Jesus n Mo: Those Furry Eskimos

They nail it every time!

Absence of furry "eskimos" is an actual argument touted against evolution! :)

Stephen Jay Gould On Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding About Evolution Science

The United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died a couple of days ago. I remembered an  essay on him written by Stephen Jay Gould. The occasion was Justice Scalia 's dissenting opinion in the 1987 case that invalidated the State of Louisiana 's "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act." Louisiana was in effect arguing that "Creation Science" be put on the same footing as the theory of evolution in science classrooms.

Here is an excerpt that goes to the core of Justice Scalia's misunderstanding about what the theory of evolution seeks to elucidate:

 Justice Scalia has defined evolution as the search for life's origin--and nothing more. He keeps speaking about "the current state of scientific evidence about the origin of life" when he means to designate evolution. He writes that "the legislature wanted to ensure that students would be free to decide for themselves how life began based upon a far and balanced presentation of the scientific evidence." Never does he even hint that evolution might be the study of how life changes after it originates--the entire panoply of transformation from simple molecules to all modern multi-cellular complexity.

and a wonderful concluding passage-

   Consider also, indeed especially, Scalia's false concept of science. He equates creation and evolution because creationists can't explain life's beginning, while evolutionists can't resolve the ultimate origin of the inorganic components that later aggregated to life. But this inability is the very heart of creationist logic and the central reason why their doctrine is not science, while science's inability to specify the ultimate origin of matter is irrelevant because we are not trying to do any such thing. We know that we can't, and we do not even consider such a question as part of science.

    We understand Hutton's wisdom. We do not search for unattainable ultimates.

We define evolution, using Darwin's phrase, as "descent with modification" from prior living things. Our documentation of life's evolutionary tree records one of science's greatest triumphs, a profoundly liberating discovery on the oldest maxim that truth can make us free. We have made this discovery by recognizing what can be answered and what must be left alone. If Justice Scalia heeded our definitions and our practices, he would understand why creationism cannot qualify as science. He would also, by the way, sense the excitement of evolution and its evidence; no person of substance could be unmoved by something so interesting. Only Aristotle's creator may be so impassive.

    Don Quixote recognized "no limits but the sky," but became thereby the literary embodiment of unattainable reverie. G.K Chesterton understood that any discipline must define its borders of fruitfulness. He spoke for painting, but you may substitute any creative enterprise: "Art is limitation: the essence of every picture is the frame."

Let me add here that although the problem of the origin of life is not addressed directly by the theory of evolution, it does come under the purview of being a scientific problem. When Gould writes "we do not even consider such a question as part of science", he means specifically the theory of evolution.  Creationists would have you think that life began as some miraculous spark, a forever mysterious event that is beyond scientific inquiry. Not so. Basic chemistry is making headway in our understanding of how inanimate matter can aggregate to form self replicating entities. See this fine post by Ashutosh Jogalekar on how chemists ponder the Origin Of Life problem. 

Creationist Version Of Neanderthal Human Interbreeding

via The Panda's Thumb..

Had to put this up. Apparently creationists have their own take on the recent findings that Neanderthals interbreed with modern humans.

Svante Paabo who has led the effort to sequence the Neanderthal genome and has a popular book about it writes:

There were many others who were interested in the Neanderthal genome – perhaps most surprisingly, some fundamentalist Christians in the United States. A few months after our paper appeared, I met Nicholas J. Matzke, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics at UC Berkeley. Unbeknownst to me and the other authors, our paper had apparently caused quite a flurry of discussion in the creationist community. Nick explained to me that creationists come in two varieties. First, there are “young-earth creationists,” who believe that the earth, the heavens, and all life were created by direct acts of God sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago. They tend to consider Neanderthals as “fully human,” sometimes saying they were another, now extinct “race” that was scattered after the fall of the Tower of Babel. As a consequence, young-earth creationists had no problem with our finding that Neanderthals and modern humans had mixed. Then there are “old-earth creationists,” who accept that the earth is old but reject evolution by natural, nondivine means. One major old-earth ministry is “Reasons to Believe,” headed by a Hugh Ross. He believes that modern humans were specially created around 50,000 years ago and that Neanderthals weren’t humans, but animals. Ross and other old-earth creationists didn’t like the finding that Neanderthals and modern humans had mixed. Nick sent me a transcript from a radio show in which he [meaning Hugh Ross] commented on our work, saying interbreeding was predictable “because the story of Genesis is early humanity getting into exceptionally wicked behavior practices,” and that God may have had to “forcibly scatter humanity over the face of the Earth” to stop this kind of interbreeding, which he compared to “animal bestiality.”

Clearly our paper was reaching a broader audience than we had ever imagined.

Aha.. so that's why humans colonized the entire planet. It was punishment for engaging in bestiality.

There is also a transcript of a bizarre conversation between creationists trying to answer the deep question that while there are references in scripture of God destroying angel-human hybrids, Neanderthal -human hybrids eventually died out too, leaving humans to be with humans only.

A Dispute About Adam And The Origins Of Humans

More than 40% Americans insist that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. Probably a majority don't believe evolution at all or accept that it has played a role but one overseen by God in the history of life.

Now genetics is throwing up another problem for creationists to chew on:

Lexington writes in the Economist -

A trickier controversy has been triggered by findings from the genome that modern humans, in their genetic diversity, cannot be descended from a single pair of individuals. Rather, there were at least several thousand “first humans”. That challenges the historical existence of Adam and Eve, and has sparked a crisis of conscience among evangelical Christians persuaded by genetic science. This is not an esoteric point, says Michael Cromartie, an evangelical expert at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre, a Washington think-tank: many conservative theologians hold that without a historical Adam, whose sin descended directly to all humanity, there would be no reason for Jesus to come to Earth to redeem man’s Fall.

Academics have lost jobs over the Adam controversy. Many Christian universities, among them Wheaton (a sort of evangelical Harvard and Yale, rolled into one), oblige faculty members to sign faith statements declaring that God directly created Adam and Eve, the “historical parents of the entire human race”. John Walton, an Old Testament scholar at Wheaton, suggested that Adam and Eve are presented in Genesis as archetypes, though he called them historical individuals too.

Read the rest here.

Creationists Don't Get The Cambrian Explosion

There is an excellent post by Nick Matzke on the Panda's Thumb on the Cambrian Explosion, which was the evolutionary radiation and diversification of animal life over a 30 million year period from about 540 mya to 510 mya. To clarify, the lower boundary set at around 540 mya does not mean there is no evidence of animal life before that and "poof" animals originated instantaneously at 540 mya. On the contrary, there is long earlier history of multicellular animal life preserved in various forms including the famous Ediacaran biota going back another 10's of million years or so,  but the fossil record does become more prolific beginning about 540 mya. The important point is that complex forms evolved and diversification occurred in recognizable stages, not all at once. So yes, there are "transitional fossils" preserved from this time period!  There are geological and ecological reasons for why animal life diversified and was preserved better by 540 mya, but that is another story.

Nick Matzke has written this post as a rebuttal to a book by Stephen Meyer titled Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.

It is a long post but well worth reading. You will learn:

1) What is the nature of the fossil record beginning late Proterozoic and the Cambrian.

2) What methods of analysis are being used by paleontologists to make sense of this fossil record and what is the current thinking on how these ancient animal groups of the Cambrian were related to each other and to extant animal groups, with implications for how and when diversification from simpler forms took place.

3) How Creationists obfuscate, ignore and are ignorant of both, the nature of the fossil record and analytical methods, resulting in them misdirecting readers about the actual state of our knowledge.

Do read it.

The Real Reason Behind The Santa Cruz Islands Earthquake

From Jesus and Mo..

And here is the less likely explanation.

Sunday Humor: Young Earth Creationists And Oxygen Levels

I get responses to my blog posts from students, geology and nature lovers and even journalists asking questions, requesting papers and sometimes just to chat.

Occasionally I get comments like this one recently left on my blog post Early Homo Leaves Modern Footprints:

hasn't anyone ever stopped to think that, maybe when that giant flood happened a long time ago (10,00 years?) that maybe, just maybe, due to the serious compression of heat, oxygen, and pressure, that that is why we have fossils and remains? also, before "the flood" the oxygen level in the air was significantly higher than afterward. so our modern "technology" that measures how much oxygen something has been exposed to, is merely based on the level of oxygen that is currently in the air. not what the levels were long ago. thus, those who claim the earth is billions or millions of years old...is mistaken due to the lack of knowledge of the oxygen levels before "the flood".

Feel free to dissect this nonsense :)

The four glaring problems:

1) There is no evidence of "the flood" which in young earth creationist language means a global flood which deposited all the rocks seen on the surface today.

2) rocks exposed to "serious compression of heat, oxygen and pressure" would destroy organic remains, not provide conditions for fossilization.

3) There is no evidence that oxygen levels a few thousand years ago were much higher than today.

4) We don't rely on the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere to figure out how old the earth is.

One good thing about comments like these is that I get tempted to dig into the literature to read more on the fundamentals. I found two good sources on the geologic history of atmospheric oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen over Phanerozoic time by Robert Berner and a chapter on Oxygen Through Time in Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere.

Great Conversations: Edward Larson On History Of Evolution

I was going through my podcast collection over the weekend in preparation for a hiking trip to the Himalayas ( more on that later this week!) and found one of the great talks I have heard on evolution. This is Edward J Larson's superb exposition on the history of creationism in the United States and its transformation (or should I say evolution) into the intelligent design movement of recent  years.

Edward J Larson is Professor of History and Law at University of Georgia. His book Evolution: The Remarkable History Of A Scientific Idea is also an excellent summary of the history of the theory of evolution.

But his talk is really worth listening too. Goes straight into my Great Conversations collection.

Why Is It Hard To Classify Archaeopteryx?

For the last few days I have had noticeable traffic to my blog via the search term " Why is it hard to classify Archaeopteryx?". And all of it from the United Kingdom! Maybe there is a college essay competition going on there on fossils and evolution..?

Coincidentally, I wrote a post more than two years ago on Archaeopteryx in response to a new analysis of Archaeopteryx bone growth which cast doubt on whether Archaeopteryx was an early bird. More recently, Xu et.al using a wider selection of character traits suggested that Archaeopteryx is not a basal bird i.e. it is not an early representative of the lineage of birds but rather may belong to a different now extinct branch of feathered dinosaurs.  So there is genuine uncertainty on how to classify Archaeopteryx.

I'm reproducing the post below with some new additional comments. Image below sourced from  Wikimedia Commons:

How birdlike was Archaeopteryx?

Beak - Yes
Feathers - Yes
Wishbone - Yes

Growth pattern of blood vessels - Not quite there yet

By comparing the structure of the bone of Archaeopteryx  with modern birds and fossil dinosaurs, researchers found out the growth pattern of blood vessels in Archaeopteryx was more like dinosaurs than modern birds. Archaeopteryx individuals seem to have taken a longer time to mature than modern birds do.

Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago and is the earliest bird-like creature to have been found yet.  A younger bird-like fossil - Ichthyornis dispar - dated about 94 million years ago shows several characteristics of quick growth, giving us an idea of the timing of the various changes in morphology and physiology that were taking place within the Maniraptor dinosaurian clade as they evolved  characteristics that are recognized as bird-like.

By the way this is not some earth shattering find. The basic relationship that  small carnivorous dinosaurs evolved into birds still holds. But the study highlights how difficult categorizing a creature which is a composite of ancestral and derived traits can be.

It doesn't matter in the larger view if Archaeopteryx is classified as a dinosaur or a bird. The value is in demonstrating that evolution of a complex suite of characters takes place in fits and starts, some features evolve earlier than others preserving the historical trajectories that major transitions in evolution have taken.

Go here for the lighter version.

Additional comments: Recently, South Korea under pressure from creationist groups was mulling excising mentions of Archaeopteryx from science textbooks because the uncertainty regarding its relationship to birds meant according to creationists that the theory of evolution is an inadequate theory to answering questions about the history of life and to the problem of the evolution of birds. Thankfully better sense has prevailed and Archaeopteryx will continue to have a place in South Korean science education.

As evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory recently pointed out, there are many aspects to evolution. There is evolution as a fact, evolution as a mechanism, and evolution as a path. Archaeopteryx not being a bird does not in any way threaten the factual basis of evolution, nor does it undermine natural selection or random genetic drift as the principle mechanisms of evolution. Its taxonomic status is a specific hypothesis about how two groups of organisms are related, i.e. evolution as a path. This aspect of evolution is concerned with the historical patterns of life, such as, when did a particular lineage originate, how are lineages related, do species originate geologically suddenly and then show almost no morphological change during their lifetime.

Was Archaeopteryx an early bird is a question of historical detail.  That initial assessment could turn out to be wrong. That does not mean that birds did not evolve but instead were spontaneously created as some creationists would insinuate. Rather, it means that our understanding about one particular ancestor descendant relationship is incomplete. It means that we don't yet have enough data to reconstruct with confidence the unfolding of one particular historical pathway of life.

Darwin Just Made It Up

Another gem from the annals of religious stupidity:

“The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up,” state Sen. Ben Waide (R) said. “My objection is they should ensure whatever scientific material is being put forth as a standard should at least stand up to scientific method. Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny.”

This comes from a Huffington Post article  (via: WEIT) which quotes Kentucky republican Sen. Ben Waide protesting the inclusion of evolution in science classes.

Darwin this... Darwin that.... Isn't it revealing that it is religious fundamentalists who claim that the theory of evolution will stand or fall based on what Darwin said?

Creationism And Fused Chromosomes

I used to avidly follow the evolution creationism debates on the internet. The beginning of my interest was the flurry of rebuttals to Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box which were put up on Boston Review. It was a great learning experience as biologists picked apart the concept of intelligent design and "irreducible complexity".

That tradition of battling creationists by providing clear explanations of biological phenomena continues with science writer Carl Zimmer explaining how the fusion of chromosomes can explain the difference in the chromosome number between our closest relatives and humans. Gorillas and chimpanzees have 24 pairs of chromosomes while humans have 23 pairs. John Hawks pitches in and gives an insight into the relationship between large genetic changes and the origin of new species.

I am always completely befuddled by the creationist response. I mean who are the creationists really addressing?  Their arguments against evolution are usually poor and not backed by evidence and their alternative explanations for the origin of complexity and diversity like Michael Behe's idea of a pre-formed genome border on the ridiculous. Even they must know that they will never win over biologists and well.. people with the ability to think for themselves..:)

My take is that creationists are not so much trying to convert people to the idea of creationism as much as trying to keep their flock from rejecting God and migrating to the side of rationality. Their enterprise of rejecting evolution and providing counter "explanations" rely on the vast majority of people with faith who already reject evolution only reading creationist literature. You could argue that with the internet it is so easy to find and read arguments put forward by scientists. That is true, but it is also true that people with strong convictions generally seek out conforming opinions and then stick to their own community. I doubt if the vast majority of followers of major creationist websites take the trouble of reading the criticisms of biologists.

I think that suits the creationists. They can misrepresent evolution and the work of scientists all they want knowing that the majority of the faithful will be reading only their side of the story. That is the reason for the conditions they have recently put on debating the fused chromosomes with Carl Zimmer. It has to be on their moderated web site with a word limit with no comments allowed.

Reservoir Rock In World's Biggest Oil Field Is Made Of Shit

From Ken Deffeyes book “Hubbert’s Peak”, via the Oil Drum:

Most massive and nonporous limestones contain textures made by invertebrate animals that ingest sediment and turn out fecal pellets. Usually, the pellets get squished into the mud. Rarely do the fecal pellets themselves form a porous sedimentary rock. In the 1970s, the first native-born Saudi to earn a doctorate in petroleum geology arrived for a year of work at Princeton. I used the occasion to twist Aramco’s collective arm for samples from the super-giant Ghawar field. As soon as the samples were ready, I made an appointment with our Saudi visitor to examine together the samples using petrographic microscopes. That morning, I was really excited. Examining the reservoir rock of the world’s biggest oil field was for me a thrill bigger than climbing Mount Everest. A small part of the reservoir was dolomite, but most of it turned out to be a fecal-pellet limestone. I had to go home that evening and explain to my family that the reservoir rock in the world’s biggest oil field was made of shit.

A bewildering variety of particle types get bound together to form limestones. Post Cambrian times, the calcium carbonate shells of marine organisms have been the most common particle type, the primary building blocks of limestones. But other particle types like fecal pellets are also common.

For carbonate sedimentologists involved in oil exploration, the most important task , is understanding the origin and distribution of porosity and permeability i.e. the open spaces in which oil migrates and is naturally stored. Sedimentologists recognize two broad categories of porosity. Primary porosity and secondary porosity.  Primary porosity is the open space between the grains and forms as grains settle down during deposition into different packing configurations depending on their shape and size.  Sediments that are deposited in environments where wave and tidal movements are vigorous will have high primary porosity because in such settings finer mud that can clog up interstices between coarser grains is winnowed away, leaving behind a lag of clean sand.

The image below is a photomicrograph of a fecal pellet sand from the Jurassic of England. The shining white material between the dark pellets is calcium carbonate cement which has filled up the primary porosity. Occasionally, there may be no precipitation of cement as the sand gets buried. In such situations the primary porosity is preserved and the deposit may become a reservoir rock.

 

Source:  SEPM Strata

And here is a picture of the Bahama Banks of the coast of Florida.

Arrows and labels show environments facing open ocean where currents and waves are vigorous and where primary porosity in sediment will be high. In the interior of the Bahamas, wave energy is much lower, resulting in sediment with less primary porosity. Fecal pellets may originate in the interior of platforms, in low energy settings. They often harden in these settings due to precipitation of cement in micro-pores within the grains. Often due to storms, these hardened pellets are then transported to high energy settings. Due to this early hardening, pellets resist getting squished against each other as the sediment is buried. Open spaces are thus preserved in such early hardened fecal pellet deposits.

Although the paleo-geographic setting would have been different than the Bahamas, the sediments of the Jurassic Ghawar reservoir limestone would have been deposited in high energy settings resulting in substantial primary porosity.

 Another category of porosity is secondary porosity that forms due to the reaction of the sediment with water during burial. It results in open spaces being created by the dissolution and leaching away of mud and grains and also due to volume changes as calcite gets replaced by the denser dolomite. This type of porosity is also present in the Ghawar limestone.

Since 1950's the Ghawar field has produced over 65 billion barrels of oil. Daily production is about 5 million barrels, about 6% of global production.

And.. what do  you know?  Glenn Morton has found another use for those famous fecal pellets..refuting young earth creationism:

One of the interesting things about Ghawar is the nature of its reservoir which provides an argument against an ideology I fight all the time, Young-earth Creationism. Ghawar is largely made of dung, which would be hard pressed to be concentrated during a global flood and thus contradicts the young-earth creationist claims.

A chaotic flood would have dispersed and broken up fecal pellets in to mud. Only long periods of  wave action and winnowing and early cementation on a sea floor would have produce the well sorted fecal pellet sands of the Ghawar reservoir deposit.

Darwin And Hitler And Other Interesting Evolution Talks And Readings

A compilation of evolution related news I came across the last week or so:

1)  How do new species evolve? Peter and Rosemary Grant have undertaken a monumental multi-decadal study of the finches of the Galapagos islands. They explain the conditions that lead to speciation, part of the Brilliantly Illuminating And Lively Lecture Series.  If you don't have time to sit through the talk, the Panda's Thumb has a summary of their findings.

2) Donald Prothero, author of the book Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why It Matters writes about recent occasions of creationists organizing geology field trips with the aim of reinterpreting the geological record to fit a young-earth creationist view point and of creationists presenting papers at the Geological Society of America meetings.

3) Darwin and Hitler- that old bogey keeps getting raised again and again. At the Planets of the Apes blog Faye Flam puts down that bogey... again! The follow up posts  ( 1 2 3 4 ) on this topic are worth reading too.  P Z Myers at Pharyngula also pitches in and points to an upcoming scholarly work by Michael Lackey which shows that the Nazis were very much a Christian Reich.

4) At the Cosmos and Culture blog anthropologist Barbara J. King explains Paleolithic diets in the context of the recent fad adopted by some to revert to the diet of our hunter gatherer ancestors as a way to healthy living.

Why The Majority Of Scientists Believe In Evolution

Came across this golden oldie at JesusandMo.net.

Callan Bentley at Mountain Beltway has very ably demonstrated that the Dunning-Kruger effect afflicts most of the U.S. Republican Presidential candidates.

Will There Be Any Water Left On Earth If ..

...Religious fundamentalists keep drinking from the well of stupidity?

..don't know the original source..I got it via - Pharyngula

Richard Leakey On Acceptance Of Evolution In Africa

On Science Friday, Richard Leakey discusses creationist views and anthropological fieldwork in Africa:

Dr. LEAKEY:  .....  In fact, there are very few African leaders who believe in human evolution and science.

FLATOW: Is that right?

Dr. LEAKEY: And it's very, very worrying, because Africa's problems will only be resolved by African scientists working on those problems. And if we don't teach science from early on, we're not going to get out of this hole, because nobody is going to pull us out of the hole, because they're in one themselves.

FLATOW: Does it make it hard to excavate in these African countries if they don't believe?

Dr. LEAKEY: Funny enough, it doesn't. Because if they don't believe we're looking for human ancestors, they don't care what you're doing.

FLATOW: What an interesting answer.

(Soundbite of Laughter)

FLATOW: You could be digging on the moon for...

Dr. LEAKEY: Exactly. For something else.

FLATOW: ...for - because of - we don't - whatever you find is not going to prove what you think it's going to prove.

Dr. LEAKEY: That's exactly the attitude. And so, thus far, it's been beneficial, if you like.

You can dig for bones as much as you want in the remote rift, just don't introduce your findings into the science syllabus.

Teaching Human Evolution In Pakistan Can Be Dangerous

Kenneth Chang of New York Times has written an interesting summary on the teaching and acceptance of evolution across Muslim countries and among Muslim immigrants in many western nations.

Atomic physicist Pervez. A Hoodbhoy went through a dramatic moment while lecturing at a university in Pakistan:

Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.

Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said. “Your lineage is what determines your worth.”

Its scary that this took place not at some isolated madrassa but at a national university. Overall acceptance of evolution - especially human evolution - is low in Muslim countries. The technological advancement engulfing these countries is not necessarily paralleled by a more scientific mindset among citizenry. Religious beliefs are playing a large role in driving a wedge between the two. Turkey is a great example. Just 2-3 decades ago creationism was not a factor affecting science education in Turkey. Today, the influence of Islamic parties is greater in society, evolution teaching is diluted at the school level and creationist textbooks are influencing biology syllabus.

The article does not mention Muslims in India but I doubt if attitudes towards evolution are significantly different among Indian Muslims.

And I wonder what the break up would be according to educational level and how it compared to Hindus.

The Probability Of Evolutionary Pathways

Joe Thornton of the University of Oregon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute writes these thoughts about how to understand and appreciate the probability of evolution following one specific pathway among many possible:

Consider the future: there are countless possible that could emerge from our present state, making the probability of the one that actually does evolve extraordinarily  low.  Does this mean that the future state that will ultimately emerge is  impossible?  Obviously not.  To say that our present biology did not evolve  deterministically means simply that other states could have evolved instead; it does not imply that it did not evolve.

Consider your own life history as an analogy.  We can all look back at the road  we have traveled and identify chance events that had profound effects on how our lives turned out.  “If the movie I wanted to see that night when I was 25 hadn’t been sold out,  I never would have gone to that party at my friend’s house, where I met my future spouse….”  Everyone can tell a story like this.  The probability of the life we actually lead is extraordinarily small.  That obviously doesn’t mean that its historical unfolding was impossible.

That we inhabit an improbably reality requires a divine explanation only if we, like Behe, take the teleological view that this is the only reality that could exist.  But if we recognize that the present is one of  many possibilities, then there is no difficulty reconciling the nature of  evolutionary processes with the complexity of biological forms. As history unfolds, potential pathways to different futures are constantly opening and  closing. Darwinian processes are entirely adequate to move living forms  along these pathways to a remarkable realization – but just one realization out of many others that could have, but didn’t, take place.

Beautifully written.

The entire article is worth reading as it explains how complex traits with interlocking components can evolve through a combination of natural selection and random genetic drift acting on adaptive mutations and neutral intermediates. And this is not just theory. Joe Thornton leads a team that does experiments to show how this can happen. The article encapsulates modern evolutionary thinking about the evolution of complexity quite well.

That it is a devastating put down of the arguments made by the Intelligent Design community makes it especially pleasurable to read. 

Richard Dawkins New Book Is Out

A long time back a fan from the U.S gave Richard Dawkins a printed T-shirt titled

Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth The Only Game in Town. I don't know if that inspired the title of his latest book - The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence For Evolution... but...

The U.K edition is out and the U.S edition will be released September 22. Not sure about the India release date.

I doubt anyone from the creationist community will be swayed into accepting evolution but if you are genuinely curious about evolution then this might be as good a book as any to start learning.

Early reviews are positive although a bit uneasy about Dawkins propensity to insult creationists. That's his style. It won't win him new readers of the fundamentalist mindset but then I think he's long given up winning those over.

For the rest as always it promises to be a treat. I really enjoyed his previous book on evolution The Ancestor's Tale and I am looking forward to reading this one.

Maybe not creationists but I am curious to know if Dawkins has made any attempt to win over another disgruntled lot; biologists who complain that Dawkins puts too much emphasis on natural selection and gives too little attention to random genetic drift and chance events as important drivers of evolution. Although he has never denied the role of drift and chance many of his previous books focused on adaptive evolution and so an emphasis on natural selection as an explanation was inevitable.

This book though is titled the Evidence For Evolution and not Evidence For Evolution through Natural Selection and I wonder if he has been more generous in explaining the role of drift as another important mechanism of evolution and how drift can generate recognizable patterns that can be powerful evidence for evolution. One example that comes to mind is mutations that affect non-coding sections of DNA. This portion of DNA since it has no functionality will be invisible to natural selection and mutations will accumulate and become fixed through random drift.

If two species have such identical patterns in the same region of their non coding DNA that is strong evidence of a shared ancestry and a shared evolutionary history. You might argue that a creator would put identical functions in two species but why would He place identical non functional bits in different species. Its a bit like recognizing plagiarism. If you copy the dud parts and mistakes from someone's essay then...

From the early reviews though natural selection still seems to be the only game in town for  Richard Dawkins.

Dumbest Argument Evah For Introducing Intelligent Design In Evolution Classes

Not even Intelligent Design (ID) proponents would have used as argument as dumb as the one the writers of the TV show Boston Legal did recently.

I caught only part of the show a couple of days ago, fortunately the part where the judge is ruling on whether ID should be taught along with evolution in biology classes. The defendants are members of school boards who want ID to be taught. The State is against the idea and is prosecuting.

Not verbatim but the ruling went along something like this:

Judge: I've heard all the arguments. Now.... its clear that religious beliefs should not interfere with a secular education...

Prosecution eyes light up, confident congratulatory glances exchanged... Defendants look glum

Judge: ...But its also clear to me that secular eduction should not completely erase the role of religion in our lives...

Prosecutors shake heads with an air of resignation, Defendants look much more cheery..

And then this eye popping piece of legal reasoning..

Judge: Haven't all of us wondered at one time or the other...don't we all have a sense of wonder and awe when holding a new born baby that there must be something more to life .. a higher mystery... than science can explain.... So I am ruling that ID should be taught alongside evolution... Case dismissed!!

Off course this fictitious case gives a ruling exactly opposite to the one where ID suffered a crushing defeat in court some years ago. In that ruling Judge John E. Jones III made it clear that ID is a lovechild of religious parents, a descendant of creationism, and is not a scientific theory and cannot be taught in evolution classes. His rejection of ID did not depend on whether science explains everything or not. In fact he makes it clear that the theory of evolution does not rule out the presence of the Almighty.

But Judge Jones said...well he didn't exactly say it, I am saying it ... but he ultimately meant ...

That while it is possible that holding a bald, slippery and naked baby may invoke a sense of mystery and awe in some of us, and a feeling that science does not explain everything about life, that does not qualify as a reason to include ID alongside evolution. A sense of mystery and awe are not scientifically testable alternative explanations of life. In other words ID besides saying that evolution cannot explain this or that doesn't offer any positive solution to the problem.

Television networks are ruled by ratings and they would have calculated that a show in favor of religious views over evolution would be approved by lots of American viewers. ID proponents have been over the years distancing themselves from making any overtly religious or mystical arguments like the one in this show since they want to be seen as "scientists". They would positively avoid any mention of religion when making their case. But the writers of the show inadvertently revealed their true motives.