The ID Report

Science & Human Origins by Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe, and Casey Luskin

The recent Hollywood SciFi movie, Prometheus, by Ridley Scott (2012), is a good reminder of how fascinated we are with the story of our own origins. Finding clues left by extra terrestrial beings, scientists funded by motivated entrepreneurs, leave on a galactic journey to find the "Engineers" who seeded life on earth. What they find surprises them, and while they find some answers to "who" created us, they are left with the more disturbing question of "why" they create us.

Perhaps the movie provides us a little insight to the question of why every hominid bone discovery in Africa is hailed by anthropologists and media sources as the key missing link in explaining human origins. We just want to know where we came from. Standard scientific texts and news reports lead the average person to believe it has all been figured out according to Darwin's theory. The new discoveries are just filling in a few missing gaps in the evidence. That could not be farther from the truth. Scientists are nowhere closer to knowing the "who" or the "why" based on the evidence than they were 50 years ago. We frequently get requests for good texts that provide a critique of the Darwinian theory of human origins. What are we to make of the latest fossil finds from Africa or the claim that our DNA is almost identical to that of the chimpanzee? Until now there has not been a definitive text - just an article here or a chapter there. We are happy to recommend this brief text on the topic that is written with a general audience in mind.

The modern scientific creation story is that humans evolved from a common ancestor through the process of common descent and natural selection acting on unplanned genetic variations. The two lines of reasoning that are typically used to argue for our common ancestry with ape-like creatures are both based on similarity - similarity in anatomy, and similarity in DNA sequence. In this new book, Science & Human Origins, the authors take on both lines of argument and show that similarity between two complex structures does not reliably indicate an evolutionary path between them.

In chapters 1 and 2, Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe challenge the central claim that Darwin's undirected mechanism of natural selection is really capable of building a human being. In chapters 1, 3, and 4, Ann Gauger and Casey Luskin critically assess the genetic and fossil evidence that human beings share a common ancestor with apes. And in the final chapter, Ann Gauger refutes scientific claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple.

So whether it's for yourself, a high school or college student, or a friend at work, the next time someone claims that the fossil or DNA evidence proves we descended from a common ancestor according to Darwin's theory, this is the book you want in order to start examining the evidence and arguments in greater detail. Like the scientists from the movie Prometheus, we think you will be surprised by what you find.

On this episode of the ID The Future podcast, Casey Luskin talks with ARN Executive Director Dennis Wagner on the Access Research Network's Top 10 Science Stories of 2011. Gaining top honors on the list was the publication of the 50th peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific paper. Biomemetics, the field of science where man tries to mimic designs found in nature, made the top 10 list again this year with inventors from Harvard building a prototype butterfly and researchers in China reverse-engineering the woodpecker in order to build a better shock-absorbing system. Tune in to find out what else made science headlines in 2011.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Bridging the Gap" (Caltech, 10/10/11), we learn: "Caltech Neuroscientists Find Normal Brain Communication in People Who Lack Connections Between Right and Left Hemispheres." Not in itself a new find, by any means.

PASADENA, Calif.—Like a bridge that spans a river to connect two major metropolises, the corpus callosum is the main conduit for information flowing between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. Now, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found that people who are born without that link—a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum, or AgCC—still show remarkably normal communication across the gap between the two halves of their brains.

Many have heard about Roger Sperry's work with people whose brains were split to control life-threatening epilepsy, whose left hand really didn't know that their right hand was doing. But the Caltech researchers studied people who had never had a functional corpus callosum, from the time of embryogenesis:

"This was a real surprise," says Tyszka. "We expected to see a lot less coupling between the left and right brain in this group—after all, they are missing about 200 million connections that would normally be there. How do they manage to have normal communication between the left and right sides of the brain without the corpus callosum?”

What may have happened is that, never having been able to connect via the CC, the two halves of the brain simply use existing communication channels more intensely, to stay connected. By contrast, Sperry's split-brain subjects brains had adapted to communicating through the CC, but then it was severed. There is a practical side to this research:

"We are now examining AgCC subjects who are also on the autism spectrum, in order to gain insights about the role of brain connectivity in autism, as well as in healthy social interactions," says Tyszka. "About a third of people with AgCC also have autism, and altered connectivity in the corpus callosum has been found in autism. The remarkable compensation in brain functional networks that we found here may thus have important implications also for understanding the function of the brains of people with autism."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At Mercatornet (August 23, 2011), we are invited to consider whether getting more women involved in floor trading would prevent future collapses. Trouble is,

So now we come to the key question: Is the floor trade world a natural outcome of human behaviour, into which some men and a much smaller proportion of women fit? Yes, probably.

My financial advisor tells me that the market is run by two principle human motives: Greed and fear. Bubbles and their subsequent collapses happen when greed overrides fear. Later, fear restores order and the market starts to recover. Which is to say that crazy markets and their corrections are caused by human nature. It’s hard to change the fundamental reality that a stock market is about people making decisions, wise or foolish.

An Italian proverb puts it like this: Three women and a goose make a market. All the rest follows.
More.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Uncommon Descent’s Barry Arrington, once lawyer for the families of murdered Columbine students, writes:

A couple of months ago a young university student contacted my law office seeking help in a dispute she was having with a university here in Colorado. [To protect my client's privacy, I am using neither her name nor the name of the university. ] The previous week she had voiced opposition to Darwinism to her biology professor, who proceeded to scream at her, denigrate her religious views, and generally demean and humiliate her in front of the rest of the class. After hearing her story I sent a demand letter to the university seeking redress. Good news. We resolved the matter on very favorable terms.

One of the terms we insisted on was a letter of apology from the professor. This is the full text of that letter: Here.

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

Prevent parasite infections by promoting "genetic variation" (Jul 7, 2011):

Sexual reproduction, then, serves as a way to keep introducing genetic variety, a process that has to constantly be repeated in order to continue staving off attacks the latest and deadliest parasites. This is known as the "Red Queen Hypothesis", taking its name from a line in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

But no, wait. According to another study, "Sex Is Not About Promoting Genetic Variation, Researchers Argue" (ScienceDaily, July 7, 2011):

Heng and fellow researcher Root Gorelick, Ph.D., associate professor at Carleton University in Canada, propose that although diversity may result from a combination of genes, the primary function of sex is not about promoting diversity. Rather, it's about keeping the genome context -- an organism's complete collection of genes arranged by chromosome composition and topology -- as unchanged as possible, thereby maintaining a species' identity. This surprising analysis has been published as a cover article in a recent issue of the journal Evolution.
"If sex was merely for increasing genetic diversity, it would not have evolved in the first place," said Heng. This is because asexual reproduction -- in which only one parent is needed to procreate -- leads to higher rates of genetic diversity than sex.

Okay. This is the real reason evolution shouldn't be taught in school.

Not

Right now, it's just a pack of warring media releases.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

And didn't star Ronald Reagan opposite a chimp.

On July 8, a documentary on the fate of Nim opens in U.S. theatres (trailer). In “Project Nim: A chimp raised like a human” (New Scientist 4 July 2011), Rowan Hooper tackles the question of why:

What on earth were they thinking of? Nim was put in diapers and dressed in clothes. He was breastfed by his human surrogate mother, Stephanie Lafarge. "It seemed natural," she says.

Lafarge's daughter, Jenny Lee, has a better explanation: "It was the seventies". Jenny was 10-years-old when Nim came to live with her family. The film, assembled from archive footage shot at the time, recreated scenes and interviews with the main characters, tells the story of Nim's chaotic life.

The purpose was to show that chimpanzees could learn American Sign Language, under the right conditions, and converse like a human. Nim learned 120 signs, but ... see the film.

The seventies? In context, celebrity skeptic Carl Sagan had written in The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Nature of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977),

Although a few years ago it would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not appear to me out of the question that, after a few years in such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published in English or Japanese (with perhaps an "as told to" after the byline). (p. 126.)

Skeptic: A person who is prepared to believe just about anything his engineer neighbour would doubt.

See also Evilicious?: Monkeys r' us prof Marc Hauser barred from Harvard lecture room

Slate reporter muses on Harvard's recent evolutionary psychology scandal

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A bid by Darwinists to acquire rights to the Expelled documentary on the ID theorists has failed. From TOAF:

Combined with the funds the Foundation already had on hand, we had just over $50,000 available to bid on the film (and pay the 10% buyer’s premium). The winning bid, however, was $201,000. Because all of the bidders were anonymous, we do not know identity of the winning bidder.

Film probably went to business interest. More later.

Update, just in: Walt Ruloff and his associates, who were the original producers of EXPELLED, won the auction. More later.

Timeline

Talk origins were trying to buy Expelled "The reason given is so they can then release unpublished material, but equally they could prevent future sales of the film."

href="http://www.uncommondescent.com/expelled/expelled-film-to-be-sold-due-to-bankruptcy/" target="another">sold due to bankruptcy. That was not a surprise.

There is a hiatus in significant coverage at this point because the companies that owned various aspects of Expelled lost touch with the people featured in it - for reasons still unexplained - despite the fact that the film was doing well.

23 October 2008 Expelled #1 in documentaries, #11 in DVDs

More here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, a list was posted to Listverse identifying Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as “#1 in a list of 10 books that screwed up the world” because “Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true.”

At the time, we noted,

Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3)

[ ... ]

And this beats der Fuehrer? So World War II was for nothing? Wow.

The list’s author tried to cover his base by asserting that his 10 through to 1 list order isn’t supposed to mean anything. Just an accident with numbers, like the universe itself?

Lists can be fun. So here’s the contest: List the ten most significant ID books of the last 25 years, and for the first three, give a brief explanation of what you think makes the book significant.

The prize is a copy of The Nature of Nature , the must-have collection of the best on both sides of the ID controversy.

Contest judged Saturday July 9.

Go here to enter.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I’ve suggested it's a strategy on the part of people who trash ID-friendly books unread: The reviewer who fails to read the book is not, in a Darwin-obsessed community, held responsible for spreading misinformation. Indeed, the community wants him to do it, to avoid conflict between with their worldview and reality.

The problem is, that only explains why he isn't censured for his action. A more critical question is why would a scientist or scholar actually volunteer to do it? And, for a free copy of The Nature of Nature , that’s our contest question.

Enter in the comments box here.

Second award offer: Yes, this contest riffs off "What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?" Some good suggestions there, and because Discovery Institute's "Ayala-ing" won't make the New Urban Lexicon, we must come up with something catchier.

So a second, separate award will be made, of Don Johnson'sProbability's Nature and Nature’s Probability for the best single word term to refer to such a reviewer.

here.

It you put your suggestion for a name here, not to worry. It'll be considered along with the ones entered in the combox below.

Contest judged: Saturday June 4, 2011.

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