The influenza viruses are known for their ability to mutate. Any virus is highly capable of doing this at a fast rate, but the flu is infamous for its high rate of mutation, meaning your shot will be pretty much useless ten months from the day you got it. This is due to a virus’ ability to cut, copy, and paste their host’s and their own DNA practically anyway and anywhere they want it. They can swap genes with their host or even other viruses vacationing in the same organism. This means your immunities for last year’s virus is now out of style, and won’t protect you against the new strain.  If you are a rich masochist, this is wonderful news. However, if you are like many others who fear pain and/or needles, getting the flu doesn’t sound like such a bad thing after all.

How is this related to evolution? It is the fundamentals of the process. Evolution occurs when one or more mutations change an organism. Over time, these mutations allow the animal to adapt. Some mutations are useful to finches in gathering certain types of food; other mutations help viruses spread faster. The influenza viruses are constantly evolving. Every year the common strain will mutate, leaving the previous vaccine moot and ineffective. Although it has a mutation that can drastically effect the way it works, it is still an influenza virus. This is known as microevolution. A mutation will change the organism’s appearance or function, but it will still be of the same species. Many skeptics of evolution typically have a hard time believing in giant leaps in the process, also known as macro evolution. What many fail to understand is that macroevolution is simply many micro evolutions over time in a population to evolve into a new species.  In animals, the process of mutation takes much longer than a virus. It can take hundreds or thousands of years before enough micro evolutions occur and separate a group into its own species.

Viruses are constantly mutating and going through tiny microevolutions, but people hardly ever think of it that way. They just think their vaccine wears off and needs renewed. Remember the next time you go to the doctor to get your shot that it’s well worth the old lady musk and “bee sting” injection, because with every new strain your body has a lower chance of keeping the virus from running its full course.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” —Romans 1:20

Creationists often claim that the ‘beauty of creation’ tells us something about the nature of their god; and that we atheists are ‘without excuse’ for not believing in god after looking at the world around us. The closet creationists, the IDists, also claim that such wonderful design in the universe is proof of a designer, which to them is the Christian god.

Now, let us take a look at a beautiful organism that must have been created by god. The evidence for special creation of this organism is so convincing that I am seriously doubting my acceptance of evolution.

This wonderful organism, Cymothoa exigua, simply must have been created by a loving creator! This cute little tongue-eating isopod causes degeneration of the tongue of its host fish, the rose snapper, Lutjanus guttatus, and it then attaches to the remaining tongue stub and floor of the fish’s mouth by hook-like pereopods. In this position the isopod acts as a replacement to the fish’s missing tongue, and in a marvel of god’s sheer ingenuity, gets the first opportunity to devour incoming meals.

Praise god for creating such a wonderful organism! Through this, we see that god loves parasites, is sadistic, might have been on pot, should not be messed around with, and…oh…according to Christians, must be worshiped. If you don’t worship this sadistic god, he will damn you to hell, and considering his amazing creations such as the above, this is a threat that we should seriously consider! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord for being a loving and sadistic god at the same time! Praise the Lord for giving us such awesome creatures that helps us marvel at the beauty of his creation!

Praise our Father in heaven, the loving Creator of gruesome organisms! Amen.

In an act that completely stunned those of us who are familiar with the often-intentional deceptive tactics that the creationists employ for Jesus to promote their dogma, (in)famous YouTube creationist VenomFangX apologized for filing false DMCA claims against another user.

For those who need an introduction, VenomFangX is a particularly clueless creationist who insists on clogging up YouTube with insanity that ranges from the idea that evolution is a tool of Satan to fawning screeds of Kent Hovind-worship. Despite being repeatedly called out for his outrageous and blatantly false claims, VenomFangX has adamantly refused to admit that his claims are all made out of hot air.

The story took a turn for the funny when VenomFang X decided that he did not like the series “Why Do People Laugh at Creationists?” made by another user, Thunderf00t. He proceeded to file false DMCA notices against Thunderf00t in an attempt at censorship. Thunderf00t decided that it was time to teach our creationist a lesson, and obtained proof that VenomFangX deliberately committed perjury in the process of filing the claims. Instead of suing the living daylights out of VenomFangX and having his account permabanned from YouTube, Thunderf00t decided to make a public example out of VenomFangX by making him – gasp – apologize and admit that he was lying all along.

Click here to watch VenomFangX getting owned.

Apparently, his devotion to Jesus did not stop VenomFangX from lying. Oh, the irony of it all!

31:22 – A cell could not have been the result of Darwinian evolution because it is a machine of at least 250 perfectly ordered proteins, each of which has to work to maintain a lifeform. Therefore there must be an intelligent design to make something this ordered and precise.

That’s assuming that proteins have all-or-nothing function, which is COMPLETELY false. There are countless mutants of even just one protein and different mutants of different proteins have different catalytic efficiencies. Most mutations don’t even have an effect on fitness, and are silent due to the degeneracy of the genetic code (multiple codons encode for the same protein). And different cellular structures can be analogous but not homologous, meaning that they have different evolutionary bases but the same function, just as with the flagella of the archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes – demonstrating that there are multiple pathways to adaptations that essentially do the same thing.

Furthermore, the longer back a protein’s lineage is, the more conserved (unlikely to change over time) it is since said protein has undergone selective pressure and any new non-silent mutations would be even more likely to be catastrophic to function. This can lead to some very inefficient proteins, such as Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase (Rubisco), which has enzymatic activity of only 4 molecules per second (most enzymes have activities of hundreds or thousands per second) but is critical for the carbon fixation cycle. If everything were so intricate and intelligently designed, Rubisco would be far more efficient and not have to consist of 40% of total proteins in the cell NOR would it be sensitive to something as simple as oxygen.

Rubisco. If it were intelligently designed, God must really have been on something.

Life can loosely be defined as a structure that is capable of metabolism, can self-replicate, and can regulate its own environment. There is strong circumstantial evidence that all three can occur individually even through very simple, immediate phenomenon; lipids, which were created by the Miller-Urey Experiment, can spontaneously form into micelles given a certain concentration of lipids (the Critical Micelle Concentation). These micelles are enclosed structures capable of forming a basis of a micro environment.

Abiogenesis Goes Far Beyond “Lightning Striking a Mud Puddle” – Thomas Cech’s Experiments

Nobel Laureate Thomas Cech showed through a fragment assay where he stripped away various portions of the bacterial ribosome that if 95% of all proteins were stripped away, the ribosome would still be capable of peptidyl transferase activity. He also found that the protein did not exist around the active sites of the ribosome. Through this and various other experiments, Cech demonstrated that RNA functions as both an encoder and a catalyst (a catalyzing RNA is referred to as a ribozyme).

Cech further demonstrated that such an RNA molecule can be relatively simple and can form through a variety of pathways. Cech sequenced random RNA sequences and found that out of a total of 10^85 possible molecules with just 172 bases, around one per 10^15 molecules was capable of some peptidyl transferase activity. Thus there are 10^70 different molecules with different bases capable of PT activity – and just for those molecules with 172 bases! Thus, one does not need a intricately and intelligently designed ribozyme to perform seemingly advanced metabolic activities – random polymerization and then selective pressure for those molecules best able to self-replicate will suffice.

39:31 – Ben fawns over Capital Hill town idiot Congressman Mark Souder (R-IN), who has proposed a bill preserving “academic freedom” at the Smithsonian in response to Sternberg’s “persecution”. This is just one of many examples of “The Academy”, a shadowy organization dedicated to eliminating God from the science lab.

Congressman Souder’s admits that he is from a district where the Democrats need to be conservatives to survive and the Republicans are even more far to the right. Belief in the literal truth of the Bible hardly makes him some sort of nonpartisan arbiter in the Evolution-ID debate. Oh, and parroting the Expelled movie ON his house website doesn’t really help.

41:29 – The National Center for Science Education is at the forefront of keeping Darwinism in power. They are one of many watchdog organizations, along with that demonic ACLU, which is in cahoots with The Academy.

And there are numerous watchdog organizations that do exactly the opposite. To imply some sort of liberal conspiracy theory is one of the many disingenuous claims this movie makes.

James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family and more guilty of spamming peoples’ e-mails than half of Nigeria

43:35 – Darwinism turns goodly, God-fearing Christians into Atheists! Just look at Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers! Beware!

(See 57:22 for more)

Although the percentage of Americans who believe evolution stand at an appallingly low 40% (only several percentage points above hardcore creationism), almost 80% of Americans consider themselves Christians… meaning that even if we assume that everyone in the remaining 20% believed in evolution, 50% of evolutionists would have to be Christians. I’m sure that they are Christians In Name Only, because they probably belong to some liberal church that supports gay marriage or is maybe just a front group for *gulp* humanism.

44:18 – Ben uses the example of the Abrams Report on MSNBC (now Verdict w/ Dan Abrams), who absolutely dismantled a lawyer from the Thomas More Law Foundation representing the defendants of the Dover School District Trial to show that the media is firmly in the hands of Big Science.

Kudos to Dan Abrams; he called out the IDers for what they really are – closest creationists. And while Abrams, Keith Olbermann, and maybe even Chris Matthews on MSNBC lean to the left, there have always been more conservative pundits on cable TV. Right-wingers Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck all gave the Expelled movie itself glowing reviews. I also have yet to see an unabashedly far-left organization that masquerades itself as “News”, just as FOX News does for the right.

45:41- Pamela Winnick “refused to take sides” in an article on the evolution-ID debate. But the Darwinists still persecuted her because she refused to show enough deference to evolution.

This is actually one area where Ben Stein gets it partially right. Winnick’s original article does try to set a neutral tone between the evolution-ID debate… although it does make the false assumption that ID is a serious theory that needs to be debated. But Stein gives no examples of how she was “persecuted”. And now Pamela Winnick cannot be considered a non-partisan journalist – her new book “Science’s War Against Religion“.

46:36 – Darwinism has infiltrated the courts in a last-ditch attempt to stop Intelligent Design. Representing the vanguard of the effort is the ACLU.

A court is a forum where all the evidence for or against Intelligent Design and/or the Theory of Evolution can be debated, discussed, and refuted. Oh wait, I forgot you don’t have any evidence – maybe that’s why you’re so afraid of the judicial system.

49:44 - Darwinists have given up on defending their own theory, and have simply resorted to attacking their opponent (religion and intelligent design) like a dirty politician.

On the contrary, this film and the IDers do the very same thing you’re decrying, and I have the liveblog to prove it.

53:12 – There have been plenty of religious people who are also scientists like Isaac Newton and Galileo. Darwinists don’t have a monopoly on good science.

No one said they did except the film, which is just used to build up a persecution complex. Francis Collins is a relatively conservative evangelical Christian and a very accomplished scientist who worked on the Human Genome Project – but the difference between him and the ID people is that the ID people use religion to manipulate science despite the overwhelming evidence.

57:22 – PZ Myers was not only converted to atheism through Darwinism, but now also actively seeks to marginalize religion, bring it down, and make it irrelevant in the public sphere.

Just one in a long line of fear-baiting arguments that this film makes. There are plenty of religious people who believe in the Theory of Evolution; even the Catholic Church and the very conservative Pope Benedict XVI’s doctrine (while not altogether rational) claim the theory as valid and leave it up to the (real) scientists.

Furthermore, Stein is insinuating that atheists are out to overthrow Christianity or something, which is completely false. This is to suggest that atheists are one monolithic force that is “out to get religion”, whereas in reality atheists are just as diverse in world view as the various Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other religious denominations. There are atheists like myself who are more or less content with keeping the separation between Church and State, and more “hardcore” atheists who seek actively to challenge the views of religious people just as Christian evangelicals do the same to nonbelievers.

The EVIL ATHEIST CONSPIRACY is coming! Watch out, or you may become one of “Them”.

There is also no conflict between religion and the Theory of Evolution as long as one sees The Bible and other holy books as a damned (pardon my language) allegory rather than word-for-word truths – as many moderate and liberal Christians have… not to mention that France during the Enlightenment experienced an upsurge of atheism up to a point in time where even the famous Cathedral of Notre Dame ceased to be a religious institution for a time – all of this before Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle.

Finally, the context of the question posed to PZ Myers is also severely lacking – if you were to ask an evangelical Christian what would be their ideal world, it would almost certainly be a monotonous one where there might not be homosexuality and every single individual were an evangelical Christian who adhered to the same brand of Christianity and was “saved”. It was obvious that PZ Myers would say that he preferred a world where scientific research would marginalize in all aspects of life.

00:42 – Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.

According to the Biological Society of Washington which had to bear the shame of that particular article being in their publication, Sternberg did not follow conventional procedure when deciding to publish the article, which was to have a board consisting of councilors, former and current presidents, and officers. But knowing that the Meyer article would not survive the rigors of peer review, Sternberg decided to personally fast-track the article to publication.

04:05 – Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDers are being persecuted.

I’ve already argued that Sternberg basically fell on his sword to look like a martyr.

05:11 – Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning – not promoting – intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.

Yes. She wasn’t promoting intelligent design. I’m sure some non-partisan independent source like… oh say the Washington Post will back her up…. right? The fact is that Crocker was pushing intelligent design in the classroom, and anything short of screaming at the top of your lungs “GOD DID IT” would be considered “neutral” in the eyes of Ben Stein.

“[...] this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.”

She even resorts to Godwin’s Rule during the very lecture TO HER STUDENTS. No wonder she was disciplined; This was indoctrination and even if she wasn’t playing the victim card and crying “persecution!”, George Mason was completely justified in what it was doing.

“The students sat stunned. But Crocker was not done. From this ill-conceived theory, she concluded, much harm had arisen. Nazi Germany had taken Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, the credo that only the fittest survive, and followed it to its extreme conclusions — anti-Semitism, eugenics and death camps. ‘What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science, that some genes and some people should be killed,’ Crocker said quietly. ‘My grandfather had a genetic problem and was put in the hospital and killed.’”

06:35 – Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.

Right. The study of evolutionary biology in doctorates varies… and within that range is little or none at all. In any case, we’ve already shown in the case of Richard Sternberg how ID’ers love to play the victim card… and since Egnor still retains his post and cannot substantiate any of his claims, he’s probably just pissed off at a few bloggers.

07:20 – Professor Marks of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.

First of all, Marks is a professor of electrical engineering, not evolutionary biology – just to make things clear. And Baylor University did offer to keep the site hosted on the university as long as Marks changed the title from “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” to something less deceiving and if he disassociated the site from being affiliated with the university; even this evangelical magazine lauded Baylor’s compromise. But Marks, determined to be a martyr, refused, and the site is now hosted on non-university servers.

08:53 – Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” – no pun intended.

[If there are any astronomy majors who would like to add to this, please e-mail Edger]

“By assessing the elements that compose our planet, they argue, we can tell that it was designed for multicellular organic life. The presence of carbon, oxygen and water in the right proportions makes it possible for organic life to exist; and this combination of minerals and chemical elements exists only on Earth. [...] our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also to give us the best view of the universe, as if Earth were designed both for life and for scientific discovery.”

So not only organisms now, but the Earth itself? So no chance through naturalistic properties a planet in the Goldilocks Zone and of the right size could have formed in the Sun’s accretion disc? And I suppose that stars are incapable of generating heavier elements that are later expelled via a supernova or that the proportion of chemical elements can change on this planet or on other planets has changed over these billions of years to one of more or less accommodation towards multicellular life? This guy deserves to get laughed out of the scientific community, not just potentially reprimanded.

By the way, there is a video version of The Privileged Planet on Google Video narrated by none other than John Rhys-Davies, AKA Gimli and Treebeard of Lord of the Rings. And just when I thought I couldn’t lose any more respect for him after his appearance in the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie “Chupacabra: Dark Seas” -

Yes, it’s El Chupacabra. On a fracking cruise liner. It’s that bad.

15:02 – Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator.

I suppose posting the image of your organization’s former logo won’t exactly help -

20:17 – As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.

On the contrary, Classical Darwinism was based on very flawed Lamarckian principles that basically assert that if a physical adaptation confers an advantage, an organism’s offspring will have that adaptation enlarged or lengthened. This of course is ridiculous and was supplanted as the “engine” of natural selection by genetic mutations caused by environmental hazards and errors by the cell’s DNA polymerases. This mechanism is far more plausible than Lamarck’s, and only serves to strengthen the Theory of Evolution.

21:50 – Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.

That’s like saying that we should give the flat-earth “theory” equal time too… because the round-earthers have been monopolizing the science world, you know.

22:54 – Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.

I wonder which group is going “hm, this looks too complex to undergo gradual genetic mutations, so I’m not going to attempt to try to find out how” and ignoring the scientific method.

25:15 – Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.

There have been debates over the definition of species that lie well outside the realm of Darwinism; in fact, there are at least ELEVEN different ways to define and differentiate a species, and evolution directly involves only one of them. A straw-man argument… although this vagueness can allow for inter-species breeding, which can be a huge source of genetic variation which only works more to the detriment of ID/Creationism.

27:04 – Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.

A low-blow character attack that I wouldn’t put past this movie – not to mention that Darwin observed finches and not humans. No matter Darwin’s supposed arrogance, scientists are allowed to make bold hypotheses IF they are grounded in reality, but the latter element would be missing from the Creationist’s mind.

28:13 – Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”

Nonspontaneous, or thermodynamically unfavorable reactions such as the formation of the various compounds in the Miller-Urey Experiment (see below) NEED energy to work. Lightning is a perfectly good source, and Stein’s incredulousness stems from his own ignorance.

28:45 – The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.

A visual representation of the Miller-Urey Experiment

This is such a common straw man argument used by many ID’ers/Creationists. The objective of the Miller-Urey Experiment was NOT to create life, but to see if a simulation of Earth’s early atmosphere consisting of simply inorganic compounds along with an energy source (lightning) could generate organic compounds. It was NOT a failure, and in fact after just one week, amino acids along with sugars, lipids, and nucleic acid precursors formed. It is impossible to have this happen in today’s atmosphere because oxygen turns the atmosphere from neutral to reducing – of course, oxygen was nonexistent due to the lack of photosynthetic organisms on the early Earth.

The many simple organic molecules formed by the Miller-Urey Experiment in just a week

More to come… the entire movie is approximately 90 minutes long.

He triumphantly posts:

Blue: Intelligent Design
Red: Darwinian Evolution
Orange: Scientific Creationism
Green: Theological Evolution

Any questions?

Yeah, DaveScot. Because, you know, your average Googler would use the term ‘Darwinian Evolution’ when looking up information on evolutionary biology.

Good to know.Looking at the graph, we see ID getting lots of attention in 2005 at the time that the Dover trial was talking place and when the IDists were whining about being trounced in court. However, notice that there apparently has been hardly any interest in ID before Dover, and still hardly any after the dust from Dover settled. For all the books the IDists have been writing, for all the propaganda they have been spewing, for all their bleating over Expelled – people are simply not paying attention. Yes, the scientific community already knew long ago that ID was a crock, but apparently nobody else has been paying attention either. Funny how DaveScot chooses not to mention this (which would have been plainly obvious by even a cursory glance at the graph), don’t you think?

Now, let us use Google Trends to get a graph for people searching for ‘evolution’, which would obviously be the choice for someone looking for information about – gasp – evolution. To be fair, I will also use ‘creationism’ instead of ’scientific creationism’. We get this:

Ouch. That must hurt for DaveScot who just a moment ago was arrogantly asking for questions. When asked why he used the term ‘Darwinian evolution’ instead of just ‘evolution’, he responded:

ID doesn’t dispute all “evolution”. It disputes Darwinian evolution.

Just…wow. Despite the fact that the IDists have never been able to come up with an actual answer to what ID actually is and despite the fact that they have never been able to agree on what part of ‘evolution’ they actually accept (Behe accepts common descent and human evolution, Dembski does not, etc.), DaveScot is now fudging and shifting the goalposts again in an effort to have his cake and eat it too. What makes this whole situation even more hilarious is that based on the very graph that he posted, most people not only do not buy into the ID nonsense, they do not even seem to care! The IDists have failed at convincing the scientific community to give their unscientific dogma the time of the day and they have apparently not made much headway in the court of public opinion as well, even with all this fudging and hedging.

I am really curious as to what ‘evolution’ the IDists accept. The Lamarackian version?

He continues:

When I say Darwinian evolution I mean the term writ large accounting for the entire history of life on earth. Do I really need to tediously qualify it at every mention? I don’t think so. Most of the subscribers and audience here recognize by now that micro-evolution by chance & necessity is not being disputed. We don’t dispute facts. We dispute theory.

Uh…what? ID does not accept evolution that accounts for the history of life on earth but accepts micro-evolution, which somehow does not qualify as ‘Darwinian evolution’? Why wouldn’t micro-evolution qualify as being ‘Darwinian’, but somehow explaining the history of life counts as ‘Darwinian’ evolution? What is the imaginary barrier separating the two? At this point, we can safely say that DaveScot does not have a clue and is making it up and fudging even more in an effort to blunder along.

Maybe, DaveScot, it is time for you and the rest of your ID propagandists to stop failing. Just…stop.

Creationists also claim that evolution is somehow weakened by the fact that scientists often disagree on the classification of hominid fossils, failing to realize that in evolutionary theory, one would expect to find the fossils hard to classify, and that if the fossils could easily be placed into clear-cut categories, it would lend credence the creationist story instead.

Ed Brayton has a post up where he includes the following chart (by Jim Foley) that shows several of the major hominid specimens and how the major creationist writers classify them:

If the fossils are easily classified into ‘ape’ and ‘human’ categories, why do creationists disagree so much on how to classify them? If the lines dividing the fossils into neatly packaged categories are indeed as clear as they would like you to believe, why can’t the leading lights of ’scientific creationism’ see those lines and agree on them? Don’t the creationists realize that, contrary to their pet story, the difficulty of classifying the hominid fossils is due to the fact that the fossils are intermediates and not all-ape or all-human as they like to claim? Again, the confusion and disagreements are simply what we would expect if the evolutionary explanation, and not the creationist one, were true.

Without even realizing it, the creationists have made our point for us yet again. If only the ’scientific creationists’ were open-minded and scientific enough to fully comprehend the implications of this, they would realize that their creation myth has more holes than a porous sponge and decide to join the rest of us in reality.

I use Neanderthal here as a general term to refer to many of our uncles and aunts. The mystery is the evolution of culture. When did it evolve? Was it a sudden large mutation that brought about the change as many argue, or was it a slow and predictable process caused by multiple factors?
I’m going to try and convince you that it was a little of both. But first, for those who are not familiar, a very brief history of our descent is in order.

I’ll begin the story at Homo hablis (2.2 mya – 1.6 mya), the first non-Australopithecine relatives of ours. Some of these guys are believed to have left Africa about 2 million years ago to spread into Asia and Europe. Their encephalization is known to be about 53% of modern humans. Until recently it was believed that they were human ancestors, but a study published in 2007 presents a strong case to the contrary. It is now believed that they and Homo ergaster are descended from a common ancestor. Homo Ergaster (1.9 mya – 1.4 mya ) is the the first creature that looks similar to us. It stands almost completely upright, has a much more flat-jaw, and has an encephalization of about 70 – 72% that of humans. The very famous Turkana Boy is a specimen of this species. Nicknamed “working man”, H. Ergaster were skilled tool makers. H. Habilis had previously been using some basic flints, but Ergasters developed the very popular hand-axes and cleavers. In the latter part of their existence, those populations that emigrated early from Africa are referred to as Homo erectus. Again, as in every other step of the way, great controversy surrounded the classification of these beings. It is today generally agreed that Homo Erectus are not our ancestors. This idea is completely compliant with the Out-of-Africa hypothesis. So the Ergasters were eventually replaced by Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 mya – 0.4 mya). These creatures with an encephalization of 82% – 104% stood on average taller than modern humans. Three lines descend from the Ergasters – Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floreneisis, and Homo sapiens. H. floreneises, or the hobbits are not universally accepted to belong to this lineage. In fact and oddly enough, a Smithsonian Institute graphic completely excludes them from the Homo Family (perhaps it is simply outdated.)

Neanderthals were the accomplished creatures about whom we produce theories after theories. Like the latter Heidelbergensis, their cranial capacity was larger than ours, and they were physically bigger. They lived on this planet for about three times our current measure and showed a panoply of abilities we consider modern. Earlier Neanderthanls lived pretty slow and steady, but those that lived with us are thought to have borrowed our advanced tools, and used them by mimicking us. Whether or not they developed these tools themselves, (or perhaps we learned some things from them) the fact that they could use them as skillfully proves the presence of some key mental faculties. Homo Sapiens, making an appearance about 200,000 years ago, emigrated from Africa in two waves. There was the ancient lineage that left the motherland more than a 100,000 years ago, and there was the tribe from which all living men and women are descended that emigrated about 40,000 – 50,000 years ago (some believe that some of the aboriginal populations alive today are a mix of the new lineage and the old – I find this somewhat fanciful.) But then about 30,000 years ago, we find a burst of what we call culture: wall paintings in French Caves, religious buildings in Gobleke Tepe, sculptures and symbolic objects traveling through bands of tribes.

So what led to this sudden burst? There are theories in the air proposing the complete evolution of the modern mind as being very recent, about 10,000 – 15,000 yrs. But can that be right? Can it be that only in the last ~250 generations have we been selected for what allegedly differs us from Cro-Magnons? Perhaps these theories are a little short-sighted. We can plainly see that technological advancement is not linear, but exponential, so maybe our ancestors just had a slow start. The glaciation periods that shadowed most of the 190,000 years of their existence must have made long-distance traveling, communication, and general survival very difficult. So maybe their everyday problems did not involve developing faster virtual networks, and discovering the secrets of higgs fields, but instead finding fresh food, and maintaining social structure. And in all honesty, these are not the concerns of modern tribal societies either. If people that are genetically the same as us can live in such a radically “primitive” world, then what more proof do we need?

But we can’t just proceed on such a simple basis, we must have a look at other creatures alive today who are also of the same family. Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gorillas, and other primates are all part of the much larger family that connects us. Ourselves and chimps had a common ancestor 6 million years ago. And chimps don’t have any culture, do they? Several researchers are studying just this. We have found that many of the “lesser apes” live in harsh hierarchical societies. And we have also seen that the “greater apes” can cognate many parts of our world. They might not be able to speak or pantomime effectively (also a matter of debate as discussed in an older post) but they have certainly convinced us not to overlook their abilities.

But before we address the question of culture/religion in their societies, we have to first agree that religion cannot exist without language. So let’s try to connect linguistic abilities in humans to their counterparts in the living natural world. Now there are waaaaay to many papers and studies that can be covered in this subject, so I’m going to try and stay modest, and mention only those two or three that I find the most striking.

But first it should be noted that vocalizing animals are not evidence of “speaking” animals. Lots of creatures (mammals/birds) are known to have multiple noises in their vocabulary, each meaning something different, and often further constructable. For example, the calls made by male putty-nosed monkeys in case of an aerial attack are different from those made in case of a ground attack. This is very important, but it has been found that creatures like this make these sounds universally. They make them in the absence of other members of their species; they learn these sounds not from their parents and surroundings (like we learn our words) but from genetically coded information. Their so called “words” are more like our audio expressions – laughing, screaming – and other things we do universally, things that do not differ culture by culture.

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Secularists and Anglicans have come together to berate the act as hollow. Darwin’s own great-great grandson has referred to it as “pointless,” and former Conservative Minister Ann Widdecombe, apparently tired of a Christian church seeking forgiveness for its transgressions, said that the Church has “already apologized for slavery and for the Crusades. When is it all going to stop? It’s insane and makes the Church of England look ridiculous.”

While Ms. Widdecombe appears to believe that apologizing for organized mass brutality lies somewhere between “insane” and “ridiculous,” Darwin’s great-great grandson’s epithet for the act, “hollow,” is an actually sensible commentary on this one. While Widdecombe, who is a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, is apparently more incensed by the idea that a Church can err than that ruthlessly slandering science is OK, the simple fact is that this act is (as Andrew Darwin has observed) pointless.

The Church of England did not accompany this apology with a precise enumeration of its erroneous factual assertions against Darwin or his theory of evolution by natural selection, nor does it accompany a pledge to help legitimate science organizations oppose creationism with the Church’s resources. The Church has not stated that it will forever remove itself from questions over whether creationism ought to be offered as science in school classrooms (though to be fair Anglican head Rowan Williams has expressed his personal opposition to creationism in schools), and it has not stated that it will modify its sermons that include Genesis quotations with disclaimers to the effect of “but Darwin really got this one right.” Their apology even contains an apparent snipe against secularism: “the problem is not just [Darwin's] religious opponents but those who falsely claim [him] in support of their own interests.”

It is unusual that Rowan Williams, the leader of the Anglican Communion who could be easily mistaken for an “Anglican Pope,” would want to issue a statement like this right now. While this is consistent with his fairly liberal stance on some issues, from a commonsense approach to homosexuality to a disastrously unpopular comment on the possibility of adopting Sharia law in certain parts of the UK, it does not reflect the generally conservative stance on human origins held by many other Christian denominations. While it is well known most conservative Protestant groups appear unequivocally opposed to evolutionary theory, it is less discussed that even the Catholic position on the theory of evolution has become muddied by Joseph Ratzinger’s recently-publicized Creation and Evolution, which is a tactful, careful critique of empiricism that stops just short of endorsing creationism.

Perhaps the Church of England wants to portray itself as a more liberal, more modern alternative to the Catholic Church (its primary competitor). Perhaps the Communion is simply trying to flex its muscles against non-English churches that are in the Anglican Communion after the recent controversy over gay marriage in Anglicanism caused significant tension between English, American, and African churches, as the American and African churches are typically much more likely to be opposed to evolutionary theory.

In any case, this apology cannot be treated as sincere as it contains no promises to action and no reference to specific wrongs done. Instead, it wastes our time with oblique swipes against the secularists who have never humiliated themselves by slandering good biological science in the first place and an awkward comparison between Darwin and Galileo; by making this comparison, the Church is shrugging its shoulders and saying that it probably isn’t that big a deal anyway because you should think that creationism is no more widespread or pernicious than geocentrism. In short, the Church is apologizing for a mote, when they owe us the receipt for a plank.

That there is some kind of political motive here is transparent. The Church of England has not offered any commentary on the implications of the truth of evolution on its own teachings or its stance on any issue, including Biblical accounts of human origins. They may be apologizing, but I am certain that they are not authentically sorry for what they did to two centuries of reasoned discourse on questions of science.

As much as I love you all to death for making it clear why good science education is an absolute necessity, I have recently come across one of the most irritating straw man arguments I have heard from you, namely the misconception that evolution is atheism. I know that although not all of you think that this is the case, a lot of you do – enough to make me decide to write this quick note.

The simple fact is that you creationists need to understand that the theory of evolution has nothing to do with atheism or even religion for that matter. Failing to understand this makes us skeptical people want to smash our heads on our desks in frustration, and I don’t think that you want to be responsible for any injury sustained by another human being, do you? I have noticed that whenever I pose a seemingly simple question to you creationists along the lines of “Where in the theory of evolution does it say that there is no god?”, most of you start fumbling, fudging, preaching or quoting from the Bible. This does not help your cause, creationists. This makes you look really ignorant. Just so you know.

I’ll set it straight once and for all: The scientific theory of evolution is not atheism. Understanding the theory does not require atheism. The theory of evolution is silent on the issue of the existence of an active deity, and it is no different from the other scientific theories in that it does not make any claims about anyone’s pet religious ideas. The debate on the existence of an active deity is not a part of the scientific theory of evolution. Evolutionists do not bring God into the facts supporting evolution; rather, it is usually creationists who start the old straw man about evolution actually being ‘atheism’.

One creationist went as far as to tell me that evolution is atheistic because the theory of evolution does not mention that god was involved in the evolutionary process. However, this notion is false because the theory of evolution does not make a claim one way or another about the existence of a deity, and although the theory of evolution does not say that a supernatural deity directed the evolutionary process, it does not say that there is no active deity. The theological arguments about the existence of an active deity/personal god is not included in the study of origins simply because it is not science and because there is no evidence for the existence for such a deity directing the development of life.

Creationists, if you want to make a convincing argument that evolution equates to atheism because god is not mentioned in the theory of evolution, why don’t you claim that meteorology also equates to atheism because the meteorologists do not say that god is involved in directing wind patterns?

You insist on mentioning god and pushing your fundamentalist religious beliefs into everything, yet you creationists are the ones who claim that evolutionists are attacking religion. You are the ones viewing creationism as your religion, so perhaps you are merely projecting when you whine about how evolution is an ‘atheistic religion’.

So, get on with it, creationists. Either rage at those darned evil meteorologists for not mentioning how your god controls weather patterns, or stop hitting on biologists for not mentioning god when describing the scientific theory of evolution. It would make you look less ignorant, and less ignorance is something that would be good for all of us.

Love,

Shalini