The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Pigs have 'evolved to love mud'", Victoria Gill explains (BBC News, 29 April 2011). Dutch researcher Marc Bracke from Wageningen University and Research Centre theorizes that

... the behaviour could have evolved in pigs' most ancient relatives."We all evolved from fish, so it could be that this motivation to be in water could be something that was preserved in animals that are able to do so."

For many animals, this would be too dangerous, because watering holes are ideal places for predators to ambush their prey.

"But pigs, like many carnivores, are relatively large animals with enlarged canine teeth, so they would be better able to fend off an attack."
So rather than pigs needing to cool down in mud because they do not have [functional] sweat glands, Dr Bracke thinks that they "did not evolve functional sweat glands like other ungulates because they liked wallowing so much".

He points out that pigs are related to whales and hippos and that the behavior is probably a "hardwired" preference for shallow water that" could have been a turning point in the evolution of whales from land-dwelling mammals."

Hmmm. Some think pigs evolved to love snow:

A herd of 25 to 30 feral pigs is tearing up backyards and scaring locals and tourists near Christina Lake in B.C."Nothing about them is very pleasant. There are emails going back and forth from people who are concerned that they could get confrontational and aggressive," said Grace McGregor, regional district director for the area, which is north of Grand Forks on Highway 3.

"I'm very, very concerned about people out walking and hiking. I certainly don't want anything happening to anyone."

The pigs are believed to have escaped from a farm in the area a few years ago.

- Tracy Sherlock, "Feral pigs pose threat to hikers", Vancouver Sun (March 21, 2011)

Some are struck by how swiftly and successfully the highly bred domestic pigs reverted to an apparent feral condition.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

An apparently reasonable thesis re the origin of human societies is offer by an archaeology team that argues (Science 22 April 2011),

Early Farmers Went Heavy on the Starch

Recent evidence shows that agriculture began in fits and starts in the Near East, more than 10,000 years ago. Now a U.S.-German team is gathering the first comprehensive evidence that the earliest farmers in the Levant ate a wide variety of plants, including starchy tubers, which may have allowed them to experiment with grain cultivation without fear of starvation, the team reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting.

Their view dovetails with the observation that hunter-gatherer societies do not, as a rule, innovate much over millennia. Innovation happened rapidly, by comparison, in agricultural societies.

Contrary to optimistic Darwinian claims (new finch species every 200 years), animals and plants do not change much by themselves over millennia. So if humans do not breed them, humans can't change much either. Hence, "we've always done it this way ..." millennially!

Farming: intelligently redesigning a food source for better service in a given location

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

No, not what you think: More from Raymond Tallis, this time "What neuroscience cannot tell us about ourselves" (New Atlantis, Fall 2010), debunking "the tropes of neuromythology.":

So when we are talking about the brain, we are talking about nothing more than a piece of matter. If we keep this in mind, we will have enough ammunition to demonstrate the necessary failure of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and conscious behavior.

It is a pure dedication to materialism that lies behind another common neuroscientistic claim, one that arises in response to the criticism that there are characteristics of consciousness that neuroscience cannot explain. The response is a strangely triumphant declaration that that which neuroscience cannot grasp does not exist. This declaration is particularly liable to be directed at the self and at free will, those two most persistent “illusions.” But even neuroscientists themselves don’t apply this argument consistently: they don’t doubt that they think they are selves, or that they have the illusion that they act freely — and yet, as we will see, there is no conceivable neural explanation of these phenomena. We are therefore justified in rejecting the presumption that if neuroscience cannot see it, then it does not exist.

Of course, Francis Crick called his idea "You are nothing but a pack of neurons", the Astonishing Hypothesis.

Tallis castigates those who Tallis castigates those who dump on free will too.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

According to "Evolution of Human 'Super-Brain' Tied to Development of Bipedalism, Tool-Making" ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2011),

Scientists seeking to understand the origin of the human mind may want to look to honeybees -- not ancestral apes -- for at least some of the answers, according to a University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist.

It's not known how many entomologists agree but,
U-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker said there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite variety of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the "super-brain," or collective mind, an event that took place in Africa no later than 75,000 years ago.[ ... ]

Among other creatures on Earth, the honeybee may be the best example of an organism that has mastered the trick of communicating complex information -- including maps of food locations and information on potential nest sites from one brain to another -- using their intricate "waggle dance."

"Humans obviously evolved a much wider range of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most important being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Individual human brains within social groups became integrated into a neurologic Internet of sorts, giving birth to the mind."
So that's it then. That's how we know.

File under: Theories of consciousness, along with the following:

In a recent book on consciousness, Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi helpfully provide a list—which they emphasize is not exhaustive—of theories that account for the relationship between mind and brain, including Spinoza’s dual-aspect theory, Malebranche’s occasionalism, Leibniz’s parallelism and doctrine of preestablished harmony, identity theory, central state theory, neutral monism, logical behaviorism, token physicalism, type physicalism, token epiphenomenalism, type epiphenomenalism, anomalous monism, emergent materialism, eliminative materialism, and functionalism (various types).

- The Spiritual Brain, p. 110

Tag as Superbrain: ("jackpot" theory of consciousness)

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From New Scientist we learn, "Shamed Harvard scientist is barred from the classroom" (Peter Aldhous, 21 April 2011):

Marc Hauser, the prominent animal cognition researcher found guilty of scientific misconduct by Harvard University last year, is to receive no rapid rehabilitation by his closest colleagues.

He's the one who made Discover's Top Ten Retractions list (# 3) fr unsubstantiable claims about monkey minds.

According to The Boston Globe, members of the university's psychology faculty voted in February not to allow Hauser to teach in the department in the 2011-2012 academic year. Following the vote, Michael Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, decided that he shouldn't be allowed to teach in other departments, either.

"Could the forthcoming book Evilicious have tipped the applecart?"

Hauser, on leave of absence, was scheduled to teach two classes,"Hot Topics in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience" and "Origins of Evil", about which he was writing a book, Evilicious (Viking Penguin):

Marc Hauser, Evolutionary Biologist

Marc Hauser’s award-winning research, at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, is aimed at understanding how the minds of human and nonhuman animals evolved. By studying nonhuman animals (monkeys, apes, dogs) in both the wild and in captivity, as well as human infants and adults, Hauser’s work has unlocked some of the mysteries of language evolution, conceptual representation, social cooperation, communication and morality.

The author of five books--including The Evolution of Communication, Wild Minds and Moral Minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong--he is currently working on a book called Evilicious: why we evolved a taste for being bad (Viking/Penguin.)

Dr. Hauser is a Harvard College Professor, Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Human Evolutionary Biology, Co-Director of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Program and Director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory.

Also go here and here.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The Earth as its continents would have been seen from space, starting 500 million years ago just before the Cambrian explosion (courtesy MSNBC Cosmiclog):

As he built the visualizations, Mendez said he was struck by the fact that the distribution of land mass among the continents has changed dramatically over the past 750 million years, but the total land area has stayed consistent – between about 10 and 30 percent of total surface area. "I was expecting to see more," he said.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), has this to say about design theory as a legitimate approach to science:

I'll start with Ken Miller's 2008 book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul. In additon to giving straightforward biology-based criticisms of Behe's irreducible complexity argument ... Miller also has a more fundamental critique of intelligent design (the "Battle for America's Soul" part).

Miller makes the claim that the intelligent design movement doesn't just want to "win the battle against Darwin"; the intelligent design movement wants to "win the greater war against science itself." This claim that the intelligent design movement is anti-science is quite a strong claim. The way intelligent design proponents typically portray their activity is that they are looking for scientific evidence for the existence of a designer. This may be confused science, but it's not anti-science. Moreover, some intelligent design proponents, like Behe, are tenured professors in science departments at legitimate academic institutions, who publish standard scientific articles in standard scientific journals. It would greatly surprise me if these people were anti-science. Perhaps some intelligent design proponents do argue in a way that is anti-science, butt those aren't the most intellectually respectable proponents of intelligent design. Those aren't the proponents of intelligent design who should be taken seriously.

Miller makes this strong claim that intelligent design is trying to win a war against science, but unfortunately he provides minimal evidence for this claim. (p. 111

Having studied the matter himself, Monton concludes,

It's pretty clear to me, judging from everything I've read by Dembski, that he intends the latter, pro-science, reading. I couldn't fully defend this by giving an example or two; the only way to really defend this claim is to read a lot of Dembski's work, and (in my opinion, at least) it becomes clear that Dembski is pro-science; he's just not pro-naturalism, and hence he's not pro-naturalism-as-a-scientific-methodology. (p. 139)

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

... Expelled

The late Karl Popper, universally regarded as a referee of what constitutes a valid scientific theory, complained that Darwinian selection is not, strictly speaking, a scientific theory because it can neither make predictions nor be rigorously tested above the micro-level, where it is a mere truism. Unlike Einstein's theory of gravity, the idea of evolution by natural selection is in principle not falsifiable. No matter what the complexity of an organism, a Darwinist can always make up an "adaptive" story explaining its origin. And when pressed to explain a severe problem like the usefulness of incipient organs, he can take refuge in the unobservable. This was Darwin's own tactic in later editions of the Origin, where he seems chiefly to argue that since the transitional stages of animal groups are hidden, his theory cannot well be refuted.

Fierce protests from the Darwinian camp eventually caused Popper to retract his criticism without explaining why. The retreat was also demanded by Popper’s own philosophical materialism.

- Catholic writer George Sim Johnston, Did Darwin Get It Right?: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution (Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 1998), p. 62.

Fast forward from 1978 when Popper recanted with no clear explanation to 1998 when Sim wrote, to 2011, and we find that philosophical materialists such as Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini have no problem critiquing Darwinism.

Are atheists braver today? Or has something changed?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), asks,

After much seeking, you finally reach the oracle. You've come equipped with a long list of questions, but when the Oracle sees you, she says: "Look, I'm busy, I only have time to answer one question. I know you've been thinking about intelligent design, and I'm glad you understand the doctrine now; Monton has given the right definition. I'll give you two options. Do you want to know whether intelligent design in science, or do you want to know whether intelligent design is true?" (P. 75)

Well?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

First, here's Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg:

... There is also a less creditable reason for hostility to the idea of a multiverse, based on the fact that we will never be able to observe any subuniverses except our own. Livio and Rees, and Tegmark have given thorough discussions of various other ingredients of accepted theories that we will never be able to observe, without our being led to reject these theories. The test of a physical theory is not that everything in it should be observable and every prediction it makes should be testable, but rather that enough is observable and enough predictions are testable to give us confidence that the theory is right.

- Steven Weinberg, "Living in the Multiverse," The Nature of Nature, p. 554

So, for a free copy of The Nature of Nature what would be acceptable evidence that other such universes exist? Contest Judged Saturday, April 23.

Enter by posting a comment here.

You may get some ideas here.

Here are the winners for the April 9 contest, Darwin's Doom.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Just recently, I learned that some Darwin lobbyists are attempting to get redress for the fact that the journal Synthese was forced to disclaim an unscholarly attack on Baylor philosophy professor Frank Beckwith in one of their guest-edited issues.

Indeed!

I can shed a bit of light on the affair. Frank Beckwith contacted me January 31, and we later spoke by phone. His problem was this. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy prof at Southeastern Louisiana University (and author of anti-ID screed The Trojan Horse) , had published a hostile account of his life and work in Synthese which implied that he was an ID advocate.

That was astonishing because we are led to expect that profs do their homework. Thus, Forrest should have known what everyone else does, that Beckwith is no such thing. I wrote about Beckwith’s rift with the ID theorists years ago here, and took the view then that he had made his point far more loudly than was necessary, under the circumstances. My personal relationship with him, slight as it was, stemmed from the fact that he returned to full communion with the Roman Catholic Church at a time (May 2007) when he was president of an evangelical scholars society (and, of course, had to resign).

Well, Beckwith rightly suspected that I am tired of the "Madame DeFarge" element that currently blights academic life, forever pointing the finger at supposed enemies of the people. I told him that, were he given the right to speak in his own defense, he could count on me to allow as many people as possible to know. He also told me, though I cannot now remember when, that the misleading material about him had been disowned by the journal. Good thing, that.

My response was not due to great affection for his views, which I have critiqued here.

No, it came down to "Madame Dufarge" vs. "Or we can be philosophers"(Beckwith) - a matchup I thought very much in the public interest. Who, after all, should rule philosophy? Madame Defarge or the philosophers?

We shall see which side Synthese comes out on, in face of the Darwin lobby’s agitation.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Nicholas Dames asks "Why bother?" (N+1, April 13, 2001) with the humanities these days, offering,

Last February, a professor of biology and Harvard PhD named Amy Bishop, having recently been denied tenure by the University of Alabama in Hunstville, released the contents of a nine-millimeter pistol on her colleagues during a departmental faculty meeting. She killed the department’s chair and two others. Three more were wounded. Startling as the homicides were, and though they ratcheted up the common, unglamorous tensions of the tenure process to something fit for a media spectacle, they were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education.

Unless, that is, you were unfortunate enough to peruse the reader comments on the New York Times’s online coverage of the killings and their aftermath. Among the helpless expressions of sadness was a large and growing strain of anger amounting to celebration. What was bizarre about the reaction was that, though Bishop worked in the Department of Biological Sciences, most of the commenters’ rage was directed toward the humanities. The dozens of hateful posts?—?however incoherent their stated reasons?—?were troubling moreover because they borrowed the rhetoric of neoliberal reform. Away with unjust privileges (like tenure), away with the guardians of unmonetizable knowledge (the humanities, the speculative sciences), away with any kind of refuge from the competitive market! Academics may not need to worry much about hostile gunfire, but they do need to worry, more than ever, about the more legal means by which hostility toward the academy gets expressed.

One way of directing contempt as well as hostility toward the humanities is to subsume them under pseudo-disciplines like evolutionary psychology. Go here, here, and here for plenty of examples.

Nancy Pearcey's recent Saving Leonardo attempts to provide a way forward.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At Religion Dispatches, Laurie "Devil in Dover" Lebo reports, "Anti-Science Bill Passes Tennessee House":

The bill, which has yet to pass the Senate, would require teachers to be helped "to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies." It also says that teachers may not be prohibited from "helping students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught."Those "controversial" theories would include, "Biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Many educrats prefer that none of these topics, nor any others that they may from time to time propose, be treated as in any way controversial - and certainly not by parents or taxpayers.

Here is another view:

Late last week, the lower chamber of the Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill preventing public school administrators from obstructing the efforts of any teacher to help:… students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

The bill, HB 386, alternatively styled the Tennessee Academic Freedom Bill and the Critical Thinking Bill, was passed by a significant majority of the Tennessee House in a vote of 70-23. The measure was sent to the State Senate on Thursday of last week, where it will be debated by the Senate Education Committee.

The bill’s chief sponsor in the House, Representative Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), said the purpose is to promote "critical thinking" in science classes. Predictably, opponents of the proposed law insist that it is merely “a backdoor means of teaching creationism....”

Dunn continued the defense of his proposal, explaining that, "Some of the best teachable moments are when you're discussing things, and when there's some give and take with the students.”

Controversies are growing around who guides the instruction of kids.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At TechCrunch (Apr 10, 2011), Sarah Lacy catches Peter Thiel in a politically incorrect moment in "We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education.":

the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. "It's what you've been told all your life, and it's how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt," Thiel says.

[ ... ]

But Thiel's issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it's fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people's best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary. "If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?" he says. "It's something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it's usually a justification for doing something mean. It's a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they'd be fine. Maybe that's not true."

The article is nuanced, and the writer challenges Thiel in some constructive ways.

Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Mark Buchanan suggests (08 April 2011) at New Scientist that the "Aliens who hide, survive". Attempting to explain why, if there are really so many space aliens, none of them have ever contacted us to pick up their legacies or their mail, he offers that - as always - natural selection is the answer:

In order to explain the Fermi paradox, Kent turns to natural selection – and suggests that it may favour quiet aliens.

He argues that it's plausible that there is a competition for resources on a cosmic scale, driving an evolutionary process between alien species on different planets. Advanced species, for example, might want to exploit other planets for their own purposes.

If so, the universe would be a violent place, and evolutionary selection may favour the inconspicuous – those who lie low on purpose, or who simply lack the skill or ambition to venture forth or advertise their existence.

"This is an interesting idea," says alien hunter Seth Shostak of the SETI institute in Mountain View, California. "If I let the cosmos know I exist, then I might be subject to extermination."

Actuarially, both Kent and Shostak are subject to extermination at some point ...

File under: Why dorks, dweebs, and rural morons don't believe in Darwinian evolution, but sophisticates do.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, we were apprised that the rarest of intellectual qualities, true genius, is merely an overdose of testosterone before birth.

You heard it here first and forgot it here first.

Recently, real news - of another child genius - has been making the rounds

At 12-years-old, Jacob Barnett is a genius. He's already in college, his IQ is higher than Einstein's, and for fun he's working on an expanded version of that man's theory of relativity. So far, the signs are good. Professors are astounded. So what else does a boy genius with vast brilliance do in his free time? Disprove the big bang, of course.For a minute, just a minute, try and follow his logic. He explained his thinking recently to the Indianapolis Star:

According to those who study the phenomenon, while child geniuses usually grow up to be intelligent adults,

Read more!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Howard Van Till was once one of the best-known Christian evolutionists, but since his "What good is stardust?" article in Christianity Today, arguing that nature is "fully gifted" and thus God never intervenes, he has increasingly moved toward what some describe as process theology.

He acknowledges his change of views, and has this to say in The Nature of Nature :

In what follows I shall use the term "naturalism," when unqualified, to represent neither more nor less than the rejection of supernaturalism. Stated positively, naturalism is committed to the belief that all events that occur within this Universe are consistent with and adequately explained by the system of natural causes. This commitment necessarily entails the additional belief that the system of natural causes is fully adequate to account for all events that transpire. Focusing on the issue of the Universe's formational economy, we can say that naturalism—as here defined -entails the RFEP.

In defining naturalism to be the rejection of supernaturalism, however, it is essential to understand that "supernaturalism" must be clearly understood as a term that can not glibly be treated as a synonym for "theism." Supernaturalism is but one form of theism among many. By “supernaturalism” I mean the specific form of theism (among North Americans it is perhaps the most common form) that entails a commitment to the belief that God is both able and, on occasion, willing to act coercively in the sense of exercising unilateral power over nature.

Coercive divine action is a determinative form of divine action that supersedes natural action and brings about outcomes in the world that are either beyond or contrary to the capabilities of natural action. Form-imposing interventions, of the sort discussed above, would clearly fall into the category of coercive divine action. Defining naturalism as anti-supernaturalism may be somewhat unconventional, but I have come to appreciate the fruitfulness of this approach in my own reflections on the issues at hand. Most importantly, I believe, it provides the basis for dispelling the rhetorically popular but logically mistaken notion that all forms of naturalism are enemies of all forms of theism. [all emphases author’s]

- Howard Van Till, “Cosmic Evolution, Naturalism and Divine Creativity, or Who Owns the Robust Formational Economy Principle?”, in Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski, Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in ScienceWilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011), p. 539.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From AAAS's ScienceInsider we learn: "Bill Allowing Teachers to Challenge Evolution Passes Tennessee House" (Sara Reardon, 7 April 2011):

f the bill passes, Tennessee would join Louisiana as the second state to have specific "protection" for the teaching of evolution in the classroom. The effects of the Louisiana law, which passed in 2008, are still unclear.

The bill allows teachers to

"help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught," namely, "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Mediocrats appalled: "Asserting that there are significant scientific controversies about the overall nature of these concepts when there are none will only confuse students, not enlighten them."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Stone Tools Influenced Hand Evolution in Human Ancestors, Anthropologists Say," (ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2011), we learn (repeated twice more in a single short piece), that

New research from anthropologists at the University of Kent has confirmed Charles Darwin's speculation that the evolution of unique features in the human hand was influenced by increased tool use in our ancestors.

The fact that Darwin speculated this adds greatly to the idea's credibility, in a way that mere evidence wouldn't.

Research over the last century has certainly confirmed the existence of a suite of features in the bones and musculature of the human hand and wrist associated with specific gripping and manipulatory capabilities that are different from those of other extant great apes. These features have fuelled suggestions that, at some point since humans split from the last common ancestor of living apes, the human hand evolved away from features adapted for locomotion toward alternative functions.

The article does not feature the routine searching question format of science stories: In this case, how do we know that it wasn't the other way around? Wanting tools in the first place would promote the behaviour change of ceasing to walk on one's hands. The fact that the hands are no longer weight-bearing might well simply mean that existing characteristics, previously suppressed, would flourish.

On tools and size of hands (which the authors tested): The Neanderthals have long been alleged to be too stupid to have as small, precise tools as homo sapiens of old, but when researchers actually produced Neanderthal model tools and tried them out,

Read more!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here are the edited conference proceedings (.pdf) of a roundtable discussion among leading astrobiologists, to relate atrobiology goals to planning in planetary sciences:

"The Next Phase in Our Search for Life: An Expert Discussion":

Moderator: Christopher P. McKay
Participants: Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Penelope Jane Boston, Inge L. ten Kate, Alfonso F. Davila, and Everett Shock

Some interesting stuff here:

PJB: I served for about three years on the National Research Council (NRC) Complex Panel and just about everybriefng we received from anyone within the planetary programs always included the life question, because it is something that's on everyone’s mind, whether they do this kind of science or not.

This question is one that I have struggled with a lot. To scope out the physical and chemical environment is really inextricably bound to the search for life, and it is true that we have focused a great deal on that because, truthfully, it is a lot easier to measure a physical parameter on Mars than it is to, "search for life," because that latter question is so open-ended. We have a very poor constraint set on what we actually mean by the term "life," and searching for biochemistry and macromolecules that look just like those on Earth is not an efficient approach. It is much more challenging to imagine how we would actually design a real life detection mission.

So people are tempted to shy away from coming to grips with that very difficult epistemological question, which is:

How do we know we have succeeded if we are anticipating looking for life that might be either reasonably different from us or radically different from us?

This was a dilemma that was not successfully overcome with the Viking missions, as we all know. So we had a certain paradigm that informed those missions about what life would do and how it would behave, and the experiments were all designed to that set of precepts. It was the best that could be done then. I am not sure we could do that much better now because we need a design that is openended enough to allow us to really explore, and that openendedness is really anathema in terms of the way space missions are constructed and controlled. We have a real philosophical and methodological dilemma here about how to push in the direction of greater emphasis on actual life detection missions. (P. 4) (ASTROBIOLOGYVolume 11, Number 1, 2011)

Yes, it does help to know what we are looking for.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Yes, the Bunny is dead, but his lawyers aren't, see?

You may have heard this one, from Dennis Overbye (New York Times, February 21, 2011):

Using mail-order snippets of DNA, Dr. Venter and his colleagues stitched together the million-letter genetic code of a bacterium of a goat parasite last year and inserted it into another bacterium’s cell, where it took over, churning out blue-stained copies of itself. Dr. Venter advertised his genome as the wave of future migration to the stars. Send a kit of chemicals and a digitized genome across space.

"We’ll create panspermia if it didn't already exist," he said.

The new genome included what Dr. Venter called a watermark. Along with the names of the researchers were three quotations, from the author James Joyce; Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the building of the atomic bomb; and the Caltech physicist Richard Feynman: "What I cannot build, I do not understand."

- "A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life"

Then Irish novelist James Joyce's estate threatened to sue, because Venter had allegedly violated Joyce's copyright.

And Caltech called to complain that Feynman had been misquoted:

The institute sent a photograph of an old blackboard on which Feynman had written, "What I cannot create, I do not understand."

And so, as Overbye notes, Venter's genome "is now in the process of acquiring its first, non-Darwinian mutation."

Last time we talked about Overbye's article it was to note his lighthearted approach to recently spotted "flightless words" about the origin of life.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Did Erasmus Darwin foreshadow the tweaking of his grandson’s paradigm?" (The Scientist , 2011-

Andrew D. Ellington, a University of Texas biologist tells us,

The Lamarckian idea that giraffes’ reaching for leaves resulted in longer-necked progeny seems silly to us today, primarily because we know so very much about the underlying mechanisms of genetics. And yet Lamarck may have a last laugh—think inheritance patterns in ciliates, or the effect of diet on the coat color of agouti mouse offspring. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how evolution can act…on evolution, yielding mechanisms that allow both adaptation and heritability within the course of a lifetime. And such paradigm shifts almost always have societal consequences. Manel Esteller shows that epigenetics also impacts the “dark genome” in a way that may improve cancer diagnostics. An even more far-reaching consequence is that it may prove possible to engineer epigenetics, as Bob Kingston’s Thought Experiment tacitly suggests. If so, will epigenetic engineering be subject to the same restrictions as genetic engineering? Or will this be a way that we can not merely treat disease, but possibly engineer human health into future generations?

nd in the face of so momentous a revolution in our thinking, his worry is

We can expect that epigenetics will be held up as the forerunner of that bastard child of Creationism, Intelligent Design.

Such limited aims in the face of so vast an ocean of possibilities.

Not only is he right in his concerns, such as they are, but it helps to see why he is right. In the f first place, modern Darwinism is a narrow cult compared to what Darwin actually proposed about how evolution occurs. For example, as David Tyler notes,

Brooks' search for a way forward led him to the view that Neo-Darwinism differs from Darwinism "on a number of important issues". He refers to the New Synthesis as the "Hardened Synthesis". Nine statements are presented to show the difference between Darwin's view (as expressed in the sixth edition of the Origin) and views held by neo-Darwinians. Brooks argues strongly that changes in evolutionary theory are overdue.

"The eclipse of Darwinism began to end in the 1980s and hangs in the balance today. We need an Extended Synthesis, using "extension" metaphorically. We must extend back in time to recover important aspects of Darwinism that were set aside, then lost during neo-Darwinism, then move forward beyond neo-Darwinism to encompass new data and concepts."

For example, Darwin did not dismiss Lamarckism; he increasingly adopted it over the editions of his Origin, as science historian Michael Flannery, has observed:

Darwin dismissed Lamarck early on only later to adopt pangenesis, a theory with strong affinities to Lamarck's inheritance of acquired characteristics. A comparison of Darwin's first edition to his sixth shows how far Darwin had departed from his own natural selection theory as a self-sufficient explanatory mechanism for biological life. His pangenesis would eventually go the way of phlogiston and humoral pathology in the pantheon of science, and his sexual selection theory wasn't much better. Why all these subsidiary theories? Because Darwin himself recognized the inadequacies of his own evolutionary model as originally conceived, but hidebound to methodological naturalism he was stuck with only naturalistic alternatives. Darwinists will tell you that modern genetics rescued their hero from the embarrassment of pangenisis, but Gregor Mendel argued against Darwinism and the same questions that vexed Darwin himself continue to vex biology today. So genetics has really "rescued" nothing. Darwin's tried out different theories of explanation, but Gertrude Himmelfarb hit the proverbial nail on the head when she said that he really only consistently crafted a "logic of possibilities," which is to say that Darwin really never amassed much evidence for his proposals; he merely heaped speculation upon speculation, suggested that "at some point in the future" evidence would be found, and discounted counter evidence as the product of "present" ignorance. This Darwin-of-the-gaps argument is still routinely trucked out. In other words, the very things most instructors would X-out and red-mark on a undergraduate paper counts as "convincing" evidence in the Darwin camp.

Um, yes. Which is why Ellington's fears are understated. See dude, it's not just the ID guys. It's Here Comes Everybody who was formerly told to just shut up.

Here's an epigenetics primer.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. 03-01)

Morality for neurons

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(My latest MercatorNet column looks at an attempt to refound morality on a totally materialist basis: commonsense notions of the mind must be abandoned in favor of a purely brain-based approach because we are our neurons

Churchland is partial to a theory that morality originates in the oxytocin-vasopressin network in mammals. One outcome is stunners like this: “The social life of humans, whether in hunter-gatherer villages, farming towns, or cities, seems to be even more complex than that of baboons or chimpanzees.”

Now, why in the world would that be?

We never get a clear idea how Churchland think morality works, though we do get more than a glimpse of her politics.

Go here for more.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.