Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
by Matthew Cobb
More on Felix Baumgartner: this terrifying camera view from Baumgartner’s chest at the beginning of his dive yesterday shows how it nearly all went terribly wrong as he span nearly out of control for over a minute before eventually getting control of his dive.
And if all that emotion wasn’t enough for you, here’s the whole jump – in Lego!
For a long time now BioLogos has ignored its initial mission of trying to convert evangelical Christians to evolution. It didn’t work—as I predicted—because those Christians know that if you buy Darwinian evolution, then you have to see much of the Bible as either fictional or at best metaphorical. And if you do that, then where does the metaphor stop? Was Jesus a metaphor for how we humans can save ourselves?
Evangelicals won’t buy that, nor do they like what they see as the other philosophical accoutrements of evolution: our status as mere evolved beasts like gibbons, the lack of a human soul, the absence of an external purpose or meaning to our lives, or of a God-imposed morality, and so on.
And so BioLogos, in desperation, now spends nearly all its time not touting evolution, but sucking up to evangelical Christians, or giving them ludicrous ways to comport their faith with scientific truth—ways that are themselves unscientific (e.g., the historicity of Adam and Eve).
In an essay from last February just reposted, “Jesus the artist,” Pete Enns (a biblical scholar who recently left the organization) tries a Hail Mary. After describing the parables of Jesus, he sneakily segues from the parables to the notion that much of the Bible could also be a story.
Nobody, after all, can take issue with stuff like this:
Parables are radical pieces of communication meant to disorient the hearers and then reorient them to an entirely new way of thinking. The reason Jesus does so much story telling is because stories—not debate or other “proofs”—are best suited for such a whole scale reorientation. Jesus’ preaching, after all, was about the kingdom of heaven (or of God).
But in the next sentence Enns sneaks in some further metaphor:
This kingdom was not about where one goes after death, but a here-and-now transformation of how people thought about God and their relationship to him.
Nice ploy, Dr. Enns, but how do you know that? Many Christians do indeed think they’re going to heaven after they die. What makes you think you know better?
Enns goes on to dissect some parables, and says some things that most will consider unexceptionable:
It is sometimes thought that Jesus told stories because he wanted to persuade the masses, the common people who are not used to debating fine points of theology like the scribes and priests. This is partially true, but it is also true that the radical message of the kingdom of heaven required a means of communication that was best suited for it. Like any work of art, stories “create” new ways of seeing the world—and it is, after all, a new world that Jesus means to create.
But then, after a long discussion of the function of Jesus’s parables as stories, Enns slips this in as his final paragraph (my emphasis):
If this is how God chooses to communicate at the incarnation—the very climax and epicenter of his story—we should not be surprised to see God painting vivid portraits elsewhere in Scripture. This is especially true of Genesis and creation. Something so fundamental to God’s story may need to be told in a way that transcends the limitations of purely intellectual engagement. Genesis may be written more to show us—by grabbing us with its images than laying out a timeline of cause and effect events—that God is the central figure on the biblical drama.
Nice try, Dr. Enns! Pity that it won’t convince anyone. Or, if you want to, please give us the reasons why you—and not the evangelicals—seem to know exactly what God intended to do when he wrote (or inspired) the Bible. It’s not because you have a pipeline to God, is it? It’s because you interpret the Bible as metaphor and want others to feel likewise. But if you’re going to do that, you need to tell us exactly which parts of the Bible are to be read as metaphor and which as literal truth. Presumably you, Dr. Enns, don’t feel that the stories of the Virgin Birth, the crucifixion, and the Resurrection are metaphors. Or if you do, please let us know in another essay (now that would be something to read) which tools you use to parse metaphor from reality.
Enns is a biblical scholar with impressive degrees (including a Ph.D. from Harvard), so he presumably relies on evidence for his conclusions. I’d love to know the evidence he uses to conclude that Genesis was metaphorical but the Resurrection was real.
Most of us see the Bible as a total fiction. The great tragedy of Enns, and of accommodationists like him, is that he can’t buy that whole hog: because of childhood indoctrination or a desire to believe what is comforting, a Biblical scholar convinces himself that part of a fictional book really is fiction, though it teaches timeless truths, while other parts or non-negotiable fact. And he has no way, despite his Ph.D. in Biblical scholarship, to do that. Tell us, Dr. Enns: if Genesis was just a useful myth rather than truth, how do you know that Jesus was the Son of God and came back from the dead?
This tactic won’t work with evangelicals, and never has, and I suspect that that’s why Enns isn’t with BioLogos any longer. But Templeton keeps giving the organization tons of money—all wasted.
Lunch yesterday was a schnitzel about the size of a Frisbee, accompanied by a warm potato and watercress salad, all washed down with a bottle of the house Grüner Veltliner. Note that you can’t see the plate.
The restaurant was the famous (and a bit touristy) Figlmüller, near the Cathedral. You can also see the calf’s-liver dinner of my companion, the estimable evolutionary biologist Nick Barton, who works at the Institute of Science and Technology in Vienna. I’ll be speaking there today (and flying to Chicago tomorrow), so posts will be thin on the ground. Let’s hope my pinch-bloggers step up to the plate.
Two more comestibles for your enjoyment. First, candied fruit (my favorite among all sweets) in a local confectionary:
And a seasonal drink, Sturm (“storm”), basically grape juice that has begun to turn into wine, so it’s alcoholic but sweet and cloudy. It comes in both red and white versions at 3 Euros per 250 ml. It goes down like pop, and so is deadly. The locals are swilling the stuff in droves every night, for it is available only briefly in fall after the grapes are harvested. I had one or three, of course.
by Matthew Cobb
You either watched this live, or followed it on Twitter, or you don’t particularly care. Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a ballon 24 miles high over New Mexico, watched by over 7 million people on a YouTube livefeed and heaven knows how many other people round the world.
As of writing, I’m still not clear whether he actually broke the sound barrier (this may be complicated by the fact that the speed of sound alters with air density and therefore with altitude…). Whatever you think of the exploit, you surely have to salute his coolness under amazing stress.
On his way up he tweeted “Do you think I will survive this? :)” and then, just as he was about to step out of the capsule, he tweeted “Here’s my last tweet for a while. Who knows, maybe my last tweet ever” Thankfully it wasn’t, and he survived.
Here are various videos and pics:
Just before he jumped:
A GIF of the opening seconds (bad for those of us who get vertigo):
The full jump on video:
And a happy Baumgartner on the ground:
There’s a discussion with him going on at Twitter – search for #stratos
Not sure what all this has to do with why evolution is true, but it no doubt tells us something about the capacity of people to do some very odd and courageous things…
I’ve never posted pictures related to human excretion before, but Adolf Loos’s public toilets in Vienna, located near the cathedral, are what all public toilets should be—works of art. Loos (1870-1933) was an important Art Nouveau (in German, “Jugendstil”) architect in Vienna, and my guidebook called attention to his remarkable toilets. (It’s hard to find those toilets on the Internet, for you can imagine what you get when you Google “Loos toilets”.)
It took me a while to find the facilities (they’re not well marked), and even longer—several visits, in fact—to be able to photograph all the important parts when nobody was using them. So, for better or worse, here they are.
The sign above ground (“Herren” means “men”; there’s one for “Damen” as well):
The underground entrance:
Art Nouveau urinals!:
. . . and toilet stalls (“besetzt” means “occupied”):
. . . and sinks:
And just to show how punctilious the Viennese are about the cleanliness of their city (it is remarkably neat and free of litter), the horses that pull tourists around the inner city have leather bags to catch their droppings:
By Matthew Cobb
One of the most important tools in evolutionary biology over the last thirty or so years has been the development of the ‘molecular clock’, which is a technique for measuring how long ago two organisms (or taxa or species) separated on the ‘tree of life’. This approach has been incredibly powerful, and underlies much of our understanding of the rate of evolution, linking fossil and molecular data – all the figures from the excellent Timetree.org are based on the molecular clock. But now it appears that in our lineage at least, the clock may not have been ticking quite so fast as we thought, and some recalibration is going to be necessary.
The basic assumption behind the molecular clock is that mutations – changes in DNA – occur at a constant rate over time, and that the number of differences between two groups can therefore be turned into a figure based on the time since the two diverged. This phenomenon was first noticed in 1962 by Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl looking at differences in haemoglobin genes, then explicitly turned into a hypothesis the following year by Margoliash, before being fully developed in the 1970s by Allan Wilson. (It is in fact a bit more complicated, as the average generation time of a species has to be taken into account – the shorter the generation time, the higher the mutation rate.)
There are some important provisos to the clock – any stretch of DNA that is subject to selection, for example, is not going to be a very useful source of clock data, as genetic differences will tend to be removed by selection; many genes that are vital to organismal function are therefore highly conserved, showing few differences between groups. For this reason, scientists tend to use either ‘synonymous changes’ in DNA – these are ‘silent’ differences that do not cause any change in gene function (protein structure, gene regulation, or whatever) – or to use stretches of non-coding DNA, which appear to be not subject to natural selection and to evolve ‘neutrally’, just accumulating mutations with time.
The sources of spontaneous mutations are well-known – mistakes in the cellular machinery during copying of DNA, electromagnetic radiation, mutagenic chemicals (most of them completely natural), and so on. These spontaneous mutations are important not only for calibrating the clock, but above all for providing the raw material for evolution by natural selection. The whole infinite variety of life is the consequence of mutations, which have then been filtered through the sieve of natural selection, over vast periods of time.
The molecular clock has been particularly important in helping to calibrate and understand the wealth of fossils relating to human evolution that have been discovered over the past decades. In fact, fossil dates have been used to help calibrate the clock data, and as a result the mutation rate that has generally been used for humans and other apes has been about 1 mutation per year per billion bases of DNA. However, new results from massive programmes of DNA sequencing have revealed that this assumed rate is probably much higher than what has actually been taking place in our gonads.
A review by Aylwun Scally and Richard Durbin, recently published in Nature Reviews Genetics, reveals that over the last decade, nine studies have come out with substantially lower mutation rates, suggesting our clocks have been running far too fast. These studies have looked at mutation rates across the whole genome, and have focused on particular genes, including one study of over 14,000 people. They all suggest that the actual mutation rate is about half that previously estimated. To put this into perspective, a study of 78 families from Iceland (mother, father, child) found that on average, a baby has 36 spontaneous mutations that are not present in either parent. Depending on where you grew up – presence of natural radiation etc – the number of spontaneous mutations in your genes is probably not too far different.
So what happens when this new, lower, figure is plugged into our estimates of divergence times for the various twigs and branches on the tangled bank of recent human evolution? Because the clock is now thought to be ticking more slowly than we originally estimated, the divergence times are being put back. So, for example, the human/Neanderthal split was estimated at between 272,000-435,000 years ago. The new figure would appear to be something more like 400,000-600,000 years.
This removes an odd discrepancy, as previous estimates of human/Neanderthal divergence using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA is found in the tiny mitochondria of our cells, which are inherited maternally, and which are involved only in the generation of energy) had come up with a figure 0f 500,000-600,000 years ago. So both nuclear DNA and mtDNA now give a similar estimate – we split from our Neanderthal cousins about half a million years ago. Not that that stopped us mating with them and getting some of their genes… In terms of the time when we left Africa (based on genetic differences between non-African and African populations), that figure used to be put at around 70,000 years ago; it now appears to have been substantially earlier, perhaps 90,000-130,000 years ago.
This useful table assembled by Ann Gibbons in her excellent Science magazine piece summarises the changes, and their links with the fossils:
A lot of unknowns remain – in particular the issue of estimating generation time in prehistoric populations, as well as the lack of population-level data for prehistoric groups (e.g. Neanderthals or Denisovans). But the increasing richness of molecular data are producing ever more refined estimates of our past. And that is the power of science – nothing is taken as fixed, knowledge changes and increases, in a uniquely progressive way, enabling us to revise and refine our understanding, and even to reject what we previously thought to be true. Indeed, there is grandeur in this view of life.
References (both hidden behind pay walls, sadly):
Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbing (2012) Revising the human mutation rate: implications for the understanding human evolution. Nature Reviews Genetics 13:745-753.
Ann Gibbons (2012) Turning back the clock” slowing the pace of prehistory. Science 338:189-191.
You can also learn more by listening to the Science magazine podcast item about this.
As the election draws nigh, Republicans continue to embarrass themselves—and America—with stupid comments about science. (Note: rarely do you see a Democrat spouting such anti-science gibberish.)
You probably remember Republican congressman Paul Broun (Georgia) who recently pronounced that evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell.” Broun is a physician, which proves once again that doctors don’t have to know much about science. Here’s his statement, made at a church in Georgia (and dismissed by his spokeswoman as as speech about his personal beliefs that was off the record. (How can something like this be “off the record”?)
“God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist [JAC: note the specious claim that he’s a scientist] that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually. How to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all our public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason, as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.”
Imagine what a reader in Scandinavia, Germany, or France would think of a statement like that! Embryology a lie from the pit of hell, meant to keep us from our Savior? And note the explicit call for theocracy, which is a major reason why we atheists despise many religions. If you think you have a handle on the Absolute Truth, then it’s incumbent on you to impose it on others.
But the biggest embarrassment is this: Broun sits on the House Space, Science and Technology Committee!
But Broun is not the only anti-science Representative who sits that science committee. Another is Todd Akin, a Republican representative from Missouri who is running for the Senate. You remember him as the guy who said in August that a woman who was raped couldn’t get pregnant. The New York Times reported his exact words as broadcast by a St. Louis radio station:
“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”
Well, as reported by ThinkProgress, Akin has problems understanding not just human reproduction, but evolution. Addresssing a Tea Party group on Thursday, Akin said this about evolution:
AKIN: I don’t see it as even a matter of science because I don’t know that you can prove one or the other. That’s one of those things. We can talk about theology and all of those other things but I’m basically concerned about, you’ve got a choice between Claire McCaskill and myself. My job is to make the thing there. If we want to do theoretical stuff, we can do that, but I think I better stay on topic.
Yeah, that “theoretical stuff” is hard! Examiner.com reports a bit more of Akin’s views about evolution:
“I’ve taken a look at both sides of the thing and it seems to me that evolution takes a tremendous amount of faith…To have all of the sudden all the different things that have to be lined up to create something as sophisticated as life, it takes a lot of faith. I don’t see it as even a matter of science because I don’t know that you can prove one or the other.”
First he equates evolution with abiogenesis—the origin of life. Second of all, we don’t have “faith” that life originated from non-life: it’s a working hypothesis that is subject to lots of current research, and for which there’s no credible alternative. Third, there is a mountain of evidence that evolution per se—the genetic change of the first Ur-organism into the millions of species existing today—is true. Finally, science doesn’t “prove” anything; our notion of truth is a provisional one, always subject to revision or rejection should new data arrive.
But of course Akin doesn’t even understand the simple ideas described in the last paragraph. He’s a jackass (forgive my invective here) who doesn’t belong in politics at all. The sad part is that despite Akin’s stupid comments, many Republicans are still backing him, and though the polls show him a wee bit behind incumbent Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, her lead is narrowing. If he wins, the Senate may well be controlled by Republicans in January.
h/t: James
My lunch yesterday was at a Beisl—a traditional Viennese restaurant (the name comes from Yiddish)—serving inexpensive but local food, wine, and beer. The one I went to is Beim Czaak, which is full of locals eating, drinking, and smoking (yes, Austria is one of the few countries in Europe where you can smoke in cafés and restaurants). But the food is good and filling, and the beer came in large mugs.
I had the Austrian equivalent of fried chicken, the very traditional dish of Backhendl. It came with a salad, and, unaccountably, the chicken sat on a bed of popcorn. With a couple of mugs of cold Bier from the keg, it was a tasty and filling Mittagessen (click all photos to enlarge):
Some other gastronomic treats I saw on the way to lunch. First, a display of cakes in a local coffee house:
Some sweets at a Confiserie:
And a teaser from a cafe I went to: the Neko Cafe, the only cat café in Vienna. Modelled on the Japanese neko (cat) cafés, it’s a place where one can loll about, drink coffee, eat pastries or Japanese sweets, and play with the five cats who roam freely. I’ll have moar photos and videos later:
And not to neglect biology, here’s a lovely Hooded crow (Corvus cornix) that I photographed in the gardens of the Schloss Belvedere, home of many great paintings by Klimt and Schiele. The crow is the subject of a famous evolutionary tale, in which two species form a hybrid zone running from north to south in eastern Europe.
More on the Beleveder later.
