Discovery Institute claims that Meyer’s ID book is approved by one of Britain’s “top geneticists”; doesn’t mention that he’s a creationist

June 23, 2013 • 7:24 am

The Discovery Institute is desperate to flog Stephen Meyer’s new book Darwin’s Doubt, which, according to Nick Matzke’s review, is not only laden with ignorance and errors, but touts ~~God~~ The Intelligent Designer as responsible for the rapid “Cambrian explosion.”

Ergo, they’re busy digging up scientists to approve of the book, though I doubt they’ll find a decent paleobiologist to give an imprimatur. Instead, in a post called “One of Britain’s top geneticists recommends Darwin’s Doubt,” the editors of Evolution News and Views, a DI mouthpiece, trumpets this:

Dr. Meyer’s book covers evidence from many disciplines — like genetics. So it seems relevant to consult one of Britain’s top geneticists, Dr. Norman C. Nevin OBE, BSc, MD, FRCPath, FFPH, FRCPE, FRCP. Once you get past all the honors and decorations, he is Professor Emeritus in Medical Genetics, Queen’s University, Belfast. In an appraisal of Darwin’s Doubt, Dr. Nevin says this:

“With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin acknowledged that there wasn’t an adequate explanation for the pattern in the fossil record in which a wide diversity of animal life suddenly appeared in the Cambrian geological period. His doubt about the “Cambrian explosion” centered on the wide range of body forms, the missing fossil intermediates and the lack of evidence for antecedents.Meyer’s book examines the implications of the “Cambrian explosion.” It is a fascinating story and analysis of Darwin’s doubt about the fossil record and the debate that has ensued. It is a tour de force. It is divided into three main parts with several chapters in each — “The Mystery of the Missing Fossils,” “How to Build an Animal.’ And After Darwin What?’

Many leading biologists criticize key aspects of evolution. The main problem with neo-Darwinism is the origin of new biological information. Building a living organism requires an immense amount of information. The issue that arises is the source of the information and how can random mutations and natural selection generate the necessary biological information to produce such a diversity of animal forms without antecedents.

This book is well informed, carefully researched, up-to-date and powerfully argued. Its value is that it confronts Darwin’s doubt and deals with the assumptions of neo-Darwinism. This book is much needed and I recommend it to students of all levels, to professionals and to laypeople.”

You can hardly get better than that.

Well, you could, actually, for Norman Nevin is a well-known evolution denier and advocate of Intelligent design. He seems, in fact, to be a Biblical literalist. And he hardly has expertise on the Cambrian Explosion, certainly not anything like expertise of Nick Matzke, who is not even a paleobiologist. (Note that the DI will continue to ignore negative verdicts by scientists like Matzke and others.)

Here’s what the British Center for Science Education (BCSE) says about Nevin:

Nevin resolutely rejects both evolutionary biology and geology. He’ been an advocate of Answers in Genesis’s position on flood geology, openly accepting Tas Walker’s “work” on the matter. He openly believes that the Noah’s Ark storey is an historical event. He believes that the Book of Genesis is historically and literally true, lock, stock and barrel. (Tas Walker is yet another Queenslander pushing young earth creationism. He works for Creation Ministries International. Many of the leaders of the young earth creationist movement come from Queensland.)

BCSE has done a considerable amount of research on Professor Nevin’s position on creationism; it suggests that he is basically a hard line Biblical literalist. We’ve presented the evidence on our blog at http://bcseweb.blogspot.com/search/label/Nevin. It also suggests that he has some severe shortcomings in his knowledge of the science he seems to use to back up his creationist position.

Professor Nevin is an elder in the largest Brethren church in Northern Ireland (the Crescent Church in Belfast—see http://www.iguidez.com/Belfast/crescent_church/). It’s large by any British standards and is believed to have a capacity of some 2,000 people. The church is located in Belfast’s university district and has been a fairly regular venue for creationists visiting the province. These have included Monty White, then of Answers in Genesis.

. . . Nevin concludes in his book that “No coherent, cohesive theology has yet been offered that would allow Christians to embrace evolution with integrity.” There you have it. Any Christian who accepts evolutionary biology has “no integrity”. This statement is an affront to mainstream Christians in general, and (given the Vatican’s position) to Catholics in particular; no small matter in a Northern Ireland context.

If you want to see what a literalist he is, go see his long apologetic talk, given at Bethany Church, on the historical existence of Adam and Eve. (The BCSE dissection of that “sermon” is here.

And from RationalWiki:

Prof Norman Nevin OBE, is Emeritus Professor of Medical Genetics at Queens University, Belfast.

He was the leader of a group of scientists which endorsed the actions of the anti-evolutionary group of scientists which endorsed the work of the intelligent design supporting website Truth in Science in 2007.

He is the president of the Centre for Intelligent Design in Glasgow.

Really, Discovery Institute? You have to dig up literalists like this and tout them as scientists with expertise to judge Meyer’s book? It’s laughable. Who will be the next endorser: Ken Ham, Hugh Ross, or Kent Hovind?

It’s ironic that the Discovery Institute claims that ID has scientific respectability, but their “scientific” evidence is never published in real science journals—only books aimed at the general public. Publication in science journals would be especially important if there was any credibility to Meyer’s claim that no naturalistic hypothesis could explain the Cambrian explosion or the increase in “biological information” that accompanies it. For that would be a startling claim.

No matter how the DI waffles when trying to explain their failure to publish in genuine science journals, the real reason is that their ideas wouldn’t pass criticial scrutiny by the scientific community.

Happy 65th birthday, your computer

June 22, 2013 • 12:02 pm

by Matthew Cobb

The machine you are reading this post on can trace its conceptual ancestry back to the city where I live and work – Manchester. 65 years ago, on 21 June 1948, the world’s first computer that could store a programme in its electronic memory – Random Access Memory or RAM – was turned on in a red brick building. Developed by ‘Freddie’ Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, the machine was able to store 2048 digits on a cathode ray tube. This development marked the beginning of programming.

The machine’s official name was ‘the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine’; its nickname was ‘The Baby’. Despite its name, it filled a room:

The Small Scale Electronic Machine, University of Manchester

To commemorate this 65^th anniversary, Google has produced this brief video explaining what was involved and why it was such a great leap forward in the history of computing. It includes archive footage and interviews with many of the men who were involved.

Interestingly (but perhaps not surprisingly), this 1961 US Army phylogenetic tree of computers, completely ignores The Baby. This (very large) 1975 poster of the history of computers has a broader view, and covers all the different sources and routes to the development of the modern computer, including The Baby.

At the time, people were well aware of the significance of what was going on in Manchester. In 1946, Norbert Wiener, the mercurial genius who was in the process of developing the concepts of cybernetics, visited the UK. After chatting to the geneticist J B S Haldane in London, Wiener made the smoky journey up to Manchester. ‘I found that Manchester was well at the front of the new technique of high-speed automatic computing machines’ he wrote in his autobiography.

On that visit to England, Wiener also met Alan Turing, who had already theorised the idea of a programmable computer as the ‘universal machine’. At the beginning of 1948, Turing joined the University of Manchester and began to use The Baby and its successors, ultimately using the machines to try and understand patterns of organismal development, through what he termed ‘morphogens’. Some of Turing’s programmes are still intact and were displayed in a recent Turing centenary exhibition about his work on morphogens, at the Manchester Museum.

In an intriguing ‘what if’, the pioneer of virus genetics, Max Delbrück, came within a gnat’s whisker of joining the University of Manchester at the same time. However, after accepting the offer, he changed his mind and went to Caltech instead. In a parallel universe, the histories of molecular genetics, developmental biology and computing all took a very different turn as Turing and Delbrück interacted in unimaginable ways.

The Baby was soon cannibalised and within 18 months was out of date; nothing remains of the original machine. But to mark the 50^th anniversary, a working replica was built, which can be seen at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester, which is housed in the world’s first passenger railway station.

If you visit Manchester, be sure to come and see the working copy, and also the blue plaque on the side of the Bridgeford Street building where The Baby was built and eventually turned on:

Jesus says it’s okay to beat your wife

June 22, 2013 • 11:25 am

Matthew Cobb noticed a “tweet” (oy, do I hate that word!) from Tom Holland, to wit:

Well, that’s provocative. Checking it out, Matthew and I found the Christian Domestic Discipline website, and it’seven worse than you can imagine. At first I thought it was a joke, but it appears to be serious. You can find gems like this:

This website is intended to be a haven for those practicing Consensual Christian Domestic Discipline, and for those who ernestly wish to learn about Christian Domestic Discipline.

What is Christian Domestic Discipline?

In order to describe to you what is Christian Domestic Discipline, I’d first like to start with what it is not.

Christian Domestic Discipline is not domestic violence. Neither is it abuse. It is an arrangement between two adults who share the belief that the husband is the head of the household and with that position comes the right to enforce his authority.

Christian Domestic Discipline is not BDSM. It is not a game. While we do not deny its sometimes erotic nature, it is ultimately not for erotic purposes. It is often much different than the domestic discipline you will find outside of the Christian faith.

A Christian Domestic Discipline marriage is set up according to the guidelines set forth in the Holy Bible, meaning the husband has authority over his wife within the bounds of God’s Word and enforces that authority, if need be, through discipline including but not limited to spanking. He uses his authority to keep peace and order in his home, protect his marriage, and help his wife mature in her Christian walk.

In a true Christian Domestic Discipline marriage, discipline is tempered with the knowledge that the husband must answer to God for his actions and decisions in his position of authority.

(This website is not intended to offend anyone. If the subject of wife spanking offends, please just click the little “x” at the top of the page to exit.)

Yes, it’s about wife-~~beating~~ “spanking,” physical abuse sanctioned and sanctified by the Holy Bible. The site is replete with gems like the following. At first I thought they must have all been written by men, but women are authors, too!

So what am I getting at? I am saying that you as a man will get all kinds of mixed signals from a woman. It’s not that she means to confuse you. She is probably confused herself. She has desires and wants of her own (and our modern culture has certainly taught her that she’ll only be happy if she can manage to meet those desires), but her created nature is never fully satisfied outside of the role for which she was created.

That is why a woman will say she wants a Prince Charming, only to run off with the first Black Knight that comes her way. She doesn’t understand it is her created nature that is causing the attraction to jerks. She doesn’t really want a jerk. What she senses in the jerk is simply masculinity in its darkest form. Her created nature can trick her into believing the jerk can provide just what she needs (until he beats her or goes out on her or otherwise mistreats her).

In reality, what she needs is a hero. Not a suave Prince Charming who brings her flowers and jumps to do her every bidding, but a Knight in Beat-up Armor who understands her needs as a woman and is self-disciplined enough to meet those needs.

Yes, a hero who understands that a woman’s needs include being upended over a knee and beat on the bum when she’s disobedient.

There are lots of lovely articles on the site, like this one from “Sir Don”:

Warm Up

By: Sir Don

When you discipline your wife, for either misbehavior or maintenance it is best to start slow and warm up her bottom, spanking her with less intensity and not going full force right out of the gate.

After a sufficient warm up you will be able to spank her with great intensity and a longer period of time, hence enforcing a proper punishment and the tears that are sure to flow.

Remember to take you time with the discipline, by spanking her longer you will find that the submission from her is greater than one done quick just to get it over with, By spanking her for a greater period of time also shows that you as her HOH take your responsibilities serious. . .

There is, of course, the requisite Scriptural justification; here’s a small sample:

1 Peter 3:1 Likewise, wives, be in subjection to your own husbands, so that, even if some refuse to believe and obey the word of God, they will be won over without a word, because of the behavior of the wives.

1 Peter 3:5-6 For in the same way, the holy wives of former times, whose hope was towards God, also adorned themselves, being in subjection to their own husbands; just as Sarah submissively obeyed Abraham calling him, “Lord, who owns me”; whose spiritual child you became when you
began doing what was right and were absolutely not afraid of any terror.

Proverbs 13:24 He who spares his rod hates his son. But he who loves him disciplines him diligently.

And there are explicit instructions about how to administer the beating, which is repeatedly distinguished from “abuse”. This is from Ned and Maria:

Her rear end and maybe ‘nearby’ is the only appropriate target. The Bible speaks of a rod to the back, but she is more sensitive and I suggest you stick with the safer spot. You want to be ultra-cautious with your treasure and not do any harm. Discipline is to be temporary – never even THINK of doing something that would give a long-term harm. That would show a lack of concern for her well-being, and she could lose respect for you. No, give her spankings to remember, and let her sit on pillows occasionally. But that’s it.

What a kindness to provide pillows!

Now I suppose this could be some twisted mixture of religion and consensual S&M, but they vehemetly deny it—while still admitting its “erotic aspects”. I think it’s just religion gone awry, as it so often does. In this case, Christianity has morphed into a form of perverted sexism, akin to fundamentalist Islam.

More on HedinGate

June 22, 2013 • 6:51 am

There’s another in the continuing series of articles by Seth Slabaugh, the Muncie Star-Press reporter who is covering the case of Dr. Eric Hedin, the Ball State University (BSU) professor under investigation for teaching intelligent design and proselytizing Christianity in a science class. Slabaugh’s piece, “Professor left twisting in the wind?“, takes its title from a Discovery Institute characterization of how Hedin is being treated.

The subtitle is “God versus science debate over BSU class includes gets ugly.” (I think that “includes” is a typo here, unless “gets ugly” is some kind of noun.) And it’s largely about the tone of the debate rather than the substance, which makes me more than a little unhappy.

I’m quoted several times as having made statements characterized by Slabauth (and the Discovery Institute or DI) as inflammatory and verbally abusive, including:

Hedin has been called “the nutty professor” by Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and author of the blog, “Why Evolution is True.” Coyne has referred to the controversy as “Hedingate.”

and these (all taken from this website).

“Were we supposed to sit back and let Hedin shove Jesus down his students’ throats, as well as presenting creationism in his science class? Well excuse me for informing Hedin’s chair (and then, when the chair did nothing, the Freedom from Religion Foundation) about his course.”

“I suspect Ball State is getting a wee bit nervous about the publicity now. Granted, their instinct is to cover their tuchus, cater to the religious and conservative majority of Indiana, and hope that it all blows over, but they’re starting to look like Dayton, Tenn., during the Scopes Trial.”

“ … I’ll be happy if this doesn’t go to court but is simply resolved by BSU telling Hedin that he can’t shove Jesus down the throats of his students. If they don’t do that, then I have no problem with saying that the BSU administration is simply cowardly and unwilling to stand up for good science.”

Je ne regrette rien. The “nutty professor” might seem a bit ad hominem, but remember that Hedin is teaching lies to his science class about intelligent design and the supposed evidence for God and Jesus in the universe. Remember that he said the universe must have been designed by the Christian god because it’s impossible that “some Hindu monkey god” was involved. It seems more charitable (and not out of place) to call him “nutty” rather than a “liar.”

The DI is also noted for “similar rhetoric” emanating from the old faker David Klinghoffer (words in quotes come from Klinghoffer):

“Physicist Eric Hedin is still left twisting in the wind, thanks to the administrators at his university.”

Coyne is an “ignoramus” and “a bully.”

“Distinctly on the far fringe, FFRP campaigns for erasing ‘In God We Trust’ from American currency … and is also responsible for some hard-edged billboards you may have seen including, ‘Yes Virginia…There Is No God,’ ‘ Heathen’s Greetings,’ ‘ Sleep In on Sundays’ and ‘Enjoy Life Now. There Is No Afterlife.’ “

You know what? I don’t care a whit about the tone of those statements. This is exactly what is to be expected on websites (not in academic journals, note) in a case that is not purely academic, but political. To me it’s about two related issues: 1) whether professors at public universities have the right to abrogate the First Amendment to the Constitution by pushing a particular religious viewpoint in the classroom, and 2) whether a professor has the right to teach lies (intelligent design creationism) in a science class, especially when he fails to present the other side.

The DI’s invective rolls off my back. At one time they—I think it was William Dembski—posted a picture of me next to one of Herman Munster, pointing out the resemblance. They eventually removed it, but it didn’t bother me at all. Satire is one of the weapons in this battle between rationality and superstition. When they don’t have arguments, they have Herman Munster and satire based on looks.

So the rhetoric from the DI doesn’t faze me in the least, and it doesn’t seem to have fazed anyone else but reporter Slabaugh. I’ve been criticized for many things in this fracas, but none of the criticism has been about my tone. It’s invariably that I’m an evolutionary carpetbagger, riding into Indiana to enforce my scientific/atheistic views on another university.

So tone is hardly an issue here, and neither is Hedin’s “twisting in the wind,” which, after all, merely means he awaits the outcome of Ball State’s investigation of his class, an investigation which is the right thing for BSU to do.

The other part of the piece deals with George Wolfe, a BSU professor who was accused in 2004 by right-wingnut David Horowitz of “supporting terrorists and indoctrinating students with a liberal, anti-military, anti-American political agenda.” But Wolfe’s case wasn’t similar to Hedin’s at all. There was no formal investigation, and Wolfe was quickly exonerated by the BSU president. Wolfe probably made a few “liberal” statements in his class and offended some right-wing students, who reported him.

The main dissimilarity between the Wolfe and Hedin cases is what the men were accused of. Hedin is not being hounded for thinking wrong thoughts or displaying “wrong” sentiments. He is accused of teaching manifest rubbish and calling it science, as well as violating the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, Wolfe, as is natural, was upset by this accusation that came out of nowhere, and has written Hedin a letter of support. It includes this.

“From what I have read about your class, I think having your students critically examine scientific theories in an Honors College class is most appropriate,” Wolfe wrote.

Be careful, Dr. Wolfe, for there was no “critical examination” in Hedin’s class. There was plenty of reading about the immanence of God and Jesus in the universe, but none about the absence of evidence for God. No Dawkins, no Stenger, no Sagan, no Krauss, no Carroll.

And Wolfe appends some advice, apparently intended for Hedin and his detractors:

“The answer to political intrusion and verbal abuse by misinformed individuals or groups is not to repress their expression but to respond with truth and dignified nonviolence. We must refuse to become like our enemies, and never allow ourselves to be drawn into hateful, slanderous debate.”

I’m not sure what he’s talking about unless he’s projecting what happened to him on this episode (entirely possible given that the firebrand Horowitz was involved), but the debate to date has been far from hateful, and hardly slanderous. Yes, there’s been some strong language, but that’s what happens in cases like this. Certainly my initial letter to Hedin’s chair was calm and reasoned, but of course achieved nothing.

What’s not important here is the tone, but the issues. The investigation of Hedin grinds on, and I hope will reach the conclusion that he transgressed, and that his course should be either dropped or changed to a philosophy/religion course that, in contrast to its present incarnation, allows airing of the secular side of science. By concentrating on the “he-said/they said” issues, emphasizing that things are “getting ugly,” and that Hedin is “twisting in the wind” (a very unwise choice for a headline, coming as it does straight from the DI), the newspaper has taken its eyes off the prize.

Let’s get back to the issues, Star-Press, and behave like the serious paper you purport to be. You’re not the National Enquirer, and there are serious issues of academic and religious freedom here. Concentrating on “tone” is simply a distraction.

Caturday felid: El gato Morris runs for mayor of a Mexican city

June 22, 2013 • 6:12 am

It’s about time we started putting cats in elective office. According to many amused sources, Morris, a Mexican tuxedo cat, is running for mayor of the town of Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz province. In fact, other animals in Mexico are following his lead.

According to ABC News:

Morris, a black-and-white kitten [JAC: not a kitten] with orange eyes, is running for mayor of Xalapa in eastern Mexico with the campaign slogan “Tired of Voting for Rats? Vote for a Cat.” And he is attracting tens of thousands of politician-weary, two-legged supporters on social media.

“He sleeps almost all day and does nothing, and that fits the profile of a politician,” said 35-year-old office worker Sergio Chamorro, who adopted the 10-month-old feline last year.

Put forth as a candidate by Chamorro and a group of friends after they became disillusioned with the empty promises of politicians, Morris’ candidacy has resonated across Mexico, where citizens frustrated with human candidates are nominating their pets and farm animals to run in July 7 elections being held in 14 states.

Also running for mayor are “Chon the Donkey” in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, “Tina the Chicken” in Tepic, the capital of the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, “Maya the Cat” in the city of Puebla and “Tintan the Dog” in Oaxaca City, though their campaigns are not as well organized as that of Morris.

. . .Morris has a website, a Twitter account and a Facebook page with more than 115,000 ‘likes,’ that makes him more popular in social networks than the five human mayoral contenders. Americo Zuniga, the candidate for the ruling party who is leading in election polls, had 33,000 Facebook ‘likes’ as of Friday.

His website has a collection of memes that picture Morris yawning while describing his “ample legislative experience,” an image that mirrors photographs of lawmakers sleeping during congressional sessions.

Heeere’s Morris. Who wouldn’t vote for a cat this lovely? Look at those eyes!

Here’s a screenshot from Morris’s Facebook page, “El Candigato Morris“:

Morris’s website (in Spanish and English) is here, with lots of cool campaign posters and other information. His Twitter feed is here.

A few campaign posters (Morris is running on an anti-rat platform):

The news is worldwide, and it shows you the power of the felid. Tintan the Dog isn’t getting near the worldwide press as Morris.

From the Guardian:

It started as a joke between friends, but Morris the cat’s bid to become mayor of the Mexican city of Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz, has now turned into a social media phenomenon with a serious message about political disenchantment.

“Morris has become an expression of how fed up people are with all the parties and a political system that does not represent us,” said Sergio Chamorro, the owner of the furry black-and-white candidate whose first campaign slogan was: “Tired of voting for rats? Vote for a cat.”

The Facebook page for the Candigato (gato means cat in Spanish) now has more than 130,000 “likes” – far more than those accrued by any of the candidates registered to stand in the Xalapa election, and more too than those of Veracruz’s current governor. Mexico will hold local elections in around half of the country on 7 July.

Morris’s Facebook page and website are filled with artwork, videos and slogans sent in by supporters from all over Mexico and beyond. Spin-off Twitter accounts have sprouted too, beyond the control of Chamorro and the small group of thirtysomething professionals who have run Morris’s campaign since his popularity took off earlier this month.

h/t: Nichole and others whom I forgotten but thank anyway

Cat and owner swim for their lives

June 21, 2013 • 1:20 pm

Here’s a heartwarming story sent by alert reader Iggy to end the week on a happy note.

The photo blog of NBC News has the story and photos of a Candadian man, Kevan Yeats, and his cat Momo, who were overtaken in Yeats’s truck when a river in Alberta overflowed. The truck went down, and both had to swim for their lives. The photos are quite dramatic:

Look at that moggie swim!

They made it.

And so this tail has a happy ending.

Have a good weekend (I’ll be here all weekend, folks!).

Three easy science pieces

June 21, 2013 • 10:20 am

I can see that book-writing is going to trim my posting here for a while, and that’s as it should be, for the book has a deadline and is something I’ve been researching for several years. But, as Maru the cat says, “I do my best.”

Here are three science-related articles you might (i.e., should) want to peruse:

*****

From the BBC news comes a report on a South American plant about to bloom in a Surrey greenhouse 15 years after it was planted. The plant, Puya chilensis, is called the “sheep-eating plant” because it supposedly esnares sheep and other animals and, after they die, using their rotten carcasses as fertilizer.

I don’t believe that for a minute, though the BBC reports on it without doubt:

In the Andes it uses its sharp spines to snare and trap sheep and other animals, which slowly starve to death.

The animals then decay at the base of the plant, acting as a fertiliser.

The RHS [Royal Horticultural Society] feeds its specimen on liquid fertiliser. . .

. . . I’m really pleased that we’ve finally coaxed our Puya chilensis into flower,” said horticulturalist Cara Smith.

“We keep it well fed with liquid fertiliser as feeding it on its natural diet might prove a bit problematic.

“It’s growing in the arid section of our glasshouse with its deadly spines well out of reach of both children and sheep alike.”

Well, that’s humorous, but not obviously a joke and therefore misleading to readers.

Matthew has found an article on the phylogenetic relationships of this plant, but nothing about its vampiric proclivities. I’m betting the whole “fertilizer” thing is a myth, but I may be wrong. Readers?

Here’s a picture of the plant about to bloom:

*****

At National Geographic you should read “The case of the missing ancestor,” about the Denisovans, a group (indeed, possibly a subspecies) of hominin that lived in Asia roughly 50,000-30,000 years ago. DNA from teeth and finger bones show that the group was not only distinct from both modern humans and Neanderthals, but that they’ve left traces in their DNA in modern humans: up to 5% of the DNA in native Australians and the inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia. (Modern humans also contain about 2.5% of Neanderthal DNA.)

The article discusses the possible evolutionary relationships between these three groups, and the questions that remain. Given that modern humans contain substantial fractions of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, I’d say that these groups would be considered populations or subspecies rather than species, the reason being that there was obviously interbreeding where they met, and the “hybrid” offspring must have been fertile.” Interbreeding and fertile offspring in nature usually indicates that two populations belong to the same species.

*****

Last week’s New York Times has an article on the post-television doings of Bill Nye, the Science Guy: “Firebrand for science, and big man on campus“. It includes a nice three-minute video profile of Nye, who really impresses me, especially because he’s clearly made a huge difference in the lives of many kids. There are people who wouldn’t be scientists if they hadn’t watched his show.

The article includes quotes from Phil Plait and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and you may not know this about Nye’s background:

There was nothing in Mr. Nye’s early days that suggested he might be a firebrand for science. Born in Washington, D.C., he studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, where he got to know a professor named Carl Sagan. He moved out West to do engineering for Boeing, where he spent some three years designing a hydraulic tube for the 747 that served to dampen vibration in the steering mechanism. He refers to it lovingly as “my tube.”

He tried his hand at stand-up comedy — his first time onstage was during a Steve Martin look-alike competition, which he won. He would achieve escape velocity from Boeing with an idea for a television program that would teach science to children in a wacky way. The best-known version of “Bill Nye the Science Guy” ran from 1992 to 1996, and won 18 Emmys in five years.

h/t: Genghis, Grania, Matthew, John, Greg, and others.

The first review of Stephen Meyer’s new ID book

June 21, 2013 • 6:52 am

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading here regularly, Stephen Meyer, a fellow of the intelligent-design-touting Discovery Institute, has published a new book called Darwin’s Doubt. Its thesis is that the Cambrian explosion of animal life, which I mentioned yesterday, could not reflect natural evolutionary processes, and so must be the work of ~~God~~ an Intelligent Designer.

It’s no use reading reviews by ID people, as they’re hardly objective, and don’t have the requisite knowledge about the Cambrian explosion anyway. I too lack that expertise, which is why I’m not reviewing the book. But, over at Panda’s Thumb, Nick Matzke, who’s finishing his Ph.D. in biology at Berkeley, has written a very long but excellent review, which he call’s “Meyer’s Hopeless Monster, Part II“. (“Part I” is a damning review Matzke wrote about a paper Meyer published in 2004.)

Matzke’s verdict: Darwin’s Doubt stinks. His overall opinion:

As I read through Meyer’s book, though, in case after case I see misunderstandings, superficial treatment of key issues which are devastating to his thesis once understood, and complete or near-complete omission of information that any non-expert reader would need to have to make an accurate assessment of Meyer’s arguments.

And he proffers this damning assessment of Meyer’s scientific explanations:

In the cases I have checked, Wikipedia does better at explaining the actual issues and methods than Meyer does.

Nick’s review is long and quite technical, so I’ll just summarize the main points of contention. I am not evaluating what Nick said, but summarizing his criticisms, and I hope I get this right!

All statement in quotes are from Matzke:

Meyer doesn’t present the full story of the Cambrian “explosion,” and neglects the animal diversification that led up to it, making the explosion seem more explosive than it was. Moreover, the earliest representatives of modern “phyla” are quite different from those that appear even in the late Cambrian, so evolution continued throughout the 30-myr period. I quote Nick:

“All of this is pretty good evidence for the basic idea that the Cambrian “Explosion” is really the radiation of simple bilaterian worms into more complex worms, and that this took something like 30 million years just to get to the most primitive forms that are clearly related to one or another living crown “phyla”, and occurred in many stages, instead of all at once. But, the reader gets very little of the actual big picture from Meyer.”

The notion of what a “new body plan” is turns out to be quite fuzzy, and in fact those “plans,” which comprise many characters, originated during the Cambrian in a step-by-step rather than instantaneous proces. Meyer’s failure to appreciate this comes from his apparent lack of understanding of modern systematics and cladistic methodology. Again I quote Nick:

“It is the step-by-step reconstruction of character changes that is the fundamentally important result that tells us about evolutionary history. This is the result that is closest to the data. The naming conventions are not of fundamental importance by comparison, even though creationists (including Meyer) usually distract themselves by focusing on names and taxonomic ranks rather than the distribution of characters. . . But Meyer never presents for his readers the point that cladistic analyses reveal the order in which the characters found in living groups were acquired, nor the fact that stem taxa are the transitional fossils the creationists are allegedly looking for. And he especially avoids giving his readers any real sense of the number of transitional forms we know about for some groups, and the detail known about their relationships and about the order in which the characters of modern groups originated. The most egregious example is with the Cambrian arthropods and arthropod relatives.

Meyer’s ignorance of modern systematics leads him to many other mistake or muddles. He mischaracterizes animals like Anomalocarus as “arthropods, which isn’t kosher. Further, some of his “phyla” are actually subgroups of other “phyla”. Meyer mistakenly thinks that modern systematics can identify fossils that are direct ancestors of modern groups. It can’t: it can identify sister groups (groups that are each other’s closest relatives) and “ancestral grades and clades”—but not single fossils that are themselves ancestral. According to Matzke, this issue (one that even I’m aware of) leads Meyer into several “howlers.” Finally, Meyer notes that some phylogenetic analysis conflict, and on this basis rejects the entire enterprise of systematics as used to analyze the fossil data! Nick weighs in:

“Again, it is only by refusing to depict and specifically discuss of the inter-relationships of these sorts of taxa, and the data that supports them, and to mention the statistical support for the resulting relationships, that Meyer manages to pretend to his readers that these questions [what is the ancestry of a group] are not even partially answered, are unanswerable, and that “poof, God did it” is a better explanation.

. . .But to creationists/IDists, all phylogenetic conflicts of any sort are considered equally, crashingly devastating. It’s rather a lot like when the young-earth creationists argued if estimates of the age of the Earth varied between 4.5 and 4.6 billion years ago, this 100-my disagreement was huge, and therefore we should instead think the Earth is 6,000 years old.

. . . All of the major statistical phylogenetic issues I’ve raised above were put forward with much more patience and detail by Doug Theobald in his “29+ Evidences for Macroevolution” FAQ at talk.origins. Meyer cites this once, near the beginning of his quote-mining tour about conflict between phylogenies, but then asserts that “In reality, however, the technical literature tells a different story.” This just ain’t so.”

Most of Meyer’s book isn’t really about the Cambrian explosion, but about his pet theme, the notion that evolution cannot produce biological “information.” His rejection of the idea that new genes can evolve—genes that can do new things—has been roundly refuted by discoveries in the last decade, if not before. Yet Meyer still rejects this, desperately clinging to the idea that the origin of new information requires ~~God~~ an Intelligent Designer. Meyer seems to think, for example, that the genetic similarity of duplicate genes arises not from duplication itself (a well understood process) but from independent, convergent evolution. That level of ignorance is so profound that it must be willful.

Nick has a long section refuting the notion that evolution can’t create new biological information (something that’s refuted not only by new genetic data, but by the evolution of transitional forms with new characters in the fossil record), but I’ll leave you to read that yourself. I’ll finish with some excerpts from Nick’s conclusions. I quote at length because there’s a lot here, and his summary is good (the bolding is mine):

“Even without addressing all of these other issues in depth, I think the above shows that Meyer’s book is already holed beneath the waterline on the key issues of Cambrian paleontology, phylogenetics, and the information argument. I’m not sure it deserves much more of anyone’s time. Sadly, some vaguely respectable people seem to have ignored the crashingly obvious flaws and endorsed the book, although in at least some cases they are already known for promoting bizarre opinions in other contexts. Enthusiastic reviewers in the blogosphere, like Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian, seem to lack even Wikipedia-level research abilities in critically assessing Meyer’s claims.

“The one refreshing bit of the book is at the end, where Meyer basically admits that, yes, this really is all about bringing an interventionist God back into science, and thereby reconciling and harmonizing science and religion, and solving the problems of meaning in the culture and belonging in the Universe, or something. How exactly this could ever work, even if Meyer’s argument’s succeeded, is not explained. Meyer completely and explicitly punts on the question of providing any sorts of answers on what exactly is supposed to have happened at the Cambrian or anywhere else in geological history, on the ID view. All we get is ID did something, somewhere, somehow, for some reason, never mind extinction, the millions of years of twiddling around with arthropods, the billions of years of twiddling around with bacteria, the endless examples of apparent evidence for evolution, etc. If Meyer takes his own arguments at all seriously, he is invoking divine intervention not just for the origin of life and the Cambrian, for basically every new gene, ORFan, any adaptation of any significance, and some ill-specified level of morphological difference. This is, probably, billions of separate divine interventions. It essentially amounts to invoking divine intervention at every instance where Meyer personally doesn’t understand something, even in cases where scientists understand something quite well, and Meyer simply can’t be bothered to do the work necessary to understand what they are talking about.

“As I’ve said before, the real problem with creationists/IDists isn’t when they stick God into the gaps in current scientific knowledge. Such a thing is unwise, given history, but at least questions that all of humanity still wonders about are vaguely worthy of divine intervention. The real problem is when creationists/IDists insert God into the gaps in their own personal knowledge, gaps which have already been filled by scientists.”

This “God-of-my-own-gaps” argument is not new, of course, for creationists have used it repeatedly, as when they raise the “no transitional forms, ergo God” claim when we already have transitional forms between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, reptiles and birds, land mammals and whales, and so on. It’s about pretending that there are gaps when there are none. But of course they continue to use the conventional god-of-the-gaps arguments for scientific issues that are still unresolved, like where did human morality come from, how did life originate, and why the laws of physics are why they are (i.e. laws that are supposedly “fine tuned” to allow the appearance of humans).

Nick and I have had our differences in the past—we’ve crossed swords several times, for instance, on the issue of accommodationism (he favors comity with religion; I don’t)—but I have to give him credit here, as I have done for all his work fighting creationism in the past. He’s done a magnificent job refuting Meyer’s thesis, and anybody interested in the technicalities of why Darwin’s Doubt is a Dud must read Nick’s post.

We can expect other reviews by paleobiologists in the near future. I’d be surprised if they were any more laudatory than Nick’s.

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