Wallace’s scientific heresy was first delivered in the April, 1869 issue of The Quarterly Review, in which he outlined what he saw as the failure of natural selection to explain the enlarged human brain (compared to apes), as well as the organs of speech, the hand, and the external form of the body:

In the brain of the lowest savages and, as far as we know, of the prehistoric races, we have an organ…little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types…. But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Australians or the Andaman Islanders, are very little above those of many animals. How then was an organ developed far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural Selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.

(Please note the language that, were we to judge the man solely by his descriptors for indigenous peoples, would lead us to label Wallace a racist even though he was in his own time what we would today call a progressive liberal.)

Since natural selection was the only law of nature Wallace knew of to explain the development of these structures, and since he determined that it could not adequately do so, he concluded that “an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature.”

Natural selection is not prescient—it does not select for needs in the future. Nature did not know we would one day need a big brain in order to contemplate the heavens or compute complex mathematical problems; she merely selected amongst our ancestors those who were best able to survive and leave behind offspring. But since we are capable of such sublime and lofty mental functions, Wallace deduced, clearly natural selection could not have been the originator of a brain big enough to handle them. Thus the need to invoke an “Overruling Intelligence” for this apparent gap in the theory.

Why did Wallace retreat from his own theory of natural selection when it came to the human mind? The answer, in a word, is hyper-selectionism (or adaptationism), in which the current adaptive purpose of a structure or function must be explained by natural selection applied to the past. Birds presently use wings to fly, so if we cannot conceive of how natural selection could incrementally select for fractional wings that were fully functional at each partial stage (called “the problem of incipient stages”) then some other force must have been at work. Darwin answered this criticism by demonstrating how present structures serve a purpose different from the one for which they were originally selected. Partial wings, for example, were not poorly designed flying structures but well designed thermoregulators. Stephen Jay Gould calls this process “exaptation” (ex-adaptation) and uses the Panda’s thumb as his type specimen: it is not a poorly designed thumb but a radial sesamoid (wrist) bone modified by natural selection for stripping leaves off bamboo shoots.

Wallace’s hyperselectionism and adaptationism were outlined more formally in an 1870 paper, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” in which he admitted up front the danger of proffering a force that is beyond those known to science: “I must confess that this theory has the disadvantage of requiring the intervention of some distinct individual intelligence…. It therefore implies that the great laws which govern the material universe were insufficient for this production, unless we consider…that the controlling action of such higher intelligences is a necessary part of those laws….”

After an extensive analysis of brain size differences between humans and non-human primates, Wallace then considers such abstractions as law, government, science, and even such games as chess (a favorite pastime of his), noting that “savages” lack all such advances. Even more, “Any considerable development of these would, in fact, be useless or even hurtful to him, since they would to some extent interfere with the supremacy of those perceptive and animal faculties on which his very existence often depends, in the severe struggle he has to carry on against nature and his fellow-man. Yet the rudiments of all these powers and feelings undoubtedly exist in him, since one or other of them frequently manifest themselves in exceptional cases, or when some special circumstances call them forth.”

Therefore, he concludes, “the general, moral, and intellectual development of the savage is not less removed from that of civilised man than has been shown to be the case in the one department of mathematics; and from the fact that all the moral and intellectual faculties do occasionally manifest themselves, we may fairly conclude that they are always latent, and that the large brain of the savage man is much beyond his actual requirements in the savage state.” Thus, “A brain one-half larger than that of the gorilla would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed for the limited mental development of the savage; and we must therefore admit that the large brain he actually possesses could never have been solely developed by any of those laws of evolution…. The brain of prehistoric and of savage man seems to me to prove the existence of some power distinct from that which has guided the development of the lower animals through their ever-varying forms of being.”

The middle sections of this lengthy paper review additional human features that Wallace could not conceive of being evolved by natural selection: the distribution of body hair, naked skin, feet and hands, the voice box and speech, the ability to sing, artistic notions of form, color, and composition, mathematical reasoning and geometrical spatial abilities, morality and ethical systems, and especially such concepts as space and time, eternity and infinity. “How were all or any of these faculties first developed, when they could have been of no possible use to man in his early stages of barbarism? How could natural selection, or survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, at all favour the development of mental powers so entirely removed from the material necessities of savage men, and which even now, with our comparatively high civilisation, are, in their farthest developments, in advance of the age, and appear to have relation rather to the future of the race than to its actual status?”

Modern Intelligent Design creationists generally (with few exceptions) believe that the designer is God. Nowhere in this paper does Wallace invoke God as the overarching intelligence. In a footnote in the second edition of the volume in which this paper was published, in fact, Wallace upbraids those who accused him of such speculations:

Some of my critics seem quite to have misunderstood my meaning in this part of the argument. They have accused me of unnecessarily and unphilosophically appealing to “first causes” in order to get over a difficulty—of believing that “our brains are made by God and our lungs by natural selection;” and that, in point of fact, “man is God’s domestic animal.” … Now, in referring to the origin of man, and its possible determining causes, I have used the words “some other power”—“some intelligent power”—“a superior intelligence”—“a controlling intelligence,” and only in reference to the origin of universal forces and laws have I spoken of the will or power of “one Supreme Intelligence.” These are the only expressions I have used in alluding to the power which I believe has acted in the case of man, and they were purposely chosen to show that I reject the hypothesis of “first causes” for any and every special effect in the universe, except in the same sense that the action of man or of any other intelligent being is a first cause. In using such terms I wished to show plainly that I contemplated the possibility that the development of the essentially human portions of man’s structure and intellect may have been determined by the directing influence of some higher intelligent beings, acting through natural and universal laws.

Clearly Wallace’s heresy had nothing to do with God or any other supernatural force, as these “natural and universal laws” could be fully incorporated into the type of empirical science he practiced. It was not spiritualism, but scientism at work in Wallace’s world-view: “These speculations are usually held to be far beyond the bounds of science; but they appear to me to be more legitimate deductions from the facts of science than those which consist in reducing the whole universe…to matter conceived and defined so as to be philosophically inconceivable.”

In Wallace’s science there is no supernatural. There is only the natural and unexplained phenomenon yet to be incorporated into the natural sciences. That he left no room in his evolutionary theory for exaptations of early structures for later use is no reflection on his ambitions and abilities as a scientist. It was, in fact, one of Wallace’s career goals to be the scientist who brought more of the apparent supernatural into the realm of the natural, and the remainder of his life was devoted to fleshing out the details of a scientism that encompassed so many different issues and controversies that made him a heretic-scientist.

If modern Intelligent Design theorists restricted their visage to only natural causes they would, perchance, be taken more seriously by the scientific community, who at present (myself included) sees this movement as nothing more than another species of the genus Homo creationopithicus.

Consider the graph above (from the website Calamities of Nature). It shows the relationship between the acceptance of evolution (here defined as “humans beings, as we know them, evolved from earlier species of animals”, a reasonably good metric of true acceptance of evolution) in various countries around the world versus their relative wealth (as measured by GDP adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity). The main trend of countries form a well defined cloud with a reasonable curvilinear fit. At the top are a well-defined cluster of northern and western European nations (plus Japan), with the southern European nations just behind them. Near the bottom are the former Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe, which still suffer the effects of decades of backward Soviet educational and economic policies. (China, South Korea, and Singapore are not shown, but on other surveys, they all rate high on the acceptance of evolution scale. so they would plot high on the ordinate or Y axis, no matter what their GDP).

The same relationship could be shown if you consider any of the recent surveys that measure science literacy on an international scale. The northern and western European nations (especially Germany and the Scandinavian countries plus Iceland) nearly always come out near the top, along with Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and sometimes China. The exact order differs from survey to survey, but they only shuffle within the top 10 or top 15. In other words, the acceptance of evolution in these countries is a very strong predictor of overall science literacy.

Now look at the position of the U.S. It is a striking outlier on the graph shown here, because its low rate of acceptance of evolution relative to its national wealth (and the same would be true if you plotted it against the money spent on education per student). It falls down near the bottom of the curve on evolution acceptance along with Islamic nations like Turkey, which spend much less per student. What is this telling us?

We’ve heard all sorts of arguments about why our U.S. students are so illiterate in science despite all the money spent on their education. Teachers point out that they are forced to focus on memorization of numerous out-of-context factoids for multiple choice tests, not the hands-on active learning method of doing science that is proven to really reach students. Others point to our pop culture, which stereotypes scientists as nerds or “mad geniuses” in white lab coats, plotting to destroy the world. Compared to other rich industrialized countries, scientists and engineers in the U.S. don’t have nearly the prestige that they have in Japan or Germany, for example—nor are they paid as well as others, such as sports stars, movie stars, and investment bankers. In the U.S., the most popular public figures are jocks and entertainers, not exactly role models for the intellectual improvement of our country. Mooney and Kirshenbaum (2009) put some of the blame on the poor scientific communication skills and lack of PR efforts by scientists to make their work more accessible and better known to the public.

No doubt all of these things are true to some extent, but they’re all missing the elephant in the room that is apparent in these data: the stultifying influence of creationism in U.S. science education. Most of the examples of science illiteracy revealed in common survey questions, such as the mistaken notions about the age of the earth and Big Bang, or whether humans lived with dinosaurs, or whether we share a lot of DNA with chimps, are clearly so out of line with reality because they are part of the creationist dogma. No matter what kids learn in school about these subjects, their religious training at home overcomes the best efforts of their teachers—and their ideas rarely change as they become scientifically illiterate adults.

The single biggest predictor of national success in science literacy is the degree to which a country is not dominated by dogmatic religious beliefs, whether it be fundamentalist Christianity or conservative Islam. As Jon Miller documented, most of these industrialized European and Asian countries have no such strong forces of religious dogmatism in their politics and culture, and their schools teach evolution and other scientific topics with almost no interference by religious zealots.

The accommodationists say that scientists must not offend the religious community in the U.S., because they are too numerous and powerful, and we need allies among the Catholics and the more moderate Protestants and Jews, wherever we can get them. As someone who grew up in a religious family and tries not offend them, I can understand this laissez faire attitude. But if these data are correct, appeasing the religious and trying to make evolution and astronomy and anthropology sound more palatable and less threatening to our religious notions really doesn’t help. Only the decline in dogmatic religious beliefs seems to predict a greater science literacy rate. As Greg Paul and Phil Zuckerman (2008) and many people have noted, the least religious of these European countries also have a very high standard of living and better sense of well being. They share another thing in common: they are countries with strong social safety nets (guaranteed health care, job security, good retirement and vacation benefits, good child care). In these countries (especially in Scandinavia and Germany), most people no longer worry much about these mundane matters of survival, and no longer feel the need to pray to a deity to protect them against the lack of health coverage, few benefits or job security, scanty retirement savings, and lack of child care that plagues many middle and lower class people in the U.S. Yet their economies are thriving, their standards of living are very high, and they have relatively few people who are poor.

Certainly, the issue of why Americans are so ignorant of science is a complex one that doesn’t have a simple single-factor answer. It is probably a nexus of causes, from media dominated by junk entertainment and little real science, to the problems with educating students, to the raging hormones of teenagers, to the big problem of dogmatic religion actively opposing science and reason in this country. Whatever the cause, the consequences are severe.

Order the book from Skeptic.com

People love to touch old objects and feel a connection to the past, whether it be the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, ancient ruins in China or India or Egypt or Europe, pieces of fossil bone on display in a museum, or the oldest objects known, the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorites. Each time I travel to do research in historic old museum collections, it feels a bit like time travel. In my field, the original specimens first described by the founders of my profession, 19th-century paleontologists like Edward Drinker Cope, O.C. Marsh, and Joseph Leidy, are still essential parts of our research. We must examine these “type specimens” to determine whether fossil species these people named and described over 100 years ago are still valid today, when we have much better and more complete and abundant specimens. When I visit the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, I can examine type specimens first named by Leidy in the 1850s. At Yale, nearly every specimen I looked at was first studied by Marsh in the 1870s and 1880s. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I worked not only on fossils first studied by Cope in the 1870s and 1880s, but the Osborn Research Library in the Department of Paleontology even has Cope’s  geology pick where any visiting scientist can touch it, or one can sit down at Cope’s original desk. Cope’s skull (donated to science, along with his entire skeleton) has floated around various museums, and many paleontologists have handled it as well (with lots of jokes about the odd situation).

Vertebrate paleontology is also such a small profession with so few practitioners in its mere 150 years of existence that we’re all connected by our graduate advisors to just a handful of men who founded the profession over a century ago. When I was a student, I shook the hand of Ned Colbert, who was Henry Fairfield Osborn’s assistant in the 1920s, and Osborn bragged that he had shaken both Darwin’s and Huxley’s hand when he did post-graduate study in Europe. So I’m only 3 degrees of separation from Darwin himself. (I also have a friend who was in the cast of the original “Footloose”, so I’m 2 degrees from Kevin Bacon).

When I visited the American Museum this fall to continue my research on fossil peccaries or javelinas (American pig-like creatures only distantly related to Old World pigs), I was keeping a close watch for one specimen in particular. Everyone who has fought in the evolution-creation wars has heard of it, and I wanted to finally see and touch the specimen for myself. It is the tooth that caused a sensation in the 1920s, and has since become something that creationists harp on excessively, even though their version of the story is full of lies and myths. It is the tooth known as Hesperopithecus haroldcooki (“Harold Cook’s western ape”).

As described in a column by Stephen Jay Gould, An Essay on a Pig Roast (1991) and even in more detail by Wolf and Mellett (1985), the true story is quite interesting. Harold Cook was the son of the famous rancher James Cook who lived near what is now Agate Springs National Monument (and who also befriended Indians such as Red Cloud who still roamed the area in the 1880s). Harold, however, took an interest in the fossils that came from his family ranch, since the rich deposits of the Agate bone beds were being excavated by the University of Nebraska and the Carnegie Museum just a few feet from the family homestead when he was growing up. Cook was not a very well-trained paleontologist, but he had a good eye for finding fossils in the incredible bone beds of western Nebraska.

In 1917 he found an odd-looking isolated tooth in what is now known as the late Hemphillian (latest Miocene) Snake Creek Formation of western Nebraska. He sent it to Henry Fairfield Osborn, the President of the American Museum at that time, and the most powerful and influential paleontologist in the world as well. (Today, most of Osborn’s work is not held in high regard by paleontologists, since he was an excessive splitter who named a new species on nearly every specimen  he studied, was too strongly influenced by his weird philosophical notions like “aristogenesis” and “racial senescence”, and did not have a real talent for anatomy compared to some of his peers like William Diller Matthew). Osborn got very excited and thought it might be the tooth of an anthropoid ape, but was cautious at first since it was such a crummy specimen: a single cheek tooth with the crown all worn away and only two roots present. Nonetheless, he was a great believer in the idea that humans and apes originated in Asia, not Africa, and might have migrated to North America along with so many other Miocene mammals that were close relatives of Asian forms. In 1922, despite all the doubts that he and all his colleagues had, he published the specimen as Hesperopithecus haroldcooki.

Image of the Hesperopithecus tooth (middle column) compared to two equally worn chimpanzee teeth (left and right columns). Click image to enlarge it

The remaining story is quite simple. Although Osborn had his doubts, and only said it might be the tooth of an anthropoid ape, the press (in this case, the Illustrated London News) jumped way past  his original cautious interpretation, and coined the term “Nebraska Man” and even published a famous “reconstruction” that was actually based on the “Java Man” specimens of Homo erectus. Meanwhile, many paleontologists got to work, excavating more specimens from near the Hesperopithecus site and uncovering a lot more fossils that gave us our first good picture of mammalian evolution in the late Hemphillian. Sure enough, they began to find specimens of peccaries such as the genus Prosthennops (which I am working on revising right now) and began to realize that these animals had teeth which could easily be mistaken for primates.

The ‘reconstruction’ of ‘Nebraska man’ by the Illustrated London News (actually based on Homo erectus, ‘Java man,’ not the Nebraska tooth, which no scientist claimed looked like an advanced species of Homo).

After a few years of excavation in the region and the discovery of many more fossils, it was clear to the much more competent anatomist (and primate specialist) William King Gregory (to whom Osborn had entrusted the analysis) that Hesperopithecus was not a primate at all, but a peccary. In 1927 Gregory wrote a paper that quietly corrected the mistake, and the story was over as far as paleontologists are concerned. If it hadn’t been trumpeted by the press and creationists so much, the fossil would be among the hundreds of specimens given species names by Cope, Marsh, Leidy, Osborn, and others, which are too incomplete to be the basis of any presently recognized species. They are usually consigned to the taxonomic trash heap of nomina dubia (“doubtful names”) and are forgotten to all but the specialists.

But the story is a favorite of creationists, who usually tell a false version of it and conclude with the laugh line “and it turned out to be the tooth of an extinct pig!” To the creationists, any mistake about interpreting fossil human ancestors is prima facie evidence that there are no valid hominid fossils, and therefore humans didn’t evolve. Both the Talkorigins.org and other sites, as well as the references below, correct most of these creationist lies:

1. The mistake was an honest one by a not-too-competent Osborn, who only suggested that it might be an anthropoid ape, NOT a  hominid. It was the tabloid media who called it “Nebraska man” and reconstructed it like Homo erectus. Osborn actually rejected the efforts of the media to overhype the specimen.
2. Contrary to myth, Osborn did not go around trumpeting his find to embarrass William Jennings Bryan, and the specimen was never mentioned at the Scopes Monkey Trial. He did write a book The Earth Speaks to Bryan to point out that The Great Commoner was out of touch with science with his embrace of creationism. Osborn must have been tickled that the specimen was found in Bryan’s home state of Nebraska but it never figured in the Scopes trial.
3. Contrary to creationist lies, Osborn was no atheist or Marxist,  but a political conservative and a devout Episcopalian who was raised as a Presbyterian and attended church regularly. In fact, Clarence Darrow planned to have Osborn testify at the Scopes Trial, precisely because he was a devout Christian and a famous evolutionist. (The judge did not allow Darrow to call any of his scientific witnesses who were also Christians to testify, ruling their testimony as irrelevant, which prompted Darrow’s famous cross-examination of Bryan instead).
4. It’s an easy mistake to make, because primates, pigs, peccaries, and even bears and raccoons have highly similar cheek teeth: the crowns are simple squares or rectangles with four bulbous cusps on each corner. This is a classic bunodont dentition that nearly all omnivorous mammals evolve, because it is generalized and suitable for chewing up both meat and vegetation. I’ve shown a peccary tooth and a primate tooth side-by-side to creationists many times, and they can’t see the difference—yet they laugh at Osborn’s innocent mistake.
5. The specimen is from a peccary (Family Tayassuidae, an American group), not a pig (Family Suidae, restricted to the Old World)! Over and over again, creationists make this mistake, showing their complete incompetence in basic biology. The two are completely different families which are only distantly related to one another, and would never be mistaken for one another by anyone with even rudimentary experience in field biology or mammalogy. Heck, even my youngest son could tell a pig from a peccary since he was 3 years old!
6. Finally, the most crucial point of all: the mistake was corrected by scientists (not by creationists who can’t tell one tooth from another) soon after it was made. This is the way science is supposed to operate. Science is always tentative, subject to revision as better ideas or evidence comes along, never final.  Scientists are human, after all, and we all make mistakes. But peer review and further scrutiny by the scientific community usually fixes them. This is in stark contrast to creationists who believe in a final truth that cannot change, and never admit their own mistakes, but create huge webs of ad hoc lies and storytelling to salvage their ideas that have been shot to pieces. (Just look at their bizarre notion of “created kinds” or “baraminology” to salvage the idea that Noah’s ark contained two of every living creature).

These are all points that I discussed in my evolution book and have lectured about again and again. After all these years, I was eager to see the real fossil. However, once I found the right cabinet and drawer, it was a bit of a disappointment. The tooth is extremely tiny and featureless without any anatomical detail on its completely worn crown. Today we have hundreds of such specimens which are usually tossed into the “unidentified” tray because there is nothing one can do with them. Only its square shape and two roots would even suggest that it might be a primate, but no competent paleontologist would go that far today—as Osborn should not have done even then.

Instead, we have a creationist lie that keeps on going and going since they copy each other without ever checking the facts or asking whether the legend is accurate. What it reveals more than anything else is the intellectual and scientific bankruptcy of creationists, who endlessly recycle myths (both of Nebraska Man and of Genesis) without ever bothering to seek the truth.

Order the book from Skeptic.com

I’ve posted frequently (see my July 24 post) on the religious kooks who insist that Galileo and Copernicus and all later astronomers were wrong  and that the earth, not the sun, is the center of the solar system. They base this weird notion on their own version of biblical literalism, since there are many passages in the Bible (e.g., Isaiah 11: 12, 40:22, 44:24; Joshua 10:12-14) which clearly present a geocentric world viewpoint (as was widely held in almost all ancient cultures and not overturned until the 1500s). Many are actually renegade Catholics who not only insist that Galileo was wrong and that the Church was right, but what the Inquisition did to Galileo was justified. Naturally, the Catholic Church is not too happy about these revisionists, since it has long come to terms with Galileo and scientific reality, and even apologized for its treatment of him. They don’t spend a lot of unnecessary time trying to repudiate or excommunicate these renegades who want to drag us back to the 14th century. I guess the Church is busy with other problems….

Recently, the Los Angeles Times ran an article on the latest version of the Catholic geocentrist movement. The article says:

“I have no idea who these people are,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, curator of meteorites and spokesman for the Vatican Observatory. “Are they sincere, or is this a clever bit of theater?”

Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church’s influence.

“Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system,” said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. “False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

Sungenis is no Don Quixote. Hundreds of curiosity seekers, skeptics and supporters attended a conference last fall titled “Galileo Was Wrong. The Church Was Right” near the University of Notre Dame campus inSouth Bend, Ind.

Astrophysicists at Notre Dame didn’t appreciate the group hitching its wagon to America’s flagship Catholic university and resurrecting a concept that’s extinct for a reason.

“It’s an idea whose time has come and gone,” astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich said. “There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s.”

After consulting with the neo-geocentrists and the Vatican observatory, the reporter next went to a logical additional source associated with biblical literalism: the loudest and more prominent creationist in the U.S., Ken  Ham, of the Answers in Genesis organization and the creation “museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. This is the same guy who insists that every word of the Bible must be interpreted literally or faith is meaningless, and who spends huge numbers of hours and dollars pushing biblical literalism and excoriating anyone who suggests that the Genesis creation story is metaphor or myth, not literally true.

And what do you think he said? Did he stick to his principles and defend geocentrism, which is found in many places in the Bible? No, he turned out to be a cafeteria Christian after all. As the Times reported:

“There’s a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated,” Ham said. “The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system.”

Ummm… sorry, Ken, but the Bible is actually MORE specific and detailed in its support of geocentrism than it is of your creation myth. What’s the matter, Ken? You can’t accept any deviation from literalism except when you decide the Bible isn’t clear or it’s metaphorical?

So what explains this inconsistency and flip-flopping in a man who insists on inerrancy, and won’t let anyone interpret the Bible metaphorically? Could it be that if he preached geocentrism, even his loyal fundie followers would laugh at him? If we pressed Pat Robertson or Oral Roberts or Mike Huckabee or the GOP presidential candidates who promote creationism, would they also agree with geocentrism? Somehow, I think not. The geocentrism vs. heliocentrism debate was over more 500 years ago, and only kooks and cranks are still waging it (along with creationists who insist the earth is flat, another idea found in the Bible). By contrast, over 150 years since Darwin’s book was published, a substantial percentage of people in the U.S. (but NOT in most European industrialized countries, nor in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, or other developed Asian countries) have still not rejected the equally outdated notions of creationism and come to terms with evolution. Apparently, 500 years is more than enough to get cultures to reject crazy religious notions, but 150 years are not enough (at least in the U.S.).

So, does this mean we still need to wait up to 350 years for creationism to finally die its long overdue death in the U.S.?

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

—Richard Feynman

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.

—John Burroughs

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, author

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

—Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003

What’s real is what’s real, and, like it or not, no one can change the nature of reality. Except, of course, with mushrooms.

—Bill Maher

It happens so often that we are inured and desensitized to it. Creationists spout lies and distortions about science and reality, and no one disputes them (except an occasional high school student who challenged Michele Bachmann’s assertion that Nobelists denied evolution). Politicians like Rick Perry and Bachmann get up and brag about their doubts about the reality of global climate change and evolution, and they become the darlings of the GOP. Partisan media like Fox News and their parent company NewsCorp admit that they are receiving money from GOP candidates, or funneling it to them, and no one seems to care. News Corp and Rupert Murdoch get away with all sorts of outrages in their tabloids, yet they are so powerful that British politicians and cops dare not cross them—until their actions are so extreme that all of the UK is disgusted with them. But every once in a while, the cat is let out of the bag, and someone says something that reveals how these people are either abysmally ignorant of reality because of deluded ideology, or they are smart enough to recognize it but play along in a cynical grab for power over those who are ignorant or ill informed.

The latest incident occurred when two pundits on Fox News were discussing the GOP candidates. They point to Jon Huntsman as the sole candidate who would admit that global warming is real (Romney, Gingrich, and others who also once admitted it are now backtracking to kowtow to the extremists who vote in GOP primaries and caucuses). They comment that he’s losing ground to Rick Perry, who made false claims not only about global warming but also about how scientists were allegedly committing fraud. One of the Fox anchors, Clayton Morris, says it it in no uncertain terms:

Certainly, if you dive into the weeds a little bit on this global warming thing, you see that it seems the facts are certainly on Huntsman’s side on all of this and fact checkers have come out, and we’re actually having our own brain room look at this right now, that any of Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water. But it doesn’t matter, because what’s resonating right now in South Carolina is helping Governor Perry tremendously. He fired back at Huntsman on global warming and gaining traction, facts or not.

There it is, in black and white. Pundits on Fox News admitting global warming is real, that it is supported by the scientific community—yet it matters not to Perry or others in the GOP craving power because their base doesn’t believe in reality. Political strategy aside, is this not among the most cynical things one could hear in the media? That facts are clear but don’t matter, since the GOP candidate must tell the extremists in their party what they want to hear, not tell the truth?

None of this is surprising to those of us in the scientific community who have followed politics since 2000. As Chris Mooney showed in his book The Republican War on Science, the GOP during the 8 years of Dubya pursued policies that were strongly in favor of big corporations, and ignored or rewrote the recommendations of their own science advisors whenever science and reality got in the way of their ideology. These incidents ranged from the subtle (rewriting EPA rules to favor big corporations) to the outrageous, such as the Bush official and  former oil company lobbyist Philip Cooney tampering with and toning down a scientific report on global warming, even though he had no science background and was clearly doing the bidding of the Administration and the oil lobby.

Indeed, the conflict goes back to the early Bush years, when Dubya backtracked on campaign pledges to curb global warming, and soon pursued policies that favored polluters, even while he was bragging to the media that he was in favor of creationism. The most revealing quote of all came when New York Times Magazine columnist Ron Suskind interviewed Karl Rove on Oct. 17, 2004:

he said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Once again, possibly without realizing it, they let the cat out of the bag. They know what is real, but they are cynical enough to play whatever political games they must play, and deny what they know to be real, all in the quest to gain and keep power. Machiavelli would not be surprised, but it is a pretty shameful admission nonetheless.

There were some in the media who have noticed it and commented, but now that the media are so polarized, you won’t hear anyone on the right wing commenting on it (with the exception of Morris above). One of the more measured and non-partisan analyses came from Nobelist Paul Krugman. As he puts it in his recent column:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

I concur that those prospects are truly terrifying, especially as we saw the consequences of eight  years of Bush policies that ignored reality and played cynical power games. Fortunately, there is still time for voters to come around and recognize this manipulation of ignorant right-wingers.

In the meantime, I proudly wear a badge which proclaims my allegiance to the “reality-based community”.

The terrifying fortress headquarters of the "Evil Empire"

After finishing my research on the fossils, I  had a bit of spare time, so on invitation from Steve Newton and Josh Rosenau (who attended my Bay Area Skeptics talk), I decided to pay a visit to another cultural landmark: the headquarters of the National Center for Science Education. This is the chief non-profit organization in the U.S. that helps local school boards and scientists and teachers when creationism threatens their classrooms. If you read the creationists’ literature and the posts on the ID creationist Discovery Institute’s (DI) website, the NCSE is this monstrous organization which exerts mind-control over every scientist in the country, and forces them to robotically chant “I accept evolution.” According to the creationists, the NCSE is pure evil, suppressing the creationism message with its enormous staff and budget and power over all of U.S. science. In Ben Stein’s crappy little creationist propaganda film Expelled, Ben pays a visit to the gleaming  headquarters of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which occupies a vast amount of floor space in a brand-new office building downtown, and has a huge staff. Over and over again the DI staffers complain about how they scientific establishment is against them, and how the NCSE has so much more power, money, and influence than they do.

So it’s surprising to actually visit the headquarters of the NCSE and get an abrupt reality check. This bête noire of creationism occupies a small, rundown, poorly ventilated commercial space in a rough part of Oakland, surrounded by fundamentalist churches. Their tiny staff is paid a pittance compared to most academic or business salaries, and they occupy cramped cubicles cluttered with piles of work. About the only way you could tell it was not any other kind of typical non-profit organization was the decoration: creationist and evolutionary posters and “timelines of creation”, casts of famous hominid fossils and prehistoric animal models,  dolls and posters and bobble-heads of Charles Darwin, clever signs from many different school board protests, and over the staff calendar and status board, “You  are not in Kansas any more.”

The minions of the NCSE plot to overthrow creationism in these dungeon-like offices

Their “archive” is the garage next door, where they have stored the records of nearly every creationist outbreak of the past 40 years, as well as thousands of cassettes and VHS tapes of debates and creationist propaganda films, and copies of many classic works of creationism. They have file drawer after file drawer of nearly every major “outbreak” of the creationism flu over the years, so when another one occurs, they have the old records and the local contact information of the activists who fought the battle last time. I even got to see a copy of “Dr. Dino” Kent Hovind’s legendary “doctoral dissertation” (bought from a diploma mill), which was written at barely high school level. The highlight of the whole place is the one tiny bathroom that they all share: its walls are lined with hilarious (mostly misspelled and incoherent) creationist hate mail and kooky and creepy things from creationist cranks that arrive by the boxload every year.

So this is the headquarters of the “Evil Empire,” the “Mordor” that creationists fear above all others? This tiny organization is allegedly brainwashing the entire scientific community, and is capable of suppression and censorship on a massive scale? This tiny office is the monster that the DI people in Ben Stein’s movie feared most? If so, then the NCSE is a David against a Goliath of creationist organizations. According to their tax forms, the budget of the DI in Seattle is nearly five times the budget of the NCSE. The DI is a huge organization which is one of the loudest and most powerful in the creationist community, along with Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis megachurch and “museum” in Kentucky—both are many times richer and more powerful than the threadbare NCSE. The budgets of most of the fundamentalist megachurches and schools like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University or the Seventh-Day Adventist schools dwarf even these. Yet all these mighty, rich organizations, with their TV shows on cable, and gigantic base of followers, fear the NCSE? The NCSE must be doing something right!

The stairway to the upper level of Mordor, um, the attic offices. It is decorated with an inflatable globe, a phylogeny poster, a geologic time scale running upstairs, and classic creationist posters.

What the NCSE demonstrates so beautifully is how a little well-targeted effort to spread the truth goes a long way. They don’t have the giant staff or budget to tackle every single creationist infection themselves, so they serve as a coordination center and clearinghouse, contacting the local scientists and teachers and activists and helping them organize, providing them with important information about the political aspects of fighting each particular battle, and helping them with arguments or documents which they can distribute to school boards or to citizens who get up to speak at a board meeting. Their staff is familiar with every political and scientific aspect of the evolution-creation wars. Their coordinators, like Josh Rosenau, are expert at getting the the local community to organize effectively, recruit allies, and make sure that they use their resources strategically in keeping school boards from making big mistakes. And they are led by the indefatigable Road Warrior, Dr. Eugenie Scott, who makes hundreds of appearances each year talking about creationism and science, and testifying before many different groups, all with her unshakably friendly, non-threatening, grandmotherly manner that gets people to listen and drop their hostility.

Despite the polls showing that about 40% of Americans agree with the major tenets of creationism, and the fact that there are many creationist organizations which are larger and more powerful, the NCSE has two key weapons: the law and reality. Fundamentalist ministers may be able to bamboozle their flocks with lies about evolution, but in the marketplace of scientific ideas, there is no longer any doubt that evolution is the way the world actually works.  Creationists may try to gussy up their ideas as “intelligent design” or hide behind the “teach the controversy” tactic, but the myths of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds are still a narrow religious dogma believed by only a minority of Americans. And that’s the ultimate line of defense: no matter what a local school board or state government does, if they leave ANY trail of their religious motivations for their acts (which is why the NCSE archive is crucial for detecting this), they run up against the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and ultimately the law is (at least in this case) on the side of scientific reality.

But it’s a never-ending struggle in this country. Creationists may not do any real science, or never learn any new arguments, or never concede that their old arguments were long ago debunked, but they are dedicated and well-funded and never give up. So the job of the NCSE never seems to end, and these hardworking underpaid staffers will never see  an empty “hot board map” showing no towns with current infections. Back in 1982, I was one of the original members of the Committees of Correspondence, Stanley Weinberg’s first effort to combat creationism in the Midwest, which evolved into the current NCSE. I’ve debated Gish and Meyer and Sternberg and a bunch of guys from ICR and DI, and written a book debunking their ideas about evolution and fossils. So I do what I can, but I don’t have the patience or time to do the job that the NCSE does. For that, I’m very grateful that they are there, fighting the good fight in the trenches, and manning the barricades that few scientists or teachers have time to deal with. We members of the skeptical and scientific community should all honor them for doing an essential job in trying to preserve the scientific integrity of our educational system, and fighting back against the untiring never-ending hordes of the forces of darkness, all while showing the patience of Job. And if you’re not already a member of NCSE, you should join, because they are doing this important job for all of us!

Order the book from Skeptic.com

The continuing problem of creationists and their efforts to hamper science education and research in this country never seems to abate. Some people throw up their hands in resignation and say, “We can never change their minds, so let’s just ignore them.” As I pointed out in my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, we cannot afford to ignore the creationist threat to science. Not only do they undermine the proper teaching of biology in our schools, but they have made no secret that their goal is to suppress any science that is not consistent with their literalistic view of the Bible. Good bye, astronomy and cosmology. Good bye, physical anthropology and human paleontology. Good bye, geology (and forget finding oil or coal or gas ever again). Good bye molecular biology, and its evidence for evolution. And forget all the benefits that these sciences provide us, or the richer perspective on life that we gain by understanding our true place in the universe, rather than the version handed down by some Bronze Age shepherds.

But a bigger problem is the fact that in some cases, denial of evolution is dangerous or even deadly. Evolution keeps happening all the time, whether creationists want to believe it or not. Yet if we deny the fact that evolution is happening in viruses and bacteria and in other pathogens and pests, it only makes the problem worse when they evolve resistance to whatever we throw at them. If creationists ran the labs that produce these protective chemicals, do you think we would have a chance when the next deadly pest hits us?

Many insects and weeds have evolved resistance to pesticides and herbicides, all within a few decades, causing enormous economic damage to people all over the world. Every modern housefly now carries the genes that make it resistant not only to DDT, but also pyrethroids, dieldrin, organophosphates and carbamates, so there are few poisons left that can suppress them. The mosquitoes that evolved resistance to DDT and other organophosphate insecticides apparently evolved in Africa during the 1960s, spread on to Asia, then reached California by 1984, Italy in 1985, and France in 1986. As entomologist Martin Taylor describes it (in Weiner, 1994, p. 255):

It always seems amazing to me that evolutionists pay so little attention to this kind of thing, and that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is the evolution itself they are struggling against in their fields every season. These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer any more?

But the most egregious example of evolution denial didn’t just hurt people, but actually killed a baby. In 1984, when a surgeon at Loma Linda University in California attempted to replace the defective heart of “Baby Fae” with the heart of a baboon. Not surprisingly, the poor baby died a few days later due to immune rejection. An Australian radio crew interviewed the surgeon, Dr. Leonard Bailey, and asked him why he didn’t use a more closely related primate, such as a chimpanzee, and avoid the possibility of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical license revoked. But under the cover of religion, his unscientific beliefs caused an innocent baby to die of immune rejection, when other alternatives might have been available. And Bailey still continues on at Loma Linda, treating kids with no regrets about his unethical experiment.

So just think about that the next time you hear someone say, “Oh, creationism is not hurting anyone.”

But my favorite talk was Eugenie Scott’s presentation, “Deja Vu all over again: Denialism of Climate Change and Evolution.” It gave me a sense of deja vu, because apparently without knowledge of each others’ work, we have converged on a common topic. This is what philosopher William Whewell would call a “consilience” or common agreement of different lines of evidence or threads of argument. As I independently pointed out in my upcoming book written last summer about science denialism, entitled Reality Check, and in a paper I wrote which is now in press, there are tremendous parallels between the evolution-deniers (creationists), the climate change deniers, and many other types of science deniers. Even more striking, they borrow most of their tactics from the prototypical reality deniers, the Holocaust revisionists, along with the tactics of the tobacco companies in creating “doubt” through PR to obscure the real science.

Consider the following:

• This scientific consensus about this idea is accepted by 95-99% of all the scientists who work in the relevant fields;
• This scientific topic threatens the viewpoints of certain groups in the U.S., so it is strongly opposed by them and people they influence;
• Their anti-scientific viewpoint is extensively promoted by websites and publications of right-wing fundamentalist institutes such as the Discovery Institute in Seattle, and often plugged by Fox News;
• The opponents of this consensus cannot find legitimate scientists with expertise in the field who oppose the consensus of qualified scientists, so they beat the bushes for “scientists” (none of whom have relevant training or research credentials) to compose a phony “list of scientists who disagree with Topic X”;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus resort to taking quotes out of context to make legitimate scientists sound like they question the consensus;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus often look for small disagreements among scholars within the field to argue that the entire field does not support their major conclusions;
• Deniers often pick on small errors by individuals to argue that the entire field is false;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus often take small examples or side issues that do not seem to support the consensus and use these to argue that the consensus is false;
• Deniers of the scientific consensus spend most of their energies disputing the scientific evidence, rather than doing original research themselves;
• By loudly proclaiming their “alternate theories” and getting their paid PR people to question the scientific consensus in the media, they manage to get the American public confused and doubtful, so less than half of US citizens accept what 99% of legitimate scientists in this field of research consider to be true;
• By contrast, most modern industrialized nations (Canada, nearly all of Europe, China, Japan, Singapore, and many others) have no problems with the scientific consensus, and treat it as a matter of fact in both their education and in their economic and political decisions;
• Powerful politicians have used the controversy over this issue to try to force changes in the teaching of this topic in schools;

Reading through this list, most people would immediately assume that it only describes the creationists and their attempts to target the scientific consensus on evolution. Indeed, the list does describe creationists or “evolution denialists”—but it also describes the actions of the climate denialists (who deny global climate change is real and human caused) as well. In fact, the membership lists of creationists and climate-change deniers is highly overlapping, with both causes being promoted by right-wing political candidates, news media (especially Fox News), and religious/political organizations like the Discovery Institute and many others.

The one big difference between them is motivation. Creationists are motivated exclusively by strong fundamentalist literalist religious beliefs; most AGW (anthropogenic global warming) deniers are motivated by right-wing political and economic ideologies, which view environmentalism as a threat to unrestrained capitalism and freedom to do whatever we damn well please (including polluting and destroying our planet). As Oreskes and Conway (2010) brilliantly document, AGW denialism did not exist as a serious movement until about a decade ago, when various right-wing and libertarian think tanks (Marshall Institute, Heartland Institute, Cato Institute), heavily funded by energy companies with vested interests in denying AGW, began a concerted PR campaign to discredit the overwhelming evidence and the conclusions of 95% of the climate science community. Because there were almost no climate scientists who denied the evidence for AGW, the PR specialists recruited among scientists not trained in climate research, and compiled phony lists of “dissenting scientists” (most of whom have no advanced degree, or their degree is not in climate science). This is comparable to the way creationists compile phony lists of “scientists dissenting from evolution,” which turns out to be mostly people with degrees completely irrelevant to evolution, like engineering and physics, rather than evolutionary biology or molecular genetics or geology. The NCSE brilliantly satirized this ridiculous PR exercise by creating “Project Steve”, which showed that there are more scientists with the name “Steve” or “Stephen” or “Stephanie” (over 1100 so far, which is less than 1% of the total population of scientists) than the total number of “scientists disputing evolution.”

I could go on and on with documentation of the other similarities between evolution-deniers and AGW-deniers, but the space in this column is limited. Most of it is provided by Oreskes and Conway (2010), and spelled out in my two upcoming publications in even greater detail. The only good news I can see in this regard is that the U.S. is almost alone in its anti-scientific attitudes toward both evolution—and AGW. Almost all the other industrialized nations in western Europe and Asia have accepted it long ago, were enthusiastic signatories at the Copenhagen Conference, and are actively involved in working to reduce their carbon footprints. More revealing is the fact that numerous relatively conservative or non-ideological institutions also accept the reality of climate change. This includes the insurance companies and their re-insurers (like Swiss Re), many other major businesses, emergency management agencies at every level, and even the U.S. military (hardly a bastion of liberalism). These organizations don’t have the luxury of playing political games. They’ve read the scientific consensus and must plan for the future. If they can see the matter so clearly, why can’t we? Just like in our lack of an energy policy and dependence on foreign oil, it looks like the U.S. will be the last major country dragged into facing reality after the rest of the world  has already jumped ahead of us and prepared for it—and invested heavily in clean energy development and preparation for climate change while we wasted time in an unnecessary battle between accepted science and ideological PR.

There is one other other ray of light: Eugenie Scott announced at TAM9 that the National Center for Science Education will now be fighting not only for good evolutionary science to be taught in schools, but also climate science as well. And her announcement got a huge round of applause from the TAM9 audience, which would not have happened a few years ago when there were still a lot of AGW deniers at TAM.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
—Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
—Richard Feynman

What’s real is what’s real, and, like it or not, no one can change the nature of reality. Except, of course, with mushrooms.
—Bill Maher

Order the book from Skeptic.com

A few weeks ago my email box was full of gloating messages from creationists claiming that the latest discovery of complex eyes in the Cambrian “proved” creationism and “refuted” evolution. As usual, creationists demonstrate a remarkable ability to completely misunderstand and misinterpret real science, and get the message of the paper ass-backward. The article to which they referred is an excellent new paper on the appearance in the Early Cambrian of compound eyes, slightly earlier than they were known previously. But creationists doesn’t know enough science to understand the paper—all they do is read “complex eyes” and “Early Cambrian” in the title, and to them, “Darwinism is falsified.” It never ceases to amaze me how they can mangle legitimate research to mean just the opposite of what was written, but so strong are their belief filters that they hear only what they want to hear, and completely miss the point of most of the world of science that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions.

The discovery itself is quite remarkable, and good discussions are given here and here. From the Lower Cambrian Emu Bay Shale of Kangaroo Island, South Australia, are nicely preserved elements (ommatidia) of compound eyes, which are larger and more complex than any others known from the Early Cambrian (although similarly complex but smaller compound eyes are found in trilobites of the Atdabanian Stage of the Cambrian, just  a few million years later). The eyes themselves are individual molts and not attached to bodies, but they were once part of some large arthropod. Some ommatidia have over 3000 lenses, equal to many of the compound eyes found since the Cambrian. Although it forces us to revise our treatment of the history of eyes a bit, it it not “the end of Darwinism” as creationists claim. The molecular data have long predicted that complex compound eyes should have appeared long before we see them in the fossil record, but were simply not preserved because they had no hard parts yet (probably because conditions in the Precambrian and Early Cambrian oceans only gradually reached a threshold that allowed mineralization of soft tissues). This discovery simply extends the range of compound eyes back a few million years earlier than we had known previously.

Yet if you read the creationist accounts of this discovery, it was as if this one paper had caused all of evolutionary biology to crumble! The main thread of their argument is the same, tired old “Cambrian explosion” misconception they’ve been beating for decades. Somehow, the appearance of one more complex fossil in the Early Cambrian makes the “Cambrian explosion” completely inexplicable by evolution. In the words of creationist IDiot David Buckna, “The Cambrian explosion is affirmed; complexity appears suddenly without transitions; Darwinism is falsified; the inference to the best explanation is intelligent design. Let the world know.”

That is pure garbage, and shows once again that creationists cannot read, or if they do read, they don’t understand anything. The truth of the matter was outlined in Chapter 7 of my 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, and I will summarize the major points below:

1. Contrary to creationist lies, there is an excellent sequence of fossils that show the logical stepwise transition from the earliest single-celled bacteria at 3.5 billion years ago, to the first eukaryotic cell at 1.8 billion years ago, to the multicellular (but soft-bodied) Ediacara biota 610 million years ago, and finally in the first two stages of the Cambrian (545-520 million years ago), the “little shellies”, which are small bit of armor of the first skeletonized organisms. Only in the third stage of the Cambrian (the Atdabanian) do the hard-shelled trilobites and other complex organisms first appear. This is exactly as would be predicted by evolution: single-celled prokaryotes, then eukaryotes, then soft-bodied multicellular creatures, then the first tiny bits of skeletonization, and finally large skeletonized fossils.

When I read the creationist versions of this reality, they always ignore all the evidence of anything prior to trilobites, despite the fact that the Ediacara biota has been known for 70 years, and the rest documented over the past few decades. They act as if no fossils existed before the trilobites (as it was in Darwin’s day) and none of the discoveries of the past 70 years existed. When Michael Shermer and I debated and beat creationists Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg in Beverly Hills in 2009, I attacked them on this very point—and they dodged it by focusing on the trilobites, and completely ignoring all the less complex organisms that preceded them.

2. The term “Cambrian explosion” is a complete misnomer. These events took place between 610 and 520 million years ago (spanning 90 million years), or even if you just restrict it to the Early Cambrian, 25 million years. Ninety million or even 25 million years is hardly a rapid “explosion” by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve urged geologists to use the more appropriate “Cambrian slow fuse” to reflect reality and not give the creationists fuel for their lies, but it’s hard to change old habits. The archaic term “Cambrian explosion” dates back to the early days of geology, when the events of the Precambrian-Cambrian transition, lasting 25 to 90 million years, seemed abrupt on the scale of the 520 million years that followed, or the 3 billion years that preceded it. That’s a geologist’s perspective, where millions of years are nothing when you’re used to billions of years of time.

Whatever caused the “Cambrian slow fuse”, and however it occurred, is is most certainly not an “abrupt explosion” that is too fast for evolution to explain. Even 25 million years is almost half of the Cenozoic, or the “Age of Mammals” that we are still a part of! There is plenty of time for events to unfold at normal rates of evolution, and the discovery of earlier compound eye fossils does not change the overall pattern.

Ironically, the creationists themselves cite articles showing the “Cambrian explosion” took tens of millions of years (clearly labeled through the paper) yet they don’t believe in a time scale longer than 6000 years for all of creation! That’s their usual tactic: cherry-pick a few things out of context, quote-mine whatever seems to support their position, and then ignore everything else that completely contradicts and falsifies what they have asserted. That may serve their purposes, but it’s not science and it’s dishonest. But as I documented in my 2007 Evolution book, they don’t care about honesty as long as they can distort and misquote science and scientists to serve their purposes of evangelism and suppression of science they don’t like.

I realize that most of us are tired of creationist lies and propaganda and political interference, and want to get on with our lives doing science and true scholarship, or just earning a living. But garbage like this latest event are evidence that the fight must go on. We must keep vigilant that they don’t threaten our schools or scientific institutions any more than they do already.

Margulis’ sheer determination in getting her ideas heard, and finding scientific evidence to support them, was remarkable, especially in a age where the idea was highly unorthodox. But she was never an orthodox scientist to begin with. Admitted to the University of Chicago when she was 14, she married Carl Sagan when she was 19, and her son Dorion Sagan is a frequent coauthor with her on her books. Her other child with the great astronomer, Jeremy Sagan, is a software developer and the founder of Sagan Technology. As the years go by and more and more people recognize her pioneering work, she has received all sorts of honors: membership of the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, the 1999 National Medal of Science, the 2008 Darwin-Wallace Medal, the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, and her papers are archived at the Library of Congress.

Thus, it is with shock and sadness that I read her recent interview in Discover magazine (April 2011, pp. 66-71). It’s one thing to read about her argument for “symbiogenesis” as more important to evolution than natural selection. That’s yet another controversial idea she has long pushed, and it’s plausible that evolution works faster with the insertion of gene sequences, especially from parasites and viruses. Indeed, the discovery of ERVs (endogenous retroviruses, fragments of DNA that once infected the genome and are now passively copied in each generation as a silent selectively-neutral fossils of past events) tends to support this idea a bit. But the the interview gets stranger and stranger, such as when she criticizes all of population genetics as “numerology”, or this weird exchange:

Interviewer: Some of your criticisms of natural selection sound a lot like Michael Behe, one of the most famous proponents of “intelligent design,” and yet you have debated Behe. What is the difference between your views?

Margulis: The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.

Thanks, Lynn. You can bet that parts of that quote will show up on the Discovery Institute site, and in a lot of future creationist books and blogs and debates. Our job clarifying the public myths of evolution is hard enough without someone as famous and honored as Margulis spouting misconceptions and outright mistakes that just beg for creationists to quote-mine them.

But the final straw is when she slips outside the realm of science entirely, and becomes a full-fledged AIDS denier. My jaw just dropped when I read the following:

There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”

How can she call herself a serious biologist and say something like this? Has she never actually LOOKED at the hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers documenting the structure of the HIV virus, and the clear documentation of that virus in patients that suffer and die from AIDS? Or the fact that patients treated with anti-retrovirals manage to suppress their AIDS symptoms? Or the disaster in South Africa, when the government became active AIDS deniers, spread misinformation and myths about AIDS, and the infection rate shot up? Not even the hard-core AIDS deniers like Peter Duesberg deny that the HIV virus exists! And citing notorious “bad boy” Kary Mullis (famous for all sorts of odd ideas–see below) is not the best way to encourage people to accept her hypothesis.

So if syphilis causes AIDS, and not HIV, where is the evidence? As microbiologist and epidemiolist Tara Smith points out in her excellent blog, Margulis offers none. Instead, she says to the credulous and uncritical interviewer:

The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient’s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing.

Great. Just what we need: an untestable hypothesis promoted by assertion and reputation, not something concrete that scientists could test (although most specialists in microbiology would say the evidence is clear that the HIV retrovirus, and not the spirochaete bacterium Treponema pallidum, is the true cause of AIDS).

The phenomenon is a familiar one: let’s call it “the Linus Pauling effect.” A highly respected and honored senior scientist, largely out of the mainstream and not up to date with the recent developments (and perhaps a bit senile), makes weird pronouncements about their pet ideas–and the press, so used to giving celebrities free air time for any junk they wish to say, prints and publishes it all as if it is the final truth. The great Linus Pauling may have won two Nobel Prizes, but his crazy idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure nearly everything seems to have died with him. William Shockley may have won a Nobel for his work on transistors, but his racist ideas about genetics (a field in which he had no expertise) should never been taken seriously. Kary Mullis may have deserved his Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction, but that gives him no qualifications to speak with authority on his unscientific ideas about AIDS denial and global warming and astrology (he hits the trifecta for pseudoscientific woo).

And now we have Margulis muddying the waters for all of us, and the press publishes her ideas with no challenges or discussion. Tara Smith says it best:

I get that Margulis feels she got the short end of the stick from the scientific establishment. I get that she sees herself as a maverick, a radical, a perpetual outsider. I also get that she has an ego the size of Texas. The last question she’s asked in the interview is “Do you ever get tired of being called controversial?” Her response: “I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.” While confidence is certainly an important trait in a scientist, so is the ability to twist your ideas around, look for the holes, test them, revise them, lather rinse repeat. You can’t let your ego blind you to the fact that, hey, *you might be wrong.* Margulis not only refuses to consider this, she admits that she has “no interest in the diseases” she’s discussing, even while she claims to know more about their causes than the scientists who have spent decades studying them. In a lot of ways, this makes Margulis worse than the creationists she dismisses.

Any other readers out there have another famous example of a respected and lauded senior scientist who makes the news talking about subjects that are entirely outside his or her expertise? Feel free to nominate your candidates for the “Linus Pauling Award.”