Skepticblog

A couple weeks ago, I participated in an online debate at Evolution News & Views with Center for Science & Culture fellow Michael Flannery on the question: “If he were alive today, would evolutionary theory’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, be an intelligent design advocate?” The following is my opening statement in the debate. A link to Flannery’s reply can be found near the end of this page.

The double dangerous game of Whiggish What-if? history is on the table in this debate that inexorably invokes hindsight bias, along the lines of “Was Thomas Jefferson a racist because he had slaves?” Adjudicating historical belief and behavior with modern judicial scales is a fool’s errand that carries but one virtue—enlightenment of the past for correcting current misunderstandings. Thus I shall endeavor to enlighten modern thinkers on the perils of misjudging Alfred Russel Wallace as an Intelligent Design creationist, and at the same time reveal the fundamental flaw in both his evolutionary theory and that of this latest incarnation of creationism.

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.) Continue reading…

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?

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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”). Continue reading…

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.”

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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.

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Two weeks ago, I did a whirlwind 39-hour trip to the Bay Area to give two different talks (one to the Bay Area Skeptics in their Chilean restaurant hangout) and also to study some fossils at the University of California Museum of Paleontology for my ongoing peccary research. It was great hanging out in the People’s Republic of Berkeley again, enjoying the incredible ambiance of Telegraph Avenue, the colorful characters on Shattuck, the amazing array of ethnic restaurants block after block, the classic “woo” of all the Eastern mystic temples, and palmistry and naturopathy and New Age shops, the chirping cross-walk warnings, and PC reminders everywhere—and seeing all the homeless people rooting through the garbage. It’s like a time warp for me, reminding me of when I first visited as a student in the 1970s—except that the hippies are still here, a bit older and grayer, but now becoming psychedelic relics. Many parts of town still have the spirit of the “Summer of Love” while others are punk or goth or hip-hop. It’s eye-opening to see the sign at the city limits proclaiming Berkeley a “nuke-free zone”(not that it matters, since there are no nuclear reactors or military bases there, and the nuclear physics is done out at Lawrence-Livermore lab).  Every time I go to one these college towns where the Sixties never ended and lots of hippies have gone to live (not only Berkeley, but also Eugene, Boulder, and Santa Cruz), I have an incredible rush of memories of that time, and the dreams my generation fought for. As a Boomer myself and child of the Sixties, it’s great to see that not every aspect of it has been forgotten or dismissed (especially not the music, of course, which has remarkable resilience).

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.

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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? Continue reading…

I’ve just survived four days of The Amazing Meeting 9 in Las Vegas, and my head is buzzing with so many thoughts—so many great talks—so many friends I haven’t seen since TAM8 last year, and new ones I met for the first time after months of email and Facebook exchanges. TAM never fails to exhilarate me—and exhaust me. My favorites: Bill Nye’s brilliant pep talk for science and space exploration; Dawkins’ wonderful preview of his new book and his speculations about extraterrestrial life; PZ Myers’ very different take on the non-prevalence of humanoids on other planets; Elizabeth Loftus’ succinct review of her lifetime of research showing the unreliability of human memory; and especially the message at the end of both Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s and Sean Faircloth’s presentations: we need to dial back all the petty sniping within our ranks and realize that we face a very serious enemy out there of religious and political zealots who do not value science, skepticism, critical thinking, or “reality-based” political views. They outnumber us; they are well funded by right-wing think tanks and evangelical churches; and they have elected plenty of people in power who are already pushing their agenda. I realize that getting skeptics and freethinkers to work together is like herding cats, but we have a powerful entrenched opposition that will require every resource at our disposal to hold them at bay, let alone push them back. They are already eroding science education and displacing good science with pseudoscience in public policies.

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.

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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.

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Biologist and paleontologists are all familiar with the name of Lynn Margulis. Now 73, she made her reputation in the 1960s for her “endosymbiosis” hypothesis: the idea that complex eukaryotic cells with all their organelles were assembled from prokaryotes which came to live symbiotically within the walls of other prokaryotic cells. Her hypothesis was first proposed by Merezhovsky in 1905 and Wallin in 1920, but Margulis used the great advances in microscopy and microbiology in the 1960s to show that the idea was highly plausible. At first, her papers were rejected by at least 15 journals before they were finally published. But as time passed, the evidence for much of her “outrageous idea” continued to accumulate. It does indeed appear that the chloroplasts of the eukaryotic cell are derived from symbiotic cyanobacteria (as it is common that many animals, from large benthic foraminifera to hermatypic corals to giant clams, use algae in their own tissues symbiotically), and that mitochondria were once purple non-sulfur bacteria. The best evidence comes from the fact that organelles have their own DNA independent of the cell’s nuclear DNA (we hear about research on mitochondrial DNA all the time); that organelles can divide independently of their host cell and have their own ribosomes; that organelles can be killed by antibiotics, just like their prokaryote ancestors, while the host cell is not killed. In addition, there are now numerous examples of eukaryotes which still use endosymbiotic prokaryotes to perform various functions, and have not completely absorbed and transformed them into organelles of the host cell. Over the years, Margulis has promoted additional ideas about the importance of symbiosis in biology, and has become a major advocate of the “Gaia” hypothesis and how all of life is dependent on the rest of life in an intricate, delicate web.

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. Continue reading…