The Evolution Debate as Culture Wars

16 Jan

There are too many good insights in this article to quote them all:

Whatever else Texas may have going for it, teaching religion in science class is inexcusable, whether or not it’s dressed in the deceptive language of intelligent design.  My (very) conservative Catholic grandma believes that evolution and faith are compatible.  Plenty of people do.  That’s because they are compatible.  The evolution vs. creation debate is less about that issue than it is about cultural dominance in general. It’s just one battleground chosen in the ongoing culture wars.

Needless to say, you should just go read it:

When the overwhelming scientific consensus points to evolutionary biology as the explanation for life, Christians have two choices.  They can say that this is consistent with their religion (God created everything including the field of evolutionary biology); or they can attempt to subvert the overwhelming consensus to fit their own narrative. Conservative institutions like, say, the Catholic Church have chosen the former over the latter.

From “Roger Ebert, Ben Stein, and the culture wars”.

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Dates Make Everything Clearer

16 Jan

I never returned to my stated confusion regarding the new tetrapod fossil footprints. The original BBC article was particularly unclear regarding the dates. The following is from one of many articles which explain this:

Tiktaalik lived around 375 million years ago, although even older elpistostegids, dating back to 385 million years, have been found.

But trackways found at a disused quarry at Zachelmie in the Holy Cross Mountains of southeastern Poland have thrown the timeline and the elpistostegids’ role into question.

In a paper released by the British weekly journal Nature, a team led by tetrapod sleuth Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, Sweden, report the finding of a dozen distinctive “hand” and “foot” prints from a creature that lived around 395 million years ago.

via Fish out of water: When did animals move to land?

“Spot the Gecko”

16 Jan

I’ve returned from holiday travels—and the subsequent craziness at work—and have just about caught up with life. To make up for my absence, enjoy this article from the Daily Mail Online.

Gecko on Pencil

© Reptile and Amphibian Ecology International and/or Paul S. Hamilto

A gecko so small it can perch on top of a pencil has been discovered along with dozens of new animal species in Ecuador’s threatened rainforest.

Fish Footprints

6 Jan

BBC News reports on “footprints of the first fish to walk on land“:

Researchers in the science journal Nature say the discovery of the footprints of a crocodile-like creature has led them to rethink our understanding of the evolution of life.

They don’t really say why exactly this is making them rethink things (no dates, etc.) I would be skeptical if the first fish on land had feet rather than fins, but maybe that’s the point.

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Evolution Of A Beneficial Mutation

4 Jan

NCTimes covers a new paper by Richard Lenski on the “Evolution Of A Beneficial Mutation”:

In other words, the other 11 populations may have evolved through different beneficial mutations to the same outcome, in terms of increased survival. If that is true, then there would be no evolutionary pressure in the 11 populations to evolve a mutation that would be superfluous or perhaps even harmful.

From the paper itself:

The latter explanation adds historical contingency, such that the likelihood of a particular outcome is conditional on whether some other event has already occurred.

This is essentially what Neil Shubin says in Your Inner Fish concerning the evolution of bodies: that organisms had the DNA to evolve them but weren’t able to until the advent of significant amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere.

When I get a chance to read the paper itself, I’ll try to post my impressions.

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A Huge Advance Against the Death Penalty

4 Jan

From the New York Times:

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

[...]

“Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”

A small step forward, but a huge advance against the death penalty.

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How to Get Rid of Bacteria? Stop Using Antibiotics.

4 Jan

I’ve often wondered if our modern obsession with anti-bacterial stuff was causing as many problems as it solved. AP takes a look at that exact problem in “Solution to killer superbug found in Norway“:

The World Health Organization says antibiotic resistance is one of the leading public health threats on the planet. A six-month investigation by The Associated Press found overuse and misuse of medicines has led to mutations in once curable diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, making them harder and in some cases impossible to treat.

Now, in Norway’s simple solution, there’s a glimmer of hope.

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An Excellent Article on Evolution and Religion

2 Jan

Leslie Tomory, who has just finished a PhD in the history of science and technology at the University of Toronto, has an excellent piece entitled “The shock and awe of creation.” In it he takes aim at the idea that evolution is inherently atheistic (an idea he labels “evolutionism”) and examines the roots of philosophical resistance to evolution.

The science of evolutionary biology is very well established, and the residual tension between religion and evolutionary biology harms both. On one hand, it makes the scientific work evolutionary biologists suspect in the eyes of many, and on the other, it makes religion appear like a regressive force. It is far better to reject the bundling of evolutionary biology with evolutionism, the real crux of the problem, than to wage a war over the minutiae of evolutionary biology, which should not be problematic from a religious point of view. Finally, accepting theistic evolution does not diminish the beauty and awe we can feel when contemplating God’s creation. On the contrary, God’s is manifest in his works, including in evolution.

This is exactly the sort of thought that we need in the struggle to combine these two fields in the popular mind.

A useful corollary to this article would be one examining the idea of God’s ordinary providence as paradox. The universe functions according to it’s own rules, yet it could not function without God. God is more directly involved than a watchmaker with his machine, yet at the same time less involved.

But, until I find or write said article, you can start by reading “The shock and awe of creation.”

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Tracking Wolves with GPS

1 Jan

Is it just me or are wolves somehow thought of as super-animals in the human imagination? This only confirms that:

A lone wolf named Brutus is helping U.S. Geological Survey scientists study Arctic wolf migrations in remote regions of Canada. These migrations can traverse hundreds of miles in 24-hour winter darkness at temperatures that reach 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

via GPS Tracks Brutus the Wolf on Marathon Hunts Around the Arctic

Smarter Hominids or Dumber Research?

1 Jan

Discover magazine has a tantalizing entitled “What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us?” The story revolves around certain hominid fossils found in South Africa:

He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

I use the word tantalizing for a reason, of course. An article from John Hawks throws a different light on the whole story:

So I’m left wondering: Why would two neuroscientists, after going to all the trouble to write a book about the evolution of the human brain, use completely obsolete anthropological information without doing a simple Google search to see if the facts have stayed the same as in 1923?

I don’t have an answer, but I’m interested in reading the book to see if it lives up to its billing.

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