I’ve had to resort to name-calling, simply because I cannot abide Andrew Brown any longer.  Someone wrote last week that without blockheads like him, we atheist bloggers wouldn’t have anything to write about, and that’s largely true.  But can’t we at least get something interesting out of our opponents?  Is it too much to expect the faitheists to have their own Hitchens, somebody with erudition, wit, a sharp tongue? Instead, we get Andrew Brown, who’s about as interesting (and cogent) as a stale matzo.

In this week’s Comment is Free column, Brown discusses “Are science and atheism compatible?” His piece was inspired by a recent vote of the Synod of the Church of England that science and God are compatible (the vote was 241-2, by the way, a masterpiece of reconciling the irreconcilable by fiat).  But, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what Brown is trying to say.  I’ve struggled through this column several times, and can’t find a coherent discussion of the question at issue.  Here’s the ending:

Nor has the decline of religious belief, in those countries where it has declined, resulted in a growth of scientific knowledge. If anything, the two have declined together. This is distressing for the atheists who believe that science and religion are natural enemies, contending for our hearts and understandings, but it makes perfect sense. Some religious doctrines are untrue, but when you abolish them, you need not thereby add to the world’s stock of truth. You could just add to the variety of its lies.

Science and organised traditional religion have to some extent the same enemies. Both rely for their influence on society on trust in authority and that is rapidly eroding. This is obvious in the case of religion, but we can see from the progress of climate change denialism how helpless scientists are against the same kind of jeering and suspicious anti-intellectualism that some of them direct at religion.

Is he trying to say that scientific knowledge is actually DECLINING in countries like Sweden and Denmark? Or anywhere else? Is his thesis that if science and religion are opponents, you’d predict that as religion declined, science would grow (this is, by the way, exactly what is happening)?

And what does the growth of climate-change denialism have to do with the compatibility of atheism and science?  What sort of “anti-intellectualism” has atheism directed toward religion? It seems to me that atheism has launched straight intellectual attacks at religion—attacks based on rationality and evidence.  Where is the evidence for miracles? How do we know that Mohamed was God’s prophet and Jesus was not?  How, exactly, can a benevolent God allow innocent people to experience evil?  Those are intellectually-motivated questions.

In his hatred of atheism, Brown seems to have degenerated into mindless brain-dump gibbering, flailing about randomly like a jerk with a wet towel in the locker room.  He is beneath contempt, and, from now on, beneath notice.

The New York Times has put up, early, a piece for next Sunday’s magazine.  It’s a long article by Russell Shorto on the continuing kerfuffle in Texas about what will appear in school textbooks.  You will recall that over the last two years the fracas was about evolution, with Texas school board chairman Don McLeroy (a dentist who also happens to be a young-earth creationist) fighting hard to insert “teach-the-controversy” material into biology texts. By and large the creationists lost that one, and McLeroy lost his position, though he’s still on the board.

As the Times notes, what goes into Texas textbooks affects much of the US.  The state has a $22 billion dollar education fund, with much of that money used to buy textbooks that fit state standards.  Textbook publishers don’t want to create special editions for each state,  so many of them simply go along with what Texas wants, and that’s what other states get as well.

This year the board is debating what children will be taught in history and social-studies classes.  As you might expect, McLeroy and his half-dozen conservative minions are trying to ensure that Texas kids are taught that the United States rests firmly on Christianity and Jesus Christ (conservative activists often use the words “Judeo-Christian” here, but of course give short shrift to the Jewish belief that Christ wasn’t the Messiah):

McLeroy is a robust, cheerful and inexorable man, whose personality is perhaps typified by the framed letter T on the wall of his office, which he earned as a “yell leader” (Texas A&M nomenclature for cheerleader) in his undergraduate days in the late 1960s. “I consider myself a Christian fundamentalist,” he announced almost as soon as we sat down. He also identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago. He went on to explain how his Christian perspective both governs his work on the state board and guides him in the current effort to adjust American-history textbooks to highlight the role of Christianity. “Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,” he said. “But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. “There are two basic facts about man,” he said. “He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

The article is worth reading, for it gives you a flavor of the controversy, what the arguments are, and who is on each side. I was surprised to learn, for example, that theologian Martin Marty, a world-famous scholar here at The University of Chicago, seems to be sympathetic to the Texas school board, at least about increasing emphasis on the importance of religion in the founding of our country.  But the article is also curiously inconclusive: it doesn’t have a point of view, but takes the “objective” journalistic stance of merely laying out who said what.  That’s fine for a news piece, but I’d expect more analysis, and perhaps a viewpoint, in the Sunday magazine.

One thing that the article should have mentioned, but doesn’t, is that the controversy about whether the US was founded as a Christian country has ramifications far beyond public-school education.  Certain members of the Supreme Court, notably Scalia and Thomas, are “originalists,” adhering to the judicial philosophy that the Constitution has a meaning that doesn’t change over time, but was fixed by the men who wrote it; and that the Court should make law based on the intent of those writers.  If conservatives start adhering to the view that the founders really wanted to create a Christian country (they support that idea with quotes, of course, but opponents have their own quotes), that opens the Court to all sorts of possibilities.  They could, for example, overturn precedent and allow the incursion of religion into the public sphere—say, prayer in schools.

Meanwhile, the loons in Texas are busy removing any approbation for liberals from the textbooks, and inserting ludicrous, pro-conservative views.  As TPM reported a month ago:

The conservative bloc on the Texas State Board of Education won a string of victories Friday, obtaining approval for an amendment requiring high school U.S. history students to know about Phyllis Schlafly and the Contract with America [the 1994 Republican document partly written by Newt Gingrich] as well as inserting a clause that aims to justify McCarthyism.

And from the Times article:

Finally, the board considered an amendment to require students to evaluate the contributions of significant Americans. The names proposed included Thurgood Marshall, Billy Graham, Newt Gingrich, William F. Buckley Jr., Hillary Rodham Clinton and Edward Kennedy. All passed muster except Kennedy, who was voted down.

Do read the Times piece, because we’re going to see these arguments being made by others (e.g., tea-party wackaloons) over the next few years.

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UPDATE: another (and in some ways a better) article on McLeroy and the Texas school board at Washington Monthly.

o.k., I’m now convinced that the mysterious Jesus and Mo artist reads this website.  Or is this discussion of opposing Kuhnian paradigms just a coincidence?

One of J.B.S. Haldane’s bon mots was this: “Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Science is loaded with things that, a priori, we could never have imagined would exist.  Frogs, for example, violate any notion I have of what an animal could evolve into.  But the queerest things of all that lie beyond our imagination are in physics. One of these is the existence of black holes. (See here for a good introduction.)

Ever wonder what it would be like to take a spacecraft near a black hole, or even enter it (which is, as John McLaughlin says, “Bye bye!”)? Two physicists from Stuttgart, Thomas Müller and Daniel Weiskopf, have just published a paper in The American Journal of Physics describing a computer program for envisioning what the sky would look like around a black hole.

They’ve also created a website with three cool movies that simulate what you’d see in three situations (New Scientist describes what you’re seeing in each case):

1.  You’re rotating around the hole at a fixed distance from it.

2.  You’re approaching the hole.

3.  You’re being sucked toward the hole.

And, if you can use the program, you can create all kinds of other black-hole tours.

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Müller, T. and D. Weisskopf.  2010.  Distortion of the stellar sky by a Schwarzchild black hole.  Am. J. Physics 78:204-214.

This week’s Nature reports that DNA from an ancient human has been recovered and sequenced.  The DNA is from a hair sample found several decades ago in Greenland, and just now recognized as human. It came from a male of the Saqqac Culture, which was active in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland from about 5,000 to about 2,500 years ago.

Surprisingly, the authors found that DNA could be sequenced from a hair lacking a follicle; apparently some cells were trapped in the hair shaft. About 80% of the genome was sequence-able. What does it tell us about this guy?  A few things:

1.  He had type A blood and was Rh positive. That’s a common blood type in Siberians and Asians.

2.  He had a haplotype consistent with having brown eyes. No surprise there.

3.  Other SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) associated with physical trait suggested that the man had darker skin, thick, dark hair, dry earwax (!), and a tendency to baldness (but remember, the DNA came from a thick swatch of hair).   A combination of SNPs from different areas of the genome suggested that he had a stocky body.  That’s no surprise, either.  (This, by the way, conforms to “Allen’s Rule,” the biogeographic observation that populations from colder areas have relatively smaller protruding limbs and parts, and stockier frames—all of which conserve heat.) All of these genotypes are consistent with what we know about people who lived in northern Asia and Alaska.

It’s great that they could find out this stuff, but it’s really no surprise.  What made the paper Nature-worthy is the recovery and sequencing of ancient DNA from a human. Oh, and the really interesting result is this: the DNA suggests that the individual had components of genes still present in East Asian and Siberian populations, but not found in modern-day Inuits or people from South and Central America.  This suggests that there were two separate invasions of North America from Asia: the one that gave rise to native Americans, South Americans, and modern Inuit on the one hand,  and that leading to the presence of Saqqaq in Greenland.  Those latter individuals probably came across the Bering Strait, and then, hugging the Arctic, made their way eastward across North America and then to Greenland.

That conclusion is of course tentative because it’s based on only this single genome.  Still, based on the sequence, and the tentative phylogeny showing that this individual’s ancestors split off from the ancestors of their closest living relatives (the Chukchis of eastern Siberia) about 5,000 years ago, anthropologists may have to revise their conclusion that there was one invasion of North America from eastern Asia around 18,000 years ago.

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Rasmussen, M. et al. (lots of authors!). 2010. Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo.  Nature online, doi:10.1038/nature08835.  Note that this group previously published a sequence of mtDNA from this individual (Gilbert, M. T. P. et al., 2008. Science 320:1787-1789)

You may have read that Cherie Blair, a British judge and the wife of ex-prime minister Tony Blair, suspended the jail sentence of a Muslim man expressly because he was religious.  The man, Shamso Miah, struck another man, breaking his jaw, while both were standing in line at a bank.  Miah was tracked down and arrested. Judge Blair (who, along with husband Tony, is showing serious signs of weakness toward faith) was lenient. According to The Daily Mail:

Yet despite saying violence on our streets ‘has to be taken seriously’ Mrs Blair, a QC who professionally uses her maiden name Cherie Booth, let him walk free from court.

She told him: ‘I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before.

‘You caused a mild fracture to the jaw of a member of the public standing in a queue at Lloyds Bank.

‘You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.’

Miah was sentenced to six months in jail, suspended for two years, and was ordered to carry out 200 hours of community service.

Now this is an insult to everyone who is not religious: do only the faithful know that bashing someone in the face is unacceptable?  I suppose a philosopher like Charles Taylor or Mary Midgley could find philosophical reasons to support Blair’s decision, but enter the philosopher (and atheist) Anthony Grayling, who takes apart Blair’s decision in a special piece written for RichardDawkins.net:

. . . As a barrister Mrs. Blair should be able to see the inadmissible corollary of passing lenient sentences on believers because they are believers; namely, that non-believers should receive less lenient sentences. If she had said – and said twice – in passing judgment on a person she knew to be non-religions, ‘I am going to apply the full penalty of the law based on the fact that you are not a religious person,’ she would not have merited any less of an outcry than she has caused, for the very good reason that this is the logical obverse of what she in fact said, and would be as unacceptable. .

Let me pick through the logic of Mrs. Blair’s view carefully here. She cannot consistently think that non-religious people have a tendency to be of good character because they are non-religious. If she did, she would think all people, whatever their beliefs or non-belief, have a tendency to be of good character. But this generous thought is precisely not what her statement says. On the contrary, her remarks to the jaw-breaking ‘devout Muslim’ (so the newspapers described him) Shamso Miah imply that she thinks that religious people have a greater tendency to be good than non-religious people. What justifies this assumption? Is it the fact that self-avowed non-religious people commit atrocities against other all other people, religious and non-religious alike, explicitly in the name of their non-religion, indeed driven to such actions in service of their non-religion? Of course not. So on what basis other than prejudice and religious sentiment can Mrs. Blair claim, in a judgment made in a British courtroom, that someone ought to be more leniently treated because he is religious?. . .

In the Times a young philosophy graduate turned journalist, Mr Hugo Rifkind, although claiming to sympathise with the National Secular Society’s complaint against Mrs. Blair, further claims that his ‘philosophy degree’ tells him that Mrs. Blair and her Roman Catholic church are the ones who are right in claiming that religious belief ‘gives you a sort of super, better morality, which outweighs everything else’. His reason for saying this is, as he puts it, that ‘There’s no such thing as abstract morality. It doesn’t even make any sense. If God isn’t the ultimate answer, what is?”

This is an awful advertisement for wherever Mr Rifkind studied philosophy. Either that or he was not paying attention in ‘week one’ when it appears (from what he says) his ethics course took place. And he certainly seems to have stopped thinking since then. Let me direct his attention to Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hume, Kant, and a few dozen others among the thinkers he ought to have come across in his studies, whose ethics are not premised on divine command or the existence of supernatural agencies, but proceed from consideration of what human beings, in this life in this world, owe each other in the way of respect, concern, trust, fairness and honesty.

Indeed.  Let’s have more of the dissection of tortuous logic, and exposing of hidden and invidious assumptions, that is the real good that philosophy can do. Grayling’s astute analysis is in strong contrast to that of Andrew Brown at The Guardian (I swear, the “Comment is free” section is fast becoming a archive of pusillanimous accommodationism), who waffles and waffles about Blair’s sentence and can’t come to a conclusion.

Anthony Grayling is a national treasure. Sadly, he’s Britain’s treasure, not America’s.

The Guardian continues its string of ludicrous essays defending religion against the encroachment of science.  The latest is a “Comment is Free” piece by Mark Vernon (you’ll remember him as the guy who wrote perhaps the all-time classic work of aphophatic tripe: “God is the Question” [see a response here]), reporting (and praising) a talk by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.  Taylor has raked in the cash for his efforts at reconciling science and faith: he won not only the 2007 Templeton Prize (one million pounds), but also the 2008 Kyoto Prize ($470,765).  I tell you, there’s serious money in accommodationism!

At any rate,  here’s Taylor’s point, much lauded by Vernon:  although science is usually based on evidence and rational inquiry, there are times when it’s not.  Those are the times when a scientist suddenly has an intuition, or a hunch, that turns out to revolutionize the way we see the world. So, for example, we have Einstein and relativity, Planck and quanta, and, I suppose, Darwin and evolution (although in that case his “hunch” evolved, so to speak, from looking at a lot of evidence).  According to Taylor and Vernon, these Kuhnian “paradigm shifts” are nothing other than a “leap of faith” or, to use religious words (which these people love to do), a “revelation”:

But take, for the sake of the argument, one of the best known attempts to understand what really happens in scientific reasoning, that put forward by Thomas Kuhn. . .

. . . What analysis of this kind suggests is that the reasonableness of science is partially true, during periods of what Kuhn called normal science, when puzzles are proposed and solved. However, during paradigm shifts, that evaporates. Science enters a period of flux and uncertainty until a new paradigm is settled. Intellectual wars break out too. Scientists stop talking to one another. They label opponents “heretics”. Then rational discourse breaks out once more – until the next shift.

The challenge is to understand what happens during the shifts. What processes are at play then? There’s a huge debate about this. But it is at least plausible that the rational periods of normal scientific enquiry are only possible because enough scientists have decided to go with the disruptive hunch or intuition. Certainly, they test it. And their tests “prove” it – until the next shift, that is.

So, the suggestion is that you could be forgiven for concluding that science is only possible because scientists are prepared to make a collective leap of faith, a commitment to the prevailing paradigm. Further, science just wouldn’t be possible if scientists always and everywhere adhered to the scientific method alone, the procedures that have come to define what counts as rational. Something other than repeated observations and correct inference is required for progress.

It’s because of him we have the phrase “paradigm shift” – those breaks between the science of Aristotle and Copernicus, or between that of Newton and Einstein. What happens, he thought, is that there is no procedural appeal to reason in these moments, no patient weighing of the evidence. Instead, there is a rupture, a revelation. Science finds itself teleported to a new world, in which even the questions it asked before now look foolish.

Indeed, sometimes scientists do rely on intuition.  And I suppose you could, in some cases, use the word “faith”.  Einstein, for example, thought that his theory of relativity was true simply because it had to be true: he knew in some way that his beautiful equations represented the state of the universe.  But what do we mean by “faith” here?  In the case of Einstein—or Darwin—their “faith” meant this: trust or confidence that their hunch was correct.

Taylor and Vernon, however, want us to take “faith” in its other, religious sense:  belief in God, the supernatural, and things that can’t be verified emprically.  Trusting that the reader won’t notice this sleight-of-hand, they then proclaim that, like believers, scientists take leaps of faith. Here’s what Vernon says:

To put it another way, the neat distinction between science and religion unravels, for religion involves commitments made on faith too. You might protest: revelation purports to come from God and is untestable, two characteristics that the scientist would certainly reject. Except that regardless of its source, a revelation can only make an impact if it makes sense to people, which is to say that they test it against their lives, that it can account for the evidence of their experience, like a theory. Revelation can only bear the weight of significance when people have engaged with it rationally too.

Moreover, a particularly successful religious revelation, or should we call it a “faith hunch”, may come to have global appeal: it becomes a kind of universal language. The Christian in Sante Fe can worship with the Christian in Shanghai. Perhaps in this respect religion is closer to science too. We might take Taylor’s lead and discuss, rationally if we can.

Can the lucubrations of philosophers and journalists manqué get any sillier than this?  A scientist’s confidence that he or she is on the right track is not the same religion’s absolute belief in the verity of propositions that can’t be supported empirically.  And, of course, none of these scientific “leaps of faith” are accepted by scientists as true until they’re vetted by scientific experiment or observation.  Einstein’s general theory of relativity, for example, wasn’t widely accepted as a true theory until Eddington demonstrated the bending of light around stars during an eclipse in 1919. In what way does this equate to a believer’s assertion that Jesus died for his sins because that believer simply knows that it’s so?

Now Vernon seems to know that something is amiss here. After all, he notes that “revelation purports to come from God and is untestable, two characteristics that the scientist would certainly reject.”  But he then implies that revelations have their own sort of “truth,” for they “make sense to people”, who “test [these relations] against their lives, that it can account for the evidence of their experience.”  But is that the same as testing the theory of relativity? Certainly not, for those revelations that are “tested” against people’s experience, and “make sense” to them, conflict among people of different faiths!

To a Muslim, Mohamed was the prophet of God, while Jesus was certainly not the son of God.  To a Christian, things are reversed. To a Hindu, neither is true, and what “makes sense” is a complex polytheism.  The lack of agreement among the claims of faith, but the requirement for agreement in science, is the crucial difference between scientific truth and religious “truth.” It would be well if Vernon and Taylor could grasp this simple distinction.  True, “the Christian in Santa Fe can worship with the Christian in Shanghai”, but the Christian in Santa Fe cannot worship with the Muslim in Santa Fe!

And of course Taylor and Vernon might consider that what “makes sense” to religious people is remarkably coincident with what those people were taught as children.  Most Muslims don’t accept Islam because it makes more sense to them than, say Christianity.  They accept it because, when they were children, they were taught that Islam was true.

All this is obvious.  What may not be obvious is the conflating of the two meanings of the word “faith” by those who assert that both science and religion rely on faith.  This is a philosophical shell game.  Maybe Vernon is taken in by it, but he’s small potatoes compared to Taylor, a man of reputation and, now, wealth.  People lap up this kind of stuff, so eager are they to hear that they really can retain their religious beliefs in the face of creeping atheism and materialism.  And they don’t want to look too hard at the arguments.  Even very smart people can be gullible when it comes to claims like this, and that gullibility translates into wealth and fame for people like Taylor.

If they want to give a Templeton Prize to a philosopher, how about Anthony Grayling or Dan Dennett?

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UPDATE:  Over at Mark Vernon’s website, it says this: “Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. He began his professional life as a priest in the Church of England: it may not seem an obvious step from there to journalism but writing a sermon is remarkably similarly to writing a feature; and speaking to parishoners is remarkably like talking to a microphone.”

We all know that Darwin missed at least one important finding during his lifetime: the work of Gregor Mendel.  It’s unlikely that he actually knew of it, or that he would have appreciated its significance if he had (it would have solved the dilemma, pointed out by the engineer Fleeming Jenkin, that Darwin’s own theory of blending inheritance inexorably erodes the genetic variation necessary for natural selection to work), but the lack of a Darwin-Mendel conjunction is often mourned by evolutionists.  Now a trio of scholars have found another “missed opportunity” for the Sage of Downe.

In a new communication to Current Biology, Adam Hart et al. report the discovery of a letter written to Darwin by the British entomologist Albert Brydges Farn (1841-1921).  Farn lays out in his letter the evidence that color variation and change in the moth Gnophos (now Charissa) obscurata, called the “annulet,” reflected the action of natural selection.  It’s the peppered-moth story in a different species.  Had Darwin followed this up, say Hart et al., he would have apprehended a crucial piece of evidence missing from his theory: observation of natural selection in action.  Here’s Farn’s letter, sent to Darwin on November 18, 1878.

My dear Sir,
The belief that I am about to relate something which may be of interest to you, must be my excuse for troubling you with a letter.

Perhaps among the whole of the British Lepidoptera, no species varies more, according to the locality in which it is found, than does that Geometer, Gnophos obscurata. They are almost black on the New Forest peat; grey on limestone; almost white on the chalk near Lewes; and brown on clay, and on the red soil of Herefordshire.

Do these variations point to the “survival of the fittest”? I think so. It was, therefore, with some surprise that I took specimens as dark as any of those in the New Forest on a chalk slope; and I have pondered for a solution. Can this
be it?

It is a curious fact, in connexion with these dark specimens, that for the last quarter of a century the chalk slope, on which they occur, has been swept by volumes of black smoke from some lime-kilns situated at the bottom: the herbage, although growing luxuriantly, is blackened by it.

I am told, too, that the very light specimens are now much less common at Lewes than formerly, and that, for some few years, lime-kilns have been in use there.

These are the facts I desire to bring to your notice.

I am, Dear Sir, Yours very faithfully,

A. B. Farn

In fact, the idea of industrial melanism as evidence for natural selection was not explicitly suggested until 1896 (14 years after Darwin’s death) by the British entomologist James William Tutt.

There’s no evidence that Darwin answered Farn’s letter, but of course he had voluminous correspondence with hundreds of people, and it’s too much to fault the old man for failing to follow up on this one suggestion.  And even had he done so, that might not have hastened the general acceptance of natural selection, which after all was not widely embraced by evolutionists until around 1930.  Nevertheless, it’s interesting to contemplate Darwin’s reaction as he read this letter.  Did he blow it off? Or did it simply get lost in the welter of his correspondence?

Hart et al. imply that this is the one crucial missing link in Darwin’s “chain of evidence,” but of course there’s another: the fossil record.  Archaeopteryx, a transitional fossil spanning reptiles and birds, was known in Darwin’s time—and he even mentions it in a later edition of The Origin*—but he didn’t seem to have grasped its significance. However, the evidence for common ancestry that could have been provided by Archaeopteryx was also supplied by several other areas of biology, notably embryology and the study of vestigial features.

Fig. 1.  The annulet, Charissa obscurata. Looks a lot like Biston betularia, no?

*p. 367 of the fourth edition: “Until quite recently these authors might have maintained, and some have maintained, that the whole class of birds came suddenly into existence during the eocene period; but now we know, on the authority of Professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper greensand; and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archeopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solenhofen. Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than this how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world.”

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Hart, A. G. R. Stafford, A. L. Smith, and A. E. Goodenough. 2010. Evidence for contemporary evolution during Darwin’s lifetime. Current Biology 20:R95.

h/t: Matthew Cobb