News flash: American Protestant ministers overwhelmingly reject evolution, are split on Earth’s age

January 20, 2012 • 12:40 pm

A survey conducted by the Christian polling organization LifeWay Research, and released on January 9, shows that Protestant pastors as a group are not only antievolution, but pretty much split on how old the Earth is. 1,000 pastors were polled, randomly selected from a list of all Protestant churches. This means that there is a mixture of liberal and conservative faiths here.

And here are the depressing data (you can download a pdf or Powerpoint presentation of the results here):

  • In response to the question “I believe God used evolution to create people,” here are the responses:

Only 12% strongly agree.

  • Re Adam and Eve, the survey says

In response to the statement, “I believe Adam and Eve were literal people,” 74 percent strongly agree and 8 percent somewhat agree. Six percent somewhat disagree, 11 percent strongly disagree and 1 percent are not sure.

“Recently discussions have pointed to doubts about a literal Adam and Eve, the age of the earth and other origin issues,” said Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research. “But Protestant pastors are overwhelmingly Creationists and believe in a literal Adam and Eve.”

  • “In the LifeWay Research survey, about one in five pastors agree that most of their congregation believes in evolution. That includes 10 percent who strongly agree and 9 percent who somewhat agree. A majority (62 percent) strongly disagree and 13 percent somewhat disagree.”

As for the so-called “liberal” Protestants, check this out:

  • “Pastors who consider themselves Mainline are more likely than Evangelicals to believe in evolution. Among those identifying themselves as Mainline, 25 percent strongly agree that God used evolution to create humans. Only 8 percent of Evangelicals strongly agree.”

Since none of these pastors probably see evolution as a non-God-driven process, that means that just one quarter of “mainline” pastors strongly accept the evolution of humans per se.  So much for the assertion that creationism is an aberrancy, a sign of “incorrect” or fundamentalist faith.

And the saddest fact of all:

  • “In response to the statement, ‘I believe the earth is approximately 6,000 years old,’ 34 percent of pastors strongly disagree. However, 30 percent strongly agree. Nine percent somewhat disagree, and 16 percent somewhat agree.”

That means 46% are in general on the young-earth side, and 43% on the old-earth side.  Now we know the earth is 4.5 billion years old, not 6,000 years old, and the evidence, which is not hard to grasp, is readily available to anyone.  This shows the extraordinary ability of religious people to ignore the plain facts to adhere to an implausible faith.  Remember that a 2006 poll by Time Magazine showed that 64% of Americans would continue to accept a tenet of their church that was contradicted by scientific facts.

This underscores a conclusion that is as plain as it is unpalatable to accommodationists: among the things that religion poisons is acceptance of science.  If we didn’t have religion, we wouldn’t have opposition to evolution.  It also shows the futility of trying to convince Protestant pastors that their faith does not conflict with evolution.  Asking that is equivalent to asking them to give up their faith.

The remarkable paternal apparatus of the goose, and a note on animal genitalia

January 20, 2012 • 9:49 am

This is a family-friendly website, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the biological oddities surrounding reproduction.  Here is one, courtesy of a Twitter post (I can’t bring myself to say “tweet”) by SciCurious, passed on by Matthew Cobb. It shows the collection of semen from a goose.

I’m not sure why they’re doing this, which involves manually stimulating the male at great length and then collecting his semen in a cup. It must be for breeding purposes, but I wasn’t familiar with this in geese.  Artificial insemination is regularly done in turkeys, for they’ve been bred to have such large breasts that the males can no longer mount the females during copulation. This is one of the more deleterious effects of artificial selection! But geese?

Anyway, the real action in this video happens at about 1:03, when after much stimulation the penis everts and ejaculates. Notice its corkscrew shape and spines.

I’m convinced that features like these evolve via sexual selection: the female “perceives” through tactile stimuli that this is a genital she likes.  For more on this, read William Eberhard’s remarkable but underappreciated book Sexual selection and Animal Genitalia.  It’s one of my favorite evolution books, for it calls attention to one of the few rules of evolutionary biology: if species are very similar in appearance, but there is only one good way to tell them apart, that difference is almost invariably in the shape of the male genitalia.

This holds not only in birds, but many other groups as well.  It’s very common in insects, and one of the first things insect taxonomists look at is the male genitals

Tellingly, in spiders the diagnostic feature is not the male genitals, but the pedipalps, a pair of anterior appendages that take the sperm from the genitals and transfer them to the females. Since the females actually contact the pedipalps but not the genitals, this supports the notion that the female’s tactile perception of male sperm-transfer organs has caused those organs to evolve rapidly and differentially among related species.  Species-specific differences occur not just in penis shape or pedipalps, but also in organs involved with copulation, such as the “claspers” in male fruit flies. Here are some differences between the penises of closely-related damselflies:

My own guess for the evolutionary process that has operated here is sexual selection based on pre-existing female preferences that have nothing to do with the quality of the male: this is called the “sensory bias” hypothesis.  Another suggestion is that the genitals of related species diverge so they can tell each other apart (the “species recognition hypothesis”): a female “feels” when she’s being rogered by the wrong male, and can terminate copulation prematurely. But I doubt that this explanation is correct because genitals also diverge rapidly in animals that don’t coexist with close relatives (as in isolated species on islands), so there’s no evolutionary pressure to tell your own males from those of a closely related species.

Anyway, on to the goose:

You’re probably asking yourself: do all birds have penises like this? The answer is no—most birds don’t have penises at all but cloacas: holes that serve for sperm exit and (in females) entry, as well as for excretion in both sexes. When birds copulate, they merely put their cloacas together (this is known romantically as the “cloacal kiss”), and insemination occurs very quickly.

But some birds, including geese, ducks, ostriches, and other ratites (large flightless birds), have “penises”, which aren’t homologous to the mammalian penis but are eversions of the cloacal wall erected by the pumping of lymph rather than blood (as in mammals).  I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but here’s a remarkable bird “penis,” that of the Argentine lake duck (Oxyura vittata), whose paternal apparatus can be more than 42 centimeters (17 inches!) long.  It is the longest penis relative to body size of any vertebrate.

This poor bird sacrificed its life for the titillation of biologists:

Reader photos: keas

January 20, 2012 • 6:54 am

Perhaps inspired by the post I did last week on the keas of New Zealand, reader Derek contributes his own photos of keas:

I enclose a couple of photos of a kea taken near the entrance to the Homer Tunnel. The tunnel is on the road to Milford Sound and is single lane, so we were waiting for our turn to travel to Milford. This bird was clearly very accustomed to humans, and fearless around them – I expect handouts were a feature of his diet.

How do boa constrictors know when to stop squeezing?

January 20, 2012 • 6:36 am

The question above is one Andy Rooney never asked, but biologists are a curious lot.  Boas (yes, their Latin name is Boa constrictor) squeeze their prey, killing them by suffocation, after first biting them to get a grip.

I’ve put below a video of a boa constrictor killing a large rat this way, but here’s a WARNING: don’t watch it if you’re squeamish! Predation is never pretty, but of course natural selection doesn’t make predators kind.

Squeezing prey in this way is costly for the snake. It takes a lot of energy for a cold-blooded (ectothermic) reptile to squeeze that hard (its metabolism goes up sevenfold when squeezing), and during the act the snake itself could be subject to predation.You don’t want to squeeze longer than you have to, but how do you know your prey is dead?

Guess.

Many of you might have said, “When the breathing stops,” but that’s apparently not correct.

The answer, which might seem obvious but is still cool, is in a new paper in Biology Letters by Scott Boback et al. (access is free), is that the snake monitor’s the prey’s heartbeat, and stops squeezing when the heart stops beating.

Well, the experiment is gruesome, and personally I wouldn’t kill rats to answer this question, but Boback et al. did the carnage. They used 16 wild-caught boas, and offered them killed but still-warm rats, kept warm by a sort of heating pad. The rats were also implanted with water-filled bulbs to measure the pressure of the snake’s squeezing, and then—the key—an artificial heart, formed by another water-filled bulb that was set to beat in three treatments: 1. no heartbeat, 2. heartbeat throughout a 20-minute period (the average time a snake squeezes a rat) and 3. heartbeat stops after 10 minutes.

The results:

  • snakes periodically tightened their coils in the constant-heartbeat treatment, but didn’t do that when there was no heartbeat from the outset
  • rats with the constant heartbeat were squeezed nearly twice as long as those with no heartbeat, and the pressure for the former was about 20% higher.
  • in the treatment for which artificial heartbeat was discontinued after 10 minutes, the snakes stopped their periodic increase in pressure at about 10 minutes, and pressures and squeezing times were intermediate between the full-heartbeat and no-heartbeat treatment. :’

    Snake pressure (vertical axis) versus time of squeezing prey (horizontal axis). Top: full 20-minute heartbeat; Middle: no heartbeat from outset; Bottom: heartbeat discontinued after 10 minutes.

Is this learned or innate? Experiments with naive boas, who had never squeezed a live prey, suggest there’s at least a strong innate component, i.e., an evolved, genetically-based ability to stop squeezing when you detect a stopped heart. But snakes also apparently learn to squeeze less when the heart stops, too. Regardless, this is the first demonstration that snakes can detect and monitor the heartbeat of prey that they’re squeezing.

The authors raise one caveat: warm-blooded (“endothermic”) prey like birds and mammals are killed much more quickly than 20 minutes, and snakes could use the cessation of movement as a cue, saving them lots of squeezing time.  Why the extra time and heartbeat monitoring? The authors theorize that the heartbeat monitoring originally evolved when the snakes preyed on cold-blooded (“ectothermic”) animals like lizards, which can live a lot longer than a few minutes without respiration and movement, and so cessation of heartbeat was a more reliable cue to death.

This explanation is interesting, but if boas’ current prey are mostly endothermic, there should have been selection to eliminate the heartbeat cue.  I have no idea what kinds of prey predominate in a modern boa’s diet.

__________________

Boback, S. M., A. E. Hall, K. J. McCann, A. W. Hayes, J. S. Forrester and C. F. Zwemer. 2012. Snake modulates construction in response to prey’s heartbeat.  Biology Letters online, doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1105

Creationist paper in a medical journal

January 19, 2012 • 7:03 am

Well, there’s one doctor in the world who thinks he knows a lot about evolution, and that he knows more than evolutionary biologists. In fact, he knows that evolution is rife with problems, is pretty much defunct, and that a new paradigm is in order.  What is that paradigm? Intelligent design, of course.

The doctor is Joseph Kuhn, a surgeon at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, and he’s just published an article in the Proceedings of that center, which I presume is a respectable, peer-reviewed journal.  Well, it isn’t respectable any more, for Kuhn’s article, “Dissecting Darwinism” (free at the link), is merely a cobbled-together list of canards from the Discovery Institute (DI).  It’s poorly written, dreadful, full of scientific errors, and the journal should not only be ashamed of it, but retract it.

What does the good Dr. Kuhn have to say about evolution? First he parades his qualifications to dissect Darwinism, which consist entirely of being in the lineage of one of his predecessors, the eighteenth-century surgeon John Hunter, who supposedly anticipated Darwin’s theories:

John Hunter was also a brilliant biologist and naturalist, having dissected and stored thousands of animals and plants. His considerable samples represented the entire initial display of the Royal College of Surgeons Museum. In two lengthy volumes, entitled Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology, and Geology, he identified the remarkable similarity of muscles and organs between various species. John Hunter proposed a gradual formation of species through mutation 70 years before Charles Darwin published his observations in On the Origin of the Species. Therefore, history reveals that surgeons are uniquely capable of gathering information, making observations, and reaching conclusions about scientific discoveries.

That’s a dumb argument if I ever heard one. And, sure enough, Kuhn proceeds to embarrass both himself and the journal.

He makes three criticisms, all taken from the Discovery Institute playbook:

1.  Life is too complex to have originated naturally.  Here we see the usual arguments: life requires both proteins and DNA, and neither could have originated without the other.  The co-evolutionary scenario, and involvement of RNA in this, isn’t mentioned. And he makes the usual bogus statistical arguments for why a “specified” DNA was unlikely:

Even if there was a self-organizing pattern, the probability of even a short strand of nucleotides occurring in a precisely specifi ed linear pattern that would code for even the smallest single-celled organism with approximately 250 genes has been calculated to be 1 in10150—1 in 1070 less than the chance of finding a particular electron in the entire universe (25).

Reference 25 is to a paper by Bill Dembski. Indeed, throughout his paper Kuhn quotes DI “experts” like Dembski, Jon Wells, and David Berlinski.   His conclusion about the origin of life is absurdly funny:

Based on an awareness of the inexplicable coded information in DNA, the inconceivable self-formation of DNA, and the inability to account for the billions of specifically organized nucleotides in every single cell, it is reasonable to conclude that there are severe weaknesses in the theory of gradual improvement through natural selection (Darwinism) to explain the chemical origin of life. Furthermore, Darwinian evolution and natural selection could not have been causes of the origin of life, because they require replication to operate, and there was no replication prior to the origin of life.

He doesn’t seem to realize that one could consider replication as an essential property of life, and that the ability of replicate would have been strongly selected for among early proto-life forms.  The last sentence above is simply gibberish.

2.  Cellular systems are irreducibly complex, and could not have evolved.  Kuhn tries to dazzle the reader with examples of complexity, but shows no awareness of what “irreducible complexity” really is: complexity whose intermediate steps could not have been adaptive during evolution.  And, of course, though he quotes Behe and Wells at length, he doesn’t give any examples.  It’s simply the argument from ignorance.

Although Nilsson and Pelger, for example, showed in a cool computer model that a complex camera eye could easily evolve, and in relatively few generations, from a simple light-sensitive pigmented eyespot, Kuhn dismisses that because one also requires the evolution of a complex brain apparatus and light-sensitive pigments to interpret the images.  Ergo Jesus:

Thus, each of these enzymes and proteins must exist for the system to work properly. Many other mathematical and logistical weaknesses to the Nilsson example of eye evolution have been uncovered (28). In summary, the eye is incredibly complex. Since it is unreasonable to expect self-formation of the enzymes in perfect proportion simultaneously, eye function represents a system that could not have arisen by gradual mutations.

Reference 28 is to a DI commentary by David Berlinski.

3.  We don’t have any transitional fossils. This claim is even more extreme than those made by the Discovery Institute.  Kuhn dismisses (or rather, ignores) the transitional fossils between early hominins and modern humans, and simply asserts that the genetic differences between modern apes and modern humans preclude the existence of a common ancestor:

The ape to human species change would require an incredibly rapid rate of mutation leading to formation of new DNA, thousands of new proteins, and untold cellular, neural, digestive, and immune-related changes in DNA, which would code for the thousands of new functioning proteins.This rate of mutation has never been observed in any viral, bacterial, or other organism. The estimation for DNA random mutations that would lead to intelligence in humans is beyond calculation. Therefore, the recently discovered molecular differences between apes and humans make the prospect of simple random mutation leading to a new species of Homo sapiens largely improbable (35).

Lots of those human-ape differences involve transposons or neutral changes in “junk DNA,” whose accumulation is unproblematic. Before one can assert that human evolution is impossible, one has to have some idea of the number of relevant genetic changes separating us from our relatives (changes important in our physiological, cognitive, and phenotypic differences), and then show that such changes could not have occurred given estimates of mutation rates and time.  Kuhn does not do this, but merely asserts that it couldn’t have happened. He has no idea how many selected changes separate us from our relatives.

As for other transitions, he dismisses the “fishapod” Tiktaalik roseae as “based on a recovered bone fragment representing the wrist structure that would be necessary for moving on land,” quoting—get this—Casey Luskin as an authority.  If you know anything, you know that Tiktaalkik was represented by far more than a wrist bone: there was a head, for example, and a shoulder girdle, all of which looked transitional between fish and amphibians.  And though Kuhn makes statements like this:

However, the modern evolution data do not convincingly support a transition from a fish to an amphibian, which would require a massive amount of new enzymes, protein systems, organ systems, chromosomes, and formation of new strands of specifically coding DNA. Even with thousands of billions of generations, experience shows that new complex biological features that require multiple mutations to confer a benefit do not arise by natural selection and random mutation. New genes are difficult to evolve. The bacteria do not form into other species. A reliance on gross morphologic appearances, as with fossils, drawings, and bone reconstructions, is severely inadequate compared to an understanding of the complexity of the DNA and coding that would have been required to mutate from a fish to an amphibian or from a primitive primate to a human.,

he fails to realize that this is all moot because we know it happened: we have the fossils! We have transitional forms between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals as well as between reptiles and birds, and of course all those fossils in the hominin lineages. Kuhn mentions none of these. The man, educated surgeon though he may be, is completely ignorant about evolution. He’s simply a mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute.

At the end, Kuhn claims that all these weaknesses of neo-Darwinism require a new paradigm to explain the origin and evolution of life:

Irreducibly complex systems involving thousands of interrelated specifically coded enzymes do exist in every organ of the human body. At an absolute minimum, the inconceivable self-formation of DNA and the inability to explain the incredible information contained in DNA represent fatal defects in the concept of mutation and natural selection to account for the origin of life and the origin of DNA. As new theories emerge that explain the origin of life, the inevitable emotional accusations of heresy and ignorance are not surprising in a period of scientific revolution. It is therefore time to sharpen the minds of students, biologists, and physicians for the possibility of a new paradigm.

Although he doesn’t specify what this new paradigm is, I suspect it involves an Intelligent Designer, aka Jesus.

This paper is rife with mistakes, misguided appropriations from the creationist literature, and simple ignorance of the evidence for evolution.  It’s an embarrassment to the author, to the journal, and to the field of medicine as a whole.  I call on the journal to retract this paper, for if it doesn’t, then the Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Center will be forever tarred as a vehicle for creationist nonsense.

h/t: Gregg

_______

Kuhn, J. A. 2012. Dissecting Darwinism.  Proceedings Baylor Univ. Medical Center 25:41-47

“Cat’s Funeral” and Homer’s “wine-dark sea”

January 19, 2012 • 6:27 am

by Matthew Cobb

I knew the name  E.V. Rieu from my battered old copy of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which he translated. On reading the Times Literary Supplement this morning, I came across this children’s poem he wrote, ‘Cat’s Funeral’. I thought it was rather good:

Bury her deep, down deep,

Safe in the earth’s cold keep,

Bury her deep-

No more to watch bird stir;

No more to clean dark fur;

No more to glisten as silk;

No more to revel in milk;

No more to purr.

Bury her deep, down deep;

She is beyond warm sleep.

She will not walk in the night;

She will not wake to the light.

Bury her deep.

I’m not really sure what a ‘children’s poem’ is (though I suppose I understand what an adult poem is – you wouldn’t give an 8 year old Eliot’s The Waste Land). “Cat’s Funeral” will do for both grown-ups and children, I think.
E. V. Rieu [EDIT – AS POINTED OUT IN THE COMMENTS, THIS IS *NOT* E. V. RIEU – IT IS A PORTRAIT OF ANTON CHEKHOV!]
The poem was published in this rather fine-looking collection of poems, with drawings by E. H. Shepard, who also drew the Winnie the Pooh books before Disney got his mitts on them. You can pick up a copy of The Flattered Flying Fish for not much at all on Abebooks (other booksellers are available).

According to Wikipedia (back on line after the SOPA blackout), Rieu (1887-1972), was the initiator the Penguin Classics series, as well as being a classics scholar and a translator. I first read the Odyssey, in Rieu’s translation, on the Greek island of Patmos (also the place where Saint John allegedly wrote the Book of Revelations, with all its Dylanesque weirdness).

It appears that Rieu was the originator of the phrase ‘wine-dark sea’. In 1983-4, the meaning of this was the subject of a long correspondence in Nature, when a series of writers discussed what exactly was meant, and how we could tell. Sadly, it is all behind Nature’s paywall, so unless you have a personal subscription or work somewhere that has access, the links in the following paragraphs will lead nowhere. Blame Macmillan Publishing.

The opening salvo suggested that the geology of the Peloponnesus meant that water was sufficiently alkaline to make the wine blue (someone later pleaded for this to be tested experimentally). This was scotched as Homer also said cattle were ‘wine-dark’ (but clearly not blue), and it was suggested that it was something to do with the sea at dusk.

A few months later a series of criticisms were put forward, including the argument that the original Greek had no colour connotation at all, and the suggestion that Homeric Greek divided the spectrum to four parts (white/black/red/yellow) (later support for this came in the shape of the doubtful suggestion that Nigerians cannot distinguish various colours), or that the phrase was referring to albedo rather than colour, or that it was a more tribute to vengeful Poseidon. Classics lecturers argued that Homerian wine can be black as well as red, and that therefore it could just be a phrase referring to a dark sea.

It was finally argued that the whole thing was Rieu’s fault, and that the original Greek could be better rendered as ‘wine-faced”, i.e. like the surface of wine. Astronomers even tried to get in on the act, pointing out that Homer described Sirius as a red star, whereas in fact it is white/blue. (A later correspondent pointed out that only Pliny and Ptolemy describe Sirius as ‘red’. Other roman writers, as well as Eygptian and Chinese astronomers, referred to Sirius as white or blue.)

After coming to no real conclusion, the correspondence was finally closed with a note from one Hilton Stowell in the ERBP Laboratory in Georgia. He wrote:

“the literati used to believe that the last word came from Stephen Dedalus [in Joyce’s Ulysses] when he spoke the winged words ‘snotgreen and scrotum-tightening sea’.”