Horseshoe crabs aren’t really “living fossils”

September 14, 2012 • 7:48 am

There are four species of horseshoe crabs in the world, with the most familiar to Americans being Limulus polyphemus, the Atlantic horseshoe crab. Here’s a group of them mating:

They are arthopods, but not “true” crabs, which are in the subphylum Crustacea.  Horseshoe crabs are in a different subphylum, the Chelicerata, more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to the crabs we know.

A good website on the group describes its morphology, behavior, and medical uses (yes, they’re useful in making drugs; see here).  Plus they’re really cute. Here’s a description of the legs of modern animals:

The horseshoe crab has 6 pairs of appendages on the posterior side of the prosoma. Five pairs of walking legs or pedipalps enable the horseshoe crab to easily move along benthic sediments. Each has a small claw at the tip except the last pair. The last pair of legs has a leaflike structure at the terminal end that is used for pushing and clearing away sediments as the crab burrows into marine bottom. The base of each leg is covered with inward pointing spines called gnathobases that move food towards the mouth located between the legs. As the legs are moving, food is crushed and macerated. There are also 2 small chelicera appendages that help guide food into the mouth.

And this is what they look like upside down.  Note the five pairs of walking legs, which are “uniramous,” that is, each leg comprises a series of segments attached end to end:

Horseshoe crabs are famous for having changed little in morphology since they first show up in the fossil record over 400 million years ago (!): they are thus called “living fossils”. (In fact, the title of Richard Fortey’s new book on living fossils is Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms.  Well, living species are remarkably similar in general external features to their long-dead (and extinct) relatives, but there are distinct differences, and of course we know nothing about the difference in their internal features, nor in the structure of the DNA of ancient species (go here for more criticisms of the notion that horseshoe crabs are living fossils).  Nevertheless, there is surprising “stasis” of morphology over a very long period of time, and we’re not sure why that is.

A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  by Briggs et al. (reference below, the “Briggs” is Derek Briggs of Burgess Shale fossil fame) casts further doubt on the “living fossil” status of horseshoe crabs, for not even their external morphology has remained reasonably similar. In particular, their legs have changed drastically.

The authors examined a fossil horseshoe crab found in Herefordshire (UK) dated at about 425 million years old.  This is the specimen, which doesn’t look promising, but they’re able to make out telling details of the appendages:

And what they find is that the limbs, unlike the uniramous limbs of modern horseshoe crabs, are biramous: each limb branches into two parts, with each branch comprising a series of segments attached end to end.  As the paper describes,

Appendages 2 to 6 project just beyond the head shield (Fig. 1 F and H). Appendages 2 to 5 are biramous (Fig. 1 F and I). The inner rami (endopods) insert in a series posterior of the chelicera, surrounding a raised central area occupied by the mouth. The outer rami insert along the outer margin of the ventral body wall. There is no evidence that these two rami were connected by an elongate limb base like the coxa in Limulus. Nonetheless the rami clearly represent elements of the same limb rather than successive limbs alternating in morphology.

Here’s a reconstruction showing first the group of biramous limbs (each bifurcated limb has a green section and a blue section) and then two pairs of limbs, with one part attached, as noted above, to the outer margin of the body wall, and the other part attached further inside around a raised ventral area (the “inside limbs,” as you can see from the above diagram of a modern crab, are the ones that remain). Phys.Org describes how these reconstructions were made:

The name of the new fossil, Dibasterium durgae, refers to the double limbs and to Durga, the Hindu goddess with many arms. It was reconstructed in three dimensions by stacking digital images of physical surfaces exposed by grinding away layers in tiny increments.

Two pair of limbs.  Modern crabs are missing the blue member of each pair.

What has happened, evolution-wise? Obviously, an entire set of limbs, the outer member of each biramous pair, has disappeared somewhere during the evolution of modern horseshoe crabs.  We don’t know exactly why this happened, or, if it was due to selection, what form of selection would favor such loss.  But the authors do speculate about the genetic basis of the loss.

In particular, in modern crabs the areas where the outer limbs would have been express the gene Distal-less (Dll) only in a transitory fashion, while the inner limbs—the ones that are present—express more marked expression of Dll.  The gene is known to be required for limb formation in other arthropods, like the fruit fly Drosophila, so it’s possible that the loss of the outer set of limbs somehow occurred by loss of Dll expression at some time in the distant past.  The authors emphasize that this is a hypothesis that is untested, for of course there’s no way we know of to see what gene expression was like in the ancient biramous fossils.

I suppose along with that theory goes a “macromutational” corollary that perhaps a single mutation in the Dll gene changed its expression so that the outer set of limbs was eliminated in one fell swoop.  If Dll is indeed involved, I would find the single-mutation scenario unlikely.  When we see a change in animals that looks like it could be caused by a single mutation that has similar effects in modern species (like the Bithorax mutation in Drosophila, which causes the appearance of four wings instead of the usual two), it’s dangerous to say that, for example, the gain or loss of wings in insect evolution was due to single mutations at a gene like Bithorax. Such changes could well be due to the accumulation of several to many genes of smaller effect.

Regardless of its cause, the difference in limb number between ancient and modern horseshoe crabs shows that what are regarded as “living fossils” may well be at one extreme of “changeability” among long-lived groups, but they have by no means remained completely unchanged.

_______________

Briggs, D. E. G., D. J. Siveter, D. J. Siveter, M. D. Sutton, R. J. Garwood, and D. Legg. 2012. Silurian horseshoe crab illuminates the evolution of arthropod limbs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online publication, 10.1073/pnas.1205875109.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Egypt ‘n’ Libya ‘n’ Yemen

September 14, 2012 • 4:51 am

UPDATE: In the meantime, there has been no violence and rioting in response to this image published in The Onion (warning: NSFW), although it simultaneously denigrates Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

_______________

Today’s Jesus and Mo echoes Aretha, and it’s absolutely spot on:

When I posted in June (title: “Egypt is doomed”) that I was worried about Egypt becoming an Islamic state under the leadership of President Mohamed Morsi, I was told by several commenters that I was wrong—that Morsi had little power and Egypt would become a fine secular state.  One commenter, for instance, assured me:

Jerry, calm down. The office of president in Egypt has very little real authority, and Moursi does not have a mandate from the people, so you can forget about Egypt becoming Iran-lite.

Well, Morsi isn’t exactly hustling to condemn the violence in his country, and the Egyptian army was notably slow in responding to the assault on the American embassy.  Yesterday President Obama declared Egypt neither an ally nor an enemy, which is a noticeably tepid endorsement of Egypt’s new government.  Remember, it’s called “The Muslim Brotherhood”: there’s nothing about in there about “sisterhood.”

Four people are dead, with surely more to come, because of Islamic demonization of infidels, the same kind of demonization causing riots about “Innocence of Muslims,” the movie that supposedly insults the Prophet (I haven’t seen it yet, but I will).  But no matter what the movie said—and it may well be offensive to Muslims and others—there is no excuse, including “religious offense,” to riot, attack, and threaten those who had no connection to the movie. There is no right to shed blood because you’re perturbed by what someone said about your faith. Condemn the Jews all you will, say that we are moneygrubbing villains who make our matzos with the blood of Christian babies, and I will defend your right to say it, though I will oppose you in speech and writing with every fact at hand. And I won’t harm a hair on your head.

Meanwhile, Americans are jumping all over each other (viz., Obama and Clinton) to condemn the film, and NBC news was so cowardly that they refused to show a clip of the movie during last night’s report on the Egyptian violence (they announced this explicitly).  That reminds me of the craven fear of newspapers to publish the Danish cartoons mocking Mohamed. For fear of the epithet “Islamophobia,” and of the ensuing violence if you offend the tender feeling of radical Muslims, nobody will assert that Americans have every right to say whatever they want about any religion.

Islam is a toxic faith—the most toxic in the world at present—and people are dying over fictional books. Can anyone say with honesty that Islam is on the whole a positive force in our world?  The world would be a better place without this religion—indeed, virtually every religion (I don’t mind Quakers so much).

h/t: several readers who sent me the cartoon

Weekly Mars rover report

September 13, 2012 • 1:06 pm

This week the Mars rover “Curiosity” has been taking cool self-portraits and checking out the instruments that will analyze the Martian minerals. They’re also going to take videos of the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos overhead. Finally, they’ll move the rover a bit closer to its target, the interesting site Glenelg.  It’s only 400 m from the landing site, but the rover moves slowly.

Here’s the video weekly report, only 1 min 40 sec long; watch it.

h/t: Michael

Steve Pinker discusses free speech, political correctness and taboos

September 13, 2012 • 9:38 am

Here is a video interview that FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) president Greg Lukianoff did with Steve Pinker about the touchy subject of whether some issues shouldn’t be discussed at all, especially on American college campuses. Some campuses actually have stricter “speech codes” than society outside the university walls. (FIRE is dedicated to fostering free speech and individual rights at American colleges and universities.)

Pinker concludes—and I agree completely—that while some subjects are appropriately off-limits in personal relationships (like the proposition in the movie “Indecent Proposal,” where Robert Redford offered Woody Harrelson money to sleep with his wife), ” it “becomes maladaptive when you apply the logic of intimate relationships to the sphere of ideas, where by entertaining a particular idea you basically entrain your solidarity with the tribe.”

But now, with tribalism on the wane, such taboos get in the way of finding the truth. Indeed, Steve even notes that his own thesis in Better Angels of Our Nature—that violence in the world has declined over time—has met with opposition from progressive scholars.

Should we be able to discuss whether there are biological differences between genders, races/ethnic groups, and individuals? Absolutely.  Yet even the skeptical Left bridles at such a conclusion, since they see invidious results from such research—indeed, from even raising such question.  I don’t agree; I guess I agree with the old saw “the truth will set you free.” That’s why I try—but perhaps don’t always succeed—in fostering free exchange of ideas on this website while avoiding the demonization of individuals who express certain opinions.

It seems to me that it’s nearly always better to know the truth (e.g., we’re going to die, you have a terminal disease, you don’t have free will, and so on), than to live in ignorance, or to suppress investigation of the truth. That said, there is a time and a place to impart truth, and that is why, as Sam Harris says in Free Will, he won’t be telling his young daughter about her lack of free will until she matures a bit!

This talk is particularly relevant to the current debates going on in the skeptical community, in which certain subjects and opinions seem to be prima facie off limits for discussion.

A Nature editor defends the value of woo

September 13, 2012 • 5:56 am

A few weeks ago I discussed a surprising essay by Daniel Sarewitz in the online version of Nature.  His piece, “Sometimes science must give way to religion,” not only claimed that science was identical to religion by ultimately resting on faith, but also argued that there was an “unknowable and the inexplicable beyond the world of our experience” and that science fails to give “insight about the mystery of existence.” In other words, he was dissing science while stepping into the muck of faith.

Although I’ve seen Nature go soft on religion before, this was a remarkably fuzzy and wooish piece from one of the world’s premier scientific journals, and, predictably, elicited a bunch of negative comments from scientists.

Now, however, Ananyo Bhattacharya, chief online editor for Nature (and presumably the editor of Sarewitz’s piece), has taken to the pages of Discover magazine to defend that piece. That is triply surprising, for Bhattacharya not only echoes Sarwitz’s sentiments and even distorts what he said, but published his own piece in a different but still reputable science magazine.

The echoing is evident from the title of Bhattacharya’s piece, “The limits of science—and scientists.”  After first reprising Sarweitz’s woo-ishness, and admitting that he “has his own problems with the piece” (if so, why did he publish such a remarkably vacuous essay?), Bhattacharya defends Sarewitz’s view that accepting science depends on faith (quotes are from the Discover piece):

The critics disagreed. Unlike religion, science does not require blind faith, they said—only trust in scientists, who had, after all, produced verifiable results and made successful predictions in the past. But that is to conflate well-established science—a body of knowledge supported by so much experiment and observation that it is very likely true—and the new findings of science at any particular moment, which are quite likely to be false. Scientists are of course human, many as fallible as any whisky priest. So you could argue that the much vaunted “trust” in science—proclaimed by Sarewitz’s critics as being purely rational—looks a bit more shaky than it did at first sight. Sarewitz was right that accepting new research requires not blind faith but “belief,” and most dictionary definitions of the word are perfectly consistent with his argument.

(Check out the link to the “quite likely to be false” assertion.)  This is logic-chopping, for Sarewitz never drew a distinction between “well-established science” and “new science (that is probably wrong).” So that’s Bhattacharya’s first misrepresentation. Another is the equating of not just some scientists, but many scientists, with “whisky priests.” Lordy!

The third misrepresentation is the contention that Sarewitz simply used people’s normal interpretation of the word “belief”, and in that sense belief in scientific authority is similar to belief in the tenets of religion. But Sarewitz didn’t say exactly that: he said that belief in scientific truth is just as irrational and faith-ridden as belief in religion. Here are two quotes from Sarewitz’s original paper (my emphasis):

The Higgs discovery, elucidating the constituents of existence itself, is even presented as a giant step towards the ultimate cure: a rational explanation for the Universe. That such scientific understanding provides a challenge to religion is an idea commonly heard from defenders of science, especially those in more militant atheist garb. Yet scientists who occupy that ground are often too slow to recognize the irrational bases of their own beliefs, and too quick to draw a line between the scientific and the irrational.

and

But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.

Here the issue is not “belief” (I prefer the word “acceptance” when it comes to scientific findings), but “faith.”

Finally, Bhattacharya defends the questionable “other ways of knowing” hypothesis—and in a particularly careless way (my emphasis):

But what was truly staggering was the support for the notion that science was, as one critic put it, “the best and only method we have for understanding reality”. It was here, in their rush to defend the walls of reason from the barbarians at the gate, the scientistas unwittingly took their cue from the logical positivists and came rather embarassingly unstuck. It is as if, given an excellent Philips screwdriver, someone had concluded that only cross-head screws are of any use. Or worse, that they are the only type of screw to exist.

Imagine if, the next time you go to see The Long Day’s Journey Into Night or The Dark Knight Rises, the activity of your brain is recorded by an MRI machine. Would a full scientific explanation of those recordings really constitute the “best or only” way to understand the experience? For anyone?

Yet in their eagerness to bash those that dare to suggest that one might experience wonder and awe, or be moved, outside a scientific context, the scientistas happily dismiss culture without a second thought.

When the philosopher A. J. Ayer was asked in the 1970s to identify the key weakness of logical positivism, Ayer, once one of its leading propononents [sic], replied that “nearly all of it was false.” By recycling the discredited notions of a dead philosophy, those that [sic, should be “who”] rashly criticised Sarewitz have demonstrated that they would benefit from a good, hard reading of poetry.

Do note the dismissive term “scientistas” That’s rather unseemly for a Nature editor. And let me add that I’ve had plenty of good, hard readings of poetry, and I still found Saarweitz’s piece deplorable. But so be it.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the notion that science is not yet able to understand or explain subjective experience, such as that produced by reading poetry. But that doesn’t mean that such understanding is forever beyond the ken of science. In the meantime, yes, poetry, art and literature are wonderful things, and may produce some kind of subjective realizations on the part of the reader and viewer. But I question whether poetry, art, and literature convey “understanding” of the world in the same way as science: one produces a subjective description of experience, which can vary from person to person, the other an objective description of reality that holds for all rational observers.

Bhattacharya’s accusation that scientists as a whole dismiss culture is, of course, totally ridiculous.  Maybe there are a few scientists who don’t appreciate any of the humanities, but I haven’t met any. And there are surely far more laypeople or humanities scholars who don’t appreciate or pay any attention to science.

I’m not sure why journalist/academics like Bhattacharya and Sarewitz are falling all over themselves to denigrate science as just one of many ways to “understand” the universe, but it’s distressing. I halfway suspect that they’re pandering to religion, something that seems obvious in Sarewitz’s piece.  We scientists—at least in America—must practice our art in a culture that’s largely religious, and we’re constantly subject to the criticism of scientism, and of being cold, bespectacled creatures who lack an appreciation for anything outside science.  If we want to keep our image burnished for the public, we have to pay lip service to those “other ways of knowing,” even if their value lies not in helping us “know”, but in enhancing the way we feel.

I’ll let two commenters on Bhattacharya’s piece have the last word. The first is Callum Hackett:

This article is a dire straw-man. You move from the claim that science is “the best and only method we have for understanding reality” to ridiculously equate this with a dismissal of non-scientific awe and culture. I mean, really? Really?! You clearly are not familiar AT ALL with the cohesive, complete world-views of such scientists. It is naive beyond measure to think that because they believe EMPIRICAL truths are best arrived at by the scientific method that they therefore think human EXPERIENCE is best reduced to formulae.

And the second comes from reader Geack:

“…there other ways, apart from science, through which people understand the world…” is simply not true. There seems to be a confusion here between “understand” and “appreciate” or “experience”. Ananyo’s choice of Long Day’s Journey and Dark Knight are illustrative of the point: they provoke emotions, and they provide exposure to the experiences and thought processes of other people. These are useful exposures and enjoyable experiences, but they provide no reliable picture of actual behavior.

Think of any complex phenomenon – take, for instance, a volcano. Poetry might be the best way to share with others the emotional experience of seeing a volcano, but only careful observation and data collection (science) can allow us to understand it – how hot is was, how fast the lava flowed, how far the ash traveled, why it happened at all, when it might happen again.

There are myriad ways other than science by which people organize their expereince of the world around them. But only the methodical recording and analysis of data that we now call science has provided actual understanding.

h/t: Dom

The world’s second chillest cat

September 13, 2012 • 4:54 am

This comes from Japan, of course, home of the world’s mellowest cat: Kagonekoshiro (“white basket cat”). This guy is a close second, and don’t ask me why he’s sitting like that! For a horrible moment I thought it was a dead cat that had been posed, but you can see it blink a few times.

Perhaps someone who reads Japanese can translate the notes on this LOLzy YouTube video:

h/t: Lauren Cobb

Michael Ruse advises the faithful on how to see the evolution of humans as inevitable

September 12, 2012 • 12:27 pm

Philosopher Michael Ruse, an atheist, has nevertheless made a bit of a career out of telling Christians how they can reconcile their theology with the facts of science. I’ve posted about this many times (in fact, I’m too lazy to look them up this afternoon), but the reasons for his faitheism still elude me.

And Ruse continues to publish this kind of stuff.  I’ve been plowing through the 600-page Blackwell Guide to Science and Christianity (J. B. Stump and A. G. Padgett, eds.), which is a pretty good compendium of views on the war between science and Christianity (and yes, it is a war), although the 54 essays are mostly on the pro-religion side.  There is one piece by Michael Ruse, however, “Darwinism and atheism: a marriage made in heaven?” (pp. 246-257, and the answer is “yes”), in which he finds yet another way to tweak theology so that the science-loving Christian is not affronted by evolution.

The other day I posted on the views of Christian paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris, who, along with many of his coreligionists, sees the evolution of humans as inevitable.  It almost has to be, for we are made in God’s image; and surely God’s intention was to create—whether ex nihilo or through evolution—a species capable of apprehending and worshiping his most excellent qualities. (It always amazes me how easily theologians who say that we can’t fathom God’s will can nevertheless easily divine His intentions.) If there is a point to Christian creation, is must be the creation of Christians.

Ruses’s piece actually has some good bits, for he pretty much takes apart all the arguments advanced so far about why the evolution of humans was inevitable. But at the end he goes south and, after dismantling all other arguments, gives his own reasons why our evolution had to have happened.  And remember, he’s an atheist! It’s like a Jew giving anti-Semites new reasons to hate the Jews.

Here’s how Ruse responds to the familiar explanations of human inevitability:

1.  Arms races.  Richard Dawkins has said that evolutionary “arms races” between competing species might inevitably lead to the evolution of high and complex intelligence.  I disagree with Richard on this, and pretty much for the reasons that Ruse adduces:

“. . . even the non-expert can see a great deal is being presupposed here First, do arms races exist and do they always have the results of [sic] that Dawkins suggests?  Paleontological evidence implies that predators and prey pretty fairly rapidly reached the peak of their abilities and get little or no faster after that. Likewise, paleontological evidence suggests that the opportunism of evolution can lead to many different forms, not all of which involve intelligence.  Without something more being added there is certainly no necessity for the emergence of beings like ourselves.” (p. 254).

2.  There was a pre-existing “human niche”.  Again, this is doubtful, and for the very reasons that Ruse suggests: we have no ability to define niches in the absence of organisms, and many organisms also create and change their own niches through their behavior.  (The classic example is the beaver, which by evolving the ability to cut down trees and build dams has suddenly created a whole new habitat for itself—rearing pups and living inside the den.) Many organisms “create” their own niches, ways of life that we would never have thought in advance could exist.  This notion is called “niche construction.”  There’s simply no way to make a compelling argument that somehow, before the first monkey came down from the trees, there was a preexisting niche for “highly intelligent social primate” that was destined—inevitably—to be filled!

3. God tweaked mutations to make humans.  This argument is a favorite not just of theologians, but of some atheistic but religion-friendly philosophers like Elliott Sober.  The idea is that to create humans, God worked on the sly, tweaking mutations that were necessary to transform our primate ancestor into a hominin.  We could never detect this, so it’s a good theory for theologians, though not so great for philosophers. God-tweaked mutations have also been suggested by physicist-theologian Robert John Russell, echoing the argument of Asa Gray, a contemporary and opponent of Darwin:

“It is hardly a surprise to learn that many find Russell’s solution problematic. One surely has here some version of the ‘God-of-the-gaps argument. One is breaking with science to achieve a theologically acceptable outcome. At the very least, one is putting strain on one’s understanding of Darwinism. . . . anticipating Russell, Gray argued that some variations are directed. Darwin was horrified and responded that to make such a move as this was to take evolutionary discussion out of the realm of science. Many feel this objection still holds today.” (p. 255).

Agreed.  Theistic evolution like this is not scientific evolution, and people who accept it shouldn’t be seen as true allies of evolutionary biology. They are inserting miracles into the evolutionary process—a form of creationism.

But Ruse has his own solution, which involves multiverses.

Ruse’s explanation of why human evolution was inevitable (p. 255-256):

The situation I favor invokes (for theological not scientific reasons) some kind of multiverse state of affairs (Ruse 2010).  There are many, an infinite number, of universes. I point out that humans have evolved and therefore, however difficult, they could have evolved. In other words, run the process enough times and humans will evolve.  Note that “enough times” might mean many, many billions of times—an infinite number in some sense. If God creates universes enough times then humans will evolve.  The fact that it takes a great deal of time is irrelevant. It would bore us to wait, but God is outside time and space. He sees always that humans will evolve.  I argue, therefore, that although evolution is unguided, the coming of humans was not unplanned.

I love the double negative “not unplanned,” which is designed to take the sting out of the word “planned.” Whenever I see such phrasing, I remember George Orwell’s advice in his essay Politics and the English Language: “One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.” 

And really—isn’t it planned simply because God saw that if he wanted to use evolution to create humans but couldn’t be assured of our arrival in a single universe, then he had to create multiple universes? That sounds like a plan to me!

But I digress.  On to the rest of Ruse’s argument:

Does this not imply an awful lot of waste on the part of God? Obviously it does from one perspective. However, note that God may not think a universe totally wasted [JAC: dopers, please ignore the last phrase] even if we do not exist in it. Already in this universe we have many worlds which presumably are unoccupied, at least unoccupied by humanlike beings.  So if we are going to talk of waste, we are already up to our necks in that problem.

So there you have it. Perplexed Christians, do you feel better? I didn’t think so.

Why not? Well, there are still a few problems.  The waste problem, simply because it’s made infinitely worse by positing multiverses, doesn’t go away.  Why didn’t God just make the Earth and Sun in the first place, and forget all those other elbenty gazillion planets and universes? Also, Ruse doesn’t recognize that positing multiverses as an answer is not acceptable to many Christians, who feel that that notion (though justified under some theories of physics) is simply a Hail Mary pass thrown by scientists to get rid of the problem of fine-tuning.

Still another problem is one that nobody ever talks about (although Paul Draper discusses it in a wonderful anti-religion essay, “Christian theism and life on Earth,” in this same volume): is it really more probable that God used evolution to effect creation than to poof things into existence ex nihilo?  Since God could already create complex life from nothing—after all, that’s how he made Jesus—why didn’t he just make lots of other humans (and animals and plants) in an instant, the way Genesis describes it?

The only reason theologians marvel at how much better it was for God to use evolution than de novo creation to bring life into being is because they have to: that’s what science tells us. They’re making a virtue from necesssity. But if you didn’t know about evolution, and knew only about the Bible and the idea that God is omnipotent and omniscient, wouldn’t you have guessed a priori that if God brought all life into being, he’d do so via an instant miracle rather than by a 3.5-billion-year process of evolution on one planet out of billions in a single universe out of billions of universes?

After all, the Bible—the inspired word of God—says not one word about evolution. On the contrary, it says life came about by a miracle.

Of course, we enlightened ones know that that was only a metaphor, and God meant evolution all along.