Human evolution

Yesterday, another hack writer caught up with me, for an interview, and wanted to know: so why do you fight Darwinism … ?

Yuh, I know. Why bother fighting the huge Darwinist tax burden. Of course, Darwinism is false, but so? People’s careers are wrecked if they oppose it.

Among other things, her editor had demanded that I account for the fact that humans share 98% of our DNA with chimps.

I asked her a simple – and, to me, obvious – question: Let’s kidnap a guy off the subway in Toronto. Yes, that is a felony offence, but maybe we can manage the whole thing discreetly and get the charges dropped, if he agrees that it was all a private matter anyway …

(would help if he was a friend or relative – of course, we could, at worst, be charged with wasting police time …)

But now! We’ve got him! We will put a chimp from the local zoo of similar age beside him (securely buckled in, because we would not want anything bad to happen to our man).

If both are more than 30 years old, and are normal specimens, how many people will believe that they are 98% identical? Read More ›

This just in from the Templeton Foundation. They’re convinced that all informed scientific criticism of evolutionary theory died long ago. Check out especially the following link: www.templeton.org/evolution. Does evolution explain human nature? Three distinguished scholars explored this Big Question during a recent discussion sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, Yale University, and Discover magazine. The panel featured Kenneth Miller, professor of biology at Brown University; Laurie Santos, a Yale psychologist and primate specialist; and David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University. The discussion was moderated by Corey Powell, editor and chief of Discover, and was based on a recent JTF Big Questions essay series, which can be found online at www.templeton.org/evolution. Video clips from the discussion are now Read More ›

Someone wrote to me recently, asking Ever since the reporting of

New analyses reveal the mini human species to be even stranger than previously thought and hint that major tenets of human evolution need revision.

Really?

Not only was H. floresiensis being held up as the first example of a human following the so-called island rule, but it also seemed to reverse a trend toward ever larger brain size over the course of human evolution. Furthermore, the same deposits in which the small-bodied, small-brained individuals were found also yielded stone tools for hunting and butchering animals, as well as remainders of fires for cooking them—rather advanced behaviors for a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s. And astonishingly, LB1 lived just 18,000 years ago—thousands of years after our other late-surviving relatives, the Neandertals and H. erectus, disappeared

More about the Hobbit (Flores man or homo Floriensis) controversy here. Read More ›

A friend warns, wisely in my view, that we be skeptical about vast claims made in the popular science press about human evolution.

One paper asserts that FOXP2 was probably involved in the evolution of speech and language, but another paper has cautioned about being too hasty in making this conclusion.

Well, after the “Ida” fossil took in Michael Bloomberg, I’d be cautious about anything evolutionary biologists say. So should Bloomberg, herafter.

For what it is worth, I also don’t believe that Flores man is really a separate human species, because I have seen proportionately formed women on the streets of Toronto who were not more than one metre tall. But it’s just the sort of squabble no one cares about, and figures like Michael Bloomberg do not get involved.

Here’s one assessment from the science literature: “The finding that FOXP2 is critical to speech and language does not by itself demonstrate the role of this gene in the origin of human speech, because the function of FOXP2 could have remained unchanged during human evolution while other speech-related genes changed.” (Jianzhi Zhang, David M. Webb and Ondrej Podlaha, “Accelerated Protein Evolution and Origins of Human-Specific Features: FOXP2 as an Example,” Genetics, Vol. 162:1825–1835 (December 2002).)

Here’s a suitably cautious paper by by Alec MacAndrew on the subject:

No-one should imagine that the development of language relied exclusively on a single mutation in FOXP2. They are many other changes that enable speech. Not least of these are profound anatomical changes that make the human supralarygeal pathway entirely different from any other mammal. The larynx has descended so that it provides a resonant column for speech (but, as an unfortunate side-effect, predisposes humans to choking on food). Also, the nasal cavity can be closed thus preventing vowels from being nasalised and thus increasing their comprehensibility. These changes cannot have happened over such a short period as 100,000 years. Furthermore the genetic basis for language will be found to involve many more genes that influence both cognitive and motor skills

Human mind needs human cognition and human cognition relies on human speech. We cannot envisage humanness without the ability to think abstractly, but abstract thought requires language.

One thing to keep in mind is that human language is also governed by the need to communicate things that no ape would need to communicate. So understanding language requires understanding mind. Read More ›

I was originally going to post this as a response to David Coppedge’s post, but it got too long. The relationship between Freud and Darwin – both intellectually and institutionally – is more complicated than has been suggested here. Although Freud had top-notch academic credentials, his career was always that of an outsider, whose main constituency was in the larger public intellectual culture and well-educated middle class people who were his client base. (Freud’s books won literary prizes, not scientific ones.) One way you can see Freud’s outsider status is that he was never granted a professorship even though he tried several times. While his theories were somewhat embraced by medical schools (peaking in the US in the 1950s), experimental Read More ›

Sigmund Freud had immeasurable impact on modern culture.  Along with Marx and Darwin, he was one of the great modern thinkers, whose “science” of psychology and treatment, psychoanalysis, defined modern concepts of human nature for generations.  His theories (based largely on Darwinism) brought new words into popular vocabulary–id, ego, super-ego, the unconscious.  His ideas influenced education, law, religion and medicine.  People began to think about their actions being determined by dreams, sexual repression and mysterious forces deep in their unconscious minds.  They worried about Oedipus complexes, anal retention, penis envy and all kinds of causal concepts Freud introduced.  They spent fortunes lying on couches undergoing psychoanalysis by their shrinks, under the impression they were getting “scientific” treatment because, after all, Read More ›

Mark, Canadian columnist to the world (and “human rights” commission survivor), discusses a recent fossil find with Hugh Hewitt:

HH: Well, we cannot let this day pass without recognizing two important things. First of all, we’ve discovered a primate that’s 1.2 million years older than Lucy, and apparently a competition between ancient bones has broken out, Mark Steyn. Are you indifferent as to which is the older and allegedly part of our family tree?

MS: Yes, I am, really. I never get terribly excited about so-called evolution stories, because it seems to me that it’s the tiny little bit of us, I can’t remember what it is now, I think it’s not just that we’re, whatever it is, 97% ape, but we’re supposedly 86% or something pumpkin. And clearly, if that’s true, then there’s something not terribly useful about the scale. It’s the tiny little percentage that separates us from the rest of this stuff that makes the difference.

HH: Well, that pumpkin stuff explains radio producers. I’d never thought of that before.

In case anyone cares what I think, after the “Ida” fiasco, I have sworn off accepting any fossil tales in the early days of their discovery. Time will tell if this is anything to write home about.

See also: Scientific American quietly disowns Ida fossil Read More ›

Is this politically correct? Hmmm… [youtube d4KcRMTKImQ]

Every time human DNA is passed from one generation to the next it accumulates 100–200 new mutations, according to a DNA-sequencing analysis of the Y chromosome.

This number — the first direct measurement of the human mutation rate — is equivalent to one mutation in every 30 million base pairs, and matches previous estimates from species comparisons and rare disease screens.

The British-Chinese research team that came up with the estimate sequenced ten million base pairs on the Y chromosome from two men living in rural China who were distant relatives. These men had inherited the same ancestral male-only chromosome from a common relative who was born more than 200 years ago. Over the subsequent 13 generations, this Y chromosome was passed faithfully from father to son, albeit with rare DNA copying mistakes. Read More ›

Semiotix – Stephen Pain The distinction between “theorising” and “belief” is extremely important because our attitude differs towards them. In a theory the reified concept of the sign does not have an ontological status but an epistemological one. While in belief, the concept has often a clear ontological one. Uexküll believed in his concept of the Bauplan in the same way as Bergson believed in the vital force. The concept of a plan is of course no different from the creationist’s concept of “intelligent design”. Any usage of the Bauplan is further complicated by its ideological usage in The Biological State, Uexküll‘s template for the German State, one that was anti-democratic and in many instances attractive to the Nazi of Read More ›

By now, most readers here are familiar with Richard Dawkins’s view of God as expressed in The God Delusion where Dawkins writes that God is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction … a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” The last time a literary character was described in such despicable terms was probably Charles Dickens’s description of Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!” writes Dickens, “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” I’ll let you decide which character is worse.

Let’s lay aside for the moment that Dawkins considers God fictional, that is to say (in Dawkins’s words) “almost certainly does not exist.” (even that betrays some slight doubt on Dawkins’s part). The real Read More ›

Here is my latest MercatorNet article, dissecting the caveman theory of psychology, explaining why evolutionary psychology is so rapidly losing credibility: “Is human behaviour really based on the survival strategies of our Pleistocene ancestors?” Well, the stone hatchet is certainly poised over our iconic cavemen. A recent Scientific American podcast admits as much, and without the narrator throwing a panic attack either. Why this? Why now? And why such equinamity? Secular materialist thinkers have as deep a desire as anyone to understand the wellsprings of human nature. But they are much more restricted in where they can look. From the very beginning of the organized “human evolution” movement, starting with Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man, they have mined Read More ›

On May 26, 2009 Reverend Barry Lynn offered his characterization of infidels who refuse to venerate Darwinius. His tirade (supported by Eugenie Scott) can be found here: Show #1415 Eugenie Scott, Susan Russell.

Some excerpts:

Reverend Barry Lynn :
The more new evidence that develops the more some people dig in to their erroneous earlier beliefs
…..
I am still flabbergasted by the notion that no matter what you show some people and say…”this why I believe what I believe” some people say, “nope not enough”….

….the religious right is already saying….”it [Ida (Darwinius)] could be a fake”

What’s wrong with people that they can’t look at evidence and say, “Ok, I didn’t see it before I’m going to re-evaluate based on what I do see.”

Read More ›

Friday, 24 July 2009 01:05 ALEXANDER CHIEJINA With Agency Report Scientists have long suspected that the sex chromosome that only males carry is deteriorating and could disappear entirely within a few million years. However, until now, no one has understood the evolutionary processes that control this chromosome’s demise. Now, a pair of Penn State scientists has discovered that this sex chromosome, the Y chromosome, has evolved at a much more rapid pace than its partner chromosome, the X chromosome, which both males and females carry. Read more… Here is some relief: “Even though some of the genes appear to be important, the team thinks there is a chance that the Y chromosome eventually could disappear. If this happens, it won’t Read More ›