I review E. O. Wilson’s new book in the TLS

January 31, 2013 • 11:41 am

Most of the contents of the Times Literary Supplement are behind a paywall (a few pieces are free in each issue), but you can at least see the latest Table of Contents here. In that issue I’ve reviewed E. O. Wilson’s new book The Social Conquest of Earth, in which he claims that major features of human behavior evolved by group (rather than individual) selection.  Sadly, my own piece, “Genes first,” is also behind a paywall, but judicious inquiry might yield you a pdf file.

Here are two excerpts:

Although Wilson pushes this view [group selection] hard –it’s the book’s centrepiece – he is probably wrong. Most biologists have rejected group selection for two reasons: it doesn’t work well in principle, and, more important, there’s no evidence that it has been of any significance in evolution. For an obvious reason, selection among groups is far less efficient than selection among genes: genes replicate and replace other genes much faster than groups of individuals divide and replace other groups. Evolving all the social traits on Wilson’s list via group selection requires a slow and unrealistic sequence of episodes in which human populations replaced each other, each replacement based on one or a few behaviours. Further, once group selection fixes a disadvantageous trait like altruism within our species, individual selection proceeds to undo it within populations (“selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals”). In other words, altruism evolved by group selection is unstable and should disappear.

If the better angels of our nature really are based on genes that evolved – rather than on non-genetic aspects of culture – then they are much more likely to have done so by individual than by group selection. This becomes even more plausible with a more detailed look at how human altruism really works. It is preferentially directed towards friends and relatives, there is much concern with reciprocity and one’s own reputation, and psychological studies show that we dislike cheaters who hurt us personally much more strongly than cheaters who hurt our group. Such behaviours are precisely what you’d expect if altruism evolved by individual rather than group selection. But Wilson ignores these problems.

It is not even clear that altruistic groups of humans would beat non-altruists. Steven Pinker has noted that success of one group over another in the real world is based not on higher frequencies of altruistic individuals, but on matters like harsher discipline, better technology, and more brutal ideology. Indeed, altruistic groups may be more easily defeated because their empathy for the weak makes them susceptible to domination. But the most important problem is this: I know of not one evolved behaviour in any species that is harmful to individuals and their genes but good for their social groups. In the end, Wilson’s invocation of group selection is superfluous.

Needless to say after that, I don’t recommend buying this misguided book, which is a sad departure from Wilson’s usual high standard of thinking and writing.

A new President for BioLogos, but no progress on the Adam and Eve question

January 31, 2013 • 5:57 am

Alert reader Sigmund keeps a weather eye on the doings of the accommodationist organization BioLogos. Founded by Francis Collins, who resigned when he became director of the National Institutes of Health, BioLogos had the goal of turning evangelical Christians towards accepting evolution. They proposed to do this by showing literalist Christians that the Bible and Darwin were completely compatible.

It didn’t work of course.

Efforts stalled, and BioLogon began engaging in all sorts of crazy apologetics, many of them trying to show how Adam and Eve—a couple that genetics tells us could not have spawned all humanity—could still somehow be human ancestors, ergo that Jesus didn’t have to die for a metaphor.

In the end, BioLogos went for the coward’s solution, refusing to take a firm stand on whether Adam and Eve really existed. This, of course, was profoundly contradictory to their pro-science approach. In their desire to reconcile Darwin and Jesus, they watered down the Darwin and begin osculating the rump of Christians. That is the inevitable result when one tries to turn literalists toward science.

Then two of BioLogos’s important people resigned: Biblical scholar Pete Enns and Vice-President Karl Giberson, I suspect because of differences in how to approach those Darwin-unfriendly Christians. The housecleaning continued: President Darrel Falk resigned at the end of last year.

Two days ago a little mole told me that BioLogos was about to name a new president, so I asked Sigmund to watch the website and report back to us. And, with his usual diligence, he has. Ladies and gentlemen, the Big Announcement:

______________

BioLogos announces a new President

by Sigmund*

The evolution of BioLogos towards becoming a purely religious apologetic organization continues with yesterday’s appointment of its new President.

Deborah Haarsma, a Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, replaces Darrel Falk, who stepped down at the end of 2012.

Haarsma is not a major name in the theistic evolution world, but her views, published in, ‘Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design’, provide some clues as to why the current BioLogos board consider her appropriate.  In that book, Haarsma and her co-author and husband Loren examine the question of whether science supports concordist (physical evidence supports the Biblical account) or non-concordist (physical evidence does not support the Biblical account) viewpoints. Haarsma comes down on the side of the non-concordists, with one notable exception: that of the thorny question of human origins. While content to use science to pull the plug on flood geology and dismiss the young-earth stories out of hand, the question of Adam and Eve remains the line in the sand across which she dares not cross.

A good overview of Haarsma’s position within the theistic evolution spectrum can be found in a series of clips she recorded for the Templeton-funded Test of Faith project in 2010. Those show that her views are very much in line with current BioLogos thinking.

In addition to Haarsma, BioLogos announced the appointment of Jeffrey Schloss—a Distinguished Professor and the T.B. Walker Chair of Biology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California—to the position of ‘Senior Scholar.’ Schloss, a former Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute and one of the original signers of the ‘List of Intellectual Doubters of Darwinism’, has gradually changed his views on ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID) over the past two decades and is now firmly within the theistic evolution camp—or at least that part of it that BioLogos occupies.

It is somewhat ironic that Schloss’s move away from Intelligent Design has occurred as BioLogos itself nestles ever closer to the standard ID viewpoint. At the very least, through its failure to take a firm position on the scientific evidence that precludes the notion of modern humans having but a single pair of common ancestors, BioLogos fails to provide a robust challenge to ID’s current stranglehold over evangelical thinking. And that very challenge is why Francis Collins founded the organization in 2007.

Screen shot 2013-01-30 at 7.54.13 PM

________

* “Sigmund” is the online pseudonym of Martin Corcoran, a cancer biologist based in Stockholm. [JAC: “Sigmund” asked me to convey this information so he will no longer be pseudonymous.]

Death from above: golden eagle drags mountain goats off cliff

January 31, 2013 • 4:32 am

WARNING: The video below shows acts of predation, to wit: an eagle knocking a mountain goat off a cliff to its death and carrying it away, so don’t watch it unless you can stomach nature at its reddest of tooth and claw.

I have a vague recollection that I’ve posted this before, but even if I have it’s worth another look—and of course there are a fair number of new readers in the last few months.

I don’t really know the goat or eagle species involved, but I trust the commentariat will enlighten me (be sure to include the Latin binomials!). My guess is that the goats are chamoix (Rupicapra rupicapra) and the eagle is a golden eagle (YouTube video says that), Aquila chrysaetos.

But this truly is one of the most amazing nature videos I’ve seen. If you watch it, be sure to watch the whole seven-minute clip, for there is some stunning footage near the end.

Note how, in the first bit, the eagle covers the prey with its wings: a common behavior thought to hide one’s kill from other predators who could steal it. Note, too, how the chamoix chase the eagle away when they’re on terra firma, and how the eagle’s advantage comes when the prey is on the cliffs. Finally, I was stunned by the fact that an eagle can actually fly with a chamoix (granted, a young one) in its talons.

h/t: Chris

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ torture

January 30, 2013 • 11:29 am

I do wonder how many of those who object so strenuously to American torturing of prisoners (I am one of those objectors) nevertheless accept eternal torture.  After all 70% of Americans believe in hell, and although some of these must surely see hell as metaphorical—usually “separation from God”, which I consider a bonus—those people are ignoring the literal description of hell in the Bible. I see such cherry-picking, impelled not by theological advance but secular reason, as more intellectually dishonest than the belief of literalists in a real, eternal fire.

The official doctrine of the Luteran Church, at least that of its two biggest branches—is that hell is a real place, a place of “eternal fire,” and you’ll go there if you either don’t get baptized or don’t accept Jesus as your personal savior. How a liberal person can believe such doctrines defies me.

But I digress; here’s today’s Jesus and Mo on the topic:

2013-01-30

h/t: Michael

Don McLeroy leaves creationist comment: evolution can’t explain “biochemical complexity”

January 30, 2013 • 7:17 am

UPDATE: See the first comment below: reader SES notes that one can watch the film “The Revisionists” online here (it’s free until February 27), and some PBS stations in America are broadcasting it tonight. The schedule is also at the link.

________________________

If you’ve followed the attempts of American creationists to get evolution of ouf the school classroom, you’ll remember Don McLeroy from Texas. A dentist with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. McLeroy was a member of the Texas State Board of Education  [TSBOE] from 1998-2011, and served as chairman of the Board from 2007-2009. His reappointment as chair was blocked by the Texas State Senate, so you can imagine how dire he was.

McLeroy is infamous because of his strenuous efforts to get evolution out of Texas public schools. Because that state has to approve textbooks, and it’s a huge consumer of them, publishers sometimes tailor nationally-distributed books to Texas standards to avoid publishing multiple editions. That’s why McLeroy’s efforts, which ultimately failed, were so pernicious. They could have given evolution a serious hit throughout America.

But it wasn’t just evolution he fought. As Wikipedia notes:

In 2005, McLeroy conducted a sermon in his church, talking about the Board of Education, saying naturalism is “the enemy” and he said: “Why is Intelligent Design the big tent? Because we’re all lined up against the fact that naturalism, that nature is all there is. Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young earth, old earth, it’s all in the tent of Intelligent Design.” An mp3 of the sermon remains online, as well as McLeroy’s powerpoint and notes. [JAC: they’re all gone]

According to a 2008 article in The New York Times, “Dr. McLeroy believes that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. ‘I believe a lot of incredible things,’ he said, ‘The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.'” McLeroy’s statements regarding science have been criticized. McLeroy and other Board members who want to challenge evolution have received criticism from more than fifty scientific organizations over an attempt to weaken the currently-accepted science standards on evolution. In particular, biologist Kenneth R. Millercalled McLeroy’s statements on science “breathtakingly” incorrect.

In March 2008, McLeroy was criticized for racially and culturally insensitive remarks saying: “What good does it do to put a Chinese story in an English book?” he said. “So you really don’t want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them.” He later apologized.

In 2009, McLeroy spoke at a board meeting using several quotes from scientists in an attempt to discredit evolution. A biology teacher later found the quotes to be incomplete, out of context, and/or incorrectly taken from a creationist website. McLeroy said that while “some of the material was taken from the creationist site […] a lot of the quotes I did get on my own.” McLeroy appeared on the Comedy Central program the Colbert Report in April 2012 wherein he said “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and when I looked at the evidence for evolution, I found it unconvincing so I don’t think he used evolution to do it, that’s my big deal.”

. . . In an interview in October 2009 he explained his approach to public school history textbook evaluation: “. . . .we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

This is the man who, in his breathtaking ignorance, and driven by a religious and hyper-conservative agenda, almost drove Texas education back into the Dark Ages. Can you imagine a man like this heading up a state school board, one with the responsibility of choosing the books to educate children? Welcome to America. (He was appointed, by the way, by Texas governor Rick Perry.)

Although McLeroy is no longer on the TSBOE, he will not go gentle into that good night. According to the Houston Press, McLeroy, the ant-ihero of a prize-winning new film about the Texas school fracas, “The Revisionaries“, is stepping up his antievolution campaign. It intensified after he read the pro-evolution books that Dawkins and I wrote. As Press reporter Casey Michel wrote yesterday:

“This past Christmas holiday I read both Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne and The Greatest Show on earth by Richard Dawkins,” McLeroy told me. “I read them, studied them, on my Kindle, on my Nook. And the evidence is not compelling. And how many people have read those books in the last month?”

(“Not me,” I informed him, hesitating to share that my time had instead been taken with going through Christopher Hitchens’s anti-religion screeds.)

His research, his church, his work – all of it has only reaffirmed his convictions, has only led him to the same conclusion. God made the Earth in six days, he said. We were made in his image. Velociraptors may have been the original beasts hunting Little Red Riding Hood. We don’t yet have all the answers, but these are things we know.

Was there any doubt that the arguments of Richard and myself would fail to move a man like this? Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it.

As part of his rehabilitation campaign, I suspect, McLeroy tried to leave the comment below on my website under a post showing a Non Sequitur cartoon (I guess it had to go someplace).   won’t try to dissect McLeroy’s critique of evolution, as I’m busy preparing for my southern peregrinations, and I think my readers are qualified to do so anyway.  I’ll just say that there is indeed evidence that evolution has created not just morphological complexity, but biochemical complexity (which of course must underlie morphological complexity); that evidence includes the data on gene duplication and divergence, and Rich Lenski’s observations of the appearance of new biochemical pathways in bacteria. But there’s much more; try your hand, if you will. Voilà—the lucubrations of Don McLeroy, D.D.S. He’ll be reading this site, I’m sure, so you can address comments to him as well (be polite, people!):

Evolution’s Achilles Heel (comment by Don McLeroy)

The great mystery of our time is why so many people, especially enlightened intellectuals, believe in evolution. Ultimately, the evidence for evolution—the idea that all life has descended from a common ancestor—is simply not compelling; evolutionists have failed to account for the development of today’s complex cell. Since first life could not have possessed all the amazing biochemistry we find today, evolutionists must demonstrate evidence for how natural selection—evolution’s primary mechanism—created it. All other evidence for evolution, from rocks, microscopes and the imaginations of man depends upon evolution proceeding at this microscopic level. What evidence do they provide?

Jerry Coyne, one of the world’s leading evolutionists, in his highly acclaimed book Why Evolution Is True, 2009, argues that it is impossible to provide every detail of evidence concerning biochemical complexity. He also admits evolutionary development of “complex biochemical… pathways is not easy, since they leave no trace in the fossil record.” Okay. How many details does he provide to demonstrate the evolution of life’s complex chemistry?

Amazingly, considering the foundational nature of cell biology to drive all evolutionary adaptations, the only “detail” Coyne provides in his book is speculation about an imaginary gene. He states that “the common ancestor of sea cucumbers and vertebrates had a gene that was later co-opted in vertebrates…” as fibrinogen. Anyone who has studied high school biology realizes that if this is all the evidence he can provide for the development of the myriad of biochemical pathways like the Krebs’s cycle or protein synthesis or other cell complexities, his evidence is embarrassingly nonexistent. Evidently, it is not only impossible to provide every detail; it is impossible to provide a single detail. And, since all other explanations in his book depend on this fundamental foundation, his arguments collapse.

Similarly, prominent evolutionist Kenneth Miller, textbook author and plaintiffs lead expert witness in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design trial, fails to provide compelling evidence for the development of cellular complexity. Texas’s 2009 high school biology standards require explanations; his new textbook presents only two details. First, a single cell organism engulfs an alga and then acquires the photosynthetic ability of the alga. Second, two distinct classes of bacteria share similar enzymes. Like Coyne, he provides no evidence for how these enzymes and foundational processes developed from first life. In conclusion, Miller waves the magic wand of his imagination and confidently declares “that complex cellular structures and pathways were produced by the process of evolution.”

Ironically, even famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins, in his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, 2009, fails to present evidence—at least for the development of biochemical complexity. The only detail he cites is a double mutation in E. coli that allows it to digest citrate. Like Coyne and Miller, he offers no evidence for how the process developed initially. He describes the cell as “breathtakingly complicated,” and states “the key to understand how such complexity is put together is that it is all done locally, by small entities obeying local rules.” He also states that some of the features of the cell descended from different bacteria, that built up their “chemical wizardries billions of years before.” These statements are not evidence; they are vain imaginations.

The only indisputable fact is: leading evolutionists have no evidence that natural selection created today’s biochemical complexity. Therefore, skepticism is the best response. Evolutionary dogmatism—the insistence that evolution is true—is a serious issue. Science is not threatened by evolutionary skepticism; science is threatened by the quasi-science of the evolutionist.

Have at it!

The snow angel of death

January 30, 2013 • 6:01 am

If you saw this in the snow, would you know what it was? Think a second before you read below.
Picture 2

Image: Gavin Murphy

A guest “blog” by Kyle Hill at Scientific American explains:

We have to assume it was a squirrel, but we know how it died. It died squirming and convulsing in the talons of an owl, locked in by the bone ratchets the owl shares with other raptors. Based on what was left behind, we also know that the attacker was likely a Great Horned Owl or a Northern Hawk Owl with a wingspan between 86 and 87 centimeters. All of this we can glean from a striking impression of a deadly strike.

There is perhaps no evidence of a kill more beautiful than these wing-prints left in the frigid Timiskaming, Ontario snow. Like throwing flour on the invisible man, the snow lets us see the tracks of an invisible predator—invisible at least to the squirrel.

With hearing good enough to sense rodents and other prey inches under the snow, owls feed by plunging their talons deeply through the drifts and into their prey. In the summer, the last thing many small mammals see is the owl. In the winter, strategies change, and many owls supplement their mammalian meat with that of small ground-dwelling birds like grouse. No matter the food, the killing itself isn’t pretty. Hawk owls in particular eviscerate small mammals before eating their heads and organs, thereafter caching the remains.

More often than not, nature is cruel, and hard on human sensibilities. But we can also subsume—or at least dull—those sensibilities by realizing natural selection, though it’s produced what looks to us like cruelty, has also given rise to both awesome animals involved in this interaction: the wary squirrel and the carnivorous owl.

House cats as predators

January 29, 2013 • 3:01 pm

by Greg Mayer

It’s long been known that house cats, which are introduced to most of the places they occur (the wild members of the species are found in Europe, North Africa, and western Asia), can wreak havoc on native wildlife, perhaps the most infamous case being that of the Stephens Island Wren (Xenicus lyalli). It has often been said that the wren was exterminated by the lighthouse keeper’s cat, but the story is both a bit more complex, and much more tragic: many cats were involved, not just one, and not just the Wren, but the entire Stephens Island land bird fauna was decimated.

Stephens Island Wren (from Ibis, 1895).
Stephens Island Wren (from Ibis, 1895).

A new study by Scott Loss, Tom Will and Peter Marra in Nature Communications makes new estimates of total mortality of wildlife due to house cats, and they are quite high: median estimates of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals annually in the United States. Money quote:

We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals. Scientifically sound conservation and policy intervention is needed to reduce this impact.

They are particularly incensed by programs that trap feral cats, but then return them to the wild after neutering them. I must say this seems to be a crazy idea– why in the world would you put the offending predators back into the ecosystem?

The most striking thing to me was their estimate that well over 2/3 of the mortality was due to “un-owned” (i.e. feral or some slight variation thereof) cats, so that cat owners taking steps to insure that their pets do not become destructive predators, while helpful, would leave most of the problem unaddressed.

Media coverage of the study can be found at the New York Times and the BBC.

______________________________________________________________

Buller, W.L. 1895. On a new species of Xenicus form an island off the coast of New Zealand. Ibis 7:236-237.

Galbreath, R. & D. Brown. 2004. The tale of the lighthouse-keeper’s cat: Discovery and extinction of the Stephens Island wren (Traversia lyalli). Notornis 51:193-200. (pdf)

Loss, S.R., T. Will & P.P. Marra. 2013. The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature Communications (pdf)

Medway, D.G. 2004. The land bird fauna of Stephens Island, New Zealand in the early1890s, and the cause of its demise. Notornis 51:201-211. (pdf)