There are of course many ways to “reconcile” faith and science, although in my opinion none have been very successful.  One of the more popular ways is to see evolution as a big improvement in theodicy—the perennial attempt of the faithful to reconcile the existence of evil with that of a loving and powerful God.  How could such a god permit the existence of suffering, particularly the suffering of innocent people, and particularly when those evils are inflicted not by other humans but by diseases like cancer or natural disasters like tsunamis?  Science, so the answer goes, solves this problem by showing that much of our suffering is simply inherent in the process of evolution, a process supposedly chosen by God to work his will.

This issue is discussed in a surprising paper by John Avise in this week’s week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  I say “surprising” because I haven’t before seen a paper in a high-class science journal that tries to show how science can be used to upgrade theology.  Avise produces a great account of the jerry-rigged nature of the human genome (which, I should add, also goes for all eukaryotic genomes), but he goes astray, I think, when relating these facts to theology.

Avise is a highly respected evolutionary biologist who spent most of his career at the University of Georgia and is now at The University of California at Irvine. Among his many achievements has been the creation of phylogeography, the discipline that uses of molecular-genetic tools to study the distribution and evolution of organisms in the wild.  Avise has written over 300 papers and 20 books; his most recent book,  Inside the Human Genome: A case for Non-Intelligent Design, makes the case that, like all the more visible imperfections and “bad design” of animals and plants, the puzzling aspects of the human genome give evidence for evolution and against creationism.

The PNAS paper, “Footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome”, seems to be a precis of the book.  The paper shows how the human genome is riddled with mistakes, inefficiencies, and just plain bad design that says Avise, makes no sense under any scheme of intelligent design.  He provides a very useful catalog of these problems in our own genome, which include the following:

• The pervasiveness of deleterious mutations, which are responsible for many human diseases.
• The fact that many of our genes are “split” by intervening sections (introns), which don’t produce a product.  This appears to be bad design because putting those split genes together “impose[s] energetic burdens on cells. These introns, which Avise sees as unnecessary (they may reflect the ancient assembly of eukaryotic genomes from segments in earlier genomes), can also lead to diseases if the splicing of different bits of a gene into the final messenger-RNA product goes awry.
• Some of our genome resides in mitochondia, the cell organelles where biological respiration occurs. But some of that respiration also requires genes in the nucleus. Further, mitochondrial DNA “does not even encode any of the proteins that are directly involved in its own replication.”  There’s no obvious reason why this should be so under a design perspective.  As Avise notes, correctly, “None of
  this makes any biological sense, except in the light of evolutionary science (which has discovered that modern mitochondria are remnants of a microbe that invaded or was engulfed by a protoeukaryotic cell in an endosymbiotic merger that took place billions of years ago).”
• Our genome is littered with repetitive DNA, much of which doesn’t seem to do anything at all.
• Ditto for the many transposable “mobile elements,” which can, when they move, lead to mutations and genetic disease.  Many of these, though, are simply dead, and can be better seen as the remnants of ancient infections than as the handiwork of an intelligent god.

Avise argues, correctly, that these “problems” are the result of evolution:

From an evolutionary perspective, such genomic flaws are easier to explain. Occasional errors in gene regulation and surveillance are to be expected in any complex contrivance that hasn been engineered over the eons by the endless tinkering of mindless evolutionary forces: mutation, recombination, genetic drift, and natural selection. Again, the complexity of genomic architecture would seem to be a surer signature of tinkered evolution by natural processes than of direct invention by an omnipotent intelligent agent.

Now I won’t defend all of these things as gross “inefficiencies” or bad design.  Avise notes, for instances, that introns can be useful, for a single stretch of DNA can be spliced in different ways, yielding different and useful gene products from a single “gene.”  But in the main Avise is right.  Our genomes, like our bodies and organ systems, are pretty much a mess that reflects their evolutionary history.  They are jerry-rigged genomes, cobbled together from ancestral genes, bits of DNA from bacteria and viruses, and nonfunctional “dead genes” that were useful in our ancestors but not in us.  And their structure is, as Avise avers, a very powerful argument against intelligent design.

The problem with Avise’s argument comes when he claims that seeing our genomes—whose structure is not only inefficient but can sometimes lead to debilitating or fatal mutations—as products of evolution relieves us of the insuperable problem of explaining their structure as the result of intelligent design.  In other words, these problems (and the “evil” they create) are inherent in evolution, so one need not explain how each of them was part of God’s plan:

Evolution by natural causes in effect emancipates religion from the shackles of theodicy. No longer need we agonize about why a Creator God is the world’s leading abortionist and mass murderer. No longer need we query a Creator God’s motives for debilitating countless innocents with horrific genetic conditions. No longer must we anguish about the interventionist motives of a supreme intelligence that permits gross evil and suffering in the world. No longer need we be tempted to blaspheme an omnipotent Deity by charging Him directly responsible for human frailties and physical shortcomings (including those that we now understand to be commonplace at molecular and biochemical levels). No longer need we blame a Creator God’s direct hand for any of these disturbing empirical facts. Instead, we can put the blame squarely on the agency of insentient natural evolutionary causation. From this perspective, the evolutionary sciences can become a welcome partner (rather than the conventionally perceived adversary) of mainstream religion (Fig 1).

The evolutionary-genetic sciences thus can help religions to escape from the profound conundrums of ID, and thereby return religion to its rightful realm—not as the secular interpreter of the biological minutiae of our physical existence but, rather, as a respectable philosophical counselor on grander matters, including ethics and morality, the soul, spiritualness, sacredness, and other such matters that have always been of ultimate concern to humanity.

Now I’m not sure how Avise can tell us what religion’s “rightful realm” is, but never mind.  There’s a bigger problem here.   If evolution is to become a “welcome partner” to religion, the faithful will have to accept that evolution and natural selection were God’s plan for creating life.  And that just raises more theological difficulties:

• Why would God choose such an inefficient and wasteful way to create life (and, for many religious people, to ultimately produce humans)?  So many individuals (including our ancestors) dying horrible deaths in the service of natural selection; so many species evolving and then leaving the scene through extinction!  If natural selection is anything, it’s is suffering, so the evolutionary process itself entails all the evils that theodicy must explain.  Positing that mutations occur because they’re inevitable byproducts of evolution just replaces the problem for theodicy with another one: why did God use a process that itself entailed so much suffering?  And why didn’t he just create everything de novo instead of using such a convoluted process? At least he would have avoided much of the misery associated with natural selection.
• And of course God could have set up evolution so that it entailed less suffering.  He could have allowed only beneficial mutations to occur rather than ones that cause disease.  An evolutionist might respond that, “Well, natural selection requires random mutations, so that entails bad ones, too.”  But of course God can do anything he wants! Why didn’t he relieve malaria in Africa by creating a single mutation that fends off the parasites whether you have one copy or two, rather than the sickle-cell mutation that fends off malaria when you have one copy but causes a horrible disease when you have two?
• This brings up an important issue: if you’re going to save the hypothesis of evolution as God’s plan, then you need to give up the idea that God intervenes in the evolutionary process, that is, you must abandon theism (the notion that God intervenes in the world) and embrace deism. God made evolution and then took his hands off—that’s why all that suffering from selection and mutation.  But few religious people buy that kind of god.  If you think that God can answer prayers, why can’t he stop the mutations that cause cancer in children?
• A related issue involves the evolution of humans.  If, as a religious person, you see humans as the ultimate goal or product of evolution, how can you  reconcile that goal with the fact that evolution is messy, contingent on unpredictable changes in the environment, and itself dependent on the random and unpredictable process of mutation? It’s not at all clear that the evolution of humans, or of a god-worshipping humanoid creature, was inevitable, especially since, of the millions of species that ever lived, it happened only once.

There are two solutions.  The first is to claim that if evolution started all over again, it would still produce humans or something like us.  As I’ve argued, there’s no scientific basis for this claim; indeed, one could make a stronger argument on the other side.  The second solution is to say that God set up the evolutionary process so that it would produce humans.  But this posits that evolution is a directed process, and I don’t know many evolutionists who believe that.  I doubt that Avise does.

• Finally, evolutionary theodicy deals only with genetic evils, and fails to explain away the rest of the world’s evils.   It still leaves the problem of why humans do evil to other humans.  And it doesn’t explain why innocent humans suffer and die from natural disasters.  Both of these could be prevented by a loving and ominipotent god.  And if you can find a satisfactory explanation for those, then you could apply that to genetic evils as well, so there’s no need to accept evolution.

In the end, evolution is not a “welcome partner” for religion or theodicy, for it raises more problems than it solves.  It’s easier and more parsimonious to simply discard the notion of God, or even to posit a malicious or unconcerned god, than to believe that a powerful and loving deity is author of the world’s ills.

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Avise, J. C.  2010.  Footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. US. online (May 5), doi: 10.1073/pnas.0914609107

h/t: Paul Jones

John Polkinghorne was a particle physicist at The University of Cambridge who left the university thirty years ago to become an Anglican priest.  Since then, he’s published a spate of books, many about the compatibility of science and faith.  He was knighted in 1997 and received the Templeton Prize in 2002.

I’ve read a fair amount of his stuff, including his latest book with Nicholas Beale, Questions of Truth (see a scathing review by Anthony Grayling), and I’ve always been amazed that someone can make a good living churning out such wooly accommodationism.  It’s so easy to write this stuff!  You just cover up ignorance and lack of evidence with a lot of fancy words, like “ground of being” or “motivated belief.”

A few weeks back, the website  in character: a Journal of Everyday Virtues, published an interview with the man, “Polkinghorne’s unseen realities” .   Here’s a few of his arguments:

Scientism is rampant. While chastising fundamentalists for adherence to a literalist scripture, he takes out after scientists for their lack of “humility”:

Certainly scientists who make arrogant claims that science tells you everything worth knowing are making a boastful claim that just doesn’t stand up. Science tells us how the world works, but it really doesn’t try to tell us about matters of meaning or value or purpose, which are equally important. So there are, of course, in the scientific community un-humble people, who try to be imperialist about the successes of science and claim that it’s the whole story.

When accommodationists make this claim, exactly which scientists are they referring to? I don’t know any who assert that science tells us everything we want to know, or that science dictates purpose and morality (although Sam Harris is coming close to a naturalistic morality).  How can science tell why I prefer Rhone wines to Bordeaux? Or if Dylan Thomas is a better poet than Anne Sexton? What we do claim is that science–or better, reason—tells us everything about the workings of the universe that we want to know.  And, for God’s sake, what truths does religion tell us about meaning, value, and purpose?

Science and faith are equivalent enterprises.  Notice in the following how Polkinghorne claims that science is not a search for truth, but for “motivated belief.”

I think both science and religion are concerned with the search for motivated belief.  They are not just plucking ideas out of the air but they have reasons from experience to support the ideas they believe to be true. But the way they seek them is somewhat different. Science is looking at the world as an object – as an “it”-which you can pull apart and do with what you want. And with science you can repeat things. You can do the same experiment over and over again until you feel sure you understand what is going on. And that gives science a great secret weapon. But there are great swaths of human encounter with reality where you meet reality not just as an object but where there is a personal dimension. Unlike with the scientific experiment, no personal experience is ever going to be exactly repeated.

Science and faith are alike, he says, because they both use “reasons from experience to support the ideas they believe to be true.” What he avoids here is the issue of how we determine what is true. Personal experience just doesn’t do it.  Does personal experience tell us that Jesus, as opposed to Mohamed, is God’s messenger? Is is “true” that we can attain paradise by killing infidels?  While Polkinghorne doesn’t tackle this question directly, he does allude to it later (see below).

A theistic God resides in quantum physics. Oh dear, not again!  Here’s the question-and-answer:

Does quantum physics make deism’s God obsolete?

Quantum physics shows, I think, that physics has not proved the closure of the world in terms of its own laws and equations. Physics can’t tell us that the exchange of energy between bits and pieces is the only thing that is going on in the world. Quantum theory, and in a different way chaos theory, have a more subtle picture of the world. If the world were simply mechanical, as people thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it would just be a gigantic piece of cosmic clockwork, and its creator would be an unseen cosmic clockmaker. That’s the creator who just makes the clock and lets it tick away. Quantum theory is something more subtle than that. We can believe a world in which we ourselves interact – we’re not clockwork at all – and we can believe in a world in which God interacts. We can believe in a God who doesn’t just sit and wait for it to happen but is involved in the unfolding of creation.

This is, as we’ve learned, an increasingly common stance.  When we can’t get evidence for God on the macroscopic level, we can find it on the quantum level in the “unpredictability” of particles. Once again, God becomes the Prime Mover of Electrons.  People who have this stance don’t explain how this quantum “indeterminacy” affects the universe on a macroscopic scale, like producing miracles, or why God chooses to hide himself on that scale but to act on particles.  In the end, this ploy is nothing more than a God-of-the-gaps argument.  Since we can’t find Him in normal experience, he must be acting in atoms.

But at the end Polkinghorne concedes two important points:

Do you think that the diversity of the world’s religions – I am referring especially to the non-Abrahamic religions – poses a challenge to religious belief?

Yes, I do. I think there are two great problems for religious people. First, there is the problem of evil and suffering. The second problem, which is really pressing at the moment, is the question of how the world’s faith traditions relate to each other. They are almost all thinking about the same domain of human experience. They have certain commonalities. All the world’s faith traditions commend compassion, for example. They are all operating in the same sort of area, but they have such different things to say about it. Just take the question of human nature. The three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – see the human person as of unique and abiding significance. Our Hindu friends see the human person as being recycled through reincarnation. Our Buddhist friends think life is an illusion from which to seek release. These are not three sets of people saying the same thing in different cultural languages. They are three sets of people saying different things. I think that the dialogue among the world’s faith traditions is just beginning. I think it will be long and painful, but I don’t think the answer is to look for a lowest common denominator. When you do that you get a very anemic picture of religion.

At least he recognizes that the problem of evil and suffering is not one that has been solved, or can be easily dismissed.  He has his own solution (not mentioned in this piece), but it’s not very satisfactory.  Anthony Grayling criticizes it:

I found the Beale-Polkinghorne explanation of natural evil (tsunamis and earthquakes that drown or crush tens of thousands, childhood cancers, and other marks of benign providence) as disgusting, though it is novel, as any that other apologists trot out. They say that the deity allows natural evils to happen because “he” has given creation “freedom to be and to make itself” – thus imputing free will to “creation” to explain natural evil in the same way as moral evil is imputed to the free will of humans. Heroic stuff.

And the most serious admission is that the “truths” arrived at by faith are mutually incompatible.  This is the first time I’ve seen such a frank acknowledgment that the beliefs of “our Hindu friends” and “our Buddhist friends” (what condescending characterizations!) are fundamentally different from those of “our Christian friends.”

Now when Polkinghorne tells us exactly how these contradictory claims will produce a “truth,” I’ll start paying attention.

If you’ve followed this website, you’ll know that nearly all the reviews of Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatttelli-Palmarini’s (F&P-P) What Darwin Got Wrong (including mine) have been highly critical.  But in this week’s New York Review of Books, Dick Lewontin’s take is a bit different.  It’s neither critical nor laudatory; in fact, while giving a cursory description of the book’s thesis, it almost perversely refuses to offer a critical evaluation.

First, full disclosure: Lewontin was my Ph.D. advisor at Harvard, and I’ve admired him for decades. He was a great mentor.

Those who have followed Lewontin’s writings, and seen his many critical book reviews, as well as some laudatory ones (here is one classic), will be puzzled at his failure to let the reader know whether What Darwin Got Wrong is good or bad.  Instead, he reiterates what I call Lewontin’s “greatest hits,” the ideas that he’s discussed many times over the past few decades.  These include the weakness of the adaptationist program, the failure of evolutionists to take seriously the idea of niche construction (the notion that organisms are not passive responders to environmental conditions, but affect their own evolutionary fate by changing their environments [think beaver dams]), and the eagerness of evolutionary psychologists to engage in storytelling rather than hard science.

When Lewontin does address the book, he makes two points. The first is his agreement with F&P-P’s thesis that the idea of natural selection as a “force” imposed on organisms by Mother Nature has been deeply misleading:

Darwin, quite explicitly, derived this understanding of the motivating force underlying evolution from the actions of plant and animal breeders who consciously choose variant individuals with desirable properties to breed for future generations. “Natural” selection is human selection writ large. But of course, whatever “nature” may be, it is not a sentient creature with a will, and any attempt to understand the actual operation of evolutionary processes must be freed of its metaphorical baggage. Unfortunately, even modern evolutionary biologists, as well as theorists of human social and psychological phenomena who have used organic evolution as a model for general theories of their own subjects, are not always conscious of the dangers of the metaphor.

I think this is a gross exaggeration.  That “metaphorical baggage” has been about as heavy as a wallet.  As I emphasized in my discussion of selection in The Nation, biologists use the construction “natural selection acting on trait/species X” as simple shorthand for a longer and more awkward description of differential gene replication reflecting the ability of those genes to leave copies in the current environment.  Here’s what I said:

Although we evolutionary biologists might describe the polar bear scenario as “natural selection acting on coat color,” that’s only our shorthand for the longer description given above. There is no agency, no external force of nature that “acts” on individuals. There is only differential replication of genes, with the winners behaving as if they were selfish (that’s shorthand, too).

And I think that nearly every evolutionary biologist would agree with this view. Even the evolutionary psychologists whom Lewontin dislikes so strongly would almost all agree.  I am 100% sure that Steve Pinker, for instance, is fully cognizant that nature is not “a sentient creature with a will.”

In fact, although Lewontin emphasizes the dangers of the “selection-on” metaphor, he gives not a single example of how it’s misled us.  When Dick and I had some exchanges about this piece before it was published, I asked him to support this statement by giving some examples. He never did.

When Lewontin does discuss the “problems” with F&P-P’s book, he does so only by alluding to the strong negative reaction it’s elicited from philosophers and biologists:

The appearance of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book at this time and the rhetoric and structure of its argument are guaranteed to provoke as strong a negative reaction in the community of evolutionary biologists as they have among philosophers of biology. To a degree never before experienced by the current generation of students of evolution, evolutionary theory is under attack by powerful forces of religious fundamentalism using the ambiguity of the word “theory” to suggest that evolution as a natural process is “only a theory.” While What Darwin Got Wrong may have been designed pour épater les bourgeois and to forcibly get the attention of evolutionists, when two accomplished intellectuals make the statement “Darwin’s theory of selection is empty,” they generate an anger that makes it almost impossible for biologists to give serious consideration to their argument.

I respectfully submit that that last sentence is COMPLETE FAIL—and insulting to boot. If you’ve read any of the reviews What Darwin Got Wrong, you’ll see that all of them have involved very serious consideration of F&P-P’s arguments. Just read the reviews. I doubt that the critics have been largely motivated by a desire to protect their turf against fundamentalist anti-evolutionism. I know I wasn’t.   Instead, we’ve been motivated by a desire to protect our field from the aggressive stupidity of fellow academics who don’t understand natural selection, biology, and the way that evolutionists do their jobs.

Lewontin, I’m afraid, has missed the mark with this one. In his crusade against facile adaptive explanations of human behavior (a crusade that I’ve often joined), he has allied himself with those like-minded critics who, sadly, know very little about evolutionary biology.

Discovered only through satellite imagery, since it’s in an inaccessible part of Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta, Canada,  this bad boy is about 2,790 feet long.  More info here.   Of course, there may be bigger ones that haven’t yet been found.

The crayons, by the way, are real.

(Apologies to Current Biology).

Something like this probably happened, but with sex, too.  (Photo from Science.)

The genome of Neandertals was just sequenced (reference below).

For those who don’t want to plow through the long (but informative!) explanatory posts about the Neandertal genome that have appeared on several science websites, here’s a quick guide:

• What’s the deal? A large group of scientists from several countries have determined the DNA sequence of most of the Neandertal genome.
• Is it “Neandertal” or “Neanderthal”? Either is correct. “Neanderthal” is most common but the new Science paper uses “Neandertal.”   The name is taken from the German “Neander Tal”, or “Neander Valley,” where the first bones of these individuals were found.
• So who were Neandertals?  They were an extinct group of humans who lived in Europe from about 400,000 years ago until about 30,000 years ago, when they seem to have gone extinct without leaving any descendants.  Their lineage diverged from that of all modern humans several hundred thousand years ago, so they were not our direct ancestors. Our real ancestors appear to have spread out from Africa to Europe and Asia in a migration event beginning about 100,000 years ago. Current Biology published a nice “quick guide” to Neandertals in 2006.
• Were they members of species different from ours? Neandertals are usually classified as being a subspecies of ours, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, so they’re usually considered members of our own species. Most biologists regard species as groups that are not capable of exchanging genes with other such groups. Since Neandertals now appear to have hybridized with “modern” H. sapiens and produced fertile offspring, this might suggest that they’re in our species. My own species concept, however, allows for some small amounts of gene flow between species, and given the low level of gene exchange between the two groups and the fact that they appear to have lived side by side in several areas without fusing into one species, I’d say that Neandertals were members of a different species, or at least of an “incipient” species. This is to some extent a semantic issue.  The two groups may have had cultural aversions to cross-mating, which count as “reproductive isolating barriers” similar to those separating species of birds who don’t hybridize because they have different appearances or songs.
• What about their genome? Sequencing the genome of this group is a stupendous achievement.  The workers took DNA from the bones of three individuals (all females) from a cave in Croatia; these females lived about 40,000 years ago.  Although the DNA extracted from their bones was highly contaminated with bacterial DNA and slightly contaminated with modern human DNA, the researchers managed, with many controls, to sort out the Neandertal DNA and sequence it.  Good sequence was obtained for about 2/3 of the genome, and was compared to sequences from modern humans living in Africa (2 samples), France, China, and Papua New Guinea.
• What does the DNA show? First, that Neandertals seem to be a bit older than we thought: their lineage diverged from ours about 825,000 years ago (this is a very rough estimate based on a “molecular clock”).  Second, there are some interesting genes that appear to have evolved faster in our lineage than in the Neandertal lineage (we can tell this because we can compare both genomes to that from our closest living relatives, chimps).  These 78 faster-human genes include those involved in skin pigmentation, sweat glands, sperm motility, as well as genes that, in modern humans, carry mutations associated with Down syndrome and schizophrenia.  Perhaps selection leading to modern humans, then, acted on skin traits and cognitive abilities.
• What else? The finding that has gotten the most attention is that some “old” genes from Neandertals still persist in human populations.  These shared human-Neandertal genes are found in the French, New Guinea, and Asian samples of modern humans but not in the African ones.
• What does this DNA sharing mean? Most likely that there was some hybridization between Neandertals and “modern” humans after our ancestors left Africa but before they had spread throughout Asia and the Pacific.  In other words, the genome of those modern humans not from Africa carries a trace (about 1%-4%) of DNA that “introgressed” from Neandertals. This is surprising because, based on earlier sequencing work of Neandertal DNA from the cellular organelle mitochrondia, there was no evidence of mixing between H. sapiens and H. sapiens neanderthalensis populations. This led to the idea that Neandertals went extinct without leaving any descendants or DNA. In light of the new findings, that’s probably wrong.
• Hybridization!  Does that mean that Neandertals interbred with the ancestors of modern humans? Probably!  But there’s one other explanation that we can’t rule out: perhaps the “Neandertal” genes in modern non-African humans are simply genes that are very old and were present in the common ancestors of both modern humans and Neandertals. These then could have been transmitted to Neandertals and non-African humans, while the ancestors of modern Africans simply did not get a sample of those genes. (Note that this does not mean that, evolutionarily speaking, modern non-Africans are more closely related to Neandertals than to modern Africans!) The “differential sorting” scenario seems unlikely to me because it involves special pleading about a non-random distribution of genes between proto-human populations that occurred well before our lineage diverged from that of Neandertals.
• Why the attention about hybridization? People are fascinated by the possibility that several different species (or subspecies) of humans could have successfully mated with each other.  We already knew that, over our evolutionary history, there have been times when several hominin species lived at the same time and roughly at the same place (as I recall, there could have been as many as three or four species of hominins living at the same time in some parts of Africa).  But in none of these cases do we have evidence for interbreeding.  The new work shows that this probably did occur between two hominin “species”.  This fascinates people for one reason, I think: sex.  It conjures up pictures of hairy, beetle-browed Neandertals shagging individuals that looked much more like us.  And indeed, that’s probably what happened.  This scenario evokes all sorts of primal emotions, and I predict a new genre of internet porn involving human/Neandertal encounters!  But that shouldn’t completely distract us from what is a truly remarkable achievement: our own ability to reconstruct the genome of our extinct relatives by grinding up their bones, extracting the DNA, and using really sophisticated methods to determine the proper sequence of millions and millions of DNA nucleotides.  Think about how amazing that is!
• Now that we have a Neandertal genome, can we make them by cloning? No.  We don’t have enough DNA, and even if we did we don’t have the technology to package it into chromosomes, or put it in the proper order with the proper surrounding elements. And if we could do those things, we’d still have to inject the Neandertal chromosomes into the egg of a modern human female, and that’s both hard and ethically dubious.
• Where can I find out more? You’ll find longer but not-too-technical descriptions of the Neandertal work in pieces by Ann Gibbons at Science and Carl Zimmer at The Loom.

___

Green, R. E. et al.  A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome.  Science 328:710-722.

Crack evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma (from SUNY Stony Brook) assesses Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong in this week’s Science.   It would be an understatement to say that the book doesn’t fare too well: the review is called “Two critics without a clue.”

These theories of natural selection work: they successfully predict research outcomes. John Werren predicted and experimentally confirmed that the first of two female parasitic wasps who lay eggs in a host insect lays a more female-biased brood than the second (2). No such prediction could be made without selection theory. Among countless other examples, the pattern of variation in DNA sequences that betokens a “selective sweep” of an advantageous mutation was predicted years before such data could be obtained. Natural selection theory makes successful predictions across a huge range of biological phenomena, and it inspires countless fruitful research programs. What more can one ask of a theory? Contrast that with the ludicrous analogy with which Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini end: “organisms ‘catch’ their phenotypes from their ecologies in something like the way that they catch their colds from their ecologies.” They helpfully explain that the similarity consists of there being both environmental and endogenous instrumental variables. I look forward to reading about the research that this formulation will inspire.

Mayr once wrote that “Evolution seems to be a subject on which everybody thinks he is qualified to express an expert opinion” (3). Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini show little familiarity with the vast literature on genetic variation, experimental analyses of natural selection, or other topics on which they philosophically expound. They are blithely agnostic about the causes of evolution and apparently uninterested in fostering any program of research. Because they are prominent in their own fields, some readers may suppose that they are authorities on evolution who have written a profound and important book. They aren’t, and it isn’t.

And he’s right.