by Matthew Cobb

Every country seems to have its cryptozoological fantasies. Tibet has the Yeti, the US has Bigfoot, the Congo has Mokele-mbembe. And Britain has… the Beast of Bodmin. Or the Beast of Exmoor. Or the Beast of Bevendean.

In each of these cases, people sight something that looks like a big cat – as in a panther or a leopard. None of these sightings claim to be of tigers or African lions. Strictly speaking, this is not the realm of cryptozoology, as no one is claiming these are unknown species. The argument is that they are animals that have escaped from zoos, circuses or the homes of rich people with massive underground bunkers who tend to have plans for world domination and go “Mwah-haa-haaa”.

Natural England – a government organisation that does what it says on the tin – has been studying claims of alien animals in the UK, and has found 38 sightings of “big cats” that cannot be explained. They have concluded that some of the claims might be true, but there is no evidence for breeding populations.

Charlie Wilson of Natural England is reported as saying: “The evidence is there that there are the odd, escaped, released dumped animals occurring in the wild every now and then.” None of this applied to the alleged big cats, for which there was no confirmation beyond exaggerated claims (“it was as big as a car”) or the usual blurry photos. “It is very unlikely that there are any big cats at large” was the conclusion.

The Sun “newspaper” reported this as “Official: No Big Cats in UK”, and printed this picture with the caption “Big cats are a myth … but if they don’t exist then how does the government explain these?”

The Natural History Museum has a neat little web page explaining how they were called in to examine what appeared to be the skull of a big cat, found on Bodmin Moor in the south of England. Discovering the truth involved not only comparative anatomy but also forensic entomology, and is quite enlightening.

Apart from the not-terribly-interesting possibility that a handful of poor Alien Big Cats (ABCs) may be roaming the British countryside, it’s probably more interesting to ask the question why people are so keen to believe in them…

Links:

Daily Telegraph article

Natural England report on big cats on Bodmin Moor

Wikipedia page on UK ABCs (caveat emptor, as with all Wikipedia pages)

by Matthew Cobb

This link was sent in by Jerry – even on his Paris jaunt, he’s keeping a close eye on debates over evolution and religion.

Over at Evolutionblog, Jason Rosenhouse reports that Peter Hess, Faith Project Director for the National Center for Science Education, has decided that ID is blasphemous. Jason’s thought-provoking piece provides a nice parallel with the Grayling review we posted here earlier today, and with Greg’s previous post on the National Science Board.

[Edit: unclear antecedent altered, just like Jerry would have wanted.]

by Matthew Cobb

Last week, the British magazine New Statesman carried a thought-provoking review by A C Grayling of David Lewis-Williams’ new book Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion. Lewis-Williams is an anthropologist who specialises in cave and rock art (in particular from South Africa). He has written two brilliant and highly-recommended popular books on prehistoric cave art, the Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, and Inside the Neolithic Mind.

In his new book (which I haven’t read), Lewis-Williams casts his anthropologist’s eye over the origins and continued existence of religion, and the reasons for it. He also kindly quotes a letter Jerry and I wrote to Nature, protesting about their coverage of the Templeton Foundation. I hope that Jerry – or myself, or Greg – will have the time to write our own review here at WEIT, but for the moment Grayling’s review will more than suffice:

Are direct arguments against religious beliefs likely to dissuade their votaries? The anecdotal evidence seems to suggest not; robust attacks by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it is said, only annoy the faithful and make them dig further in.

I am not so sure about this. In my experience, waverers and Sunday-only observers can find forthright challenges to religious pretensions a relief and a liberation. They give them the reason, sometimes the courage, to abandon those shreds of early-acquired religious habit that cling around their ankles and trip them up.

Still, Darwin and David Lewis-Williams have a point in thinking, as the former put it, that “direct arguments against [religion] produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science”. In the preface to this book, Lewis-Williams says that he intends to follow Darwin’s strategy, seeking to achieve by flanking manoeuvres what Dawkins and Hitchens attempt by cavalry charge.

Actually Lewis-Williams does both. There is quite a lot of galloping straight at the opposition with flashing sabre. But the main thrust of the book is incremental: a well-informed and steady march through the history of religion and its conflict with science, reprising what the author describes as the evolution of his own thought about these matters.

“Over the years I pondered the long history of religion. In particular, I thought about the implications of the earliest archaeological evidence for religion . . . I found it salutary to explore social (cultural) anthropology . . . As we look over this sorry tapestry, we must face a fundamental question – one that many today, believers and non-believers alike, try to avoid: Is there really a spirit realm occupied by supernatural beings and forces that are concerned with human life on earth? By contemplating the history of religion and science we are able to answer that question in a way that gradually leads to “freedom of thought”.”

The need to do so is all the more urgent, the author notes, because the great dividing line in the world today is between opponents defined by religious commitment or tradition.

Lewis-Williams is a highly distinguished archaeologist and palaeoanthropologist who has written some of the definitive works on ancient cave art, in particular the rock art of the San (Bushman) people of his native South Africa. He wrote the classic Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meaning in Southern San Rock Paintings (1981), whose ideas animate his account of Stone Age religion and the nature of religious belief and experience in three chapters of this book. His descriptions and interpretations are fascinating, though highly speculative.

If Lewis-Williams’s expertise in Stone Age art is one plank for the argument of the book, the other is the adventure of thought in the epochs that have elapsed since classical antiquity. He traces the development of both religious and scientific thinking from ancient Greece to the 19th century – from Plato to Darwin – which includes the establishment, from Constantine onwards, of religious orthodoxy against all comers (“heretics” and pagans alike). It is an instructive review; it leads Lewis-Williams to remind us that large sections of official Christianity now merely shrug their shoulders over the question of the position of Planet Earth in the universe, a matter on which they were once prepared to kill people for taking the wrong view.

The historical chapters constitute a lucid survey of the background, from which certain patterns can be deduced that Lewis-Williams explores in chapters on religious experience, belief and origins. Together, these suggest an analysis of the nature of religion itself. They are the most original parts of his discussion. He summarises the conclusion he arrives at as follows:

“Religion is one possible explanation, not for natural phenomena, but for highly complex experiences that the human brain generates. It does so in such a way that a whole range of further explanations (for natural events, death and so forth) becomes available. Moreover, religion makes possible powerful social and political hierarchies not based on sex or brute strength. The persistence of the neurology of the brain through time ensures that the “origin” of religion is always with us.”

This last remark explains what he means by the phrase “origin-as-process”, and his reason for thinking that the stock analysis of earlier anthropology – that religion evolves from animism through totemism to polytheism and thence monotheism – is incorrect. He has an interesting point here. Polytheism persists in both actual and disguised forms: actual in the Hindu pantheon; disguised in the “Trinity” or in any religion, including Islam and Judaism, that admits the existence of angels and demons (and, in the former at least, a populated afterlife) along with the deity.

Lewis-Williams does not leave matters at the level of analysis. In a long and thoughtful concluding chapter entitled “God’s Empire Strikes Back”, he considers the current tensions and conflicts generated by the revived debate about religion. He concludes that there is no future in attempting reconciliation between theistic and non-theistic world-views, and that our hope must be that Darwin will be proved right eventually, that science will finally cut the taproot of religion. He ends by quoting Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne: “In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.” That is surely right, and it serves as the guiding principle of Lewis-Williams’s endeavours in these rich and educative pages.

There is, accordingly, a great deal to applaud in this book. One aspect of it left me intrigued, however: the chapter on Stone Age religion, describing and offering interpretations of cave paintings from tens of thousands of years ago, long before the dawn of history. Did our remotest ancestors really distinguish between natural and supernatural realms? Or did they regard the significant agencies that controlled nature as part of nature, and such that they could be encountered and communicated with, just like any other part of nature?

Lewis-Williams thinks that cave walls were viewed as the sacred interface between human beings and chthonic forces. Can we really know? Perhaps he can appeal to the continuity of brain structure and function to suggest that religious experience is likewise continuous. However, he is careful enough to talk often of “maybe” and “perhaps”; and to an amateur being offered the explanation, it is the tentativeness that sounds most persuasive.

by Matthew Cobb

More cryptozoology. These two pictures were posted by a friend, Dr Fiona Crawford, who visited the English Lake District (home of Beatrix Potter) last weekend. She labelled them “tracks of unknown animal”. The first one looks like a human hand print, but the second shows a set of prints, clearly not made by human hand.

So what made them? NB There are no bears left in the Lakes, and the biggest mammals are ungulates. Mind you, it is hard to tell what the scale is. They seem to be smaller than a human hand. Could it be a pine marten? The small size would tend to exclude the possibility that someone was wearing boots with pawprints on them – in WW2 British Special Operations Executive agents in the Far East wore boots with soles with a human footprint on them, but reversed, so anyone tracking them in the jungle would think a) they were a “native” and b) they were going the other way…

UPDATE (8 April 2010):

After over 20 contributions (including from Fiona, who took the photos), I think we can be pretty confident it’s a badger print. Here’s a useful guide to prints of British mammals (when I was a lad we had these on the soles of our shoes – nothing to do with the SOE shenanigans mentioned at the beginning of this post).

The large pad kind of gives it away, no? And here are some badger prints:

On the other hand, the claws on the Lakeland Yeti’s prints seem to be much more spread out… Is the mystery really solved?

By Matthew Cobb

On June 25, 2000, Bill Clinton, flanked by Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute and Craig Venter of Celera Genomics, with Tony Blair incongruously at the end of a satellite feed, stood at the White House. Clinton announced that “the international Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics Corporation have both completed an initial sequencing of the human genome – the genetic blueprint for human beings.” They claimed that the genome “promises to lead to a new era of molecular medicine, an era that will bring new ways to prevent, diagnose, treat and cure disease”.

In this week’s issue of Nature (which published the draft sequence in February 2001), there is the first of what will undoubtedly be a series of articles and books looking at what has happened over the last 10 years [these articles are open access].

Or maybe there won’t be any such flood of publications, for the simple reason that, despite all the hype, the contribution of the genome to human health has been pretty negligible. In other words, from a purely medical point of view, there isn’t much to celebrate.

Part of the reason for this slight sense of disappointment can be found in that first, triumphal declaration: a genome is not a “blueprint”, in the sense of a plan that can be read off to deduce a particular structure or behaviour. You cannot look at the chicken genome and deduce that a cockerel will go “cock-a-doodle-doo”. And there are no “cancer genes”.

The genome has turned out to be a much more complicated place than many suspected (I would argue that many of us who actually worked on how genes function in whole organisms predicted this). Genes regulate other genes and, above all, interact with the environment. Organisms are not simply the expression of the genome, they are constructed through myriad interactions between the environment and the genes.

And those interactions turn out to be incredibly complicated. Although computing power has also increased over the last 10 years, attempts to model what all these genes are doing have floundered, and people who work in these areas are in danger of drowning in a sea of data. Those who thought there were big bucks to be made have still to make their fortune; many have lost their shirts. My hunch is that it will be a long time before the promised health benefits turn up.

On the other hand, the prospect of lots of money – and health benefits – did mean that a massive amount of attention was paid to sequencing, and the result has been an unprecedented explosion of information about the evolution of life. Over 3,800 organisms (including around 200 humans) have had their entire genomes sequenced, while sequence information on more than 200,000 species has been obtained. This figure is growing all the time, as the price of sequencing plummets and the ease of obtaining entire genomes increases.

We are living through an astonishing revolution in science, and young biologists should be grabbing the opportunity to make some amazing discoveries about the evolution of life. For example, I am interested in the evolution of the sense of smell. These databases contain the sequences of genes that code for olfactory receptors; it is relatively straightforward to see how they evolved in different lineages, and above all, to gain insight into the role of this sense in the life of a given organism.

Up until 2004, it was argued that birds didn’t have much of a sense of smell (there was no real basis for this prejudice, but it was widely held). Then the chicken genome revealed that there were over 500 olfactory receptor genes (more than in a human). And this week, the genome of the zebra finch reveals that this songbird has about 215 functional olfactory receptor genes. This should be leading people to start finding out what exactly birds are doing with their sense of smell – finding food, navigating, finding mates?

For any young scientists reading this – not just biologists, but computer scientists, mathematicians, chemists – the current revolution in genomics should be seen as a new ocean to explore, a sea of unexploited knowledge that they can play in. It really is that amazing. As the poet William Wordsworth wrote with regard to a rather more bloody revolution – the French revolution of 1789:
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!”