succeeding generations. As Paul Ricoeur insists, the story is penitential in motive, a reflection of Jewish penitential spirit as revealed in the Psalms and the prophetic literature. The real thrust of the Yahwist's Adam myth is to separate the origin of evil from the origin of being.

John H. Walton argues for a priestly role for Adam, which he is given in Genesis 2: 15:

We can presume that it is in this role that Eve serves as a complementary helper to Adam (not simply as a reproductive partner5). This priestly role, not mentioned in the first account, would support an understanding of Adam and Eve as the fountainhead for humanity that may be understood as representational rather than biological. Adam (and eventually Eve) is plausibly differentiated not as the only members of their species, but as the designated representatives of their species in the center of sacred space—a species that has been endowed with the image of God (an act of [functional] creation). If one were to adopt this hypothesis, Adam and Eve would not necessarily be the first humans in God’s image or those through whom all humanity is descended.6 But as the human representatives (priests) serving in God’s presence, the disorder of sin would be seen as entering the world through them, and all humans would now be subject to that disorder and would be seen as being corporately subject to sin through these representatives. That disorder has permeated human nature.

And:

The most important issue in Romans (and theology in general) is that people in the image of God sinned, and therefore all are subject to sin and death and in need of salvation. Adam was our first High Priest, and Christ is our ultimate High Priest. The Bible therefore could be read as requiring only that the sin of our representative Adam extended to us all, as the salvation of our representative Christ is extended to us in a similar manner.

If sin did not originate in one biological man, then it has no fixed point in time.  Seen in this light, the necessity of having a six-thousand year creation is removed, allowing for the span of time that conventional science suggests describes the universe in which we live.  It also opens up the possibility that the prehistory of humanity is one of an ongoing saga of evolution.

Zaimov closes with another Ham quote: 

In another message in March, he said Christian leaders who do not interpret the creation account in Genesis 1-11 literally are leading people astray.

“Genesis 1-11 is like the foundation to a house. The whole structure stands upon it — all of our major doctrines like sin, salvation, the coming consummation, marriage, and more are grounded in Genesis," Ham wrote in his post at the time.

“Sadly many Christian leaders say Genesis isn't literal history and in doing so they undermine the foundation. No wonder such a large percent of church millennials don't defend marriage as for one man and woman. They no longer have a foundation to base their thinking on,” he added.

Two things came to mind when I read this.  First, the foundation to a house can be one of several different shapes.  It might be round (Conrad Hyers' understanding that the creation story's purpose is to establish the one true God by dispelling the pantheistic gods), or oblong (Walton's understanding that the creation story is a story of the ordering of the sacred space of the temple) or even square (Ken Ham's six-day literal reading of Genesis).  There are many different ways of reading these passages, most of which do not entail a literal understanding of them. 

The second thing that struck me is that, because we might not have a six-day understanding of our creation has little bearing on our understanding of marriage, since that is mentioned throughout the Bible. Paul waxes cogently about marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 as well as other scattered places. 

Ham's statement that evolutionary creationists are compromising is, therefore, without merit and his contention that the Genesis account is literal history is fraught with controversy.  This is not the place for an examination of the deficiencies of the young earth model, theologically, but they exist and they are numerous.  Evolutionary creationists can rest assured that they are worshipping the One True God and have not compromised on their faith.

Tracey Moody: Ark Encounter $62 Million in Debt

Tracey Moody, writing in Patheos in November of last year, suggests that, behind the grand opening of the Ark Encounter, there are financial concerns that Ham is not being upfront about. As she notes, the Ark 'n Park is being funded by a $62.5 million TIF. What is a TIF?

TIF stands for “Tax Increment Financing” and they’re usually issued in urban areas that are considered “blighted.” For example, suppose there was an abandoned shopping mall in a deteriorating community. A TIF can be set up to attract developers whose businesses may revitalize the area. The district officials could, for example, give the developers interest-free loans to build their project based on what they expect they can retrieve in property taxes over the next 30 years. That’s it. The developers don’t have to do anything differently from if they hadn’t been issued the TIFs at all. But now, rather than the property taxes going back to the community, the tax revenue is diverted to pay off the loan.

This can be a great help to the local economy if the development is a long-term success — it’s money well invested. The downside is, if the new developments fall short of projections (or fail entirely), the developers aren’t held liable for repayment and the burden of debt falls on the investors and taxpayers.

TIFs are controversial for a number of reasons and they’ve been discontinued in California, the first U.S. state to implement their use, because of the numerous lawsuits they led to (not to mention other unintended consequences).

So, at least on the surface, it seems as if Ham and his backers are hedging their bets, just in case the whole operation goes south. There are other incentives that the backers of the Ark Encounter managed to get out of the city of Williamstown, Kentucky (who's city planners plainly want this project to succeed at all costs):

According to Section VIII of the Memorandum of Agreement, in addition to the $62 million, the city and county agreed to other incentives (courtesy of local taxpayers):

$175,000 would be given to Ark Encounter to reimburse the amount they felt the property was overvalued.

$19,000 would go to Ark Encounter’s real estate agent, representing 2% of the total purchase price of the land.

98 acres of Grant County land would be sold to Ark Encounter for $1 (yes, one dollar).

As Moody notes, “These are perfect examples of public funding, regardless of Ken Ham saying again and again that, “No money will be taken out of the state’s budget to fund the Ark.””

There is additional funny business going on.  When Ham states that “No unwilling taxpayer will subsidize the Ark,” he is technically correct. The catch is that the Ark, itself, is the only non-profit portion of the park. Moody elaborates:

Crosswater Canyon, controlled by Answers in Genesis, is a non-profit that owns and operates two for-profit companies, Creation Museum, LLC and Ark Encounter, LLC. All donations for the project come in through the non-profit Crosswater Canyon, but all the tax incentives are applied to the for-profit Ark Encounter, LLC.

The literal Ark itself is the only non-profit portion of the attraction. So all the tax deductible donations people make are applied to the construction of the Ark, which qualifies as non-profit because it is an “educational tool.”

What about the land surrounding the Ark? That’s not technically part of the non-profit part of the park, so your donations wouldn’t apply there… but that’s why visitors will have to pay to park their cars (800 acres of land, and Ken Ham wants to charge people to park) and then pay admission to satisfy the business portion of the attraction.

Moody notes that she is a humanist and, while not antagonistic to Christian concerns, clearly does not share them. The report is fairly dispassionate, however, and her concerns are genuine. She notes that the Park would never survive in the real world because it needed tax-payer funding to succeed. This is, perhaps, true and, perhaps, not. Typically, large, for-profit sports teams get a municipality to pay for their stadiums and arenas because such edifices are, often, massive undertakings that can cost upwards of $100 million to build. For example, the Delta Center, in Salt Lake City (a much less euphonious appellation than ‘The Salt Palace,’ the arena it replaced) cost $93 million to construct, in 1991, which is $162 million in 2016 dollars.  Here in Knoxville, one of the sticking points in getting large, popular bands to come to the city is that, in order to finance the Thompson-Boling arena, on the University of Tennessee campus, a punitive ‘entertainment tax’ was levied on all entertainment in the city, adding up to 20% to ticket prices and to local hotel prices.

All eyes are on Ham and his new wonder attraction.  It will be interesting to see what attendance numbers are and whether it declines in the same pattern that the Creation Museum's has.  

The Ark Encounter is Open

Up until today, the largest wooden structure in the world was the Todai-ji, which housed the Great Buddha and is in the old Japanese capital of Nara.  Now, that title has been taken over by the new Ark Encounter, in Williamsburg, Kentucky.  Below is a short news story on the event.  In waxing on the new ark, the reporter reminds us of the astonishing fact that the original ark  was built without the benefit of modern tools.  Of course, the Todai-ji was built in 728 A.D. without the aid of modern tools also. 



One part of the interview involves a molecular geneticist who has signed on with the staff of the ark encounter.  She is asked how her degree has informed her in her work and she remarks that it confirms what the Bible says.  At one point, she is asked how they came up with the animals that are on the Ark, given that there has been so much speciation.  She responds that they got experts together, classifying animals into their original “kinds.”

What is glossed over here is that, if the ark actually dates to around 2400 B.C. (an absurd number given that we have recorded histories of other civilizations that date back further than this), then the level of speciation and extinction would be orders of magnitude greater than anything we have experienced before or since.  Entire groups apparently went extinct with no written record of their existence.  Why, for example, did the winged reptiles go extinct when they could have just flown away once the ark landed?  How did the vast majority of the marsupials end up in Australia?  These are just two of many, many questions that have no easy answers.  For a list of the staggering implications of a literal flood story and why it requires hundreds of separate miracles to pull off, see this FAQ from Talk Origins.

It is a remarkable achievement, but further contributes to the Disneyization of Christianity (zip lines, anyone?), where we focus almost entirely on what we think the Bible says rather than what it means.  Ken Ham and his organization are so engaged in the message that the earth was created 6000 years ago that they completely miss the fact that the early church writers who formed the foundations of our faith and guided the church into the second century, couldn't have cared less about when the earth was created.

The Ark Encounter: A monument to indulgence.

Hat tip to Rob Mitchell.

Phil Plait's Biased View of Anti-Science Purveyors

Phil Plait has a Slate article that squarely takes aim at Donald Trump (A "yuge" target!) and the anti-science views of the Republican party in general.  He writes:

As an astronomer I of course have certain pet projects; I’ve taken on astrology, Moon landing deniers, cosmic doomsday promulgators, and geocentrists. But a background in science allows me to broaden that approach, and I will happily help shoulder the load to debunk the claims of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, homeopaths, and young-Earth creationists.

Some of these present a more pressing need than others, of course. Astrology is a minor issue compared with, say, someone who supports abstinence-only education.

But they’re all there, all the time, creating a background buzz of hogwash, an atmosphere of denial of science, evidence, and rational thinking … and that can have devastating consequences.

There are many reasons to castigate many republicans for their anti-science views and, in my experience, anti-evolutionary bills in statehouses spring almost uniformly from the minds of republican legislators. Having said that, Plait makes some very hasty judgements and omits some very critical information in his post. First, he writes:

Months ago, early on in the presidential campaign, I made light of Trump, saying that his particular candidacy would crash and burn when he inevitably said or did something so outrageous and horrific that people would flee his side.

I was wrong. I underestimated just how thoroughly the GOP had salted the Earth. Philosophical party planks of climate change denial, anti-evolution, anti-intellectualism, intolerance, and more have made it such that Trump can literally say almost anything, and it hardly affects his popularity.

First off, these aren't party planks.  No single Republican, except maybe Jeb Bush (maybe), intended to do away with science education and, in any event, it is doubtful they could.  He notes that Marco Rubio doesn't know how old the earth is.  Maybe not, but in his answer, he deferred to the scientists and said that it didn't matter in his campaign.  Political?  Yes.  Anti-science?  No.  Plait's "intolerance" link points to one Louie Gohmert, a Texas republican who wanted to be sure we don't have "gay space colonies."  I don't know any republican that thinks this way or even have this on their radar.

Second, it is easy to find one idiot out there who doesn't have anything better to do than legislate stupid things.  Try extrapolating that to the Republican party as a whole.  You can't.  It is like saying that the protests of the Westboro Baptist church represent Christianity as a whole.

He also omits some critical information that skews his argument.  As Mischa Fisher wrote in 2013, in The Atlantic, The Republican party isn't really an anti-science party. She writes:

I'm the first to admit that there are elected Republicans with a terrible understanding of science—Representative Paul Broun of Georgia, an M.D. who claims evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell” is one rather obvious example—and many more with substantial room for improvement. But Republicans, conservatives, and the religious are no more uniquely “anti-science” than any other demographic or political group. It’s just that “anti-science” has been defined using a limited set of issues that make the right wing and religious look relatively worse. (As a politically centrist atheist, this claim is not meant to be self-serving.)

Republicans, and members of the traditionally Republican coalition like conservatives and the religious, are criticized for rejecting two main areas of science: evolution and global warming. But even those critiques are overblown. Believing in God is not the same as rejecting science, contrary to an all-too-frequent caricature propagated by the secular community. Members of all faiths have contributed to our collective scientific understanding, and Christians from Gregor Mendel to Francis Collins have been intellectual leaders in their fields. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, wrote a New York Times bestseller reconciling his faith with his understanding of evolution and genetics.

Plait seems to be unaware of these examples. Fisher continues:

The more important question on climate change is not “how do we eliminate carbon immediately?” but “how best do we secure a cleaner environment and more prosperous world for future generations?”

It is on this subject that many on the political left deeply hold some serious anti-scientific beliefs. Set aside the fact that twice as many Democrats as Republicans believe in astrology, a pseudoscientific medieval farce. Left-wing ideologues also frequently espouse an irrational fear of nuclear power, genetic modification, and industrial and agricultural chemistry—even though all of these scientific breakthroughs have enriched lives, lengthened lifespans, and produced substantial economic growth over the last century.

As I mentioned above (and she reiterates), it is certainly easy to find Republicans promoting idiotic things, but Plait glosses over the idiocies that are promoted by Democrats, as almost all anti-vaxxers are.  He further conflates scientific issues with social ones (he is not the only one to do this).  He mentions abstinence-only education as if it were a scientific conspiracy theory, when in fact, it is a social/religious position that is disagreed on by conservatives and liberals, not on scientific but on behavioral grounds.   Put another way, the Bible teaches abstinence before marriage and many liberals think that is silly.

Plait's view of republicans is, in my experience, somewhat typical of the left's complete misunderstanding of the conservative mindset.   In his caricature of Republicans, he creates a straw man/cardboard cut-out that he then trashes. This is the viewpoint that he brings with him in his central premise: that anti-scientific tendencies are how we ended up with Donald Trump.  This premise is very debatable.  It is equally plausible that we ended up with Donald Trump because many in the electorate are tired of being told that their values and views are unimportant and insignificant.  They are also tired of federal overreach and see Trump as a (possible) alternative to this problem.  They also don't trust Hillary Clinton.  At.  All.

As governments here and abroad become increasingly plutocratic, it has not been lost on many people that they are losing their voice.  This viewpoint was brought front and center by the vote of the British people to leave the EU.  When interviewed, most of the people that voted “leave” did so because they felt they were losing their national identity and their ability to control any of their own destiny.  Donald Trump is tapping into that feeling.

Does Trump say stupid things?  Yes, he does.  Are some of his viewpoints untenable?  Yes, they are.  But his rise to power has little to do with anti-science views of his supporters. 

Ark Encounter Set to Open July 7

The Ark Encounter, the offshoot of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, will be opening its doors on July 7, with much fanfare and hoopla.  Laurie Goodstein writes:

In the beginning, Ken Ham made the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. And he saw that it was good at spreading his belief that the Bible is a book of history, the universe is 6,000 years old, and evolution is wrong and is leading to our moral downfall.

And Ham said, let us build a gargantuan Noah’s ark 45 minutes away to draw millions more visitors. And let it be constructed by Amish woodworkers, and financed with donations, junk bonds and tax rebates from the state of Kentucky. And let it hold an animatronic Noah and lifelike models of some of the creatures that came on board two-by-two, such as bears, short-necked giraffes — and juvenile Tyrannosaurus rexes.

And it was so.

Ham’s “Ark Encounter,” built at a cost of more than $102 million, is scheduled to open July 7 in Williamstown. Ham and his crew have succeeded in erecting a colossal landmark and an ambitious promotional vehicle for their particular brand of Christian fundamentalism, known as “young earth” or “young universe” creationism.

It was not smooth sailing. The state tried to revoke the tax rebates after learning that Ham would require employees to sign a “statement of faith” that would exclude people who were gay or did not accept his particular Christian creed. Ham went to court and in January, he won.

Ham comments that he does not want his park to be thought of as “entertainment” (then why the zip lines?) but should, instead, serve a religious purpose as a reminder to the present world that God, once upon a time, flooded the world.  On the other hand, God also said that he would never do it again, so this is, perhaps, a cautionary park.  Interestingly, as a testament to how far the country has shifted to the left, we have this:

A group of local atheist activists, the Tri-State Freethinkers, recently tried to put up billboards on the highway approaching the ark, calling it the “Genocide and Incest Park,” but no billboard company would agree, said the Freethinkers’ founder and president, Jim Helton, so the group plans to protest at the ark’s grand opening. “The moral of the flood story is horrible,” Helton said. “We’re not saying he can’t build his park. But we don’t think it’s appropriate for a family fun day.”

While I don't for a minute support the premise of the Ark Encounter that there was a world-wide flood, it is difficult to believe that the message that the ark puts forth is a horrible lesson.  In what way?  Is it not inclusive and diverse enough?  The moral of the flood story is that humans have evil intentions and desires that are contrary to God's word and that God, in the past, has cut off humanity for such behavior.  That is pretty much straight-forward Christianity.  Perhaps that is problem: the ark is religious in nature, something the Tri-State Free Thinkers group adamantly opposes.  It likely would not matter what the moral was. 

Is Louisiana's LSEA Bad Science?

It isn't, according to University of Shreveport political science professor Jeff Sadow. He argues:

[Senator Karen Carter] Peterson’s annual exercise persisted — until this year. With Democrat John Bel Edwards now governor, neither she nor anyone else filed a bill to repeal the act. That’s because the author of the law, former state Sen. Ben Nevers, a Bogalusa Democrat, serves as Edwards’ chief of staff. In the past, surely knowing her bill never would make it out of committee, Carter kept trying regardless as an apparent attempt to make Jindal look bad. She has no wish to do the same to Edwards.

But Peterson’s and others’ opposition to the act should disturb anybody who desires academic excellence in Louisiana education. The law creates a minor incentive for science classrooms to explore important issues and develop critical thinking skills. It also stands as a bulwark against the potential imposition of politically motivated orthodoxy masquerading as science. To oppose the act reveals an intolerance of freedom in academic inquiry — and a willingness to indulge a totalitarian impulse seeking to control information and knowledge.

Here is the problem that I see: the modern creationism movement has taken great pains to divorce the notion of creationism from the Bible, or any organized religion. They treat it as science, and promote it as such. They don't promote it as religion. To be sure, every court case that has been adjudicated has shown that it is, but because of this, the teaching of creationism now masquerades as “Teaching the Controversy” “Teaching the Full Range of views," or “Teach the Strengths and Weaknesses.”  Oddly, enough, these methodologies don't include all of scientific inquiry, but just happen to focus on evolution (and sometimes climate change).  Waiting in the wings is “scientific creationism,”  a view supported by a large number of legislators, it seems. 

Yes, it is true that we should keep science agenda free (and that is becoming increasingly hard in this over-politicized culture), but the LSEA does not do this.  If anything, it promotes the stealth agenda of ID and creationism.

New Book Out: How I Changed My Mind About Evolution

The Religion News Service has a story about a new book that has been published that will likely set many fundamentalist evangelicals' teeth on edge and rattle their cages.  The book is titled How I changed My Mind About Evolution: Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science (which I just picked up as a Kindle e-book, seconds ago) Cathy Grossman writes:

Creationist Christian tourists may soon flock to the Ark Encounter, a literal vision of Noah’s story in Genesis come to life in July as a theology-packed tourist attraction in Williamstown, Ky.

But this month, another group of evangelicals is making a very different case – minus any animatronic critters — in a new book, “How I Changed My Mind About Evolution.”

It promotes the idea that one can be serious about Christian faith and still accept a scientific Darwinian account of human origins. BioLogos, the organization of pro-evolution Christians in the sciences founded by famed geneticist Francis Collins, teamed with InterVarsity Press to publish a collection of 25 personal essays from clergy, scholars and scientists.

It should be a good read. The Kindle version is only $8.84.

Another Republican Gets Evolution Wrong

This time, it is Rush Limbaugh, who, in one of his daily shows, questioned the wisdom of evolution.  Writing about the unfortunate incident in which the gorilla, Harambe, was shot to protect a human child, Rush stated:

A lot of people think that all of us used to be gorillas, and they're looking for the missing link out there. The evolution crowd. They think we were originally apes. I've always had a question: If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape, and how come he didn't become one of us? "Well, that's why they're all missing link, Mr. Limbaugh. Your question is absurd." Here's one more from Ashley Byrne from PETA. "You know, the gorilla's endangered, he was 17 years old. They've had him for quite a long time."

Rush, if my children came from my wife, why is my wife still alive? This notion that evolution is strictly linear has been known to be wrong since the time of Charles Darwin, yet it is perpetuated by people who don't like evolution but won't learn anything about it.  This is why we have systematics.  As a refresher to Rush, here is a diagram that I concocted during one of my back and forths with someone about my BioLogos post on hominins of the Middle Pliocene:

In this example, there is no straight lineal relationship between any two forms.  In fact, the one salient feature of systematics is that it can only delineate taxonomic sister groups, it cannot delineate ancestor-descendant relationships.  There is no such thing as the "missing link."  Viewed within this prism,  it becomes apparent that transitional forms abound in the fossil record.  Think of the form Gerobatrachus hottoni, otherwise known as the “frogamander.”  It has the basal characteristics of both frogs and salamanders and represents the stem group to both of those forms.  Everything that follows in each node, leading to salamanders and frogs, is transitional.

This is how modern evolutionary theory is practiced.   It would sure be nice if some news people would learn this.

Jimmy Carter Visits Ark Encounter, Rains on Ken Ham's Parade

Ex-president Jimmy Carter visited the not-yet-open Ark Encounter site in Petersburg, Kentucky, on June 10, at the invitation of LeRoy Troyer, head of construction.  Unfortunately, he did not sign on to Ken Ham's, shall we say, compressed, understanding of time:

“I don’t have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe,” said Carter, who holds a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Naval Academy, in a 2012 interview with the Huffington Post. “But I don’t adhere to passages that so-and-so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind. Today we have shown that the earth and the stars were created millions, even billions, of years before. We are exploring space and sub-atomic particles and learning new facts every day, facts that the Creator has known since the beginning of time.”

This stated belief does not align with the stance of Answers in Genesis.

“Christians need to trust God's Word as their final authority. The Scriptures never change," says one Creation Museum exhibit description. "One does not build their faith upon models and reconstructions, which may change as we learn more.”

Interestingly, in their own press release on the visit, Answers in Genesis made no mention of Carter's contrasting views, only that he “praised the quality of the work and shared his impressions of the project that his architect friend Mr. Troyer has designed and built for Answers in Genesis.”

H. floresiensis Not As Young or As Unique As We Thought

In other words, so much for the pathology argument.  Many news outlets, National Geographic being one of them, are reporting on new fossils that closely match those of Homo floresiensis that were found at Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores in the late 1990s.  Adam Hoffman writes:

The 700,000-year-old human remains are the first found outside Liang Bua cave, the site on Flores that yielded the original hobbit fossils. The much older samples show intriguing similarities to H. floresiensis, including their small size, and so provide the best evidence yet of a potential hobbit ancestor.

“Since the hobbit was found, there have been two major hypotheses concerning its ancestry,” says Gerritt van den Bergh, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia and a contributor to the work.

According to one theory, H. floresiensis is a dwarfed form of Homo erectus, an ancient human relative that lived in East Asia and parts of Africa until about 143,000 years ago. But other researchers think the hobbits evolved from even earlier, smaller-bodied hominins such as Homo habilis or Australopithecus.

“These new findings suggest that Homo floresiensis is indeed a dwarfed form of Homo erectus from Java, a small group of which must have gotten marooned on Flores and evolved in isolation,” van den Bergh says.

The article goes on to note that the competing argument, that the fossils of Liang Bua represent some kind of pathological condition, and that they maintained this condition for some 700 ky, is now untenable. Clearly this is a side-branch of human evolution.The other key finding is that they also had stone tools, specifically a “straightforward core and flake” technology. Further, the tools show a striking similarity to those found at Liang Bua, suggesting that there was remarkable cognitive "stability" in this population. 

The more we think we know about human evolution, the less, it turns out, that we do.  For now, the entire article is available from Nature for free here. 

Neandertals Too Inbred to Survive?

Science Daily is running a story on research published in the journal Genetics that posits that Neandertals were so inbred that their genetic load (the number of bad genes in a population) was so high that it reduced their fertility by 40%.  From the Genetics Society of America:

Previous studies of DNA extracted from Neanderthal remains revealed that these Eurasian hominids were much more inbred and less genetically diverse than modern humans. For thousands of years, the Neanderthal population size remained small, and mating among close relatives seems to have been common.

Then, 50,000-100,000 years ago, groups of anatomically modern humans left Africa and moved to the homelands of their distant Neanderthal cousins. The two groups interbred, mingling their previously distinct genomes. But though a small fraction of the genome of non-African populations today is Neanderthal, their genetic contribution is uneven. Neanderthal sequences are concentrated in certain parts of the human genome, but missing from other regions.

"Whenever geneticists find a non-random arrangement like that, we look for the evolutionary forces that caused it," says [Kelley] Harris.

Harris and her colleague Rasmus Nielsen (University of California, Berkeley / University of Copenhagen) hypothesized that the force in question was natural selection. In small populations, like the Neanderthals', natural selection is less effective and chance has an outsized influence. This allows weakly harmful mutations to persist, rather than being weeded out over the generations. But once such mutations are introduced back into a larger population, such as modern humans, they would be exposed to the surveillance of natural selection and eventually lost.

There is something odd about this analysis, that I think the writer is getting wrong. While it is quite true that drift has an outsized role in small populations—leading to founder effect in some populations (such as Ellis van Kreveld on the Pitcairn Islanders), when deleterious mutations reach a larger population, they don't get weeded out, they get masked. Most really bad alleles are recessive and only express themselves in the presence of a parent with a like allele.  In the presence of a dominant allele, they don't express themselves. 

I will be curious to read the research that derives from this.

Humans and Fire

It had been conventional wisdom that the origin of bipedality occurred in a forest/fringe environment and that a move to the savannah during the dry-out at the end of the Pliocene accelerated the evolution of humans.  That was thrown into turmoil when it was discovered that Ardipithecus ramidus possessed facultative bipedal characteristics at 4.4 million years but lived in an entirely forested environment.

Now, it seems, the savannah is seen as playing a different role in human evolution.  Charles Q. Choi, of Scientific American writes:

A longtime theory holds that early humans discovered how to use fire accidentally—perhaps while making stone tools they found that striking rocks against each other could generate sparks, and then gradually learned fire had many uses.

The problem with such serendipity-based explanations is that they "raise more questions than they answer," says evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Parker at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. For example, these theories do not address when or where the discovery might have occurred, why it did not happen earlier or why other animals that use stone tools—chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, crab-eating macaques and sea otters are known to do so—did not also develop fire use, Parker notes.

Parker and his colleagues suggest in a study published in the April Evolutionary Anthropology that humans developed fire use as a natural response to environmental changes. Previous research found that roughly 3.6 million to 1.4 million years ago—as the genus Homo emerged in Africa—the continent regularly experienced bouts of aridity, causing forests to shrink and dry grasslands to spread. Earlier studies suggested these climate shifts may have driven humanity’s ancestors away from a life climbing trees and toward one of walking upright on the ground, Parker says.

Yes, but there have been, as alluded to above, issues with these previous studies. If bipedality originated in the forest, as a response to who-knows-what, then they already possessed it when the drying out began. But this is not the crux of Parker's research:

Parker and his colleagues suggest in the new study that our ancestors not only grew accustomed to fire but learned to exploit it as a naturally occurring resource. This adaptation, called pyrophilia, may have set the stage for more active and deliberate human use of fire.

The research team's models suggest early humans benefited from wildfires in a number of ways: The blazes would have made it easier to find food, much as Martu Aboriginal women in Australia still rely on fire to clear brush for more efficient hunting. The models also indicate that early humans might have combed the charred remains of wildfires to dine on animals, seeds, nuts and tubers cooked in the flames—benefitting from a chemical process that not only makes many foods easier to digest but kills germs and neutralizes some toxins.

This has not been proposed before and it will be interesting to see if more evidence of this is found. Read the whole thing.

Ken Ham Extends the Olive Branch

Ken Ham has offered to take Bill Nye on a tour of his new Ark Encounter (or at least show him the door, as the story goes).  Czarina Ong writes:

Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham and "The Science Guy" Bill Nye have had their differences, especially concerning creationism, but Ham wants to set these aside. This is why he recently invited Nye to visit the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky.

"I want to publicly invite Bill Nye to come visit the Ark. I want to show him personally, or just show him where the entrance is, and let him go on his own, whatever he wants to do," Ham says in a video message posted on his Facebook page. "I'd be thrilled to be able to show Bill Nye through the Ark, and so I'll be interested to know if people out there think Bill Nye will take up my invitation. I hope that he does."

The Ark Encounter is a unique themed attraction park featuring a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark. It contains life-like figures of the animals that were saved during the Great Flood. The park also shows how Noah and his family managed to survive and weather 40 days of non-stop rain.

The Ark Encounter is still closed and will open on July 7, but the Creation Museum is already in operation.

It has become conventional wisdom in recent years that the Nye on Ham debate a few years back was what gave the Ark-n-Park the boost that it needed to get enough of the remaining donations and that, plus junk bonds, put it over the top, allowing construction to begin.  There is no word yet on whether or not Bill Nye has accepted.

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.