In their attempt to marginalize atheists, accommodationists are homing in on a common strategy, which includes these claims:

1.  There is more than one way of finding out the truth about the universe. Science is one way, religion another.  Ergo Jesus. Example: Marilynne Robinson’s post, “Religion, science and the ultimate nature of reality.”

2. If you think that empirical evidence and reason is the sole arbiter of what’s true, you’re guilty of scientism.  This makes scientists just as religious as fundamentalists.  Ergo Jesus.  Example here.

3.  And, by the way, science itself makes mistakes. Scientists are human and some of their claims are unreliable. Also, science continually replaces old ideas with new ones, so scientific “truth” is unstable. Ergo Jesus. Rod Dreher of the Templeton Foundation has recently taken this tack (see here and here).

4.  Science and religion contribute fruitfully to each other.  Ergo Jesus. See anything written by the Templeton Foundation, Krista Tippett, or John Polkinghorne.  This “fruitful interaction hypothesis”—never mind that many of the same people see science and religion as having distinct and nonoverlapping domains—is the basis of HuffPo’s dreadful new “Religion and Science” section.

5.  Most important, those New Atheists are just so mean and shrill that they contribute nothing, nay, can contribute nothing, to the “dialogue” between science and faith. Indeed, their relentless negativity and incivility alienates the faithful, making them flee from science back to the arms of Jesus.  Thus it’s advisable to simply omit the atheist viewpoint from debates and panels. This appears to be the strategy of organizations like the National Center for Science Education (whose “faith project” consists almost entirely of accommodationist  posts and “recommended readings”), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Templeton Foundation, the World Science Festival, and bloggers like Chris Mooney and Josh Rosenau.

The last claim has just been made by Michael Zimmerman, founder of the Clergy Letter Project, an attempt to get clergy to sign a statement saying that there is no conflict between science and their faith.  I’ve written about Zimmerman’s views before, criticizing his philosophical accommodationism and view of American religion as a largely liberal enterprise, and characterizing the Letter Project as “harmless at worst” (actually, I suspect it’s useful, but nowhere near as useful as its advocates claim).   But I wouldn’t consider this an uncivil attack.  Nevertheless, in his latest defense of the Project, Zimmerman goes after New Atheists in general:

Oddly enough, although these Clergy Letter Project members are often among the first to fight for all forms of creationism to be removed from our public schools and for evolution to be taught, they have also been relentlessly attacked by “New Atheists.” The crux of these attacks seems to take two forms. In the first, clergy members are ridiculed simply for having religious faith. In the second, supposedly intelligent people pretend they are unable to distinguish these clergy members from the fundamentalists with whom they share very little theologically and they are then tarred with the brush of unthinking literalism.

Well, I’m not aware of these “relentless attacks” (a Mooneyism if there ever was one) on members of the Clergy Letter Project, nor have I participated in them.  (My online dictionary defines “relentless” as “obsessively constant, incessant”.) Perhaps Dr. Zimmerman can point us to some of them (he implies that they’re not rare)—that is, attacks not on faith, but on “Clergy Letter Project members.”  Yes, some of us have ridiculed believers in general (or even in particular; viz. the Pope), and have drawn parallels between fundamentalists and more liberal believers who nevertheless still accept superstition.  But do those critiques constitute “relentless attacks” on Clergy Letter Project members?  Like many accommodationists, Zimmerman seems unable to distinguish between frank criticism and vicious, rabid aggression.

Nor do they want to make this distinction, because if they did they might have to actually address the New Atheists’ substantive arguments against religion. The most important of these is this: “What’s the evidence for the stuff that you claim is true?”

According to the Catholic News Service, which I take to be authoritative on this issue, the Vatican is about to declare the attempted ordination of women as priests as one of the gravest crimes against the church:

Pope John Paul’s 2001 document distinguished between two types of “most grave crimes,” [“delicta graviora”] those committed in the celebration of the sacraments and those committed against morals. Among the sacramental crimes were such things as desecration of the Eucharist and violation of the seal of confession.

Under the new revisions, the “attempted ordination of women” will be listed among those crimes, as a serious violation of the sacrament of holy orders, informed sources said. As such, it will be handled under the procedures set up for investigating “delicta graviora” under the control of the doctrinal congregation.

In 2008, the doctrinal congregation formally decreed that a woman who attempts to be ordained a Catholic priest and the person attempting to ordain her are automatically excommunicated. In 1994, Pope John Paul said the church’s ban on women priests is definitive and not open to debate among Catholics.

Another crime within the the “delicta graviora” is sexual abuse of a minor by a priest.

Can the Catholic Church look more ridiculous than this? And are we still supposed to respect it?

by Matthew Cobb

The question of why some research articles get published in high-profile scientific journals is one that perpetually preoccupies scientists (or at least, those of us who don’t habitually publish in such journals), and has been discussed here a number of times. The latest issue of Nature raises this question again.

Nature – a commercial publication – is one of two weekly science journals that has a high public and academic profile, and which publishes material covering the whole range of scientific endeavour. (the other is Science). To keep up its profile – and thereby its profits – Nature has to have a keen eye for research that is sexy and exciting. One person’s sexy is another’s dull, of course, and sometimes it’s hard to see what made the editor’s eye gleam – I’m happy to admit that I don’t understand the titles of many of the articles in Nature (“Intra-unit-cell electronic nematicity of the high-Tc copper-oxide pseudogap states” for example, which I’m sure is really fantastic, but I don’t get it…).

This week’s Nature has a dramatic cover of a frontal view of a battered fossil primate skull, with the headline “The parting of the ways”. Sure looks sexy:

The associated article, by Zalmut et al, is entitled “New Oligocene primate from Saudi Arabia and the divergence of apes and Old World monkeys“. It describes the skull of a new species, Saadanius hijazensis, which was found in Saudi Arabia and is an early (“stem”) catarrhine. “Catarrhine” is the term that describes old world monkeys and the apes (including us), which split away from the New World Monkeys (platyrrhines) around 40 MY ago. Exactly when the apes split from the old world monkeys has been a matter of some discussion, and this fossil, which has few catarrhine specialisations, dates to 28-29MY ago, suggesting the split took place after this date.

Here are the details of the fossil:

The authors also include this useful diagram of primate evolution and the place of Saadanius within it. This will no doubt feature in many future lectures on primate evolution:

Is this Big News? Well probably not. When I suggested to Jerry he might blog on this, he mailed back “so what?” (He didn’t use those exact terms, but something more robust…). As he pointed out – “If it was a fly ancestor it would go to Drosophila Information Service…” (DIS – a highly valued publication – is pretty much what it says, and not exactly Nature.)

Basically, the fossil provides physical evidence that the split took place <28 MY ago (the previous youngest stem catarrhine fossil was from around 30 MY), which fits in which the molecular data, suggesting there may have been an early-Oligocene split (i.e. 23 MY at the earliest). Is that something that’s really amazing? I’m not sure. But the Nature editors obviously thought so.

Interestingly, the part of the story I found the most fascinating appeared in today’s Guardian, in an article by Ian Sample, which in its earlier editions appeared with a dramatic picture showing the skull in situ and goes on to describe how the poor animal met its end:

Iyad Zalmout, lead author of the study, spotted the damaged skull of Saadanius lying upside down in the sediment with its teeth glinting in the sun. Serious wounds on the front of the skull suggest the creature met a violent end. “He got in the way of a big carnivore and died in a horrible way,” Zalmout said. “The puncture marks in the skull suggest he was seized by the head, got chewed around a bit, and was then thrown away.”

Brenda Benefit, professor of biological anthropology at New Mexico State University, said: “For me this discovery is one of the most significant in my lifetime. Until now we have not had a very perfect fossil ancestor for the Old World monkeys and apes.”

“Some palaeontologists, inlcuding myself, thought that this is exactly what the common ancestor to Old World monkeys and apes would look like, based on resemblances between Miocene fossil Old World monkeys and apes, whereas others thought they would be shorter snouted and more round-headed like modern gibbons.

“Saadanius resolves this debate and demonstrates the importance of the fossil record for knowing what our ancestors looked like.”

Now that’s a lot more convincing. Maybe for once the science journalist got it right, while the scientists and the journal editors didn’t.

Note to creationists: this post is not about the validity of the discovery, it’s more a reflection on our views about what is and is not noteworthy in science.

UPDATE: The BBC website also reports this and concludes with this underwhelming phrase: “The new date, of 29 million years ago, fits more closely with what the researchers would have expected and is not surprising from a palaeontological point of view.” So Nature is putting “not surprising” results on its front cover…

Reference: Iyad S. Zalmout, William J. Sanders, Laura M. MacLatchy, Gregg F. Gunnell, Yahya A. Al-Mufarreh, Mohammad A. Ali, Abdul-Azziz H. Nasser, Abdu M. Al-Masari, Salih A. Al-Sobhi, Ayman O. Nadhra, Adel H. Matari, Jeffrey A. Wilson & Philip D. Gingerich (2010). New Oligocene primate from Saudi Arabia and the divergence of apes and Old World monkeys. Nature 466:360-364. [Subscription needed to see beyond abstract.]

UPDATE:  Two minutes ago, on the NBC Evening News, Brian Williams reported this finding, also claiming that it proves the precedence of the chicken.

Crikey, I’ve seen bad science journalism before, but this takes the cake. It’s a piece in today’s MSNBC Science & Technology section, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg: British scientists claim to have solved the scientific, philosophical mystery.” The piece is short, and here’s the bulk of it:

It is an age-old riddle that has perplexed generations: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now British scientists claim to have finally come up with the definitive answer: The chicken.

The scientific and philosophical mystery was purportedly unraveled by researchers at Sheffield and Warwick universities, according to the Daily Mail newspaper.

The scientists found that a protein found only in a chicken’s ovaries is necessary for the formation of the egg, according to the paper Wednesday. The egg can therefore only exist if it has been created inside a chicken.

The protein speeds up the development of the hard shell, which is essential in protecting the delicate yolk and fluids while the chick grows inside the egg, the report said.

“It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,” said Dr. Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University’s Department of Engineering Materials, according to the Mail.

“The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation, but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process,” he said.

Now I haven’t read the whole paper (link is below), but even if the piece accurately describes what the scientists found, it says nothing—absolutely nothing—about whether the chicken or the egg came first.

In fact, we’ve known the answer to that question for decades.  In the evolutionary sense, which is the only meaningful sense in which you can ask this question, the answer is clear:  the egg came first.  Birds evolved from dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs laid eggs.  Therefore eggs were around before there were birds, and during the period when birds were evolving from dinosaurs, every creature in that lineage laid eggs. Therefore eggs preceded chickens in evolutionary time.

Now the observation that supposedly settles the issue in favor of chicken precedence is this:

The scientists found that a protein found only in a chicken’s ovaries is necessary for the formation of the egg, according to the paper Wednesday. The egg can therefore only exist if it has been created inside a chicken. The protein speeds up the development of the hard shell, which is essential in protecting the delicate yolk and fluids while the chick grows inside the egg, the report said.

But that says nothing about “which came first.”  Yes, a protein found in the ovaries of modern chickens is necessary for the formation of a modern chicken egg (note, not just an egg, but a modern chicken egg). But the chicken’s ovaries, the protein, and the egg that chicken lays almost certainly co-evolved, that is, have undergone genetic change in a coordinated fashion over the same time period.  Just because one feature is now required for the formation of the other doesn’t mean that one evolved before the other.   Got that, MSNBC? Oh, and you too, Dr. Freeman.

Now you can construe this “finding” in another way: the chicken temporally precedes its egg.  That is, you have to have an adult chicken before it can make eggs.  But we already knew that, and finding out that adult chicken proteins help make adult eggs doesn’t add anything.

Oy gewalt!

_________

Freeman, C. L., H. H. Harding, Q. Quigley, P. M. Rodger.  2010.  Structural control of crystal nuclei by an eggshell protein. Angewandte Chemie 49:5135-5137.

By Kraus et al. in the latest Nature.  This can’t be unwitting, can it?

A hot compact dust disk around a massive young stellar object