Παρασκευή 29 Φεβρουαρίου 2008
Ventura County Reporter
Do the evolution
The Rev. Michael Dowd began life as a born-again evangelical believing Darwinian biology to be the work of the devil. Now, he preaches the gospel of science.
By Joan Trossman Bien 02/28/2008
The Rev. Michael Dowd is making the rounds in Ventura County this week, delivering speeches and workshops at churches in Ojai and Ventura. The topic of his considerable passion: evolution.
For Dowd, a trip through the cosmos ends at your front door. Actually, Dowd and his scientist-author wife, Connie Barlow, don’t really have their own front door. They have lived on the road for six years, preaching the excitement of science as religious inspiration. They roam North America appearing at venues both secular and sectarian, attempting to convince their audience that each individual person is the result of 14 billion years of evolution.
Dowd did not come to this intersection of science and religion in a predictable way. He says he had an epiphany when he was in the Army.
“I was on a backpacking trip, and I had a very profound mountain experience where I was confronted with a vision of my death, basically,” Dowd says. “The thought that was there was, what if I live 100 years — what difference does a person make in their lifetime? …
"I was convinced that I wanted to make a difference in the world, but, at the time, I was really addicted to drugs and alcohol and a lot of stuff, just really struggling.”
“I came off the mountain, literally, and the next Sunday went to church. They showed a Billy Graham film and asked if somebody wanted to commit their life to Christ, and I ran down to the altar.”
After leaving the Army, Dowd attended Evangel University in Springfield, Miss., where he received a B.A. in biblical studies and philosophy. But the school had a few surprises for the born-again young man. “I was unprepared that they were going to be teaching evolution there,” Dowd says. “I was blown away. At first I was freaked out.
I walked out of class, made a big scene and stuff. In fact, I told my roommate that Satan obviously had a foothold in the school. It was
the only way I could make sense out of them teaching evolution at the school, because I had come to believe that evolution was of the Devil, and here they were teaching evolution at a Bible-reading college.”
What the 49-year-old preacher now believes in is a science-based sacred understanding of the universe. “It is very far from fundamentalism,” Dowd says.
The reformed and informed Dowd has indeed traveled a long way from evangelical Christian fundamentalism. His path toward politics began in 1988 with an interest in environmentalism. As his search for knowledge continued, Dowd looked to the sciences for answers.
“I was immersing myself in the studies of biology, cosmology, anthropology and all these disciplines related to the entire universe story,” Dowd says. “Cosmology is the study of the cosmos, the study of the large-scale structures of the universe. I studied chemistry, where the elements of the periodic tables came from. We’ve known since 1957 that chemical elements came from inside stars. Joni Mitchell had it right back in the ’60s: We are stardust.”
As Dowd pursued his studies of all 
things scientific, he felt he was learning far more about the nature of reality than he had learned from the Bible. “I began to see science as revelatory,” Dowd said. “I began calling it ‘public revelation.’ Private revelation is an insight which comes to one individual. Public revelation is what the whole scientific community is given.”
The collision of science and politics landed squarely in Dowd’s lap in the mid-’90s. “I was the organizer for the National Environmental Trust,” Dowd says. “So my job was to organize Jewish rabbis, Catholic priests, Protestant clergy and Evangelical clergy on key environmental issues which were coming up for a vote in Congress.”
Those were the glory days of former House of Representatives leader Newt Gingrich. “The Republicans were threatening to repeal all the major environmental legislation,” Dowd says, “so there was a lot of interest and a lot of funding for organizing the religious communities around protecting some of the environmental concerns. In the United States, that was the first time that religion and religious leaders were beginning to take a public stand on environmental issues.”
Dowd’s next stop was a governmental sustainable life campaign, first in Portland, Ore., then in New York. “My job was to help neighbors come together and support one another, four to eight households at a time,” Dowd says. These neighborhood groups became eco-teams helping each other with using less water, composting, driving less and recycling.
Everything changed when Dowd met his future wife.
“We fell in love as mission partners,” Dowd said. “We both basically felt that our purpose in this world in our lifetime was to share this universe story perspective with everyone, from atheists to evangelicals.”
And that is why they have no front door of their own, only the road and other people’s houses where they stay as they travel from one speaking engagement to the next.
They have published a book discussing their evolutionary views, Thank God for Evolution, and operate a Web site, thankgodforevolution.com.
Dowd relishes sharing his enthusiasm with all types of groups. Recently, he spoke to a group of 125 evangelical ministers about evolution. He says they accept the concept the way most people accept death and taxes. “But it doesn’t inspire them, it doesn’t fire them up. It’s like, ‘OK, evolution, whatever.’ ”
The comprehensive vision Dowd preaches is based in science. “It is the story of the universe, how the galaxies evolved, how our solar system evolved, how planet Earth evolved, and life, and how human cultures have evolved over the last 2 ½ million years of human existence,” he says. “Darwinian biological evolution only accounts for an understanding of the biological aspect. We are also talking about the evolution of galaxies and stars and planets and human evolution.”
Dowd says he believes chaos, breakdowns and bad news are the catalysts for creativity and transformation. “So I begin to trust the chaos, I trust the challenges, I trust the difficulties,” he says.
Hoping to give his audiences a sense of compassion and commitment with his presentations, Dowd nevertheless also believes the world is heading down a dangerous path.
“Frankly, if we don’t find ways of cooperating across ethnic and religious differences in the next 50 to 70 years, we are in deep doo-doo.”
Dowd is not afraid to take a political stance on issues of social importance. “Think about the millions of people who are united in peace thanks to George W. Bush,” Dowd says. “He is the great unifier — not in the way he would want. So it is that chaos-vibed creativity that allows me to be less judgmental toward George Bush, even though I am profoundly committed to getting somebody like Barack [Obama] or Hilary [Clinton] in the White House.
“So rather than looking at the challenges we are now dealing with and saying, ‘Oh shit!’ we look at the challenges and say, ‘OK, what is possible now?’ ” Dowd says. “That way you have a different emotional stance.”
Dowd is realistic about the serious problems facing the world, whether political in nature or simply unavoidable disasters. He says he sees them as challenges instead as roadblocks. “I think oil is going to be a challenge,” Dowd says. “Overpopulation is obviously going to be a challenge. Most population scientists say that within the next 80 years, we will see human population decline. I think we’re going to see the growing gap between rich and poor.”
But Dowd says he views these issues as forcing civilization to come up with creative solutions. He says he can envision some terrible circumstances before we are able to rebound.
“I’m not Pollyanna,” Dowd says. “We could see some kind of nuclear exchange. I think that from an evolutionary viewpoint these problems — even catastrophes — will serve as evolutionary drivers.”
The Rev. Dowd speaks this week at the following Ventura County locations: Feb. 28, 7 p.m., at Meditation Mount, 10340 Reeves Road, Ojai, 640-8815; March 2, 10 a.m., at the Ventura Vineyard Church, 1956 Palma Dr. Suite A, Ventura, 650-2510; and March 5, 7 p.m., at the Center for Spiritual Living, 101 S. Laurel St.643-1933.
Δευτέρα 4 Φεβρουαρίου 2008
One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 31 January 2008 08:34 am ET
People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.
A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes.
"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.
The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin.
"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.
The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.
If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism.
"It's exactly what I sort of expected to see from what we know about selection around this area," said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the study results regarding the OCA2 gene. Hawks was not involved in the current study.
Baby blues
Eiberg and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages.
They specifically looked at sequences of DNA on the OCA2 gene and the genetic mutation associated with turning down melanin production.
Over the course of several generations, segments of ancestral DNA get shuffled so that individuals have varying sequences. Some of these segments, however, that haven't been reshuffled are called haplotypes. If a group of individuals shares long haplotypes, that means the sequence arose relatively recently in our human ancestors. The DNA sequence didn't have enough time to get mixed up.
"What they were able to show is that the people who have blue eyes in Denmark, as far as Jordan, these people all have this same haplotype, they all have exactly the same gene changes that are all linked to this one mutation that makes eyes blue," Hawks said in a telephone interview.
Melanin switch
The mutation is what regulates the OCA2 switch for melanin production. And depending on the amount of melanin in the iris, a person can end up with eye color ranging from brown to green. Brown-eyed individuals have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production. But they found that blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.
"Out of 800 persons we have only found one person which didn't fit — but his eye color was blue with a single brown spot," Eiberg told LiveScience, referring to the finding that blue-eyed individuals all had the same sequence of DNA linked with melanin production.
"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," Eiberg said. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics.
That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.
"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids."
Κυριακή 3 Φεβρουαρίου 2008
Feb 03, 2008 04:30 AM
Think that we humans are a fait accompli, a done deal that hasn't changed over the eons?
Think again.
Evidence is accumulating that the species is still evolving, and doing so at an unprecedented rate.
A major new study says that in the past 5,000 years, natural selection – gene mutations that spread because they're beneficial – has occurred 100 times faster than at any other period in human history.
American researchers have found evidence of recent mutations on about 1,800 genes, or 7 per cent of the human genome; traits such as lighter skin and blue eyes in northern Europeans and partial resistance to certain diseases in areas of Africa.
"We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals," said one of the study's co-authors, anthropologist John Hawks, at a presentation recently.
Just because modern humans are able to manipulate their environment, says University of Toronto molecular anthropologist Esteban Parra, "doesn't mean biological evolution has stopped. It has increased."
The new evidence contradicts the long-held view that it takes 1,000 to 10,000 generations – or 20,000 to 200,000 years – for an advantageous mutation to crop up in an individual, then spread through a population. The study has compressed the time frame to only 100 to 200 generations, which in evolutionary terms is extremely short.
"That's how long it's been since some of these genes originated, and today they're in 30 or 40 per cent of people," said Hawks. "What we are catching is an exceptional time."
One they've been able to catch only because scientists can now tap into the human genome that was sequenced in 2003.
Researchers analyzed 3.9 million genetic markers in 270 people from four groups: Han Chinese, Japanese, Africa's Yoruba people, and northern Europeans. (The DNA was supplied by the International HapMap Project, which is analyzing genetic similarities and differences around the world. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
A little background: Mankind's earliest ancestors split from the forerunners of today's chimpanzees about 6 million years ago. Roughly 2 million years ago, the predecessors of modern humans began the long trek out of Africa and into the rest of the world.
About 150,000 years ago, we appeared, modern humans. Some 50,000 years later, our brains made a stunning leap forward, developing complex language and abstract symbols. We had begun the journey to civilization.
At that point, the evolutionary process, having sufficiently ensured humans' survival as a species, basically stopped, slowing to a glacial pace. Or so it was thought.
By the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance. In an essay published in 2000, he wrote, "there's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 years or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."
Noted British geneticist Steve Jones broadly agreed, but dated the evolutionary slowdown much later, with the rise of agriculture at the end of the Ice Age 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
When humans made the transition from hunting-gathering to raising crops and domesticating animals, the move led to dietary changes and to settled habitats in specific regions. Combined, they ignited a surge in human numbers.
Far from slowing down, it appears that, when there were enough people to, in effect, work with, the process of evolution rapidly began to accelerate.
Even without modern-day knowledge of genes, Charles Darwin wrote in his revolutionary The Origin of Species that in animal breeding, herd size "is of the highest importance for success" because large populations have more genetic variation. The same turns out to be true for us.
Since the advent of agriculture, the human population has grown steadily from about 5 million 10,000 years ago to 200 million in 1 AD (it's 6.5 billion today). But as people migrated to different geographic regions, they had to adapt to a variety of conditions and pressures.
One example cited by the new study is lactase, the gene that helps humans digest milk but which, for most of the planet's population, switches off in adulthood. At some time in the past few thousand years, northern European dairy farmers – living with weaker sunlight therefore less vitamin D exposure – developed a mutation that lets them tolerate health-giving milk throughout their lives. (U of T's Parra says other variations have also shown up in dairy-farming regions in Africa, even though sun exposure isn't a problem.)
Where genetic fine-tuning has been busiest, however, is in disease resistance. When more of our ancestors started living together in set locales, outbreaks of epidemic diseases periodically culled their numbers, leaving behind genetically different and fitter survivors.
Michael Bisson, chair of anthropology at McGill University, cites native North Americans who were felled by various diseases when Europeans first arrived. "But they subsequently developed genetic immunities which they still possess," he says. "So yes, there's been significant evolution even in the last 1,000 years," he says.
Malaria is one of the clearest examples of ongoing evolution, the U.S. study found. It's now known that more than two dozen genetic adaptations have evolved to resist it, including an entirely new blood type, called the Duffy blood type.
Why then does malaria still persist in Africa? Because the mosquito that spreads it is also adapting, says Esteban Parra: Genetically, humans are "in a race with disease, a very dynamic race."
Another recently discovered gene, which originated about 4,000 years ago, now exists in about 10 per cent of Europe's population. It was discovered recently because it's giving some people resistance to HIV/AIDS, though its original function was likely to ward off smallpox.
But with more and better drugs and vaccines, clean water, sanitation and plentiful food (at least for most of the planet), why does the species still need to tinker biologically to survive? Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, was among those who thought it no longer did; that "natural selection has almost become irrelevant."
They were wrong, say those who can now access the complex inner workings of Homo sapiens' 25,000 (or so) genes. They say adaptation appears to be built into our DNA to respond to changing environmental, even cultural, stresses.
That could mean extended fertility spans, says John Hawks: "Any kind of genetic variation that increases the success of later fertility will be selected for," he predicts.
Another area of adaptation is likely to be the brain, as it responds to the pressures of pervasive technology. Brain size grew slowly over a long period of time, but an analysis of skulls by Hawks in a earlier study showed that size started diminishing about 10,000 years ago. Today, the brain is about an eighth of the size it once was. Evolution, Hawks theorized, was making it more compact and efficient
In 2005, University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn reported that two "new" gene variations involved in brain size and complexity are still a work in progress. One emerged about 37,000 years ago and is now present in 70 per cent of humans; the other, only 5,800 years old, has spread to 30 per cent.
"Our environment and the skills we need to survive in it are changing faster than we ever imagined," Lahn said then. "I would expect the human brain, which has done well by us so far, would continue to adapt to those changes."
Most researchers prefer not to speculate on where genetic adaptation will take us next. Esteban Parra will "predict" only that "evolution isn't going to stop."
With one caveat, that is: It won't stop unless and until we do first.
Lynda Hurst is hurtling along the evolutionary highway. She can be reached at: lhurst@thestar.ca.
Published Saturday, February 2, 2008
CARY MCMULLEN: An idea for opponents of evolution
In less than three weeks, Florida’s State Board of Education is expected to vote on whether to revise the science standards for the state’s public school students. The proposed new standards contain a ticking bomb otherwise known as evolution.
For the first time, Florida’s students would be explicitly required to learn about the theory of evolution. Until now, the standards have had some vague language about “biological changes over time.” From the experience my children have had in science classes, I can testify that they did not learn much about the theory of evolution, and I’m sure that instruction about the theory varies from one school to the next.
So it’s no wonder that changes are being considered. The independent Thomas B. Fordham Institute gave the state a grade of F in science. Because the federal government is pushing for improved math and science education, the heat is on the state board. The new standards under consideration are comprehensive and generally get high marks — except when it comes to high school biology.
The battle is heating up between a vocal minority who oppose the teaching of evolution and those who think the teaching of scientific principles shouldn’t be, well, monkeyed with. As many as seven county school boards — most in Northern Florida — have passed resolutions opposing the evolution standards, according to the St. Petersburg Times, and more could follow.
There have been rumblings among parents that they would withdraw their children from school rather than have their children learn the theory of evolution.
I have expressed my opinion before in this space that I see no conflict between the theory of evolution and the teachings of the Bible. But today I am more interested in making a proposal that might allow for a way out of the dilemma.
Let’s cut to the chase — those who object at all costs to having their children learn about evolution are conservative Protestants who have a religious basis for their objection.
First, these folks must realize one thing: The theory of evolution eventually will be taught in public schools. It is as inevitable as the sunrise. There are far too many people who not only have no objection to the theory of evolution, they insist their children learn it as part of a complete education.
So here’s my proposal: Let those parents who have a religious scruple about this part of the curriculum sign a waiver exempting their children from learning it. My guess is that relatively few families would take this step.
This proposal would allow evolution to be taught as unqualified science to willing students, while those whose families object would not have to learn it in violation of their consciences. Both sides would get their way.
A final caveat to conservative Protestants: My proposal would not get your children entirely off the hook. It’s unlikely they would be exempted from being tested about evolution in the battery of standardized tests mandated by the state and federal governments. And colleges are not going to be interested in your children’s explanations about why they scored poorly on the science sections of the SAT and ACT. Even if you tell your children not to believe it, it would not hurt them to learn what the theory of evolution is.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it would allow society to move forward.
Cary McMullen is religion editor for The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla. Contact him at
cary.mcmullen@theledger.com.
