Just another nerd.
The plica semilunaris, labeled as the second item in the diagram below, is a fascinating example of our collective evolutionary heritage. This small fold is the remnant of a nictitating membrane–or third eyelid–which still exists in numerous other animals, including a small number of mammalian species.
For some reason, Big Think titled the Richard Dawkins video below “Why Religion and Evolution Don’t Mix Well” which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the video.
Rather, Dawkins addresses a very specific question: if natural selection favors adaptations that increase the fitness of individual organisms, how does religion increase the fitness of human beings? Why does religion persist in human cultures given that its claims about reality are false?
Bryan Fischer is a knucklehead who is the public face of the American Family Association. Ed Brayton highlights typical Fischer-esque thinking, in this case Fischer’s refutation of evolution.
See if you can follow the “logic”,
But Paul’s point is: Death did not enter into the world until sin came in, and sin came in through Adam. So before Adam, there was no death. Now, if evolution is right… you’d have to have literally millions of years where there was death. Death in the animal kingdom, and death in the human kingdom. You’d have to have millions of years of people being born and people dying.
And yet the scriptures are very clear: Death entered into the world through sin, and sin entered into the world through Adam. No sin, no death. Prior to Adam, there was no death. So evolution cannot possibly be true. It’s just a matter of theological fact.
Oh my.
Apparently the creationists at the Discovery Institute are planning an Academic Freedom Day for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, February 12, 2009. On their website, the organizers make much use of this quote from Darwin,
A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.
Not surprisingly, this is not quite the full quote, nor does it give the context in which Darwin wrote this. This is from the introduction to the Origin of Species where Darwin apologizes for publishing an “abstract” of his views that leaves many issues for future volumes,
This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy. No doubt errors will have crept in, though I hope I have always been cautious in trusting to good authorities alone. I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will suffice. No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this. For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this cannot possibly be here done.
Of course the problem with the creationists is they constantly ask us to balance the argument of science with the arguments of pseudo-science. Ultimately, as the Discovery Institute laied it out in a 1999 memo, their agenda is the decidedly anti-scientific goal of rejecting materialism due to its “devestating” social consequences (which, of course, is precisely Philip Johnson’s entire argument).
Of course whatever else a non-materialist view of the universe may be, it ain’t science.
Occasionally I’ll read articles in newspapers or magazines speculating that humans are no longer subject to natural selection and just have to shake my head. Fortunately, Scientific American has a nice overview of the current state of thinking about human evolution that dispels that “we’re no longer evolving nonsense.” In fact, it appears to be just the opposite,
But DNA techniques, which probe genomes both present and past, have unleashed a revolution in studying evolution; they tell a different story. Not only has Homo sapiens been doing some major genetic reshuffling since our species formed, but the rate of human evolution may, if anything, have increased. In common with other organisms, we underwent the most dramatic changes to our body shape when our species first appeared, but we continue to show genetically induced changes to our physiology and perhaps to our behavior as well. Until fairly recently in our history, human races in various parts of the world were becoming more rather than less distinct. Even today the conditions of modern life could be driving changes to genes for certain behavioral traits.
. . .
But that turns out not to be the case. In a study published a year ago Henry C. Harpending of the University of Utah, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues analyzed data from the international haplotype map of the human genome [see “Traces of a Distant Past,” by Gary Stix; Scientific American, July 2008]. They focused on genetic markers in 270 people from four groups: Han Chinese, Japanese, Yoruba and northern Europeans. They found that at least 7 percent of human genes underwent evolution as recently as 5,000 years ago. Much of the change involved adaptations to particular environments, both natural and human-shaped. For example, few people in China and Africa can digest fresh milk into adulthood, whereas almost everyone in Sweden and Denmark can. This ability presumably arose as an adaptation to dairy farming.
Another study by Pardis C. Sabeti of Harvard University and her colleagues used huge data sets of genetic variation to look for signs of natural selection across the human genome. More than 300 regions on the genome showed evidence of recent changes that improved people’s chance of surviving and reproducing. Examples included resistance to one of Africa’s great scourges, the virus causing Lassa fever; partial resistance to other diseases, such as malaria, among some African populations; changes in skin pigmentation and development of hair follicles among Asians; and the evolution of lighter skin and blue eyes in northern Europe.
Harpending and Hawks’s team estimated that over the past 10,000 years humans have evolved as much as 100 times faster than at any other time since the split of the earliest hominid from the ancestors of modern chimpanzees. The team attributed the quickening pace to the variety of environments humans moved into and the changes in living conditions brought about by agriculture and cities. It was not farming per se or the changes in the landscape that conversion of wild habitat to tamed fields brought about but the often lethal combination of poor sanitation, novel diet and emerging diseases (from other humans as well as domesticated animals). Although some researchers have expressed reservations about these estimates, the basic point seems clear: humans are first-class evolvers.
The article goes on to provide a simple gloss over different possibilities for human evolution including extinction, stasis, and even self-directed evolution (transhumanism FTW).
It seems odd to see stasis as an option. In the short term, certainly we can arrange things so humanity remains relatively as it is now if we really wanted too, but only if we maintain the same environment and clearly that is simply not an option. Human culture changes the environment which then fuels further changes in human culture. There’s very little about the last 50,000 years of humanity’s existence which could in any way, shape or form be described as static.
Running in place is simply not an option for homo sapiens.
Ronald Bailey’s Attack of the Super-Intelligent Purple Space Squid Creators is one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time that uses a bit of humor to expose the idiocy behind creationism, and especially the most unintentionally hilarious moment in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,
Near the end of the silly new anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—in which fellow panelist Steve Meyer appeared—host Ben Stein asks Richard Dawkins, who is arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this is a great “gotcha,” like it’s the silliest thing he’s ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence has repeatedly created life on earth.
So, since our esteemed opponents are agnostic with regard to the “source of design,” and because intelligent design cannot rule out the hypothesis that super-intelligent purple space squids are not the “source of design” of life on earth, I will provisionally accept that hypothesis for the remainder of my talk.
I went and saw Expelled about a week after it came out, and happened to be the only person in the theater watching it — which was nice because I could use my Blackberry throughout the film to fact check it. Which, of course, was beside the point since the movie was so bad it was self-refuting, as in the moment with Dawkins where Stein and the filmmakers poke fun at the panspermia hypothesis. Of course the panspermia hypothesis is extremely unlikely — but it is orders of magnitude more likely than the god hypothesis which Stein and Expelled were pushing.
Anyway, from there Bailey indulges in heresy by questioning the wisdom of choices made by our super-intelligent purple space squid creators,
If that is the case, it would seem the record shows that the intelligent designers—which I am hypothesizing are super-intelligent purple space squids—evidently spent more than 2 billion years tinkering with single-cell algae and bacteria before they got around to creating multi-cellular species. Do intelligent design proponents have a theory to explain that? Were the space squid creators just lazy?
In addition, the record clearly shows that when more complex forms of life were created by super-intelligent purple space squids, they apparently arranged their creations in a specific order. Why did the purple space squids arrange the fossils in a sequence in which fish appear before amphibians which appear before reptiles which appear before mammals? And why did the purple space squids arrange 390 million years ago for the first amphibians to resemble Crossopterygian fish that were also alive at that time? These first amphibians had such characteristics as internal gills, fish-like skull bones, and—interestingly—eight digits just as the Crossopterygian fish did. Apparently our intelligent purple space squid creators (or whoever) found eight digits displeasing, and simply eliminated the extra three digits after they killed off the early amphibians and individually created thousands of later species of amphibians with only the now standard five digits.
It’s almost as if there weren’t any super-intelligent purple space squid creators at all, but rather the slow mindless operation of some natural process — lets call it natural selection for argument’s sake — that over billions of years led to gradual adaptive changes that explain the variety of life in both the fossil record and on our planet today.
Nah, that couldn’t be, could it?