Massimo apologizes

November 5, 2010 • 9:38 am

Over at Rationally Speaking, Massimo Pigliucci has tendered a gracious apology to me—and to others—for “making remarks about motives and character that had no logical connection to the substance of the arguments being discussed.”  Indeed, I sometimes took umbrage at his attitude, especially his accusations that I was naive, uncredentialed, and unqualified to discuss philosophy.

But never mind. It’s very nice of Massimo to make this gesture, and of course I accept his apology. I too, will try to temper my stridency (at least toward him!), and to stick purely to the arguments at hand.  It’s inevitable that we’ll have further disagreement, but we both recognize that what’s important in such discussions are not the personalities or the credentials, but the ideas.

Cheers!

Can New Scientist get any worse on evolution?

November 5, 2010 • 6:32 am

I’ve often highlighted the ludicrous missteps New Scientist makes when covering evolutionary biology (see here, here, and here, for instance).  They seem to delight in publishing stupid and thoughtless articles about how Darwin was wrong, and how we need a whole new evolutionary paradigm.  I thought they’d been set straight by petulant evolutionists interested in real science, but apparently not.  They’ve pulled out all the stops with their new piece, “The chaos theory of evolution,” by Keith Bennett, described as

professor of late-Quaternary environmental change at Queen’s University Belfast, guest professor in palaeobiology at Uppsala University in Sweden, and author of Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life (Cambridge University Press). He holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

I weep for the Royal Society, which seems to have fallen on hard times.  Professor Bennett  has apparently decided that the entire corpus of modern evolutionary theory is simply wrong, and, in his genius, replaces it with what he calls the “chaos theory of evolution.”  The entire edifice is rotten from ceiling to basement, argues Professor Bennett, including Darwin’s most important idea:  natural selection. What does he replace it with? A bunch of buzzwords, like “fractal” and “nonlinearity”.  It’s the most wrongheaded attack on the field by someone in it that I’ve seen in a long time. (Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s book, What Darwin Got Wrong, doesn’t count, since they’re not really evolutionists.)

What’s wrong with the theory of evolution?  Rather, you should ask what’s right.  Here’s Bennett’s “J’accuse” (I’ve put his quotes in italics):

  • Punctuated equilibrium shows that macroevolution operates by processes completely different from those causing microevolution.  Well, the debate is still on about whether there are forms of higher-level sorting occcurring in macroevolution (in my book Speciation, with Allen Orr, I accept a limited role of species selection), but nobody—even the most hidebound opponents of neo-Darwinism—claim that the features of organisms themselves were built by processes other than those causing microevolution: natural selection and genetic drift.  Punctuated equilibrium is a theory that attempts to explain not the presence of traits in plants and animals, but their relative predominance among all species through evolutionary history.
  • Bennett claims that there aren’t many good examples of natural selection in the wild (this is part of his idea that it’s not important). He says this about John Endler’s book Natural Selection in the Wild:

“Later, John Endler, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter, UK, scrutinised claimed examples of natural selection but found a surprising lack of hard evidence (chronicled in his 1986 book Natural Selection in the Wild).”

Well, that’s just hogwash.  I have Dr. Endler here behind this sign, and I’ll bring him out;  he’ll tell you that you know nothing of his work.  Endler’s book was in fact a documentation of several hundreds observed examples of natural selection, and since then there have been many more.  Here’s the publisher’s precis:

“Professor Endler finds that there are a remarkable number of direct demonstrations of selection in a wide variety of animals and plants. The distribution of observed magnitudes of selection in natural populations is surprisingly broad, and it overlaps extensively the range of values found in artificial selection. He argues that the common assumption that selection is usually weak in natural populations is no longer tenable, but that natural selection is only one component of the process of evolution; natural selection can explain the change of frequencies of variants, but not their origins.”

  • Bennett argues that “If macroevolution really is an extrapolation of natural selection and adaptation, we would expect to see environmental change driving evolutionary change.” He says that there’s precious little evidence for this, but what he cites is not convincing.  He makes a huge deal about how North American trees moved north after the last glaciation.  According to Bennett, they should all have moved in concert at the same rate, with the oaks marching lock step with the beeches:

“The distribution shifts were individualistic, with huge variations between species in the rate, time and direction of spread. For example, larch spread from south-west to north-east, white pine from south-east to north-west. Rates vary from 100 metres a year to over 1000 metres (Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, vol 70, p 550). In other words, trees show no predictable response to climate change, and respond individually rather than as communities of species.”

WHAT?  Who ever said that different trees, with their different ways of disseminating propagules and their different sensitivities to environmental variation, would all move at the same rate? And their movement was predictable: they recolonized favorable areas. Only a moron would think that that colonization must happen at exactly the same rate for different species.

Bennett further claims that because modern tree communities differ from ancient ones, this somehow vitiates the predictability of evolutionary theory:

“The fossil record also tells us that the make-up of modern forest communities differs from those of 20,000 years ago. Today we recognise various types of forest, such as boreal, deciduous and aspen parkland, each with a distinctive mix of tree species. Yet the fossil record tells us that these are just temporary groupings. Multi-species communities do not have long histories and do not shift their distributions in a coordinated way in response to climate changes, as Darwin supposed. We therefore cannot assume that the members of modern forest communities evolved together or are somehow dependent on each other.”

But of course evolution—and ecology—depend on contingency, and the response to disturbances depends on evolutionary history, fortuitous ecological circumstances, random mutations, who gets to a place first, and so on.  When the meteorite decimated many dinosaurs, was it a violation of evolutionary theory that their ecological niches were largely filled by mammals?  Over the history of life, many extinctions were followed by drastic differences in the subsequent composition of communities. It’s ludicrous to think that this somehow violates Darwinian evolution, or to claim that this shows that members of a community are not affected by each other either ecologically or evolutionarily.

  • Bennett claims that there’s precious little evidence that speciation or extinction responds to environmental changes; things shuffle on and off the mortal coil at a rather constant rate regardless of what’s happening to the environment:

“The overall picture is that the main response to major environmental changes is individualistic movement and changes in abundance, rather than extinction or speciation. In other words, the connection between environmental change and evolutionary change is weak, which is not what might have been expected from Darwin’s hypothesis.”

This of course neglects all the work showing that extinctions are correlated with major environmental changes (what about that meteorite, which was found simply by assuming that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction must have had some environmental cause?) It neglects all the work showing that speciation is prompted by environmental changes, evidence amply documented in our book Speciation.  The rise of the Isthmus of Panama, for example, gave rise to many pairs of animal species which, beginning as populations sundered by the Isthmus, went merrily on separate genetic paths and became different species.  And what about all those species that invaded islands (an environmental change) and, finding new niches, speciated like crazy? The Hawaiian Drosophila and honeycreepers, the Galapagos finches, the radiation of marsupials in Australia—these are only a few examples. And I’m sure my paleontological readers could cite many more examples of connections between environment and speciation or extinction.

  • So how does Bennett see evolution as working? He doesn’t say, exactly; he just throws out a lot of buzzwords:

“I suggest that the true source of macroevolutionary change lies in the non-linear, or chaotic, dynamics of the relationship between genotype and phenotype – the actual organism and all its traits. The relationship is non-linear because phenotype, or set of observable characteristics, is determined by a complex interplay between an organism’s genes – tens of thousands of them, all influencing one another’s behaviour – and its environment.”

That’s not an answer, and it’s not a source of “macroevolutionary change.” All it is is pointing out that organisms result from complicated networks of development. (I hate the word “nonlinear”, because it’s used so loosely, as in this context, that the reader doesn’t know what it means.  It sure sounds fancy, though!)  But even if a linear input into a developmental pathway doesn’t have a linear output, how on earth does that vitiate evolutionary theory? So long as there is some connection between a gene substitution and an organism’s traits and reproductive output, no matter how “nonlinear it is,” then natural selection can produce adaptive change.  I hate to say this, but one gets the impression that beneath this fancy postmodern verbiage, Bennett doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about.

  • Oh, and there are those “initial conditions”:

“Second, behaviour of the system is sensitive to initial conditions. We see this in responses to glaciations in the Quaternary period. The exact circumstances of the beginning of each interglacial determine the development of the whole period, leading to unpredictable differences between interglacials (Quaternary Science Reviews, vol 14, p 967).”

But who has ever denied that evolution is sensitive to what’s there in the first place?  Marsupials got to Australia and took over; lemurs did the same in Madagascar.  Contingency is important in evolution. Ditto for mutation: the entire course of evolution depends on what random mutations happen to pop up.  But how, exactly, does that overturn neo-Darwinism? Contingency is part of neo-Darwinism!

  • Here comes another buzzword!:

“Third, the history of life is fractal. Take away the labelling from any portion of the tree of life and we cannot tell at which scale we are looking (see diagram). This self-similarity also indicates that evolutionary change is a process of continual splitting of the branches of the tree.”

Yeah, so what?  Splitting and common ancestry were important aspects of Darwin’s own theory produced in 1859.  We just didn’t have the fancy word “fractal” back then.

  • Echoing Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, Bennett minimizes the importance of natural selection in favor of “self-generating evolution”:

“Iterating these unpredictable changes over hundreds or thousands of generations will inevitably lead to evolutionary changes in addition to any that come about by the preferential survival of certain phenotypes. It follows that macroevolution may, over the longer-term, be driven largely by internally generated genetic change, not adaptation to a changing environment.”

But how does “internally generated genetic change” produce adaptation? It may, through various genetic constraints, limit the type of variation available for the disposition of either selection or drift.  But, pray tell, how do we explain the fishes’ fins, the polar bear’s coat, the flowers of angiosperms, the fangs of the tiger, the camouflage of the octopus, and all the myriad ways organisms make their living in adaptive ways, without invoking natural selection?  Can “internally generated change” explain that appearance of design that was once taken as evidence for God, but is now seen as the product of natural selection. If Bennett has a third explanation for adaptive design, by all means let him give it.

This was the big problem with Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong.  They argued that natural selection was not only unimportant, but incoherent; yet they had no substitute explanation for the appearance of design in animals and plants.  “Internally generated genetic change” won’t do it.  It may explain why there’s one adaptation rather than another, but not why there’s adaptation in the first place.

  • Finally, Bennett decries modern evolutionary theory because it can’t predict future evolution:

“There can be no “laws” of evolution. We may be able to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the evolution of any given species or group after the fact, but we will not be able to generalise from these to other sequences of events. From a practical point of view, this means we will be unable to predict how species will respond to projected climate changes over next century. . . In the last analysis, evolution can be likened to the description of human history as “just one damn thing after another”, exactly as Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini have argued.”

In my critique of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book in The Nation, I showed how evolutionary explanations—even those dealing with the past—are indeed testable.  Evolutionists are not just passive victims of history, doomed to make up post facto stories that can’t be tested. Clearly Bennett hasn’t though deeply about this issue, since even the most elementary evolution texts are filled with descriptions of experiments testing things like how mimicry works, the mechanisms of sexual selection, the effect of seed size on the evolution of bird beaks, and so on.  And whoever said that the response of organisms to environmental changes must be absolutely predictable if evolutionary theory is to be seen as true? We have no idea what mutations will arise to help animals and plants adapt to new environments, nor about how evolution in one species may affect the environmental niches of another.  So what? Nobody ever claimed—except for ignorant people like Bennett—that for evolutionary theory to be valid, we evolutionists must predict exactly how evolution is going to proceed. Nevertheless, we’re pretty good at one thing:  predicting that microbes will adapt to new antibiotics!  We just don’t know what mutations will be involved.

Articles like Bennett’s are infinitely depressing, not just because someone who seems to be credentialed in the field can misunderstand it so badly, but also because their drivel gets published in a place like New Scientist.  I think most of us realized that the journal was going downhill anyway, but now it appears to be at rock bottom.

Epigenetics kerfuffle

November 4, 2010 • 6:49 am

Last week I highlighted a piece on epigenetics by Florian Maderspacher, an editor at Current Biology.  (For this post I’ll define “epigenetics” as “inheritance that transcends generations but is not based on changes in DNA sequence”.) Florian decried all the current hype about epigenetics—that is, the idea that this phenomenon will revolutionize our view of evolution—and mentioned its connection to Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist who wrought immense havoc on Russian science and agriculture with his misguided notion that environmental modifications of crops could become permanently fixed in their genes.

I agree with much of what Maderspacher said (I’ve posted on this before): the “evolutionary” notion of epigenetics is an overblown construct with little empirical backing, and seems largely to further the career aspirations of its advocates.

Now the two biggest drivers of the “evolutionary epigenesis” bandwagon, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, have replied in Current Biology, and Maderspacher responds (scroll down when you get to the page).  Jablonka and Lamb object to the Lysenko analogy as tarring their new paradigm with the ghosts of pseudoscience past.  Maderspacher responds:

Of course, tastes are allowed to differ, but I firmly believe that in scientific discourse, which is not categorically different from other forms of discourse, there is some room for stylistic freedom, all the more in an opinion piece such as mine. If you compare my six-column piece to the amount of paper that has been filled with sensationalism about epigenetics, it seems legitimate that the ‘small dog’ barks a little louder, as it were. (that in the interim both science and nature neuroscience have run special issues on epigenetics is a case in point)

I chose Lysenko as an admittedly extreme figurehead, because he exemplifies what can happen if political interpretation gets in the way of scientific rigour. In particular I was interested in the interpretation the public brings towards a rather esoteric field of molecular biology and genetics. Why are people so interested in epigenetics? Because they like to see it as a liberation (”victory over the genes”), and this is exactly where Lysenko was coming from. I wanted to expose this distorted reasoning. To imply that I equate the study of environmental influences on heredity with Lysenkoism is, frankly, untenable.

But of course this part of the kerfuffle is about framing and tone. The more important thing is the science behind the epigenetics hype.  And I maintain, as I have for a while, that there is simply no good data supporting the idea of non-genetically based and transgenerational inheritance as an important factor in evolution.  I’ve read nearly all of Jablonka and Lamb’s papers, and they keep recycling the same tired old examples (mouse fat and toadflax) to show how drastically epigenetic inheritance can alter our view of neo-Darwinian evolution.  They have not said anything new for a long time.

Their arguments are unconvincing for a number of reasons. Epigenetic inheritance, like methylated bits of DNA, histone modifications, and the like, constitute temporary “inheritance” that may transcend one or two generations but don’t have the permanance to effect evolutionary change.  (Methylated DNA, for instance, is demethylated and reset in every generation.)  Further, much epigenetic change, like methylation of DNA, is really coded for in the DNA, so what we have is simply a normal alteration of the phenotype (in this case the “phenotype” is DNA) by garden variety nucleotide mutations in the DNA.  There’s nothing new here—certainly no new paradigm.  And when you map adaptive evolutionary change, and see where it resides in the genome, you invariably find that it rests on changes in DNA sequence, either structural-gene mutations or nucleotide changes in miRNAs or regulatory regions.  I know of not a single good case where any evolutionary change was caused by non-DNA-based inheritance.

Maderspacher hits the nail squarely:

This leads to the second line of criticism, my allegedly distorted portrayal of epigenetics as a scientific discipline. I happily admit that I am not an epigenetics expert, by any stretch of the imagination. I would even argue that it can sometimes be helpful to have a view from afar, from someone who has no personal stakes in the matter. And I certainly agree that paradigms (and terms) in biology shift all the time. But they shift when new empirical data call the pervious paradigm into question. In the case of DNA and histone modification, I cannot see how they call for a change in our view of genetics. As for epigenetic inheritance, I am aware that there are numerous examples and mention some in the piece. This is interesting biology and deserves attention. But does it call for a paradigm shift? Only time will tell, I guess.

I’m talking in Medellin, Colombia next week about all of the new “challenges” to neo-Darwinism, and epigenesis is among them.  Relevant to the increasing cacophony from the “Darwin-was-wrongers,” I have two quotes.  The first is from evolutionary biologist Doug Futuyma:

One has to have a certain degree of reservation about claims that are made on the basis of one or two examples that are going to be a major challenge or a new expansion.  Otherwise you’re talking about jumping on one  bandwagon after another.

The second is from my Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin:

. . . scientists are always looking to find some theory or idea that they can push as something that nobody else  ever thought of because that’s the way they get their prestige. . . .they have an idea which will overturn our whole view of evolution because otherwise they’re just workers in the factory, so to speak. And the factory was designed by Charles Darwin.

Florian is much more polite than I am, but as I age I become less reluctant to broach the charge of careerism.  Being ambitious is not inherently bad: all scientists secretly wish to get a big name and be lionized among their peers. A desire for renown—to be first with the goods—has motivated much of the best science we have.  But there’s a good way and a bad way to get famous.  The good way is to produce solid, interesting data and avoid overhyping them.  The bad way is what Lewontin was talking about above.

Unhappy meals

November 4, 2010 • 5:26 am

One of the few jokes I’ve ever made up (besides this one: Q: What do French horses eat?  A: Haute cuisine), was about the “Unhappy meal,” which I proposed would be given to badly-behaving kids on family trips to McDonald’s. It consisted of a tuna fish sandwich, carrot sticks, a kiwi, a bottle of water, and a toy: the New York Times crossword puzzle with a miniature pencil.

It ain’t a joke any more.  On Tuesday, the board of supervisors of the People’s Republic of San Francisco banned the traditional Happy Meal, stipulating that any meal given with a toy would have to meet certain nutritional standards (fewer than 600 calories in the meal, and it has to have fruits, vegetables, and no sugary soft drinks).  Now all meals are Unhappy Meals.

Until now, Happy Meals included the following:

  • a side order consisting of small of french fries or sliced apples with a side of caramel dip.
  • a soft drink (12 ounces), milk, chocolate milk, orange juice or apple juice.
  • a hamburger, cheeseburger, or a four piece order of Chicken McNuggets with dipping sauce.

Fighting childhood obesity is a really good thing to do, but enough is enough. (After all, it’s usually parents who buy the Happy Meals for their kids, and they can choose milk and apples.)  What’s next—carding kids before they can buy a Coke?  And why stop at childhood obesity?  After all, New York has already banned trans fats.  Can a ban on steaks, cakes, and pakes be far behind?

Food isn’t medicine, and kids—unless they’re really obese—deserve an occasional treat.  If you want to keep your kids healthy, feed them good stuff at home and don’t take them to McDonald’s so often.

(Here’s my only other joke: “Did you hear about the Kleenex magnate? He’s always putting his business in other people’s noses.”)


A good book on bad science

November 4, 2010 • 5:05 am

Doctor, columnist, blogger, and woo-chaser Ben Goldacre’s acclaimed book, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (2008), has just appeared in an American edition.  I’ll be reading it for sure.

Bad Science sold 240,000 copies in the UK (that’s huge!) and reached #1 on the nonfiction charts.  Reviews have been uniformly positive; there’s one in this week’s New York Times, and you can see older reviews in the Torygraph and The Independent.

And the book has a new chapter that didn’t appear in the two-year-old British edition.  From the NYT review:

Sometimes bad science is downright harmful, and in the chapter titled “The Doctor Will Sue You Now,” the usually affable Dr. Goldacre is indeed angry, and rightly so. The chapter did not appear in the original British edition of the book because the doctor in question, Dr. Matthias Rath, a vitamin pill entrepreneur, was suing The Guardian and Dr. Goldacre personally on a libel complaint. He dropped the case (after the Guardian had amassed $770,000 in legal expenses) paying $365,000 in court costs. Dr. Rath, formerly head of cardiovascular research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., and founder of the nonprofit Dr. Rath Research Institute, is, according to his Web site, “the founder of Cellular Medicine, the groundbreaking new health concept that identifies nutritional deficiencies at the cellular level as the root cause of many chronic diseases.”

Dr. Rath’s ads in Britain for his high-dose vitamins have claimed that “90 percent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die with months of starting treatment” and suggested that three million lives could be saved if people stopped being treated with “poisonous compounds.” He took his campaign to South Africa, where AIDS was killing 300,000 people a year, and in newspaper ads proclaimed that “the answer to the AIDS epidemic is here.” The ads asked, “Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There is a natural answer to AIDS.” That answer was multivitamin supplements, which he said “cut the risk of developing AIDS in half.”

“Tragically,” as Dr. Goldacre writes, Dr. Rath found a willing ear in Thabo Mbeki. Despite condemnation by the United Nations, the Harvard School of Public Health and numerous South African health organizations, Dr. Rath’s influence was pervasive. Various studies have estimated that had the South African government used antiretroviral drugs for prevention and treatment, more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths could have been prevented.

You don’t have to buy the book to read the whole sorry story, which is readily available online. Dr. Goldacre believes in the widest possible dissemination of information. But if you do buy the book, you’ll find it illustrated with lucid charts and graphs, footnoted (I’d have liked more of these), indexed and far more serious than it looks. Depending on your point of view, you’ll find it downright snarky or wittily readable.

If you’ve read it, weigh in.  Inquiring Americans want to know.

Islamic apologetics in a cardiology journal

November 3, 2010 • 7:10 am

There’s a lot of religious woo appearing lately in scientific journals, but this is one of the worst I’ve seen.  There’s a new paper in the International Journal of Cardiology by M. Loukas et al., “The heart and cardiovascular system in the Qur’an and Hadeeth“(click to download a pdf), that is nothing less than Islamic creationism.  What it tries to do is show how remarkably accurate and prescient were the Qur’an and Hadeeth (a post-Mohammed collection of the prophet’s sayings and actions) about the cardiovascular system and how to take care of it.

It’s unbelievable how far these authors stretch the Qur’an and Hadeeth to show how well they comport with modern science.  It’s like Al Mohler or Henry Morris wrote this paper. Here are a few examples.

The article says this:

Although there are multiple Qur’anic verses and prophetic traditions regarding the spiritual heart, a few but important references have certainly been made about the anatomy and physiology of the physical heart as a vulnerable organ vital to the human being.We first see the heart referred to as a muscle and not in a metaphorical sense in a prophetic tradition, where it is stated, “Beware! There is a piece of flesh in the body if it remains healthy the whole body becomes healthy, and if it is diseased, the whole body becomes diseased. Beware, it is the heart” [32]. This tradition holds true if taken either literally or spiritually.

I missed the part here about the heart being a muscle.  But if this is taken metaphorically, referring to the “heart” as the seat of character and emotion, then what does it have to do with science or medicine?. And indeed, if you read that verse in the Qur’an, metaphorical it seems to be:

Narrated An-Nu’man bin Bashir: I heard Allah’s Apostle (sallalahu alayhi wa salam) saying, ‘Both legal and illegal things are evident but in between them there are doubtful (suspicious) things and most of the people have no knowledge about them. So whoever saves himself from these suspicious things saves his religion and his honor. And whoever indulges in these suspicious things is like a shepherd who grazes (his animals) near the Hima (private pasture) of someone else and at any moment he is liable to get in it. (O people!) Beware! Every king has a Hima and the Hima of Allah on the earth is His illegal (forbidden) things. Beware! There is a piece of flesh in the body if it becomes good (reformed) the whole body becomes good but if it gets spoilt the whole body gets spoilt and that is the heart.

Here’s a good one, where the authors conveniently omit discussing a woman’s “impure” menstrual blood:

Blood is also mentioned numerous times in verses discussing food. For instance, the intake of blood is completely forbidden, and all of the blood of a slaughtered animal must be drained at the time of the slaughter as the carotid arteries and jugular veins are severed. There seems to be an acknowledgement in the Qur’an that some blood is impure and can contain and transmit pathogens leading to disease. In addition, during menstruation, women are to abstain from sexual intercourse and the ritual prayer because menstrual blood is considered impure. However, not all blood is impure, as Mohammad distinguishes between menses and blood “…from a blood vessel;” if a woman’s uterine vessels are to rupture causing bleeding, the restrictions placed on a female during menstruation does not apply [22]. Blood is also used when the Qur’an describes the early stages of the embryo as “congealed blood” or “blood clot” (to be discussed later in the paper). Thus, we find several comments of blood in the Qur’an as an impurity, as spreading disease, a sign of lineage, and in relation to women’s health.

And. . . . praying to Mecca is good for the heart!

The Islamic prayer is performed at least five times a day and consists of a series of movements entailing standing, prostrating, and sitting. When performing prayer, the author of the Qur’an discourages lazily performing prayer as performed by the Hypocrites [34]; thus, a lethargic and carelessness approach to prayer neither obtains any spiritual nor physical benefit to the state of health. Also, the amount of prostrations, and thus physical movement, during a prayer varies from one prayer to the next.We find that increased number of prostrations in a prayer (i.e. physical movement) correlates with the time of day when one usually eats, possibly to help digest food and, in the long run, reduce the chances of thrombus formation. In addition, the author of the Qur’an states, “Truly it is in the remembrance of God that the hearts find peace” [35]. It is said that Mohammad advised people not to go to sleep immediately after meals, for that would lead to a hardening of the heart [36]. It was also advised not to engage in strenuous physical activity after eating.

The physical movements during prayer also help prevent deep vein thrombi. . .

I would have thought a few stiff laps around the mosque would be better.

And. . . the Qur’an was accurate about embryology, too!

The Qur’an and the Hadeeth provide detailed, accurate descriptions of the major events that occur during embryological development. . .  Although many verses in the Qur’an and prophetic traditions discuss the development of the embryo, only two will be described below. It is remarkable to note that the descriptions presented in these 7th century texts closely resemble the various stages of the embryo.

“We [God] created man from a quintessence of clay.We then placed him as a nutfah (drop) in a place of settlement, firmly fixed, then We made the drop into an ‘alaqah (leech-like structure), and then We changed the ’alaqah into a mudhah (chewed-like substance, somite stage), then We clothed the bones with lahm (muscles, flesh), then We caused him to grow and come into being and attain the definitive (human) form. So, blessed be God, the best to create” [40].

“When forty-two nights have passed over the conceptus, God sends an angel to it, who shapes it (into human form), makes its hearing, sight, skin, muscles and bones…” [41].

Enough—you get the idea.  The article is all about showing that the Qur’an and Hadeeth are textbooks of science. And what could that be about except to justify the accuracy—and perhaps the holiness—of these sacred texts? Certainly Islamic scholars made notable contributions to science, but you won’t find them in the Qur’an or Hadeeth.

We’re well familiar with this type of exegesis from “scientific creationists,” who comb verses from the Bible to show its scientific accuracy, like the existence of dinosaurs.  What’s absolutely ridiculous is that the same exercise in selective citation, with Islamic texts, is published in The International Journal of Cardiology. It would be interesting to do this exercise in reverse: check out Islamic texts for descriptions that are scientifically inaccurate, or prescriptions that are unhealthy.  But of course the authors aren’t interested in that type of science.

UPDATE: Here are some negative reactions by scientists and a letter of protest to the journal’s editor.


h/t: Richard Dawkins, who provides a link if you want to write the journal’s editor (and you should).  Here’s Richard’s own letter, used with permission:

Dear Professor Coats

<http://www.alhasso.com/The%20Heart%20and%20cardiovascular%20system%20in%20the%20Quran%20and%20Hadeeth.pdf&gt;

I presume that you have by now been alerted to the fact that the above piece of unscientific drivel has somehow managed to slip through the net of your refereeing process. I trust that is not too late to save the reputation of the International Journal of Cardiology, and I expect that you are already taking the necessary steps to countermand acceptance of this fatuous paper.

Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins FRS
Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science
University of Oxford

and mine

First Name Sender: Jerry
Last Name Sender: Coyne

Subject: Loukas et al. paper
Journal ID: 506041
Journal Title: International Journal of Cardiology

Text of Email:
It is a travesty that your journal published a paper purporting to show how accurate the Qur’an and Hadith are on scientific issues. Not only was the article full of cherry-picked quotes that have to be very liberally interpreted to bring them even close to modern science, but the authors neglect those parts of Islamic “scripture” that CONTRADICT modern science.  What kind of “scientific” publication is that? Your journal should be ashamed of itself.

Jerry Coyne, Professor, Ecology and Evolution, The University of Chicago

___

Loukas, M., Y. Saad, R. S. Tubbs and M. M. Sjoha.  2010. The heart and cardiovascular system in the Qur’an and Hadeeth.  Internat. J. Cardiol., in press.