It’s been a hectic but fun trip so far; I’ve had my time in the UK and am sitting in Heathrow on my way to Amsterdam and Groningen. I’ve had no time to post about the Royal Society meetings, which were full of good talks and good fellowship.

Nick Barton spoke on the evolution of sex (summary: it’s still a mystery), and there were talks by John Willis on Mimulus, Spencer Barrett on heterostyly in plants, Holly Wichman on viruses as models of evolution, Dolph Schluter on sticklebacks, and many others on varied aspects of evolutionary genetics. When I return in late November I’ll try to post some of the intersting things I’ve learned, including the story of a South African plant that has evolved, as part of its ground-hugging flower, a PERCH on which sunbirds sit while sipping nectar and pollinating the plant. This is the only case I know of in which a plant has evolved a perch to specifically accommodate birds, although of course many species of flowers (including Mimulus lewisii), have evolved “landing platforms” from their petals to allow bees to alight.

I did find out that the Royal Society headquarters on Carlton Terrace used to be the German Embassy until WWII. Buried in the Royal Society Garden is a dog with a headstone, a name, and the epiphet “ein treues Hund” (a faithful dog), said to be Ribbentrop’s dog, although this is disputed. (The dog may belong to his predecessor.)

The news of the day is this: future GOP wacko Presidential candidate Sarah Palin doesn’t accept evolution. In her piece on Palin’s soon-to-be-best-seller, Going Rogue, NYT reviewer Michiko Kakutani reports that Palin doesn’t accept evolution. But first, some tidbits, which you will learn here first because you are NOT going to buy this book:

All in all Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, ungrateful to the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office . . .

. . . Ms. Palin suggests that she and her husband, Todd, are ideally qualified to represent the Joe Six-Packs of the world because they are Joe Six-Packs themselves. “We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she writes in “Going Rogue.” “We know what it’s like to work union jobs, to be blue-collar, white-collar, to have our kids in public schools. We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

As for evolution:

Elsewhere in this volume she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

I had a bit of a problem with Francis Collin’s evangelic Christianity when he was appointed head of the NIH, but will those of you who criticized these reservations be equally accommodating of Palin’s overweening faith? I doubt it. Her denial of evolution alone disqualifies her to be President, for it shows her sheer, blind resistance to facts–at least those facts at odds with her faith.

Let’s face it: the woman is just plain dumb (and don’t tell me how media-savvy she is), and it’s a testimony to the desperation of the Republican Party that many of them are enthusiastic about electing the first president who openly embraces creationism. Let’s not invite Her in to take over.

h/t: Otter

by Matthew Cobb

Creationists have a very fixed view of the world – literally and figuratively. They have The Truth – it’s written in a series of manuscripts that were produced by various tiny Middle Eastern sects 2-3 millennia ago, which were eventually sifted and sorted and mistranslated into a set of what were deemed to be acceptable views to a group of Church leaders around 1500 years ago. All they have to do is to read it, and The Truth is obvious – God created all species, so there can be no evolution.

Science, however, doesn’t claim to have The Truth. We simply have the best approach to reality that we can have, based on the available evidence. If we were to find fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian, then we would all have to backtrack on the phrase that forms the title of this blog. However, there comes a point at which the absence of contradictory evidence, and the overwhelming weight of supporting evidence, leads us to stop pussy-footing around. We abandon all that philosophical bet-hedging and simply state “evolution is true”. If the fossil rabbits ever turn up (don’t hold your breath), we’ll revisit the statement – as the French say, only imbeciles don’t change their minds.

In the process of getting to such clarity, scientists spend a lot of time arguing, doing experiments that occasionally have contradictory results, and trying to figure out who in the resulting intellectual battle is actually right. It’s part of what makes science fun. Whenever these kind of debates arise – be they in evolutionary biology or climate science, to take two targets of certain sections of the blogosphere and of conservatives – they are immediately taken to be proof that there is “a crisis”. This is particularly irritating when the views that are supposed to be evidence of “the jury being out” in fact represent a tiny minority. Sometimes this can have dreadful consequences. There are some fools and charlatans who claim that AIDS is not caused by HIV. Tragically, they have had a great impact on the policy of the South African government. That does not mean that there is any kind of “debate” or “crisis” over the issue.

The latest example of this kind of claim has come, unsurprisingly, in the wake of the article by Donald Williamson on the evolution of caterpillars, and its recent utter and total debunking by Hart & Grosberg, which has been dealt with extensively by Jerry on this blog.

One Brian Thomas, “a Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research” has posted an article which claims that the Williamson study and its trashing “discloses deep evolutionary disagreement”. He concludes:

Beneath the veneer of a controversial peer-review process is a substantial debate over the very basics of evolution. Some scientists have pointed out that neo-Darwinism is inadequate to explain why life forms appear fully-equipped, unique, and discrete. One of these bravely offered hybridogenesis as an alternative evolutionary mechanism. Others cogently demonstrated some scientific deal-breakers for hybridogenesis. Perhaps both sides are correct in their assessments of the opposing evolutionary ideas—neither explanation is sufficient. And if life could not have evolved, it must have been created.

Thomas may be a “science writer”, but he’s surely no scientist! No one with a scrap of scientific insight could read the article by Hart and Grosberg and not be totally and utterly convinced that they are right and Williamson was completely wrong. That’s the power of science – we determine our views on the basis of the evidence. Thomas, along with all other creationists, can’t allow himself to do that, or he’d come round to reality – life was not created, it evolved.

h/t: Rick Grosberg

by Matthew Cobb

[Apologies for cross-posting – this appeared last week over at z-letter.com, but I felt it could do with a wider outing!]

In the 1980s, the Alvarez (père et fils) first suggested that an extraterrestrial impact caused the catastrophic climate changes that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs – and loads of other stuff – 65 MY ago. The location of that impact is now widely thought to have been the Chicxulub crater on the Yucutan Peninsula in Mexico. Other suspects for the death of the dinosaurs include the Deccan Traps, a massive area of igneous rock in India that is more than 2 km thick and covers 500,000 km2. These rocks, formed 60-68 MY ago, would have led to massive release of sulphur dioxide, which wouldn’t have made the climate any nicer.

However, over the last few years, Sankar Chatterjay of the Texas Technical University, has been arguing that  a submarine structure off the western coast of India, which he has called “Shiva”, is in fact a massive crater produced by a meteor strike. “Shiva” – if it exists – is 500 km across, and would be indicative of a a meteor about 40km wide – nearly 10 times larger than the estimated size of Chixculub object.

Dr Chatterjee recently presented his ideas at a meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA), in a 15 minute talk. Here’s an extract from his abstract which describes the catastrophic consequences of such an impact:

The impact was so powerful that it led to several geodynamic anomalies: it fragmented, sheared, and deformed the lithosphere mantle across the western Indian margin and contributed to major plate reorganization in the Indian Ocean. It initiated rifting between India and Seychelles in the west and created the Laxmi Ridge; it shattered the Indian plate easterly along the Narmada-Son Rift extending 1500 km across, dividing the Indian shield into a southern peninsular block and a northern foreland block. Because of topographic barrier of the Western Ghat Mountain range, the impact-triggered tsunami was restricted along the Narmada-Son Rift at the KT boundary. The relationships between large meteoritic impact, hotspot, flood basalt volcanism, plate tectonics, geodynamic anomalies, and sudden environmental catastrophe on Earth may open up a new field of unified investigation. Although the Reunion hotspot responsible for Deccan eruption was close to the Shiva crater in time and space, impact probably triggered a component of the Deccan Trap: the iridium-rich alkaline igneous complex rocks that were emplaced asymmetrically as a fluid ejecta at the KT boundary along the NE downrange direction of the bolide trajectory outside the crater ring. Two large impacts such as Shiva and Chicxulub in quick succession on the antipodal position, in concert with Deccan eruptions, would have devastating effects globally leading to climatic and environmental catastrophes that wiped out dinosaurs and many other organisms at the KT boundary.

For the non-geologist, it’s hard to know whether Chatterjee is right or not. In fact, it may be hard for the geologists, too, as this idea has been floating around since at least the 2003 meeting of the GSA, when Chatterjee gave a similar talk. Although he published a paper in Museum of Texas Tech University Special Publications in 2006 (available here), this is clearly an issue that needs to be addressed in a major peer reviewed journal, to help the rest of us decide whether he’s really found evidence of what would be more than a smoking gun – it would be a veritable smoking howitzer.

Whoever Dennis Sewell is, he has, as the Brits say, “gone badly wrong.”  Check out what seems to be a precis of his book, The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics, in the online Times of London.  The paper has published an article that, in essence, holds Darwin responsible for not only the Columbine massacres and the Nazi Holocaust, but also the decline of morality in today’s world.

After a perfunctory nod to Darwin Year, Sewell gets down to it:

Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was the first of the 13 children to be murdered, and whose son Craig narrowly escaped being shot, cannot understand why so little attention has been paid to the motivation of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their interest in Charles Darwin’s ideas. “Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

Much of the evidence remains sealed under a court order issued to minimise the risk of copycat killings, but from those documents that are in the public domain, it is clear that Eric Harris fantasised about putting everyone into a violent computer game that only the fittest could survive. And, like Darwin himself, he noted how vaccination might be interfering with nature’s weeding process. In his rantings Harris said he wished there were no vaccines, or even warning labels on dangerous goods, “and let natural selection take its course. All the fat, ugly, retarded, crippled dumbass, stupid f***heads in the world would die… Maybe then the human race can actually be proud of itself”.

As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes… It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

I wonder if Harris ever read any Darwin. I doubt it.

And why does Sewell hold Darwin more responsible than other authors, like Camus, whose writings have also been used to justify senseless violence?  Because evolution is taught in lots of schools:

The basics of evolution are much more accessible and are taught in every high school, so it should not be surprising that Darwin seems to be emerging as the inspiration for the more dim-witted schoolboy sociopath.

The implication, of course, is that perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so eager to teach evolution to our kids.

What galls Sewell the most about evolution is this familiar plaint: it destroys the basis of morality.

Darwin would no doubt have been horrified by all this, but it’s easy to see why some of his ideas might appeal to the disturbed adolescent mind. One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

I haven’t heard any atheist say that life is “utterly meaningless.”  What evolution eroded was the idea that humans were special creations of God, thereby removing the authority of God-given purpose.  What we say is that we ourselves give meaning to our lives — through our friends, our work, our families, and our avocations.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

Apparently Sewell hasn’t heard about the secular origin of morality, or the fact that, as even many theologians admit, we cannot philosophically ground right and wrong on divine fiat. And what’s wrong with accepting one’s morality as “matter of personal choice”? Isn’t it more admirable to act out of reasoned principles of morality than out of fear of eternal immolation for disobeying the Sky Dictator?  Freedom to behave is what makes moral behavior admirable, and immorality deplorable.  Who is more admirable: someone who gives to the poor because a small sacrifice produces an enormous improvement in the world’s welfare, or someone who does so because Jesus preached charity as a way to heaven?  Were Sewell correct, we atheists, bereft of meaning, would be bumping ourselves off by the score, but not until we’d committed our fair share of murders, rapes, and robberies.  Where are all the immoral atheists?

Nor has Sewell grasped that the moral precepts of faith are even more “readily interpreted as a license to kill.”  What inspires the fanatics who train their gunsights on abortion doctors, or strap bags of explosives and nails around their waists?

Sewell even cites wacko Ann Coulter as a trenchant critic of Darwin:

Coulter claims she is not surprised that psychopaths gravitate towards Darwin’s ideas. “Instead of enshrining moral values,” she says, Darwin “enshrined biological instincts.” Coulter believes Darwin’s theory appeals to liberals because it “lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing — screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child — Darwin says it will benefit humanity”.

I’ve read a lot of Darwin, but I don’t remember him saying anything about screwing my secretary and offing Grandma.

Sewell goes on, but I can’t.  Darwin takes the rap for slavery (despite his well known antislavery activities) and, of course, for the Holocaust. The “orders” followed by the Nazis apparently came from the sage of Downe.  And in the end, we’re all accused of neglecting Darwin’s dark legacy:

There are, however, many interesting questions about how Darwin’s views chime with our values of liberal democracy and human rights, or the simple lessons of right and wrong that most of us teach our children. But our society cannot begin to address these issues while we are fed only a bowdlerised account of Darwin’s work. The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called “Darwinism” — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it — are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions [sic].

I hadn’t realized that Darwinism was a “world-view.”  Silly me — all along I thought it was just a theory meant to explain the development and diversity of life.

Shame on the Times for publishing tripe like this. I’d expect to see this flatulence in a creationist pamphlet, but not in a reputable newspaper. Fortunately, the Times readers are taking Sewell apart in the comments section.

Over at The Flying Trilobite, Glendon Mellow posts five portraits of scientists/evolutionists, including Genie Scott, Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall,  Craig Venter et moi.  This was a task for his drawing course:

This is the series Lights I began for my drawing course at York. Our project was to draw between 5 and 30 heads. The idea and compositions I set for myself are fairly simple. Draw portraits of living biologists, each with a light source on their heads, and incorporating a double helix form.

I like the fly, and am flattered by the idea to do my portrait (my first, I think), but wish I didn’t look so australopithecine (note: not the artist’s fault!)

My favorite is the joint Venter/Dawkins portrait:

Check out Glendon’s evolution-themed gallery, especially “Haldane’s Precambrian Puzzle.”

All artwork copyrighted by Glendon Mellow.