Literature

Several US States are considering academic freedom bills to protect teachers and students from charges of being ideologically motivated if they encourage critical evaluation of origins theories. For example, the text before the Missouri House is:

"teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of theories of biological and chemical evolution."

Such bills are justified because Darwinists recognise that their theory is being threatened and they have an evangelical zeal for protecting it from being undermined. The need for critical appraisal is demonstrated every time someone claims an example of natural selection as evidence for "evolution" - whether the phenomenon is antibiotic resistance or morphological change in lizards. Not surprisingly, many educators want to be able to discuss the evidence freely: what it demonstrates and what it does not demonstrate. Yet Darwinists are so sensitive about their theory that they portray critical scrutiny as subversive to science. They claim that framing the issue in terms of academic freedom is a cloak for teaching creationism.

Educators need to be able to discuss the cracks in Darwinism without fear of their professionalism being questioned.

The film Expelled! has crystallised thinking for many. Sad to say, dissent over the fundamentals appears not to be an option if you want to stay within the science community. There are too many cases of good scientists who have been excluded because they dared question the 'unquestionable'. These scientists have been treated shabbily by some colleagues who have openly declared that they are unfit to teach or practise science. Their academic freedom is being denied.

Unfortunately, the latest issue of Science perpetuates these problems. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee starts with the comment:

"If creationism is a mutating virus, as many educators believe, then its latest guise is legislation to protect "academic freedom." Politicians in five U.S. states are pushing bills to enable educators to teach alternatives to evolution by protecting their "right" to discuss with students the idea of intelligent design (ID)."

Clearly, the intent in this article is to suggest that "academic freedom" is a cloak for injecting religion into the classroom. The presenter of Expelled!, Ben Stein, is said to have "helped intelligent design proponents in their efforts to dethrone Darwin". Not a word here about the reality of intolerance within the scientific community. There is no recognition that many scientists have scientific concerns about the way evolutionary theory is taught. How can science be healthy when issues like this cannot be openly explored!

The same issue of Science has two letters commenting on a palaeontologist's journey from young-earth creationism to acceptance of evolution (published in a previous issue). The first illustrates the intolerance documented in Expelled!:

"Science magazine is not the place to give even a hint of respectability to those who would deny the fundamental fact of evolution. There is too much at stake, for our children and our society, to give any credence to those promoting unscientific nonsense (creationism or intelligent design) and justifying irrational beliefs under the guise of religion."

The second letter comes from an advocate of Gould's NOMA approach to science and faith issues:

"We within the scientific community must continue to present the demonstrable evidence from the physical realm and clearly express how that evidence supports our current interpretations. This effort is not served well at all by dogmatic pronouncements such as "Evolution is fact," even if such statements are accurate. Furthermore, for members of the scientific community to make theological statements in the name of science is philosophically illegitimate, and destructive in our truth-seeking efforts."

This correspondent objects to evolutionists claiming, for example, that Darwinism has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Nevertheless, he wants to appear humble by not being dogmatic about "Evolution is a fact" even though he thinks it is. The missing contribution of this letter is the recognition that the "scientific community" includes ID advocates and also creationists. Were he to acknowledge this, he might usefully suggest that a dialogue within science over these issues is much needed. However, on present showing, this would result in himself being ostracised because he would be making it easier for the opposition to get a hearing.

Faced with such intransigence from the leaders of the scientific community, there should be no surprise when the public shows disquiet about science itself. But this would be in no-one's interest - for the real argument is not with science, but with ideologically-minded scientists who are trying to use science as a tool to further their own agendas. This point is important, because there are a growing number of young people who are alarmed at what they see in the scientific community: a dogmatism about a materialistic worldview that is equated with science. Some are being turned away. This is one message that champions of the 'public understanding of science' appear to have totally missed!

States Push Academic Freedom Bills
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
Science 320, 9 May 2008: 731.

See also:

Missouri House of Representatives' Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education bill.

Stevens, C.W. Evolution and Faith: Empathy Is Misplaced, Science, 320, 9 May 2008, 745 | DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5877.745b

Whipple, A. Evolution and Faith: Empathy Is Crucial, Science, 320, 9 May 2008, 745 | DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5877.745c

Connor, K. It May Be 2008 at Home, But in the Academy It's 1984, Townhall.com, Sunday, May 11, 2008

Just when you thought there was little innovative thinking about the origin of religion, along comes an anthropologist to prove you wrong! My initial reaction on reading Maurice Bloch's new paper was to think: "How refreshing!" At last, here is someone who can see the emptiness of evolutionary explanations for the origin of religion. Here is a taster of his objections to this particular genre of evolutionary story-telling:

"The third problem with such theories is that they explain religion as a product of core knowledge or modular capacities, such as naive physics, number, naive biology and naive psychology, all of which, with the possible exception of the last, we share with all our anthropoid relatives. Such a proposal is therefore unconvincing simply because no other animal than humans manifests any behaviour that is remotely like what is usually called religion."

Furthermore, when the academic world and the media latch on to any hint of similarity between apes and humans, it is almost a relief to find someone recognising that there are major discontinuities. Contrast this write-up of Ape Genius with Bloch:

"Chimpanzees do not have anything which remotely resembles the many and varied phenomena that have been labelled religion in anthropology. Indeed, this was probably also true of early sapiens. But, more importantly, there is also something else that chimpanzees, and probably early sapiens, do not have. This is social roles or social groups, understood in one particular sense of the word social."

There is a twist to Lennon's song (and to Dawkins' polemic) - you can't both imagine and do away with religion! (For larger image, go here)

There are two key words in Bloch's paper: transactional and transcendental. Transactional behaviour relates to the moulding of roles and groups by "a process of continual manipulation, assertions and defeats". This is found in chimpanzee social organisation and it is found also among humans. Transcendental behaviour, however, consists of essentialized roles and groups. "Essentialized roles exist separately from the individual who holds them. Rights and duties apply to the role and not to the individual." Bloch has a striking illustration of this from the life of a Malagasy village elder known to him for a long time.

"By now, he is old, physically weak and a little bit senile. He has difficulty in recognizing people. He spends most of his days in a foetal position wrapped up in a blanket. Yet he is treated with continual deference, consideration, respect and even fear. Whenever there is a ritual to be performed, he has to be put in charge so that he can bless the participants. When he is treated with great respect he is being behaved to, and he accordingly behaves towards others as a transcendental elder. This does not mean, however, that he is not also within the transactional social system. While as a transcendental elder he is little different to what he was when he was in his prime several years ago, as a transactional player he has lost out completely in the machiavellian game of influence, and nobody takes much note of him anymore or of his opinions since in the continual power play of daily life he has become insignificant."

By comparison, chimpanzee sociality is purely transactional. "[T]he transcendental social does not exist among the chimpanzees." The human sense of the transcendental is presented as the key to understanding religion.

"The transcendental network can with no problem include the dead, ancestors and gods as well as living role holders and members of essentialized groups. Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental."

Given the sense of transcendence, religion is not something extra, needing an explanation in its own right, but it is an expression of a central human characteristic, deeply affecting many other cultural behaviours. Those who present religion as a superstition, a delusion or a virus of the mind are making a category mistake. Richard Dawkins and his unhappy band of atheist zealots are out of their depth when they indulge in their polemics. They are missing something of fundamental importance to being human.

Given this sense of transcendence, religion is not a phenomenon that needs to be explained. "Once we realize this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion." But it is necessary to explain our sense of transcendence. Where does this come from?

"What needs to be explained is the much more general question, how it is that we can act so much of the time towards visible people in terms of their invisible halo. The tool for this fundamental operation is the capacity for imagination. It is while searching for neurological evidence for the development of this capacity and of its social implications that we, in passing, will account for religious-like phenomena."

It is at this point that Bloch seems to restrict the nature of the enquiry. Is this investigation bounded by the dictates of naturalism, or can avenues of enquiry related to design be explored? If the sense of transcendence is really something special, why rule out lines of enquiry that take us beyond materialism? We are here touching on the related issue of consciousness: is that a matter of neuronal activity only? Science may not be able to answer all our questions, but there is absolutely no reason (apart from insisting on a dogma) for denying the right to ask them in academia.

Why religion is nothing special but is central
Maurice Bloch
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Firstcite, 21 February 2008 | DOI:10.1098/rstb.2008.0007

Abstract: It is proposed that explaining religion in evolutionary terms is a misleading enterprise because religion is an indissoluble part of a unique aspect of human social organization. Theoretical and empirical research should focus on what differentiates human sociality from that of other primates, i.e. the fact that members of society often act towards each other in terms of essentialized roles and groups. These have a phenomenological existence that is not based on everyday empirical monitoring but on imagined statuses and communities, such as clans or nations. The neurological basis for this type of social, which includes religion, will therefore depend on the development of imagination. It is suggested that such a development of imagination occurred at about the time of the Upper Palaeolithic 'revolution'.

Coghlan, A. Religion a figment of human imagination, NewScientist.com (28 April 2008)

This is a case study of Paranthropus boisei, an ape-like animal that is regarded by evolutionists as a member of the human family tree. It is "known popularly as the "Nutcracker Man" because it has the biggest, flattest cheek teeth and the thickest enamel of any known hominin." Inevitably, these teeth have stimulated discussion about the animal's diet.

"Since the first specimen was reported by Mary and Louis Leakey in 1959, scientists have believed that P. boisei fed on nuts and seeds or roots and tubers found on the savannas throughout eastern Africa because the teeth, cranium and mandible appear to be built for chewing and crunching hard objects."

Paranthropus boisei (Source)

The research has involved a microwear texture analysis of the molars of seven specimens of P. boisei. This utilised sophisticated microscopy techniques to map patterns of pits and scratches on the surface of the teeth.

"The researchers looked at complexity and directionality of wear textures in the teeth they examined. Since food interacts with teeth, it leaves behind telltale signs that can be measured. Hard, brittle foods like nuts and seeds tend to lead to more complex tooth profiles, while tough foods like leaves lead to more parallel scratches, which corresponds with directionality.
They compared the dental microwear profiles of P. boisei to the microwear profiles of modern-day primates that eat different types of diets - grey-cheeked mangabeys and brown capuchins, which eat mostly soft items but fall back on hard nuts or palm fronds, and the mantled howling monkey and silvered leaf monkey, which eat mostly leaves and other tough foods."

The results were surprising.

"The P. boisei teeth had light wear, suggesting that none of the individuals ate extremely hard or tough foods in the days leading up to death. It's a pattern more consistent with modern-day fruit-eating animals than with most modern-day primates. "It looks more like they were eating Jell-o," Ungar said."

So, teeth that look as though they are an adaptation to eating hard foods show a microwear texture that suggests they bit into soft fruit. This is a paradox that can be illustrated today by the gorilla - and there are some important implications.

"If you give a gorilla a choice of eating a sugary fruit or a leaf, it will take the fruit every time," Ungar said. "But if you look at a gorilla's skull, its sharp teeth are adapted to consuming tough leaves. They don't eat the leaves unless they have to."
This finding represents a fundamental shift in the way researchers look at the diets of these hominins. "This challenges the fundamental assumptions of why such specializations occur in nature," Ungar said. "It shows that animals can develop an extreme degree of specialization without the specialized object becoming a preferred resource."

These findings provide another nail in the coffin of adaptationism. There is a tendency in the evolutionary literature to provide a "Just-So" story for every trait. Even though Darwinists know this approach lacks rigour, they show total commitment to finding plausible accounts for the origins of every feature they see. However, it is now becoming apparent that some specialisations are vestigial and have lost touch with their roots. This gives even more of a free hand to adaptationist storytelling/speculation.

Furthermore, the implications are even more significant for Darwinists. If the mechanisms of variation and natural selection forged the original adaptation, why are these mechanisms apparently powerless to bring about further transformation with continuing environmental change? Why was P. boisei left with over-engineered dentition when the animal ate the equivalent of Jell-o? Why do gorillas have teeth that are out of character with their diet? The "adaptive landscape" concept invokes morphological continuity for adaptive change, but these findings suggest that adaptation may not always be a reversible or multi-way process. Some trajectories of adaptation may lead an organism into a cul-de-sac from which it cannot retreat. This leads to a model of genetic impoverishment by specialisation and speciation that explains a significant body of data. It is a useful model to explain some aspects of extinction. But it is not a model that Darwinists have embraced, because it does not fit comfortably with their adaptive landscape model, nor with their extrapolation of microevolutionary change to macroevolution.

Dental Microwear and Diet of the Plio-Pleistocene Hominin Paranthropus boisei
Peter S. Ungar, Frederick E. Grine, Mark F. Teaford.
PLoS ONE 3(4) 30 April 2008: e2044 | doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002044

Abstract: The Plio-Pleistocene hominin Paranthropus boisei had enormous, flat, thickly enameled cheek teeth, a robust cranium and mandible, and inferred massive, powerful chewing muscles. This specialized morphology, which earned P. boisei the nickname "Nutcracker Man", suggests that this hominin could have consumed very mechanically challenging foods. It has been recently argued, however, that specialized hominin morphology may indicate adaptations for the consumption of occasional fallback foods rather than preferred resources. Dental microwear offers a potential means by which to test this hypothesis in that it reflects actual use rather than genetic adaptation. High microwear surface texture complexity and anisotropy in extant primates can be associated with the consumption of exceptionally hard and tough foods respectively. Here we present the first quantitative analysis of dental microwear for P. boisei. Seven specimens examined preserved unobscured antemortem molar microwear. These all show relatively low complexity and anisotropy values. This suggests that none of the individuals consumed especially hard or tough foods in the days before they died. The apparent discrepancy between microwear and functional anatomy is consistent with the idea that P. boisei presents a hominin example of Liem's Paradox, wherein a highly derived morphology need not reflect a specialized diet.

See also:

New Findings Challenge Conventional Ideas On Evolution Of Human Diet, Natural Selection, ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2008)

Andrew Moore is manager of the Science & Society Programme at the European Molecular Biology Organization and he has some strong views on the way evolutionary theory is taught within Europe. In a Commentary article in Nature, he is insistent that "Science teaching must evolve". This is (possibly) a welcome emphasis, because ID advocates have been saying something similar for a long time. In this context, the word "evolve" does not mean undirected, unsupervised change, but the intelligent engineering of the curriculum and the way it is taught.

A resource for teachers not mentioned by Moore (For more, go here)

There is common ground with Andrew Moore about some of the faults of present practices.

"[M]ost schools across Europe still teach phylogeny based on comparative anatomy, embryology and physiology. This works fairly well, but to preserve it as the paradigm to describe evolution in the face of a more robust approach is like continuing to describe the universe and matter in terms of newtonian mechanics, neglecting relativity and quantum mechanics. In fact, it is worse, because newtonian mechanics is sound and consistent within certain frames of reference. Phylogeny based on similarity of form is fundamentally unsound because of the adaptation and convergent evolution witnessed in nature."

Clearly, Moore finds serious limitations in traditional approaches to taxonomy. There are too many ambiguities for this to be handled within school science classes, and it is certainly possible for students to question the outcomes in ways that would not show evolutionary theory in a favourable light. The result, says Moore, is that "they leave school without fully understanding how well supported evolutionary theory is. Worse still, the understanding they have - based on the fossil record - is easy prey to specious arguments from anti-science movements." So, instead, Moore wants a strong emphasis on molecular phylogeny:

"Molecular phylogenetics is routine science. In the early 1960s researchers were already comparing gene sequences to infer evolutionary relatedness. Early work included the comparison of haemoglobin sequences between horses, pigs, cattle and rabbits, and between various primates."
and:
"It is, however, worth asking how teachers will deal with the material. The theoretical basis of molecular phylogenetics should be simple to grasp. A useful, albeit imperfect, analogy is the tracing of modern European languages back to archaic language groups by studying 'mutations' in spelling and pronunciation. [. . .] But equipping teachers with modern tools is rather left to chance, and many have trouble with ideas such as the molecular clock - a basic concept in molecular evolution."

This heavy emphasis on molecular phylogenetics does not do justice to the different assessments by scientists of this particular methodology of handling data. An important contribution to this legitimate debate was blogged here: Undermining the assumed hegemony of molecular systematics. Another blog drew attention to the problems of using molecular data to assess time intervals: Molecular clocks tell the wrong time!

The point is that these are legitimate debates within science. The implication of Moore's essay is that the molecular data is free of the ambiguities of "comparative anatomy, embryology and physiology" and the "fossil record". But this is simply erroneous.

Another problem area for origins teaching where there is (possible) agreement concerns Origin of Life research. Moore realises that this is not Darwinism and that it is highly speculative. He writes in a way that is reminiscent of an ID scientist with concerns about the way this subject is taught:

"Speculations on the chemical origins of life are almost universally covered in school curricula under 'Evolution', despite the questionable relevance of the topic for evolution, and its rather uncertain scientific basis. At most it represents an opportunity to discuss the principles of disagreement and competing ideas in science. But it is far from sound evolutionary theory."

Is there a way forward? Moore sees some light on the horizon.

"A developer of first-class teaching resources in molecular biology, the National Centre for Biotechnology Education (NCBE) in Reading, UK, will soon make a significant contribution for molecular evolution. [. . .] the NCBE is preparing "A birthday present from Mr Darwin": a teaching resource on modern concepts in evolution, to be circulated to UK schools and hosted on a freely accessible webpage. One of the 12 exercises, for example, involves studying the melanocortin-1 receptor (McR1) gene sequences from paleontological finds to deduce the probable coat colour of woolly mammoths."

In passing, it is worth noting that ID scientists would put the emphasis on molecular biology and its implications for variation in living things (rather than molecular evolution). However, the puzzle in the quote above is that the "probable coat colour of woolly mammoths" completely by-passes anything linked to Darwin's theory. The genetics of body hair colouration is common ground for ID and evolutionary biologists.

Let's go to the final paragraph:

"There is something more serious at stake: the erosion of public trust in Darwin's original theory of evolution by natural selection in the face of 'alternative theories' from the Intelligent Design movement. An article in Science recently demonstrated a moderate correlation between knowledge of genetics and acceptance of the theory of evolution among members of the general public. No less than before, evolutionary theory needs to be buttressed by all the good science it can get, and there is no better place to start than in school."

Oh dear! Where is the emphasis on finding truth? Where is the desire to explore the issues and follow the evidence wherever it leads? Implicit in this article is the recognition that the traditional defences of Darwinism are not as rigorous or persuasive as Darwinists would like them to be. Instead of teaching evidence for and against the theory and developing critical skills in students, the counsel is one of burying old arguments and closing ranks behind molecular phylogenetics to buttress up Darwin's explanation of the origin of species. Is this what education is really about?

Science teaching must evolve
Andrew Moore
Nature 453, 31-32 (1 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/453031a

Abstract: Evolutionary theory, study and knowledge moved on dramatically in the latter half of the twentieth century, but school teaching, curricula and teacher training are still in the primeval soup era

See also:

Tyler, D. Suggestions for improving the teaching of evolutionary biology, ARN Literature Blog, 25 April 2008.