Scientists decry creeping creationism in Britain

September 19, 2011 • 5:57 am

According to yesterday’s Guardian, a group of scientists that include David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Paul Nurse (head of the Royal Society), Lewis Wolpert, Helena Cronin, and Colin Blakemore, have banded together to fight creeping creationism in Britain, both in schools and elsewhere:

A group of 30 scientists have signed a statement saying it is “unacceptable” to teach creationism and intelligent design, whether it happens in science lessons or not. The statement claims two organisations, Truth in Science and Creation Ministries International are “touring the UK and presenting themselves as scientists and their creationist views as science”.

“Creationism and intelligent design are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in publicly funded schools,” the scientists say.

“There should be enforceable statutory guidance that they may not be presented as scientific theories in any publicly funded school of whatever type.”

The scientists claim organisations such as Truth in Science are encouraging teachers to incorporate intelligent design into their science teaching.

“Truth in Science has sent free resources to all secondary heads of science and to school librarians around the country that seek to undermine the theory of evolution and have intelligent design ideas portrayed as credible scientific viewpoints. Speakers from Creation Ministries International are touring the UK, presenting themselves as scientists and their creationist views as science at a number of schools.”

Free schools and academies were not obliged to teach the national curriculum and so were “under no obligation to teach evolution at all,” it added.

You can find the statement and the list of 30 signatories here.

I was surprised to learn not only that evolution is not a mandated part of the national curriculum, but also these two facts, which seem more characteristic of the US than Britain:

Curiously, the Telegraph article on the same issue has this description:

The naturalist [Attenborough] joined three Nobel laureates, the atheist Richard Dawkins and other leading scientists in calling on the government to tackle the “threat” of creationism.

Why is Dawkins identified as “the atheist” rather than as “the biologist”? After all, Dawkins has written far more about biology than about atheism, and that’s how he got famous in the first place.  Moreover, Wolpert,  Attenborough and Paul Nurse (and probably others) are atheists too.

Steve Pinker’s new book

September 18, 2011 • 9:48 am

Expect a lot of press over the next few weeks about Steve Pinker’s new book, a massive tome (832 pages long) called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It will be released October 4, and can get it for about $25 on Amazon.

The title tells the tale: it’s a meticulously documented argument about how much violence has declined from our hunter-gatherer days ten millennia ago through medieval times to the modern day.  Such a rapid decline argues, of course, that either we are not innately violent or that, if we are, we’re increasingly able to control our genetic endowment.  Such a steep decline in violence can’t reflect the action of natural selection weeding out our “aggression genes,” for the change has simply happened too quickly.

Over at The Guardian, Andrew Anthony briefly summarizes the book and gives a longer, and pretty good, account of Pinker’s life as a public intellectual, which at times has been tempestuous.  Anthony does mention one potential criticism that I find strange:

As both conservative pessimists, such as the philosopher John Gray, and postmodern relativists dismiss the post-Enlightenment understanding of progress as pure folly, Pinker is likely to stand accused of Panglossian naivety. Indeed, he says that when he told colleagues what he was writing, they said he reminded them of the man who jumped off the roof of a tall building and halfway down observed: “It looks good so far.”

To be tagged as a credulous optimist is one thing, yet Pinker also risks being condemned as a scientific racist. His graphs on the incidence of murder show present-day tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures to be far more homicidal than even the most lethally armed developed nation, a fact that is bound to bring censure from those Pinker derides as the “anthropologists of peace”.

If the data indeed show that difference—and given Pinker’s meticulousness and awareness of what is at stake here, I’m sure they do—it would be foolish to claim he’s a scientific racist.  It’s of immense scientific interest if populations living the way our ancestors did not so long ago were more prone to violence, and ethnicity is the last thing that I would think could explain that.

You can see Pinker’s nascent ideas for this book in a 2007 TED talk here.

How big was the human population bottleneck? Another staple of theology refuted.

September 18, 2011 • 7:13 am

A new paper in Nature by Heng Li and Richard Durbin contains estimates of the “effective population size” of our ancestors at different points in evolutionary time. (Effective population size isn’t the same as census size, as it reflects things like unequal sex ratios—unlikely in our ancestors—or variation in family size, but it’s probably not too far off.)  These are the best estimates of our demographic history to date, as they rest on fewer assumptions than previous methods, and have been validated by computer simulation studies.  They bear not only on what happened when early humans were in Africa and then left Africa, but also on our recurrent discussion of the scientific evidence that absolutely rebuts the Adam and Eve story.

The data come from “coalescent” models—estimates of the time in the past at which two copies of genes from different people, or from the same person, last shared a common ancestral gene form. From these models, data on genetic differences within individuals (i.e., between the two copies of each non-sex-chromosome gene that everyone carries), and estimates of ancestral generation times (25 years in this paper) and mutation rates (rates of change at individual DNA bases), you can work out what the population size of our ancestors was at different times in the past.

The authors made their model from complete genome sequences of six individuals: two Europeans, a Korean, a Chinese, and two Yoruba (a west African group). The figure below pretty much tells the tale: it gives effective population size (on the Y axis) at different times in our species’ history (the X axis shows time before the present on a log scale). The estimates from each individual are represented by different-colored lines, and the key gives the ethnicity of each person.  These data are from “autosomes” (those chromosomes that are not sex chromosomes), but DNA data from sex chromosomes gives pretty much the same result.

The first thing you see is obvious: our ancestors went through two different phases of population “bottlenecking” (constriction): one occurred about three million years ago, when a large population declined to around 10,000 individuals. The authors note that while this may reflect population size decline associated with the origin of hominins after our split with the lineage that produced modern chimps, they also say that this could be an artifact of ancient genetic polymorphisms maintained by natural selection.

The second bottleneck is the one of interest, for it’s the one associated with a reduced population size as humans left Africa.  For the Chinese, Korean, and European genomes, effective population size fell from about 13,500 (at 150,000 years ago) to about 1200 between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.  Now this is the effective population size, almost certainly an underestimate of census size, but that only makes the problem worse: we never went through a bottleneck of anything near two individuals, as the Biblical Adam-and-Eve story suggests.  This, of course, means that theologians have to scramble to save that story, turning it, as always, into a “metaphor”.  (In science, a falsified hypothesis gets tossed on the scrap heap; in religion, a falsified hypothesis becomes a metaphor.)  And it also suggests that Jesus died for that metaphor.

But enough of Biblical exegesis.  While the bottleneck for non-European populations was probably associated with a group leaving Africa and subsequently colonizing the world, we also see a somewhat less severe bottleneck in the African samples: from about 16,100 people about 100,000-150,000 years ago to 5,700 about 50,000 years ago.  It’s not clear why the populations in Africa bottlenecked as well.

Finally, we also see the population recover in size, with a huge increase  in all populations beginning roughly 20,000 years ago.  This clearly reflects population growth in both Africa and in areas colonized from Africa as humans expanded around the globe.

There are two other interesting points:

  • All the data clearly show that all modern humans,  African and non-African alike, descend from one “homogeneous ancestral population in the last 100,000 years, with subsequent minor admixture out of Africa from Neanderthals.”  This goes against earlier theories that there is a much older divide separating West African from non-African populations.
  • Also contrary to earlier assumptions that after Homo sapiens left Africa (ca. 60,000 years ago) there was little interbreeding between African and non-African populations, the new data show that genetic interchange between these populations continued up until 20,0000-40,000 years ago.  This conclusion, though, is provisional because it depends on estimates of mutation rates which are necessarily indirect.

The upshot and the lesson for the science/religion debates: we now have a pretty good estimate of how many ancestors our own species had at various times in the past, all the way back to near when we diverged from the lineage leading to modern chimps.  And the lesson for theology is the usual: science has shown that scripture is wrong, so yet another Biblical “truth” becomes a metaphor.

Science continues to invalidate the claims of faith.  First special creation went by the board, so theologians—at least the rational ones—were forced to show that of course God would have used evolution to fulfill his Big Plan to Produce Humans.  Now Adam and Eve have also become metaphors, leading to all kinds of humorous theological speculations about who were humanity’s parents and what, exactly, was the nature of their Original Sin.  Next on the agenda are morality and free will, staples of religious doctrine but items that are starting to be explained purely by science.  We now see morality as having a purely secular origin, perhaps involving evolution; and we don’t really have the freedom of choice envisioned by many faiths.

All of this shows that science is dominant to religion, for when they clash, as they inevitably must, “sophisticated” theologians must frantically revise their doctrines to comport with scientific truth.  And they hate that. This innate recognition of the precedence of science over faith is, I think, one reason why so many religious people and faitheists are picking at science, claiming that the methodology of science is based just as strongly on faith as are the “truths” of religion.  But if that were the case, why does religion inevitably bow before science?

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Li, H. and R. Durbin.  2011. Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences.  Nature 475:493-497.

Dinosaur feathers in amber!

September 18, 2011 • 5:17 am

The latest issue of Science contains a paper by McKellar et al, showing a number of examples of dinosaur and early bird feathers preserved in late Cretaceous amber (about 70 million years old) from Alberta, Canada (h/t to artist Kalliope Monoyios at Symbiartic for calling this work to my attention).  The feathers show almost all the stages in the evolution of those structures—beginning with simple filaments, presumably for thermoregulation, to coiled filaments used by diving birds like grebes to modify their buoyancy by absorbing water, to more complicated feathers similar to those in modern birds.

The hypothesized stages in the evolution of modern feathers are shown below (figure 1 from the paper); all of these stages are seen in the amber specimens.  The authors describe the stages:

The currently accepted (11, 12) evolutionary  developmental model for feathers (Fig. 1A) consists of a stage I morphology characterized by a single filament: This unfurls into a tuft of filaments (barbs) in stage II. In stage III, either some tufted barbs coalesce to form a rachis (central shaft) (IIIa), or barbules (segmented secondary branches) stem from the barbs (IIIb); then, these features combine to produce tertiary branching (IIIa+b). Barbules later differentiate along the length of each barb, producing distal barbules with hooklets at each node to interlock adjacent barbs and forma closed pennaceous (vaned) feather (stage IV). Stage V encompasses a wide range of additional vane and subcomponent specializations. Most modern birds possess stage IV or V feathers or secondary reductions from these stages (11, 16).

Here’s a feather from stage “1”: a simple filament, but note that some of these are coiled:

And more complicated feathers:

How do we know these feathers are from theropod dinosaurs (the ones that evolved feathers and whose descendants became modern birds) rather than more modern birds living at the time. The authors give several reasons, including the fact that some of the feather types are found only in fossilized dinosaurs like Sinornithosaurus millenii.  But I’m not convinced that at least some of the more complex feathers didn’t derive from what we’d consider “birds”, especially since bird fossils do occur in the area.

In his a Perspective piece accompanying this paper, Mark Norrell is more judicious, concluding that “complex ‘modern’ feather adaptations had already appeared before the extinction of the nonavian dinosaurs.” Norrell also sees the most surprising finding as that of feathers with coiled “barbules” (side structures in stage 3b above) suggesting that some of the early feathered dinos were diving animals.

If you want just a summary of the pictures and a brief description, check out Kapi’s post at Symbiartic (she was the illustrator of WEIT). Here’s one of the photo she presents, showing the feather in situ in an amber chunk, with the caption she gives:

Within this amber piece, six feather fragments partially overlap each other. The beaded appearance of the barbules (finest structures) in this image is a result of pigments concentrated within just a portion of each of the segments that make up the barbules. These barbule segments or “internodes” are connected in a fashion similar to the segments in a bamboo shoot. Photo: Ryan McKellar

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McKellar, R.,  B. D. E. Chatterton, A. P. Wolfe and P. J. Currie. 2011. A diverse assemblage of Cretaceous dinosaur and bird fossils from Canadian amber. Science 333:1619-1622.

Who says only the faithful give to charity?

September 17, 2011 • 11:09 am

The atheist community at YouTube is running a 24-hour live show to raise money for an organization I very much support: Medicine sans Frontieres (“Doctors without borders”).

The live feed is here: http://www.blogtv.com/people/dprjones and I’ve pasted the schedule below (click to enlarge).   Go, watch, and donate!

I’ve just listened to Barbara Forrest, and coming up are  erv (Abbie Smith), Larry Krauss, P. Z. Myers, Anthony Grayling, Michael Shermer, James Randi, and many more.

Who knows where the time goes?

September 17, 2011 • 9:37 am

This lovely but mournful song was written by Sandy Denny, an English folk singer who performed with Fairport Convention and who died in 1978 at 31 (drugs, of course).  I think the best recorded version, though, was by Judy Collins on her eponymous album from 1969 (Denny was much less popular in America).  Sadly, Collins’s version is not available on YouTube, but here’s Denny’s recorded version with Fairport Convention:

And have a listen to this one, with just Denny and a guitar.

From The Guardian:

Her best-known song, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”, along with Nick Drake’s “Fruit Tree” and John Martyn’s “Solid Air”, are products of a peculiarly English strain of blissful autumnal melancholy. As a lyricist she wove together the threads of English lyrical balladry, her songs variously recalling the lovestruck troubadour ayres of Thomas Campion, the antiquarian romanticism of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti’s windblown, regretful verse, and Thomas Hardy’s tragedies. As a voice – she has an unforgettable breathy huskiness – she connected the dots between the folk songs of Kathleen Ferrier and contemporary revivalists such as Briggs and Collins.

A live version from Judy Collins (2000), very different from the above but quite beautiful, is here.

Two easy pieces

September 17, 2011 • 7:22 am

Two new pieces on atheism and spirutuality have just appeared.  Neither is worth close scrutiny or dissection, but they’re worth a quick look and a bit of thought.

The first is a new piece by Gary Gutting in The New York Times “Opionator” section:  “Beyond New Atheism.”  Gutting begins by faulting the New Atheists for misunderstanding why most people are religious:

Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

That’s deeply confusing!  What New Atheists have tried to do is show that a) there is no evidence for a God, so there is no center, and b) you can ground meaning and values in secular ideals.   Mostly, however, Gutting says that the major problem with New Atheism is that we don’t have a program to replace the sense of “meaning and purpose” that religion gives to people.  He touts Philip Kitcher’s essay, “The Joy of Secularism,” as an example of an atheist who takes this problem seriously (see also James Wood’s essay on this in the New Yorker).

Fair enough, except that that issue hasn’t been completely neglected.  Many, like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, have talked about how we find meaning and purpose within ourselves rather than by being servile to a deity.  And others, including myself, Greg Paul, and Frederick Solt et. al. have talked about how a reformation of society, making people more “secure” by fostering economic equality, health care, and less general dysfunction, will, according to sociological data, be likely to diminish religion’s hold on people.  The underlying idea, for which there’s much evidence, is that religiosity is a byproduct of general insecurity, so you turn to God when you don’t feel that you have a social network or a government that cares about you.

As for this plaint by Gutting,

Many others, however, need convincing that atheism (or secular humanism, as Kitcher prefers) has the resources to inspire a fulfilling human life. If not, isn’t the best choice to retreat to a religion of hope? Why not place our bet on the only chance we have of real fulfillment?

Well, first I’d point Gutting to Sweden and Denmark, where, as Phil Zuckerman has shown, two largely atheistic societies are filled with people having meaningful and fulfilling lives. Why is that?

Second, I’d point out to Gutting that if there is no evidence for God, than the “only chance we have or real fulfillment”—being religious—gives you as much chance as buying a Powerball ticket.  Phase I of the New Atheism simply involves convincing people that there’s no evidence for God, and from that convincing much else will follow (yes, including some angst).  But how condescending of people like Gutting to say that the people need their religion, even if it’s wrong, because they need hope! Of course atheists must deal with the issue of the creeping nihilism that often attends the embrace of atheism, but to dismiss New Atheism because it doesn’t deal with social support is a serious mistake.  You can’t approach phase II—the reassurance that one can have a good life without God—until you complete phase I: the evidence that there is no God.

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The second piece is a remarkably splenetic diatribe by one Lillian Daniel—a minister of the United Church of Christ, who, over at PuffHo, kicks serious butt among those people who claim to be “spiritual” but are too pansy-ass to do what they should: become religious.  In “Spiritual but not religious? Please stop boring me,” we have stuff like this:

Like people who go to church don’t see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep tradition.

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn’t interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

Unfortunately, many people who have these “spiritual” experiences (I am increasingly reluctant to use that word) don’t believe in God or a handed-down, made-up religious tradition.

Daniel’s piece is a precis of a much longer attack on spirituality in The Christian Century, ‘You can’t make this stuff up.”  I think it’s worth reading simply because it’s so amazingly clueless and unintentionally hilarious in its assumption that inside everyone who loves a sunset, or weeps at the strains of Beethoven, is someone hungering to drink the blood of Jesus:

But in the church we are stuck with one another, therefore we don’t get the space to come up with our own God. Because when you are stuck with one another, the last thing you would do is invent a God based on humanity. In the church, humanity is way too close at hand to look good. It’s as close as the guy singing out of tune next to you in your pew, as close as the woman who doesn’t have access to a shower and didn’t bathe before worship, as close as the baby screaming and as close as the mother who doesn’t seem to realize that the baby is driving everyone crazy. It’s as close as that same mother who crawled out an inch from her postpartum depression to get herself to church today and wonders if there is a place for her there. It’s as close as the woman sitting next to her, who grieves that she will never give birth to a child and eyes that baby with envy. It’s as close as the preacher who didn’t prepare enough and as close as the listener who is so thirsty for a word that she leans forward for absolutely anything.

It’s as close as that teenager who walked to church alone, seeking something more than gratitude, and finds a complicated worship service in which everyone seems to know when to stand and when to sing except for him—but even so, he gets caught up in the beauty of something bigger than his own invention.

Suddenly it hits that teenager: I don’t need to invent God, because God has already invented me. I don’t need to make all this up for myself. There’s a community of folks who over thousands of years have followed a man who was not lucky—who was, in the scheme of things, decidedly unlucky. But he was willing to die alongside other unlucky ones, and he was raised from the dead to show there is much more to life than you could possibly come up with. And as for the resurrection, try doing that for yourself.

She also makes a few digs at National Public Radio.  I weep for the parishioners who have this woman as their pastor.  But why the invective against the poor “spiritual” folks?  Well, many meanstream churches in America are losing members, and the attempt to rope in the “spiritual” may be a desperate measure to stem this tide.