Memo to Duane Gish: Humans and Neanderthals Diverged From One Another 660,000 Years Ago January 6, 2009
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: anthropology, biology, Charles Darwin, creationism, Darwin, evolution, human evolution, James Dobson, John Macarthur, Neanderthals, science
add a comment
PandasThumb.org discusses today the recent sequencing of Neanderthal DNA, and what it means for thinking about human evolution.
Bottom line: Neanderthals did NOT belong to the same species as us. Instead, humans and Neanderthals diverged from one another, in their evolution, 660,000 years ago.
Money quote:
Analysis of the assembled sequence unequivocally establishes that the Neandertal mtDNA falls outside the variation of extant human mtDNAs, and allows an estimate of the divergence date between the two mtDNA lineages of 660,000 ± 140,000 years.
Read the full discussion here.
Young earth creationists, such as Duane Gish, have long tried to imply that Neanderthals were just a race of humans, little different from you and me, and that God did not make more than one human-like species on earth.
The recent sequencing of Neanderthal DNA makes this position utterly untenable.
Creation v. Evolution Metaphor Watch: Intelligent Design and the Problem of Etiological Narratives January 4, 2009
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: atheism, biology, creation, creationism, Darwin, etiological narratives, evolution, Genesis, intelligent design, James Dobson, John Macarthur
2 comments
An example of an etiological narrative (a mythical story that purports to account for the existence of something) in a children’s book:
why-didnt-god-just-give-night-animals-night-vision
The story is a retelling of the fourth day of creation in Genesis 1, and seems to answer the question, “Why are there stars and a moon out at night—what is their purpose in being there?”
The answer offered is: “To give nocturnal animals light to see by.”
Thus the conceptual metaphor is: “The stars and the moon ARE lights, and were made to function AS lights.”
But wouldn’t any clever child quickly see that this “explanation” is, at best, not terribly persuasive?
For example, if God wanted some animals to see at night, then why didn’t he simply give them night vision?
And even this begs the question.
Why would God want some animals to see at night in the first place?
To hunt?
And to hunt whom? People and other sleeping creatures?
Why would God make a world like that?
And why is there night at all?
Or eyes?
Thus this page from a children’s book seems to inadvertantly stumble upon the incoherence of all “intelligent design” explanations for the universe, for it seems impossible to pin down why, exactly, a designer would make the world in one way, and not in another.
No “intelligent design” narrative, however simple or complex, can account for the universe without this kind of question begging.
And this is one reason why it can never achieve the level of being a science, as evolutionary biology is.
This is not to denegrate “intelligent design” as an explanation, only to say that it is (by its inherently metaphorical nature) not capable of being framed in scientific terms (except in the vaguest of ways).
And because it is an anthropomorphic projection onto nature, it must necessarily speculate about what is IN the mind of God in ways which are impossible to independently test or verify.
In other words, it is an explanation that raises as many mysterious questions as it purports to explain.
Evolution, with its more modest range of questions, and testability, is thus ameniable to the scientific method in ways that “intelligent design” cannot be.
Part FISH, Part Four-Footed TETRAPOD: Professor Neil Shuban Explains the Transitional Fossil, TIKTAALIK December 14, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: biology, Charles Darwin, Christianity, creationism, evolution, geology, intelligent design, James Dobson, John Macarthur, neil shuban, paleontology, tiktaalik
2 comments
The predictive power of Darwin’s theory of evolution is illustrated in this brief video below:
THE TIC, TIC, TIC, TIKTAALIK OF EVOLUTIONARY TIME December 14, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: Genesis, music, evolution, creation, nature, intelligent design, creationism, Richard Dawkins, biology, Charles Darwin, Darwin, Darwinism
add a comment
Apparently some graduate students, with a bit of time on their hands, made an appreciative song for their favorite transitional fossil:
The Ultimate Recycling Project: A Boost for the Hindu Myths of Cosmology? December 14, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: astronomy, Buddhism, Christianity, creationism, cycles, evolution, geology, Hinduism, philosophy, physics, science
add a comment
The idea that the universe is eternally recycling itself over vast eons of time is an intuition about our cosmos that Hindus have long held, and at least some contemporary cosmologists may be arriving at a similar belief.
This from New Scientist this week:
ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. “I was taken aback,” he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang “singularity”, the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening?
Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory that the recycled universe was based on, called loop quantum cosmology (LQC), had managed to illuminate the very birth of the universe - something even Einstein’s general theory of relativity fails to do.
Read the full article here.
After reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Shiva”:
She killed the pigeons of peace and security,
She has taken honesty and confidence from nations and men,
She is hunting the lonely heron of liberty.
She loads the arts with nonsense, she is very cunning
Science with dreams and the state with powers to catch them at last.
Nothing will escape her at last, flying nor running.
This is the hawk that picks out the star’s eyes.
This is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan;
The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things.
Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme,
Empty darkness under the death-tent wings.
She will build a nest of the swan’s bones and hatch a new brood,
Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed.
2009 Marks the 150th Anniversary of the Publication of “The Origin of Species”—and Here is an 1881 Image of Charles Darwin December 5, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: Charles Darwin, Christopher Hitchens, creationism, evolution, James Dobson, John Macarthur, Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins
add a comment
The Anthropic Principle—and Young Earth Creationism December 5, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: anthropic principle, biology, creationism, evolution, Jesus, physics, religion, Richard Dawkins, young earth creationism
add a comment
New Scientist today has an article on yet another curious coincidence in the universe, which, if it were not so, would see no life in it.
The article explains:
IT’S not just the nature of dark matter that’s a mystery - even its abundance is inexplicable. But if our universe is just one of many possible universes, at least this conundrum can be explained.
The total amount of dark matter - the unseen stuff thought to make up most of the mass of the universe - is five to six times that of normal matter. This difference sounds pretty significant, but it could have been much greater, because the two types of matter probably formed via radically different processes shortly after the big bang. The fact that the ratio is so conducive to a life-bearing universe “looks like a tremendous coincidence”, says Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ben Freivogel, also at UCB, wondered if the ratio can be explained using the anthropic principle which, loosely stated, says that the properties of the universe must be suitable for the emergence of life, otherwise we wouldn’t be here asking questions about it. In order to avoid questions about how these properties became so finely tuned, the anthropic principle is combined with the idea that our universe is part of a multiverse, in which each universe has randomly determined properties.
Freivogel focused on one of the favoured candidate-particles for dark matter, the axion. Axions have the right characteristics to be dark matter, but for one problem: a certain property called its “misalignment angle”, which would have affected the amount of dark matter produced in the early universe. If this property is randomly determined, in most cases it would result in a severe overabundance of dark matter, leading to a universe without the large-scale structure of clusters of galaxies. To result in our universe, it has to be just the right value.
In a multiverse, each universe will have a random value for the axion’s misalignment angle, giving some universes the right amount of dark matter needed to give rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life as we know it.
Sometimes creationists suggest that biological scientists are motivated to suppress evidence about the evolution of species—and that, in fact, the evidence for biological evolution is weak.
But physicists seem to have no qualms about going wherever the evidence leads them—and in the instance of the anthropic principle, it certainly leads them in directions that, at the least, do not hurt the arguments of those who believe in Intelligent Design.
In other words, all scientists—including those focused on biology—attempt to get at the truth of things. With regard to physics, there are curious elements to it which give weight to religious interpretations, but with regard to biology, the notion that species do not change and the earth is young is clearly false—and do not support biblical young earth creationism.
If a biologist found an “anthropic principle” at work in biology, he or she would publish it—just as scientists do in physics.
What I’m trying to say is that creationists—if they are to be creationists and treat science seriously—should be old earth creationists who accept that species have changed over time.
Physics gives weight to the multi-universe hypothesis as well as a “god hypothesis”—but biology does not give any weight to a “young earth/fixity of species” model of life history.
No Place to Hide?: Why the Internet Foreshadows the Decline of Young Earth Creationism November 23, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: religion, atheism, agnosticism, Genesis, Jesus, evolution, creationism, apologetics, John Macarthur, paleontology, young earth creationism
add a comment
Paleontologist Dan Phelps visits Ken Ham’s creationist museum in Kentucky and offers his take here.
Money quote:
Most homeschoolers are already teaching their children creationism, so the museum may at worst strengthen the message the kids are getting at home. Some of the claims, such as the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus and other carnivores are so absurd one wonders how many of the children (or adults) are really going to accept it. There is a lot of scientifically valid information available on dinosaurs in books and on the Internet. Creationists are really going to have to go to great lengths to shelter their children from this information.
And when the kids grow up?
Well, of course, if their intellectual light comes on they’ll feel righteous resentment at being so ridiculously sheltered from the wider world—and their Internet surfing will lead them to sights like this.
America’s Comedic Socrates: Bill Maher on “Religulous” and His “I don’t know” Agnosticism November 23, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: America, apologetics, Bill Maher, Catholicism, Christianity, creationism, Genesis, Jesus, Judaism, philosophy, Socrates
add a comment
Life Gets Complicated—Really Fast November 21, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: Charles Darwin, creationism, Darwin, death, evolution, extinction, fred hoyle, intelligent design, life, natural selection, niles eldridge, stephen gould
add a comment
A single cell organism that, when it moves, makes track lines identical to those found fossilized in precambrian strata suggests that the multi-cellular “Cambrian Explosion” really was quite the explosion indeed.
Discovery Channel News explains:
Until about 550 million years ago, there were very few animals leaving trails behind. Then, within ten million years an unprecedented blossoming of life swarmed across the planet, filling every niche with hard-bodied, complex creatures.
“It wasn’t a gradual development of complexity,” Matz said. “Instead these things suddenly seemed to burst out of a magic box.”
Charles Darwin first noticed the Cambrian Explosion and thought it was an artifact of a poorly preserved fossil record. The precambrian trace fossils were left by multicellular animals, he reasoned, so there must be some gap in fossils between the nearly empty Precambrian and the teeming world that quickly followed. But if the first traces were instead made by G. sphaerica, it would mean the Explosion was real; it must have been a diversification of life on a scale never before seen.
Long periods of boredom. Short periods of terror. Not exactly the six days of Genesis, but still pretty startling. Sounds like Gould’s punctuated equilibrium to me.
The more things change, the more things stay the same, don’t they? And there’s still lots of things that we do not know.
The horror and mystery of existence and life (like death, taxes, and the poor) are still with us.
Intelligent Design v. The Multiverse: Discover Magazine Has a Fascinating Article on God-Belief and the Possibility That We Live in a Multiverse November 16, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: agnosticism, apologetics, astronomy, atheist, Charles Darwin, creationism, evolution, physics, religion, science
add a comment
Money quote:
If the multiverse is the final stage of the Copernican revolution, with our universe but a speck in an infinite megacosmos, where does humanity fit in? If the life-friendly fine-tuning of our universe is just a chance occurrence, something that inevitably arises in an endless array of universes, is there any need for a fine-tuner—for a god?
“I don’t think that the multiverse idea destroys the possibility of an intelligent, benevolent creator,” Weinberg says. “What it does is remove one of the arguments for it, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution made it unnecessary to appeal to a benevolent designer to understand how life developed with such remarkable abilities to survive and breed.”
On the other hand, if there is no multiverse, where does that leave physicists? “If there is only one universe,” Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”
As for Linde, he is especially interested in the mystery of consciousness and has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental component of the universe, much like space and time. He wonders whether the physical universe, its laws, and conscious observers might form an integrated whole. A complete description of reality, he says, could require all three of those components, which he posits emerged simultaneously. “Without someone observing the universe,” he says, “the universe is actually dead.”
Yet for all of his boldness, Linde hesitates when I ask whether he truly believes that the multiverse idea will one day be as well established as Newton’s law of gravity and the Big Bang. “I do not want to predict the future,” he answers. “I once predicted my own future. I had a very firm prediction. I knew that I was going to die in the hospital at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow near where I worked. I would go there for all my physical examinations. Once, when I had an ulcer, I was lying there in bed, thinking I knew this was the place where I was going to die. Why? Because I knew I would always be living in Russia. Moscow was the only place in Russia where I could do physics. This was the only hospital for the Academy of Sciences, and so on. It was quite completely predictable.
“Then I ended up in the United States. On one of my returns to Moscow, I looked at this hospital at the Academy of Sciences, and it was in ruins. There was a tree growing from the roof. And I looked at it and I thought, What can you predict? What can you know about the future?”
The Discover article, as a whole, strikes me as making a strong case, not the theism or atheism, but for agnosticism.
Read the whole article here.
Intelligent Design v. The Multiverse?: Discover Magazine Has a Fascinating Article on the Fine Tuning of the Universe—and Its Implication for God-Belief November 16, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: agnosticism, life, evolution, creationism, apologetics, doubt, Charles Darwin, physics, Steven Weinberg, multiverse, cosmology, multiverse hypothesis
2 comments
Money quote:
If the multiverse is the final stage of the Copernican revolution, with our universe but a speck in an infinite megacosmos, where does humanity fit in? If the life-friendly fine-tuning of our universe is just a chance occurrence, something that inevitably arises in an endless array of universes, is there any need for a fine-tuner—for a god?
“I don’t think that the multiverse idea destroys the possibility of an intelligent, benevolent creator,” [physicist and Nobel laureate Steven] Weinberg says. “What it does is remove one of the arguments for it, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution made it unnecessary to appeal to a benevolent designer to understand how life developed with such remarkable abilities to survive and breed.”
On the other hand, if there is no multiverse, where does that leave physicists? “If there is only one universe,” [cosmologist Bernard] Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”
As for [multiverse supporting physicist Andrei] Linde, he is especially interested in the mystery of consciousness and has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental component of the universe, much like space and time. He wonders whether the physical universe, its laws, and conscious observers might form an integrated whole. A complete description of reality, he says, could require all three of those components, which he posits emerged simultaneously. “Without someone observing the universe,” he says, “the universe is actually dead.”
Yet for all of his boldness, Linde hesitates when I ask whether he truly believes that the multiverse idea will one day be as well established as Newton’s law of gravity and the Big Bang. “I do not want to predict the future,” he answers. “I once predicted my own future. I had a very firm prediction. I knew that I was going to die in the hospital at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow near where I worked. I would go there for all my physical examinations. Once, when I had an ulcer, I was lying there in bed, thinking I knew this was the place where I was going to die. Why? Because I knew I would always be living in Russia. Moscow was the only place in Russia where I could do physics. This was the only hospital for the Academy of Sciences, and so on. It was quite completely predictable.
“Then I ended up in the United States. On one of my returns to Moscow, I looked at this hospital at the Academy of Sciences, and it was in ruins. There was a tree growing from the roof. And I looked at it and I thought, What can you predict? What can you know about the future?”
I especially like Andrei Lind’s anecdote about modesty with regard to what the future might hold.
I think that it is suggestive of the idea that agnosticism is the most reasonable way to approach questions concerning multiverses and the existence of gods (or God).
Etiological Narrative Watch: Did the Hindu God Hanuman, and an Army of Monkeys and Squirrels, Build the Limestone Shoals Between India and Sri Lanka Known as “Adam’s Bridge”? November 15, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: apologetics, Buddhism, creationism, evolution, Genesis, Hinduism, India, literature, philosophy, poetry, religion, yoga
2 comments
An etiological narrative is a story that purports to explain (in mythic, religious, or literary terms) the origin of something. It is, in other words, an imaginitive story triggered by a question about how (or why) something came to be in the world.
- Example: Why does a rainbow appear in the sky after it rains?
- Etiological narrative response: After the Great Flood, God told Noah that he would not inundate the whole earth with water ever again, and the rainbow is the sign of God’s promise (see Genesis 9:12-17).
Today’s etiological narrative comes from Indian literature, the Hindu epic Ramayana.
There is a narrow land bridge between Sri Lanka and India that the Ramayana says was built by the god Hanuman and an army of monkeys.
The Ramayana says that squirrels, bringing pebbles, also assisted Hanuman in the bridge building project.
As literature, the story reads as an ancient and delightful pre-scientific explanation for an otherwise natural geologic phenomenon.
But according to Time magazine, this etiological narrative is taken literally by fundamentalist Hindus, and when the Indian government proposed to build a shipping lane through the bridge, it resulted in a conflict between religious fundamentalists and certain economic interests:
A 30-mile chain of limestone shoals called Adam’s Bridge connecting India with Sri Lanka has become the unlikely centerpiece of a political drama. Devout Hindus believe that the Ram Sethu, as they call it, was constructed by a monkey-army led by Lord Hanumana to enable Lord Rama to cross over to Lanka to rescue his wife Sita, who had been kidnapped by the Lankan king, Ravana. Scientists, however, say it is a natural structure that joined Sri Lanka to the Asian continent during the last Ice Age.
When the government submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court last week saying “mythological texts” could not “incontrovertibly prove” the existence of Lord Rama or the simian construction of the Ram Sethu, all hell broke loose. Opposition Hindu hard-liners held spirited demonstrations accusing the government of “hurting Hindu sentiments” by suggesting the gods were mythological figures. The government was forced into damage-control mode — two senior officials were immediately suspended, an inquiry was ordered, and the affidavit was withdrawn. The controversy reached such heights that NASA was obliged to declare it had nothing to do with the use of its photos by some Hindu groups to imply that Adam’s Bridge was 1,750,000 years old and hence synchronous with “Ramrajya” — the golden period of Lord Rama’s rule.
This latest episode in the Indian equivalent of the creationism/evolution debate began with a case in the Supreme Court against the $560 million Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project, which aims to create a navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula so ships can avoid going around Sri Lanka, thus saving time and money. Arguing that the planned route would cause damage to the Ram Sethu, pious petitioners wanted the government to forge an alternative route.
Etiological narratives are fascinating cultural barometers—for they can bring out the raw tensions between religion and science—and unveil the diverse (and often unconscious) assumptions that people bring to the reading of texts.
Evolution? The Fossils Say Yes: In the NY TIMES Today is an Extensive Report on Tiktaalic, a Fossil Fish/Amphibian Transition October 15, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: biology, Charles Darwin, creationism, evolution, fossils, intelligent design, James Dobson, John Macarthur, natural selection, paleontology, Richard Dawkins, Sarah Palin
add a comment
Money quote from the Times science article:
In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.
There was much more to the complex transition than fins evolving into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size, a beginning of the bone’s adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.
The anatomy of this early transformation in life from water to land had never before been observed with such clarity, paleontologists and biologists said Wednesday in announcing the research.
The scientists said in a report being published Thursday in the journal Nature that the research exposed delicate details of the creature’s head and neck, confirming and elaborating on its evolutionary position as “an important stage in the origin of terrestrial vertebrates.”
In that case, the fish, a predator up to nine feet long, was a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The fossil species was named Tiktaalik roseae, nicknamed “fishapod” for its fishlike features combined with limbs similar to those of tetrapods, four-legged land animals.
The new research on the head skeleton of Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) was conducted at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the University of Chicago.
“The braincase, palate and gill arch skeleton of Tiktaalik have been revealed in great detail,” said Jason Downs, a research fellow at the academy and lead author of the report. “By revealing new details of the pattern of change in this part of the skeleton, we see that cranial features once associated with land-living animals were first adaptations for life in shallow water.”
An Ur-Moment in Intellectual History: What Happened 170 Years and 12 Days Ago? October 5, 2008
Posted by santitafarella in Uncategorized.Tags: apologetics, biology, Blaise Pascal, Charles Darwin, creationism, economics, evolution, intelligent design, John Macarthur, science, Thomas Malthus, young earth creationism
add a comment
On September 28, 1838, Darwin picked up Malthus’s essay on population, and realized that it could be applied to animals and plants.
Money quote from Darwin’s autobiography:
“[I] happened to read for amusement ‘Malthus on Population,’ and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.”
Source: Panda’s Thumb