Further to Uncommon Descent Contest Question 3: Human evolution – What do we actually know? (13 May 2009), this article in Wall Street Journal by Gautam Naik (May 15, 2009) boosts the finding of the skeleton of an ancient primate from 47 million years ago as a “landmark discovery.” Why?

Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today’s lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

In other words, the landmark discovery in an abandoned quarry near Frankfurt, Germany, keeps the controversy going by evening the odds. Read More ›

Walter ReMine once said to me, the supposed 99.5% identity between chimps and humans is like taking two books, creating an alphabetical listing of all the unique words in each book, and then comparing the lists of unique words derived from each book. It would be really easy then to use these lists to argue: “see the books are 99.5% identical!” Another ID proponent, David Pogge, argued that the sequence comparison are like comparing driving directions: two sets of directions can have 99% similarity, but a few differences can lead to radically different destinations. With this in mind, here is Rick Sternberg’s Guy Walks Into a Bar and Thinks He’s a Chimpanzee: The Unbearable Lightness of Chimp-Human Genome Similarity.

Yesterday, Intelligent Design critic and creationist basher, P.Z. Meyers, posted what he considers to be a real scientific challenge for ID proponents on his Pharyngula blogsite. The main thrust of his challenge is outlined in this Youtube video:

[youtube ZkED8cWRu4Q]

So, has Myers indeed stumbled upon a true significant challenge for ID?  Or, has he simply stumbled, as he so often does, over his own misconceptions and metaphysics?  I vote for the latter. Read More ›

Here is a true story about “theistic evolution,” by Carol Iannone:

[Theistic evolution, as normally propounded today = accept on faith that God dun it and holler yer guts fer Jesus to feel good – because the evidence suggests there is no God].

Why any theist should do that today is incomprehensible to me, because the evidence is all in the theists’ camp. But tax-supported, tenured professors can say anything they want, and they certainly do.

Here is an instructive story about their true fate: Read More ›

Ladies and Gents, Schemes and Themes, and all Things in Between, it has been revealed to me by Memes, which I know now are truly called Themes, the true and tragic tale of Memes. In a very distant galaxy called Gleams, on a planet known as Dreams, a terrible war erupted among the parties of the Materialistic Regimes. Engaged in the conflict were the ruling party, known as Schemes, and the revolutionary party, known as Themes. The Themes were led by a ruthless leader, who had once been a member of the Schemes, named Xeme. After a long campaign that was very difficult and extreme, and in spite of very courageous fighting on their own steam, the Themes were beaten Read More ›

Scientists say this time the soup is good here.

On March 2, 2009, the controversial* Turkish intellectual Adnan Oktar responded to my questions about doubting Darwin in Turkey.

Turkey is of increasing interest in Western circles because of its application for membership in the European Union. And materialist atheists have been freaking out in the pop science press about Darwin doubt in Turkey.

Modern Turkey emerged from the breakup of the Ottoman empire, under secularist Kemal Ataturk.**

I became interested years ago when a Turkish friend kindly sent me a number of the books produced by Adnan Oktar and his associates, under the pen name Harun Yahya. I finally got a chance to correspond with him. Here are his responses to my questions. (I will also shortly post a review of Evolution Deceit, the most succinct and comprehensive of the critiques of overblown claims for Darwinian evolution that I have ever read.)

O’LEARY: How did you become interested in the evolution controversies? The conventional wisdom offered by many media sources in North America is that doubts about Darwin are a product of American evangelical Christianity in the deep rural South, and can only be understood with reference to that culture. Unless I have lost the plot, your doubts could not stem from that culture. From what, then, did they stem? Read More ›

Thomas Vaughan has written a play that takes a critical look at both intelligent design and evolution. It opens this Thursday and extends for two weeks. It’s being produced by Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company (go here). The writer’s notes are as follows and include a generous remark about me. I’m grateful to Thomas Vaughan for allowing me to look over his shoulder and offer comment. I encourage everyone in the Houston area to go see this enlightening play. The character Henry Darden’s views are based on the ideas of well-qualified scientists. These professionals are not creationists, and they do not believe in Intelligent Design. Their credentials and their motives are impeccable. As a dramatist, I am not qualified to have Read More ›

You can earn free stuff by answering the question below this entry:

One of the causes of “just-so” storytelling about human evolution is the fact that, until comparatively recently, people did not write things down or manufacture a lot of objects.

People like Pascal Boyer can write books like Religion Explained, secure in the knowledge that no documents or extensive artifacts are likely to turn up from 50 000 years ago that challenge his claims.

To see what difference this makes, consider the case of King Tut’s tomb. Archaeologists have unearthed an extensive story of the short-lived effort of one Pharaoh to convert Egypt to monotheism. We actually know a fair bit about what happened there, due to deciphering writings and examining extensive artifacts.

Now and then a brief light is shone on a far earlier era, and here is one: An Australian cave painting depicts a marsupial lion (“Cave Painting Depicts Extinct Marsupial Lion ” by Stéphan Reebs, Natural History Magazine 09 May 2009): Read More ›

Richard Lewontin, in reviewing several books that celebrate Darwinism, writes …There remains, nevertheless, a substantial population whose commitment to a fundamentalist Christian belief in divine creation of the earth and its inhabitants has driven them to political action. Having been convinced that the separation of church and state is here to stay, they have adopted a pseudo-scientific theory of intelligent design in which the designer is unspecified, and attempted to introduce it into the school curricula in the name of intellectual openness. The scientific community has the definite sense of being embattled and one of its responses is to use the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of its apostle of truth about the material basis of evolution and the Read More ›

In 2004, a find of some very small humans (about a metre tall) was announced. They lived on the Indonesian island of Flores from about 93 000 years ago to about 12 000 years ago. At Access Research Network, Robert Deyes, in Homo Floresiensis: The Flower That Is Shaking The Human Evo Tree,

… what is becoming clear from these studies is that in many aspects of its anatomy H. floresiensis presents us with a clear ‘misfit’ for the human evolutionary sequence. In the words of one review “[H. floresiensis] threatens to overturn our understanding of where we come from and the type of ancestors that have shared the human family tree” (Ref 4).

[ … ]

While Gee’s wild speculation over missing species seems undeserved of the title of objective science, his concerns do tell of a crisis for evolutionary biologists. In short, H. floresiensis has today become the flower that is shaking the human evolutionary tree. Findings such as these turn our cherished notions of human evolution upside down since they show tool-making, small-brained hominin species living alongside humans as recently as 12,000 years ago. Read More ›

(an announcement from Professor David Snoke:) Upcoming event: “Grill the ID Scientist” Tuesday, June 9 7 PM, University of Pittsburgh Campus (room TBA) A network of scientists known as the Intelligent Design (ID) community continues to question basic tenets of Darwinism and origin-of-life scenarios. Not only are their views controversial in scientific circles — many in the evangelical world, who might be expected to embrace ID, are also not sold on the value of the ID program. This event brings together a panel of scientists associated with the ID movement. After a short presentation, the bulk of the evening will be given to questions from the audience. This event is aimed primarily at researchers, graduate students and advanced undergrad students Read More ›

In “Scientific American’s Editor and Its President to Step Down”, (New York Times, April 24, 2009), Stephanie Clifford notes

In a shake-up at Scientific American, the longtime editor John Rennie and the magazine’s president, Steven Yee, are leaving.

Rennie had been around since 1994, and was associated by various people I talked to with an aggressive slant toward Darwinism and multiverse theory.

This article by Max Tegmark, promoting four layers of multiverses – essentially to avoid the implications of the fine tuning of the only universe whose existence we can verify – may have been the oddest moment in the history of a magazine that dates back to 1845.

I’ve heard various figures quoted about the staff reductions, ranging from 5-30%. But it’s hard to say because many staff may have gone freelance (or, as the elite would prefer it, “became consultants”) or been reassigned to other divisions of the parent company, MacMillan.

Some friends have supposed that the decline was due to the ideological slant of the mag, which was increasingly at odds with that of the public. I think it had more to do with the recent 18% drop in ad revenue. A friend remembers glossy car ads, but these days that may even be politically incorrect.

Some of my friends cancelled their subscriptions to Scientific American, when it became increasingly political. However, most readers probably did not stop reading media like SciAm because they became more ideological. The process was actually the opposite. Magazines like SciAm became more ideological when they became less necessary for the purpose of delivering information.

In general, the more necessary a news source is, the less ideological it can afford to be.

Read More ›

Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, writes in Time:

David Sheff wrote a beautiful book called, appropriately enough, Beautiful Boy A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Meth Addiction, one of the most compelling portrayals I’ve ever read of a parent’s loss of a child to drugs. …

Many people still call addiction a moral failing. But 20 years of research tells us that it’s a disease that results in part from the damage that abused drugs to the brain circuits required for self-control. Unfortunately that damage is long-lasting, meaning that the person remains vulnerable to relapse even after years of successful rehabilitation.

Sheff’s experiences highlight how poorly our society addresses addiction. … Yet punishment and stigmatization do nothing to ameliorate the problem. How could they, when about 50% of addiction is rooted in our genes and much of the rest is due to social and cultural factors such as stressful childhood experiences?

All true, but all irrelevant, and in my view, harmful. Read More ›

From the Faraday Institute, we learn of an effort to combat intelligent design in Turkey:

A significant event during the past month has been the Darwin Anniversary Conference organized by The Faraday Institute and held in Istanbul. As one of our Turkish speakers remarked: “It was the first time for evolutionary discussions in Turkey that both vulgar positivism and religious fundamentalism were excluded”. The main two-day Symposium was attended by 50 faculty biologists from universities all over Turkey, 10 PhD students and 10 observers in the field of education, and drew an international platform of speakers, including Prof. Francisco Ayala (University of California at Irvine), Prof. Aykut Kence (Middle East Technical University, Ankara), Prof. Nidhal Guessoum (American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), Prof. David Lordkipanidze (Director General of the Georgian National Museum), Prof. Vidyanand Nanjundiah (Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore) and Prof. Simon Conway Morris FRS (Cambridge University). Whereas the main focus of the conference was evolutionary biology, time was also given to the challenge of teaching modern biology today in Turkey and beyond. Details in English and Turkish may be seen [here]. Talks and summaries will be posted at this site as they become available.

On the final night of the Symposium a Public Event was held attended by 430 people, mainly students from different Istanbul universities.

The programme included a number of short talks about Darwin and evolution, the first performance of Re:Design in Turkey (the dramatisation of the Darwin-Gray correspondence performed by the Menagerie Theatre Company), and a televised Panel Discussion on ‘The Hard Questions’ in which the audience posed questions about Darwin and evolution to a panel of experts. The event drew extensive media coverage with clips on the Turkish evening news and 17 journalists in attendance resulting in full-page articles and interviews in publications such as Turkish Newsweek.

Francisco Ayala: Some notes of interest

I don’t know much about most of these people, but the first-mentioned, Francisco Ayala, is here described, accurately in my view, by Phillip Johnson: Read More ›