In the most recent edition of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association’s ScienceLink (Vol 28, No. 4, 2008), there is an interesting piece by Graeme Stemp-Morlock on the decision by the United Church Observer , the leading United Church-related magazine, to co-sponsor the Royal Ontario Museum’s “Evolution Revolution” exhibit ($15,000 cash and $35,000 advertising):

If a small operation like ours was able to stand up without fear and proudly support this exhibit then we thought it would draw attention to the fact that huge corporations much bigger than ours were afraid to,” said David Wilson, editor of the United Church Observer. “We were trying to say ‘you don’t need to be afraid.'”

(Note: I have not so far been able to find Stemp-Morlock’s ScienceLink article online.)

I suspect that Darwin’s racism was a factor in corporate disinterest. What if someone started quoting key relevant passages from Darwin’s Descent of Man? Like that black people are closer to gorillas than white people are? Not prevaricating or explaining them away, just quoting what the old toff actually said – and honestly believed?

In the early Nineties, there was an enormous, career-limiting uproar at the Museum – including daily demos – around allegations of racism in connection with an exhibit from Africa. I don’t imagine anyone wants more of that.

In any event, editor Wilson opines thusly:

I got the sense that evolution challenges religious dogma but not religion

and

I found myself musing on how the theory evokes the inherent beauty of a creation that is constantly and eternally evolving.

Wilson says that creation is “eternally” evolving, it is likely a slip of the tongue. That would be a non-theistic vision of life which is at odds with conventional science (which holds that the universe has a beginning and an end). He adds,

There is nothing in the Darwin exhibit that threatens or diminishes religion or people of faith.

which is interesting because Toronto columnist and literary lion Robert Fulford got the exact opposite impression:

In the 1860s, when the world was first compelled to deal with him, his theory was terrifying, world-shaking, religion-threatening. It still raises furious controversy.

Who’s right? Well, they’re both right, really. There is nothing specifically Christian or even theistic about “the inherent beauty of a creation that is constantly and eternally evolving,” and the idea that Wilson expresses is more commonly used to construct a case for atheism. Which raises the question: What is the point of a liberal church-related magazine getting involved? According to Stemp-Morlock, the staff was worried about “creationist chill.”

Revealingly, Drew Halfnight writes this, Read More ›

Those who follow the Darwin industry are very familiar with Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. In that biography they were one of the few biographers to highlight young Charles’ Edinburgh years (October 1825 to April 1827) and show the powerful influences that experience had on the teenager. Here too in Desmond and Moore’s new Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Edinburgh becomes the substantive starting point. This is as it should be since the freethinkers he would be exposed to in the radical Plinian Society (a largely student-based group Darwin seemed to relish given his attendance at all but one of its 19 meetings during his stay there) would have a profund influence on his thinking for the rest of his life. Desmond and Moore correctly acknowledge this, observing that this period “helped condition his life’s work on the deepest social — and scientific — issues” (17). Indeed the Plinians would steep Charles in a radical materialism that the present biographers admit was “mirrored” in his work a decade later (35).

All well and good so far. But not quite.  This is a book with its own cause. From the outset the authors explain frankly that , “We show the humanitarian roots that nourished Darwin’s most controversial and contested work on human ancestry” (xviii). And those “humanitarian roots,” we are told again and  again throughout its 376 narrative pages was Darwin’s passionate and unwavering hatred of slavery.  “No one has appreciated the source of that moral fire that fuelled his strange, out-of-character obsession with human origins. Understand that,” they insist, “and Darwin can be radically reassessed” (xix).  And what is that reassessment?  The reader is not left waiting:  “Ours is a book about a caring, compassionate man who was affected for life by the scream of a tortured slave” (xx).

At issue, of course, isn’t the horrific abomination of slavery nor Darwin’s abhorrence of it (this has long been known and acknowledged by historians) but rather the purported impact that Desmond and Moore claim his abolitionism had on his theory’s development and purpose.  In short, the question is, does the anti-slavery Darwin necessarily make for a “kinder, gentler” Darwin? An affirmative answer must rest upon two supports, one conceptual and the other factual. The remainder of this essay will examine both to answer this question.

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In the face of systematic attempts to efface from public view, Darwin’s racism, a friend writes to offer quotes from Darwin’s Descent of Man:

Savages are intermediate states between people and apes:

“It has been asserted that the ear of man alone possesses a lobule; but ‘a rudiment of it is found in the gorilla’ and, as I hear from Prof. Preyer, it is not rarely absent in the negro.

“The sense of smell is of the highest importance to the greater number of mammals–to some, as the ruminants, in warning them of danger; to others, as the Carnivora, in finding their prey; to others, again, as the wild boar, for both purposes combined. But the sense of smell is of extremely slight service, if any, even to the dark coloured races of men, in whom it is much more highly developed than in the white and civilised races.”

“The account given by Humboldt of the power of smell possessed by the natives of South America is well known, and has been confirmed by others. M. Houzeau asserts that he repeatedly made experiments, and proved that Negroes and Indians could recognise persons in the dark by their odour. Dr. W. Ogle has made some curious observations on the connection between the power of smell and the colouring matter of the mucous membrane of the olfactory region as well as of the skin of the body. I have, therefore, spoken in the text of the dark-coloured races having a finer sense of smell than the white races….Those who believe in the principle of gradual evolution, will not readily admit that the sense of smell in its present state was originally acquired by man, as he now exists. He inherits the power in an enfeebled and so far rudimentary condition, from some early progenitor, to whom it was highly serviceable, and by whom it was continually used.”

[From Denyse: Decades ago, I distinguished myself by an ability to smell sugar in coffee. It wasn’t very difficult, with a bit of practice, and it helped to sort out the office coffee orders handily. My best guess is that most people could learn the art if they wanted to. Most human beings don’t even try to develop their sense of smell – we are mostly occupied with avoiding distressing smells or eliminating or else covering them up. I don’t of course, say that we humans would ever have the sense of smell of a wolf, but only that Darwin’s idea here is basically wrong and best explained by racism. ] Read More ›

Whodathunkit?? The Lucy (yer granny was an ape!!) exhibition is not a big draw, even in Seattle.

A friend writes:

“I actually went to see Lucy yesterday and it was very revealing. Not only was I underwhelmed with the incompleteness of Lucy’s skeleton, but I was struck with the admissions from the video playing with Donald Johansen admitting that he found Lucy’s bones over the course of an entire hillside, and that if there were one more rainstorm, her bones may have been washed away never to be seen again. So what happened in the prior rainstorm to transport her bones from somewhere else? This makes me skeptical that Lucy represents one individual, or one anything. Who really knows.”

Look, basically,”Lucy” is a cultural artifact. She didn’t need to exist, really. She just needed to serve a purpose at a certain time – to convince people that materialism is true and religions, including Christianity, are living on borrowed time.

Of course, that’s nonsense, but it’s elite nonsense, so we must defer to it, I suppose, and pay taxes to support it.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist Read More ›

In an ironic twist, professors arguing that nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of natural selection, are experiencing a different type of selection pressure themselves. How important is evolutionary biology really? From NATURE The Year of Darwin has got off to a bad start. In the Netherlands a national reorganization of university budgets has led Leiden University to sack its classical evolutionary-biology staff. “There will be no one left who can teach natural selection,” says population ecologist Jacques van Alphen, one of six tenured professors who will lose their jobs on 1 March. Their jobs have been eliminated in favour of jobs in molecular biology. Leiden is experiencing the consequences of a decision by science minister Ronald Read More ›

This just in from the British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog:

The brain imaging community is about to experience another shockwave, just days after the online leak of a paper that challenged many of the brain-behaviour correlations reported in respected social neuroscience journals.

Social neuroscience (which I take to be a classic example of false knowledge) depends in large part on measured changes in blood flow. However,

The interpretation of human brain imaging experiments is founded on the idea that changes in blood flow reflect parallel changes in neuronal activity. This important new study shows that blood flow changes can be anticipatory and completely unconnected to any localised neuronal activity. It’s up to future research to find out which brain areas and cognitive mechanisms are controlling this anticipatory blood flow. As the researchers said, their finding points to a “novel anticipatory brain mechanism.”

Writing a commentary on this paper in the same journal issue, David Leopold at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, said the findings were “sure to raise eyebrows among the human fMRI research community.”

If anyone went to jail over “social neuroscience” findings, I hope they get released really soon, and sue the government. Whatever happened to science that was cautious?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

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The article, Darwin’s Birthday Poll: Fewer Than 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution, just up at foxnews.com, references this Gallup poll, in which this question is asked, “Do you, personally, believe in the theory of evolution, do you not believe in evolution, or don’t you have an opinion either way?”

Why don’t they ever ask about the specifics of the theory? For example: 1) Do you believe that all living things came from a universal single-celled common ancestor? 2) Do you believe that random mutation or random variation and natural selection explain the origin of all life and its complexity? 3) Do you believe that humans evolved from a primitive ape-like ancestor in the last several million years, and if so, does the Darwinian mechanism in question 2) explain how it happened?

The Gallup poll then goes on to discuss educational level and church attendance, and how this correlates with belief in “evolution.” As expected, those with more “education” are more likely to be true believers, and those who attend church weekly are less likely to be true believers. The conclusion is obviously that educated people can see the truth and wisdom of evolution, and those who attend church regularly are blinded by religion.
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In todays Wall Street Journal OpionJournal online appears this editorial by NYU’s Gary Marcus.  Marcus is a professor of evolutionary psychology.  In this editorial, he wants to make the case that evolution settles for what works, not necessarily for what is ideal or best.  He then wants to apply this to understanding human behavior, especially as it relates to our economic behavior.  Marcus writes:

All this matters because endeavors like economics and social policy are all built around theories about what human beings are and how they function. We allow consumers access to credit cards, for example, because we assume (despite ample evidence to the contrary) that they will be smart enough to balance their short-term needs as consumers with their long-term capacity to maintain a fiscally sensible reality. Read More ›

Casey Luskin’s thoughts on tomorrow’s Darwin Day celebrations here: www.usnews.com/…/darwin-intelligent-design-…

Okay, this is a little OT (but only slightly), but sometimes debating with a Darwinist can be like this. [youtube k3HaRFBSq9k]

I found this ‘Dawkins – Dick D’ Rap’ on youtube while searching for the piece below – sorry not embedded (and apologies if it has been posted before, but I found it amusing). Dawkins Rap A.A.Gill offers his own review of Attenborough’s programming David Attenborough may just be God – by A.A.Gill Gill comments; “David, honour and blessings be on his name, came down to television to describe for us, once again, why natural selection works and what survival of the fittest really means. He did this by showing a film of himself in previous incarnations. Here was divine proof that life began with Attenborough….It would be nice to see the argument for intelligent design given a separate programme that isn’t Read More ›

I am pleased to say that an audio version (MP3) of my play ‘Lincoln and Darwin — Live for One Night Only!’ is now on-line at ‘The Sci-Phi Show’, courtesy of Jason Rennie, the Sydneyside philosophical broadcaster. Here it is, just in time for Lincoln and Darwin’s 200th birthday (tomorrow). The play runs to 85 minutes and is premised on Lincoln and Darwin coming on one of today’s TV chat shows to talk about has happened since they died.  Each then is given the option of staying in 2009 or returning to the 19th century. One decides to stay and the other goes.  The play was originally staged in Liverpool in September 2008 as part of the annual meeting of the British Read More ›