World’s weirdest fish

May 13, 2009 • 12:28 pm

Meet Histiophryne psychedelica, discovered a year ago in Indonesia and just described by Pietsch et al. in the February edition of Copeia.  I’ve never seen a weirder fish, and what’s even more amazing is that it moves by hopping along the ocean floor using jets of water expelled from the gill slits.  You can read more about it, and see its bizarre “hopping” behavior, at the National Geographic website here.

If you’re a biologist, or somebody who just likes biology, tell me that you don’t get a frisson of excitement from seeing this thing.  Nature always coughs up creatures weirder than we can imagine.

H. psychedelica, D. J. Hall

P. psychedelica 2

Photographs by David J. Hall, from Pietsch et al. paper

A Bizarre New Species of Frogfish of the Genus Histiophryne (Lophiiformes: Antennariidae) from Ambon and Bali, Indonesia full access

Theodore W. Pietsch, Rachel J. Arnold, David J. Hall
pg(s) 37–45

Abstract

A new species of frogfish of the teleost order Lophiiformes, family Antennariidae, is described from three specimens collected in shallow waters off Ambon and Bali, Indonesia. A member of the antennariid genus Histiophryne, the new taxon differs substantially from its congeners in having a broad flat face, surrounded by thick, fleshy, laterally expanded cheeks and chin, with eyes directed forward; skin of the body thick and loose, forming conspicuous fleshy folds that envelop the unpaired fins; a remarkable pigment pattern of white swirling stripes radiating from the eyes and continuing back to the body and tail; genetic divergence in the nuclear recombination activation gene-2 (RAG2), cytochrome oxidase-I (COI), and 16S rRNA genes; and a set of behavioral traits not previously known in fishes. The new species is described and compared with its congeners. Notes on habitat, locomotion, pigment pattern and camouflage, predation and defense, and reproduction and parental care are also provided.

Why the evolution of humans was NOT inevitable; BioLogos peddles more dubious science

May 13, 2009 • 7:21 am

Over at that hilarious goldmine of accommodationism, Francis Collins’s BioLogos website (generously supported by The Templeton Foundation, they have posted an answer to the question, “Did evolution have to result in human beings?” Now if you know anything about this history of faith/science accommodationism, you know that the answer has to be “yes”, at least if you construe the question to mean “Did evolution have to result in a rational, highly intelligent being that was capable of apprehending and worshiping its creator?”  If God is running the evolutionary process, as the accommodationists maintain, then the evolution of humans (who are, after all, the goal of this process — the one species made in God’s image) could not have been left to chance.

And so, religious biologists like Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins, and “science-friendly” theologians like John Haught, have maintained in their writings that evolution would inevitably have coughed up an intelligent rational creature like Homo sapiens.  In other words, contrary to the assertions of Stephen Jay Gould, if we re-ran the tape of life, something humanlike would always appear.  Religious apologists always contend that the evolution of what we will call “humanoids” was not a continent process: it was built by God into the very fabric of evolution.

Of course, this is not a scientific belief.  For one thing, it makes humans different from other creatures.  The faithful don’t go around maintaining that the evolution of squirrels or cockroaches was an inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process, because according to Scripture God didn’t make rodents of insects in His image.  So God stuck his hand in, somewhere, to make humanoids appear.  That is creationism, pure and simple.  Or, he designed the process with the foreknowledge that humans would appear, which is also creationism, since no evolutionist really thinks that the process was jerry-rigged from the outset to produce certain life forms.

Second, if you do believe in a naturalistic and materialistic process of evolution in which God didn’t interfere, then the appearance of humans doesn’t seem likely at all — and certainly not inevitable.  Higher intelligence and rationality evolved only once, so it certainly isn’t something like eyes (whose morphology evolved independently dozens of time).  The idea that “convergent evolution” shows that humans were inevitable is deeply fallacious.

Yet BioLogos uses this argument — a favorite of the religious paleontologist Simon Conway Morris –to show that (surprise!) something like humans WAS inevitable in evolution.  After disposing of Gould’s contingency argument, they then approvingly reiterate Conway Morris’s “convergence” argument:

Humans: Inevitable, Intentional

Simon Conway Morris presents a different perspective, arguing humans, or a human-like species, are actually an inevitable part of evolution.  Morris is not proposing a different mechanism for human evolution, merely a different observation of its possible outcomes.  Morris would agree that any slight difference in the history of human DNA would result in a different evolutionary path.  Unlike Gould, however, Morris argues each of those possible pathways would inevitably lead to something like the human species.  Morris writes:

“The prevailing view of evolution is that life has no direction — no goals, no predictable outcomes. Hedged in by circumstances and coincidence, the course of life lurches from one point to another. It is pure chance that 3 billion years of evolution on Earth have produced a peculiarly clever ape. We may find distant echoes of our aptitude for tool making and language and our relentless curiosity in other animals, but intelligence like ours is very special. Right?”

“Wrong! The history of life on Earth appears impossibly complex and unpredictable, but take a closer look and you’ll find a deep structure. Physics and chemistry dictate that many things simply are not possible, and these constraints extend to biology. The solution to a particular biological problem can often only be handled in one of a few ways, which is why when you examine the tapestry of evolution you see the same patterns emerging over and over again.”

The patterns Morris mentions are also referred to as convergences in the evolutionary process.  In his most recent book, Life’s Solution, Morris gives many examples of physical traits or abilities found repeatedly among different species.5 Normally, such similarities are understood asthe result of common ancestry.  However, the species in Morris’s examples are known to be distantly related.  In many cases, not even these species’ common ancestor shared the same trait.  The implication is that several different species have independently developed similar traits.

The examples of convergence range across many levels of biology.  One popular and straightforward example is the human eye.  It turns out that several other species share a nearly identical visual system to that of the human eye, including the octopus.6 However, humans and octopuses have separate predecessors, neither of which shared this characteristic.  Two very different evolutionary paths arrived at the same visual system.  If Gould’s supposition is correct, and there was an infinity of other possible outcomes, then this example of convergence is all the more improbable.  Morris’s argument, conversely, is that the laws of nature allow for only a few solutions to any particular problem.  It appears the eye has developed independently at least seven times over the course of evolutionary time.

Human Significance

To see evidence for human significance, one need only consider Morris’s examples of convergence for many of the traits that are particularly relevant for human-like beings.  These examples include basic senses like balance, hearing and vision, as well as highly advanced features like the human brain.  Morris argues that evolution does not pose any threat to human significance.  Characteristics such as a large brain capable of consciousness, language and complex thought would inevitably have to emerge from the evolutionary process. Morris writes:

“Contrary to popular belief, the science of evolution does not belittle us.  As I argue, something like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability, and our existence also reaffirms our one-ness with the rest of Creation.” 7

The exact anatomical features of this ultimate sentient being might not be precisely specified by the evolutionary process, however.  This thought can be unsettling to anyone who imagines our particular body plan is part of the imago Dei, or image of God. Despite the marvelous paintings in the Sistine Chapel, there is no reason to think that God the Father has a physical body that looks like ours.

God’s Sovereignty in the Evolution of Humans

Belief in a supernatural creator always leaves open the possibility that human beings are a fully-intended part of creation.  If the Creator chooses to interact with creation, he could very well influence the evolutionary process to ensure the arrival of his intended result.  (See Question 14 about Evolution and Divine Action.)  Furthermore, an omniscient creator could easily create the universe in such a way that physical and natural laws would result in human evolution.  (See Question 19 about Fine-Tuning of our Universe.)

Although the unpredictable mutations of DNA can make any species appear entirely accidental, Simon Conway Morris also puts forward strong arguments in favor of the inevitability of creatures that have the attributes of humans.  From this perspective, it seems the evolutionary process itself might be geared toward human life.

So it goes. (By the way, have a look at the last paragraph of this page where BioLogos suggests that the evolution of humanoids ON OTHER PLANETS was  improbable. (As expected, they take this stand because theologists can’t see God sending Jesus careening from planet to planet to save every species of alien).

The Argument for the Inevitability of Humanoids is perhaps the most popular argument (ranking with The Fine Tuning of Physical Constants) used by accommodists to show that evolution and God are not in conflict.  But the argument is simply wrong.  Nobody can say with assurance that the evolution of humanoids was inevitable.  The only honest response is “We don’t know” (and I would add “what we know about evolution tells us that it was probably not inevitable.”)

I attacked this argument in my New Republic essay “Seeing and Believing,” and for those who haven’t read it, or who don’t wish to plow through the link to find it, I’ll reproduce it here. This was a review of two books, Kenneth Miller’s Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, and Karl Giberson’s Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.

III.

In Finding Darwin’s God, his earlier book, Miller proclaimed a universal theism: “Remember, once again, that people of faith believe their God is active in the present world, where He works in concert with the naturalism of physics and chemistry.” Giberson clearly agrees. And where do they find the hand of God in nature? Unsurprisingly, in the appearance of humans.

Giberson and Miller assert that the evolution of humans, or something very like them, was inevitable. Given the way that evolution works, they claim, it was certain that the animal kingdom would eventually work its way up to a species that was conscious, highly intelligent, and above all, capable of apprehending and worshipping its creator. This species did not have to look perfectly human, but it did have to have our refined mentality (call it “humanoid”). One of Miller’s chapters is even titled “The World That Knew We Were Coming.” Giberson notes that “capabilities like vision and intelligence are so valuable to organisms that many, if not most biologists believe they would probably arise under any normal evolutionary process…. So how can evolution be entirely random, if certain sophisticated end points are predictable?”

Reading this, many biologists will wonder how he can be so sure. After all, evolution is a contingent process. The way natural selection molds a species depends on unpredictable changes in climate, on random physical events such as meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions, on the occurrence of rare and random mutations, and on which species happen to be lucky enough to survive a mass extinction. If, for example, a large meteor had not struck Earth sixty-five million years ago, contributing to the extinction of the dinosaurs–and to the rise of the mammals they previously dominated–all mammals would probably still be small nocturnal insectivores, munching on crickets in the twilight.

Evolutionists long ago abandoned the notion that there is an inevitable evolutionary march toward greater complexity, a march that culminated in humans. Yes, the average complexity of all species has increased over the three-and-a-half billion years of evolution, but that is because life started out as a simple replicating molecule, and the only way to go from there is to become more complex. But now complexity is not always favored by natural selection. If you are a parasite, for instance, natural selection may make you less complex, because you can live off the exertions of another species. Tapeworms evolved from free-living worms, and during their evolution have lost their digestive system, their nervous system, and much of their reproductive apparatus. As I tell my students, they have become just absorptive bags of gonads, much like the students themselves. Yet tapeworms are superbly adapted for a parasitic way of life. It does not always pay to be smarter, either. For some years I had a pet skunk, who was lovable but dim. I mentioned this to my vet, who put me in my place: “Stupid? Hell, he’s perfectly adapted for being a skunk!” Intelligence comes with a cost: you need to produce and to carry that extra brain matter, and to crank up your metabolism to support it. And sometimes this cost exceeds the genetic payoff. A smarter skunk might not be a fitter skunk.

To support the inevitability of humans, Giberson and Miller invoke the notion of evolutionary convergence. This idea is simple: species often adapt to similar environments by independently evolving similar features. Ichthyosaurs (ancient marine reptiles), porpoises, and fish all evolved independently in the water, and through natural selection all three acquired fins and a similar streamlined shape. Complex “camera eyes” evolved in both vertebrates and squid. Arctic animals such as polar bears, arctic hares, and snowy owls either are white or turn white in the winter, hiding them from predators or prey. Perhaps the most astonishing example of convergence is the similarity between some species of marsupial mammals in Australia and unrelated placental mammals that live elsewhere. The marsupial flying phalanger looks and acts just like the flying squirrel of the New World. Marsupial moles, with their reduced eyes and big burrowing claws, are dead ringers for our placental moles. Until its extinction in 1936, the remarkable thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf, looked and hunted like a placental wolf.

Convergence tells us something deep about evolution. There must be preexisting “niches,” or ways of life, that call up similar evolutionary changes in unrelated species that adapt to them. That is, starting with different ancestors and fuelled by different mutations, natural selection can nonetheless mold bodies in very similar ways–so long as those changes improve survival and reproduction. There were niches in the sea for fish-eating mammals and reptiles, so porpoises and ichthyosaurs became streamlined. Animals in the Arctic improve their survival if they are white in the winter. And there must obviously be a niche for a small omnivorous mammal that glides from tree to tree. Convergence is one of the most impressive features of evolution, and it is common: there are hundreds of cases.

All it takes to argue for the inevitability of humanoids, then, is to claim that there was a “humanoid niche”–a way of life that required high intelligence and sophisticated self-consciousness–and that this niche remained unfilled until inevitably invaded by human ancestors. But was its occupation really inevitable? Miller is confident that it was:

“But as life re-explored adaptive space, could we be certain that our niche would not be occupied? I would argue that we could be almost certain that it would be–that eventually evolution would produce an intelligent, self-aware, reflective creature endowed with a nervous system large enough to solve the very same questions we have, and capable of discovering the very process that produced it, the process of evolution…. Everything we know about evolution suggests that it could, sooner or later, get to that niche.”

Miller and Giberson are forced to this view for a simple reason. If we cannot prove that humanoid evolution was inevitable, then the reconciliation of evolution and Christianity collapses. For if we really were the special object of God’s creation, our evolution could not have been left to chance. (It may not be irrelevant that although the Catholic Church accepts most of Darwinism, it makes an official exception for the evolution of Homo sapiens, whose soul is said to have been created by God and inserted at some point into the human lineage.)

The difficulty is that most scientists do not share Miller’s certainty. This is because evolution is not a repeatable experiment. We cannot replay the tape of life over and over to see if higher consciousness always crops up. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking that the evolution of humanoids was not only not inevitable, but was a priori improbable. Although convergences are striking features of evolution, there are at least as many failures of convergence. These failures are less striking because they involve species that are missing. Consider Australia again. Many types of mammals that evolved elsewhere have no equivalents among marsupials. There is no marsupial counterpart to a bat (that is, a flying mammal), or to giraffes and elephants (large mammals with long necks or noses that can browse on the leaves of trees). Most tellingly, Australia evolved no counterpart to primates, or any creature with primate-like intelligence. In fact, Australia has many unfilled niches–and hence many unfulfilled convergences, including that prized “humanoid” niche. If high intelligence was such a predictable result of evolution, why did it not evolve in Australia? Why did it arise only once, in Africa?

This raises another question. We recognize convergences because unrelated species evolve similar traits. In other words, the traits appear in more than one species. But sophisticated, self-aware intelligence is a singleton: it evolved just once, in a human ancestor. (Octopi and dolphins are also smart, but they do not have the stuff to reflect on their origins.) In contrast, eyes have evolved independently forty times, and white color in Arctic animals appeared several times. It is hard to make a convincing case for the evolutionary inevitability of a feature that arose only once. The elephant’s trunk, a complex and sophisticated adaptation (it has over forty thousand muscles!), is also an evolutionary singleton. Yet you do not hear scientists arguing that evolution would inevitably fill the “elephant niche.” Giberson and Miller proclaim the inevitability of humanoids for one reason only: Christianity demands it.

Finally, it is abundantly clear that the evolution of human intelligence was a contingent event: contingent on the drying out of the African forest and the development of grasslands, which enabled apes to leave the trees and walk on two legs. Indeed, to maintain that the evolution of humans was inevitable, you must also maintain that the evolution of apes was inevitable, that the evolution of primates was inevitable, that the rise of mammals was inevitable, and so on back through dozens of ancestors, all of whose appearances must be seen as inevitable. This produces a regress of increasing unlikelihood. In the end, the question of whether human-like creatures were inevitable can be answered only by admitting that we do not know–and adding that most scientific evidence suggests that they were not. Any other answer involves either wishful thinking or theology.

Miller opts for theology. Although his new book does not say how God ensured the arrival of Homo sapiens, Miller was more explicit in Finding Darwin’s God. There he suggested that the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics allows God to intervene at the level of atoms, influencing events on a larger scale:

“The indeterminate nature of quantum events would allow a clever and subtle God to influence events in ways that are profound, but scientifically undetectable to us. Those events could include the appearance of mutations, the activation of individual neurons in the brain, and even the survival of individual cells and organisms affected by the chance processes of radioactive decay.”

In other words, God is a Mover of Electrons, deliberately keeping his incursions into nature so subtle that they’re invisible. It is baffling that Miller, who comes up with the most technically astute arguments against irreducible complexity, can in the end wind up touting God’s micro-editing of DNA. This argument is in fact identical to that of Michael Behe, the ID advocate against whom Miller testified in the Harrisburg trial. It is another God-of-the-gaps argument, except that this time the gaps are tiny.

Obviously, given that higher intelligence and rationality of the human type has evolved only once, the existence of convergence says nothing about whether these features would always appear.  In fact, the one-offness seems to imply otherwise.

What bothers me about this is, of course, that BioLogos is using the imprimatur of science (and the wonky ideas of Simon Conway Morris) to try to convince people that of course our evolution was inevitable.  This tactic is a favorite of BioLogos (and Templeton), for it tries to blur the boundaries between science and faith.  As scientists we can say nothing about the inevitability of humans except that it seems unlikely given its unique appearance.  Certainly one can say that the idea of evolutionary convergence is irrelevant here.

Please, BioLogos, stop making scientific arguments for God!

More on Dick Lewontin and WEIT: what’s the deal with natural selection?

May 12, 2009 • 6:58 am

Several days ago I called attention to Richard Lewontin’s review of WEIT and several other books in The New York Review of Books.  In it, Dick (excuse the informality, but he was my Ph.D advisor) praises the book but takes me to task for implying that the evidence for natural selection is as strong as the evidence for evolutionary change per se:

Where he is less successful, as all other commentators have been, is in his insistence that the evidence for natural selection as the driving force of evolution is of the same inferential strength as the evidence that evolution has occurred. So, for example, he gives the game away by writing that when we examine a sequence of changes in the fossil record, we can

“determine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation.”

But to say that some example is not falsification of a theory because we can always “find” (invent) a feasible explanation says more about the flexibility of the theory and the ingenuity of its supporters than it says about physical nature. Indeed in his later discussion of theories of behavioral evolution he becomes appropriately skeptical when he writes that

“imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories.”

While this is a perfectly good argument against those who claim that there are things that are so complex that evolutionary biology cannot explain them, it allows evolutionary “theory” to fall back into the category of being reasonable but not an incontrovertible material fact.

There is, of course, nothing that Coyne can do about the situation. There are different modes of “knowing,” and we “know” that evolution has, in fact, occurred in a stronger sense than we “know” that some sequence of evolutionary change has been the result of natural selection. Despite these misgivings, it is the case that Coyne’s book is the best general explication of evolution that I know of and deserves its success as a best seller.

This “critique” has been picked up by several bloggers (see below), and I want to respond in a bit more detail.

First of all, yes, it’s true that the evidence for natural selection as the cause of most evolutionary change in the past is not as strong as the evidence that evolutionary change occurred.  It cannot be otherwise.  We can see evolution happening in the fossil record, but it is infinitely harder to parse out the causes of that change.   We weren’t around when it occurred, so we must rely on inference.  This difficulty is one reason why it took biologists much longer to accept natural selection than to accept evolution.   But to say that the evidence for selection is weaker than for evolution does not mean that the evidence for natural selection is weak, a conclusion I fear that creationists will extract from Lewontin’s comment.

Here is why selection still seems the best hypothesis for the origin of adaptive features of organisms.

1.  It is the only scientific theory, among all of those that have been adumbrated, that currently makes sense.  Failed explanations include teleology, intelligent design, and Lamarckism.  Some of these were once valid scientific alternatives to natural selection, but have failed either because they are untestable or because they were testable and shown to be wrong. If Lewontin and others want to say that some process other than selection is responsible for the limbs of tetrapods, the fins of whales, and the white color of polar bears, they must say what they envision.  Yes, Lewontin and Gould showed that many things for which we can concoct adaptive stories may be “spandrels” — nonadaptive traits hitchhiking on other adaptations — but this does not mean, as Lewontin seems to imply, that selection may not play a major role in creating adaptations.

2.  In cases where we can actually investigate whether selection is responsible for an adaptive change in a species, it is.  I give several examples in WEIT, including coat colors in mice and the famous work of Rosemary and Peter Grant on Darwin’s finches. And of course there are those dozens of cases of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, insecticide resistance in arthropods, and herbicide resistance in weeds.  In bacteria, for instance, we can show that the genetic variation for resistance preexisted in the population and not invoked by the selective agent, precisely as the theory of natural selection posits.

3.   In tests where we envision that selection was responsible for an adaptation, we can do laboratory tests to see if the adaptation at least gives a fitness advantage to those individuals possessing it.  One example of this is the Browers’ work on Batesian mimicry in the viceroy butterfly.  It was shown that exposure to a toxic monarch made naive bluejays sick, and that later these bluejays avoided the nontoxic viceroys, giving a survial advantage to mimics.  This is precisely what has to happen for that mimicry to evolve by natural selection.  Likewise with color in guppies:  brightly colored guppies get eaten more often in Trinidadian streams than do their duller confreres.  This explains why guppies are less colorful in predator-filled streams.

4.  The prerequisites for selection — the heritability of traits, the fact that there is competition between individuals, and that there are fitness differences between individuals with different traits — have all been demonstrated in living organisms in nature.  If few traits showed any heritable genetic variation, we’d be justified in rejecting selection as a major cause of evolution. Guppy coloration is heritable.

5.   Even in ancient species we can test the likelihood that selection caused evolutionary change.  Horses lost their toes right about the time when the forests were disappearing on the Great Plains.  We know that hooves are more effective adaptations for running in open grassland than are multi-toed feet. Likewise, horse teeth become higher and more robust precisely when silicon-rich grasses were replacing the leafy forests.  We know that herbivores need higher and more robust teeth to deal with grass. It is a good inference that the appearance of grassland was the selective factor promoting the loss of horse toes and the change in horse teeth.

6.  As discussed in previous posts, selection as we envision it has certainly been adequate to explain the evolution of complex adaptations like the eye, and in geologically reasonable periods of time.  Therefore it remains a viable hypothesis for adaptive change. This didn’t have to be the way it turned out.

What about my supposed double standard about accepting natural selection for many traits but being skeptical when it comes to evolutionary psychology?  This is a reasonable tactic for one important reason: we have many more alternative theories for the appearance of human behavioral traits than we do for morphological adaptations in other species.  How many alternative theories do we have for the appearance of flippers in proto-whales, or for the movement of their nasal passages to the top of their heads?  In contrast, there are many alternative theories for the appearance of traits like human rape, depression, music, art, religion, etc.  Blowholes aren’t likely to be spandrels; the appearance of music and poetry might well be.  Humans have culture and rationality to a degree possessed by no other animal, and can learn many things not permitted in species having smaller (or no) brains.   That’s why we need to be more cautious about imputing selection to human behaviors than to blowholes.

Now I think Dick did have a point: I should have pointed out (though I might have; I can’t remember!) that it is a lot easier to come up with evidence for evolution than for selection.  But I think Lewontin’s own anti-selectionist biases are intruding here. As I mentioned in an earlier post on ideological grounds neither he nor Gould were ever very strong promoters of selection. I’m not sure what the connection is between selection and politics (it may be the misuse of selectionism that Gould and Lewontin saw among sociobiologists), but neither of these chaps were avid promoters of selection.  They preferred to emphasize other processes, including pleiotropy, spandrels, genetic drift and the like. I think this was a deliberate strategy.

Over on EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse analyzes Dick’s review and has some good comments:

I don’t understand what it means to say that “natural selection is the driving force of evolution.” Given Lewontin’s past writing (most notably his spandrels paper with Stephen Jay Gould) I would guess that his point is that some biologists are too quick to attribute some anatomical feature of some organism to the prolonged working of natural selection.

That may be true, but when we are talking about adaptations the evidence for natural selection seems to me to be very strong. For one thing, it is the only natural mechanism known that can account for complex structures (like bird wings or vertebrate blood clotting systems). For another, every complex structure studied to date shows clear evidence of being a cobbled together Rube Goldberg machine, which is exactly what we would expect if they were crafted by natural selection.

On top of this, biologists routinely use adaptive reasoning to generate testable hypotheses about the creatures they are studying. Lewontin would know better than I whether biologists engaging in flights of fancy is a genuine problem in the field, but it is undeniable that “the adaptationist program” has yielded great dividends over the years . . .

. . In fairness, I think Stephen Jay Gould was pretty clear on this point [the ubiquity and importance of selection] in several of his essays. I compiled some of his statements on the matter in this essay. But I share Coyne’s frustration. I’ve never really understood what it is exactly that anti-selectionists are complaining about. If they agree that complex adapations arise as the result of gradual accretion mediated by natural selection, then I fail to see how they are really so different from people like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett (two people often described as being beknighted uber-selectionists). If they do not agree then I would like to hear their proposed alternative mechanism.

Now I have great affection for Lewontin (as all of his students say, “I love that man”), but I would like to see him make an explicit statement about what aspects of nature he imputes to natural selection.  We’re not just talking about rape, male domination, and music here, but coat colors, physiology, feathers, gills, flowers, toxins, and the like.  Like Jason, I think the anti-selectionists have gone way, way overboard, and have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.  (These people also include the “structuralists,” and those who attribute adaptations to the self-organizing properties of biological matter.)

Online radio interview with Dr. Alvin Augustus Jones

May 11, 2009 • 7:47 am

My interview about evolution and WEIT with Dr. Alvin Jones at The Paradise Radio Network on WCBQ-AM (North Carolina) is now online.

Dr. Jones is a religious guy, and told me before we went on the air that he didn’t accept evolution. I have to say, though, that on the air he was absolutely polite and let me present my case without too much dissent.  A pleasurable experience.

Teacher sanctioned for calling creationism what it is

May 11, 2009 • 6:12 am

Meet James Corbett, the teacher who was sanctioned for calling creationism “religious superstitious nonsense” in his California classroom.  Apparently he was up on 20 counts of violating the first amendment by gratuitously insulting religion (a student taped him secretly).  The teacher was found mostly not guilty, with one exception: the creationist comment.

This is very strange, as many of the other comments he made (link also connects to the judge’s ruling) are much more clearly gratuitious and unacceptable insults to religious views, including this epiphet from Mark Twain: “Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.”  Here’s the relevant part of the judge’s decision:

The Court turns first to Corbett’s statement regarding John Peloza … This statement presents the closest question for the Court in assessing secular purpose. Peloza apparently brought suit against Corbett because Corbett was the advisor to a student newspaper which ran an article suggesting that Peloza was teaching religion rather than science in his classroom. … Corbett explained to his class that Peloza, a teacher, “was not telling the kids [Peloza’s students] the scientific truth about evolution.” … Corbett also told his students that, in response to a request to give Peloza space in the newspaper to present his point of view, Corbett stated, “I will not leave John Peloza alone to propagandize kids with this religious, superstitious nonsense.” … One could argue that Corbett meant that Peloza should not be presenting his religious ideas to students or that Peloza was presenting faulty science to the students. But there is more to the statement: Corbett states an unequivocal belief that creationism is “superstitious nonsense.” The Court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement, even when considered in context. The statement therefore constitutes improper disapproval of religion in violation of the Establishment Clause.

What bothers me is that Judge Jones said something essentially identical to what Corbett said in his ruling on the Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover et al. case — in a Federal courtroom.  Why wasn’t that pronouncement a violation of the Establishmenbt Clause?

I do believe in preserving religious liberty and avoiding promoting one religion over another — or deriding religions with a political purpose — in the public schools, but in this case it’s not that clear.  Here is some disagreement with the ruling by  Eugene Volokh (scroll down that page to see his analysis):

Establishment Clause Violation for Public High School Teacher To Call Creationism “Superstitious Nonsense”:

So holds C.F. v. Capistrano Unified School Dist., decided Friday. I understand the logic of the case — the Court has repeatedly said that the government’s disapproving of religion is as unconstitutional as the government’s endorsing religion, and the district court decision tries to implement that. But it seems to me that this just helps illustrate the difficulties posed by the endorsement test.

To begin with, the court concludes that it “cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in [the] statement,” applying the Lemon test’s “secular purpose” prong. But I would think the legitimate secular purpose is clear: The speaker is trying to get students to accept the theory of evolution, which he believes to be much more conducive to scientific thinking, and much more likely to produce useful results, than creationism. That’s a perfectly secular purpose. To be sure, it’s a purpose that is accomplished using the means of deriding religion. But that doesn’t stop the purpose (promoting belief in a scientific theory that the speaker thinks is sound, useful, and conducive to scientific thinking) from being secular. . .

. . .I say it again: The court may have been quite right as a matter of existing doctrine, and if we are going to say that public institutions can’t advocate in favor of creationism, it makes sense for the doctrine — which has been defended by claims of symmetry, such as that the government may neither endorse nor disapprove of religion, may neither advance nor inhibit religion, and may neither show favoritism nor hostility — to also bar statements that creationism is superstitious nonsense. But the result is either that (1) teachers can’t condemn voodoo, astrology, young-Earthism, and so on as the bunk that they are, (2) courts have to draw lines between which religious beliefs may be disapproved of and which may not be, or (3) teachers are even more at see about what they are constitutionally barred from saying than we’ve seen from past endorsement cases.

The whole issue is hashed out by readers over at The Panda’s Thumb.

But read the interview with Corbett, and see if you don’t think that he’s a good teacher, the kind you’d like your kids to have.   And he hardly seems to be a raving atheist:

Q. People have accused you of being anti-Christian. What are your personal religious convictions?

A. The most important words ever spoken are: “Love your neighbors as yourself,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and “Judge not, lest you be judged.” We hear those words from a lot of religions. That’s what I believe – that’s the core of it. I’m eclectic with religion. I was baptized Catholic and have worn a Celtic cross around my neck for the past 50 years. Right now, I’d call myself a smorgasbord Catholic. Occasionally, I go to a church on holidays. And I often stand behind the curtains at Crossline Church (a nondenominational Christian church that meets at Capistrano Valley High on Sundays) and listen to the sermon. They are intellectually stimulating, and they can often provide you with a perspective on major issues of the day. I like to hear what anybody has to say.

BioLogos Foundation’s “suggested reading”

May 10, 2009 • 11:01 am

Francis Collins’s accommodationist website BioLogos, funded by our friends at The Templeton Foundation, features this book prominently on their website:

Lamoreauyx

All well and good, until you get to the publisher’s description:

“In this thought-provoking book, born-again Christian Denis O. Lamoureux argues that the God of the Bible created the universe and life through evolution—an ordained, sustained, and design-reflecting natural process. In other words, evolution is not the result of blind chance and our creation is not a mistake. Lamoureux challenges the popular assumption that God disclosed scientific facts in the opening chapters of Scripture thousands of years before their discovery by modern science. He contends that in the same way the Lord meets us wherever we happen to be in our lives, the Holy Spirit came down to the level of the inspired biblical writers and used their ancient understanding of origins in order to reveal inerrant, life-changing Messages of Faith. Lamoureux also shares his personal story and struggle in coming to terms with evolution and Christianity.”
– Wipf and Stock Publishers

Sounds like directed evolution to me: “ordained and design-reflecting”.  This is supported by the thesis of Lamoureux’s earlier book Evolutionary Creation, which is described on his own website as follows:

“Evolutionary creation claims the Father, Son and Holy Spirit created the universe and life through an evolutionary process. This position fully embraces both the religious beliefs of conservative Christianity and the scientific theories of cosmological, geological and biological evolution. It contends that God ordains and sustains the laws of nature, including the mechanisms of evolution. More specifically, evolution is ‘teleological,’ and features plan, purpose and promise. In particular, this view of origins asserts that humanity evolved from primate ancestors, and during this natural process the Image of God arose and sin entered the world. Evolutionary creationists experience God’s presence and action in their lives. They contend that the Lord meets men and women in a personal relationship, which at times involves both dramatic and subtle miraculous signs and wonders.”

Walks and quacks like creationism. . Do Collins and Templeton really want to be in bed with this kind of person?When are Collins and his minions going to realize that this is CREATIONISM and not the theory of evolution as it is is understood by scientists?  An evolutionary process that is guided, and aimed at evolving specific species, is a form of supernaturalism.  Darwin himself recognized this in a letter to the geologist Charles Lyell:

I entirely reject, as in my judgment quite unnecessary, any subsequent addition ‘of new powers and attributes and forces,’ or of any ‘principle of improvement’, except in so far as every character which is naturally selected or preserved is in some way an advantage or improvement, otherwise it would not have been selected. If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish. . . I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

Templeton claims it will have no truck with creationism or intelligent design, but that is precisely what is being promoted on BioLogos’s website.   More blurring of the boundaries between faith and science, but of course that is Templeton’s (and Collins’s) agenda.  Dr. Collins is a scientist, and should know better.  And I wish that Templeton would keep its prosperous paws away from evolutionary biology — they always muck it up!


Another child killed by religion

May 10, 2009 • 6:35 am

It’s chilling: this report in the January 20 New York Times details the death of an 11-year-old girl, Kara Neumann, who died from diabetes because her parents refused medical care, believing that prayer would heal her.  They are going on trial next week.

But what is even more chilling are these two facts (verbatim from the article):

1.  About 300 children have died in the United States in the last 25 years after medical care was withheld on religious grounds, said Rita Swan, executive director of Children’s Health Care Is a Legal Duty, a group based in Iowa that advocates punishment for parents who do not seek medical help when their children need it.

and

2.  Criminal codes in 30 states, including Wisconsin, provide some form of protection for practitioners of faith healing in cases of child neglect and other matters, protection that Ms. Swan’s group opposes.  (See Wendell’s comment below for an explanation of how this works in Tennessee.)

I’m not sure exactly what “forms of protection” are involved here, but any protection is too much. So it’s ok to kill your kid by withholding treatment, but not through more intentional abuse?   One child dead is too many; three hundred is a national tragedy.  (The Times describes several other horrifying cases.) This would not have happened in a secular society, for there would  be no reason to withhold medical care.

As Steven Weinberg said in a quote I gave yesterday:  “for good people to do evil — that takes religion.”

If you’d like to read more about this issue, The Times mentions this book by Shawn Peters:  When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children and the Law (Oxford, 2007).

Child doomed by religious faith

May 9, 2009 • 10:33 am

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.

–Steven Weinberg


No conflict between science and religion, you say?  Have a look at this article from the Minneapolist StarTribune.  Thirteen-year old Daniel Hauser, whose parents are Catholics but adhere to the healing practices of “the Nemenhah religious group” (this appears to be a Native American religion that believes in spiritual and herbal healing) decided that he didn’t want treatment for his Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Instead, he wants herbal treatments, and his parents are supporting him.  With chemotherapy, the cure rate is very high; doctors say that without it his survival probability is 5%.

The Hausers are in court:

Colleen and Anthony Hauser are in a legal battle with Brown County, where authorities are accusing the parents of child neglect and endangerment. After Daniel stopped chemotherapy after a single treatment, opting instead for “alternative medicines,” child protection workers went to court requesting custody.

Doctors had recommended six chemo treatments, followed by radiation. Dr. Bruce Bostrom, a pediatric oncologist at Childrens Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota and Daniel’s treating physician, on Friday estimated the risk of death from forgoing treatment at about 95 percent. And he testified that Daniel’s tumor had grown since he underwent one chemotherapy treatment in February.

“What is the ultimate outcome of that process?” Tom Sinas, an attorney for the guardian ad litem, asked of the tumor’s growth.

“Death,” Bostrom replied.

The StarTribune report goes on:

The Hausers declined to speak to reporters after Friday’s court session. But Dan Zwakman, a member of the Nemenhah religious group to which they belong, acted as the family spokesman. He argued that this is a case about religious freedom, noting that the group’s motto is “our religion is our medicine.”

. . . Earlier in the day, Dr. Bruce Bostrom of Children’s Hospitals and Clinics, who first diagnosed the cancer when the boy arrived at a Minneapolis emergency room in January, said Daniel has a 95 percent chance of survival if he receives chemotherapy.

Bostrom also said he believes Daniel does not fully understand his condition.

“I think that he understands that he was sick,” Bostrom testified. “He doesn’t understand that the Hodgkin’s is what’s making him sick, and he was led to believe that the chemotherapy was making him sick, when the exact opposite was true.”

“Religious freedom” is not the freedom to kill a child through withholding science-based medicine.  A 13-year-old child, perhaps brainwashed by his parents, simply cannot make this decision for himself.   This is a life-or-death conflict between science, which can save the child, and religion, which is killing him.   No conflict here? What would Francis Collins say?

(Thanks to P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula for calling this to my attention.  He has a post on this incident.)