Francis Collins sees God in quantum mechanics

May 7, 2009 • 2:32 pm

Over at New Scientist, Andy Coghlan takes on BioLogos (Francis Collins’s new accommodationist website), and its theistic assertion that God can act through the “uncertainties” in quantum mechanics. (This is also an argument made by Kenneth Miller in Finding Darwin’s God.) Coghlan quotes BioLogos and then dismantles the argument:

“With quantum mechanical uncertainty and the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems,” Collins writes, “the world is now understood to have a certain freedom in its future development.”

This means, he goes on:

“It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognisable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law-breaking miracles,” says Collins.

“Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude God’s action in the world. Our perception of the world opens once again to the possibility of divine interaction.”

So, because God somehow tinkers in a quantumy type way, it’s worth praying for divine guidance and intervention. To me, and to other scientists and commentators, Collins is straying into pseudo-scientific speculation simply to keep God in the earthly frame. Believing in God in the first place is by definition a leap of faith, and one that many scientists and many non-scientists are, after careful and reasonable thought, unwilling to take. For those who have trouble accepting that we’re a product of pure chance, there is the option of believing that God set everything in motion.

Larry Moran brings up the same issue over at Sandwalk. This is precisely the problem of strenuous accommodationism as typified by Collins’s website. It just can’t help insinuating itself into real science.  It is embarrassing to see a scientist straying into this kind of territory, and it smacks of desperation.

Hobbits are back, and they’re REAL!

May 7, 2009 • 1:11 pm

I’ve written quite a bit about the Homo floresiensis controversy: these are the small (1-meter tall) individuals whose remains were found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, originally dated about 18,000 years old.  They are remarkable because of their size, their small brains (about the size of a chimp’s) and their remarkably recent age — a time when the much taller and brainier Homo sapiens had already infested the world.  But there was doubt about whether these diminuitive fossils represented a real species: some people thought that the one relatively complete skull represented a diseased or microcephalic individual.

Two papers in the latest issue of Nature (links below) address this controversy, and both come down on the side of H. floresiensis being a real species, not an aberration. (There’s also a very nice two-page summary by Daniel Lieberman if you don’t want to plow through the articles.)  More bones have been found in the Liang Bua cave on Flores (see below), most notably a pretty complete foot.  The foot, like the rest of the skeleton, shows an intriguing mixture of primitive and derived traits.  There are now enough bones to pretty much rule out the “aberrant individual” theory.

So what was H. floresiensis?  As the diagram below shows, it could have been a descendant of an earlier hominin species, H. habilis, or perhaps a very early form of H. erectus; in both cases it would have had to reach the island several million years ago.  Yet the brains of these two ancestors were larger than that of the hobbit, so how did it get such a small titer of gray matter? (Hobbit brains were about 400 cc in volume, the size of a modern chimp or of the smallest australopithecines.)  Here the notable dwarfism of many species on islands (including elephants on Flores) comes in: like other mammal species, H. floresiensis could simply be an evolutionarily dwarfed form of an earlier hominin. Weston and Lister’s paper gives relevant data taken, oddly enough, from dwarf hippos on Madagascar , but I’ll leave you to follow their reasoning in their article.

This is perhaps the most bizarre and interesting twist in hominin evolution yet, and it’s completely unsettled.  A whole new group of questions open up.   How did this weird species coexist with the much larger and brainier H. sapiens for so long?  (H. floresiensis was not dumb, by the way: they managed to colonize the island over water and made fairly sophisticated tools).  If hobbits are a remnant of the H. habilis lineage, how come we don’t find habilis fossils elsewhere outside of Africa?

The foot of Homo floresiensis.   W. L. Jungers, W. E. H. Harcourt-Smith, R. E. Wunderlich, M. W. Tocheri, S. G. Larson, T. Sutikna, Rhokus Awe Due & M. J. Morwood

Insular dwarfism in hippos and a model for brain size reduction in Homo floresiensis. E. M. Weston and A. M. Lister

________________________________________________________________________________

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Ling Bua cave on Flores: where the hobbits were found.  Photograph by C. Turney, University of Wollongong

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Homo floresiensis might be most closely related to early H. erectus, but also shows potential affinities with H. habilis. In either case, recognizing H. floresiensis as a species will require us to re-examine how we define species of the genus Homo and how they were related to each other. Reasonably well-known relationships are indicated by solid arrows; less secure relationships are indicated by dotted arrows. Broken vertical bars indicate uncertainties about when species evolved or went extinct. (Figure and caption from Lieberman’s summary.)

World Science Festival Redux

May 7, 2009 • 6:41 am

The people at the World Science Festival have asked me to publish their response to a number of us who expressed concern about their support from The Templeton Foundation and their inclusion of a program to discuss/harmonize faith and science.  In the interest of fairness, here is their letter.  I will again post my regretful decision to withdraw from their invitation to discuss science and faith, and then their response to that, and my final response.  This may not be of interest to most people, but they want it on the record.

Three points first:

1.  I have enormous admiration for Brian Greene and his staff for organizing this festival, whose purpose is to acquaint the public with the wonders of science.  What better thing could a scientist do?  What’s more, it’s an altruistic act: Greene has little to gain professionally from doing this; he’s doing it because the payoff in terms of arousing interest and participation in science is potentially enormous.   My only beef about the Festival is that they insist on dragging religion into it, and to imply on their website that faith and science can be reconciled.  I just couldn’t be part of that endeavor.

2.  I still cannot understand what these “conversations” about faith and science are supposed to accomplish.  Surely religious people are not going to convince us scientists to somehow change our methods, or to become religious if we’re not.  Ergo, we scientists don’t stand to benefit from these dialogues. Perhaps we can come to a better understanding of why people are religious, but that won’t change our feelings that their beliefs are mere superstititions.  Nor do religious people stand to benefit:  as I said yesterday, all we can do to help them is to tell the faithful about our latest discoveries, which, if these findings contradict their scripture or dogma, gives them the chance to go back and tinker with their theology so it doesn’t conflict too badly with science.  But we don’t need public dialogues to accomplish that:  “Hey, pastor, we’ve found a transitional form between land animals and seals!”  The faithful have other ways of finding this stuff out, like learning about science from reading or going to secular science festivals.

3.  If anyone doubts that the Templeton Foundation’s implicit goal is to blur the lines between science and religion in a way that is inimical to science, I urge you to have a look at their website, especially their big prizes.  And have a look at the “Epiphany Prize” for inspiring t.v. and movie presentations. They gave one to The Passion of the Christ, for crying out loud!   Note the emphasis on Christian religion and the absence of anything else.  Check out all the other prizes for religious “advances.”  And read science writer John Horgan’s piece on how he felt co-opted by Templeton money. This is clearly a foundation with a mission. But scientists tend to avoid criticizing the Foundation because they give us so damn much money!

In the end, all these dialogues can do is make the participants walk away thinking, “Aren’t we fine fellows?  We’ve engaged the other side.  And maybe they were pretty good fellows too.”  But nothing substantive is accomplished. As for the listeners, well, these are like debates between creationists and evolutionists.  (Most scientists now recognize that these latter debates are futile.) There is simply no time to cover substantive points, and each side is preaching to its choir anyway.   As Steven Weinberg said, “I’m in favor of a dialogue between faith and science, but not a constructive dialogue.”  I would go further and say that there’s really not much point in any dialogue or “conversation.”  Let us publish and speak about our side; let them publish and speak about theirs separately.  Eventually a winner will emerge. Indeed, it’s emerging now, as the proportion of nonbelievers rises in our country. I have no doubt that, within a century or so, this country will become as secular as Europe is now.

o.k.  On to the letters, given in chronological order.  The first is from Brian Greene and  Tracy Day co-founder and Executive Director of the Science Festival. They wrote it to several of us who had expressed concern about the “religion/science” dialogue and the Templeton involvement:

Dear _____, ______, and Jerry

We’ve just become aware of the email exchange regarding the WSF.

Two issues are being raised. We respond to each in turn.

First: Regarding the Festival’s sponsors.

The World Science Festival produces programs according to the strictest standards of editorial integrity. The Festival’s lead producers are among the most respected of journalists, having between them decades of experience, and an abundance of honors and awards. (Indeed, for a recent press release we did a count: the 2008/2009 producers have between them over two dozen National News Emmy, Peabody, and Dupont Awards, and well over a hundred years of producing experience for some of the nation’s most prominent news organizations.) It goes without saying—but for clarity’s sake we shall say it anyway—that in keeping with standard journalistic practices, the World Science Festival does not accept financial contributions that come with any expectation or stipulation for participation in editorial decision-making. And just so it’s clear that this is not a platitude, we’ll note that the Festival has turned down sponsorship opportunities, some quite substantial, because the sponsor sought to blur the Festival’s requirement of a sharp and inviolable distinction between financial support and editorial control. All of the Festival’s sponsors respect this distinction fully.

Second: Regarding the appropriateness of having a Science and Faith program at the Festival.

We feel strongly that it is thoroughly and completely appropriate for the World Science Festival to have a program focusing on Science, Faith, and Religion. We conceived the World Science Festival as an annual gathering that would take science out of the classroom—where for far too long it has been consigned—and allow the general public to immerse itself in this most wondrous and insightful of human undertakings. In short, the Festival is seeking to shift the public’s perception of science as an isolated, esoteric body of knowledge to the recognition that not only is science everywhere, but science has the capacity to deeply inform one’s worldview.

As such, the Festival has programs that not only focus on the content of science traditionally defined, but programs that seek to illuminate how science interfaces with other disciplines and outlooks. We’ve had dance programs interpreting unified theories through choreography and music, plays seeking the human saga paralleling great scientific discoveries, debates focused on policy implications of scientific developments and breakthroughs, readings and discussions of literature influenced by science, among many other forays into ‘non-scientific’ disciplines. For the Festival to have programs exploring the art-science relationship, the government-science relationship, the business-science relationship, the literature-science relationship, and yet to willfully ignore the prominent and tumultuous religion-science relationship would be a strange and, dare we say, cowardly omission.

If there is an opportunity for compelling discourse with the capacity to yield a deeper understanding of scientific thinking, its role in exposing the nature of reality and humankind’s place within it, then there’s room for such a program in our Festival.

With all best wishes,

Tracy Day

Co-Founder/Executive Director

World Science Festival

Brian Greene

Co-Founder/Chairman

World Science Festival

Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Physics Columbia University

She then sent me a personal email:

Dear Jerry,

I hope our earlier email regarding the Science and Religion program in the 2009 World Science Festival provides clarity on why we consider the program not only appropriate, but also relevant and important. I’m writing separately to emphasize how much we’d value your participation in this program, and the enthusiasm with which the invitation is offered. I’d be happy to discuss any of the issues in greater detail, if you think that might be of use. Looking forward to your response.

With best wishes,

Tracy Day

I then responded, withdrawing from the Festival. (This was the email published yesterday).

Dear Tracy,

After much discussion with my colleagues, and some soul-searching, I am going to have to decline with great regret your kind invitation to speak at the World Science Festival.   I regard it as a distinct honor to have been invited, and under normal circumstances would not have hesitated to accept.  But two things have forced me to my decision in this circumstance.

The first is that you consider faith as a topic appropriate for discussion in your Festival.  You mention that you feature programs that integrate science with dance, with public policy, with literature, and so on.  But these are quite different from religion.  Neither dance, public policy, nor literature are based on ways of looking at the world that are completely inimical to scientific investigation.  Science and religion are truly incompatible disciplines; science and literature are not.  That is, one can appreciate great literature and science without embracing any philosophical contradictions, but one cannot do this with religion (unless that religion is a watered down-deism that precludes any direct involvement of a deity in the world).  This incompatibility was the topic of my article in The New Republic.  Similarly, homeopathy and modern medicine are philosophically and materially contradictory.  It would be just as inappropriate to offer a discussion of homeopathy versus modern medicne.

You go on to say that,

“If there is an opportunity for compelling discourse with the capacity to yield a deeper understanding of scientific thinking, its role in exposing the nature of reality and humankind’s place within it, then there’s room for such a program in our Festival.”

But there is no such possibility in the program you propose.  How could a dialogue with religion possibly yield a deeper understanding of scientific thinking?  Such discourse would only confuse people about what scientific thinking is.  The Templeton Foundation, for example, has always sought to blur those lines!  And science’s role in “exposing the nature of reality and humankind’s place in it” has nothing to do with religion or theology.  It is a purely scientific role: to find out how the Universe works and how humans came to be.  It is telling, here, that the editorial by Brian Greene to which I was pointed–an editorial explaining to the public why science is important and exciting–said not a single word about religion.

The second consideration is that the festival is being supported by The Templeton Foundation.  I absolutely believe you when you say that there are no strings attached, and that the Foundation is not exercising any editorial judgement.  But this is not the issue.  The issue is that, by saying it sponsors the Festival, the Templeton Foundation will use its sponsorship to prove that it is engaging in serious discussion with scientists.  Like many of my colleagues, I regard Templeton as an organization whose purpose is to fuse science with religion: to show how science illuminates “the big questions” and how religion can contribute to science.  I regard this as not only fatuous, but dangerous.  Templeton likes nothing better than to corral real working scientists into its conciliatory pen.  I don’t want to be one of these.  That’s just a matter of principle.  But the “no strings” argument doesn’t wash for me, for precisely the same reason that congressmen are not supposed to take gifts from people whose legislation they could influence. It is the appearance of conflict that is at issue.

To avoid this appearance in the future, I would strongly suggest that the Festival discontinue taking money from Templeton.  That foundation is widely regarded in the scientific community as one whose mission, deliberate or not, is to corrupt science.  It doesn’t belong as a sponsor of your festival.

I am sorry to go on for so long, but I thought you deserved an explanation for my waffling, and for my decision.  I certainly support the goals of the festival and hope that it goes very well this year.

Best wishes,
Jerry Coyne

Their response, including a note to one of us who is participating in the festival:

Dear All:

_______, (one scientist who is participating in the Festival)
We’d be thrilled to have you as part of this program. We believe that the schedule will work and we’re double-checking.

Jerry,
We see that you’ve posted your response to us on your blog. We’d appreciate it if you would not just refer to our letter but post it as well so your readers can have a fuller appreciation of our position.

Many thanks and all the best,
Tracy

I was a bit distressed because I don’t think they really took my concerns seriously (at least, not as seriously as they take Templeton’s big donation!), and I wrote this final email:

Dear Tracy,

Yes, of course.  The only reason I didn’t put up your response that was because I don’t believe in posting private emails from other people without their permission (that’s why I left your name off of my reply).  I will post it tomorrow, with the names of the senders.

Just one note: looking at the history of the Templeton Foundation, I noticed that they gave the divisive and anti-Semitic movie “The Passion of the Christ” a $50,000 “Epiphany Prize” for “inspiring films and television.”  This comes perilously close to Templeton’s having endorsed anti-Semitism.  Please remember that Jews protested assiduously against this film.  Do you really want to take money from such an organization?  Judging from the reply you sent, there is nothing you can learn about Templeton that would make you rethink your decision to accept their largesse.

cordially,
Jerry

In which I refuse an invitation to the World Science Festival on grounds of accommodationism

May 6, 2009 • 7:01 am

The organizers of the World Science Festival in New York invited me to participate on a panel that would discuss the relationship between faith and science.  It was an honor to get the invitation, because this is a high-profile festival, with lots of good people and publicity, that is organized by the physicist Brian Greene in New York.  The “conversation” in which I was invited to participate included a religious evolutionist, a philosopher, and a priest/astronomer (a similar discussion was held at the Festival in 2008).  Reading last year’s description didn’t give me a very good feeling, as it smacked of accommodationism.

Prominent clashes — both historical and contemporary — have led to the widely held conclusion that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. Yet, many scientists practice a traditional faith, having found a way to accommodate both scientific inquiry and religious teaching in their belief system. Other scientists are bringing science to bear on the phenomenon of religion and spiritual belief — neuroscientists are studying what happens in the brain during religious experiences, while anthropologists are investigating how religion is linked to cooperation and community. This program provided an intimate look at what scientists have to say about their religious beliefs and what might be revealed by scientific studies of spirituality.

What was more distressing was that one of the Festival’s sponsors was The Templeton Foundation, whose implicit mission is to reconcile science and religion (and in doing so, I think, blur the boundaries between them).   I discussed this issue with some of my colleagues, and they were of mixed opinion: some thought that I should go and denounce the Templeton Foundation, or religion/science accommodationism in general (and thereby “enlighten” the public); others thought that I would be tainted by participating in a Templeton-funded conference.  In the end, I agreed with the latter group, although this wasn’t an easy decision.  I sent the following letter of regret to the organizers.

Dear ____________,

After much discussion with my colleagues, and some soul-searching, I am going to have to decline with great regret your kind invitation to speak at the World Science Festival.   I regard it as a distinct honor to have been invited, and under normal circumstances would not have hesitated to accept.  But two things have forced me to my decision in this circumstance.

The first is that you consider faith as a topic appropriate for discussion in your Festival.  You mention that you feature programs that integrate science with dance, with public policy, with literature, and so on.  But these are quite different from religion.  Neither dance, public policy, nor literature are based on ways of looking at the world that are completely inimical to scientific investigation.  Science and religion are truly incompatible disciplines; science and literature are not.  That is, one can appreciate great literature and science without embracing any philosophical contradictions, but one cannot do this with religion (unless that religion is a watered down-deism that precludes any direct involvement of a deity in the world).  This incompatibility was the topic of my article in The New Republic.  Similarly, homeopathy and modern medicine are philosophically and materially contradictory.  It would be just as inappropriate to offer a discussion of homeopathy versus modern medicne.

You go on to say that,

“If there is an opportunity for compelling discourse with the capacity to yield a deeper understanding of scientific thinking, its role in exposing the nature of reality and humankind’s place within it, then there’s room for such a program in our Festival.”

But there is no such possibility in the program you propose.  How could a dialogue with science possibly yield a deeper understanding of scientific thinking?  Such discourse would only confuse people about what scientific thinking is.  The Templeton Foundation, for example, has always sought to blur those lines!  And science’s role in “exposing the nature of reality and humankind’s place in it” has nothing to do with religion or theology.  It is a purely scientific role: to find out how the Universe works and how humans came to be.  It is telling, here, that the editorial by Brian Greene to which I was pointed–an editorial explaining to the public why science is important and exciting–said not a single word about religion.

The second consideration is that the festival is being supported by The Templeton Foundation.  I absolutely believe you when you say that there are no strings attached, and that the Foundation is not exercising any editorial judgement.  But this is not the issue.  The issue is that, by saying it sponsors the Festival, the Templeton Foundation will use its sponsorship to prove that it is engaging in serious discussion with scientists.  Like many of my colleagues, I regard Templeton as an organization whose purpose is to fuse science with religion: to show how science illuminates “the big questions” and how religion can contribute to science.  I regard this as not only fatuous, but dangerous.  Templeton likes nothing better than to corral real working scientists into its conciliatory pen.  I don’t want to be one of these.  That’s just a matter of principle.  But the “no strings” argument doesn’t wash for me, for precisely the same reason that congressmen are not supposed to take gifts from people whose legislation they could influence. It is the appearance of conflict that is at issue.

To avoid this appearance in the future, I would strongly suggest that the Festival discontinue taking money from Templeton.  That foundation is widely regarded in the scientific community as one whose mission, deliberate or not, is to corrupt science.  It doesn’t belong as a sponsor of your festival.

I am sorry to go on for so long, but I thought you deserved an explanation for my waffling, and for my decision.  I certainly support the goals of the festival and hope that it goes very well this year.

Best wishes,
Jerry Coyne

So, I ain’t going, which would have been fun, especially because E. O. Wilson will be there for an 80th birthday fete.  But I just couldn’t see myself taking money from an organization that is devoted to promulgating a futile —indeed, dangerous — dialogue between science and religion.  I can never understand what religion has to say to scientists that would improve our work or our understanding of the universe, and all we can contribute to religion are empirical discoveries that force the faithful to regroup and fine-tune their theology to accommodate the new findings.

Preserved protein from an 80-million-year old dinosaur support the dinosaurian origin of birds

May 6, 2009 • 6:16 am

In this week’s Science we find a paper by Schweitzer et al. (total of 16 authors!) that has a quite remarkable result. (See the one page summary by Robert Service here.)  The upshot is that protein-sequence data from an 80-million-year old duckbilled dinosaur supports the dinosaurian origin of birds.

This story has a bit of a tortuous background.  First of all, we’ve known for a long time that birds evolved from gracile theropod dinosaurs; the fossil and anatomical evidence is given in WEIT.  But for some folks, DNA-based data is more convincing than is the fossil record.  And molecular evidence is what Schweitzer et al. provided.

In 2007, her group published a paper purporting to show that fragments of the protein collagen (a structural protein found in blood vessels and connective tissue), taken from a 68-million-year old fossil of T. rex, showed that the protein sequence (which reflects the DNA sequence) was more similar to that of birds than to that of modern reptiles. This strongly suggests that birds evolved from a lineage of dinosaurs that had already branched off of the lineage that gave rise to modern reptiles.  This meant that birds and dinosaurs are each other’s closest relatives compared to say, turtles or iguanas. In fact, many systematists say that birds are dinosaurs, which is the conclusion you’re forced to if you’re a hidebound cladist.  I mentioned this paper in WEIT in footnote 11 on p. 237 (this was probably the last thing I put in the book). Of course this result was no surprise to paleontologists.

As recounted by Service, this result was sharply questioned by other researchers, who claimed that the protein sequence was due to contamination; many others thought it was hard to believe that any protein could survive for so many millions of years.  I was a bit depressed about this, because I had already put the result in my book and there was no opportunity to change it before publication.  Also, it was just such a cute result — the kind of new finding that gets our juices flowing as scientists.

Well,  Schweitzer and her team persisted, and her new result supports the old one.  This time the group extracted protein fragments from the femur of a duck-billed dinosaur, Brachylophosaurus canadensis, collected in Montana. Great care was taken to prevent contamination.  They found that some of the elements in the demineralized bone bound to  antibodies made against bird collagen, indicating that collagen fragments similar in sequence to those of birds were present in the bone.  The same was found with antibodies for hemoglobin and two other structural proteins.

Some biochemical wizardry on bone extracts identified eight fragments of collagen, and their sequences (also determined in a separate lab to preclude contamination) were determined.  Sure enough, they were similar to the T. rex fragments that were questioned earlier, and were more similar to collagen sequences of modern birds than to those of modern reptiles. (See the phylogeny below.)  Note that there’s a small disparity between the fossil and biochemical evidence:  T. rex, as a theropod (the group that gave rise to modern birds), should be more closely related to modern birds than is B. canadensis.  This discrepancy might be an artifact of not having a complete protein sequence.

Let’s be clear: the phylogeny that we get doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know before.  Birds are highly-evolved dinosaurs, and that was already confirmed by the fossil record.  Still, it’s nice to have this molecular confirmation, and perhaps the most surprising result is the ability to determine the sequences of protein fragments that have survived for millions of years.  If this can be done with other fossils, we’ve suddenly gained the ability to solve many long-standing puzzles about ancestry and evolutionary relatedness.

phylogeny

Phylogeny showing closer relationship between dinosaurs and birds (Gallus = chicken, Struthio = ostrich) than between either of these groups and modern reptiles (alligators and Anolis lizards).  Ergo, birds are dinosaurs.


hadriosaur

Brachylophosaurus canadensis, the duck-billed dinosaur whose proteins were sequenced.  Illustration by Julius T. Csotony from Science article.

Schweitzer, M. H. et al.  2009. Biomolecular Characterization and protein sequences of the campanian hadrosaur B. canadensis. Science 324:626-631.

What early Europeans might have looked like

May 5, 2009 • 7:01 am

Today’s Daily Mail reports on an upcoming BBC2 program in which a forensic scientist Richard Neve, using 40,000-year-old bones, recreated the face of a very early inhabitant of Europe.  This was soon after “modern Homo sapiens” began migrating out of Africa and populatint the world (ca. 100,000 to 60,000 years ago).

From the article:

To sculpt the head, Mr Neave called on his years of experience recreating the appearance of murder victims as well as using careful measurements of bone.

It was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. This will follow the evolution of humans from the cradle of Africa to the waves of migrations that saw Homo sapiens colonise the globe.

The head has taken pride of place on the desk of Alice Roberts, an anthropologist at Bristol University, who presents the programme.

‘It’s really quite bizarre,’ she told Radio Times. ‘I’m a scientist and objective but I look at that face and think “Gosh, I’m looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago” and there’s something weirdly moving about that.

‘Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he’s used to looking at differences between populations.

‘He said the skull doesn’t look European or Asian or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them.

‘That’s probably what you’d expect of someone among the earliest populations to come to Europe.’

And, if you’re of European ancestry, no matter how far back, here’s what your forebear might have looked like:

early-european

The evolutionary biology of the swine flu virus

May 5, 2009 • 6:18 am

Carl Zimmer has a good article in today’s New York Times describing the swine flu virus (“H1N1”) as well as other pathogenic viruses, where they come from, and how they evolve.  It turns out that the swine flu virus actually derived from humans — from the strain that caused the terrible influenza epidemic of 1918 (which killed my paternal grandmother when my father was only six months old).  This virus infected swine, and then combined back with genes from humans and birds to create a more virulent strain:

. . . From time to time, a new kind of flu emerges that causes far more suffering than the typical swarm of seasonal flu viruses. In 1918, for example, the so-called Spanish flu caused an estimated 50 million deaths. In later years, some of the descendants of that strain picked up genes from bird flu viruses.

Sometimes reassortments led to new pandemics. It is possible that reassortment enables flu viruses to escape the immune system so well that they can make people sicker and spread faster to new hosts.

Reassortment also played a big role in the emergence of the current swine flu. Its genes come from several ancestors, which mainly infected pigs.

Scientists first isolated flu viruses from pigs in 1930, and their genetic sequence suggests that they descend from the Spanish flu of 1918. Once pigs picked up the flu from humans, that so-called classic strain was the only one found in pigs for decades. But in the 1970s a swine flu strain emerged in Europe that had some genes from a bird flu strain. A different pig-bird mix arose in the United States.

In the late 1990s, American scientists discovered a triple reassortant that mixed genes from classic swine flu with genes from bird viruses and human viruses. All three viruses — the triple reassortant, and the American and European pig-bird blends — contributed genes to the latest strain.

It is possible that the special biology of pigs helped foster all this mixing. Bird flu and human flu viruses can slip into pig cells, each using different receptors to gain access. “We call the pig a mixing vessel because it can replicate both avian and mammalian influenza virus at the same time,” said Juergen Richt of Kansas State University. “The mixing of these genes can happen much easier in the pig than in any other species.”

05virus1-190

H1N1 (swine flu) virus. From today’s NYT article

Fortunately, experts don’t think this virus has the stuff to cause a serious pandemic.  But they’re still worried about mutation and evolution that could increase its virulence.  As Bill Maher said in yesterday’s clip, creationists who are worried about swine flu are worried about evolution.