As I sat down on the metro last Saturday, I noticed three magazines on the seat. The first two were Awake! magazine and The Watchtower: “Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom”. The third magazine — I’m not making this up — was the April 2009 edition of Metro Weekly: Washington’s Gay & Lesbian News Magazine. I would love to know who was sitting there before I was.

I hope that the issue of Awake! is targeted at children, considering the lack of complexity in their articles. I also hope that no child reads it, considering its misrepresentation of evolution. In a short section “Was it Designed?” the magazine marvels at the toucan’s beak:

The consistency of the toucan’s beak has been compared to that of a hard sponge. Some parts of it are hollow, while other parts are made up of beams and membranes. The result is a lightweight beak that has astounding strength. “It’s almost as if the toucan has a deep knowledge of mechanical engineering,” says [materials scientist Mark Andre] Myers…

As a friend of mine noted, my circulatory system works remarkably well and yet I do not possess a deep knowledge of hydraulics. But I digress. The ending was the most frustrating:

What do you think? Did the toucan’s strong but lightweight beak come about by chance? Or was it designed?

How about C) neither of the above? I think the beak is a result of cumulative natural selection. Awake! seems to be implying that something so successful couldn’t have “come about by chance” and so it must be designed. This great mini-lesson from the University of Indiana’s Evolution & the Nature of Science Institutes would have been helpful:

This lesson provides an elegant, easy way for students to actually compare Darwin’s cumulative non-random selection with the non-cumulative version so often erroneously implied. Students working in pairs attempt to produce a full sequence of 13 cards of one suit (ace – to king). This must be done by shuffling the suit of cards for each round, then checking the cards. Half the teams must look for the full sequence each time, and repeat the process until this is accomplished. The other teams start to “build” their sequence by pulling the ace when it first appears as the top card, then adding to the stack whenever the “next” card for the sequence is shuffled to the top. Discussion clearly reveals how the second method mimics Darwinian natural selection, while the first does not.

Of course, there are some significant differences between this activity and evolution. The students have a desired outcome and are only accepting shuffles that get closer to that ace-king “strong/lightweight beak.” But there’s no reason to assume that nature had to result in that particular beak. Over time the successful random changes propagate while the unsuccessful changes don’t. In that sense, we don’t necessarily know which random mutations and variations will occur, but we know any that stick around will be successful for their environment. The toucan’s variation could have exploited a different niche in its environment, and Awake! would be marveling: “Did the toucan’s incredible, narrow, and flexible beak come about by chance? Or was it designed?”

It’s not chance that the toucan’s beak is successful. It is chance that this particular model is what happened, but I’m not going to give Awake! magazine credit for having that degree of nuance in their question.

Here at the American Humanist Association, we get all sorts of calls, letters, and emails.  A few months ago, a woman named Janina Balabat sent us a copy of her book entitled Conversations with an Atheist along with a handwritten note.  The title intrigued me a bit, and I opened it to see which famous atheist she had spoken with.

Nobody.  She imagines that she poses her questions to an atheist then imagines that he’s stumped.  Her chapter “Answers from an Atheist” begins:

I can picture that my dear atheist friend stopped for a moment and listened attentively as I asked all of my questions.  He grew slightly uncomfortable and his face turned red.  He found himself in deep silence.  He then began talking to himself, “I’m such a powerful person.  I know so much of life, of nature, and not only of things on Earth, but of the nature of the other planets.  I’ve read many educational books.  Yet, I do not have answers to these life questions.  Why can’t I answer?  Why don’t I have any answers?  Why don’t I know?  Why don’t I know who set everything up so wonderfully?  Why don’t I know my Creator?”

This tactic is the very epitome of a straw man argument.  She must not have met (m)any atheists, since her caricature of us is beyond cliche and I doubt very much that an atheist would ask why he doesn’t know his ‘Creator’.

I thank Janina Balabat for her book and her good intentions.  I can picture that she stops for a moment as she realizes that her argument is attacking a straw man.  She finds herself in deep silence.  She then asks herself, “How could I paint such an uninformed caricature of atheists?  Why didn’t I just make some nonreligious friends and talk to them?  Would that have helped me understand them?”

Most of Conversations with an Atheist is Balbat quoting Bible passages at the reader, without ever convincing us that the Bible speaks the truth.  If she had actually discussed this issue with the atheists she considers her audience–and she says she wants every atheist in the world to read it–then perhaps she wouldn’t have spent 400 pages citing a source we don’t consider credible.

To help her meet more atheists, I thought I would try to connect her with Daniel Dennett.  I instantly thought of him as I read this passage of her book:

Not only has nature created beauty for the eyes, but she has also remembered to fill our stomach.  She has prepared tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic, pumpkins, cantaloupes, apples, pears, potatoes, beets, white cabbage, and cauliflower.  Nature knows that man likes sweetness, and she has therefore created the little bee, which works so hard all of its life to prepare sweet honey to satisfy a person’s life, to enhance it and make it sweeter and happier.

Dennett even used honey as an example in a fascinating lecture “Darwin’s Other Strange Inversion” at TED Talks:

For those of you who can’t watch the video, here’s the part I found particularly apt:

It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet, guys go for girls like this because they are sexy, we adore babies because they are so cute, and of course we are amused by jokes because they are funny.  This is all backwards…

Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar-detector because sugar is high energy, and has been wired up to the “preferer” to put it very crudely.  And that’s why we ‘like’ sugar.  Honey is sweet because we like it, not: we like it because honey is sweet.  There is nothing intrinsically sweet about honey.  If you looked at glucose molecules until you were blind you won’t see why they tasted sweet.  You have to look in our brains to understand why they are sweet.

We humans are a result of our environment; we evolved to experience honey as sweet and pleasurable because it provides us with energy.  We change to fit our environment, the environment is not specially designed with us in mind.  It would be like marveling at how well the bottle was designed to fit the water inside it.

As humans, we fancy ourselves to be unique creatures. That is why Jane Goodall’s landmark study of the chimpanzees of Gombe, Tanzania, in the early 1960′s caused such initial disbelief in the wider scientific community. Jane Goodall was the first scientist to observe the behavior of tool making and tool use by chimpanzees, which, by extension, made her to the first person to document the use of tools by any animal other than humans. Anthropologists had long defined human beings as “man the tool maker”, and, as the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey exclaimed in response to Jane Goodall’s initial report, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

We now know that several species of animals are capable of using tools. But a chimpanzee named Santino, living in captivity at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden, has pushed our understanding of chimp behavior (and human uniqueness) forward once again. In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers documented Santino’s recurrent behavior of calmly collecting rocks and breaking apart chunks of the concrete in his zoo enclosure in the morning and then subsequently using the stockpile of projectiles to throw at zoo visitors later in the day. Santino is a 31-year old alpha male, and he never attacked the other chimps in his enclosure. He reserved his ire (and projectiles) only for humans.

This is amazing. Even recently, I read that one of the defining characteristics of humans is that we are capable of thinking about the future in an abstract way and making plans. And yet Santino directly challenges that idea. As one of the researchers quote in the Associated Press article stated:

“These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way,” said the author of the report, Lund University Ph.D. student Mathias Osvath. “It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events.”

In other words, Santino had thought about what he wanted to do and how he could do it. And he wasn’t acting in a blind rage but rather with premeditation, because several hours (and sometimes days) separated his stockpiling of weapons and his assaults on zoo visitors.

While much time and talk has been spent on the subject of intelligent life in other corners of the universe, we have so much more to learn about intelligent life on our own planet. As we start to understand more and more how intelligence is a continuum and that chimpanzees and humans have more in common than we previously imagined, I hope that we also rededicate ourselves to protecting this endangered species.

A recent New York Times article discusses some developments in anthropology that shed light on the complex evolutionary origins of human behavior. Apparently, fundamental insights into human evolution can be gained just by watching how babies and adults interact:

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.

The article goes on to discuss how cooperative parenting, such as sharing in the raising of village children, is a human behavior that is both common around the world and also built on social trust. Another key paragraph explains:

Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

In other words, during our species’ early formative years, the population density was so low that warfare between populations of humans was highly unlikely. Rather, cooperative behaviors were evolving; women who could leave their children in the care of others for a day could be more effective gatherers, for example. It seems that this cooperation and trust is built into our species today; for example, Dr. Hrdy notes in the article that humans operate with an implicit trust that other members of our species will not harm us as a matter of normal day-to-day behavior.

I’ve long objected to the overuse of the term “human nature.” Not because I doubt that humans have some characteristics that may be so universal as to be ascribed to an inherent human nature, but rather because the term is so often employed to present an incomplete observation in the guise of some sort of universal truth about Homo sapiens sapiens. Think about how often you have heard someone say, “It’s human nature to make war,” or, “we’ll never get rid of greed, it’s human nature,” or “it’s human nature to lie, steal, etc.” It seems to be a prop for pessimism, an excuse to doubt humanity’s potential, a reason to maintain the status quo in light of a fear of change.

The reality is, of course, that whatever nature that humans have inborn in us, or hard-wired, is extraordinarily intricate. Human beings are capable of warfare and destruction, but they are also capable of acts of heroism and compassion. I don’t want to belabor this rather obvious point — that human behavior and its origins are very complex — but it is good to keep that in mind, as one of the most common criticisms that secular humanists receive in the U.S. is that we somehow cannot have any kind of morality because it isn’t anchored in some sort of god or holy text. To someone like me, who was raised in a freethinking household and considers himself to be both a lifelong humanist and a moral person, this criticism is absurd. Just as absurd is the idea that humans have some sort of innate destructiveness that must be checked by the threat of hellfire. Secular humanists know that they have no such original sin and need no such external threat to hold it back. As humans we are already capable of functioning as a society without some invisible eye monitoring our behavior– it is what we evolved to do.

The world is far from a perfect place, and much ugliness persists. The story of this ugliness, of destruction and war, is as complicated as the road that we followed to our big brains and upright gait. But assuming that killing is so inherent in our nature as to be an immutable characteristic is to ignore a huge part of the story, a story that may be simply understood the next time you look upon an infant that is no relation to you but still feel the instinctual urge to protect that child as if it were your own.

Mark your calendars: Darwin Day is just around the corner!

Darwin Day, a project of the Institute for Humanist Studies, celebrates the birthday of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin with events all around the world on or around February 12. The year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, so many organizations will be going the extra mile. Science organizations that are part of the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) have already declared 2009 “The Year of Science.”

The Institute for Humanist Studies recently launched a newly designed Darwin Day website at www.darwinday.org. Groups and individuals can post their Darwin Day events, submit photographs and artwork, or learn more about Darwin’s significance in the scientific community.

The website’s launch couldn’t come at a better time in light of an article in today’s Dallas News: In Texas, three critics of evolution were appointed to a six-member State Board of Education committee that reviews curriculum standards for public school science classes.

It probably comes as no surprise that one of the appointees is the vice president of the anti-evolution think tank Discovery Institute, while another is a signer of the Institute’s “Dissent from Darwinism” document which states, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

But progressive groups are speaking out:

Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller, who frequently spars with social conservative groups, called it “simply stunning that any state board members would even consider appointing authors of an anti-evolution textbook to a panel of scientists.” The textbook is titled Explore Evolution.

“Texas universities boast some of the leading scientists in the world,” said Ms. Miller, of the progressive, nonprofit group. “It’s appalling that some state board members turned to out-of-state ideologues to decide whether Texas kids get a 21st century science education.”

Miller hits it right on the nose. I hope that the Texas Freedom Network and other grassroots efforts to counter the so-called ‘intelligent design’ movement find success and keep all forms of education masking as creationism out of our public schools.

Suddenly, Darwin Day seems more than just a party with a birthday cake–it’s a battle for the future of science education. What will you be doing?

File this one under better late than never:

The Church of England owes Charles Darwin an apology for misunderstanding his theory of evolution and making errors over its reaction to it, a senior clergyman said today…

An essay by the Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, the church’s head of public affairs, called Good Religion Needs Good Science directly addresses Darwin. It concludes: “We try to practise the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests.

The essay, posted here on the Church of England’s website, states that the Church of England was wrong to lash out at Darwin, but goes on to say that Darwin’s work has been misapplied in the form of “Social Darwinism” and used as a justification for racism. The author writes:

‘Darwinism’ has become something bigger than Darwin’s own theories, and raises many moral questions. This doesn’t make the church of the 1860s right to have attacked Darwin, but it does suggest that the question is deeper than deciding whose side you would have been on in that historic debate between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Darwin’s supporter, Thomas Huxley.

Despite all of the attention that this essay has received in the British media, the Church of England is quick to say that this isn’t really an apology. The Guardian notes:

A Church of England spokesman said Brown’s piece was a “personal view” of Darwin’s contribution to science and did not amount to an official apology by the church.

This essay is part of a website launched today by the Church of England about evolution. It comes on the heels of a controversy stoked by comments from the Rev. Professor Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society, who called for creationism to be taught in science education classes in the UK, calling it a “legitimate worldview.”

In a June 25th article from the Science section of the New York Times we discover that the latest link between fish and tetrapods has been discovered.  The 365 million year old skull and sundry body parts discovered in Latvia is thought to be the oldest tetrapod, or four-legged creature in the Earth’s history.  The discovery continues to close in on the transition between fish to four-legged animals “by presenting the skull, exceptionally preserved braincase, shoulder girdle and partial pelvis of Ventastega curonica from the Late Devonian of Latvia, a transitional intermediate form between the ‘elpistostegids’ Panderichthys and Tiktaalik and the Devonian tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) Acanthostega and Ichthyostega.”

Now the sixty-four million dollar question; So how does this knowledge benefit us today?  Well as biologist Neil Shubin explains:

“When you know how to look, fish are just one way station in our historical path. In fact, we share deep similarities with all living creatures on our planet. Seeing the history inside our bodies is like peeling an onion: The first layers we see reveal the history we share with primates (large brains and opposable thumbs). Peel deeper and we find the layers of history shared with other mammals (hair and breasts), reptiles (our distinctive way of chewing food), fish (arms, legs, backbones and heads), worms (an anus on one side of the body and a mouth on the other), jellyfish (the DNA recipe that builds our bodies), sponges (our many celled bodies) and so on.

Even as we are discovering more about the DNA that builds animal bodies (including our own), new fossils from around the world are continuing to crop up that help explain our anatomical history. Just as we have a family tree that extends to our parents, grandparents and so on, our human family tree extends to other living beings. The same DNA technology that allows courts and forensics experts to identify perpetrators and fathers allows us to categorize the relationships between our species and others. Do this and we see that inside every organ, cell and gene of our bodies lies more than 3.5 billion years of the history of life.”

If we didn’t share a history with the everything from bacteria to apes, we might not have the physical ails that afflict us.  The evolutionary path that winds through the many twists and turns that have created our less than perfect and at times fragile physiques.  Still, the problems we share through are evolutionary history also mean we can study other species mean that work with flies and bacteria may be the source of great medical advances for humans. Work on a worm that is no bigger than a comma is helping us understand how our genetic material functions in both health and disease. 

Our shared history makes it possible for work done on flies and even worms to lead to health advances for our own species.  I think we ignore these possibilities at our own peril.  Again as Neil Shubin says,  Is there any more powerful statement about the importance of our deep evolutionary connection to the rest of life than that?”

Dinesh D’Souza is nothing if not prolific. Saying that, he is also very shrewd. However, I think he overreached himself in his article, “What Science Cannot Tell Us.” He tries to prove the limits of science with the argument that the really important questions can’t be answered by science.Let’s look at his summary of the argument:

Consider some of the most important questions facing us as human beings: Why are we here? Where ultimately did we come from? Where are we going? Science can provide us with very limited answers. As the philosopher Wittgenstein once put it, one has the feeling that even if all possible scientific knowledge could been obtained, the biggest questions of life would remain largely untouched and unanswered.

He shrewdly quotes Wittgenstein to give authority to his statement, but does the argument really play out?“Where ultimately did we come from?” Scientists are making great strides into the questions of where we came from both as species on planet earth and how the cosmos evolved. I don’t have time to demonstrate these (could anyone) but these articles can give a flavor of these advances.

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab
Laurence Krauss Takes on the Universe
Talk Origins

D’Souza is very clever in how he downplays science in the article:

I call this the “atheism of the gaps.” The basic idea is that if science hasn’t figured something out, just wait a few years, because the brilliant scientists are working on it. Have faith that they will come up with good answers in the future, just as they have in the past. In other words, we should assume that people who are smart enough to make toasters are also smart enough to figure out whether there is life after death.

He dismisses scientists as folks who make toasters. It would be laughable if it weren’t so affective. Also by creating the phrase “atheism of the gaps” he tries to dismiss the “God of the gaps” by turning the argument on its head. The problem with his argument is that it isn’t “atheism of the gaps” but it’s really science advancing into the gaps. And unlike the “God of the gaps” whose area of influence grows smaller with each scientific advance, science grows more impressive and awe inspiring as it advances into the gaps.

Can we see where we’re coming from?Is it scary to some people? I think the answer in both cases is yes. Why are we here? I suppose the answer that nature of this planet and the way bacterium evolved into eventually up to man is not a real answer to some people, and yet it is fascinating and humbling. We are a part of this planet and related to everything on it. How can one not be awed by such a realization?

The Louisiana House voted to for a bill called the “Louisiana Science Education Act” which is supposed to promote “critical thinking” by students on topics such as evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning. Pity the bill doesn’t seem to be designed to actually promote critical thinking but appears to be an attempt to get religion in the form of intelligent design and any other method into the science class room. As American’s United describes it:”the bill would promote teaching creationism in public schools and said some teachers might use supplemental materials produced by fundamentalist Christian organizations.”

I’m all for teachers being able to teach controversial subjects but I don’t think anyone wants religious debates being carried on in the classroom. As Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and a founding member of the Louisiana Coalition for Science (LCFS), says,

“The legislature shouldn’t be allowing creationists to undermine Louisiana public schools. The House of Representatives just gave the Religious Right a green light to use other people’s children for their own agenda.”

Patsye Peebles, a veteran biology teacher from Baton Rouge and a founding member of the LCFS adds,

“I was a biology teacher for 22 years, and I never needed the legislature to tell me how to present anything. This bill doesn’t solve any of the problems classroom teachers face, and it will make it harder for us to keep the focus on accurate science in science classrooms. Evolution isn’t scientifically controversial, and we don’t need the legislature substituting its judgment for the scientists and science teachers who actually know the subject.”

Similar bills have been introduced in several states over the past year and have been supported by opponents of evolution. I fear this may be the issue republicans use to mobilize voters for the upcoming election. This could be a devasting turn of events for science education in America.

Today is Darwin Day, and what better way to celebrate than with some primordial soup and maybe a sandwich? (See TedBlog for the validity of adding the sandwich.)

I’ve been enjoying Evolution on PBS with narration by Liam Neeson. It’s a great resource for what evolution is and how it works, for example, to make an eye or a wing. Other good sources are Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable or the video Growing Up in the Universe.

Why not throw a party with either video? Then there’d be no fooling us about transitional fossils. No one would trick us about complex design of eyes or wings. The only thing not covered in the above suggestions is abiogenesis. Fortunately, you can find abiogenesis on the net.

So I suggest a Darwin Day resolution for a bit of entertainment and education. Besides nothing feels better than being able to say “Why yes, actually, half an eye could be quite useful” and being able to explain why. Ah the power of a little science and a little learning.