September 23, 2008, 10:22 pm
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09 ... ?th&emc=th
Evolving the Single Daddy
What do a tree that lives in the deserts of Algeria, an Asian freshwater clam and a stick insect from Sicily have in common?
The answer is that each of them has evolved a strange form of asexuality. Why strange? It involves males.
Sex, to get technical about it, is the mixing of genes from two parents to make a new individual that has a genetic contribution from both. Asexuality thus refers to any of a number of forms of reproduction that involve only one genetic parent.
That parent is typically the female. The reason is that, in many species, females can easily reproduce without males. An egg, after all, contains nutrients and other stuff that an embryo needs in order to grow. Often, the only thing the egg is missing is the set of genes that comes from the father. But this set of genes can sometimes be dispensed with — the egg can develop without it. As a consequence, females in species from aphids to dandelions are the ultimate single mothers: they reproduce without males, and each is the sole genetic parent of her offspring.
Becoming an ultimate single dad is more complicated. The problem is that sperm are little more than mobile packets of DNA: they don’t have what it takes to grow into a new individual by themselves. For an offspring to have a father but no mother thus requires some genetic jiggery-pokery.
Cupressus dupreziana (Eric Hunt) Which is what the tree, the clam and the stick insect have evolved. The details differ, but in each species the result is the same. Genes are inherited only from the father, via his sperm (or pollen, in the case of the tree).
To see how this can work, take the clam. Here, reproduction starts as though it’s sex as normal: a sperm enters an egg. But then, things get distinctly abnormal. The mother’s genes are ejected. That’s right: they are rounded up and thrown out. The egg is left with the genes that arrived in the sperm. Or, to put it another way, the father’s DNA hijacks the egg.
Corbicula fluminea (Ondřej Zicha)In short, it’s a sexual process with an asexual outcome. Now that’s kinky.
(There are a couple of other oddities of this system. One is that a little of the mother’s DNA gets spared. Small components of the cell known as mitochondria have their own DNA; in these clams, as in most other animals, mitochondria are inherited from the mother via eggs. But this accounts for just a handful of genes. The other oddity is that the sperm aren’t normal. In most species, sperm carry one copy of the father’s genome, eggs carry one copy of the mother’s. The embryo thus has two full genomes, one from each parent. In these clams, sperm carry at least two copies of the father’s genome. Hence, the loss of the mother’s doesn’t lead to the embryo having only one.)
Genetic piracy — where genes pervert the normal course of events in order to enhance their own spread — of one sort or another evolves often. But this particular form, where only the father’s DNA gets transmitted, is exceedingly rare. In nature, it’s known from fewer than 10 species, and an even smaller number do it all the time (the stick insect is an occasional participant). Why?
There are several possible reasons. One is that this kind of asexuality may be hard to evolve in the first place. Without knowing more about the genes involved in making it happen, this idea is difficult to assess. But there are circumstantial reasons to think difficulty isn’t an obstacle. First, genetic weirdness of one sort or another evolves often. Indeed, examples of the opposite case — eggs throwing out a male’s DNA after fertilization — are well known from species of fish, amphibians, nematode worms and insects. (These examples, incidentally, were discovered long before the male versions were.) Moreover, in many species this kind of male asexuality happens spontaneously from time to time, and is quite easy to induce in the laboratory.
But if it is easy to evolve, why don’t we see it more? Maybe we’re bad at spotting it. Because the aspiring single dad will usually need to hijack eggs and other female investments — in other words, he needs a surrogate mother — the process will outwardly look like sex. To be sure that asexuality is what’s really going on will often take a genetic analysis. So perhaps there are other species out there engaging in this covert asexuality.
But if they are, they may be short-lived. The evolution of traditional, female-only asexuality typically leads to a swift extinction. We know this because although such species frequently evolve, they don’t stay around for long. If you look at the tree of life, female-only asexual groups are all out on the twigs: there are no great asexual lineages equivalent to fish or birds. Instead, the asexual groups are a few species of snail here, a dandelion there.
Male-only asexuality is likely to lead to extinction too, but faster. After all, if males routinely hijack eggs and turn those eggs into males, the population will be in danger of becoming all male. If this happens, there won’t be any eggs left to hijack. Indeed, it’s probably not a coincidence that both the tree and the clam are actually hermaphrodites — individuals make both eggs and sperm — and thus the supply of eggs is less likely to run out imminently. But in most species, evolving the single daddy will put you on the fast track to oblivion.
**********
NOTES:
The tree in question is the Saharan cypress, Cupressus dupreziana. Several species of clam from the genus Corbicula have evolved male asexuality; the stick insects are Bacillus rossius and Bacillus grandii.
For a more detailed description of each example of male asexuality mentioned here, see pages 416-419 of Burt, A. and Trivers, R. 2006. “Genes in Conflict: the Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements.” Harvard University Press. Also see this book for other examples of genetic piracy.
For clam eggs throwing out the mother’s DNA after fertilization, see Komaru, A., Ookubo, K. and Kiyomoto, M. 2000. “All meiotic chromosomes and both centrosomes at spindle pole in the zygotes discarded as two polar bodies in clam Corbicula leana: unusual polar body formation observed by antitubulin immunoflurorescence.” Development Genes and Evolution 210: 263-269.
For male asexuality evolving spontaneously, for it being easy to induce in the laboratory, and for an analysis of the likelihood of extinction, see McKone, M. J. and Halpern, S. L. 2003. “The evolution of androgenesis.” American Naturalist 161: 641-656.
For examples of eggs throwing out sperm DNA, see Bell, G. 1982. “The Masterpiece of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality.” University of California Press.
Many thanks to Gideon Lichfield for comments and suggestions.
Darwinism Verses Intelligent Design
There is a related photoraph at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/scien ... ref=slogin
October 16, 2008
Fossil Fish Shows Complexity of Transition to Land
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.
There was much more to the complex transition than fins morphing into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size — a beginning of the bone’s adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.
The anatomy of this early transformation in life from water to land had never been observed with such clarity, paleontologists and biologists said in announcing the research on Wednesday.
The scientists said in a report being published Thursday in the journal Nature that the research exposed delicate details of the creature’s head and neck, confirming and elaborating on its evolutionary position as “an important stage in the origin of terrestrial vertebrates.”
In that case, the fish, a predator up to nine feet long, was a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The fossil species was named Tiktaalik roseae, nicknamed “fishapod” for its fishlike features combined with limbs similar to tetrapods, four-legged land animals.
The new research on the head skeleton of Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) was conducted at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the University of Chicago.
“The braincase, palate and gill arch skeleton of Tiktaalik have been revealed in great detail,” said Jason Downs, a research fellow at the academy and lead author of the report. “By revealing new details of the pattern of change in this part of the skeleton, we see that cranial features once associated with land-living animals were first adaptations for life in shallow water.”
Several skeletons of the fish were excavated four years ago on Ellesmere Island, in the Nunavut Territory of Canada, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle, by a team led by Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, and Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences. The Devonian-age rocks containing the fossils indicated that the fishapod lived in shallow waters of a warm climate. It may have made brief forays on land.
Since the discovery was reported in 2006, Dr. Downs and two specimen preparators, C. Frederick Mullison of the academy and Bob Masek at Chicago, spent more than a year prying deeply into the skulls of several fishapod skeletons. The results were also analyzed by Dr. Shubin and two other co-authors of the report, Dr. Daeschler of the academy and Farish Jenkins Jr., an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.
“Our work demonstrates that the head of these animals was becoming more solidly constructed and, at the same time, more mobile with respect to the body across this transition,” Dr. Daeschler said.
Dr. Shubin said that Tiktaalik was “still on the fish end of things, but it neatly fills a morphological gap and helps to resolve the relative timing of this complex transition.”
For example, fish have no neck but “we see a mobile neck developing for the first time in Tiktaalik,” Dr. Shubin said.
“When feeding, fish orient themselves by swimming, which is fine in deep water, but not for an animal whose body is relatively fixed, as on the bottom of shallow water or on land,” he added. “Then a flexible neck is important.”
One of the most intriguing findings, scientists said, was the reduction in size of a bony element that, in fish, links the braincase, palate and gills and is associated with underwater feeding and respiration. In more primitive fish, the bony part of what is called the hyomandibula is large and shaped like a boomerang. In this fossil species, the bone was greatly reduced, no bigger than a human thumb.
“This could indicate that these animals, in shallow-water settings, were already beginning to rely less on gill respiration,” Dr. Downs said, noting the specimen’s loss of rigid gill-covering bones, which apparently allowed for increased neck mobility.
In the transition from water to land, the researchers said, the hyomandibula gradually lost its original functions and, in time, gained a role in hearing. In humans, as in other mammals, the hyomandibula, or stapes, is one of the tiny bones in the middle ear.
As Dr. Daeschler said, “The new study reminds us that the gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles required much more than the evolution of limbs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/scien ... ref=slogin
October 16, 2008
Fossil Fish Shows Complexity of Transition to Land
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.
There was much more to the complex transition than fins morphing into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size — a beginning of the bone’s adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.
The anatomy of this early transformation in life from water to land had never been observed with such clarity, paleontologists and biologists said in announcing the research on Wednesday.
The scientists said in a report being published Thursday in the journal Nature that the research exposed delicate details of the creature’s head and neck, confirming and elaborating on its evolutionary position as “an important stage in the origin of terrestrial vertebrates.”
In that case, the fish, a predator up to nine feet long, was a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The fossil species was named Tiktaalik roseae, nicknamed “fishapod” for its fishlike features combined with limbs similar to tetrapods, four-legged land animals.
The new research on the head skeleton of Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) was conducted at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the University of Chicago.
“The braincase, palate and gill arch skeleton of Tiktaalik have been revealed in great detail,” said Jason Downs, a research fellow at the academy and lead author of the report. “By revealing new details of the pattern of change in this part of the skeleton, we see that cranial features once associated with land-living animals were first adaptations for life in shallow water.”
Several skeletons of the fish were excavated four years ago on Ellesmere Island, in the Nunavut Territory of Canada, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle, by a team led by Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, and Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences. The Devonian-age rocks containing the fossils indicated that the fishapod lived in shallow waters of a warm climate. It may have made brief forays on land.
Since the discovery was reported in 2006, Dr. Downs and two specimen preparators, C. Frederick Mullison of the academy and Bob Masek at Chicago, spent more than a year prying deeply into the skulls of several fishapod skeletons. The results were also analyzed by Dr. Shubin and two other co-authors of the report, Dr. Daeschler of the academy and Farish Jenkins Jr., an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.
“Our work demonstrates that the head of these animals was becoming more solidly constructed and, at the same time, more mobile with respect to the body across this transition,” Dr. Daeschler said.
Dr. Shubin said that Tiktaalik was “still on the fish end of things, but it neatly fills a morphological gap and helps to resolve the relative timing of this complex transition.”
For example, fish have no neck but “we see a mobile neck developing for the first time in Tiktaalik,” Dr. Shubin said.
“When feeding, fish orient themselves by swimming, which is fine in deep water, but not for an animal whose body is relatively fixed, as on the bottom of shallow water or on land,” he added. “Then a flexible neck is important.”
One of the most intriguing findings, scientists said, was the reduction in size of a bony element that, in fish, links the braincase, palate and gills and is associated with underwater feeding and respiration. In more primitive fish, the bony part of what is called the hyomandibula is large and shaped like a boomerang. In this fossil species, the bone was greatly reduced, no bigger than a human thumb.
“This could indicate that these animals, in shallow-water settings, were already beginning to rely less on gill respiration,” Dr. Downs said, noting the specimen’s loss of rigid gill-covering bones, which apparently allowed for increased neck mobility.
In the transition from water to land, the researchers said, the hyomandibula gradually lost its original functions and, in time, gained a role in hearing. In humans, as in other mammals, the hyomandibula, or stapes, is one of the tiny bones in the middle ear.
As Dr. Daeschler said, “The new study reminds us that the gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles required much more than the evolution of limbs.”
The title of this forum speaks to the political drive behind this debate. First off, intelligent design is more or less accepted as a "theory" behind the creation of the first life form while Darwin never looked behind the common ancestor, and focused on how species evolved through the theory of "natural selection" that in a nutshell is survival of the best. Now the 2 predominant scientific theories behind the creation of life are spontaneous generation and panspermia (cosmic infection).
Now, personally, I believe everything in the physical world follows the natural laws and would therefore have a physical explanation and that Allah created the absolute start point of existence, which as research in the physical sciences progress is believed to be before the start of the this universe.
But back to my point, if you want to be very general and in a religious or philosophical aspect, intelligent design is true. However, in terms of the physical being of everything, I prefer spontaneous generation because it really is the only foreseeable way because even with panspermia, the life would have had to originate from somewhere else and even though we're looking (optimistically) at about 10 billion years for life to be made somewhere else and end up on Earth seems more unlikely than the <1 billion years for lipids to form a membrane around RNA.
Just my 2 cents.
Now, personally, I believe everything in the physical world follows the natural laws and would therefore have a physical explanation and that Allah created the absolute start point of existence, which as research in the physical sciences progress is believed to be before the start of the this universe.
But back to my point, if you want to be very general and in a religious or philosophical aspect, intelligent design is true. However, in terms of the physical being of everything, I prefer spontaneous generation because it really is the only foreseeable way because even with panspermia, the life would have had to originate from somewhere else and even though we're looking (optimistically) at about 10 billion years for life to be made somewhere else and end up on Earth seems more unlikely than the <1 billion years for lipids to form a membrane around RNA.
Just my 2 cents.
February 10, 2009
Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential
By NICHOLAS WADE
Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part.
It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.
Biologists quickly accepted the idea of evolution, but for decades they rejected natural selection, the mechanism Darwin proposed for the evolutionary process. Until the mid-20th century they largely ignored sexual selection, a special aspect of natural selection that Darwin proposed to account for male ornaments like the peacock’s tail.
And biologists are still arguing about group-level selection, the idea that natural selection can operate at the level of groups as well as on individuals. Darwin proposed group selection — or something like it; scholars differ as to what he meant — to account for castes in ant societies and morality in people.
How did Darwin come to be so in advance of his time? Why were biologists so slow to understand that Darwin had provided the correct answer on so many central issues? Historians of science have noted several distinctive features of Darwin’s approach to science that, besides genius, help account for his insights. They also point to several nonscientific criteria that stood as mental blocks in the way of biologists’ accepting Darwin’s ideas.
One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, and for 12 years more before its sequel, “The Descent of Man,” which explored how his theory applied to people.
He brought several intellectual virtues to the task at hand. Instead of brushing off objections to his theory, he thought about them obsessively until he had found a solution. Showy male ornaments, like the peacock’s tail, appeared hard to explain by natural selection because they seemed more of a handicap than an aid to survival. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick,” Darwin wrote. But from worrying about this problem, he developed the idea of sexual selection, that females chose males with the best ornaments, and hence elegant peacocks have the most offspring.
Darwin also had the intellectual toughness to stick with the deeply discomfiting consequences of his theory, that natural selection has no goal or purpose. Alfred Wallace, who independently thought of natural selection, later lost faith in the power of the idea and turned to spiritualism to explain the human mind. “Darwin had the courage to face the implications of what he had done, but poor Wallace couldn’t bear it,” says William Provine, a historian at Cornell University. (Read commentary by Dr. Provine on passages from "On the Origin of Species." )
Darwin’s thinking about evolution was not only deep, but also very broad. He was interested in fossils, animal breeding, geographical distribution, anatomy and plants. “That very comprehensive view allowed him to see things that others perhaps didn’t,” says Robert J. Richards, a historian at the University of Chicago. “He was so sure of his central ideas — the transmutation of species and natural selection — that he had to find a way to make it all work together.” (Dr. Richards comments on "On the Origin of Species.")
From the perspective of 2009, Darwin’s principal ideas are substantially correct. He did not get everything right. Because he didn’t know about plate tectonics, Darwin’s comments on the distribution of species are not very useful. His theory of inheritance, since he had no knowledge of genes or DNA, is beside the point. But his central concepts of natural selection and sexual selection were correct. He also presented a form of group-level selection that was long dismissed but now has leading advocates like the biologists E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson.
Not only was Darwin correct on the central premises of his theory, but in several other still open issues his views also seem quite likely to prevail. His idea of how new species form was long eclipsed by Ernst Mayr’s view that a reproductive barrier like a mountain forces a species to split. But a number of biologists are now returning to Darwin’s idea that speciation occurs most often through competition in open spaces, Dr. Richards says.
Darwin believed there was a continuity between humans and other species, which led him to think of human morality as related to the sympathy seen among social animals. This long-disdained idea was resurrected only recently by researchers like the primatologist Frans de Waal. Darwin “never felt that morality was our own invention, but was a product of evolution, a position we are now seeing grow in popularity under the influence of what we know about animal behavior,” Dr. de Waal says. “In fact, we’ve now returned to the original Darwinian position.”
It is somewhat remarkable that a man who died in 1882 should still be influencing discussion among biologists. It is perhaps equally strange that so many biologists failed for so many decades to accept ideas that Darwin expressed in clear and beautiful English.
The rejection was in part because a substantial amount of science, including the two new fields of Mendelian genetics and population genetics, needed to be developed before other, more enticing mechanisms of selection could be excluded. But there were also a series of nonscientific considerations that affected biologists’ judgment.
In the 19th century, biologists accepted evolution, in part because it implied progress.
“The general idea of evolution, particularly if you took it to be progressive and purposeful, fitted the ideology of the age,” says Peter J. Bowler, a historian of science at Queen’s University, Belfast. But that made it all the harder to accept that something as purposeless as natural selection could be the shaping force of evolution. “On the Origin of Species” and its central idea were largely ignored and did not come back into vogue until the 1930s. By that time the population geneticist R. A. Fisher and others had shown that Mendelian genetics was compatible with the idea of natural selection working on small variations.
“If you think of the 150 years since the publication of ‘Origin of Species,’ it had half that time in the wilderness and half at the center, and even at the center it’s often been not more than marginal,” says Helena Cronin, a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics. “That’s a pretty comprehensive rejection of Darwin.” (Dr. Cronin's comments on Darwin's text.)
Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. “People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior,” Dr. Cronin says. “But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin’s tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies — that’s quite an influential body that’s still rejecting Darwinism.”
The yearning to see purpose in evolution and the doubt that it really applied to people were two nonscientific criteria that led scientists to reject the essence of Darwin’s theory. A third, in terms of group selection, may be people’s tendency to think of themselves as individuals rather than as units of a group. “More and more I’m beginning to think about individualism as our own cultural bias that more or less explains why group selection was rejected so forcefully and why it is still so controversial,” says David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at Binghamton University.
Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”
Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.
*****
February 10, 2009
Essay
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
By CARL SAFINA
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him.
Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.
By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.
That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too.
In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after “Origin.” He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical.
Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.
Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term “dinosaur.” Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things.
Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.
Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?
Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.
Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science.
That’s why Darwin must go.
Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea.
Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. “Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?” he wrote in “Zoonomia” in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how.
Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter “natural selection.” What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.
But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin.
Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.
Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”) and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right.
But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.
Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and the president of the Blue Ocean Institute. His books include “Song for the Blue Ocean,” “Eye of the Albatross” and “Voyage of the Turtle.”
*****
February 10, 2009
Genes Offer New Clues in Old Debate on Species’ Origins
By CAROL KAESUK YOON
Charles Darwin called it the “mystery of mysteries,” a problem so significant and one he was so sure he had solved that he named his world-changing work after it: “On the Origin of Species.” So he might be surprised to learn that 150 years after the publication of his book, the study of how species originate, a process known as speciation, is not only one of the field’s most active areas of study, but also one of its most contentious.
While researchers agree that many of the recent breakthroughs would have come as a huge surprise to the grand old man, they seem to disagree about almost everything else, from what a species is to what exactly is meant by the origin of species and even whether Darwin shed any light on the process at all.
“Speciation is definitely one of the big-picture grand themes of evolutionary biology,” said Mary Jane West-Eberhard, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She described study of the process as “an apparent turmoil that might be misunderstood by an outsider as a caldron of doubts and uncertainties but that in fact is a vitally alive science.”
Part of the difficulty with studying the origin of species comes from the vastness of the question — how did the diversity of all life on Earth arise, from orchids to elephants to bacteria to ourselves? It is difficult, too, to try to reconstruct events — the birth of species — long past.
“A decade ago, the joke was that spell-checkers regularly attempted to substitute the word ‘speciation’ with ‘speculation,’” Mohamed Noor, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University, wrote in a commentary in the journal Nature. But he added, “Speculation in this area will soon be a thing of the past.”
To support such optimism, researchers point to the recent discovery of so-called speciation genes. Most biologists define a species as a group that is reproductively isolated — it cannot interbreed or exchange genes with any other. The newly discovered genes cause reproductive isolation between two groups by causing their offspring, or hybrids, to be infertile or die. Scientists say the identities of the long-sought genes, several of which have recently been pinpointed in fruit flies, mice, fish and yeast, came as a surprise.
On Friday, Daven Presgraves, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Rochester, and colleagues published a paper in the journal Science identifying the latest such gene to be discovered. It is the second one that the team has found in fruit flies. The newly discovered gene, Nup 160, like its predecessor, Nup 96, causes reproductive isolation between the species Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila simulans.
Unexpectedly, the genes both produce proteins that are part of a large piece of cellular machinery known as the nuclear pore complex, a gateway that controls what molecules move into and out of the nucleus. It is still unclear why, in what Dr. Presgraves describes as a blind search for genes that cause problems in hybrids, his team twice pulled out genes involved in the nuclear pore complex or why the complex might be particularly important in the evolution of reproductive isolation.
“The question is,” said Douglas Futuyma, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, “what the hell does this have to do with hybrid sterility?”
One reason some scientists object to the use of the term “speciation genes” is that although the genes cause reproductive isolation, it is not clear whether the genes in question caused the initial reproductive isolation responsible for the origin of the species.
To get closer to the crucial early stages of reproductive isolation, Kirsten Bomblies, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues study hybrids that are the offspring of crosses between strains of plants within a single species. Surprisingly, even among different strains of the weed Arabidopsis thaliana, Dr. Bomblies said, “some crosses fail catastrophically.” The hybrids are “tiny, their leaves are twisted and warped, they have massive die-off of cells, and the worst cases are unable to flower.”
As with the Drosophila genes, the function of the hybrid-disrupting genes found in Arabidopsis has come as a surprise. They appear to be genes for disease resistance, suggesting that the rapid evolution of disease resistance in different strains may be the beginning of the evolution of reproductive isolation between them. The study may have significance far beyond Arabidopsis; Dr. Bomblies, who last year won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her research, notes that breeders have noticed the withering of different strains’ offspring in a variety of species, including wheat, tobacco, cotton and the houseplant Streptocarpus.
Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved with the study, said the work was important because it suggested that an entire class of genes, those involved with fending off disease, and a particular kind of natural selection — that imposed by disease organisms — could be broadly important in speciation in plants. (Read comments by Dr. Rieseberg's on "On the Origin of Species.")
The surprises now being found in the DNA of diverging species are, of course, things Darwin could never have guessed at. Having written “Origin of Species” decades before Gregor Mendel’s genetic work was rediscovered, he certainly did not anticipate such findings in his vision of the diversification of life.
“Genetics was one area where he really fell down,” said Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Why Evolution Is True” (Penguin, 2009).
Yet the strongest pattern emerging from the study of these speciation genes is one Darwin might well have expected. The single widespread commonality is that nearly all appear to have diverged to produce reproductive isolation as a result of adaptation under powerful natural selection.
More than anything else, Darwin focused on adaptation via natural selection in the shaping of the diversity of life. The finding comes as something of a surprise to modern biologists, however, because in the absence of evidence, it was plausible that random divergence over time might also have been an important force leading groups to becoming distinct species.
“Probably the most important finding,” Dr. Rieseberg said, “is that selection is driving the process.”
The harking back to Darwin’s emphasis on selection goes well beyond studies of DNA. A particularly powerful type of selection that Darwin emphasized was sexual selection, as when females choose showy mates and male suitors violently combat one another, which can lead to the evolution of things like peacock tails or massive deer antlers.
Now new studies are providing increasing evidence that sexual selection is capable not only of producing outrageous structures but also new species, an idea of Darwin’s that Dr. West-Eberhard describes as “almost completely forgotten for nearly a century.”
A small Amazonian frog known as Physalaemus petersi provides a particularly strong example of how females’ choosiness in mates may be driving the formation of a new species. Males of the mottled brown species reach just over an inch in length and can be found singing in choruses to attract females. In some populations, the males’ song is what is called a “whine” — a kind of frog meow. But in other populations, males whine and add a squawk. Michael J. Ryan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and colleagues have found that the difference evolved because females in one population preferred pure whine, whereas in another they preferred whine and squawk.
What is particularly interesting about petersi, though, is that the female frogs’ preference for different songs in different populations also appears to be causing the populations to begin to evolve into distinct species. When given a choice of songs from either population, females nearly uniformly prefer their own population’s song, as strictly as if the two populations belonged to two long separated species. The researchers have even gathered evidence that the populations that prefer different songs, while very closely related, appear to be beginning to diverge from one another genetically, suggesting they are moving down the path toward becoming separate species.
So if Darwin pointed out the importance of selection, and even the power of sexual selection, why the often heard claim that the “Origin” has little to say about how species originate?
The problem lies in how biologists define a species. Today, the most common definition of a species is a group that is reproductively isolated from other groups, the biological species concept set out by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr in 1942. As a result, the origin of species is, necessarily, considered the origin of reproduction isolation. Yet both concepts would have been rather foreign to Darwin.
Darwin, who once wrote that species were “indefinable,” might have described a species as a segment of a branch on the ever-expanding tree of life, the same tree he drew as the only figure in the “Origin.” Or he might have said it was something more distinct than a variety and less than a genus.
And there are some biologists today who say that Darwin in all his vagueness, not modern biologists, had the definition right. David Wake, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied Ensatina salamanders for decades. He says their patterns of interbreeding and adaptation simply do not yield to their being divided into species as dictated by the biological species concept.
His salamanders, he said, like so many other real living things, are “much messier” than a definition like the biological species concept allows. Consider asexual species. If a species is an entity that does not exchange genes with others, then every asexual organism, every individual bacterium, for example, could be considered a separate species, hardly a useful distinction. And the complications go on and on.
So perhaps Darwin hit the mark, at least the mark he intended, when he chose his famed title.
“I think he’s not referring to how do you get two species of finch out of one,” Dr. Futuyma said of “Origin of Species.” “I think what he means is something much more embracing, something we would today call the origin of biological diversity. You could be talking about two species of finches or a human versus a giraffe or an oak tree for that matter. The world is full of species, and his book clearly embraces the whole thing.”
Darwin’s own last words in the book suggest just such a broad scope: “There is grandeur in this view of life,” he wrote, that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential
By NICHOLAS WADE
Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part.
It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.
Biologists quickly accepted the idea of evolution, but for decades they rejected natural selection, the mechanism Darwin proposed for the evolutionary process. Until the mid-20th century they largely ignored sexual selection, a special aspect of natural selection that Darwin proposed to account for male ornaments like the peacock’s tail.
And biologists are still arguing about group-level selection, the idea that natural selection can operate at the level of groups as well as on individuals. Darwin proposed group selection — or something like it; scholars differ as to what he meant — to account for castes in ant societies and morality in people.
How did Darwin come to be so in advance of his time? Why were biologists so slow to understand that Darwin had provided the correct answer on so many central issues? Historians of science have noted several distinctive features of Darwin’s approach to science that, besides genius, help account for his insights. They also point to several nonscientific criteria that stood as mental blocks in the way of biologists’ accepting Darwin’s ideas.
One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, and for 12 years more before its sequel, “The Descent of Man,” which explored how his theory applied to people.
He brought several intellectual virtues to the task at hand. Instead of brushing off objections to his theory, he thought about them obsessively until he had found a solution. Showy male ornaments, like the peacock’s tail, appeared hard to explain by natural selection because they seemed more of a handicap than an aid to survival. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick,” Darwin wrote. But from worrying about this problem, he developed the idea of sexual selection, that females chose males with the best ornaments, and hence elegant peacocks have the most offspring.
Darwin also had the intellectual toughness to stick with the deeply discomfiting consequences of his theory, that natural selection has no goal or purpose. Alfred Wallace, who independently thought of natural selection, later lost faith in the power of the idea and turned to spiritualism to explain the human mind. “Darwin had the courage to face the implications of what he had done, but poor Wallace couldn’t bear it,” says William Provine, a historian at Cornell University. (Read commentary by Dr. Provine on passages from "On the Origin of Species." )
Darwin’s thinking about evolution was not only deep, but also very broad. He was interested in fossils, animal breeding, geographical distribution, anatomy and plants. “That very comprehensive view allowed him to see things that others perhaps didn’t,” says Robert J. Richards, a historian at the University of Chicago. “He was so sure of his central ideas — the transmutation of species and natural selection — that he had to find a way to make it all work together.” (Dr. Richards comments on "On the Origin of Species.")
From the perspective of 2009, Darwin’s principal ideas are substantially correct. He did not get everything right. Because he didn’t know about plate tectonics, Darwin’s comments on the distribution of species are not very useful. His theory of inheritance, since he had no knowledge of genes or DNA, is beside the point. But his central concepts of natural selection and sexual selection were correct. He also presented a form of group-level selection that was long dismissed but now has leading advocates like the biologists E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson.
Not only was Darwin correct on the central premises of his theory, but in several other still open issues his views also seem quite likely to prevail. His idea of how new species form was long eclipsed by Ernst Mayr’s view that a reproductive barrier like a mountain forces a species to split. But a number of biologists are now returning to Darwin’s idea that speciation occurs most often through competition in open spaces, Dr. Richards says.
Darwin believed there was a continuity between humans and other species, which led him to think of human morality as related to the sympathy seen among social animals. This long-disdained idea was resurrected only recently by researchers like the primatologist Frans de Waal. Darwin “never felt that morality was our own invention, but was a product of evolution, a position we are now seeing grow in popularity under the influence of what we know about animal behavior,” Dr. de Waal says. “In fact, we’ve now returned to the original Darwinian position.”
It is somewhat remarkable that a man who died in 1882 should still be influencing discussion among biologists. It is perhaps equally strange that so many biologists failed for so many decades to accept ideas that Darwin expressed in clear and beautiful English.
The rejection was in part because a substantial amount of science, including the two new fields of Mendelian genetics and population genetics, needed to be developed before other, more enticing mechanisms of selection could be excluded. But there were also a series of nonscientific considerations that affected biologists’ judgment.
In the 19th century, biologists accepted evolution, in part because it implied progress.
“The general idea of evolution, particularly if you took it to be progressive and purposeful, fitted the ideology of the age,” says Peter J. Bowler, a historian of science at Queen’s University, Belfast. But that made it all the harder to accept that something as purposeless as natural selection could be the shaping force of evolution. “On the Origin of Species” and its central idea were largely ignored and did not come back into vogue until the 1930s. By that time the population geneticist R. A. Fisher and others had shown that Mendelian genetics was compatible with the idea of natural selection working on small variations.
“If you think of the 150 years since the publication of ‘Origin of Species,’ it had half that time in the wilderness and half at the center, and even at the center it’s often been not more than marginal,” says Helena Cronin, a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics. “That’s a pretty comprehensive rejection of Darwin.” (Dr. Cronin's comments on Darwin's text.)
Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. “People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior,” Dr. Cronin says. “But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin’s tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies — that’s quite an influential body that’s still rejecting Darwinism.”
The yearning to see purpose in evolution and the doubt that it really applied to people were two nonscientific criteria that led scientists to reject the essence of Darwin’s theory. A third, in terms of group selection, may be people’s tendency to think of themselves as individuals rather than as units of a group. “More and more I’m beginning to think about individualism as our own cultural bias that more or less explains why group selection was rejected so forcefully and why it is still so controversial,” says David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at Binghamton University.
Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”
Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.
*****
February 10, 2009
Essay
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
By CARL SAFINA
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him.
Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.
By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.
That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too.
In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after “Origin.” He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical.
Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.
Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term “dinosaur.” Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things.
Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.
Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?
Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.
Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science.
That’s why Darwin must go.
Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea.
Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. “Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?” he wrote in “Zoonomia” in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how.
Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter “natural selection.” What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.
But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin.
Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.
Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”) and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right.
But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.
Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and the president of the Blue Ocean Institute. His books include “Song for the Blue Ocean,” “Eye of the Albatross” and “Voyage of the Turtle.”
*****
February 10, 2009
Genes Offer New Clues in Old Debate on Species’ Origins
By CAROL KAESUK YOON
Charles Darwin called it the “mystery of mysteries,” a problem so significant and one he was so sure he had solved that he named his world-changing work after it: “On the Origin of Species.” So he might be surprised to learn that 150 years after the publication of his book, the study of how species originate, a process known as speciation, is not only one of the field’s most active areas of study, but also one of its most contentious.
While researchers agree that many of the recent breakthroughs would have come as a huge surprise to the grand old man, they seem to disagree about almost everything else, from what a species is to what exactly is meant by the origin of species and even whether Darwin shed any light on the process at all.
“Speciation is definitely one of the big-picture grand themes of evolutionary biology,” said Mary Jane West-Eberhard, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She described study of the process as “an apparent turmoil that might be misunderstood by an outsider as a caldron of doubts and uncertainties but that in fact is a vitally alive science.”
Part of the difficulty with studying the origin of species comes from the vastness of the question — how did the diversity of all life on Earth arise, from orchids to elephants to bacteria to ourselves? It is difficult, too, to try to reconstruct events — the birth of species — long past.
“A decade ago, the joke was that spell-checkers regularly attempted to substitute the word ‘speciation’ with ‘speculation,’” Mohamed Noor, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University, wrote in a commentary in the journal Nature. But he added, “Speculation in this area will soon be a thing of the past.”
To support such optimism, researchers point to the recent discovery of so-called speciation genes. Most biologists define a species as a group that is reproductively isolated — it cannot interbreed or exchange genes with any other. The newly discovered genes cause reproductive isolation between two groups by causing their offspring, or hybrids, to be infertile or die. Scientists say the identities of the long-sought genes, several of which have recently been pinpointed in fruit flies, mice, fish and yeast, came as a surprise.
On Friday, Daven Presgraves, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Rochester, and colleagues published a paper in the journal Science identifying the latest such gene to be discovered. It is the second one that the team has found in fruit flies. The newly discovered gene, Nup 160, like its predecessor, Nup 96, causes reproductive isolation between the species Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila simulans.
Unexpectedly, the genes both produce proteins that are part of a large piece of cellular machinery known as the nuclear pore complex, a gateway that controls what molecules move into and out of the nucleus. It is still unclear why, in what Dr. Presgraves describes as a blind search for genes that cause problems in hybrids, his team twice pulled out genes involved in the nuclear pore complex or why the complex might be particularly important in the evolution of reproductive isolation.
“The question is,” said Douglas Futuyma, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, “what the hell does this have to do with hybrid sterility?”
One reason some scientists object to the use of the term “speciation genes” is that although the genes cause reproductive isolation, it is not clear whether the genes in question caused the initial reproductive isolation responsible for the origin of the species.
To get closer to the crucial early stages of reproductive isolation, Kirsten Bomblies, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues study hybrids that are the offspring of crosses between strains of plants within a single species. Surprisingly, even among different strains of the weed Arabidopsis thaliana, Dr. Bomblies said, “some crosses fail catastrophically.” The hybrids are “tiny, their leaves are twisted and warped, they have massive die-off of cells, and the worst cases are unable to flower.”
As with the Drosophila genes, the function of the hybrid-disrupting genes found in Arabidopsis has come as a surprise. They appear to be genes for disease resistance, suggesting that the rapid evolution of disease resistance in different strains may be the beginning of the evolution of reproductive isolation between them. The study may have significance far beyond Arabidopsis; Dr. Bomblies, who last year won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her research, notes that breeders have noticed the withering of different strains’ offspring in a variety of species, including wheat, tobacco, cotton and the houseplant Streptocarpus.
Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved with the study, said the work was important because it suggested that an entire class of genes, those involved with fending off disease, and a particular kind of natural selection — that imposed by disease organisms — could be broadly important in speciation in plants. (Read comments by Dr. Rieseberg's on "On the Origin of Species.")
The surprises now being found in the DNA of diverging species are, of course, things Darwin could never have guessed at. Having written “Origin of Species” decades before Gregor Mendel’s genetic work was rediscovered, he certainly did not anticipate such findings in his vision of the diversification of life.
“Genetics was one area where he really fell down,” said Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Why Evolution Is True” (Penguin, 2009).
Yet the strongest pattern emerging from the study of these speciation genes is one Darwin might well have expected. The single widespread commonality is that nearly all appear to have diverged to produce reproductive isolation as a result of adaptation under powerful natural selection.
More than anything else, Darwin focused on adaptation via natural selection in the shaping of the diversity of life. The finding comes as something of a surprise to modern biologists, however, because in the absence of evidence, it was plausible that random divergence over time might also have been an important force leading groups to becoming distinct species.
“Probably the most important finding,” Dr. Rieseberg said, “is that selection is driving the process.”
The harking back to Darwin’s emphasis on selection goes well beyond studies of DNA. A particularly powerful type of selection that Darwin emphasized was sexual selection, as when females choose showy mates and male suitors violently combat one another, which can lead to the evolution of things like peacock tails or massive deer antlers.
Now new studies are providing increasing evidence that sexual selection is capable not only of producing outrageous structures but also new species, an idea of Darwin’s that Dr. West-Eberhard describes as “almost completely forgotten for nearly a century.”
A small Amazonian frog known as Physalaemus petersi provides a particularly strong example of how females’ choosiness in mates may be driving the formation of a new species. Males of the mottled brown species reach just over an inch in length and can be found singing in choruses to attract females. In some populations, the males’ song is what is called a “whine” — a kind of frog meow. But in other populations, males whine and add a squawk. Michael J. Ryan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and colleagues have found that the difference evolved because females in one population preferred pure whine, whereas in another they preferred whine and squawk.
What is particularly interesting about petersi, though, is that the female frogs’ preference for different songs in different populations also appears to be causing the populations to begin to evolve into distinct species. When given a choice of songs from either population, females nearly uniformly prefer their own population’s song, as strictly as if the two populations belonged to two long separated species. The researchers have even gathered evidence that the populations that prefer different songs, while very closely related, appear to be beginning to diverge from one another genetically, suggesting they are moving down the path toward becoming separate species.
So if Darwin pointed out the importance of selection, and even the power of sexual selection, why the often heard claim that the “Origin” has little to say about how species originate?
The problem lies in how biologists define a species. Today, the most common definition of a species is a group that is reproductively isolated from other groups, the biological species concept set out by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr in 1942. As a result, the origin of species is, necessarily, considered the origin of reproduction isolation. Yet both concepts would have been rather foreign to Darwin.
Darwin, who once wrote that species were “indefinable,” might have described a species as a segment of a branch on the ever-expanding tree of life, the same tree he drew as the only figure in the “Origin.” Or he might have said it was something more distinct than a variety and less than a genus.
And there are some biologists today who say that Darwin in all his vagueness, not modern biologists, had the definition right. David Wake, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied Ensatina salamanders for decades. He says their patterns of interbreeding and adaptation simply do not yield to their being divided into species as dictated by the biological species concept.
His salamanders, he said, like so many other real living things, are “much messier” than a definition like the biological species concept allows. Consider asexual species. If a species is an entity that does not exchange genes with others, then every asexual organism, every individual bacterium, for example, could be considered a separate species, hardly a useful distinction. And the complications go on and on.
So perhaps Darwin hit the mark, at least the mark he intended, when he chose his famed title.
“I think he’s not referring to how do you get two species of finch out of one,” Dr. Futuyma said of “Origin of Species.” “I think what he means is something much more embracing, something we would today call the origin of biological diversity. You could be talking about two species of finches or a human versus a giraffe or an oak tree for that matter. The world is full of species, and his book clearly embraces the whole thing.”
Darwin’s own last words in the book suggest just such a broad scope: “There is grandeur in this view of life,” he wrote, that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
The evolution of debate over the origin of species
By Barry Cooper, For The Calgary HeraldFebruary 11, 2009 4:02 AM
Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. In November, the Origin of Species, which contained his theory of natural selection, will be 150. For a century and a half, it has served as the foundation of modern biology. And yet the theory remains controversial --as authorities from the Vatican to Kevin Padian, a friend of mine who is a biologist and paleontologist at Cal Berkeley, agree.
Last fall the Vatican announced the theory of evolution was compatible with biblical revelation, but had no plans to offer an apology to Darwinians for disrespecting him over the past century. A few weeks ago, the Anglicans allowed as their criticism of Darwin was over-wrought. They apologized to Darwin's ghost.
But there are still plenty of biblical literalists around for whom the Bible story of creation is simply true. Kevin has debated with these folks, to his credit, but to say they were talking past one another already assumes more common ground than is really there, (you can see it all on YouTube.)
For scientists, Darwin's account of evolution deals with how lifeforms change. Some are concerned about how the notionally first form of life spontaneously originated from inorganic matter. One way or another, they focus on scientifically defined and scientifically manageable problems.
For their part, the theologians, whether informed by statesmanship or ire, argue Darwin's and the Darwinists' scientific theory has nothing to do with the meaning of life, the truths apprehended by the cognition of faith. For most of us, a shrug of indifference would sufficiently express our interest.
This would be premature because there are philosophers who have also discussed the meaning of evolution--though not for a couple of hundred years. Probably the most thorough analysis of the question was made long before Darwin by the German thinker Immanuel Kant, in the 18th century.
For Christians, the same guiding hand of the divine master-craftsman governed the construction of the individual (made in the image and likeness of God) and the species. But when people cease to believe in divine creation, the species dissolves into a series of separate individuals. So where do species come from?
Kant provided a comprehensive account of what an organism was -- a living reality that develops, regenerates, and reproduces according to an internal law. It is a link in a chain, called a species, extending from the past into the future. Kant then proposed a theory of evolution of living beings from simple to complex organisms. He was aware this account by itself did not address the question of the meaning of life was that nevertheless was undergoing this evolution.
Being a philosopher, and so interested in understanding everything, he provided an account of life was that evolved according to this law. He was also aware his explanatory law of evolution itself stood outside the evolution it described. Thus the species, which were supposed to descend from one another, nevertheless stood side by side, much as they did when created by a divine hand. Kant considered this a paradox: species were generated from one another, yet they were separate realities. For philosophically inclined biologists, this remains a puzzling problem.
Darwin solved the paradox, at least to his own satisfaction, not by examining philosophical paradoxes but by transferring the economic struggles for life in bourgeois society (he was, after all, the grandson of the fabulously wealthy Josiah Wedgwood) to the animal realm. Now, Darwin was a great empirical naturalist and he arranged an enormous amount of material in support of his theory. As to any concern about what the meaningful reality of life was that underwent this evolution, Darwin and his followers were not particularly clear.
There was, moreover, a decidedly secular and anti-Christian side to the argument when the assumption was made that the notion human beings were the final link in the chain of evolution had a bearing on the meaning of ethics and spirituality. For example, the survival of the fittest, which Darwin himself adopted in the 1860 edition, can easily (and deliberately) be interpreted in terms of the moral superiority of the stronger.
Contemporary Darwinians forget the genuine philosophical issues about which their master was ill-informed. Religious fundamentalists, hostile equally to science and to philosophy, are hardly an improvement. No doubt we can look forward to another century and a half of inconclusive polemic.
Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
The Vatican claims Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity
The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution should not have been dismissed and claimed it is compatible with the Christian view of Creation.
By Chris Irvine
Last Updated: 1:52PM GMT 11 Feb 2009
Gianfranco Ravasi: Monsignor Ravasi said Darwin's theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church Photo: EPA
Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said while the Church had been hostile to Darwin's theory in the past, the idea of evolution could be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.
Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, added that 4th century theologian St Augustine had "never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish" and forms of life had been transformed "slowly over time". Aquinas made similar observations in the Middle Ages.
Ahead of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the Vatican is also set to play down the idea of Intelligent Design, which argues a "higher power" must be responsible for the complexities of life.
The conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University will discuss Intelligent Design to an extent, but only as a "cultural phenomenon" rather than a scientific or theological issue.
Monsignor Ravasi said Darwin's theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, pointing to comments more than 50 years ago, when Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans.
Marc Leclerc, who teaches natural philosophy at the Gregorian University, said the "time has come for a rigorous and objective valuation" of Darwin by the Church as the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth approaches.
Professor Leclerc argues that too many of Darwin's opponents, primarily Creationists, mistakenly claim his theories are "totally incompatible with a religious vision of reality".
Earlier this week, prominent scientists and leading religious figures wrote to The Daily Telegraph to call for an end to the fighting over Darwin's legacy.
They argued that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it to attack religion while they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to support Darwin's theory.
The Church of England is seeking to bring Darwin back into the fold with a page on its website paying tribute to his "forgotten" work in his local parish, showing science and religion need not be at odds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... anity.html
By Barry Cooper, For The Calgary HeraldFebruary 11, 2009 4:02 AM
Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. In November, the Origin of Species, which contained his theory of natural selection, will be 150. For a century and a half, it has served as the foundation of modern biology. And yet the theory remains controversial --as authorities from the Vatican to Kevin Padian, a friend of mine who is a biologist and paleontologist at Cal Berkeley, agree.
Last fall the Vatican announced the theory of evolution was compatible with biblical revelation, but had no plans to offer an apology to Darwinians for disrespecting him over the past century. A few weeks ago, the Anglicans allowed as their criticism of Darwin was over-wrought. They apologized to Darwin's ghost.
But there are still plenty of biblical literalists around for whom the Bible story of creation is simply true. Kevin has debated with these folks, to his credit, but to say they were talking past one another already assumes more common ground than is really there, (you can see it all on YouTube.)
For scientists, Darwin's account of evolution deals with how lifeforms change. Some are concerned about how the notionally first form of life spontaneously originated from inorganic matter. One way or another, they focus on scientifically defined and scientifically manageable problems.
For their part, the theologians, whether informed by statesmanship or ire, argue Darwin's and the Darwinists' scientific theory has nothing to do with the meaning of life, the truths apprehended by the cognition of faith. For most of us, a shrug of indifference would sufficiently express our interest.
This would be premature because there are philosophers who have also discussed the meaning of evolution--though not for a couple of hundred years. Probably the most thorough analysis of the question was made long before Darwin by the German thinker Immanuel Kant, in the 18th century.
For Christians, the same guiding hand of the divine master-craftsman governed the construction of the individual (made in the image and likeness of God) and the species. But when people cease to believe in divine creation, the species dissolves into a series of separate individuals. So where do species come from?
Kant provided a comprehensive account of what an organism was -- a living reality that develops, regenerates, and reproduces according to an internal law. It is a link in a chain, called a species, extending from the past into the future. Kant then proposed a theory of evolution of living beings from simple to complex organisms. He was aware this account by itself did not address the question of the meaning of life was that nevertheless was undergoing this evolution.
Being a philosopher, and so interested in understanding everything, he provided an account of life was that evolved according to this law. He was also aware his explanatory law of evolution itself stood outside the evolution it described. Thus the species, which were supposed to descend from one another, nevertheless stood side by side, much as they did when created by a divine hand. Kant considered this a paradox: species were generated from one another, yet they were separate realities. For philosophically inclined biologists, this remains a puzzling problem.
Darwin solved the paradox, at least to his own satisfaction, not by examining philosophical paradoxes but by transferring the economic struggles for life in bourgeois society (he was, after all, the grandson of the fabulously wealthy Josiah Wedgwood) to the animal realm. Now, Darwin was a great empirical naturalist and he arranged an enormous amount of material in support of his theory. As to any concern about what the meaningful reality of life was that underwent this evolution, Darwin and his followers were not particularly clear.
There was, moreover, a decidedly secular and anti-Christian side to the argument when the assumption was made that the notion human beings were the final link in the chain of evolution had a bearing on the meaning of ethics and spirituality. For example, the survival of the fittest, which Darwin himself adopted in the 1860 edition, can easily (and deliberately) be interpreted in terms of the moral superiority of the stronger.
Contemporary Darwinians forget the genuine philosophical issues about which their master was ill-informed. Religious fundamentalists, hostile equally to science and to philosophy, are hardly an improvement. No doubt we can look forward to another century and a half of inconclusive polemic.
Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
****
The Vatican claims Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity
The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution should not have been dismissed and claimed it is compatible with the Christian view of Creation.
By Chris Irvine
Last Updated: 1:52PM GMT 11 Feb 2009
Gianfranco Ravasi: Monsignor Ravasi said Darwin's theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church Photo: EPA
Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said while the Church had been hostile to Darwin's theory in the past, the idea of evolution could be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.
Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, added that 4th century theologian St Augustine had "never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish" and forms of life had been transformed "slowly over time". Aquinas made similar observations in the Middle Ages.
Ahead of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the Vatican is also set to play down the idea of Intelligent Design, which argues a "higher power" must be responsible for the complexities of life.
The conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University will discuss Intelligent Design to an extent, but only as a "cultural phenomenon" rather than a scientific or theological issue.
Monsignor Ravasi said Darwin's theories had never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, pointing to comments more than 50 years ago, when Pope Pius XII described evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans.
Marc Leclerc, who teaches natural philosophy at the Gregorian University, said the "time has come for a rigorous and objective valuation" of Darwin by the Church as the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth approaches.
Professor Leclerc argues that too many of Darwin's opponents, primarily Creationists, mistakenly claim his theories are "totally incompatible with a religious vision of reality".
Earlier this week, prominent scientists and leading religious figures wrote to The Daily Telegraph to call for an end to the fighting over Darwin's legacy.
They argued that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it to attack religion while they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to support Darwin's theory.
The Church of England is seeking to bring Darwin back into the fold with a page on its website paying tribute to his "forgotten" work in his local parish, showing science and religion need not be at odds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... anity.html
February 12, 2009
Editorial | Editorial Observer
Darwin at 200: The Ongoing Force of His Unconventional Idea
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
I can’t help wondering what Charles Darwin would think if he could survey the state of his intellectual achievement today, 200 years after his birth and 150 years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” the book that changed everything. His central idea — evolution by means of natural selection — was in some sense the product of his time, as Darwin well knew. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who grasped that there was something wrong with the conventional notion of fixed species. And his theory was hastened into print and into joint presentation by the independent discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace half a world away.
But Darwin’s theory was the product of years of patient observation. We love to believe in science by epiphany, but the work of real scientists is to rigorously test their epiphanies after they have been boiled down to working hypotheses. Most of Darwin’s life was devoted to gathering evidence for just such tests. He writes with an air of incompleteness because he was aware that it would take the work of many scientists to confirm his theory in detail.
I doubt that much in the subsequent history of Darwin’s idea would have surprised him. The most important discoveries — Mendel’s genetics and the structure of DNA — would almost certainly have gratified him because they reveal the physical basis for the variation underlying evolution. It would have gratified him to see his ideas so thoroughly tested and to see so many of them confirmed. He could hardly have expected to be right so often.
Perhaps one day we will not call evolution “Darwinism.” After all, we do not call classical mechanics “Newtonism.” But that raises the question of whether a biological Einstein is possible, someone who demonstrates that Darwin’s theory is a limited case. What Darwin proposed was not a set of immutable mathematical formulas. It was a theory of biological history that was itself set in history. That the details have changed does not invalidate his accomplishment. If anything, it enhances it. His writings were not intended to be scriptural. They were meant to be tested.
As for the other fate of so-called Darwinism — the reductionist controversy fostered by religious conservatives — well, Darwin knew plenty about that, too. The cultural opposition to evolution was then, as now, scientifically irrelevant. Perhaps the persistence of opposition to evolution is a reminder that culture is not biological, or else we might have evolved past such a gnashing of sensibilities. In a way, our peculiarly American failure to come to terms with Darwin’s theory and what it’s become since 1859 is a sign of something broader: our failure to come to terms with science and the teaching of science.
Darwin does not fit our image of a scientist. From the 21st century, he seems at first to bear a closer resemblance to an amateur naturalist like Gilbert White in the 18th century. But that is an illusion. Darwin’s funding was private, his habit was retiring and he lacked the kind of institutional support that we associate with science because it did not exist. But Darwin’s extensive scientific correspondence makes it clear that he was not the least bit reclusive intellectually and that he understood the character of science as it was practiced in his day as well as anyone.
We expect these days that a boy or girl obsessed with beetles may eventually find a home in a university or a laboratory or a museum. But Darwin’s life was his museum, and he was its curator. In June 1833, still early in the five-year voyage of the Beagle, he wrote about rounding Cape Horn: “It is a grand spectacle to see all nature thus raging; but Heaven knows every one in the Beagle has seen enough in this one summer to last them their natural lives.” (In this same letter, he celebrates the parliamentary attack on slavery in England.)
The rest of Darwin’s life did in fact revolve around that voyage. As you sift through the notes and letters and publications that stemmed from his years on the Beagle, you begin to understand how careful, how inquisitive and how various his mind was. The voyage of the Beagle — and of a young naturalist who was 22 at its outset — is still one of the most compelling stories in science.
Darwin recedes, but his idea does not. It is absorbed, with adaptations, into the foundation of the biological sciences. In a very real sense, it is the cornerstone of what we know about life on earth. Darwin’s version of that great idea was very much of its time, and yet the whole weight of his time was set against it. From one perspective, Darwin looks completely conventional — white, male, well born, leisured, patrician. But from another, he turned the fortune of his circumstances into the most unconventional idea of all: the one that showed humans their true ancestry in nature.
****
February 12, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Origin of Darwin
By OLIVIA JUDSON
London
MY fellow primates, 200 years ago today, Charles Darwin was born. Please join me in wishing him happy birthday!
Unlike many members of the human species, Darwin makes an easy hero. His achievements were prodigious; his science, meticulous. His work transformed our understanding of the planet and of ourselves.
At the same time, he was a humane, gentle, decent man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend. Judging by his letters, he was also sometimes quite funny. He was, in other words, one of those rare beings, as likeable as he was impressive.
For example, after his marriage, Darwin worked at home, and his children (of the 10 he fathered, seven survived to adulthood) remembered playing in his study. Later, one of his sons recounted how, after an argument, his father came up to his room, sat on his bed, and apologized for losing his temper. And although often painted as a recluse, Darwin served as a local magistrate, meting out justice in his dining room.
Moreover, while many of his contemporaries approved of slavery, Darwin did not. He came from a family of ardent abolitionists, and he was revolted by what he saw in slave countries: “Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal .... It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”
He practiced a kind of ideal, dream-like science. He examined the minutiae of nature — shells of barnacles, pistils of flowers — but worked on grand themes. He corresponded with lofty men of learning, but also with farmers and pigeon breeders. He observed, questioned, experimented, constantly testing his ideas.
Could plants from the mainland colonize a newly formed island? If so, they would need a way to get there. Could they survive in the ocean? To find out, he immersed seeds in salt water for weeks, then planted them to see how many could sprout. He reported, for example, that “an asparagus plant with ripe berries floated for 23 days, when dried it floated for 85 days, and the seeds afterwards germinated.” The Atlantic current moved at 33 nautical miles a day; he figured that would take a seed more than 1,300 miles in 42 days. Yes, seeds could travel by sea.
He published important work on subjects as diverse as the biology of carnivorous plants, barnacles, earthworms and the formation of coral reefs. He wrote a travelogue, “The Voyage of the Beagle,” that was an immediate best seller and remains a classic of its kind. And as if that was not enough, he discovered two major forces in evolution — natural selection and sexual selection — and wrote three radical scientific masterpieces, “On the Origin of Species” (1859), “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” (1871) and “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872).
The “Origin,” of course, is what he is best known for. This volume, colossal in scope yet minutely detailed, laid the foundations of modern biology. Here, Darwin presented extensive and compelling evidence that all living beings — including humans — have evolved from a common ancestor, and that natural selection is the chief force driving evolutionary change. Sexual selection, he argued, was an additional force, responsible for spectacular features like the tail feathers of peacocks that are useless for (or even detrimental to) survival but essential for seduction.
Before the “Origin,” similarities and differences between species were mere curiosities; questions as to why a certain plant is succulent like a cactus or deciduous like a maple could be answered only, “Because.” Biology itself was nothing more than a vast exercise in catalog and description. After the “Origin,” all organisms became connected, part of the same, profoundly ancient, family tree. Similarities and differences became comprehensible and explicable. In short, Darwin gave us a framework for asking questions about the natural world, and about ourselves.
He was not right about everything. How could he have been? Famously, he didn’t know how genetics works; as for DNA — well, the structure of the molecule wasn’t discovered until 1953. So today’s view of evolution is much more nuanced than his. We have incorporated genetics, and expanded and refined our understanding of natural selection, and of the other forces in evolution.
But what is astonishing is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw. His imagination told him, for example, that many female animals have a sense of beauty — that they like to mate with the most beautiful males. For this he was ridiculed. But we know that he was right. Still more impressive: he was not afraid to apply his ideas to humans. He thought that natural selection had operated on us, just as it had on fruit flies and centipedes.
As we delve into DNA sequences, we can see natural selection acting at the level of genes. Our genes hold evidence of our intimate associations with other beings, from cows to malaria parasites and grains. The latest research allows us to trace the genetic changes that differentiate us from our primate cousins, and shows that large parts of the human genome bear the stamp of evolution by means of natural selection.
I think Darwin would have been pleased. But not surprised.
Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion.
*****
A Christian Progressive Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
washington Post Blog
Feb 12th 2009
Professor, Chicago Theological Seminary
Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is professor of theology at Chicago
Theological Seminary and senior fellow at the Center for American
Progress. She was president of CTS from 1998-2008.
A Christian Progressive Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin
In my own work as a Christian progressive, I have found evolutionary
biology, and especially the Human Genome Project, a source of rich
dialogue between theology and science. As we celebrate the 200th
anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, however, the norm for
the relationship between religion and science is anything but
productive and respectful. Instead, anti-Darwinist views in
conservative and even moderate-to-conservative Christianity have
been increasing, especially in the last quarter century.
As a Christian, an advocate of human rights, and a person strongly
committed to democratic ideals, I believe Darwin's work was of
consummate importance for human progress. I further believe that
religious progressives need to speak out more directly against a
religious campaign against evolutionary biology. We need to say
clearly that this targeting of evolution by conservative
Christianity is far more political in origin than it is purely
theological.
There is no doubt that Darwin's legacy in science has been vast; the
theory of natural selection that gave rise to the Darwinian
revolution underlies both theory and method in science. The
Darwinian upheaval is just this: the origin of species is bottom up,
through natural forces, rather than top-down and fixed like
conservative Christian theology in particular would contend.
This is where all the trouble arises. The idea that human life is
continuous with other creatures and indeed with the whole planet is
a profoundly destabilizing idea for religious and political
practices of dominance and control. This whole struggle is more
about politics than it is about abstract issues like religious faith
and secularism. In the 200 years since Charles Darwin's birth, this
has changed very little.
In the England of Darwin's own time, the great Anglican "compromise"
had managed to head off the kind of violence and anticlericalism of
the French Revolution, but it was a very fragile compromise. Darwin
knew well, coming as he did from a family that contained several
prominent "freethinkers" who provoked public controversy, how
controversial his ideas on the "Origin of Species" and "The Descent
of Man" would be. In fact, his ideas might be thought to be more
than controversial, they could be regarded as treason. People in
Darwin's time could go to prison for heresy because it was
seditious, undermining the divine origin of the monarchy.
Today's conservative Christian efforts to force school systems to
teach "Intelligent Design," a form of creationism, reveals the same
kind of political and social ideology as in Darwin's time.
Creationism goes hand-in-hand with efforts to claim the United
States is a Christian nation. Creationists posit a God who controls
the creation; this ideology reinforces political ideas of control of
society. This "Christian politics" is sometimes
called "dominionism."
Darwin's ideas are considered controversial by these Christian
conservatives precisely because they are freeing for democratic
process and they are freeing for theological reflection. I have
found dialogue with the newer genetics, the astonishing leap forward
beyond Darwin, to be particularly thought-provoking.
Unlike conservative Christian theology, progressive Christian
theology, especially in its heritage in Protestant liberalism, has
long emphasized the continuity of the human with the rest of
creation. Progressive Christians by and large oppose regarding human
nature as fixed and static and a unique "lord of creation." The
inescapable learning from evolutionary biology is that human beings
are deeply creatures. We share 90% of our genes with mice. If that
doesn't take the "lords of creation" down a peg, I fail to see what
will!
Evolutionary biology also teaches us species solidarity. Human
beings are so much more alike than they are different from each
other. Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow,
feminist psychologists, have shown that human beings are defined by
their relationality and connection. Asian feminist theologians such
as Chung Hyun Kyung make a similar argument. Genetically speaking,
racial distinctions are so minor as to be almost negligible. Racial
difference is a political invention for social and economic
dominance. Human beings are also "one of a kind," as our
DNA "fingerprints" show. Progressives in religion have long
emphasized the unique value and distinctiveness of each human being--
the individual and her or his uniqueness is a profound good of God's
creation. We therefore support human rights, including all women's
rights and gay rights, and racial equality as the political practice
of valuing human individuality and human freedom.
Evolutionary biology does not exhaust all that theology has to say
about human nature. That's where a Christian interpretation of the
whole of human nature is a different interpretation that that of the
sociobiologists, in particular, many of whom seek a wholly
naturalistic explanation for human nature and behavior. But there
are large and increasing areas of fruitful dialogue possible, as
second and third generation evolutionary biologists nuance their own
arguments.
Secularists take issue with the fact that to posit a God is to pose
an "unanswerable question" and thus has no place in a reasonable
world. In progressive theology, however, unanswerable questions are
not regarded as barriers, but doorways for religious contemplation.
An infinite God can neither be proved nor disproved. Religion and
science are, in the end, different ways of knowing. I know several
scientists who acknowledge that science is a branch of philosophy;
science does not need to replace other epistemologies to do its
work.
What is so exciting about some of the new dialogues between religion
and science is the imaginative play that results from this simple
acknowledgment. I believe that human beings are both spirit and
matter, but these are not wholly separate and certainly not opposed.
I find the ways science helps us explore the material nature of
humanity can also illuminate aspects of the spiritual. That's only
possible if religion and science quit pointing fingers at each
other, however.
*****
Darwin's Birthday Poll: Fewer Than 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution
Thursday , February 12, 2009
A new poll released just in time for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday
found that only 39 percent of Americans say they "believe in the
theory of evolution," and just 24 percent of those who attend church
weekly believe in that explanation for the development of life on
Earth.
The Gallup survey, released Wednesday, found a quarter of those
polled do not believe in evolution, and 36 percent said they don't
have an opinion either way.
Another survey by the Pew Research Center got similar results.
The Gallup poll of 1,018 American adults found strong ties between
education level and belief in the theory of evolution.
"Among those with high-school educations or less who have an opinion
on Darwin's theory, more say they do not believe in evolution than
say they believe in it," Gallup found. "For all other groups, and in
particular those who have at least a college degree, belief is
significantly higher than nonbelief."
Just 21 percent of respondents who had up to a high school level of
education believe in evolution, compared with 74 percent of those
with postgraduate degrees.
Frank Newport, Gallup's editor-in-chief, wrote that attitudes were
shaped to an even greater degree by religion.
"Previous Gallup research shows that the rate of church attendance
is fairly constant across educational groups, suggesting that this
relationship is not owing to an underlying educational difference
but instead reflects a direct influence of religious beliefs on
belief in evolution," he said.
Among weekly churchgoers, only 24 percent said they believe in
evolution, while 41 percent do not and 35 percent have no opinion.
Inversely, 55 percent of those who seldom or never attend church
expressed belief in evolution, while 11 percent do not, and 34
percent have no opinion.
Editorial | Editorial Observer
Darwin at 200: The Ongoing Force of His Unconventional Idea
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
I can’t help wondering what Charles Darwin would think if he could survey the state of his intellectual achievement today, 200 years after his birth and 150 years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” the book that changed everything. His central idea — evolution by means of natural selection — was in some sense the product of his time, as Darwin well knew. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who grasped that there was something wrong with the conventional notion of fixed species. And his theory was hastened into print and into joint presentation by the independent discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace half a world away.
But Darwin’s theory was the product of years of patient observation. We love to believe in science by epiphany, but the work of real scientists is to rigorously test their epiphanies after they have been boiled down to working hypotheses. Most of Darwin’s life was devoted to gathering evidence for just such tests. He writes with an air of incompleteness because he was aware that it would take the work of many scientists to confirm his theory in detail.
I doubt that much in the subsequent history of Darwin’s idea would have surprised him. The most important discoveries — Mendel’s genetics and the structure of DNA — would almost certainly have gratified him because they reveal the physical basis for the variation underlying evolution. It would have gratified him to see his ideas so thoroughly tested and to see so many of them confirmed. He could hardly have expected to be right so often.
Perhaps one day we will not call evolution “Darwinism.” After all, we do not call classical mechanics “Newtonism.” But that raises the question of whether a biological Einstein is possible, someone who demonstrates that Darwin’s theory is a limited case. What Darwin proposed was not a set of immutable mathematical formulas. It was a theory of biological history that was itself set in history. That the details have changed does not invalidate his accomplishment. If anything, it enhances it. His writings were not intended to be scriptural. They were meant to be tested.
As for the other fate of so-called Darwinism — the reductionist controversy fostered by religious conservatives — well, Darwin knew plenty about that, too. The cultural opposition to evolution was then, as now, scientifically irrelevant. Perhaps the persistence of opposition to evolution is a reminder that culture is not biological, or else we might have evolved past such a gnashing of sensibilities. In a way, our peculiarly American failure to come to terms with Darwin’s theory and what it’s become since 1859 is a sign of something broader: our failure to come to terms with science and the teaching of science.
Darwin does not fit our image of a scientist. From the 21st century, he seems at first to bear a closer resemblance to an amateur naturalist like Gilbert White in the 18th century. But that is an illusion. Darwin’s funding was private, his habit was retiring and he lacked the kind of institutional support that we associate with science because it did not exist. But Darwin’s extensive scientific correspondence makes it clear that he was not the least bit reclusive intellectually and that he understood the character of science as it was practiced in his day as well as anyone.
We expect these days that a boy or girl obsessed with beetles may eventually find a home in a university or a laboratory or a museum. But Darwin’s life was his museum, and he was its curator. In June 1833, still early in the five-year voyage of the Beagle, he wrote about rounding Cape Horn: “It is a grand spectacle to see all nature thus raging; but Heaven knows every one in the Beagle has seen enough in this one summer to last them their natural lives.” (In this same letter, he celebrates the parliamentary attack on slavery in England.)
The rest of Darwin’s life did in fact revolve around that voyage. As you sift through the notes and letters and publications that stemmed from his years on the Beagle, you begin to understand how careful, how inquisitive and how various his mind was. The voyage of the Beagle — and of a young naturalist who was 22 at its outset — is still one of the most compelling stories in science.
Darwin recedes, but his idea does not. It is absorbed, with adaptations, into the foundation of the biological sciences. In a very real sense, it is the cornerstone of what we know about life on earth. Darwin’s version of that great idea was very much of its time, and yet the whole weight of his time was set against it. From one perspective, Darwin looks completely conventional — white, male, well born, leisured, patrician. But from another, he turned the fortune of his circumstances into the most unconventional idea of all: the one that showed humans their true ancestry in nature.
****
February 12, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Origin of Darwin
By OLIVIA JUDSON
London
MY fellow primates, 200 years ago today, Charles Darwin was born. Please join me in wishing him happy birthday!
Unlike many members of the human species, Darwin makes an easy hero. His achievements were prodigious; his science, meticulous. His work transformed our understanding of the planet and of ourselves.
At the same time, he was a humane, gentle, decent man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend. Judging by his letters, he was also sometimes quite funny. He was, in other words, one of those rare beings, as likeable as he was impressive.
For example, after his marriage, Darwin worked at home, and his children (of the 10 he fathered, seven survived to adulthood) remembered playing in his study. Later, one of his sons recounted how, after an argument, his father came up to his room, sat on his bed, and apologized for losing his temper. And although often painted as a recluse, Darwin served as a local magistrate, meting out justice in his dining room.
Moreover, while many of his contemporaries approved of slavery, Darwin did not. He came from a family of ardent abolitionists, and he was revolted by what he saw in slave countries: “Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal .... It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”
He practiced a kind of ideal, dream-like science. He examined the minutiae of nature — shells of barnacles, pistils of flowers — but worked on grand themes. He corresponded with lofty men of learning, but also with farmers and pigeon breeders. He observed, questioned, experimented, constantly testing his ideas.
Could plants from the mainland colonize a newly formed island? If so, they would need a way to get there. Could they survive in the ocean? To find out, he immersed seeds in salt water for weeks, then planted them to see how many could sprout. He reported, for example, that “an asparagus plant with ripe berries floated for 23 days, when dried it floated for 85 days, and the seeds afterwards germinated.” The Atlantic current moved at 33 nautical miles a day; he figured that would take a seed more than 1,300 miles in 42 days. Yes, seeds could travel by sea.
He published important work on subjects as diverse as the biology of carnivorous plants, barnacles, earthworms and the formation of coral reefs. He wrote a travelogue, “The Voyage of the Beagle,” that was an immediate best seller and remains a classic of its kind. And as if that was not enough, he discovered two major forces in evolution — natural selection and sexual selection — and wrote three radical scientific masterpieces, “On the Origin of Species” (1859), “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex” (1871) and “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872).
The “Origin,” of course, is what he is best known for. This volume, colossal in scope yet minutely detailed, laid the foundations of modern biology. Here, Darwin presented extensive and compelling evidence that all living beings — including humans — have evolved from a common ancestor, and that natural selection is the chief force driving evolutionary change. Sexual selection, he argued, was an additional force, responsible for spectacular features like the tail feathers of peacocks that are useless for (or even detrimental to) survival but essential for seduction.
Before the “Origin,” similarities and differences between species were mere curiosities; questions as to why a certain plant is succulent like a cactus or deciduous like a maple could be answered only, “Because.” Biology itself was nothing more than a vast exercise in catalog and description. After the “Origin,” all organisms became connected, part of the same, profoundly ancient, family tree. Similarities and differences became comprehensible and explicable. In short, Darwin gave us a framework for asking questions about the natural world, and about ourselves.
He was not right about everything. How could he have been? Famously, he didn’t know how genetics works; as for DNA — well, the structure of the molecule wasn’t discovered until 1953. So today’s view of evolution is much more nuanced than his. We have incorporated genetics, and expanded and refined our understanding of natural selection, and of the other forces in evolution.
But what is astonishing is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw. His imagination told him, for example, that many female animals have a sense of beauty — that they like to mate with the most beautiful males. For this he was ridiculed. But we know that he was right. Still more impressive: he was not afraid to apply his ideas to humans. He thought that natural selection had operated on us, just as it had on fruit flies and centipedes.
As we delve into DNA sequences, we can see natural selection acting at the level of genes. Our genes hold evidence of our intimate associations with other beings, from cows to malaria parasites and grains. The latest research allows us to trace the genetic changes that differentiate us from our primate cousins, and shows that large parts of the human genome bear the stamp of evolution by means of natural selection.
I think Darwin would have been pleased. But not surprised.
Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion.
*****
A Christian Progressive Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
washington Post Blog
Feb 12th 2009
Professor, Chicago Theological Seminary
Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is professor of theology at Chicago
Theological Seminary and senior fellow at the Center for American
Progress. She was president of CTS from 1998-2008.
A Christian Progressive Happy Birthday to Charles Darwin
In my own work as a Christian progressive, I have found evolutionary
biology, and especially the Human Genome Project, a source of rich
dialogue between theology and science. As we celebrate the 200th
anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, however, the norm for
the relationship between religion and science is anything but
productive and respectful. Instead, anti-Darwinist views in
conservative and even moderate-to-conservative Christianity have
been increasing, especially in the last quarter century.
As a Christian, an advocate of human rights, and a person strongly
committed to democratic ideals, I believe Darwin's work was of
consummate importance for human progress. I further believe that
religious progressives need to speak out more directly against a
religious campaign against evolutionary biology. We need to say
clearly that this targeting of evolution by conservative
Christianity is far more political in origin than it is purely
theological.
There is no doubt that Darwin's legacy in science has been vast; the
theory of natural selection that gave rise to the Darwinian
revolution underlies both theory and method in science. The
Darwinian upheaval is just this: the origin of species is bottom up,
through natural forces, rather than top-down and fixed like
conservative Christian theology in particular would contend.
This is where all the trouble arises. The idea that human life is
continuous with other creatures and indeed with the whole planet is
a profoundly destabilizing idea for religious and political
practices of dominance and control. This whole struggle is more
about politics than it is about abstract issues like religious faith
and secularism. In the 200 years since Charles Darwin's birth, this
has changed very little.
In the England of Darwin's own time, the great Anglican "compromise"
had managed to head off the kind of violence and anticlericalism of
the French Revolution, but it was a very fragile compromise. Darwin
knew well, coming as he did from a family that contained several
prominent "freethinkers" who provoked public controversy, how
controversial his ideas on the "Origin of Species" and "The Descent
of Man" would be. In fact, his ideas might be thought to be more
than controversial, they could be regarded as treason. People in
Darwin's time could go to prison for heresy because it was
seditious, undermining the divine origin of the monarchy.
Today's conservative Christian efforts to force school systems to
teach "Intelligent Design," a form of creationism, reveals the same
kind of political and social ideology as in Darwin's time.
Creationism goes hand-in-hand with efforts to claim the United
States is a Christian nation. Creationists posit a God who controls
the creation; this ideology reinforces political ideas of control of
society. This "Christian politics" is sometimes
called "dominionism."
Darwin's ideas are considered controversial by these Christian
conservatives precisely because they are freeing for democratic
process and they are freeing for theological reflection. I have
found dialogue with the newer genetics, the astonishing leap forward
beyond Darwin, to be particularly thought-provoking.
Unlike conservative Christian theology, progressive Christian
theology, especially in its heritage in Protestant liberalism, has
long emphasized the continuity of the human with the rest of
creation. Progressive Christians by and large oppose regarding human
nature as fixed and static and a unique "lord of creation." The
inescapable learning from evolutionary biology is that human beings
are deeply creatures. We share 90% of our genes with mice. If that
doesn't take the "lords of creation" down a peg, I fail to see what
will!
Evolutionary biology also teaches us species solidarity. Human
beings are so much more alike than they are different from each
other. Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow,
feminist psychologists, have shown that human beings are defined by
their relationality and connection. Asian feminist theologians such
as Chung Hyun Kyung make a similar argument. Genetically speaking,
racial distinctions are so minor as to be almost negligible. Racial
difference is a political invention for social and economic
dominance. Human beings are also "one of a kind," as our
DNA "fingerprints" show. Progressives in religion have long
emphasized the unique value and distinctiveness of each human being--
the individual and her or his uniqueness is a profound good of God's
creation. We therefore support human rights, including all women's
rights and gay rights, and racial equality as the political practice
of valuing human individuality and human freedom.
Evolutionary biology does not exhaust all that theology has to say
about human nature. That's where a Christian interpretation of the
whole of human nature is a different interpretation that that of the
sociobiologists, in particular, many of whom seek a wholly
naturalistic explanation for human nature and behavior. But there
are large and increasing areas of fruitful dialogue possible, as
second and third generation evolutionary biologists nuance their own
arguments.
Secularists take issue with the fact that to posit a God is to pose
an "unanswerable question" and thus has no place in a reasonable
world. In progressive theology, however, unanswerable questions are
not regarded as barriers, but doorways for religious contemplation.
An infinite God can neither be proved nor disproved. Religion and
science are, in the end, different ways of knowing. I know several
scientists who acknowledge that science is a branch of philosophy;
science does not need to replace other epistemologies to do its
work.
What is so exciting about some of the new dialogues between religion
and science is the imaginative play that results from this simple
acknowledgment. I believe that human beings are both spirit and
matter, but these are not wholly separate and certainly not opposed.
I find the ways science helps us explore the material nature of
humanity can also illuminate aspects of the spiritual. That's only
possible if religion and science quit pointing fingers at each
other, however.
*****
Darwin's Birthday Poll: Fewer Than 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution
Thursday , February 12, 2009
A new poll released just in time for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday
found that only 39 percent of Americans say they "believe in the
theory of evolution," and just 24 percent of those who attend church
weekly believe in that explanation for the development of life on
Earth.
The Gallup survey, released Wednesday, found a quarter of those
polled do not believe in evolution, and 36 percent said they don't
have an opinion either way.
Another survey by the Pew Research Center got similar results.
The Gallup poll of 1,018 American adults found strong ties between
education level and belief in the theory of evolution.
"Among those with high-school educations or less who have an opinion
on Darwin's theory, more say they do not believe in evolution than
say they believe in it," Gallup found. "For all other groups, and in
particular those who have at least a college degree, belief is
significantly higher than nonbelief."
Just 21 percent of respondents who had up to a high school level of
education believe in evolution, compared with 74 percent of those
with postgraduate degrees.
Frank Newport, Gallup's editor-in-chief, wrote that attitudes were
shaped to an even greater degree by religion.
"Previous Gallup research shows that the rate of church attendance
is fairly constant across educational groups, suggesting that this
relationship is not owing to an underlying educational difference
but instead reflects a direct influence of religious beliefs on
belief in evolution," he said.
Among weekly churchgoers, only 24 percent said they believe in
evolution, while 41 percent do not and 35 percent have no opinion.
Inversely, 55 percent of those who seldom or never attend church
expressed belief in evolution, while 11 percent do not, and 34
percent have no opinion.
How good science gave great evil an alibi
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldFebruary 17, 2009
The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, coinciding as it does with the 150th anniversary of the publication of his signature The Origin of Species, has rightly prompted a reconsideration of the man, his life and most importantly his work --the theory of evolution.
For the most part, it has been laudatory, those approving it being more motivated to play it up than those who disagree with it profoundly.
That's a pity. For, it is quite possible to simultaneously acknowledge Darwin's remarkable accomplishments as a naturalist, while also recoiling in horror from the use made of his work by less-gifted men. That is, however useful the concept of natural selection may be to explain biological variation, the survival of the fittest is a lousy way for humans to live.
Let us not dip into the argument about whether mankind was created by an all-powerful God or evolved over billions of years from single-celled creatures. It's all been said before, and either way it comes down to faith, and people believing what they want to believe. The people of God cannot prove creation and although the evolutionists can muster evidence, they remain stuck with the problem of ultimate origins. (As the yarn goes, God challenged a scientist to a contest in to create a living man: The scientist thought he had a chance, so accepted. When the day came, God arrived with His pile of dirt to make a man, and the scientist asked for some to make his. "Ah," said God. "First you make your own dirt.")
Instead, let us assume there is no God, and that natural selection is the whole truth about the ascent of man. Go back over the biological family tree, and one would then expect to find that wherever a creature's attributes gave it a competitive advantage in its environment --bigger teeth, faster legs, an opposable forethumb--its genes are more likely to be passed along to offspring than those less suited.
As Darwin's correspondent Herbert Spencer put it, "It cannot but happen . . . that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. . . . This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest."
If that is so, what are the implications?
First, it made the world a harsher place than it already was.
Looking to the animal world of which we must, under this theory, be the most highly developed part, what do we see, but the law of the jungle? The biggest pups suckle at the expense of the runt, which may well die; the most powerful beasts eat first and chase off weaker competitors in the breeding season; the animal with the best brain--man --lords it over all of them, and unrestrained by some moral sense, the most powerful men dominate others of their species, too. Civilization has barely changed things: at high school, it was their animal qualities that gave jocks the advantage over nerds in the quest for females, as I sadly recall.
In other words, might is right, or at least the mechanism by which man ascended the evolutionary ladder, and must therefore be considered the ultimate "good."
And herein lies the problem.
Darwin himself was, by all accounts, a moderate and decent man. However, others more willing than he to apply practically the apparent lessons of evolutionary theory, did hideous things and called it Darwinism.
Thus, with all the enthusiasm of dog breeders, people acclaimed in their day for their humanity and wisdom--economist John Maynard Keynes for instance, and such Canadian icons as J. S. Woodsworth and Emily Murphy--ardently advocated the improvement of the human breed by restraining the feeble-minded from reproduction. (Right here in Alberta, the 1928 Sexual Sterilization Act provided for the sterilization of mentally deficient individuals, and was not repealed until 1972. Later more than $140 million was paid out as compensation to victims.)
In Germany, the Nazis took things to horrifying extremes, using extermination and stud farms to reinforce "the master race," but the eugenics phenomenon went around the world, causing endless misery to people suddenly classified as suitable for culling.
It all made perfect sense at the time, so it seemed. But compassion became irrational. Indeed, mercy--failure to steal one's neighbour's lunch, so to speak--could even be seen as bad for the species.
The second implication is that if man was but the highest development of an entirely natural process, he had no obligation to a Creator with the right to demand man's obedience. For those who bridled even under such modest moral restraints as an imperfect church could impose, it was the ultimate liberation. Obviously, if there was no divine obligation, there was really no force behind the Ten Commandments.
This could be awkward though.
One might still think the murder of oneself would be a wrong thing. But if mankind was free to make up his own rules--indeed, if other people thought the removal of one's bourgeois self was for the benefit of the world's workers-- well, one had one less argument to deploy in one's defence.
Alas. Darwin isn't the only person whose words uttered for good have been bent to evil. But few scientific treatises have given evil such a broad alibi.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldFebruary 17, 2009
The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, coinciding as it does with the 150th anniversary of the publication of his signature The Origin of Species, has rightly prompted a reconsideration of the man, his life and most importantly his work --the theory of evolution.
For the most part, it has been laudatory, those approving it being more motivated to play it up than those who disagree with it profoundly.
That's a pity. For, it is quite possible to simultaneously acknowledge Darwin's remarkable accomplishments as a naturalist, while also recoiling in horror from the use made of his work by less-gifted men. That is, however useful the concept of natural selection may be to explain biological variation, the survival of the fittest is a lousy way for humans to live.
Let us not dip into the argument about whether mankind was created by an all-powerful God or evolved over billions of years from single-celled creatures. It's all been said before, and either way it comes down to faith, and people believing what they want to believe. The people of God cannot prove creation and although the evolutionists can muster evidence, they remain stuck with the problem of ultimate origins. (As the yarn goes, God challenged a scientist to a contest in to create a living man: The scientist thought he had a chance, so accepted. When the day came, God arrived with His pile of dirt to make a man, and the scientist asked for some to make his. "Ah," said God. "First you make your own dirt.")
Instead, let us assume there is no God, and that natural selection is the whole truth about the ascent of man. Go back over the biological family tree, and one would then expect to find that wherever a creature's attributes gave it a competitive advantage in its environment --bigger teeth, faster legs, an opposable forethumb--its genes are more likely to be passed along to offspring than those less suited.
As Darwin's correspondent Herbert Spencer put it, "It cannot but happen . . . that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces. . . . This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest."
If that is so, what are the implications?
First, it made the world a harsher place than it already was.
Looking to the animal world of which we must, under this theory, be the most highly developed part, what do we see, but the law of the jungle? The biggest pups suckle at the expense of the runt, which may well die; the most powerful beasts eat first and chase off weaker competitors in the breeding season; the animal with the best brain--man --lords it over all of them, and unrestrained by some moral sense, the most powerful men dominate others of their species, too. Civilization has barely changed things: at high school, it was their animal qualities that gave jocks the advantage over nerds in the quest for females, as I sadly recall.
In other words, might is right, or at least the mechanism by which man ascended the evolutionary ladder, and must therefore be considered the ultimate "good."
And herein lies the problem.
Darwin himself was, by all accounts, a moderate and decent man. However, others more willing than he to apply practically the apparent lessons of evolutionary theory, did hideous things and called it Darwinism.
Thus, with all the enthusiasm of dog breeders, people acclaimed in their day for their humanity and wisdom--economist John Maynard Keynes for instance, and such Canadian icons as J. S. Woodsworth and Emily Murphy--ardently advocated the improvement of the human breed by restraining the feeble-minded from reproduction. (Right here in Alberta, the 1928 Sexual Sterilization Act provided for the sterilization of mentally deficient individuals, and was not repealed until 1972. Later more than $140 million was paid out as compensation to victims.)
In Germany, the Nazis took things to horrifying extremes, using extermination and stud farms to reinforce "the master race," but the eugenics phenomenon went around the world, causing endless misery to people suddenly classified as suitable for culling.
It all made perfect sense at the time, so it seemed. But compassion became irrational. Indeed, mercy--failure to steal one's neighbour's lunch, so to speak--could even be seen as bad for the species.
The second implication is that if man was but the highest development of an entirely natural process, he had no obligation to a Creator with the right to demand man's obedience. For those who bridled even under such modest moral restraints as an imperfect church could impose, it was the ultimate liberation. Obviously, if there was no divine obligation, there was really no force behind the Ten Commandments.
This could be awkward though.
One might still think the murder of oneself would be a wrong thing. But if mankind was free to make up his own rules--indeed, if other people thought the removal of one's bourgeois self was for the benefit of the world's workers-- well, one had one less argument to deploy in one's defence.
Alas. Darwin isn't the only person whose words uttered for good have been bent to evil. But few scientific treatises have given evil such a broad alibi.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
I hate to be blunt, but that article is total BS and the writer has very limited knowledge of evolution and the practice of science. His main argument involves the use of Social Darwinism, which beside the association of attaching Darwin's name, has nothing to do with natural selection. Social darwinism is psychological and conflicts with natural selection because natural selection suggests that inferior species will cease to be based upon non-random mating and factors that decrease it's likelihood of mating.
Evolution = change over time.
That article sets Darwin up as a straw dog to pillory the notion of evolution, which is so strangely loathed by Christian extremists (and that loon Harun "I am the Mahdi" Yahya), but shows the characteristic lack of comprehension.
I blame our schools reluctance to teach science properly when it doesn't help to build bombs. (Funny how Evangelicals never attack physics or maths...) If they did, people wouldn't be so ignorant.
The newspaper in question should be ashamed of running such an uneducated piece. More evil has been done in the name of Darwin? What about in the name of Christ, of Krishna, of Buddha, of Muhammad, of God?
Foolishness, all of it. Scientists aren't "Darwinists", they are students of evolution. He wasn't a prophet or a man starting a movement! He was an observer, one whose observations and theories brought a new perspective to science that turned out to be fruitful.
That article sets Darwin up as a straw dog to pillory the notion of evolution, which is so strangely loathed by Christian extremists (and that loon Harun "I am the Mahdi" Yahya), but shows the characteristic lack of comprehension.
I blame our schools reluctance to teach science properly when it doesn't help to build bombs. (Funny how Evangelicals never attack physics or maths...) If they did, people wouldn't be so ignorant.
The newspaper in question should be ashamed of running such an uneducated piece. More evil has been done in the name of Darwin? What about in the name of Christ, of Krishna, of Buddha, of Muhammad, of God?
Foolishness, all of it. Scientists aren't "Darwinists", they are students of evolution. He wasn't a prophet or a man starting a movement! He was an observer, one whose observations and theories brought a new perspective to science that turned out to be fruitful.
I think the main thrust of his argument is that Darwin's views have been manipulated for evil purposes. I don't think he is at all saying that Social Darvinisim is anywhere close to the original thinking of Darvin.a1337 wrote:I hate to be blunt, but that article is total BS and the writer has very limited knowledge of evolution and the practice of science. His main argument involves the use of Social Darwinism, which beside the association of attaching Darwin's name, has nothing to do with natural selection. Social darwinism is psychological and conflicts with natural selection because natural selection suggests that inferior species will cease to be based upon non-random mating and factors that decrease it's likelihood of mating.
I do not think that the article sets Darwin up as a straw dog. It is simply stating that Darwins original ideas have been manipulated for evil purposes. The author has a pretty good understanding of the theory of evolution and how is has been abused for social engineering....TheMaw wrote:Evolution = change over time.
That article sets Darwin up as a straw dog to pillory the notion of evolution, which is so strangely loathed by Christian extremists (and that loon Harun "I am the Mahdi" Yahya), but shows the characteristic lack of comprehension.
But your article doesn't mention that society engineers everything for selfish motives. Look at how many 'freedom fighters' are killing in the name of Allah and Islam. Rather, the article attempts to scapegoat science as means of evil justification when history would show religion has much higher death count.
The focus of the article is reflection upon Darwin on his 200th anniversary - the use and abuse of his ideas. It is not about social engineering. As a religious person he has given Darwin credit for his science.a1337 wrote:But your article doesn't mention that society engineers everything for selfish motives. Look at how many 'freedom fighters' are killing in the name of Allah and Islam. Rather, the article attempts to scapegoat science as means of evil justification when history would show religion has much higher death count.
How good science gave great evil and alibi? That really does sound like an article that isn't religiously driven and essentially scapegoats the discoveries Darwin made with the holocaust. The conversion of scientific discoveries to the things Social Darwinism is social engineering. The author is clearly smearing blood on Darwin's hands, otherwise there would be a stronger focus on the BS that is social Darwinism rather than implying connections when as stated the only connection is adding darwin to the end.
March 31, 2009
Editorial
Evolutionary Semantics, Texas-Style
The Texas Board of Education gave grudging support last week to teaching the mainstream theory of evolution without the most troubling encumbrances sought by religious and social conservatives. But the margins on crucial amendments were disturbingly close, typically a single vote on a 15-member board, and compromise language left ample room for the struggle to continue.
This was not a straightforward battle over whether to include creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design, in the science curriculum. That battle has been lost by Darwin’s opponents in the courts, the schools and most political arenas.
Rather, this was a struggle to insert into the state science standards various phrases and code words that may seem innocuous or meaningless at first glance but could open the door to doubts about evolution. In the most ballyhooed vote, those like us who support the teaching of sound science can claim a narrow victory.
Conservatives tried — but failed — to reinsert a phrase requiring students to study the “strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories, including evolution. That language had been in the standards for years, but it was eliminated by experts who prepared the new standards for board approval because it has become a banner for critics of Darwinian evolution who seek to exaggerate supposed weaknesses in the theory.
The conservatives also narrowly lost attempts to have students study the “sufficiency or insufficiency” of natural selection to explain the complexities of the cell, a major issue for proponents of intelligent design. The conservatives also failed to get the word “sufficiency” inserted by itself, presumably because that would imply insufficiency as well. They had to settle for language requiring students to “analyze, evaluate and critique” scientific explanations and examine “all sides” of the scientific evidence.
At the end of a tense, confusing three-day meeting, Darwin’s critics claimed that this and other compromise language amounted to a huge victory that would still allow their critiques into textbooks and classrooms. One can only hope that teachers in Texas will use common sense and teach evolution as scientists understand it.
Editorial
Evolutionary Semantics, Texas-Style
The Texas Board of Education gave grudging support last week to teaching the mainstream theory of evolution without the most troubling encumbrances sought by religious and social conservatives. But the margins on crucial amendments were disturbingly close, typically a single vote on a 15-member board, and compromise language left ample room for the struggle to continue.
This was not a straightforward battle over whether to include creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design, in the science curriculum. That battle has been lost by Darwin’s opponents in the courts, the schools and most political arenas.
Rather, this was a struggle to insert into the state science standards various phrases and code words that may seem innocuous or meaningless at first glance but could open the door to doubts about evolution. In the most ballyhooed vote, those like us who support the teaching of sound science can claim a narrow victory.
Conservatives tried — but failed — to reinsert a phrase requiring students to study the “strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories, including evolution. That language had been in the standards for years, but it was eliminated by experts who prepared the new standards for board approval because it has become a banner for critics of Darwinian evolution who seek to exaggerate supposed weaknesses in the theory.
The conservatives also narrowly lost attempts to have students study the “sufficiency or insufficiency” of natural selection to explain the complexities of the cell, a major issue for proponents of intelligent design. The conservatives also failed to get the word “sufficiency” inserted by itself, presumably because that would imply insufficiency as well. They had to settle for language requiring students to “analyze, evaluate and critique” scientific explanations and examine “all sides” of the scientific evidence.
At the end of a tense, confusing three-day meeting, Darwin’s critics claimed that this and other compromise language amounted to a huge victory that would still allow their critiques into textbooks and classrooms. One can only hope that teachers in Texas will use common sense and teach evolution as scientists understand it.
Canadians' creation beliefs jumbled
By Misty Harris, Canwest News Service;April 11, 2009
The chicken-or-the-egg question of human existence is looking more and more like a philosophical omelette, with a new poll revealing a jumble of Christian beliefs when it comes to creation and evolution.
The survey conducted and Global National for Easter, found 30 per cent of Canadians who believe in God also believe in evolution. Another 23 per cent of believers agree with ideas put forth by both creationists and evolutionists.
"As you get older, you become more accepting of possibilities," says John Wright, senior vice-president of Toronto-based pollster Ipsos Reid. "There are now people who are prepared to accept both sides and don't see them as necessarily being mutually exclusive."
Overall, 31 per cent of Canadians believe humans were created by "a spiritual force" and not as part of an evolution from other species over time; 41 per cent believe that humans evolved" from lower species such as apes;" 21 per cent are on the fence, agreeing and disagreeing with certain aspects of each theory; seven per cent aren't sure.
Rev. Eleanor Barrington, minister of Trinity United Church in Ottawa, says pitting evolution and creation against each other serves only to"divide and judge." He said that "good theology embraces whatever knowledge is out there.
Some Canadians, however, aren't sold on contemporary Christianity's willingness to invite Darwin into the pews.
The poll of 1,000 people, conducted by phone from March 31 to April 2, 2009 with a random sample of Canadians, is considered accurate within plus or mi-nus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Misty Harris, Canwest News Service;April 11, 2009
The chicken-or-the-egg question of human existence is looking more and more like a philosophical omelette, with a new poll revealing a jumble of Christian beliefs when it comes to creation and evolution.
The survey conducted and Global National for Easter, found 30 per cent of Canadians who believe in God also believe in evolution. Another 23 per cent of believers agree with ideas put forth by both creationists and evolutionists.
"As you get older, you become more accepting of possibilities," says John Wright, senior vice-president of Toronto-based pollster Ipsos Reid. "There are now people who are prepared to accept both sides and don't see them as necessarily being mutually exclusive."
Overall, 31 per cent of Canadians believe humans were created by "a spiritual force" and not as part of an evolution from other species over time; 41 per cent believe that humans evolved" from lower species such as apes;" 21 per cent are on the fence, agreeing and disagreeing with certain aspects of each theory; seven per cent aren't sure.
Rev. Eleanor Barrington, minister of Trinity United Church in Ottawa, says pitting evolution and creation against each other serves only to"divide and judge." He said that "good theology embraces whatever knowledge is out there.
Some Canadians, however, aren't sold on contemporary Christianity's willingness to invite Darwin into the pews.
The poll of 1,000 people, conducted by phone from March 31 to April 2, 2009 with a random sample of Canadians, is considered accurate within plus or mi-nus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
June 26, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Human Nature Today
By DAVID BROOKS
Has there ever been a time when there were so many different views of human nature floating around all at once? The economists have their view, in which rational people coolly chase incentives. Traditional Christians have their view, emphasizing original sin, grace and the pilgrim’s progress in a fallen world. And then there are the evolutionary psychologists, who get the most media attention.
For 99 percent of human history, they observe, our species lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. The people who survived developed certain mental modules, which have been passed down to us through our genes. Some of these traits serve us well in the modern age. Children have the capacity to learn language with astonishing speed. Some of these traits don’t. Humans have an insatiable craving for fatty and sugary foods.
In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called “The Mating Mind,” in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that’s a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.
Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they’ve been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.
Now Miller has published another book, “Spent,” in which he takes evolutionary psychology to the mall. The basic argument is that each of us is born with our own individual level of six big traits: intelligence, openness to new things, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and extraversion. These modules are built into humans and other animals (apparently squid can be shy).
We are all narcissists, Miller asserts. We spend much of our lives trying to broadcast our excellence in these traits in order to attract mates. Even if we’re not naturally smart or outgoing, we buy products and brands that give the impression we are.
According to Miller, driving an Acura, Infiniti, Subaru or Volkswagen is a sign of high intelligence. Driving a Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford or Hummer is a sign of low intelligence. Listening to Bjork is a sign of high intelligence, while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd is a sign of low intelligence. Watching Quentin Tarantino movies is a sign of high openness. He theorizes that teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections.
Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek. And “Spent” is a sign that the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.
The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.
Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments. Different circumstances can selectively activate different genetic potentials. Individual behavior can vary wildly from one context to another. An arrogant bully on the playground may be meek in math class. People have kaleidoscopic thinking styles and use different cognitive strategies to solve the same sorts of problems.
Evolutionary psychology leaves the impression that human nature was carved a hundred thousand years ago, and then history sort of stopped. But human nature adapts to the continual flow of information—adjusting to the ancient information contained in genes and the current information contained in today’s news in a continuous, idiosyncratic blend.
The second problem is one evolutionary psychology shares with economics. It’s too individualistic: individuals are born with certain traits, which they seek to maximize in the struggle for survival.
But individuals aren’t formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn’t merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it’s also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.
The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there’s no escaping context. That’s worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/opini ... &th&emc=th
Op-Ed Columnist
Human Nature Today
By DAVID BROOKS
Has there ever been a time when there were so many different views of human nature floating around all at once? The economists have their view, in which rational people coolly chase incentives. Traditional Christians have their view, emphasizing original sin, grace and the pilgrim’s progress in a fallen world. And then there are the evolutionary psychologists, who get the most media attention.
For 99 percent of human history, they observe, our species lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. The people who survived developed certain mental modules, which have been passed down to us through our genes. Some of these traits serve us well in the modern age. Children have the capacity to learn language with astonishing speed. Some of these traits don’t. Humans have an insatiable craving for fatty and sugary foods.
In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called “The Mating Mind,” in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that’s a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.
Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they’ve been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.
Now Miller has published another book, “Spent,” in which he takes evolutionary psychology to the mall. The basic argument is that each of us is born with our own individual level of six big traits: intelligence, openness to new things, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and extraversion. These modules are built into humans and other animals (apparently squid can be shy).
We are all narcissists, Miller asserts. We spend much of our lives trying to broadcast our excellence in these traits in order to attract mates. Even if we’re not naturally smart or outgoing, we buy products and brands that give the impression we are.
According to Miller, driving an Acura, Infiniti, Subaru or Volkswagen is a sign of high intelligence. Driving a Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford or Hummer is a sign of low intelligence. Listening to Bjork is a sign of high intelligence, while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd is a sign of low intelligence. Watching Quentin Tarantino movies is a sign of high openness. He theorizes that teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections.
Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek. And “Spent” is a sign that the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.
The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.
Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments. Different circumstances can selectively activate different genetic potentials. Individual behavior can vary wildly from one context to another. An arrogant bully on the playground may be meek in math class. People have kaleidoscopic thinking styles and use different cognitive strategies to solve the same sorts of problems.
Evolutionary psychology leaves the impression that human nature was carved a hundred thousand years ago, and then history sort of stopped. But human nature adapts to the continual flow of information—adjusting to the ancient information contained in genes and the current information contained in today’s news in a continuous, idiosyncratic blend.
The second problem is one evolutionary psychology shares with economics. It’s too individualistic: individuals are born with certain traits, which they seek to maximize in the struggle for survival.
But individuals aren’t formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn’t merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it’s also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.
The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there’s no escaping context. That’s worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/opini ... &th&emc=th
August 4, 2009, 9:30 pm
Dawn at the Museum
Jonathan Player for The New York Times. The Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Last week, I visited the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Stepping inside is, in some ways, like entering a time warp. The vaulted, iron-and-glass ceilings are reminiscent of a 19th century railway station; the ornate carvings and ironwork decorations conjure a time of Imperial splendor and grand ambition. Statues of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and other men of science, stand on pedestals around the ground floor. Many of the skeletons and skins on display were collected by the explorers and administrators of Empire. And if you get bored with the dodos and dinosaurs, you can visit the Pitt Rivers Museum — the entrance is behind the skeleton of the giraffe — a fascinating repository of human objects and artifacts that includes totem poles and shrunken heads.
But the place nods to modernity, too. In a corner by the lavatories, a model of DNA rotates silently; a screen connected to a camera in the museum’s tower shows young swifts in their nest, a link between the cases of dead animals inside the building and the living ones outside.
The Oxford Museum ranks in the annals of evolutionary history because, just after it opened in 1860, it was the scene of a debate that immediately became legendary. Several people spoke, but today only two are remembered: Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and colleague of Darwin’s. (Huxley became known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” and went on to become an important force in the public understanding of science, writing and lecturing for a general audience, usually on matters evolutionary.)
It is the DNA molecule that has made museums strangely — wonderfully — relevant to biology in the 21st century.
A few months earlier, Darwin had published “On the Origin of Species,” in which he presented extensive evidence for evolution by natural selection and argued that all living beings are descended from a common ancestor.
In it, he said little about humans and evolution, but the implications were lost on no one. Before a huge audience, Huxley and Wilberforce argued over whether human beings have evolved — whether we are, in fact, a species of ape.
The climax came — so the story goes — when the Bishop asked Huxley whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he was descended from a monkey? Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, but he would be “ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” A woman fainted.
But I’m afraid I wasn’t really thinking about Huxley and Wilberforce. As I gazed around the museum, my thoughts were with that DNA molecule. For it is that molecule that links us all together, from Goliath beetle and pygmy shrew to iguanadon and kangaroo. And it is that molecule that has made museums strangely — wonderfully — relevant to biology in the 21st century.
At the time of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, natural history museums were not places to study evolution, they were catalogs of nature. Large and impressive catalogs, but catalogs all the same. And of course, they are still hugely important stores of information about biodiversity, both now and in the remote past. But they have also become something much more.
It’s all those dusty specimens. The ability to extract DNA from dead creatures means that the skins and skeletons of animals that were alive 50, 100, 200 years ago can provide an invaluable source of knowledge about recent genetic changes.
This isn’t to say there aren’t difficulties. Dealing with old samples remains tricky, and the quality of preserved DNA is variable. However, unlike many other sources of old DNA, such as bodies frozen in permafrost, museum collections often (though not always!) have notes about where and when an organism died, as well as having several animals of the same species taken in successive years. In other words, museums sometimes have dead populations, rather than one or two individuals.
The collections also span an interesting and important period in global history: the past century, during which we humans have affected other beings on the planet as never before. Human population growth, the invention of antibiotics and pesticides, the clearing of forests, hunting and fishing — all these and more have had an impact on the genetics of countless species. By using museum specimens to look back in time, we can potentially assess that impact in detail.
Consider, for example, Hector’s dolphin, a species that lives in the coastal waters off New Zealand, and that, these days, often gets tangled up in fishing nets. The dolphins are rare: there are thought to be fewer than 4000 individuals at large. They also have rather low genetic diversity — a factor that, combined with small populations, is thought to be a risk factor for extinction. But perhaps there isn’t really a problem: perhaps their genetic diversity has always been low?
It hasn’t. Specimens of the dolphin have been collected since the 1870s. A comparison of DNA from the museum material with that from dolphins out and about today shows that genetic diversity has eroded substantially over the past 130 odd years. If we’re not careful, Hector’s dolphin may not be with us much longer.
Or take the American black duck. During the 19th century, black ducks were the most common duck to the east of the Appalachians. That changed in the 1940s, when mallards started to arrive in large numbers; by 1969, mallards had become more common than black ducks. Moreover, genetic analysis of modern specimens shows that the two species are close — so close that they might as well be considered one.
Again, it wasn’t always thus. DNA analysis of museum specimens collected before 1940 show that black ducks and mallards used to differ much more markedly. So what has caused the change? Hanky panky. Yes, members of the two species have been interbreeding. There are even hints that the female black ducks prefer to mate with male mallards.
I could go on.
But I’ll stop with one last thought. The techniques for extracting DNA, and sequencing it, are getting better and better: you can do much more with much less material than you could, even ten years ago. In fact, the techniques are changing at warp speed. In five years time, we will have tools to cheaply sequence the entire genomes of these specimens; we will be able to expand our understanding of evolutionary patterns in ways we can presently only dream of.
And, as I reflect on this, it begins to seem that the time warp I stepped into on entering the museum is one zooming forwards, not back.
Notes:
Anyone interested in visiting the Oxford Museum from the comfort of their living room can take a virtual tour here. For further information about the collections or the architecture (including a complete who’s-who of the statues), see the museum’s index page.
There is some uncertainty about exactly what was said during the Huxley-Wilberforce debate; I have taken my account from pages 3-7 of Irvine, W. 1956. “Apes, Angels and Victorians.” Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and pages 118-125 of Brown, J. 2002. “Charles Darwin: The Power of Place.” Pimlico.
For an overview of the possibilities and pitfalls of extracting DNA from museum specimens, as well as a review of studies that have applied the technique, see Wandeler, P., Hoeck, P. E. A., and Keller, L. F. 2007. “Back to the future: museum specimens in population genetics.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22: 634-642. For the analysis of modern and museum samples of Hector’s dolphin, see Pichler, F. B. and Baker, C. S. 2000. “Loss of genetic diversity in the endemic Hector’s dolphin due to fisheries-related mortality.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 267: 97-102.
For black ducks merging with mallards, see Mank, J. E., Carlson, J. E., and Brittingham, M. C. 2004. “A century of hybridization: decreasing genetic distance between American black ducks and mallards.” Conservation Genetics 5: 395-403. For (slim) evidence that female black ducks prefer male mallards, see Brodsky, L. M., Ankey, C. D., Dennis, D. G. 1988. “The influence of male dominance on social interactions in black ducks and mallards.” Animal Behaviour 36: 1371-1378.
Many thanks to Dan Haydon for insights, comments, and suggestions.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08 ... mode=print
Dawn at the Museum
Jonathan Player for The New York Times. The Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Last week, I visited the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Stepping inside is, in some ways, like entering a time warp. The vaulted, iron-and-glass ceilings are reminiscent of a 19th century railway station; the ornate carvings and ironwork decorations conjure a time of Imperial splendor and grand ambition. Statues of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and other men of science, stand on pedestals around the ground floor. Many of the skeletons and skins on display were collected by the explorers and administrators of Empire. And if you get bored with the dodos and dinosaurs, you can visit the Pitt Rivers Museum — the entrance is behind the skeleton of the giraffe — a fascinating repository of human objects and artifacts that includes totem poles and shrunken heads.
But the place nods to modernity, too. In a corner by the lavatories, a model of DNA rotates silently; a screen connected to a camera in the museum’s tower shows young swifts in their nest, a link between the cases of dead animals inside the building and the living ones outside.
The Oxford Museum ranks in the annals of evolutionary history because, just after it opened in 1860, it was the scene of a debate that immediately became legendary. Several people spoke, but today only two are remembered: Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and colleague of Darwin’s. (Huxley became known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” and went on to become an important force in the public understanding of science, writing and lecturing for a general audience, usually on matters evolutionary.)
It is the DNA molecule that has made museums strangely — wonderfully — relevant to biology in the 21st century.
A few months earlier, Darwin had published “On the Origin of Species,” in which he presented extensive evidence for evolution by natural selection and argued that all living beings are descended from a common ancestor.
In it, he said little about humans and evolution, but the implications were lost on no one. Before a huge audience, Huxley and Wilberforce argued over whether human beings have evolved — whether we are, in fact, a species of ape.
The climax came — so the story goes — when the Bishop asked Huxley whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he was descended from a monkey? Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, but he would be “ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” A woman fainted.
But I’m afraid I wasn’t really thinking about Huxley and Wilberforce. As I gazed around the museum, my thoughts were with that DNA molecule. For it is that molecule that links us all together, from Goliath beetle and pygmy shrew to iguanadon and kangaroo. And it is that molecule that has made museums strangely — wonderfully — relevant to biology in the 21st century.
At the time of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, natural history museums were not places to study evolution, they were catalogs of nature. Large and impressive catalogs, but catalogs all the same. And of course, they are still hugely important stores of information about biodiversity, both now and in the remote past. But they have also become something much more.
It’s all those dusty specimens. The ability to extract DNA from dead creatures means that the skins and skeletons of animals that were alive 50, 100, 200 years ago can provide an invaluable source of knowledge about recent genetic changes.
This isn’t to say there aren’t difficulties. Dealing with old samples remains tricky, and the quality of preserved DNA is variable. However, unlike many other sources of old DNA, such as bodies frozen in permafrost, museum collections often (though not always!) have notes about where and when an organism died, as well as having several animals of the same species taken in successive years. In other words, museums sometimes have dead populations, rather than one or two individuals.
The collections also span an interesting and important period in global history: the past century, during which we humans have affected other beings on the planet as never before. Human population growth, the invention of antibiotics and pesticides, the clearing of forests, hunting and fishing — all these and more have had an impact on the genetics of countless species. By using museum specimens to look back in time, we can potentially assess that impact in detail.
Consider, for example, Hector’s dolphin, a species that lives in the coastal waters off New Zealand, and that, these days, often gets tangled up in fishing nets. The dolphins are rare: there are thought to be fewer than 4000 individuals at large. They also have rather low genetic diversity — a factor that, combined with small populations, is thought to be a risk factor for extinction. But perhaps there isn’t really a problem: perhaps their genetic diversity has always been low?
It hasn’t. Specimens of the dolphin have been collected since the 1870s. A comparison of DNA from the museum material with that from dolphins out and about today shows that genetic diversity has eroded substantially over the past 130 odd years. If we’re not careful, Hector’s dolphin may not be with us much longer.
Or take the American black duck. During the 19th century, black ducks were the most common duck to the east of the Appalachians. That changed in the 1940s, when mallards started to arrive in large numbers; by 1969, mallards had become more common than black ducks. Moreover, genetic analysis of modern specimens shows that the two species are close — so close that they might as well be considered one.
Again, it wasn’t always thus. DNA analysis of museum specimens collected before 1940 show that black ducks and mallards used to differ much more markedly. So what has caused the change? Hanky panky. Yes, members of the two species have been interbreeding. There are even hints that the female black ducks prefer to mate with male mallards.
I could go on.
But I’ll stop with one last thought. The techniques for extracting DNA, and sequencing it, are getting better and better: you can do much more with much less material than you could, even ten years ago. In fact, the techniques are changing at warp speed. In five years time, we will have tools to cheaply sequence the entire genomes of these specimens; we will be able to expand our understanding of evolutionary patterns in ways we can presently only dream of.
And, as I reflect on this, it begins to seem that the time warp I stepped into on entering the museum is one zooming forwards, not back.
Notes:
Anyone interested in visiting the Oxford Museum from the comfort of their living room can take a virtual tour here. For further information about the collections or the architecture (including a complete who’s-who of the statues), see the museum’s index page.
There is some uncertainty about exactly what was said during the Huxley-Wilberforce debate; I have taken my account from pages 3-7 of Irvine, W. 1956. “Apes, Angels and Victorians.” Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and pages 118-125 of Brown, J. 2002. “Charles Darwin: The Power of Place.” Pimlico.
For an overview of the possibilities and pitfalls of extracting DNA from museum specimens, as well as a review of studies that have applied the technique, see Wandeler, P., Hoeck, P. E. A., and Keller, L. F. 2007. “Back to the future: museum specimens in population genetics.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22: 634-642. For the analysis of modern and museum samples of Hector’s dolphin, see Pichler, F. B. and Baker, C. S. 2000. “Loss of genetic diversity in the endemic Hector’s dolphin due to fisheries-related mortality.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 267: 97-102.
For black ducks merging with mallards, see Mank, J. E., Carlson, J. E., and Brittingham, M. C. 2004. “A century of hybridization: decreasing genetic distance between American black ducks and mallards.” Conservation Genetics 5: 395-403. For (slim) evidence that female black ducks prefer male mallards, see Brodsky, L. M., Ankey, C. D., Dennis, D. G. 1988. “The influence of male dominance on social interactions in black ducks and mallards.” Animal Behaviour 36: 1371-1378.
Many thanks to Dan Haydon for insights, comments, and suggestions.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08 ... mode=print
September 1, 2009, 9:08 pm
The Fantasy Genome Project
Here’s a game for a rainy afternoon. If you could pick any organism to have its whole genome sequenced — what would it be?
I played this recently, and it made me ponder. For it raises another, more fundamental question: what does a genome actually tell us?
A genome is an inventory of an organism’s DNA. Genes are made of DNA, so looking at a whole genome tells us all of an organism’s genes. Or it will one day.
At the moment, our ability to interpret whole genomes is patchy: it’s like trying to read a foreign language with an incomplete dictionary and grammar. We don’t yet know what most genes do, or how they interact with each other.
Moreover, a lot of the DNA in a genome does not encode genes, it does . . . something else. What that something else is remains, by and large, to be discovered. Some of it might do nothing at all. (One of the big surprises of the human genome project was how few genes we have. Obviously — or so everyone thought — an animal as magnificent and complex as ourselves must have a lot of genes. Most of the early estimates came in around 100,000 genes; the real number is more like 24,000. This is about the same as a sea urchin — around 23,000 genes — and rather fewer than rice, which boasts around 50,000. More than 95 percent of the human genome does not contain genes.)
But just because we don’t yet understand all the information that genomes contain doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. Consider, for example, the single-celled being Cryptosporidium parvum. This is an intestinal parasite of humans and other animals; it belongs to a group known as the apicomplexans, which includes a number of nasties such as Plasmodium, the bugs that cause malaria. The whole genome sequence of Cryptosporidium revealed that it is missing several of the genes that had been identified as potential drug targets in some of its apicomplexan relatives. Attacking Cryptosporidium will thus require a different strategy.
There are many uses for genomes beyond discovering which genes an organism has and which it lacks. Indeed, one of the most powerful uses of a genome is to compare its general structure with those of other genomes. By doing this, we can spot patterns in how genomes evolve, and we can start to answer fundamental questions in evolution.
Let me give you a couple of examples. By now, we have whole genome sequences for a plethora of parasites. These range from the aforementioned apicomplexans to disease-causing bacteria to fungi to nematode worms that parasitize plants. Interestingly, many of these organisms have small, stream-lined genomes: they have lost many of the genes possessed by their free-living relations. The plant-parasitic nematode Meloidogyne hapla is a case in point: it has about 5,500 fewer genes than the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Similarly, parasitic bacteria tend to have smaller genomes than free-living bacteria. Why does this happen? Because parasites can piggy-back on their hosts for many tasks, such as getting nutrients. They lose the genes because they don’t need them anymore.
Another use for genomes: we can ask fundamental questions about where new genes come from. For example, do they appear when sections of the genome are duplicated? Or do new genes arrive from other species altogether, a phenomenon known as horizontal gene transfer? The answer varies from one species to the next. Brewer’s yeast has seen large-scale duplications. The nematode worm Meloidogyne hapla appears to have acquired a few genes from bacteria and from plants. Diatoms — these are a type of algae — have large numbers of bacterial genes in their genomes. Indeed, according to one recent estimate, 5 percent of diatom genes have been acquired from bacteria. That’s enormous — and entirely different from the pattern seen so far in animals.
I haven’t enumerated all the uses for genomes — there are many more. But rather than listing them, I want to turn back to my original question, and dream of all the organisms we could sequence.
Needless to say, I want to pick a species that hasn’t already been done. So no humans, dogs, cows, chickens, chimpanzees. Brewer’s yeast is out; so are fruit flies and honey bees. And let’s say no bacteria, because hundreds have been done already.
(I haven’t been able to find a complete list of everything that has been done so far, though there is a list of many of the biggies here. In general, most of the organisms that have been done are “worthy”: they cause or carry diseases — e.g., Plasmodium, mosquitoes — or they are important in the laboratory, like mice, roundworms and fruit flies, or in farming — rice, corn. A few were selected because they shed light on patterns of genome evolution, e.g., pufferfish, which have famously small genomes, or because of their relationship to us — chimpanzees, duck-billed platypus.)
Oh, there are so many millions to choose from! Part of me wants to be greedy, and sequence the lot: world genome project, here we come.
But if I had to choose just one?
I’d choose the African coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae.
Alberto Fernandez Fernandez. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later. Preserved specimen of Latimeria chalumnae in the Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria.
These fish (pronounced see-la-canth) are the relicts of a once mighty group. The earliest coelacanth fossils date back to the Devonian, around 360 million years ago, and their heyday was in the Triassic, around 230 million years ago. More than 120 species are known from the fossil record, some of which were giants, reaching three meters (almost 10 feet) in length. Some coelacanths lived in freshwater; others were marine; and many of them were abundant. But around 70 million years ago, they vanished — no fossil coelacanths have been found in younger rocks — and were presumed to be extinct.
Until 1938, when a living coelacanth was — to universal astonishment — caught in South African waters. Since then coelacanths have been found living in deep waters off the Comoros Islands (these are a set of islands in the Indian Ocean; they lie between Mozambique and Madagascar), and off Manado Tua, a volcanic island belonging to Indonesia. Living proof, if any were needed, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. (The Indonesian coelacanth is a different species from the African one; it’s called Latimeria menadoensis.)
Coelacanths are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, their closest relatives are lungfish — and us. When I say “us,” I don’t mean humans here, but tetrapods — amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Indeed, coelacanths and lungfish are more closely related to us than they are to salmon or tuna: the animal that was our common ancestor diverged from the ray-finned fishes hundreds of millions of years ago. (Most fish you’ve ever heard of, except sharks, are ray-finned fish.) This means that by comparing the coelacanth genome with tetrapod genomes, we can discover genetic features that make tetrapods unique. Sequences that we have and they lack, for example, may shed light on how our ancestors evolved to live on land.
The second reason that coelacanths are interesting is that they are what Darwin termed a “living fossil.” That is, today’s coelacanths are clearly recognizable from their fossils, which means that, over the past 70 million years, their skeletons haven’t changed much in form.
In and of itself, this need not mean that their evolution has been unusually slow. Many parts of an animal can evolve while leaving no fossil trace. For example, genes important in the immune system, or skin color, or in the wavelengths of light that the eye detects, can evolve without affecting the structure of the skeleton. However, preliminary genetic evidence suggests that coelacanths are, indeed, evolving more slowly than the rest of us. A study of their genome might help us to understand why. It should also give us a window into the past: slow evolution means that their genes are a kind of historical document, a record of what genes looked like long ago.
So that’s what I’d choose.
And you?
Notes:
There are several different ways to define the term gene. Here, I use it to mean a stretch of DNA that contains the instructions for building a protein. For a history of the estimates of the number of genes in the human genome, go here. For estimates as to the proportion of the human genome that does not contain genes, go here. For the number of genes in sea urchins, see Sodergren, E. et al. 2006. “The genome of the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus.” Science 314: 941-952. For the number of genes in rice, see Yu, J. et al. 2002. “A draft sequence of the rice genome (Oryza sativa L. ssp. indica).” Science 296: 79-92.
For the genome of Cryptosporidium parvum, and an analysis of which genes it lacks, see Abrahamsen, M. S. et al. 2004. “Complete genome sequence of the apicomplexan, Cryptosporidium parvum.” Science 304: 441-445.
For evidence that parasitic bacteria have smaller genomes than their free-living relatives, see Merhej, V. et al. 2009. “Massive comparative genomic analysis reveals convergent evolution of specialized bacteria.” Biology Direct 4: 13. (This paper is a comparative study of 317 whole genomes!) For Meloidogyne hapla having fewer genes than C. elegans, and for evidence of horizontal gene transfer in this species, see Opperman, C. H. et al. 2008. “Sequence and genetic map of Meloidogyne hapla: a compact nematode genome for plant parasitism.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105: 14802-14807.
For Brewer’s yeast having experienced a whole genome duplication, see Wolfe, K. H. and Shields, D. C. 1997. “Molecular evidence for an ancient duplication of the entire yeast genome.” Nature 387: 708-713. For an overview of genome duplications and their importance in evolution see, for example, Taylor, J. S. et al. 2003. “Genome duplication, a trait shared by 22,000 species of ray-finned fish.” Genome Research 13: 382-390.
For diatoms containing large numbers of bacterial genes, see Bowler, C. et al. 2008. “The Phaeodactylum genome reveals the evolutionary history of diatom genomes.” Nature 456: 239-244. For a general look at horizontal transfer in animals and other eukaryotes, see Keeling, P. J. and Palmer, J. D. 2008. “Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic evolution.” Nature Reviews Genetics 9: 605-618.
For general background on coelacanths and their relations to the rest of us, see chapter ten of Maisey, J. G. 2000. “Discovering Fossil Fishes.” Westview Press. For coelacanth genes evolving slowly, see Noonan, J. P. et al. 2004. “Coelacanth genome sequence reveals the evolutionary history of vertebrate genes.” Genome Research 14: 2397-2405. For an overview of what we know about coelacanths so far, see Modisakeng, K. W. et al. 2006. “Molecular biology studies on the coelacanth: a review.” South African Journal of Science 102: 479-487. For further arguments on why sequencing a coelacanth would be a good idea, go here. I’m told that, officially, the coelacanth is in the queue for whole genome sequencing, and some little bits and pieces have been done; but it is nowhere near complete.
Many thanks to Chris Amemiya, Austin Burt, Thiago Carvalho, Sofia Castello y Tickell, Mike Eisen, Dan Haydon, Gideon Lichfield, Dmitri Petrov and Jonathan Swire for insights, comments and suggestions.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09 ... mode=print
The Fantasy Genome Project
Here’s a game for a rainy afternoon. If you could pick any organism to have its whole genome sequenced — what would it be?
I played this recently, and it made me ponder. For it raises another, more fundamental question: what does a genome actually tell us?
A genome is an inventory of an organism’s DNA. Genes are made of DNA, so looking at a whole genome tells us all of an organism’s genes. Or it will one day.
At the moment, our ability to interpret whole genomes is patchy: it’s like trying to read a foreign language with an incomplete dictionary and grammar. We don’t yet know what most genes do, or how they interact with each other.
Moreover, a lot of the DNA in a genome does not encode genes, it does . . . something else. What that something else is remains, by and large, to be discovered. Some of it might do nothing at all. (One of the big surprises of the human genome project was how few genes we have. Obviously — or so everyone thought — an animal as magnificent and complex as ourselves must have a lot of genes. Most of the early estimates came in around 100,000 genes; the real number is more like 24,000. This is about the same as a sea urchin — around 23,000 genes — and rather fewer than rice, which boasts around 50,000. More than 95 percent of the human genome does not contain genes.)
But just because we don’t yet understand all the information that genomes contain doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. Consider, for example, the single-celled being Cryptosporidium parvum. This is an intestinal parasite of humans and other animals; it belongs to a group known as the apicomplexans, which includes a number of nasties such as Plasmodium, the bugs that cause malaria. The whole genome sequence of Cryptosporidium revealed that it is missing several of the genes that had been identified as potential drug targets in some of its apicomplexan relatives. Attacking Cryptosporidium will thus require a different strategy.
There are many uses for genomes beyond discovering which genes an organism has and which it lacks. Indeed, one of the most powerful uses of a genome is to compare its general structure with those of other genomes. By doing this, we can spot patterns in how genomes evolve, and we can start to answer fundamental questions in evolution.
Let me give you a couple of examples. By now, we have whole genome sequences for a plethora of parasites. These range from the aforementioned apicomplexans to disease-causing bacteria to fungi to nematode worms that parasitize plants. Interestingly, many of these organisms have small, stream-lined genomes: they have lost many of the genes possessed by their free-living relations. The plant-parasitic nematode Meloidogyne hapla is a case in point: it has about 5,500 fewer genes than the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Similarly, parasitic bacteria tend to have smaller genomes than free-living bacteria. Why does this happen? Because parasites can piggy-back on their hosts for many tasks, such as getting nutrients. They lose the genes because they don’t need them anymore.
Another use for genomes: we can ask fundamental questions about where new genes come from. For example, do they appear when sections of the genome are duplicated? Or do new genes arrive from other species altogether, a phenomenon known as horizontal gene transfer? The answer varies from one species to the next. Brewer’s yeast has seen large-scale duplications. The nematode worm Meloidogyne hapla appears to have acquired a few genes from bacteria and from plants. Diatoms — these are a type of algae — have large numbers of bacterial genes in their genomes. Indeed, according to one recent estimate, 5 percent of diatom genes have been acquired from bacteria. That’s enormous — and entirely different from the pattern seen so far in animals.
I haven’t enumerated all the uses for genomes — there are many more. But rather than listing them, I want to turn back to my original question, and dream of all the organisms we could sequence.
Needless to say, I want to pick a species that hasn’t already been done. So no humans, dogs, cows, chickens, chimpanzees. Brewer’s yeast is out; so are fruit flies and honey bees. And let’s say no bacteria, because hundreds have been done already.
(I haven’t been able to find a complete list of everything that has been done so far, though there is a list of many of the biggies here. In general, most of the organisms that have been done are “worthy”: they cause or carry diseases — e.g., Plasmodium, mosquitoes — or they are important in the laboratory, like mice, roundworms and fruit flies, or in farming — rice, corn. A few were selected because they shed light on patterns of genome evolution, e.g., pufferfish, which have famously small genomes, or because of their relationship to us — chimpanzees, duck-billed platypus.)
Oh, there are so many millions to choose from! Part of me wants to be greedy, and sequence the lot: world genome project, here we come.
But if I had to choose just one?
I’d choose the African coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae.
Alberto Fernandez Fernandez. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later. Preserved specimen of Latimeria chalumnae in the Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria.
These fish (pronounced see-la-canth) are the relicts of a once mighty group. The earliest coelacanth fossils date back to the Devonian, around 360 million years ago, and their heyday was in the Triassic, around 230 million years ago. More than 120 species are known from the fossil record, some of which were giants, reaching three meters (almost 10 feet) in length. Some coelacanths lived in freshwater; others were marine; and many of them were abundant. But around 70 million years ago, they vanished — no fossil coelacanths have been found in younger rocks — and were presumed to be extinct.
Until 1938, when a living coelacanth was — to universal astonishment — caught in South African waters. Since then coelacanths have been found living in deep waters off the Comoros Islands (these are a set of islands in the Indian Ocean; they lie between Mozambique and Madagascar), and off Manado Tua, a volcanic island belonging to Indonesia. Living proof, if any were needed, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. (The Indonesian coelacanth is a different species from the African one; it’s called Latimeria menadoensis.)
Coelacanths are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, their closest relatives are lungfish — and us. When I say “us,” I don’t mean humans here, but tetrapods — amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Indeed, coelacanths and lungfish are more closely related to us than they are to salmon or tuna: the animal that was our common ancestor diverged from the ray-finned fishes hundreds of millions of years ago. (Most fish you’ve ever heard of, except sharks, are ray-finned fish.) This means that by comparing the coelacanth genome with tetrapod genomes, we can discover genetic features that make tetrapods unique. Sequences that we have and they lack, for example, may shed light on how our ancestors evolved to live on land.
The second reason that coelacanths are interesting is that they are what Darwin termed a “living fossil.” That is, today’s coelacanths are clearly recognizable from their fossils, which means that, over the past 70 million years, their skeletons haven’t changed much in form.
In and of itself, this need not mean that their evolution has been unusually slow. Many parts of an animal can evolve while leaving no fossil trace. For example, genes important in the immune system, or skin color, or in the wavelengths of light that the eye detects, can evolve without affecting the structure of the skeleton. However, preliminary genetic evidence suggests that coelacanths are, indeed, evolving more slowly than the rest of us. A study of their genome might help us to understand why. It should also give us a window into the past: slow evolution means that their genes are a kind of historical document, a record of what genes looked like long ago.
So that’s what I’d choose.
And you?
Notes:
There are several different ways to define the term gene. Here, I use it to mean a stretch of DNA that contains the instructions for building a protein. For a history of the estimates of the number of genes in the human genome, go here. For estimates as to the proportion of the human genome that does not contain genes, go here. For the number of genes in sea urchins, see Sodergren, E. et al. 2006. “The genome of the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus.” Science 314: 941-952. For the number of genes in rice, see Yu, J. et al. 2002. “A draft sequence of the rice genome (Oryza sativa L. ssp. indica).” Science 296: 79-92.
For the genome of Cryptosporidium parvum, and an analysis of which genes it lacks, see Abrahamsen, M. S. et al. 2004. “Complete genome sequence of the apicomplexan, Cryptosporidium parvum.” Science 304: 441-445.
For evidence that parasitic bacteria have smaller genomes than their free-living relatives, see Merhej, V. et al. 2009. “Massive comparative genomic analysis reveals convergent evolution of specialized bacteria.” Biology Direct 4: 13. (This paper is a comparative study of 317 whole genomes!) For Meloidogyne hapla having fewer genes than C. elegans, and for evidence of horizontal gene transfer in this species, see Opperman, C. H. et al. 2008. “Sequence and genetic map of Meloidogyne hapla: a compact nematode genome for plant parasitism.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105: 14802-14807.
For Brewer’s yeast having experienced a whole genome duplication, see Wolfe, K. H. and Shields, D. C. 1997. “Molecular evidence for an ancient duplication of the entire yeast genome.” Nature 387: 708-713. For an overview of genome duplications and their importance in evolution see, for example, Taylor, J. S. et al. 2003. “Genome duplication, a trait shared by 22,000 species of ray-finned fish.” Genome Research 13: 382-390.
For diatoms containing large numbers of bacterial genes, see Bowler, C. et al. 2008. “The Phaeodactylum genome reveals the evolutionary history of diatom genomes.” Nature 456: 239-244. For a general look at horizontal transfer in animals and other eukaryotes, see Keeling, P. J. and Palmer, J. D. 2008. “Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic evolution.” Nature Reviews Genetics 9: 605-618.
For general background on coelacanths and their relations to the rest of us, see chapter ten of Maisey, J. G. 2000. “Discovering Fossil Fishes.” Westview Press. For coelacanth genes evolving slowly, see Noonan, J. P. et al. 2004. “Coelacanth genome sequence reveals the evolutionary history of vertebrate genes.” Genome Research 14: 2397-2405. For an overview of what we know about coelacanths so far, see Modisakeng, K. W. et al. 2006. “Molecular biology studies on the coelacanth: a review.” South African Journal of Science 102: 479-487. For further arguments on why sequencing a coelacanth would be a good idea, go here. I’m told that, officially, the coelacanth is in the queue for whole genome sequencing, and some little bits and pieces have been done; but it is nowhere near complete.
Many thanks to Chris Amemiya, Austin Burt, Thiago Carvalho, Sofia Castello y Tickell, Mike Eisen, Dan Haydon, Gideon Lichfield, Dmitri Petrov and Jonathan Swire for insights, comments and suggestions.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09 ... mode=print
November 3, 2009
Creationism, Minus a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World
By KENNETH CHANG
AMHERST, Mass. — Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic.
But, they said, young-Earth creationists, who believe God created the universe, Earth and life just a few thousand years ago, are rare, if not nonexistent.
One reason is that although the Koran, the holy text of Islam, says the universe was created in six days, the next line adds that a day, in this instance, is metaphorical: “a thousand years of your reckoning.”
By contrast, some Christian creationists find in the Bible a strict chronology that requires a 6,000-year-old Earth and thus object not only to evolution but also to much of modern geology and cosmology, which say the Earth and the universe are billions of years old.
“Views of scientific evolution are clearly influenced by underlying religious beliefs,” said Salman Hameed, who convened the two-day conference here at Hampshire College, where he is a professor of integrated science and humanities. “There is no young-Earth creationism.”
But that does not mean that all of evolution fits Islam or that all Muslims happily accept the findings of modern biology. More and more seem to be joining the ranks of the so-called old-Earth creationists. They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences.
The debate over evolution is only now gaining prominence in many Islamic countries as education improves and more students are exposed to the ideas of modern biology.
The degree of acceptance of evolution varies among Islamic countries.
Research led by the Evolution Education Research Center at McGill University, in Montreal, found that high school biology textbooks in Pakistan covered the theory of evolution. Quotations from the Koran at the beginning of the chapters are chosen to suggest that the religion and the theory coexist harmoniously.
In a survey of 2,527 Pakistani high school students conducted by the McGill researchers and their international collaborators, 28 percent of the students agreed with the creationist sentiment, “Evolution is not a well-accepted scientific fact.” More than 60 percent disagreed, and the rest were not sure.
Eighty-six percent agreed with this statement: “Millions of fossils show that life has existed for billions of years and changed over time.”
The situation in Turkey is different and changed only in the past couple of decades. One of the conference participants, Taner Edis, said he never encountered creationist undertones when he was growing up in Turkey in the 1970s. “I first noticed creationism when I came to America for graduate school,” said Dr. Edis, now a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri. He thought it an American oddity.
Some years later, while browsing a bookstore on a visit to Turkey, Dr. Edis found books about creationism filed in the science section. “It actually caught me by surprise,” he said.
In Turkey, officially a secular government but now ruled by an Islamic party, the teaching of evolution has largely disappeared, at least below the university level, and the science curriculum in public schools is written in deference to religious beliefs, Dr. Edis said.
Harun Yahya, a Turkish creationist of the old-Earth variety, has gained prominence in Turkey and elsewhere. A quarter of a world away, most of the biology teachers in Indonesia use Mr. Yahya’s creationist books in their classrooms, the McGill researchers found, although some said they did that to provide counterarguments to materials their students were reading anyway.
In the McGill research, fewer students in Indonesia than in Pakistan thought evolution a well-accepted scientific fact, yet 85 percent agreed that fossils showed that life had existed for billions of years and changed over time.
The quality of biology education “varies highly depending on what country you’re in and what school you’re in,” said Jason R. Wiles, a professor of biology at Syracuse University and associate director of the McGill center.
In addition, the situation in Iran, where the Shiite sect of Islam dominates, may be far different than in neighboring Iraq, where Sunnis are more numerous. There is no single leader, like the Roman Catholic pope, who can dictate an official view that holds for all Muslims.
Even finding out how different countries teach evolution can be difficult, Dr. Hameed said. Saudi Arabia, for example, does not let foreigners see the biology textbooks. “We don’t have much information,” he said.
For many Muslims, even evolution and the notion that life flourished without the intervening hand of Allah is largely compatible with their religion. What many find unacceptable is human evolution, the idea that humans evolved from primitive primates. The Koran states that Allah created Adam, the first man, separately out of clay.
Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.
Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said. “Your lineage is what determines your worth.”
Biology education, even in places like Pakistan that otherwise teach evolution, largely omits the question of where humans came from.
Some academics at the conference worried that the rejection of some aspects of evolution might leave Islamic countries at a disadvantage in scientific education. Dr. Hameed said a negative reaction to evolutionary theory could reflect a struggle to retain cultural traditions and values against Western influences, even though Islamic creationists readily borrowed many of the arguments from Western creationists, just removing the young-Earth aspects.
There is some indication that in the West, where non-Islamic influences are strongest, Islamic creationism may be stronger in reaction to the outside pressure. For example, high school students at Islamic schools in and near Toronto were far more doubting of evolution than students in Indonesia or Pakistan, the McGill researchers found. A majority of the students at the Canadian Islamic schools disagreed that a significant body of data supported evolution and that all life came from the same common ancestors.
At the same time, many of the Canadian Muslims even acquired young-Earth creationist beliefs, which are thoroughly Western in origin. Only half the students surveyed at the Islamic schools in the Toronto area thought fossils showed that life had existed for billions of years and had changed over time, compared with the 86 percent of the students in Pakistan.
In a study financed by the National Science Foundation, Dr. Hameed and his colleagues will survey the beliefs of Muslim doctors in five Muslim countries — Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey — and compare them with Muslim doctors in non-Muslim countries — Turkish doctors in Germany, Pakistani doctors in Britain, and Turkish and Pakistani doctors in the United States.
“We actually expect, especially in Europe, where they have a harder time merging in the culture,” Dr. Hameed said, “harsher rejection of evolution in England and Germany” than in Muslim countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/scien ... &th&emc=th
Creationism, Minus a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World
By KENNETH CHANG
AMHERST, Mass. — Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic.
But, they said, young-Earth creationists, who believe God created the universe, Earth and life just a few thousand years ago, are rare, if not nonexistent.
One reason is that although the Koran, the holy text of Islam, says the universe was created in six days, the next line adds that a day, in this instance, is metaphorical: “a thousand years of your reckoning.”
By contrast, some Christian creationists find in the Bible a strict chronology that requires a 6,000-year-old Earth and thus object not only to evolution but also to much of modern geology and cosmology, which say the Earth and the universe are billions of years old.
“Views of scientific evolution are clearly influenced by underlying religious beliefs,” said Salman Hameed, who convened the two-day conference here at Hampshire College, where he is a professor of integrated science and humanities. “There is no young-Earth creationism.”
But that does not mean that all of evolution fits Islam or that all Muslims happily accept the findings of modern biology. More and more seem to be joining the ranks of the so-called old-Earth creationists. They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences.
The debate over evolution is only now gaining prominence in many Islamic countries as education improves and more students are exposed to the ideas of modern biology.
The degree of acceptance of evolution varies among Islamic countries.
Research led by the Evolution Education Research Center at McGill University, in Montreal, found that high school biology textbooks in Pakistan covered the theory of evolution. Quotations from the Koran at the beginning of the chapters are chosen to suggest that the religion and the theory coexist harmoniously.
In a survey of 2,527 Pakistani high school students conducted by the McGill researchers and their international collaborators, 28 percent of the students agreed with the creationist sentiment, “Evolution is not a well-accepted scientific fact.” More than 60 percent disagreed, and the rest were not sure.
Eighty-six percent agreed with this statement: “Millions of fossils show that life has existed for billions of years and changed over time.”
The situation in Turkey is different and changed only in the past couple of decades. One of the conference participants, Taner Edis, said he never encountered creationist undertones when he was growing up in Turkey in the 1970s. “I first noticed creationism when I came to America for graduate school,” said Dr. Edis, now a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri. He thought it an American oddity.
Some years later, while browsing a bookstore on a visit to Turkey, Dr. Edis found books about creationism filed in the science section. “It actually caught me by surprise,” he said.
In Turkey, officially a secular government but now ruled by an Islamic party, the teaching of evolution has largely disappeared, at least below the university level, and the science curriculum in public schools is written in deference to religious beliefs, Dr. Edis said.
Harun Yahya, a Turkish creationist of the old-Earth variety, has gained prominence in Turkey and elsewhere. A quarter of a world away, most of the biology teachers in Indonesia use Mr. Yahya’s creationist books in their classrooms, the McGill researchers found, although some said they did that to provide counterarguments to materials their students were reading anyway.
In the McGill research, fewer students in Indonesia than in Pakistan thought evolution a well-accepted scientific fact, yet 85 percent agreed that fossils showed that life had existed for billions of years and changed over time.
The quality of biology education “varies highly depending on what country you’re in and what school you’re in,” said Jason R. Wiles, a professor of biology at Syracuse University and associate director of the McGill center.
In addition, the situation in Iran, where the Shiite sect of Islam dominates, may be far different than in neighboring Iraq, where Sunnis are more numerous. There is no single leader, like the Roman Catholic pope, who can dictate an official view that holds for all Muslims.
Even finding out how different countries teach evolution can be difficult, Dr. Hameed said. Saudi Arabia, for example, does not let foreigners see the biology textbooks. “We don’t have much information,” he said.
For many Muslims, even evolution and the notion that life flourished without the intervening hand of Allah is largely compatible with their religion. What many find unacceptable is human evolution, the idea that humans evolved from primitive primates. The Koran states that Allah created Adam, the first man, separately out of clay.
Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.
Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said. “Your lineage is what determines your worth.”
Biology education, even in places like Pakistan that otherwise teach evolution, largely omits the question of where humans came from.
Some academics at the conference worried that the rejection of some aspects of evolution might leave Islamic countries at a disadvantage in scientific education. Dr. Hameed said a negative reaction to evolutionary theory could reflect a struggle to retain cultural traditions and values against Western influences, even though Islamic creationists readily borrowed many of the arguments from Western creationists, just removing the young-Earth aspects.
There is some indication that in the West, where non-Islamic influences are strongest, Islamic creationism may be stronger in reaction to the outside pressure. For example, high school students at Islamic schools in and near Toronto were far more doubting of evolution than students in Indonesia or Pakistan, the McGill researchers found. A majority of the students at the Canadian Islamic schools disagreed that a significant body of data supported evolution and that all life came from the same common ancestors.
At the same time, many of the Canadian Muslims even acquired young-Earth creationist beliefs, which are thoroughly Western in origin. Only half the students surveyed at the Islamic schools in the Toronto area thought fossils showed that life had existed for billions of years and had changed over time, compared with the 86 percent of the students in Pakistan.
In a study financed by the National Science Foundation, Dr. Hameed and his colleagues will survey the beliefs of Muslim doctors in five Muslim countries — Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey — and compare them with Muslim doctors in non-Muslim countries — Turkish doctors in Germany, Pakistani doctors in Britain, and Turkish and Pakistani doctors in the United States.
“We actually expect, especially in Europe, where they have a harder time merging in the culture,” Dr. Hameed said, “harsher rejection of evolution in England and Germany” than in Muslim countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/scien ... &th&emc=th
November 24, 2009, 9:30 pm
An Evolve-By Date
By OLIVIA JUDSON
Olivia Judson on the influence of science and biology on modern life.
Yesterday, Tuesday, Nov. 24, was The Big Day: it was exactly 150 years since Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was first published. In this book, Darwin described how evolution by natural selection works — and presented a huge body of evidence, drawn from every field of biology then known, that evolution can account for the patterns we see in nature.
I’ve written before about what an important book it was and why it mattered so much, so I won’t do that again now. Instead, I want to mark the occasion by looking at the limits of evolutionary potential.
To see what I mean by this, consider the following paradox. Whenever we do evolution experiments in the laboratory or on the farm, we can cause pronounced and rapid change in the traits we are interested in — we can evolve bigger horses, smaller dogs, cows that make more milk, viruses that thrive at higher temperatures and so on. In the laboratory, in other words, evolution has huge potential. But if it has that much potential — how come organisms keep going extinct in nature? In other words, why does evolution keep failing?
The question matters as never before. We humans are busily changing the environment for most of the beings on the planet, and often, we are doing so very fast. To know what effect this will have, we badly need to know how readily different creatures can evolve to deal with changes to their environment. For if we’re not careful, many groups will soon be faced with an evolve-by date: if they don’t evolve rapidly enough to survive in this changing world, they will vanish.
The basis of evolutionary potential is clear enough in principle. Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any
Associated Press Charles Robert Darwinindividuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not? If not, everybody dies, and it’s game over. If yes, evolution may come to the rescue, improving, as time goes by, the ability of individuals to cope in the new environment. What determines the extent of the underlying genetic variation? Factors such as how big the population is (bigger populations usually contain more genetic variation) and how often mutations occur.
Let me give an example of how this works. Imagine you have a population of algae that have been living for generations in a comfy freshwater pool. Now suppose there’s a ghastly accident and, all of a sudden, the pool becomes super-salty. Whether the algae will be able to survive depends on whether any individuals already have any capacity to survive and reproduce in salty water. If none of them do, they all die, and the population goes extinct. But if some do, then the survivors will reproduce, and over time, beneficial mutations will accumulate such that the algae get better and better at living in a high-salt environment.
This isn’t just hypothetical: many experiments have taken organisms, be they algae, fungi or bacteria, from an environment to which they are well-adapted to one where they are not, and watched what happens. The result is reliable: at first, they tend not to cope that well (measured, as usual in evolution, by their ability to survive and reproduce). However, as long as the environment doesn’t change again, their coping ability rapidly improves: within a few tens of generations, beneficial mutations appear and spread, and the organisms evolve to become much better at handling their new circumstances.
But here’s the thing. A big drawback of experiments of this type is that the initial change the organisms experience is not that severe — it is not, in fact, so severe that no one can cope, and the population goes extinct. The reason is simple: if the population immediately goes extinct, you have no experiment (at least, not one you can publish). Which means that we have the illusion that evolution is more powerful than it is: we keep studying evolutionary rescues, not evolutionary failures.
Moreover — and this also has a bearing on the matter — where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair. Suppose you put bacteria into test tubes where their usual sugar source is in short supply, but an alternative one — which they can’t consume at all — is abundant. (If you put them with just this alternative source, they would all die of starvation at once.) Then, you can watch how long it takes for the bacteria to evolve so they can digest the alternative. The answer, in one famous case, was more than 31,000 generations! Which just goes to show: just because a particular trait would be useful does not mean that it will soon evolve.
To me, all this is a bit sobering. If most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a useful new trait — they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that — if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment — many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.
Notes:
As far as I know, the idea of evolutionary failure was first discussed by Bradshaw, A. D. 1991. “Genostasis and the limits to evolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 333: 289-305. This paper also contains some good examples of organisms in nature failing to adapt. The problem of extinction in the context of adaptation has been more recently discussed by Bell, G. and Collins, S. 2008. “Adaptation, extinction and global change.” Evolutionary Applications 1: 3-16. See also, Bell, G. and Gonzalez, A. 2009. “Evolutionary rescue can prevent extinction following environmental change.” Ecology Letters 12: 942-948.
For a review of experiments in evolution — and for evidence that, for a wide range of organisms, a sudden change in the environment usually results in the pattern I described, see Elena, S. F. and Lenski, R. E. 2003. “Evolution experiments with microorganisms: the dynamics and genetic bases of adaptation.” Nature Reviews Genetics 4: 457-469.
For bacteria taking more than 31,000 generations to evolve the ability to digest a new source of sugar, see Blount, Z. D., Borland, C. Z. and Lenski, R. E. 2008. “Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105: 7899-7906.
Many thanks to Dan Haydon, Gideon Lichfield and Jonathan Swire for insights, comments and suggestions.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... mode=print
An Evolve-By Date
By OLIVIA JUDSON
Olivia Judson on the influence of science and biology on modern life.
Yesterday, Tuesday, Nov. 24, was The Big Day: it was exactly 150 years since Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was first published. In this book, Darwin described how evolution by natural selection works — and presented a huge body of evidence, drawn from every field of biology then known, that evolution can account for the patterns we see in nature.
I’ve written before about what an important book it was and why it mattered so much, so I won’t do that again now. Instead, I want to mark the occasion by looking at the limits of evolutionary potential.
To see what I mean by this, consider the following paradox. Whenever we do evolution experiments in the laboratory or on the farm, we can cause pronounced and rapid change in the traits we are interested in — we can evolve bigger horses, smaller dogs, cows that make more milk, viruses that thrive at higher temperatures and so on. In the laboratory, in other words, evolution has huge potential. But if it has that much potential — how come organisms keep going extinct in nature? In other words, why does evolution keep failing?
The question matters as never before. We humans are busily changing the environment for most of the beings on the planet, and often, we are doing so very fast. To know what effect this will have, we badly need to know how readily different creatures can evolve to deal with changes to their environment. For if we’re not careful, many groups will soon be faced with an evolve-by date: if they don’t evolve rapidly enough to survive in this changing world, they will vanish.
The basis of evolutionary potential is clear enough in principle. Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any
Associated Press Charles Robert Darwinindividuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not? If not, everybody dies, and it’s game over. If yes, evolution may come to the rescue, improving, as time goes by, the ability of individuals to cope in the new environment. What determines the extent of the underlying genetic variation? Factors such as how big the population is (bigger populations usually contain more genetic variation) and how often mutations occur.
Let me give an example of how this works. Imagine you have a population of algae that have been living for generations in a comfy freshwater pool. Now suppose there’s a ghastly accident and, all of a sudden, the pool becomes super-salty. Whether the algae will be able to survive depends on whether any individuals already have any capacity to survive and reproduce in salty water. If none of them do, they all die, and the population goes extinct. But if some do, then the survivors will reproduce, and over time, beneficial mutations will accumulate such that the algae get better and better at living in a high-salt environment.
This isn’t just hypothetical: many experiments have taken organisms, be they algae, fungi or bacteria, from an environment to which they are well-adapted to one where they are not, and watched what happens. The result is reliable: at first, they tend not to cope that well (measured, as usual in evolution, by their ability to survive and reproduce). However, as long as the environment doesn’t change again, their coping ability rapidly improves: within a few tens of generations, beneficial mutations appear and spread, and the organisms evolve to become much better at handling their new circumstances.
But here’s the thing. A big drawback of experiments of this type is that the initial change the organisms experience is not that severe — it is not, in fact, so severe that no one can cope, and the population goes extinct. The reason is simple: if the population immediately goes extinct, you have no experiment (at least, not one you can publish). Which means that we have the illusion that evolution is more powerful than it is: we keep studying evolutionary rescues, not evolutionary failures.
Moreover — and this also has a bearing on the matter — where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair. Suppose you put bacteria into test tubes where their usual sugar source is in short supply, but an alternative one — which they can’t consume at all — is abundant. (If you put them with just this alternative source, they would all die of starvation at once.) Then, you can watch how long it takes for the bacteria to evolve so they can digest the alternative. The answer, in one famous case, was more than 31,000 generations! Which just goes to show: just because a particular trait would be useful does not mean that it will soon evolve.
To me, all this is a bit sobering. If most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a useful new trait — they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that — if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment — many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.
Notes:
As far as I know, the idea of evolutionary failure was first discussed by Bradshaw, A. D. 1991. “Genostasis and the limits to evolution.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 333: 289-305. This paper also contains some good examples of organisms in nature failing to adapt. The problem of extinction in the context of adaptation has been more recently discussed by Bell, G. and Collins, S. 2008. “Adaptation, extinction and global change.” Evolutionary Applications 1: 3-16. See also, Bell, G. and Gonzalez, A. 2009. “Evolutionary rescue can prevent extinction following environmental change.” Ecology Letters 12: 942-948.
For a review of experiments in evolution — and for evidence that, for a wide range of organisms, a sudden change in the environment usually results in the pattern I described, see Elena, S. F. and Lenski, R. E. 2003. “Evolution experiments with microorganisms: the dynamics and genetic bases of adaptation.” Nature Reviews Genetics 4: 457-469.
For bacteria taking more than 31,000 generations to evolve the ability to digest a new source of sugar, see Blount, Z. D., Borland, C. Z. and Lenski, R. E. 2008. “Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105: 7899-7906.
Many thanks to Dan Haydon, Gideon Lichfield and Jonathan Swire for insights, comments and suggestions.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... mode=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/scien ... ?th&emc=th
July 19, 2010
Adventures in Very Recent Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE
Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.
The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.
The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.
Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution.
Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.
“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
So much natural selection has occurred in the recent past that geneticists have started to look for new ways in which evolution could occur very rapidly. Much of the new evidence for recent evolution has come from methods that allow the force of natural selection to be assessed across the whole human genome. This has been made possible by DNA data derived mostly from the Hap Map, a government project to help uncover the genetic roots of complex disease. The Hap Map contains samples from 11 populations around the world and consists of readings of the DNA at specific sites along the genome where variations are common.
One of the signatures of natural selection is that it disturbs the undergrowth of mutations that are always accumulating along the genome. As a favored version of a gene becomes more common in a population, genomes will look increasingly alike in and around the gene. Because variation is brushed away, the favored gene’s rise in popularity is called a sweep. Geneticists have developed several statistical methods for detecting sweeps, and hence of natural selection in action.
About 21 genome-wide scans for natural selection had been completed by last year, providing evidence that 4,243 genes — 23 percent of the human total — were under natural selection. This is a surprisingly high proportion, since the scans often miss various genes that are known for other reasons to be under selection. Also, the scans can see only recent episodes of selection — probably just those that occurred within the last 5,000 to 25,000 years or so. The reason is that after a favored version of a gene has swept through the population, mutations start building up in its DNA, eroding the uniformity that is evidence of a sweep.
Unfortunately, as Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, pointed out last year in the journal Genome Research, most of the regions identified as under selection were found in only one scan and ignored by the 20 others. The lack of agreement is “sobering,” as Dr. Akey put it, not least because most of the scans are based on the same Hap Map data.
From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.
A new approach to identifying selected genes has been developed by Anna Di Rienzo at the University of Chicago. Instead of looking at the genome and seeing what turns up, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues have started with genes that would be likely to change as people adopted different environments, modes of subsistence and diets, and then checked to see if different populations have responded accordingly.
She found particularly strong signals of selection in populations that live in polar regions, in people who live by foraging, and in people whose diets are rich in roots and tubers. In Eskimo populations, there are signals of selection in genes that help people adapt to cold. Among primitive farming tribes, big eaters of tubers, which contain little folic acid, selection has shaped the genes involved in synthesizing folic acid in the body, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The fewest signals of selection were seen among people who live in the humid tropics, the ecoregion where the ancestral human population evolved. “One could argue that we are adapted to that and that most signals are seen when people adapt to new environments,” Dr. Di Rienzo said in an interview.
One of the most visible human adaptations is that of skin color. Primates have unpigmented skin beneath their fur. But when humans lost their fur, perhaps because they needed bare skin to sweat efficiently, they developed dark skin to protect against ultraviolet light.
Coloring the skin may sound simple, but nature requires at least 25 different genes to synthesize, package and distribute the melanin pigment that darkens the skin and hair. The system then had to be put into reverse when people penetrated the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia and acquired lighter skin, probably to admit more of the sunlight required to synthesize vitamin D.
Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them.
East Asians have several genetic variants that are rare or absent in Europeans and Africans. Their hair has a thicker shaft. A version of a gene called EDAR is a major determinant of thicker hair, which may have evolved as protection against cold, say a team of geneticists led by Ryosuke Kimura of Tokai University School of Medicine in Japan.
Most East Asians also have a special form of a gene known as ABCC11, which makes the cells of the ear produce dry earwax. Most Africans and Europeans, on the other hand, possess the ancestral form of the gene, which makes wet earwax. It is hard to see why dry earwax would confer a big survival advantage, so the Asian version of the gene may have been selected for some other property, like making people sweat less, says a team led by Koh-ichiro Yoshiura of Nagasaki University.
Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations. Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.
One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.
The cases of natural selection that have been tracked so far take the form of substantial sweeps, with a new version of a gene being present in a large percentage of the population. These hard sweeps are often assumed to start from a novel mutation. But it can take a long time for the right mutation to occur, especially if there is a very small target, like the region of DNA that controls a gene. In the worst case, the waiting time would be 300,000 generations, according to a calculation by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. And indeed, there are not many hard sweeps in the human genome.
But the new evidence that humans have adapted rapidly and extensively suggests that natural selection must have other options for changing a trait besides waiting for the right mutation to show up. In an article in Current Biology in February, Dr. Pritchard suggested that a lot of natural selection may take place through what he called soft sweeps.
Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.
Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.
July 19, 2010
Adventures in Very Recent Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE
Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.
The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.
The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.
Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution.
Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.
“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
So much natural selection has occurred in the recent past that geneticists have started to look for new ways in which evolution could occur very rapidly. Much of the new evidence for recent evolution has come from methods that allow the force of natural selection to be assessed across the whole human genome. This has been made possible by DNA data derived mostly from the Hap Map, a government project to help uncover the genetic roots of complex disease. The Hap Map contains samples from 11 populations around the world and consists of readings of the DNA at specific sites along the genome where variations are common.
One of the signatures of natural selection is that it disturbs the undergrowth of mutations that are always accumulating along the genome. As a favored version of a gene becomes more common in a population, genomes will look increasingly alike in and around the gene. Because variation is brushed away, the favored gene’s rise in popularity is called a sweep. Geneticists have developed several statistical methods for detecting sweeps, and hence of natural selection in action.
About 21 genome-wide scans for natural selection had been completed by last year, providing evidence that 4,243 genes — 23 percent of the human total — were under natural selection. This is a surprisingly high proportion, since the scans often miss various genes that are known for other reasons to be under selection. Also, the scans can see only recent episodes of selection — probably just those that occurred within the last 5,000 to 25,000 years or so. The reason is that after a favored version of a gene has swept through the population, mutations start building up in its DNA, eroding the uniformity that is evidence of a sweep.
Unfortunately, as Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, pointed out last year in the journal Genome Research, most of the regions identified as under selection were found in only one scan and ignored by the 20 others. The lack of agreement is “sobering,” as Dr. Akey put it, not least because most of the scans are based on the same Hap Map data.
From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.
A new approach to identifying selected genes has been developed by Anna Di Rienzo at the University of Chicago. Instead of looking at the genome and seeing what turns up, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues have started with genes that would be likely to change as people adopted different environments, modes of subsistence and diets, and then checked to see if different populations have responded accordingly.
She found particularly strong signals of selection in populations that live in polar regions, in people who live by foraging, and in people whose diets are rich in roots and tubers. In Eskimo populations, there are signals of selection in genes that help people adapt to cold. Among primitive farming tribes, big eaters of tubers, which contain little folic acid, selection has shaped the genes involved in synthesizing folic acid in the body, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The fewest signals of selection were seen among people who live in the humid tropics, the ecoregion where the ancestral human population evolved. “One could argue that we are adapted to that and that most signals are seen when people adapt to new environments,” Dr. Di Rienzo said in an interview.
One of the most visible human adaptations is that of skin color. Primates have unpigmented skin beneath their fur. But when humans lost their fur, perhaps because they needed bare skin to sweat efficiently, they developed dark skin to protect against ultraviolet light.
Coloring the skin may sound simple, but nature requires at least 25 different genes to synthesize, package and distribute the melanin pigment that darkens the skin and hair. The system then had to be put into reverse when people penetrated the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia and acquired lighter skin, probably to admit more of the sunlight required to synthesize vitamin D.
Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them.
East Asians have several genetic variants that are rare or absent in Europeans and Africans. Their hair has a thicker shaft. A version of a gene called EDAR is a major determinant of thicker hair, which may have evolved as protection against cold, say a team of geneticists led by Ryosuke Kimura of Tokai University School of Medicine in Japan.
Most East Asians also have a special form of a gene known as ABCC11, which makes the cells of the ear produce dry earwax. Most Africans and Europeans, on the other hand, possess the ancestral form of the gene, which makes wet earwax. It is hard to see why dry earwax would confer a big survival advantage, so the Asian version of the gene may have been selected for some other property, like making people sweat less, says a team led by Koh-ichiro Yoshiura of Nagasaki University.
Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations. Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.
One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.
The cases of natural selection that have been tracked so far take the form of substantial sweeps, with a new version of a gene being present in a large percentage of the population. These hard sweeps are often assumed to start from a novel mutation. But it can take a long time for the right mutation to occur, especially if there is a very small target, like the region of DNA that controls a gene. In the worst case, the waiting time would be 300,000 generations, according to a calculation by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. And indeed, there are not many hard sweeps in the human genome.
But the new evidence that humans have adapted rapidly and extensively suggests that natural selection must have other options for changing a trait besides waiting for the right mutation to show up. In an article in Current Biology in February, Dr. Pritchard suggested that a lot of natural selection may take place through what he called soft sweeps.
Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.
Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.
Evolution rejected by hundreds of millions of Muslims and evangelicals
Creationism, a religious world view that adamantly rejects Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, is on the rise among evangelical Protestants and most of the world’s Muslims.
And it’s cause for concern. Social and political consequences are erupting from the resurgence of literal belief in the creation stories of the Bible and the Qur’an, says a specialist on evolutionary theory among the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims.
Nidhal Guessoum, a Middle Eastern physics and astronomy professor, is among those who say critical thinking, freedom of thought and even human rights come under threat when hundreds of millions of people literally believe that God created the universe in “six days” and Adam from nothing.
It is not only the majority of residents in Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia and Turkey who strongly reject the teaching that humans and other species evolved over millions of years from less complex creatures.
So do tens of millions of evangelical Christians in North America (as well as South America and Africa). Christian creationist beliefs in a so-called “young earth” have been promoted, for instance, at Metro Vancouver’s largest Protestant congregation; more than 4,000 people show up each weekend at Burnaby’s evangelical Willingdon Church.
Nidhal Guessoum, a physics and astronomy professor in the Middle East, estimates roughly 60 per cent of the world’s Muslims are creationists, including many living in the U.S. and Canada.
The problems with creationism were highlighted at a September conference, The Uses and Abuses of Biology, at Cambridge University in England, hosted by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Speakers, including Canadians, documented the worldwide spread of various forms of creationism.
The Cambridge conference was not a gathering of religion bashers. Many speakers maintained it’s not at all necessary for Christians or Muslims to believe in creationism to be authentic people of faith. There are noted Christian and Muslim theologies, speakers emphasized, that embrace evolution.
RELATED: The Uses and Abuses of Charles Darwin
Muslims value seasonal focus on Jesus, Mary
Is Canada importing patriarchy?
Charles Darwin: Troublemaker of the Century
But such “evolutionary theists” are strongly resisted by leading Muslim figures. Guessoum lamented how powerful Muslim clerics in the Middle East — such as Harun Yayha, Safar Al-Hawali, Abdul Majid al-Zindani, Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi`i and others — repeatedly warn that any Muslim who accepts Darwinian evolution is a dangerous heretic.
Overall, Guessoum, who teaches at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, estimates roughly 60 per cent of the world’s Muslims are creationists, including many living in the U.S. and Canada.
Even though poll results about evolution vary based on the questions asked, Salman Hameed reported in the journal Science that strong anti-evolution majorities exist in Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt and Pakistan. The latter is among Canada’s top six source countries for immigrants.
The ascendance of creationism among Muslims has occurred in part in reaction to 19th and 20th-century European and American colonialism, said Guessoum, an Algerian. Foreign occupation caused many Muslims to become more fundamentalist, as their way of saying, “‘We don’t want to be like the West.’“
As a consequence, Guessoum said, most people fail to recognize that during Islam’s socalled Golden Age (roughly 650 to 1200 AD) Muslims were the world’s scientific leaders. He described how early Muslim thinkers, such as Ibn Khaldun, Ikhwan as-Safa, Al-Jahiz and the poet Rumi advanced evolutionary ideas long before Darwin did in the mid-1800s.
How is Muslim and evangelical Christian creationism playing out in North America?
Coventry University scholar Fern Elsdon-Baker, supported by the Faraday Institute and the John Templeton Foundation, is beginning a multi-year study into that question in Britain and Canada.
Website of the Creation Science Assoc. of B.C. shows woman with dinosaur. It holds programs in many evangelical churches.
A team of British and York University researchers are focusing on creationism beliefs among evangelical Christians and Muslims, the latter of whom view both the Bible and Qur’an as holy.
(Creationism is not widely accepted among Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists, who generally embrace evolution.)
What could this new team of researchers expect to find when they look at creationism among Canadian Muslims, who, as a result of immigration, now form the fastest-growing religion in Canada, with more than one million adherents?
Vancouver astrophysicist Redouane Al Fakir, who has a PhD from the University of B.C., is disappointed in the way many imams in Canada deal with issues such as creationism and evolution. “It can be a mess.“
Despite Al Fakir’s reluctance to detail internal problems in the country’s Muslim population, he finds a lack of critical scientific inquiry in some Metro Vancouver mosques, many of which have imams trained in religious schools outside Canada.
“The less-educated imams tend to be pro-creationist,” said Moroccan-raised Al Fakir. “The more educated are open to the scientific method in regards to the origins of the species.“
In North America, belief in creationism is by no means confined to Muslims. Some form of creationist belief is held by roughly two thirds of U.S. evangelicals, who frequently call for it to be taught in secular schools.
Middle Eastern scholar Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi`i, one of the fathers of modern Salafism, says evolution is “heresy” and forbids studying it.
An Angus-Reid survey found 43 per cent of Americans accept the creationist teaching that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, which means they reject the established scientific view the universe began roughly 13 billion years ago.
In contrast, Angus Reid pollsters have found just 16 per cent of Britons hold to creationism.
Canadians’ acceptance of creationism falls in between the U.S. and Britain – at 24 per cent, a figure many find surprisingly high.
Queensland University professor Thomas Aechtner, who was educated in B.C., is beginning to research how the creationism-evolution “wars” are playing out around the world, including in North America.
He’s aware that numerous groups, such as the Creation Science Association of B.C., are teaching creationism in a host of Canadian evangelical churches. The organization’s website features a painting of a woman looking into the eyes of a small dinosaur, suggesting both existed at the same time.
It’s hard to discern what is being taught about creationism and evolution in evangelical and Muslim private schools in North America, even those that receive taxpayer money. Such religious schools are required to follow government science curricula, which mandate the teaching of evolution.
However, Guessoum says, many religious biology teachers have told him that though they discuss evolutionary theory in public and their classrooms, they hold more creationist beliefs “at home.“
That split approach was confirmed by a study by McGill University and Harvard researchers of more than 5,000 Muslim biology teachers and students around the world, including in Canada. The researchers found many Muslim biology teachers and students reject scientific evolution, even while they include the subject in their curriculum.
Even though hundreds of millions of Muslims today believe in creationism, the major 9th century Islamic thinker Al-Jihaz taught evolutionary concepts.
While Guessoum doesn’t want people to panic, he is worried that Muslim leaders’ attacks on people who adhere to evolution have political consequences.
Fundamentalist leaders who believe in creationism, he said, are also likely to oppose liberal values such as girls and boys learning together. Other studies show creationists tend to disapprove of such things as homosexuality, euthanasia, sex outside marriage and abortion and reject human-made climate change.
Both Guessoum and Al Fakir want creationists to realize that many Christian and Islamic thinkers, from Arabia’s Al-Jahiz to Catholic paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Protestant Alister McGrath, have promoted evolutionary ideas as part of their theology.
And Quessoum would like more Muslims to read the Qur’an “holistically,” rather than in a piecemeal, literalistic way. For instance, even though it’s stated in the Bible and the Qur’an that God sits on a “throne,” Guessoum said no Muslim literally believes it.
In other words, even poorly educated Muslims know scriptural references to God’s throne are metaphors. So he encourages them to interpret more of the Bible and Qur’an as profound spiritual metaphors, including the stories of Adam and Eve and a six-day creation.
[email protected]
http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2014/10/0 ... ngelicals/
Creationism, a religious world view that adamantly rejects Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, is on the rise among evangelical Protestants and most of the world’s Muslims.
And it’s cause for concern. Social and political consequences are erupting from the resurgence of literal belief in the creation stories of the Bible and the Qur’an, says a specialist on evolutionary theory among the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims.
Nidhal Guessoum, a Middle Eastern physics and astronomy professor, is among those who say critical thinking, freedom of thought and even human rights come under threat when hundreds of millions of people literally believe that God created the universe in “six days” and Adam from nothing.
It is not only the majority of residents in Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia and Turkey who strongly reject the teaching that humans and other species evolved over millions of years from less complex creatures.
So do tens of millions of evangelical Christians in North America (as well as South America and Africa). Christian creationist beliefs in a so-called “young earth” have been promoted, for instance, at Metro Vancouver’s largest Protestant congregation; more than 4,000 people show up each weekend at Burnaby’s evangelical Willingdon Church.
Nidhal Guessoum, a physics and astronomy professor in the Middle East, estimates roughly 60 per cent of the world’s Muslims are creationists, including many living in the U.S. and Canada.
The problems with creationism were highlighted at a September conference, The Uses and Abuses of Biology, at Cambridge University in England, hosted by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Speakers, including Canadians, documented the worldwide spread of various forms of creationism.
The Cambridge conference was not a gathering of religion bashers. Many speakers maintained it’s not at all necessary for Christians or Muslims to believe in creationism to be authentic people of faith. There are noted Christian and Muslim theologies, speakers emphasized, that embrace evolution.
RELATED: The Uses and Abuses of Charles Darwin
Muslims value seasonal focus on Jesus, Mary
Is Canada importing patriarchy?
Charles Darwin: Troublemaker of the Century
But such “evolutionary theists” are strongly resisted by leading Muslim figures. Guessoum lamented how powerful Muslim clerics in the Middle East — such as Harun Yayha, Safar Al-Hawali, Abdul Majid al-Zindani, Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi`i and others — repeatedly warn that any Muslim who accepts Darwinian evolution is a dangerous heretic.
Overall, Guessoum, who teaches at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, estimates roughly 60 per cent of the world’s Muslims are creationists, including many living in the U.S. and Canada.
Even though poll results about evolution vary based on the questions asked, Salman Hameed reported in the journal Science that strong anti-evolution majorities exist in Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt and Pakistan. The latter is among Canada’s top six source countries for immigrants.
The ascendance of creationism among Muslims has occurred in part in reaction to 19th and 20th-century European and American colonialism, said Guessoum, an Algerian. Foreign occupation caused many Muslims to become more fundamentalist, as their way of saying, “‘We don’t want to be like the West.’“
As a consequence, Guessoum said, most people fail to recognize that during Islam’s socalled Golden Age (roughly 650 to 1200 AD) Muslims were the world’s scientific leaders. He described how early Muslim thinkers, such as Ibn Khaldun, Ikhwan as-Safa, Al-Jahiz and the poet Rumi advanced evolutionary ideas long before Darwin did in the mid-1800s.
How is Muslim and evangelical Christian creationism playing out in North America?
Coventry University scholar Fern Elsdon-Baker, supported by the Faraday Institute and the John Templeton Foundation, is beginning a multi-year study into that question in Britain and Canada.
Website of the Creation Science Assoc. of B.C. shows woman with dinosaur. It holds programs in many evangelical churches.
A team of British and York University researchers are focusing on creationism beliefs among evangelical Christians and Muslims, the latter of whom view both the Bible and Qur’an as holy.
(Creationism is not widely accepted among Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists, who generally embrace evolution.)
What could this new team of researchers expect to find when they look at creationism among Canadian Muslims, who, as a result of immigration, now form the fastest-growing religion in Canada, with more than one million adherents?
Vancouver astrophysicist Redouane Al Fakir, who has a PhD from the University of B.C., is disappointed in the way many imams in Canada deal with issues such as creationism and evolution. “It can be a mess.“
Despite Al Fakir’s reluctance to detail internal problems in the country’s Muslim population, he finds a lack of critical scientific inquiry in some Metro Vancouver mosques, many of which have imams trained in religious schools outside Canada.
“The less-educated imams tend to be pro-creationist,” said Moroccan-raised Al Fakir. “The more educated are open to the scientific method in regards to the origins of the species.“
In North America, belief in creationism is by no means confined to Muslims. Some form of creationist belief is held by roughly two thirds of U.S. evangelicals, who frequently call for it to be taught in secular schools.
Middle Eastern scholar Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi`i, one of the fathers of modern Salafism, says evolution is “heresy” and forbids studying it.
An Angus-Reid survey found 43 per cent of Americans accept the creationist teaching that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, which means they reject the established scientific view the universe began roughly 13 billion years ago.
In contrast, Angus Reid pollsters have found just 16 per cent of Britons hold to creationism.
Canadians’ acceptance of creationism falls in between the U.S. and Britain – at 24 per cent, a figure many find surprisingly high.
Queensland University professor Thomas Aechtner, who was educated in B.C., is beginning to research how the creationism-evolution “wars” are playing out around the world, including in North America.
He’s aware that numerous groups, such as the Creation Science Association of B.C., are teaching creationism in a host of Canadian evangelical churches. The organization’s website features a painting of a woman looking into the eyes of a small dinosaur, suggesting both existed at the same time.
It’s hard to discern what is being taught about creationism and evolution in evangelical and Muslim private schools in North America, even those that receive taxpayer money. Such religious schools are required to follow government science curricula, which mandate the teaching of evolution.
However, Guessoum says, many religious biology teachers have told him that though they discuss evolutionary theory in public and their classrooms, they hold more creationist beliefs “at home.“
That split approach was confirmed by a study by McGill University and Harvard researchers of more than 5,000 Muslim biology teachers and students around the world, including in Canada. The researchers found many Muslim biology teachers and students reject scientific evolution, even while they include the subject in their curriculum.
Even though hundreds of millions of Muslims today believe in creationism, the major 9th century Islamic thinker Al-Jihaz taught evolutionary concepts.
While Guessoum doesn’t want people to panic, he is worried that Muslim leaders’ attacks on people who adhere to evolution have political consequences.
Fundamentalist leaders who believe in creationism, he said, are also likely to oppose liberal values such as girls and boys learning together. Other studies show creationists tend to disapprove of such things as homosexuality, euthanasia, sex outside marriage and abortion and reject human-made climate change.
Both Guessoum and Al Fakir want creationists to realize that many Christian and Islamic thinkers, from Arabia’s Al-Jahiz to Catholic paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Protestant Alister McGrath, have promoted evolutionary ideas as part of their theology.
And Quessoum would like more Muslims to read the Qur’an “holistically,” rather than in a piecemeal, literalistic way. For instance, even though it’s stated in the Bible and the Qur’an that God sits on a “throne,” Guessoum said no Muslim literally believes it.
In other words, even poorly educated Muslims know scriptural references to God’s throne are metaphors. So he encourages them to interpret more of the Bible and Qur’an as profound spiritual metaphors, including the stories of Adam and Eve and a six-day creation.
[email protected]
http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2014/10/0 ... ngelicals/
The Neanderthals, the Denisovans and Us
It’s been nearly 160 years since we Homo sapiens, or “wise people,” first got an inkling through Charles Darwin and the discovery of Neanderthal remains that we are just another evolving species on this planet. In recent years, the pace of new discoveries — made possible by advances in a broad array of disciplines, including biotechnology, genetics and paleontology — has increased.
In 2010, scientists found that our ancestors not only crossed paths with other hominids on a similar evolutionary track, but mated with them. They discovered that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals because many people, mostly outside of Africa, carry DNA that matches material from the Neanderthals, our heavy-browed evolutionary relatives.
Now a new study of global genomes, published this month in the journal Science, reports that our ancestors also crossed paths and interbred with another distinct hominid species known as the Denisovans.
Like all the previous studies, the latest one raises at least as many questions as it answers. It found, for example, high levels of Denisovan ancestry in Oceania, thousands of miles from the Siberian cave where the species was discovered less than a decade ago. Does that mean the Denisovans wandered far and wide, or that they crossed paths somewhere else with modern humans who later settled in Melanesia?
Another tantalizing discovery was that some regions of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA became more common in modern humans as generations passed, suggesting that it proved useful for survival, perhaps by supplying genes that bolstered immunity. But Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA was totally absent from four regions of the modern human genome, suggesting that there were areas in which our ancestors found better and unique evolutionary solutions.
As discoveries and scientific methods multiply, we will become more familiar with our distant ancestors of all kinds and species. What is already evident is that our ancestry cannot be defined by a tidy genealogical tree, but is an ever-evolving, mysterious and wonderfully diverse tangle of roots and branches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/opini ... nd-us.html
It’s been nearly 160 years since we Homo sapiens, or “wise people,” first got an inkling through Charles Darwin and the discovery of Neanderthal remains that we are just another evolving species on this planet. In recent years, the pace of new discoveries — made possible by advances in a broad array of disciplines, including biotechnology, genetics and paleontology — has increased.
In 2010, scientists found that our ancestors not only crossed paths with other hominids on a similar evolutionary track, but mated with them. They discovered that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals because many people, mostly outside of Africa, carry DNA that matches material from the Neanderthals, our heavy-browed evolutionary relatives.
Now a new study of global genomes, published this month in the journal Science, reports that our ancestors also crossed paths and interbred with another distinct hominid species known as the Denisovans.
Like all the previous studies, the latest one raises at least as many questions as it answers. It found, for example, high levels of Denisovan ancestry in Oceania, thousands of miles from the Siberian cave where the species was discovered less than a decade ago. Does that mean the Denisovans wandered far and wide, or that they crossed paths somewhere else with modern humans who later settled in Melanesia?
Another tantalizing discovery was that some regions of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA became more common in modern humans as generations passed, suggesting that it proved useful for survival, perhaps by supplying genes that bolstered immunity. But Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA was totally absent from four regions of the modern human genome, suggesting that there were areas in which our ancestors found better and unique evolutionary solutions.
As discoveries and scientific methods multiply, we will become more familiar with our distant ancestors of all kinds and species. What is already evident is that our ancestry cannot be defined by a tidy genealogical tree, but is an ever-evolving, mysterious and wonderfully diverse tangle of roots and branches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/opini ... nd-us.html
Evolution Is Happening Faster Than We Thought
Amsterdam — A FRIEND recently invited me over to see the blackbird that had taken up residence in a potted plant on her balcony.
Serenely incubating eggs in the inner city, this bird had little in common with its shy, reclusive ancestors that nested in Europe’s forests. Early in the 19th century, probably in Germany, blackbirds began settling in cities. By the mid-20th century, they were hopping around on stoops all over Europe.
Many “wild” bird species — like the peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks and laughing gulls of New York — have set up camp in cities. But the thing about Europe’s urban blackbirds (a relative of the American robin, not to be confused with North American blackbirds, which belong to a different family) is that they are very different from their forest-dwelling relatives. They have stockier bills, sing at a higher pitch (high enough to be heard over the din of traffic), are less likely to migrate (in cities there’s food and warmth year-round), and have less nervous personalities.
For many of these differences, genes are responsible. The birds’ DNA, after 200 years or less of adaptation, has diverged from that of their rural ancestors.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opini ... ought.html
Amsterdam — A FRIEND recently invited me over to see the blackbird that had taken up residence in a potted plant on her balcony.
Serenely incubating eggs in the inner city, this bird had little in common with its shy, reclusive ancestors that nested in Europe’s forests. Early in the 19th century, probably in Germany, blackbirds began settling in cities. By the mid-20th century, they were hopping around on stoops all over Europe.
Many “wild” bird species — like the peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks and laughing gulls of New York — have set up camp in cities. But the thing about Europe’s urban blackbirds (a relative of the American robin, not to be confused with North American blackbirds, which belong to a different family) is that they are very different from their forest-dwelling relatives. They have stockier bills, sing at a higher pitch (high enough to be heard over the din of traffic), are less likely to migrate (in cities there’s food and warmth year-round), and have less nervous personalities.
For many of these differences, genes are responsible. The birds’ DNA, after 200 years or less of adaptation, has diverged from that of their rural ancestors.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opini ... ought.html
From Fins Into Hands: Scientists Discover a Deep Evolutionary Link
Extract:
On Wednesday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago reported that our hands share a deep evolutionary connection not only to bat wings or horse hooves, but also to fish fins.
The unexpected discovery will help researchers understand how our own ancestors left the water, transforming fins into limbs that they could use to move around on land.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/scien ... d=71987722
Extract:
On Wednesday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago reported that our hands share a deep evolutionary connection not only to bat wings or horse hooves, but also to fish fins.
The unexpected discovery will help researchers understand how our own ancestors left the water, transforming fins into limbs that they could use to move around on land.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/scien ... d=71987722
The Book That Deflated Darwin Day
If someone prior to 2012 had predicted that Oxford University Press would publish a book with the title Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, one might have wondered about his sanity, or at least about how familiar he was with current discourse in elite academia. But Oxford did in fact publish the book, and the intellectual aftershocks have yet to subside.
The book’s author, philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a professor of long standing at New York University and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and election to such august bodies as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. It is a testament to Professor Nagel’s stature that his dissent from Darwinian theory was allowed to be published at all. But his stature has not prevented a flood of abuse and even occasional suggestions of creeping senility.
It’s not often that a book by a professional philosopher attracts the notice—let alone the ire—of the cultural powers-that-be. Mind and Cosmos has been denounced in The Nation and the Huffington Post, attacked by prominent academics including evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker at Harvard and biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago, dubbed the “most despised science book of 2012” by the London Guardian, defended in the New Republic (where Nagel’s critics were blasted as “Darwinist dittoheads” and a “mob of materialists”), reported on in a feature story for the New York Times, and put on the cover of the Weekly Standard, which depicted poor Professor Nagel being burned alive while surrounded by a cabal of demonic-looking men in hoods.
Nagel attracted special displeasure for praising Darwin skeptics like mathematician David Berlinski and intelligent-design proponents like biochemist Michael Behe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer. As the New York Times explained, many of Nagel’s fellow academics view him unfavorably “not just for the specifics of his arguments but also for what they see as a dangerous sympathy for intelligent design.” Now there is a revealing comment: academics, typically blasé about everything from justifications of infanticide to the pooh-poohing of pedophilia, have concluded that it is “dangerous” to give a hearing to scholars who think nature displays evidence of intelligent design.
Unfortunately for Nagel, he is a serial offender when it comes to listening to the purveyors of such disreputable ideas. In 2009 he selected Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design as a book of the year for the Times Literary Supplement. Written by my Discovery Institute colleague Stephen Meyer (whose ideas are discussed in the original conclusion to this book), Signature in the Cell made the case for purpose in nature from the existence of the digital information embedded in DNA. After being denounced by one scientist for praising Meyer’s book, Nagel dryly recommended that the scientist should “hold his nose and have a look at the book” before dismissing it.
Apparently unconcerned about being accused of consorting with the enemy, Nagel insisted in Mind and Cosmos that “the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion.” Nagel added that he thinks this antireligious materialist worldview “is ripe for displacement”—an intriguing comment considering that he himself remains an unrepentant atheist.
Nagel ultimately offered a simple but profound objection to Darwinism: “Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself.” In other words, if our mind and morals are simply the accidental products of a blind material process like natural selection acting on random genetic mistakes, what confidence can we have in them as routes to truth?
The basic philosophical critique of Darwinian reductionism offered by Nagel had been made before, perhaps most notably by Sir Arthur Balfour, C. S. Lewis, and Alvin Plantinga. But around the same time as the publication of Nagel’s book came new scientific discoveries that undermined Darwinian materialism as well. In the fall of 2012, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project released results showing that much of so-called junk DNA actually performs biological functions. The ENCODE results overturned long-repeated claims by leading Darwinian biologists that most of the human genome is genetic garbage produced by a blind evolutionary process. At the same time, the results confirmed predictions made during the previous decade by scholars who think nature displays evidence of intelligent design.
More...
https://home.isi.org/node/68729?utm_source=Direct
If someone prior to 2012 had predicted that Oxford University Press would publish a book with the title Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, one might have wondered about his sanity, or at least about how familiar he was with current discourse in elite academia. But Oxford did in fact publish the book, and the intellectual aftershocks have yet to subside.
The book’s author, philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a professor of long standing at New York University and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and election to such august bodies as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. It is a testament to Professor Nagel’s stature that his dissent from Darwinian theory was allowed to be published at all. But his stature has not prevented a flood of abuse and even occasional suggestions of creeping senility.
It’s not often that a book by a professional philosopher attracts the notice—let alone the ire—of the cultural powers-that-be. Mind and Cosmos has been denounced in The Nation and the Huffington Post, attacked by prominent academics including evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker at Harvard and biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago, dubbed the “most despised science book of 2012” by the London Guardian, defended in the New Republic (where Nagel’s critics were blasted as “Darwinist dittoheads” and a “mob of materialists”), reported on in a feature story for the New York Times, and put on the cover of the Weekly Standard, which depicted poor Professor Nagel being burned alive while surrounded by a cabal of demonic-looking men in hoods.
Nagel attracted special displeasure for praising Darwin skeptics like mathematician David Berlinski and intelligent-design proponents like biochemist Michael Behe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer. As the New York Times explained, many of Nagel’s fellow academics view him unfavorably “not just for the specifics of his arguments but also for what they see as a dangerous sympathy for intelligent design.” Now there is a revealing comment: academics, typically blasé about everything from justifications of infanticide to the pooh-poohing of pedophilia, have concluded that it is “dangerous” to give a hearing to scholars who think nature displays evidence of intelligent design.
Unfortunately for Nagel, he is a serial offender when it comes to listening to the purveyors of such disreputable ideas. In 2009 he selected Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design as a book of the year for the Times Literary Supplement. Written by my Discovery Institute colleague Stephen Meyer (whose ideas are discussed in the original conclusion to this book), Signature in the Cell made the case for purpose in nature from the existence of the digital information embedded in DNA. After being denounced by one scientist for praising Meyer’s book, Nagel dryly recommended that the scientist should “hold his nose and have a look at the book” before dismissing it.
Apparently unconcerned about being accused of consorting with the enemy, Nagel insisted in Mind and Cosmos that “the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion.” Nagel added that he thinks this antireligious materialist worldview “is ripe for displacement”—an intriguing comment considering that he himself remains an unrepentant atheist.
Nagel ultimately offered a simple but profound objection to Darwinism: “Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself.” In other words, if our mind and morals are simply the accidental products of a blind material process like natural selection acting on random genetic mistakes, what confidence can we have in them as routes to truth?
The basic philosophical critique of Darwinian reductionism offered by Nagel had been made before, perhaps most notably by Sir Arthur Balfour, C. S. Lewis, and Alvin Plantinga. But around the same time as the publication of Nagel’s book came new scientific discoveries that undermined Darwinian materialism as well. In the fall of 2012, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project released results showing that much of so-called junk DNA actually performs biological functions. The ENCODE results overturned long-repeated claims by leading Darwinian biologists that most of the human genome is genetic garbage produced by a blind evolutionary process. At the same time, the results confirmed predictions made during the previous decade by scholars who think nature displays evidence of intelligent design.
More...
https://home.isi.org/node/68729?utm_source=Direct
How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution
The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — so how did it come to be?
A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers, berries, snail shells or, if they are near an urban area, bottle caps and plastic cutlery. Some bowerbirds even arrange the items in their collection from smallest to largest, forming a walkway that makes themselves and their trinkets all the more striking to a female — an optical illusion known as forced perspective that humans did not perfect until the 15th century.
Yet even this remarkable exhibition is not sufficient to satisfy a female flame bowerbird. Should a female show initial interest, the male must react immediately. Staring at the female, his pupils swelling and shrinking like a heartbeat, he begins a dance best described as psychotically sultry. He bobs, flutters, puffs his chest. He crouches low and rises slowly, brandishing one wing in front of his head like a magician’s cape. Suddenly his whole body convulses like a windup alarm clock. If the female approves, she will copulate with him for two or three seconds. They will never meet again.
The bowerbird defies traditional assumptions about animal behavior. Here is a creature that spends hours meticulously curating a cabinet of wonder, grouping his treasures by color and likeness. Here is a creature that single-beakedly builds something far more sophisticated than many celebrated examples of animal toolmaking; the stripped twigs that chimpanzees use to fish termites from their mounds pale in comparison. The bowerbird’s bower, as at least one scientist has argued, is nothing less than art. When you consider every element of his courtship — the costumes, dance and sculpture — it evokes a concept beloved by the German composer Richard Wagner: Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, one that blends many different forms and stimulates all the senses.
This extravagance is also an affront to the rules of natural selection. Adaptations are meant to be useful — that’s the whole point — and the most successful creatures should be the ones best adapted to their particular environments. So what is the evolutionary justification for the bowerbird’s ostentatious display? Not only do the bowerbird’s colorful feathers and elaborate constructions lack obvious value outside courtship, but they also hinder his survival and general well-being, draining precious calories and making him much more noticeable to predators.
Images and more....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/maga ... dline&te=1
The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — so how did it come to be?
A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers, berries, snail shells or, if they are near an urban area, bottle caps and plastic cutlery. Some bowerbirds even arrange the items in their collection from smallest to largest, forming a walkway that makes themselves and their trinkets all the more striking to a female — an optical illusion known as forced perspective that humans did not perfect until the 15th century.
Yet even this remarkable exhibition is not sufficient to satisfy a female flame bowerbird. Should a female show initial interest, the male must react immediately. Staring at the female, his pupils swelling and shrinking like a heartbeat, he begins a dance best described as psychotically sultry. He bobs, flutters, puffs his chest. He crouches low and rises slowly, brandishing one wing in front of his head like a magician’s cape. Suddenly his whole body convulses like a windup alarm clock. If the female approves, she will copulate with him for two or three seconds. They will never meet again.
The bowerbird defies traditional assumptions about animal behavior. Here is a creature that spends hours meticulously curating a cabinet of wonder, grouping his treasures by color and likeness. Here is a creature that single-beakedly builds something far more sophisticated than many celebrated examples of animal toolmaking; the stripped twigs that chimpanzees use to fish termites from their mounds pale in comparison. The bowerbird’s bower, as at least one scientist has argued, is nothing less than art. When you consider every element of his courtship — the costumes, dance and sculpture — it evokes a concept beloved by the German composer Richard Wagner: Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, one that blends many different forms and stimulates all the senses.
This extravagance is also an affront to the rules of natural selection. Adaptations are meant to be useful — that’s the whole point — and the most successful creatures should be the ones best adapted to their particular environments. So what is the evolutionary justification for the bowerbird’s ostentatious display? Not only do the bowerbird’s colorful feathers and elaborate constructions lack obvious value outside courtship, but they also hinder his survival and general well-being, draining precious calories and making him much more noticeable to predators.
Images and more....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/maga ... dline&te=1
New Science Uprising Episode: “Programming Without a Programmer”?
Two remarkable advances in science together sealed the doom of any materialist evolutionary theory. They are the development of computer software, and the discovery that digital code lies at the foundation of life. That’s the theme of the new third episode of Science Uprising, “DNA: The Programmer.”
You’d have to be pretty insensitive to watch these six minutes through to the end without getting goosebumps, even if the information argument developed by Douglas Axe, Stephen Meyer, and other design theorists is already familiar to you:
Video at:
https://evolutionnews.org/2019/06/new-s ... rogrammer/
Atheists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins are famed scientists who freely agree on the analogy between software and genetic coding. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who ought to know, ups the ante by noting that DNA stands as a far more impressive instance of coding than the software that humans are able to devise. As Stephen Meyer says here, we know from having lived in and observed the world that “information always arises from an intelligent source.” Simply applying that knowledge to the biological information in DNA seems to command an inference to intelligent design.
Hidden in the Milky Way
We also know, as Meyer points out, that “random changes in a section of functional code or functional information is going to degrade that information long before you get to something fundamentally new. That’s the problem with the mutation-selection mechanism as an explanation for new genetic information.” To describe the difficulty of evolving a functional protein, Douglas Axe, the Caltech-trained chemical engineer, draws a striking comparison to seeking out — blindfolded! — a particular atom secreted away somewhere in the Milky Way.
“So here’s the question,” asks the masked narrator of Science Uprising: “If our DNA code is more complex than any manmade software, where did it come from? Is it possible it was authored without an author? Programmed without a programmer?” Materialists are forced back to such a conclusion, which common sense, or what Dr. Axe has called “common science,” tells us is absurd.
The episode also briefly sketches those most precious things in humans experience whose value our culture’s reigning materialism would have us deny. There’s a lot at stake. Please do consider sharing it widely.
********
New Science Uprising Episode: Evolution, Mutations, and “Fooling the Laymen”
In a lecture, Phillip Johnson cited physicist Richard Feynman on a scientist’s obligation to be honest — not only with himself or in other scientific contexts but, not one bit less, when speaking to the lay public. “You should not fool the laymen when you’re talking as a scientist.” That such a thing would need to be said is itself revealing. What’s more, Feynman insisted, you should “bend over backwards to show how you may be wrong.”
The comments are taken from a Commencement address by Feynman in 1974 at Caltech. Johnson, a founding father of modern intelligent design theory, was so moved by this that he said “I wish it could be set to music.”
As far as I know it hasn’t been set to music. But the idea is a major theme in the new Science Uprising series. Scientists fool themselves and they fool non-scientists, not about dry technical details with no special significance, but about matters that bear on huge, life-altering world picture issues. One example is the role of mutations in evolution. That is the topic of Episode 6 of Science Uprising, “Mutations: Failure to Invent.” It’s out now; see it here:
Video at:
https://evolutionnews.org/2019/07/new-s ... he-laymen/
The Alternative Perspective
The idea that random genetic mutations lead to wondrous, creative innovations is so influential that it forms the premise of a movie franchise, X-Men, that has grossed $6 billion worldwide over the past couple of decades. That’s a lot of “fooling the laymen”! The alternative perspective would be open to the possibility of creative evolution requiring intelligence guidance.
The producers of the X-Men movies aren’t scientists. However, the science media have done their best to mislead about the work of real scientists: for example, National Academy of Sciences member Richard Lenski. We’re all victims of that hype, including Hollywood moviemakers. Dismantling the hype about Lenski occupies biochemist Michael Behe for a significant part of his recent book, Darwin Devolves.
Super-Challenges Not Super-Powers
As Professor Behe explains in Science Uprising, the Long-Term Evolution Experiment conducted by Lenski has demonstrated not the creative power of unguided evolution but the occasional benefits of devolution, of breaking or disabling genes. That’s the opposite lesson from the one drawn by media such as the New York Times in reporting on Lenski’s efforts. “Think about it,” says the masked narrator of Science Uprising, against the backdrop of poignant images of people suffering from genetic illnesses, “significant mutations don’t create superpowers. They create super-challenges. Sometimes those mutations are even life-threatening.”
Behe notes that the Lenski experiment covers 60,000+ generations of E. coli bacteria, the equivalent of 1.5 million years of human evolutionary history. Yet for all the mutations observed, there are no innovations like the ones needed to produce the wonders of biology that we know. Devolutionary mutations can help organisms, but they can’t build anything. The real science uprising will come when thoughtful lay people realize they’ve been fooled on this point, and a range of others, crucial to how we understand our own origins.
Two remarkable advances in science together sealed the doom of any materialist evolutionary theory. They are the development of computer software, and the discovery that digital code lies at the foundation of life. That’s the theme of the new third episode of Science Uprising, “DNA: The Programmer.”
You’d have to be pretty insensitive to watch these six minutes through to the end without getting goosebumps, even if the information argument developed by Douglas Axe, Stephen Meyer, and other design theorists is already familiar to you:
Video at:
https://evolutionnews.org/2019/06/new-s ... rogrammer/
Atheists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins are famed scientists who freely agree on the analogy between software and genetic coding. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who ought to know, ups the ante by noting that DNA stands as a far more impressive instance of coding than the software that humans are able to devise. As Stephen Meyer says here, we know from having lived in and observed the world that “information always arises from an intelligent source.” Simply applying that knowledge to the biological information in DNA seems to command an inference to intelligent design.
Hidden in the Milky Way
We also know, as Meyer points out, that “random changes in a section of functional code or functional information is going to degrade that information long before you get to something fundamentally new. That’s the problem with the mutation-selection mechanism as an explanation for new genetic information.” To describe the difficulty of evolving a functional protein, Douglas Axe, the Caltech-trained chemical engineer, draws a striking comparison to seeking out — blindfolded! — a particular atom secreted away somewhere in the Milky Way.
“So here’s the question,” asks the masked narrator of Science Uprising: “If our DNA code is more complex than any manmade software, where did it come from? Is it possible it was authored without an author? Programmed without a programmer?” Materialists are forced back to such a conclusion, which common sense, or what Dr. Axe has called “common science,” tells us is absurd.
The episode also briefly sketches those most precious things in humans experience whose value our culture’s reigning materialism would have us deny. There’s a lot at stake. Please do consider sharing it widely.
********
New Science Uprising Episode: Evolution, Mutations, and “Fooling the Laymen”
In a lecture, Phillip Johnson cited physicist Richard Feynman on a scientist’s obligation to be honest — not only with himself or in other scientific contexts but, not one bit less, when speaking to the lay public. “You should not fool the laymen when you’re talking as a scientist.” That such a thing would need to be said is itself revealing. What’s more, Feynman insisted, you should “bend over backwards to show how you may be wrong.”
The comments are taken from a Commencement address by Feynman in 1974 at Caltech. Johnson, a founding father of modern intelligent design theory, was so moved by this that he said “I wish it could be set to music.”
As far as I know it hasn’t been set to music. But the idea is a major theme in the new Science Uprising series. Scientists fool themselves and they fool non-scientists, not about dry technical details with no special significance, but about matters that bear on huge, life-altering world picture issues. One example is the role of mutations in evolution. That is the topic of Episode 6 of Science Uprising, “Mutations: Failure to Invent.” It’s out now; see it here:
Video at:
https://evolutionnews.org/2019/07/new-s ... he-laymen/
The Alternative Perspective
The idea that random genetic mutations lead to wondrous, creative innovations is so influential that it forms the premise of a movie franchise, X-Men, that has grossed $6 billion worldwide over the past couple of decades. That’s a lot of “fooling the laymen”! The alternative perspective would be open to the possibility of creative evolution requiring intelligence guidance.
The producers of the X-Men movies aren’t scientists. However, the science media have done their best to mislead about the work of real scientists: for example, National Academy of Sciences member Richard Lenski. We’re all victims of that hype, including Hollywood moviemakers. Dismantling the hype about Lenski occupies biochemist Michael Behe for a significant part of his recent book, Darwin Devolves.
Super-Challenges Not Super-Powers
As Professor Behe explains in Science Uprising, the Long-Term Evolution Experiment conducted by Lenski has demonstrated not the creative power of unguided evolution but the occasional benefits of devolution, of breaking or disabling genes. That’s the opposite lesson from the one drawn by media such as the New York Times in reporting on Lenski’s efforts. “Think about it,” says the masked narrator of Science Uprising, against the backdrop of poignant images of people suffering from genetic illnesses, “significant mutations don’t create superpowers. They create super-challenges. Sometimes those mutations are even life-threatening.”
Behe notes that the Lenski experiment covers 60,000+ generations of E. coli bacteria, the equivalent of 1.5 million years of human evolutionary history. Yet for all the mutations observed, there are no innovations like the ones needed to produce the wonders of biology that we know. Devolutionary mutations can help organisms, but they can’t build anything. The real science uprising will come when thoughtful lay people realize they’ve been fooled on this point, and a range of others, crucial to how we understand our own origins.
Scientists Confirm: Darwinism Is Broken
Darwinian theory is broken and may not be fixable. That was the takeaway from a meeting last month organized by the world's most distinguished and historic scientific organization, which went mostly unreported by the media.
The three-day conference at the Royal Society in London was remarkable in confirming something that advocates of intelligent design (ID), a controversial scientific alternative to evolution, have said for years. ID proponents point to a chasm that divides how evolution and its evidence are presented to the public, and how scientists themselves discuss it behind closed doors and in technical publications. This chasm has been well hidden from laypeople, yet it was clear to anyone who attended the Royal Society conference, as did a number of ID-friendly scientists.
Maybe that secrecy helps explain why the meeting was so muffled in mainstream coverage.
More....
https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/davi ... rce=Direct
*****
Video: Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ToSEAj2V0s
Darwinian theory is broken and may not be fixable. That was the takeaway from a meeting last month organized by the world's most distinguished and historic scientific organization, which went mostly unreported by the media.
The three-day conference at the Royal Society in London was remarkable in confirming something that advocates of intelligent design (ID), a controversial scientific alternative to evolution, have said for years. ID proponents point to a chasm that divides how evolution and its evidence are presented to the public, and how scientists themselves discuss it behind closed doors and in technical publications. This chasm has been well hidden from laypeople, yet it was clear to anyone who attended the Royal Society conference, as did a number of ID-friendly scientists.
Maybe that secrecy helps explain why the meeting was so muffled in mainstream coverage.
More....
https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/davi ... rce=Direct
*****
Video: Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ToSEAj2V0s