Creationists declare war over the brain

• 22 October 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition.
• Amanda Gefter

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".
Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.
In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

Now the institute is funding research into "non-material neuroscience". One recipient of its cash is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 "evolution hearings" in Kansas. Using a Discovery Institute grant, Menuge wrote Agents Under Fire, in which he argued that human cognitive capacities "require some non-natural explanation".

In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness," he writes, "and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation." Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

But William Dembski, one of ID's founding fathers and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, praised Schwartz's work as providing "theoretical support for the irreducibility of mind to brain". Dembski's website shows that he is currently co-editing The End of Materialism with Schwartz and Beauregard.

Meanwhile, Schwartz has been working with Henry Stapp, a physicist at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who also spoke at the symposium. They have been developing non-standard interpretations of quantum mechanics to explain how the "non-material mind" affects the physical brain.

Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools. But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, emphasises: "This is real and dangerous and coming our way."

He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons. "Progress in science is slow on many fronts," says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. "We don't yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn't mean cancer has spiritual causes."

And for Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, "it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn't currently explained doesn't mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics."

The attack on materialism proposes to do just that, but it all turns on definitions. "At one time it looked like all physical causation was push/pull Newtonianism," says Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina. "Now we have a new understanding of physics. What counts as material has changed. Some respectable philosophers think that we might have to posit sentience as a fundamental force of nature or use quantum gravity to understand consciousness. These stretch beyond the bounds of what we today call 'material', and we haven't discovered everything about nature yet. But what we do discover will be natural, not supernatural."

And as Clark observes: "This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as 'Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,' but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn't follow at all. There's nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that's just brains changing brains."

That is the voice of mainstream academia. Public perception, however, is a different story. If people can be swayed by ID, despite the vast amount of solid evidence for evolution, how hard will it be when the science appears fuzzier?

What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain - and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the "God of the gaps".

Evolution - Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.

The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.

Related Articles

• New legal threat to teaching evolution in the US
• http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926643.300
• 09 July 2008
• Creationists unveil 'God lab'
• http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826564.000
• 14 May 2008
• Perspectives: Meaning and the body
• http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726382.100
• 12 January 2008
• The Big Questions: What is consciousness?
• http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225780.073
• 18 November 2006

Weblinks

• Watch the webcast of the UN "Beyond Mind-Body" symposium
• http://www.mindbodysymposium.com/
• The Discovery Institute
• http://www.discovery.org
• Mindful Hack: Denyse O'Leary's non-material neuroscience blog
• http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/
• Steven Novella vs Michael Egnor
• http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php?p=189

From issue 2679 of New Scientist magazine, 22 October 2008, page 46-47

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/an-interview-with-eo-wilson-the-father-of-the-encyclopedia-of-life/index.html

October 23, 2008, 12:34 pm

An Interview With E.O. Wilson, the Father of the Encyclopedia of Life

This past Sunday, "CBS News Sunday Morning" aired my report on the Encyclopedia of Life project. (I'm campaigning hard for them to post the segment online.)

As usual, putting this story together involved conducting a number of interviews, which were fascinating-but I had time to use only a few sentences of each one in the finished story. It always seems such a shame to let the rest of these interviews go to waste.

So today, I offer a much longer version of my interview with E.O. Wilson (friends call him Ed), the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, naturalist and Harvard research professor who's the father of the Encyclopedia of Life.

DAVID POGUE: So how did this project come about?

DR. E.O. WILSON: I've been in systematics and the mapping of biological diversity all my life. And a little more than ten years ago, I thought the time had come to undertake a complete mapping of the world's fauna and flora.

Because remarkably-and this is little known even in the scientific community-we've only begun to explore this planet. It was 250 years ago this year that Karl Linneus, the great naturalist in Sweden, began what became the official form of biological classification: two names, like "homo sapiens" for us, and ranging the species in hierarchies according to how much they resemble one another. 250 years ago.

And in that period of time, we have found and given names to perhaps one-tenth of what's on the surface of the earth. We have now found 1.8 million species. But the actual number is almost certainly in excess of 10 million, and could be as high as a hundred million, when you throw in bacteria.

Let me give you an example. Fungi. The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world. They're necessary for the health of other organisms. (We should get rid of the idea that fungi are what gives you athlete's footŠfeet.) Some 60,000 species are known, and it's been estimated by experts that more than 1.5 million exist. So we've just begun to explore it. And that's true, group after group. We're just beginning.

For a period of time, I was a voice in the wilderness, with a few others, wandering around and trying to raise a lot of money, unsuccessfully, saying, "You know, we need to bulk up the exploration of the planet, the living part." And finally, in 2003, I wrote a paper called "The Encyclopedia of Life." And I said, "What we need is to get out there and search this little-known planet, and then put all the information that we get on species already known into a single great database, an electronic encyclopedia, with a page that's indefinitely extensible for each species in turn, and that would be available to anybody, any time, anywhere, single access, on command, free."

We were about to enter the age of Google. We were about to enter an age where, technically, we could have everything available to everybody all the time.

So I published that article and began to promote it. And some others picked up on it. The key, however, was the warm reception made to it by the MacArthur Foundation. [The MacArthur and Sloan foundations eventually contributed $12 million to launch the project. Later, Dr. Wilson also won the TED Prize, which brings with it $100,000 and, more importantly, a lot of exposure and contacts to help three visionaries each year make their wishes come true.]

DP: And what do you say to people who think, "Oh. Oh, how interesting. A database for scientists." I mean, is there a greater purpose to a Web site like this?

EOW: The public will have this unlimited encyclopedia, where it can browse [at eol.org]. Where individual students can do their own research projects. Where you can make your own field guide wherever you're going. It will tell you what the butterflies are of Oregon, or maybe you're hoping to make a trip to Costa Rica and the whole family would like to see turtles. In time, you'll be able to do this with a few keystrokes.

DP: So I understand that the Encyclopedia will operate Wikipedia-style, with contributions from the public, which are then approved by experts?

EOW: The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs. You can pick almost any group that has any kind of intrinsic interest in it, from dragonflies to pill bugs to orb-weaving spiders. Anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological fact about a species already known, and can provide that right into The Encyclopedia of Life.

DP: Haven't there been previous attempts to catalogue every species in the world?

EOW: Yes, there have been several. And if you have access to one of the great libraries and a LOT of time, you can, with great effort, pull out everything known about every species. But it would take an army actually to get all the information on all species, all 1.8 million species and on beyond, around the world.

For example, 30 feet from where we sit is the largest ant collection in the world. One million specimens, 6,000 species, and it's a wonderful resource. [DP notes: This collection represents Wilson's own life's work.]

But any scientist who wants to utilize this collection-and that's most of them who are doing research on ants-have to come here [to my department at Harvard]. But when The Encyclopedia of Life receives all the information that we have, like the superb photographs and basic data on the species, just a few keystrokes away, it'll be possible to do high-level, cutting-edge, real-time research, wherever you are.

Simultaneously, to speed things along even more, the Biodiversity Heritage Library Initiative has set out to scan and make available maybe 500 million pages published all through time, on all species. [They are literally scanning thousands of books and journals, converting the scans to text, and making it all available to the Enyclopedia of Life.] I just got a letter from one of the leaders of this who said, "We've just passed the eight million mark."

DP: It sounds like this is going to be a major world resource. How is it gonna pay for itself? Are you gonna sell ads?

EOW: This project has to pay for itself. We got our break through the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations to get started. But now we have to pick up funds to expand it to anything near completion.

And right now, I don't have an idea of what that will take in funding. But I'm pretty sure of one thing. It's not going to cost more than the Human Genome Project, because it's way ahead. And it's gonna cost a lot less than our space programs-a lot less. In fact, if we could have a small fraction of one of a space program budget alone, we would see this project go way fast into the future.

It's a scientific moon shot-big science. But I think it's gonna turn out to be one of the least expensive. It doesn't take a lot of high technology to discover species and work out their characteristics.

DP: Is there a larger purpose to The Encyclopedia of Life?

EOW: Oh, yeah. The Encyclopedia of Life is absolutely vital in saving the environment. Because we're losing the vast percentage of species; we are losing them. Whenever we focus on a particular group, whether it's birds, frogs, whatever, we can just see them disappearing. So what happens among all these other groups, from beetles to ants to bacteria to fungi and so on? You know full well that they're disappearing, too. But we don't even know what's disappearing. And we don't know how to save most of them. And we don't know how this is going to affect the environment.

We need to have this information, this great database, in order to plan strategies that are maximally efficient, cost the least, square kilometer by square kilometer around the world, and save the most. And we can't do that without a thorough knowledge of what we're trying to save.

Listen: What would thrill people the most about space exploration? Surely it would be the discovery of life on another planet.

Then, Congress, if it weren't busted, would be willing to put out billions to explore that planet-find out all of the life forms there. Why shouldn't we be doing the same for planet earth? It's a little-known planet. Ninety percent of the life forms unknown to us.

And this is gonna be fun. This is a return to exploring a little-known planet.

DP: What is your involvement with The Encyclopedia of Life these days?

EOW: Here at Harvard, I've started a part of The Encyclopedia of Life effort: the Global Ant Project. I've obtained the funds. We've just had a meeting of ant specialists from around the country.

DP: That's gotta be a party.

EOW: Yeah, it was. (LAUGHTER) The word for them is myrmecologists. And believe me, this was an exciting but, I have to admit, idiosyncratic clan meeting. (LAUGHTER)

And for a skeptical audience who says, "Well, how could studying ants be very important?" Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers. Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems. Take away humans, and everything would come back and flourish. But I don't wanna go down that down that road for a broad audience. (LAUGHTER)

DP: I'm just curious: when you see an ant in the kitchenŠHas your life's work caused you to reach a point where you wouldn't just stomp on it?

EOW: Oh, no. (LAUGHTER) I've slaughtered more ants in my life than possibly any living person. Whole colonies.

DP: What is your sense of The Encyclopedia of Life's likelihood of success?

EOW: Likelihood of success? Certain. Challenges? Large. Some unknown. But right now, those that can be imagined don't seem to be insoluble. It won't take a huge amount of funding. It'll be relatively a small "big science" effort. No. I think this whole effort has a great future.

DP: So you don't see it being derailed by people leaving, or money running out, or-

EOW: What's to derail? I mean, we're not talking about the Hadron Collider, with people standing outside, wringing their hands thinking that the Earth will disappear into a black hole. We're not talking about religious believers trying to put the stop on the stem cells. We're talking about finding out about life on a little-known planet and making full use of that knowledge.

In Britain, creationist theory is evolving

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Simon Dawson / Associated Press

Monty White wants creationism taught in British schools. “We do get the students to question what they’re being taught about evolution,” he says.

Groups that oppose Darwin are making headway in schools.

By Gregory Katz, Associated Press
March 15, 2008

LONDON -- After the Sunday service in Westminster Chapel, where worshipers were exhorted to wage "the culture war" in the World War II spirit of Sir Winston Churchill, cabbie James McLean delivered his verdict on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

"Evolution is a lie, and it's being taught in schools as fact, and it's leading our kids in the wrong direction," said McLean, chatting outside the chapel. "But now people like Ken Ham are tearing evolution to pieces."

Ken Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, a Kentucky-based organization that is part of an ambitious effort to bring creationist theory to Britain and the rest of Europe. McLean is one of a growing number of evangelicals embracing that message -- that the true history of the Earth is told in the Bible, not Darwin's "The Origin of Species."

Europeans have long viewed the conflict between evolutionists and creationists as primarily an American phenomenon, but it has recently jumped the Atlantic with skirmishes in Italy, Germany, Poland and, notably, Britain, where Darwin was born and where he published his 1859 classic.

Darwin's defenders are fighting back. In October, the 47-nation Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog, condemned all attempts to bring creationism into Europe's schools. Bible-based theories and "religious dogma" threaten to undercut sound educational practices, it charged.

Schools are increasingly a focal point in this battle for hearts and minds.

A British branch of Answers in Genesis, which shares a website with its American counterpart, has managed to introduce its creationist point of view into science classes at a number of state-supported schools in Britain, said Monty White, the group's chief executive.

"We do go into the schools about 10 to 20 times a year and we do get the students to question what they're being taught about evolution," said White, who founded the British branch seven years ago. "And we leave them a box of books for the library."

Creationism is still a marginal issue here compared with its impact on cultural and political debate in the United States. But the budding fervor is part of a growing embrace of evangelical worship throughout much of Europe. Evangelicals say their ranks are swelling because of revulsion with the hedonism and materialism of modern society. At the same time, attendance at traditional churches is declining.

"People are looking for spirituality," White said in an interview at his office in Leicester, 90 miles north of London. "I think they are fed up with not finding true happiness. They find having a bigger car doesn't make them happy. They get drunk and the next morning they have a hangover. They take drugs but the drugs wear off. But what they find with Christianity is lasting."

Other British organizations have joined the crusade. A group called Truth in Science has sent thousands of unsolicited DVDs to every high school in Britain arguing that mankind is the result of "intelligent design," not Darwinian evolution.

In addition, the AH Trust, a charity, has announced plans to raise money for construction of a Christian theme park in northwest England with a 5,000-seat television studio that would be used for the production of Christian-oriented films. And several TV stations are devoted to Christian themes.

All this activity has lifted spirits at the Westminster Chapel, a 165-year-old evangelical church that is not affiliated with nearby Westminster Abbey, where Darwin is buried.

In the chapel, the Rev. Greg Haslam tells 150 believers that they are in a conflict with secularism that can only be won if they heed Churchill's exhortation and never give up.

"The first thing you have to do is realize we are in a war, and identify the enemy, and learn how to defeat the enemy," he said.

There is a sense inside the chapel that Christian evangelicals are successfully resisting a trend toward a completely secular Britain.

"People have walked away from God; it's not fashionable," said congregant Chris Mullins, a civil servant. "But the evangelical church does seem to be growing and I'm very encouraged by that. In what is a very secular society, there are people returning to God."

School curricula generally hold that Darwin's theory has been backed up by so many scientific discoveries that it can now be regarded as fact. But Mullins believes creationism also deserves a hearing in the classroom.

"Looking at the evidence, creationism at the least seems a theory worthy of examination," he said. "Personally, I think it is true and I think the truth will win out eventually. It's a question of how long it takes."

Terry Sanderson, president of Britain's National Secular Society, a group founded in 1866 to limit the influence of religious leaders, said that the groups advocating a literal interpretation of the Bible are making headway.

"Creationism is creeping into the schools," he said. "There is a constant pressure to get these ideas into the schools."

The trend goes beyond evangelical Christianity. Sanderson said the British government is taking over funding of about 100 Islamic schools even though they teach the Koranic version of creationism. He said the government fears imposing evolution theory on the curriculum lest it be branded as anti-Islamic.

The Council of Europe spoke up last fall after Harun Yahya, a prominent Muslim creationist in Turkey, tried to place his lavishly produced 600-page book, "The Atlas of Creation," in public schools in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain.

"These trends are very dangerous," Anne Brasseur, author of the Council of Europe report, said in an interview.

Brasseur said recent skirmishes in Italy and Germany illustrate the creationists' tactics. She said Italian schools were ordered to stop teaching evolution when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister, although the edict seems to have had little effect in practice. In Germany, she said, a state education minister briefly allowed creationism to be taught in biology class.

The rupture between theology and evolution in Europe is relatively recent. For many years people who held evangelical views also endorsed mainstream scientific theory, said Simon Barrow, co-director of Ekklesia, a British-based, Christian-oriented research group. He said the split was imported from the United States in the last decade.

"There is a lot of American influence, and there are a lot of moral and political and financial resources flowing from the United States to here," he said. "Now you have more extreme religious groups trying to get a foothold."

In some cases, the schools have become the battlegrounds. Richard Dawkins, the Oxford university biologist and author of last year's international best-seller "The God Delusion," frequently lectures students about the marvels of evolution only to find that the students' views have already been shaped by the creationist lobby.

"I think it's so sad that children should be fobbed off with these second-rate myths," he said.

"The theory of evolution is one of the most powerful pieces of scientific thinking ever produced and the evidence for it is overwhelming. I think creationism is pernicious because if you don't know much it sounds kind of plausible and it's easy to come into schools and subvert children."

White, the director of the British Answers in Genesis, is well aware that the group's school program is contentious. The group has removed information about it from its website to avoid antagonizing people.

The group operates a warehouse with $150,000 worth of DVDs, books and comics promoting creationism, but he says he only sends speakers and materials into schools that invite Answers in Genesis to make a presentation.

White, 63, said he was reared as an atheist and, after earning a doctorate in chemistry, embraced evangelical Christianity in 1964.

He says that when he is asked to speak to science classes, he challenges the accuracy of radioactive dating which shows the world to be thousands of millions of years old and says that the Bible is a more accurate description of how mankind began. He personally believes the Earth is between 6,000 and 12,000 years old.

"Usually I find the discussion goes on science, science and science, and then when the lesson is finished one or two students say, 'Can we talk about other things?' and I sit down with them and usually they want to talk about Christianity," he said. "They want to know, why do you believe in God? Why do you believe in the Bible? How can you be sure it's the word of God?"

Dawkins feels the effect. He said he is discouraged when he visits schools and gets questions from students who have obviously been influenced by material from Answers in Genesis. "I continually get the same rather stupid points straight from their pamphlets," he said.

White is getting ready for a visit by Ken Ham, who will preach at Westminster Chapel this spring. Meanwhile, he is pleased that small groups of creation science advocates now meet regularly in Oxford, Edinburgh, Northampton and other British cities.

"The creation movement is certainly growing," he said. "There are more groups than there were five years ago. There are more people like me going out speaking about it, and there's more interest. You have these little groups forming all over the place."

Babel's Dawn

Fossil Evidence of Speech?

One very obvious difference between the vocalizations of all our ape cousins and humans is the presence of air sacs in all
the apes. Air sacs are essentially large bags that attach to the throat and lie atop the upper chest. Apes use them to make
great big sounds, noises that make them sound larger than they are, rather like putting a truck horn on a Volkswagen to
command respect. Humans do not have air sacs. Dutch linguist Bart de Boer has looked into the question of whether the
absence of air sacs in humans has something to do with the rise of language. If it does, we can date language to at least 800
thousand years ago he told the Evolang conference in Barcelona this evening (Friday, March 14, 2008).
The fossil evidence comes from the hyoid bone, the only bone in the vocal system, and therefore the only source of fossil
evidence for what was going on in the vocal tract’s evolution. (An earlier presentation said we cannot describe the vocal
tract on the basis of the hyoid bone; however, de Boer presented evidence that all the apes have a hyoid bone with a cup
shape in the middle while human hyoids lack the cup. So perhaps we can at least tell from the hyoid whether or not there
was an air sac. See: Stop Your Yacking.) Humans and Neanderthals have almost identical hyoids and just published data
shows that Homo heidelbergensis of 800 thousand years ago had a human-like hyoid. No erectus hyoid fossil has ever
been found, so we cannot push the loss of air sacs back to them. An Australopithecus afarensis hyoid with the
characteristic cup has been found, but as I recall that was a fossil from an infant and so is not quite definitive. The young of
a species often show traits that disappear in the adult. (See: The Selam Fossil)
But what evidence is there that the loss of air sacs might be related to the rise of speech? De Boer has modeled the sounds
that follow the addition of an air sac to the vocal system. Air sac result in lower frequency sounds and a smaller acoustic
range than humans enjoy. Air sacs shorten the articulatory range and the mouth is less able to shape the sound that comes
out from an air sac vocalization. De Boer hypothesized that when what you say becomes more important than how you
sound, air sacs give way. So the disappearance of air sacs is likely a good bit of evidence that speech of some sort has
appeared.
During the question session following the presentation, one woman asked if it was true even today for humans that what
you say is more important than how you say it. De Boer said he liked to believe it would, but the young woman seemed
unconvinced. On the other hand, if what you say doesn’t matter so much, the conference as a whole is wrongly focused.
Another questioner pointed out that there is a sexual appeal in having a big air sac and that mating strength would be a
counterbalance to the pressures from language to reduce the sac. De Boer agreed but thought that the descent of the larynx
may well have been a counterbalance to the loss of air sacs. He said this explanation is not perfect, however, because the
lowered larynx would likely only offer an alternative way of deepening the voice after the sac had already disappeared.
March 14, 2008 in evolang 2008 | Permalink

World Science

More “little people” fossils found

March 11, 2008
Courtesy Public Library of Science
and World Science staff

Re­search­ers say they have dis­cov­ered more fos­sils of min­ia­ture, is­land-dwelling peo­ple, adding a new twist to the sa­ga of so-called “hob­bit” fos­sils re­ported found in In­do­ne­sia in 2004.

A sci­en­tif­ic de­bate has raged over wheth­er those came from a spe­cies of min­ia­ture hu­ma­n­s—as their disco­verers ar­gued—or just from dis­eased, or­di­nary peo­ple.

A map indicates the relative locations of Flores, Indonesia (lower-left red arrow) and Palau (upper-right red arrow.)

If the form­er were true, this would fit in with the fact that ma­ny spe­cies of an­i­mals al­so evolve in­to small forms on is­lands. But sev­er­al stud­ies have chal­lenged the view that the In­do­ne­sian spec­i­mens rep­re­sent a new spe­cies; for ex­am­ple, a pa­per in the March 5 is­sue of the jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Roy­al So­ci­e­ty B sug­gests the “hob­bits” were in real­ity mal­nour­ished cretins.

The disco­very of ad­di­tion­al, some­what si­m­i­lar fos­sils on oth­er is­lands may both re­new and com­pli­cate the de­bate.

In this week’s is­sue of the re­search jour­nal PLoS One, Lee Berger and col­leagues of the Uni­ver­s­ity of the Wit­wa­ters­rand, South Af­ri­ca, Rut­gers Uni­ver­s­ity and Duke Uni­ver­s­ity in North Car­o­li­na de­scribe new­found fos­sils of lit­tle hu­ma­ns from other is­lands.

They lived 1,400 to 3,000 years ago, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers, and share some fea­tures with the ear­li­er spec­i­mens, dubbed Ho­mo flo­re­sien­sis by their disco­verers. The name came from the loca­t­ion of disco­very, In­do­ne­sia’s Flo­res Is­land.

The new find­ings comes in­stead from Palau, an is­land chain in the west­ern cen­tral Pa­cif­ic. Palau con­sists of a main is­land of Ba­bel­daob, with hun­dreds of smaller rock is­lands to the south­west. These con­tain ca­ves and rock shel­ters, ma­ny of which have yielded pre­his­tor­ic hu­man re­mains.

The new spec­i­mens from two such ca­ves, Uche­li­ungs and Ome­dokel, which seem to have been used as bur­i­al sites, re­search­ers said.

Both ca­ves, they added, yielded skele­tons of in­di­vid­u­als who would have been small even rel­a­tive to oth­er such popula­t­ions and are ap­prox­i­mately the size of H. flo­re­sien­sis or small mem­bers of the ge­nus Aus­tra­lo­pith­e­cus. These fos­sils were dat­ed to be­tween 1410 and 2890 years ago. The Ome­dokel cave en­trance al­so con­tained re­mains of larg­er peo­ple dat­ed to around a mil­len­ni­um ago, the re­search­ers said.

These ca­ves have pro­vid­ed and will con­tin­ue to pro­vide a wealth of spec­i­mens, which will need deeper stu­dy, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors added. But pre­lim­i­nar­y anal­y­sis of more than a doz­en in­di­vid­u­als in­clud­ing a male who would have weighed around 43 kg (95 lb) and a female of 29 kg (64 lb) show that these peo­ple “had ma­ny cran­io­fa­cial fea­tures con­sid­ered un­ique to H. sapi­ens,” our spe­cies, re­search­ers said.

“These in­di­vid­u­als are likely to be from a hu­man popula­t­ion who ac­quired re­duced stat­ure, for some rea­son,” the re­search­ers said in an­nounc­ing the find­ing March 10.

“It is well es­tab­lished that popula­t­ions liv­ing on iso­lat­ed is­lands of­ten con­sist of in­di­vid­u­als of smaller stat­ure than their main­land cousin­s—a phe­nom­e­non known as is­land dwarf­ism. This is true not just for hu­ma­ns but for ma­ny an­i­mals in­clud­ing ex­tinct mam­moths and ele­phants from is­lands off Si­be­ria, Cal­i­for­nia and even in the Med­i­ter­ra­nean. Al­ter­na­tively, the is­land may have been col­o­nized by a few small in­di­vid­u­als, be­tween 3,000 and 4,000 years ago who, through ex­ten­sive in­breed­ing, and oth­er en­vi­ron­men­tal drivers, pro­duced a small-bodied popula­t­ion, which con­tin­ued to in­hab­it Palau un­til at least 1,400 years ago.”

As well as hav­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of H. sapi­ens, the Palau fos­sils al­so have fea­tures seen in H. flo­re­sien­sis, the re­search­ers said.

Berger and col­leagues said they don’t in­fer from these fea­tures any di­rect rela­t­ion­ship be­tween the peo­ples of Palau and Flo­res. How­ev­er, they added, the ob­serva­t­ions do sug­gest that at least some of the fea­tures which have been tak­en as ev­i­dence that the Flo­res in­di­vid­u­als are mem­bers of a sep­a­rate spe­cies, may be a com­mon adapta­t­ion in hu­ma­ns of re­duced stat­ure.

Anal­y­sis of the Palau spec­i­mens probably won’t set­tle ar­gu­ments over the sta­tus of H. flo­re­sien­sis as there are fea­tures of Flo­res ma­n, such as small brain size, not found in the peo­ple of Palau, Berger and col­leagues added. Nev­er­the­less, they said, the find­ings sug­gest that at least some of the un­usu­al fea­tures seen in Flo­res are due to en­vi­ronment rath­er than an­ces­tral her­it­age.

“Above all, the skele­tons from Palau should greatly in­crease our un­der­stand­ing of the pro­cess of is­land dwarf­ism in hu­man popula­t­ions and of the an­cient co­lon­iz­a­tions of Ocea­nia,” the re­search­ers said in their an­nounce­ment. The study was funded by the Na­tional Ge­o­graph­ic So­ci­e­ty Mis­sion Pro­grams. A doc­u­men­ta­ry on the find­ings, “Mys­tery Skulls of Palau,” pre­mieres Mon­day, March 17 at 10 PM on the Na­tional Ge­o­graph­ic Chan­nel in the U.S.

τό είδαμε στήν WORLD SCIENCE

Estimates for peopling of Americas getting earlier

March 13, 2008
Courtesy Science
and World Science staff

Arche­ol­o­gists are pre­sent­ing what they call the lat­est ev­i­dence that a tra­di­tion­al ac­count of the peo­pling of the Amer­i­cas is wrong.

The mainstream view pre­vail­ing in the past sev­er­al dec­ades holds that hu­mans en­tered the con­ti­nent about 12,000 years ago us­ing a tem­po­rary land bridge from north­east­ern Asia to Alas­ka. These mi­grants would have giv­en rise to a cul­ture of mam­moth hunters known for their un­ique stone pro­ject­ile-points and dubbed Clo­vis, af­ter re­mains found near Clo­vis, N.M., in the 1930s.

Excavation of the Schaefer mammoth in Wisconsin, thought by archaeologists to date to about 14,500 years ago. (Image courtesy D. Joyce)

But in re­cent years ev­i­dence has turned up that the first Amer­i­cans might have been con­sid­erably old­er, some ar­chae­o­lo­gists ar­gue.

A new re­view pub­lished in the re­search jour­nal Sci­ence con­tends that that the first Amer­i­cans had their roots in south­ern Si­be­ria, ven­tured across the Ber­ing land bridge probably around 22,000 years ago, and mi­grat­ed down in­to the Amer­i­cas as early as 16,000 years ago.

In the pa­per, Ted Goebel of Tex­as A&M Uni­ver­s­ity and col­leagues ar­gue that the lat­ter date is when an ice-free cor­ri­dor in Can­a­da opened and en­abled the migra­t­ion.

The new ac­count is bol­stered by ge­net­ic ev­i­dence and the dis­cov­ery of new ar­chae­o­log­i­cal sites and more ac­cu­rate dates for old sites, ac­cord­ing to the re­search­ers.

Ge­net­ic ev­i­dence, they wrote, points to a found­ing popula­t­ion of less than 5,000 peo­ple at the be­gin­ning of the sec­ond migra­t­ion in Can­a­da.

Moreover, they added, ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ev­i­dence sug­gests the Clo­vis cul­ture may have been rel­a­tive late­com­ers to the Amer­i­cas or de­scen­dants of ear­li­er Paleo-Indian popula­t­ions rep­re­sented at ar­chae­o­log­i­cal sites such as Mon­te Verde in Chil­e. That site is thought to have been oc­cu­pied 14,600 years ago.

The re­search by Goebel and col­leagues ap­pears in the jour­nal’s March 14 is­sue.

EVE SAVORY

Science vs. creationism

Scientific community mobilizes defence of evolution
March 11, 2008

I never could understand, as a young television reporter in Saskatchewan, why scientists refused to defend evolution. It was 1980 and a controversy had erupted over creationism being taught in some science classes. I might have been asking scientists to debate the Flat Earth Society, so withering were their responses to my requests for an interview.
Paleontologist David Eberth explained to me last week that scientists used to believe debating the subject would imply creationism and evolution had equal merit.
"After they were done saying what a pile of poo this whole scientific creationism is, [they] basically wiped their hands of it and walked away," said Eberth, a senior research scientist at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta.
Big mistake. Being left with the ring to itself, creationism reinvented itself as
intelligent design, with the claim that life is too complex to have developed
randomly. Now, said Eberth, the science community is seeing "the negative
education, political and socio-economic fallout for not engaging."
In books, in editorials, in speeches and on the internet, scientists are now
defending evolution on any platform they can get. What's got them so
rattled? "It's the threat to science," said Daniel Fairbanks, author of the new book
Relics of Eden.
The Brigham Young University geneticist — and Christian — writes that
creationists and advocates of intelligent design "have successfully promoted
history's most sophisticated and generously funded attack on science,
claiming that evolution, human evolution in particular, is a 'theory in crisis.'"
Far from being a "theory in crisis," evolution is a fact.
In the 149 years since the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, scientists have uncovered a veritable Noah's flood
of fossil and DNA proof that species evolved.
The evidence is, oh… pick a superlative: overwhelming, irrefutable,
incontrovertible, up there with the earth is round and revolves around the sun.
Yet Christian creationism — the belief that the Bible is literally true — isn't just holding its ground in the face of all that evidence. It's seizing new territory, or so Eberth, Fairbanks and many others fear.
In Texas, Florida, Kentucky, Kansas, Arkansas and elsewhere, Fairbanks writes, a powerful Christian fundamentalist movement conducts an "ongoing assault on science … whose political objectives are to cast doubt on the reality of evolution and to restrict or dilute it in the science curricula of public schools."
Science consistently wins in the courts. The most recent triumph was the 2005 decision against the Dover, Pennsylvania school district, where the courts ruled intelligent design was religion, not science. And ruled it unconstitutional.
Yet despite winning those battles, science is losing the war, according to Eberth. "We have a whole generation of kids in the U.S. who are having this stuff pumped down their throats," he said. Evolution not in the curriculum
In Canada, the debate is less noisy. In fact, you might not be aware there is a debate.
Still, I was floored when Banff resident Scott Rowed, a member of the Centre for Inquiry, told me his daughter graduated from Grade 12 in Alberta without ever hearing the word "evolution."
"The underpinnings of our life sciences courses, our curriculum, are all based on the assumptions of evolution," said the Alberta Department of Education's Kathy Telfer. But evolution itself is not part of the core curriculum in most Canadian schools.


"It's not unheard of, in fact [it] may be quite common, for students to go through their entire public education without hearing about evolution," Jason Wiles of McGill University's Evolution Education Research Centre told me.
What else worries scientists?
Consider the ascent of Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and for several startling months a serious challenger for the Republican presidential nomination. A creationist, he suggested the U.S. constitution should be amended "so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."
And survey after survey has found roughly half of Americans believe God created humans in their present form, in a single act, within the last 10,000 years.
Only 22 % of Canadians hold that opinion, according to an Angus Reid poll published last June. Curiously, the same poll found 42 per cent of us agree with the creationist belief that we co-existed with dinosaurs.
In Europe, people used to scratch their heads over the furious evolution debate in the United States. Now they have their own alarums and excursions. The creationists have opened so many fronts that last fall a study by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe warned, "If we are not careful, the values that are the very essence of the Council of Europe will be under direct threat from creationist fundamentalists."
It's not just a blossoming Christian fundamentalism that alarms the council. It's also Islamic scientific creationism. The report describes how a Turkish book titled The Atlas of Creation had been sent to schools in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain. The author, Islamist preacher Harun Yahya, calls Darwinism a "ruse of Satan," which, he writes, "is collapsing and causing panic in the Darwinian global empire."
Science takes the offensive
Panic? No. Major concern? Yes.
Enough so that scientists are sending out a stream of books, lectures, and editorials explaining,
demonstrating, defending evolution, including in January alone:
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences published the book Science, Evolution, and Creationism.
The co-discoverer of the transitional fossil Tiktaalik ("the fish that does pushups") published Your Inner Fish.
The journal Nature asked the science community to "take every opportunity to promote"
evolution.
A new Journal devoted to teaching evolution was launched.
17 U.S. organizations declared evolution education a "must."
And Daniel Fairbanks published Relics of Eden. "There really is a movement going on here," he told me from his Utah office.
Fossils and DNA hold the proof
If fossils hadn't so thoroughly locked up the proof, the evidence Fairbanks presents would finish the job. For our evolutionary history is written in our DNA.
As an undergraduate exploring for fossils in his geology class, Fairbanks had already had to rethink his deeply religious upbringing. Accepting the story the fossils told "was a change in my world view," he said.
As a geneticist, he now studies a different kind of fossil. But the story they tell is the same.
These "relics" of our evolutionary past are segments of DNA, mutations, apparently redundant, which have accumulated over time and now clutter up the genomes of humans and other species.
"Each relic, we presume, was inherited from a common ancestor," Fairbanks told me. "The closer they are, then the more recent the common ancestor of that organism must be, and the more distant they are — that is, the more diverged they are — then the more distant the common ancestor must be."
The sequencing of three primate genomes — human, chimpanzee, and the rhesus macaque — was "a scientific opportunity unlike any that we have ever had before," said Fairbanks.
The chapters that demonstrate how genomes prove the evolutionary relationship may demand
concentration from those of us without a degree in biology. Be prepared to learn about transposons, retroelements and pseudogenes. The payoff is in understanding why scientists find the evidence indisputable.
Fairbanks spent a lot of time on the primates because he has found that while many people are willing to believe other species have evolved, they draw the line at humans. "They just can't get beyond the point that we share common ancestry with other animals," he said.
Evolution, atheism and God
Fairbanks is troubled by the dichotomy laid out by two extremes: creationists and atheists. Both make the claim, he said, that you must believe in either evolution or God. You can't believe in both. He himself has no trouble marrying the two in his personal life, but adds: "If one accepts that dichotomy, then the study of science is frightening. It seems to be something that is the enemy of religion when in fact it is not."
Perhaps atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have done more to damage evolution than to champion it.
In fact, rather than seeing creationists and evolutionists engaging in battle, Fairbanks has embraced the call made by one enthusiastic reviewer of his book for an "intellectual peace corps." "Say I am a member of it," he told me.
Back in 1980, I finally did find a scientist who thought defending evolution in my news story would be worth his while. Taylor Steen, a biologist and a Christian, told me then that "creationism is bad religion. And it's bad science."
Science and scientists have paid a price for assuming that that simple answer — or none at all — would suffice.

Additional links
There are thousands of other websites where one can pursue these topics. Here are three that are worth exploring:
The Talk Origins Archive takes an evolutionary perspective but links to sites that support
creationism and Intelligent Design.
One of the most active promoters of the latter point of view is the Institute for Creation Research And the Creation Information Portal gives a Canadian viewpoint.