Author Archives: Paul Braterman
Science and politics at the Creation Museum
Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/08/science-and-politics-at-the-creation-museum.html. This piece also appeared at https://rightingamerica.net/science-and-politics-at-the-creation-museum/, with book authors’ comment: “Below is Dr. Paul Braterman’s review of Righting America at the Creation Museum. For us, the best part of this generous review is that Braterman covers and understands all parts of our argument. More than this, we appreciate his scientific interventions, and we absolutely agree that we should have included Henry Morris’ biblical racism in our book.”
Do we really need 230 pages of at times closely argued text, followed by 70 pages of footnotes, just to tell us about Kentucky’s intellectually bankrupt Creation Museum and the authoritarian organisation, Answers in Genesis, that brings it to us? The answer, I fear, is yes.
For instance, this book will tell you that Ebenezer the Allosaurus, prize exhibit at Answers in Genesis’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, was donated by the Peroutka Foundation. It will also tell you that Michael Peroutka, in a 2013 speech still available on youtube, states that government schools indoctrinate children away from Christian ideas (a theme that recurs throughout this book), and that this is what they were designed to do. The book also points out that he served on the Board of Directors of the League of the South, whose chairman had defined southern people as white. I recently learned that Peroutka is the official Republican Party candidate for the post of attorney general of the State of Maryland in the November 2022 elections. We had better pay attention.
There is no shortage of books refuting antiscientific creationism, but this volume nonetheless manages to find many new and important things to say about the subject, as manifested at the Museum. Susan Trollinger is an Associate Professor (now Professor) of English at the University of Dayton, Ohio, and author of Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia, while William is Professor of History at the same university, and author of God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism. Both are committed Christians and critical Catholics. Thus they are unusually well-placed to analyse the rhetorical devices, the historical roots, and the theological assumptions and moral universe of the Museum, and its parent organisation, Answers in Genesis. On their blog, they have applied much the same critique to the Museum’s sister attraction, the Ark Encounter, which was under construction when this book went to press and features here in an epilogue.
I have been watching Answers in Genesis myself for some time, and my own additional comments here are in [brackets].
We already have abundant material rebutting creationism on scientific grounds, but the Trollingers explicitly refrain from discussing the science. What they do instead is much more interesting. In an extended and detailed analysis, they apply the Museum’s own criteria to the Museum’s own display. It does not fare well.
We start with a short history of creationism, including the events leading up to the formation of Answers in Genesis (henceforth AiG),1 and an account of that organisation’s other activities and prolific outpourings. The Museum itself had topped a total of 2 million visitors by 2015, and claims that the average visitor has a college or advanced degree. There is much more about AiG’s extended campaigns and their political implications in the last chapter of the book, and I would have welcomed clearer signalling of this early on, to avoid the risk of burying the lede. I would also have liked to be told more about the deep connections, going back a century, between US creationism and right-wing politics, a subject on which one of the authors is an expert. Relatedly, I regret that AiG’s repeated denial of the importance of human-caused global warming is barely mentioned, not only because of the importance of the topic but because it illustrates how committed AiG is to the use of the Bible in forwarding the American Right’s political agenda. However, these criticisms serve only to underline the book’s ongoing importance.
As the book points out, all museums are rhetorical devices. Modern2 Natural History museums emerged from the private collections of cabinets of curiosities as part of the democratising and educational efforts of the late 19th-century. Their function was not merely to display, but to educate, and convey a sense of scientific mastery. Dioramas were used to impart a sense of immediacy, while simultaneously imposing one particular view of the world; typically, male animals would dominate the scene, with smaller females playing a lesser role. Dioramas also impart a spurious sense of objectivity, since visitors see with their own eyes, without being aware that what they are seeing is a highly edited version of reality. The museum further conveys its message, by leading visitors through numbered rooms in a particular order, in order to enhance its narrative.
Contemporary2 museums have come to challenge this top-down narrative. Current educational thinking requires visitors to be free to examine objects in their own way, in their own chosen order, and often with hands-on exhibits, in order to construct their own personal narratives. The goal is to make the visitor an active partner in the creation of knowledge, rather than its passive recipient.
The Creation Museum has all the trappings of a contemporary museum. It is technically sophisticated, with sound effects accompanying dioramas, animatronic human and dinosaur figures, and special effects including a movie theatre with seats that shake. Moreover, it claims to be offering visitors their own free choice between its own Young Earth evolution denial, and mainstream science. This claim is reinforced by one of the early dioramas, in which two men are shown excavating a dinosaur skeleton. A narrator tells us that one of these is an evolutionist and the other a creationist, but that both are scientists. This claim is central to the AiG version of creationism, which argues that biblical and evolutionist perspectives are equally valid. The next room reiterates the same point, proclaiming “Same Facts, but Different Views… Why?”, explicitly asking visitors to choose between God’s Word and “their own arbitrary philosophy”. Ken Ham, founder and CEO of AiG, and his son-in-law Bodie Hodge, have in interviews both stressed the claim that they “give both sides”.
A good-faith discussion of such a choice would require an evenhanded depiction of the two contrasting worldviews, but this is not what happens. Instead, as the book enumerates, we have a sequence of displays presenting Young Earth creationism, claiming the authority of biblical figures, and speaking of a culture in crisis as the wrecking ball of “Millions of Years” destroys the foundation of the church (that last image occurs repeatedly in AiG publications). We are shown a peaceful Eden, with humans (just two of them, of course) and dinosaurs peacefully coexisting, until T. rex is transformed into a fearsome predator by the Fall, which allows Death into the world. We have animatronic scenes from the building of the Ark, and an exposition of Flood geology with the Flood responsible for the breakup of the continents and the formation of their features, and also for subsequent cooling (in their publications, AiG does admit the existence of one Ice Age). This, visitors are told, led to the formation by natural selection of today’s diversity of species from the smaller number of kinds present in the Ark (in AiG’s private language, such natural selection does not count as “evolution”). At various points there are photographs, videos, and displays showing the wonders of nature, to prove that “there has to be a powerful Intelligence behind the universe.” Evolution is indeed presented, or rather misrepresented, in such a way as not to be believed, an approach that is also advocated on the AiG website and elsewhere.
The Museum’s own account of past, present, and future is embodied in the 7 Cs of Creation, Corruption (the Fall), Catastrophe (the Flood), Confusion (Tower of Babel), Christ, the Cross, and Consummation (when Earth will be restored to the perfection it had had before the Fall). Running through all of this, we have the recurring theme of human disobedience to God’s word, bringing down His punishment. Our present social problems are manifestations of this disobedience, as is the acceptance of evolution by compromising churches. The visitor moves along a predetermined path illustrating this narrative, with a simple clear overarching message of salvation for the faithful, and well-deserved damnation for the rest. As in the days of Noah, so today. The presentation and trappings of the Museum belong to the 21st century, but its authoritarian top-down control of movement and message places it firmly in an older era.
This is particularly clear in the Voyage of the Ark room, which shows the misery of those trapped by rising waters, from the perspective of the saved. The message is clear. Go through the open door and be saved, or it will be shut on you and misery and death will follow. As other exhibits make clear, a direct analogy is being drawn between the wickedness of the Flood generation and the moral depravity of our own times. The visitor has two clear options; to accept God’s word, or to stand among those condemned.
Here as elsewhere, the Bible itself is massaged, manipulated, and misquoted. Crucially for AiG’s theodicy, we are told that drowned humanity had ignored Noah’s warnings, and thus lost the chance to enter the Ark with him, but biblically there was no such chance and no warning. We are shown an animatronic Methuselah telling us how Noah attempted to warn the people, but there is no reference to any such thing in Genesis. Noah is described as a preacher, although there is no biblical basis for this either. There are even textual changes; in Genesis 11:2, “They journeyed from the East” becomes “They moved down from the mountains of Ararat”, to impose AiG’s smoothed out Flood-to-Babel narrative. There are also some strange interpretations. For example, in Genesis 3, the ground brings forth thorns as part of Adam’s punishment, therefore thorns were created during the lifetime of humanity. But we find thorns alongside dinosaurs in the fossil record. Therefore dinosaurs must have coexisted with humans. And since creation was “very good”, death could not have existed before the Fall, therefore all these dinosaurs were originally vegetarians.
A Natural History museum is rich in actual objects, such as fossils or stuffed animals. The Creation Museum is much poorer in actual objects, but derives its emotional impact from meticulously detailed dioramas, allowing us peepholes into the worlds of Adam and Eve or Noah. The real subject matter of the Museum is, then, not creation as a whole, but Genesis 1 – 11, treated as actual history.
Next, the book discusses AiG’s central claim to be presenting science. The core argument here is based on a distinction between “observational science”, which depends on repeatable experiments, and “historical science”, which according to Ham lacks any such secure foundation, since the past is not repeatable and the attempt to discover it therefore depends on unverifiable assumptions. This same argument occurs ad nauseam throughout the whole of AiG’s output, and is implicit in the presentation and objects in the Museum. Placards repeatedly state (emphasis in originals) “The evidence is in the present. But what happened in the past?”
It is not difficult to show (I have done so myself) that the elevation of observational over historical science is so much pseudophilosophical twaddle. But again, this book follows the more interesting path of applying the Museum’s criteria to its own exhibits.
If the only kind of science with objective weight is observational science, that is what the Museum should be presenting. But where is it? AiG claims that such evidence is to be found in the Museum’s planetarium, and in the rooms dedicated to the Wonders of Creation, and the presentation of Flood Geology. This book examines those claims, and finds them wanting. The planetarium tells us of the vastness and beauty of the cosmos, but even if this is taken as evidence of a Creator, that is no proof of a biblical God, let alone a recent six-day creation. Blue stars, we are told, cannot last for billions of years (true), therefore the universe cannot be billions of years old (false; the very same science that tells us that such stars cannot last also tells us that they are continually being generated). The planetarium also speaks of unspecified theoretical problems, and claims that star formation has never been observed. These are not convincing arguments.3
Of 38 placards in the Flood Geology room, 15 represent theoretical models of past events, and are thus, by the Museum’s criteria, not science at all. However, 26 placards to display some kind of scientific information. But much of that information is merely historical science. The Mt. St Helens eruption, 1980, is presented as a model of rapid catastrophic change, but all the data here are firmly in the past and unrepeatable. There is genuine observational science describing for example blind cave fish, but arguing (more historical science!) that these represent adaptation through loss of genetic information. It is implied without any justification that all adaptation is of this kind, and the diversity of species is then explained away in terms of such adaptation. Thus all canids (dogs, wolves, jackals, foxes etc) have been adapted by information loss from an original created canid “kind”. This concept of a kind is crucial to flood geology, in order to explain how the ancestors of all existing animals could have been squeezed into the Ark.
We share in the authors’ glee when they point out how thoroughly one of the Museum’s prize examples violates the Museum’s own logic. This is the skeleton of the Allosaurus nicknamed Ebenezer, who, we are told, was drowned, and his body then swept away among sedimentary debris, quickly buried lying on his left side, and rapidly fossilised. But none of this is observational science. Even the fact that the skeleton was buried on his left side is strictly speaking historical science, since it has now been moved, so that the observation cannot be repeated. No one has ever observed the rapid fossilisation of a skeleton, so that’s not observational science either, there is no evidence that the Allosaurus drowned, and the idea that sedimentary debris would be swept along by a current of water is exactly the kind of extrapolation from present to past that AiG is fundamentally opposed to.
The Museum also relies heavily on the word “suggests”. For example, we are told that the fact that the Coconino Sandstone is several hundred feet thick “suggests rapid, thick deposition.” Why should it, when we are later told that thin layers also “suggest” rapid processes? [Actual examination of the sandstone suggest no such thing, since it shows every sign of gradual wind-driven deposition with very occasional rainfall, including round pitted grains, cross-bedding, ripple marks, drying cracks, and animal footprints, completely inconsistent with a flood origin.] Here, and in case after case, as the authors show, we are presented with suppression of crucial data, and the imposition of far-fetched models (the Museum’s own word), that bring the observations into line with biblical literalism. And so the Museum lives up to its promise of seeing the data through the prism of Young Earth biblical literalism. But this means that the data are not allowed to tell us anything except the predetermined narrative, and the entire programme of enlisting scientific observation in support of creationism is a cheat.
At this point, the book reminds us of what the Bible actually says on scientific topics. It is very much what you would expect, given its time and place. The Earth is a flat disc, with a lower world beneath it. The sun, moon, and stars are set in a dome or firmament, which the sun traverses daily from East to West before returning beneath the Earth at night. The upper waters are beyond the firmament, and heaven itself beyond that.
Unsurprisingly, you will not find this out at the Museum. On the contrary, the Museum repeatedly shows the Earth as a rotating sphere, part of the solar system, embedded within the Milky Way galaxy. Our modern cosmology is presented throughout all the exhibits described as evidence for the biblical account, even though biblical and modern cosmologies are completely incompatible.
Next, the book discusses how the Museum uses the Bible. It is of course presented as absolute truth, so that any falling away from this is compromise and corruption. In particular, Genesis 1 through 11 (from creation to the Tower of Babel) is straightforward narrative history. For AiG, there must have been a literal Adam and Eve and a literal Fall, otherwise the atonement through Christ’s death on the Cross makes no sense. The authors illustrate this in a footnote through copious quotations, but I think the point also deserves heavier emphasis in the main text. Theologically, AiG agrees on this point with the Rev John MacArthur, whom AiG quote copiously with approval, and who says that “in an important sense, everything Scripture says about our salvation through Jesus Christ hinges on the literal truth of what Genesis 1-3 teaches about Adam’s creation and fall. There is no more pivotal passage of Scripture.”
The most remarkable fact is that there is not a single Bible accessible, not even Genesis 1 – 11 is quoted in full, passages are presented with undeclared omissions, and single verses are presented in a manner totally unrelated to their actual context. Videos and diverse illustrations ranging from the solar system to the double helix to birds and fishes to aeroplanes are said, according to the Museum’s official guidebook, to “scientifically confirm” creationism. We have “15 Amazing Science Videos on the six Days of Creation”, coupled with quotations based on New Testament verses, to prove that “men are Without Excuse” if they fail to recognise this. There is endless attention-grabbing and distraction, more like scanning the Internet than serious discussion, with every obstacle placed in the way of thoughtful engagement.
AiG claims that its own viewpoint is beyond question, because it is directly based on the plan text, without added interpretation. Yet exposition always implies interpretation, all the more strongly when dealing with a text written in an ancient language thousands of years ago. The Museum, preparing to denounce the heresy of Old Earth creationists, discusses and rejects the possibility that the Hebrew word yom could mean anything other than a 24 hour day. But it passes over in silence the controversy surrounding word bara, second word of the text, and conventionally translated as “created”. Does this mean, as has been suggested, creation out of nothing, or the imparting of orderliness to a pre-existing chaos, or fashioning to some specific form or purpose? The Museum bypasses all such discussion, quoting the assertion in the Westminster Confession of Faith that it means creation out of nothing, implying that this interpretation is in the Bible. But it is not. [The controversy even extends to the very first word, Bereishith, as a comparison of translations will show.]
In the Museum’s Biblical Reference room, we don’t have any bibles, but we do have a list of those who wrongly chose human reason as opposed to God’s Word. Descartes is in there, along with Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Darwin, condemned as we would expect for their appeal to human reason, but so is C. I. Scofield of the Scofield Reference Bible, much favoured by creationists a century ago. This is,we are told, represents “Scripture Abandoned”, leading directly to the horrors displayed in the Museum’s Graffiti Alley; terrorism, school shootings, gay marriage, drug abuse, and the Church compromising with evolution.
So what was Scofield’s offence? He advocated an Old Earth interpretation of Genesis, with an unstated time gap implicit in the early verses. Literalism indeed, but not as the Museum understands it, and for this he is justly condemned.
But does the Museum live up to its own standards? I fear not. It shows a rotating earth, and this, as Cardinal Bellarmine reminded Galileo, flatly contradicts Joshua 10:12-13, which says that “the sun stood still in the midst of heaven”. The Museum has already been criticised for this by the Association for Biblical Astronomy, and, as the book shows at some length, AiG’s self-defence is clearly a departure from its own standards of literalism. Playfully, the authors imagine a future in which AiG’s own approach is denounced as compromise, and treated as scornfully as the Scofield Bible is here, by some future even more rigorous creationist organisation. [I would add that these days, AiG also feels the need to defend itself against a well-argued Bible-based flat-earthism.]
The Starting Points room at the beginning of the Bible Walkway Experience poses a question that is central to the Museum’s claims, and AiG’s entire programme; God’s Word, or human reason. And anything that disagrees with God’s Word, as interpreted by AiG, is at best misguided, at worst damnable. This is a doctrine with massive political implications. People must be saved from the corrupt doctrines of secular education, and we even have a film in which two angels take on the job of rescuing one particular individual. In the process, they triumph over a nerdy but strangely ill-informed science teacher at Enlightenment High School by producing arguments (actually, extremely bad and long debunked arguments) for rejecting deep time geology. Thus faith and common sense are enough to expose the godless elitism of the scientific establishment.
For Ham and his colleagues, the regular scientific narrative is “the religion of atheism” designed to “explain the universe and life without God,” so that in public schools “sadly those of the teachers… are the high priests of this religion imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students.” Evolution teaches that “young people are just animals in a struggle for survival” and this is what accounts for school shootings.
The Museum’s Graffiti Alley laments the removal of prayer from US schools, the legality of abortion, assisted suicide laws, and the decision to turn off life support for a brain-dead patient. This, together with origin of life research and study of prehuman fossils is linked to “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” For AiG, the US was founded on Christian principles, by founding fathers who believed in the truth of the Bible, and to invoke the separation of Church and State is to attack Christianity. Graffiti Alley also has numerous newspaper headlines regarding gay teens and gay marriage, although when challenged the Museum disingenuously pointed out that none of its own signage was anti-gay. Vast inequalities of wealth, the plight of the poor, and corporate malfeasance are absent from Graffiti Alley, and the only specific teaching of Jesus that seems to concern AiG is his use of Genesis in his teaching regarding marriage.
In the Bible Walk-through Experience, the Tower of Babel exhibit tells us that the Bible teaches that we are all one race, one blood. This is contrasted with evolutionary thinking, described as a recent excuse to reject God’s Word. The only image of a slave in the Museum is juxtaposed with a quotation from Stephen Jay Gould, “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increase by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”4 It is as if 1859 had been the start of slavery in the US, as opposed to being within six years of its abolition, and as if the Bible had not been used even into the late 20th century to justify racism, antisemitism, and segregation. [I would mention here Henry Morris’ own explicit racism, in The Beginning of the World, reprinted 2005 and now also available on Kindle, according to which (1977) the descendants of Ham (said to include Africans and Chinese, among others) are racially (or in the 1991 printing genetically) restricted to material matters, in contrast to the spiritual and intellectual destinies of the other two brothers. Henry Morris, as many readers will know, was co-author of The Genesis Food, foundational document of modern Young Earth creationism, and founder of the Institute for Creation research, with which in 1991 Ken Ham was himself associated.]
When challenged as to why the Bible does not explicitly forbid to slavery, but on the contrary incorporates it as an institution, AiG replies that “neither slavery in New Testament times nor slavery under the Mosaic covenant had anything to do with the sort of slavery where ‘Black’ people were bought and sold as property by ‘White’ people in the well-known slave trade over the last few centuries,” refers to “the extreme kindness to be shown to slaves/servants commanded in the Bible” (where?), points out that Hebrew slaves were held in bondage for only six years, and assert that “Biblical Christians led the fight against slavery”.
This is an extremely selective reading of history. Those who fought to retain slavery in the Americas were also, like most of their contemporaries, biblical Christians, and biblical Christians were prominent in the defence of segregation in post-World War II America (see e.g. Mississippi Praying, cited by the Trollingers). So these excuses are not perhaps very convincing. But even if they were, that would not help AiG’s cause, since a sincere literalist has no business making any excuses at all.
Ken Ham maintains that a large section of the Museum is devoted to combating racism, but the reality is that his “one race” strategy is dedicated to ignoring the racism still present in American society and forgetting the reality of the civil rights struggle. Ham’s Darwin’s Plantation is described on Amazon as a “thorough history of the effect of the theory of evolution on the history of the United States, including slavery and the civil rights movement”, but that book devotes less than two pages the civil rights movement, does not even mention Martin Luther King Jr., and devotes 18 pages to attacking the use of human rights language to advance the “homosexual agenda”. [I would add that eight weeks after the murder of George Floyd, Ken Ham showed on his blog images linking Black Lives Matter to Angela Davis and Karl Marx.]
The final chapter before the Epilogue is entitled “Judgment”, and focuses on the Museum’s teachings regarding judgement, atonement, and redemption. Here the Museum’s film, The Last Adam, describes Jesus as expiatory sacrifice. Lots of blood. And to emphasise the seriousness of sin, and of the shedding of blood to atone for it, the young Mary is made by her parents to witness the gory annual sacrifice and slaughter by a priest, in her village, of one of her father’s lambs. Sin has terrible consequences, and atonement comes at a terrible price.
As the authors point out, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible to suggest any such event. [Indeed, they are far too kind here. The events described could not possibly have happened. The annual atonement sacrifice, as anyone familiar with the Day of Atonement ritual knows, was a goat (or rather one of two goats, the other one, the scapegoat, being cast out into the wilderness), and all such sacrifices had been centralised at the Temple in Jerusalem for several hundred years before the time of Jesus, and, according to biblical literalists, since the time of Solomon.] Whatever is going on here, it is decidedly unbiblical. However, all too biblical is a verse from Revelation, shown on-screen directly after the depiction of the crucifixion, “And whoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” The flames are heard crackling.
The Dragon Hall Bookstore derives its name from rhetorical suggestions that legendary dragons, and of course the unidentified beasts in the Book of Job, could have been dinosaurs. The bookstore’s offerings include the MacArthur Study Bible (I have discussed John MacArthur above, and elsewhere), copious offerings from AiG and from Henry Morris, and books and DVDs supporting traditional sex roles and the belief that America is based on Christian principles, and attacks on climate change science and on public schools as an institution. Materials designed for schools, homeschooling, and church study groups include textbooks showing God’s special grace to the United States, and how science supports the biblical record. This is only part of what is available through AiG’s online store, including online college courses for credit. All of this, AiG tells us (and we would be foolish not to believe them), is in support of a “spiritual war… In our homes, churches … schools (whether public or private it), workplaces, courts”, for which AiG the is providing “advanced ‘weaponry’ ” and “Christian ‘patriot missiles’ .“ Ominous enough when this book was written, how much more so now.
This spiritual war is being pursued far beyond the Museum. AiG had, while the book was being written, twenty-five available speakers in the US, and seven in the UK, and gave 48 presentations in a four-month period, including the UK Creation Mega Conference in the English Midlands. 39 of the presentations were in churches, mainly Baptist or nondenominational. The authors attended one such presentation in a rural Ohio church, given by Bob Gillespie (now with his own Creation’s Hope Ministries), a graduate of Cedarville University, a private Baptist university with 4,700 students. Gillespie asked the audience how many had been to the Creation Museum. About 2/3 raised their hands. He emphasised the importance of the Museum’s Starting Points room, explaining that the reason some people are atheist is because they do not want to obey God’s rules. He then launched into a rapid, detailed exposition of creation science, reminiscent of the Museum itself in its level of overload. Dinosaurs could indeed have been fitted on the Ark, since there were only 50 or so different kinds, so this makes sense once “we put our biblical glasses on.” Besides, there is biblical and folklore evidence for dinosaurs. When science disagrees with the Bible, the evidence later proves that the science was wrong. Examples include the pig’s tooth offered in evidence at the Scopes Trial [actually it wasn’t, because of its dubious scientific status] and junk DNA which isn’t junk at all [actually it is; for an amusing proof of this, see here]. Current cosmology is “just belief”, macroevolution is impossible because it would require the addition of “new information”, evolution is refuted in a three-minute video that he showed, observational science will someday provide the answer to the “distant starlight” problem, and according to a slide that he showed, hundreds of physical processes (actually the slide, on screen for under half a minute, listed just 56) set limits to the age of the world. As to how these processes, such as “tight bends in rocks”, “Stone Age burials”, and the inevitable “radiohalos” entailed a young Earth, there was no chance to ask. While Gillespie made little effort to establish rapport with the audience, the audience were very eager to establish their rapport with him, as allies against the evolutionist enemy.
Ham has devoted one book, Already Compromised, to lamenting the fact that even colleges identifying as Christian do not share his view of what Christianity entails, and another, Six Days: The Age of the Earth and the Decline of the Church, to his claim that such compromise, especially within the church, unlocks the door to disbelief. AiG seeks to correct this at the Museum, in its outreach activities, in its educational programs available to home schoolers and Christian schools. It even provides a list of questions to probe the credentials of what claims to be a Christian college [for my own take on colleges that meet Ham’s criteria, see here], and has a close relationship with Cedarville University (already mentioned as Bob Gillespie’s alma mater), the first to offer a geology program that “teaches young-earth and world-wide flood cataclysm.”
The Trollingers cite Cedarville as an example of what happens when a College aspires to meeting AiG’s standards. In the period between 2012 and 2015, during all of which AiG was in close contact with Cedarville, it carried out a purge of faculty, removing a theology professor who believes in a literal Adam and Eve but for the wrong reasons, getting rid of the philosophy department altogether, triggering the exodus of 43 faculty and staff and 15 trustees, and leading to the resignation of one Bible Professor when the school ruled that women should not teach theology classes that included men, because of what St Paul said about men’s and women’s roles.
They also cite the example of Bryan College. In 2010, Ham attacked Bryan College by name for compromise, because it was teaching textbook evolution science in conjunction with separate discussions of other views, saying that it was about time that such colleges were held accountable for undermining Scripture. He did not need to wait long for such accountability. In 2014, the trustees issued a “clarification” of their College’s Statement of Belief, replacing “that the origin of man was by fiat of God in the act of creation as related in the book of Genesis” with “We believe all humanity is descended from Adam and Eve. They are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life forms.” This led to the departure of at least nine instructors, four board members, and additional staff cuts.
[I see that Ham received an honorary degree from Bryan in 2017; the AiG website tells us of this, under the modest headline Recognizing the World’s Foremost Authority for Creation.
Meantime, AiG campaigns on behalf of laws designed to protect the right to teach creationism and climate science denial, in the name of academic freedom. It is a big mistake to imagine that creationists are going to play fair. They don’t.]
The book tells us of AiG’s other campaigns, such as that against Calvin College, and the organisation BioLogos. BioLogos, which is funded by the Templeton Foundation, is an organisation founded by Francis Collins, bringing together mainly evangelical Christians who seek to understand what they call “evolution creationism” in a Christian context. [I would add that one of the clearest expositions of evolution science that I have seen is that given by Dennis Venema on the Biologos website.] Ham has rejected an offer to meet with BioLogos president Deborah Haarsma, describes BioLogos as “helping the devil in leading this and coming generations away from the truth of God’s Word,” and warns that, along with churches that accept same-sex marriage, it will have to face God’s judgement for doing so.
In conclusion the authors lament that the Museum, and AiG’s entire programme, are based on a stultifying doctrine of God’s fierce judgement based on salvation through belief, with the whole of religion reduced to a simple binary based purely on acceptance or rejection of one particular interpretation of the Bible. The Jesus of Matthew 25, who identified himself with the stranger, the hungry, thirsty, naked, and imprisoned, is nowhere to be found, nor is any of Christianity’s rich intellectual and social justice tradition, from Augustine to Bonhoeffer.
“Sad indeed. For all of us,” they conclude. I can only agree.
I thank Glenn Branch, Gary Hurd, Nick Matzke, Andrew Petto, and the Reverend Michael Roberts for suggestions and comments.
1] Including juicy details not present in the more compressed account in Ronald Numbers’ classic, The Creationists.
2] Here “modern” and “contemporary” should be seen as technical terms used by historians, so that “modern” here means roughly the style dominant from the 19th into the first half of the 20th centuries, as opposed to the more recent “contemporary”. I would have preferred a different choice of words, since in this context “modern” means “old-fashioned” rather than “up-to-date”.
3] This is a common style of creationist argument. For example, creationists argue that since comets are relatively short lived (this is true), the existence of comments proves that the solar system is young, as if we did not know that new comets are being generated all the time. Science is complicated, and our knowledge does indeed have gaps, but “God of the gaps” arguments have been ridiculed by theologians themselves for over a century. And in the nature of things we could not have directly observed processes, such as the formation of a new biological genus, that take more time than the length of time we have been observing.
4] Gould is of course correct. As long as educated opinion accepted biblical creationism, racism was justified on biblical grounds. When this view was replaced by evolution, then naturally racists began to use biological arguments to justify their position.
Museum images under Creative Commons, via Wikipedia
Anti-Science Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Morality
By Carl Weinberg, republished with permission. Read the original article here.
[My own comments: It is easy to link creationism to religion, but to me this seems counter-effective, as well as ignoring the many believers who oppose creationism all the more fervently because it is a travesty of their own faith. Debunking the science in “creation science” is an endless activity, but I don’t think anyone ever became a creationist because of things like polonium halos, or alleged gaps in the fossil record. Digging deeper, we can identify creationism as a conspiracy theory. Indeed it could hardly be otherwise, given its claim that the entire scientific establishment and most of the educational system is engaged in a diabolical plot. This is a particularly dangerous conspiracy theory, not only because it is fiercely anti-intellectual, but because it keys into climate science denial and, these days, into even crazier and more toxic beliefs.
Why do people buy into conspiracy theories, and how to thwart those who use such theories to enhance their power?
This raises further urgent questions; why do people buy into conspiracy theories, and how to thwart those who use such theories to enhance their power. Questions for the psychologist, the social scientist, and the historian, as this article exemplifies.]
Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we are inundated with COVID conspiracy theories: Satan-worshipping globalist elites, including George Soros and Bill Gates, deliberately developed and spread the COVID virus around the globe. The COVID vaccine is the Mark of the Beast from the Book of Revelation. Hollywood celebrities caught COVID by drinking infected adrenochrome harvested from live children in a satanic ritual. Mask and vaccine mandates are a communist plot by the Jewish Illuminati. Polling data suggest that millions of Americans—up to 20 percent of the country—believe at least some of these claims.
Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we are inundated with COVID conspiracy theories…
For secular and scientifically-minded Americans, it’s tempting to dismiss COVID conspiracy believers as lunatics and fools. But if we want to have a chance at beating the COVID pandemic, we do not have the luxury of ignoring 20 percent of the population. Nor will browbeating them work. Better to begin by attempting to understand the roots of conspiracy theories aimed at modern science, with the aim of confronting those ideas more effectively. My new book, Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America, suggests that people embrace conspiracy theories when they are concerned about moral decline and feel powerless to reverse it.
Starting with the Scopes “Monkey” trial of 1925, I trace a century of Christian conservative activism animated by conspiratorial claims remarkably resonant with the COVID culture war. Leading Christian fundamentalists of the 1920s—William Bell Riley, Gerald Winrod, Mordecai Ham, among them—blamed evolutionary science on an all-powerful international, satanic, Jewish communist cabal, foretold in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 1924 sermons delivered in North Carolina, Ham warned his audience that Satan worked through a shadowy network of Jews with a “tremendous banking connection” who stood behind the new immoral Russian Bolshevik government. “The day is not far distant,” Ham warned, “when you will be in the grip of the Red Terror and your children will be taught free love by that damnable theory of evolution.”
Better to begin by attempting to understand the roots of conspiracy theories aimed at modern science, with the aim of confronting those ideas more effectively.
While creationists claimed that evolution was bad science and appealed to the Bible for authority, their primary tactic was to argue that the real danger of evolution was the way it made people act. If you taught young people they were descended from animals, that is, they would act in an “animalistic” fashion, which had both violent and sexual implications. In this view, communists were the worst. Not only were they atheists, undermining the authority of the Bible and promoting evolutionary science. But from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Trotsky, they fought for social changes that undermined existing power relations and represented an evolving class-based morality. In pinning evolution and communism on Jews, Riley, Winrod, and Ham followed the lead of auto magnate Henry Ford, who published the fabricated Protocols as fact. In The International Jew, published as a series in Ford’s Dearborn Independent, the automaker blamed Jews for all manner of social ills, especially for promoting “sex knowledge” to demoralize the Christian masses. In a similar fashion, current-day creationists like Ken Ham (no relation to Mordecai) of Answers in Genesis link the changing “man-centered” (as opposed to “God-centered”) morality of evolution to abortion and gay marriage.
Which is to say that COVID conspiracy theories do not really derive from opposition to science, but rather express deep anxiety and a sense of powerlessness about the current moral state of American society. What makes conspiracy theorizing distinct is precisely the sense that the conspirators possess a near-supernatural power to affect the course of events. In real life, powerful people do lie and make decisions in secret. But they are never fully in control. Witness, for example, the disastrous twenty-year US war in Afghanistan or the massive movement last year to protest police brutality.
In real life, powerful people do lie and make decisions in secret. But they are never fully in control.
After we peel back the fantastical Jewish space lasers and lizard people, we will find a well-grounded concern with the power wielded over ordinary people by billionaires and their allies in both political parties. We can’t really have a rational debate over the role of Satan in the COVID-19 pandemic. But we can exchange ideas about pharmaceutical drug prices, the opioid epidemic, amnesty for undocumented immigrants, tech companies’ suppression of free speech, abortion rights, police brutality, and even the spate of strikes workers have launched across the US today. It is through debates on these kinds of issues that progress can be made.
Carl R. Weinberg is Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion and Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America. Follow him on Twitter @Euclid585.
Black swans and other deviations: like evolution, all scientific theories are a work in progress
Discussions about the nature of science and scientific theories are often confused by the outdated view that such theories are rendered false when anomalies arise. The notion of a scientific theory as a static object should be replaced with the more current view that it is part of a living research programme, which can broaden its scope into new areas.
For example, take the hypothesis that all swans are white, which seemed pretty good to Europeans until Dutch explorers found black swans in Australia in 1636. So what happens to our hypothesis? There are a number of options.
1) Redefine swan-ness to include whiteness. Then black swans aren’t really swans, and the hypothesis remains true by definition.
2) It’s been disproved. Discard it.
3) Compare different species of swan the world over, and see how well black swans fit in.
(1) is the least useful. Definitions can only tell us about how we are using words. They tell us nothing about the world that those words attempt to describe. (2) is based on the common-sense idea that hypotheses should be discarded when falsified by observation. This was the idea put forward by philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s, to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.
He saw psychoanalysis, for example, as pseudoscience because disagreement with its findings can always be explained away as a result of repression. Popper’s 1930s view has a great deal to commend it, but throws out a lot of babies with the bathwater. (3) is how science actually works, as Popper and his colleagues, who challenged traditional views of how science works, had realised by the 1970s. https://www.youtube.com/embed/mE590aeTdqE?wmode=transparent&start=0 GoJo Media/YouTube.
In our example, the black swan was an anomaly, but any major scientific theory will have anomalies. Newton’s theory of planetary motion could not explain the orbit of Mercury, an anomaly that was known for decades before Albert Einstein explained it with his general theory of relativity. Despite this anomaly, Newton’s theory was retained because there is so much that it does explain. A theory is not meant to be a final statement of how things are, but just the latest stage of a research programme in continual progress.
Evolution as theory and research
In the 18th century, the existence of family relationships between different species was spelt out in the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s grouping of living things into species, genera, orders and so on, but there was no suggestion of how things got that way. By the 1820s, the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was talking about inheritance of characteristics acquired as the result of striving (as the giraffe’s ancestors strived to reach higher into the trees).
By 1859, naturalist-biologists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the idea of natural selection as the primary driver of evolution. Natural selection, that is, operating on variation, but with no understanding of where the variants came from, or how that variation was inherited.
In the early 20th century came the discovery of mutations as a source of variants and the incorporation of the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel’s genetics into evolution science, but as yet without knowledge of the material basis of mutation and inheritance. This emerged in the 1940s, when DNA was recognised as the genetic material. Then from the 1950s onwards there was the determination of its structure and the cracking of the genetic code that revealed how it directs the formation of proteins.
Since then, we have recognised that evolution is governed by chance as well as by selection, that inheritance is complicated by things like gene duplication (where a chunk of DNA is copied twice and each copy can then evolve independently), horizontal gene transfer (where DNA is transferred between species), and even the incorporation of genetic material from viruses into our own genetic material. And of course there are plenty of other things that we still don’t understand … Yet.
So at every stage, we have an imperfect theory, full of gaps and inconsistencies, but one that emerges all the stronger from scrutiny of its imperfections. Like atomic theory, it has developed in ways that its originators could not even have imagined, with growing understanding at all levels from individual molecules to the genetics of populations. And like atomic theory it is fundamental to our understanding of the science that has grown up around it. Biology without evolution is like chemistry without atoms.
The possibility of correction
Sometimes we tells students that “the scientific method” consists in gathering data, formulating hypotheses to explain them and then collecting more data to see if the hypotheses stand up. At other times, we tell them that it consists in formulating hypotheses, collecting data and rejecting the hypotheses if the data don’t fit. Such views are much too simple and make scientific research sound like following a rather boring recipe.
The first step in any scientific enquiry is deciding that something is worth looking at. So the possible results must be worth having and the research programme must have some prospect of success. The next thing is continual dialogue between hypotheses and data. The hypotheses must be open to modification in the light of the data and must always remain open in principle to correction in the light of further knowledge. This commitment to the possibility of correction is known as fallibilism, and is one thing that all scientific endeavours have in common.
Beyond that, I see no point in pretending that science has a single method (it doesn’t), or in trying to draw a hard and fast line between scientific knowledge and other kinds of knowledge about the world (there isn’t one).
What about the swans?
Meantime, DNA evidence shows that the different white swan species whooper swan, tundra swan and mute swan are closely related, with the Australian black swan as their first cousin. Surprisingly, the black-necked swan of South America is a more distant relation.
Other questions suggest themselves. Is there any link between geographical distribution and closeness of relationship? When and where did the separate species arise? Do the differences in colour have any survival value, and if so, what?
So by now, our original swan hypothesis, based on appearance, has been greatly modified, and given rise to a whole range of new questions involving molecular similarities, adaptive evolution vs neutral drift, biogeography and the fossil record. That’s science.
Paul Braterman, Hon. Research Fellow; Professor Emeritus, University of Glasgow
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial
This piece,written in October 2020, seems more relevant now than ever. The Reverend John Macarthur returned to this theme in November 2021, repeating his description of the world as disposable and comparing it to a styrofoam cup
Paul Braterman, University of Glasgow
Every so often you come across a piece of writing so extraordinary that you cannot help but share it. One such piece is a sermon on global warming by American pastor John MacArthur. Full of beautifully constructed rhetorical flourishes, it is forcefully delivered by an experienced and impassioned preacher to a large and appreciative audience.
For me, as a man of science, it is the most complete compilation of unsound arguments, factual errors and misleading analogies as I have seen in discussions of this subject. But it’s important because climate change is a big election issue this November in the US, where there is a growing movement of evangelical Christians who deny its existence, while Joe Biden promises a “clean air revolution”.
Read more: Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change denial
The minister of the COVID-denying, law-defying Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California – which has encouraged worshippers to congregate as normal despite state COVID-19 restrictions – MacArthur is an impressive figure whose Study Bible has sold almost 2 million copies.
He regards the infallibility of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, as essential to his faith, and his sermon about global warming can only be understood in that context. MacArthur’s rejection of the science is shared by other major US ministries and organisations such as Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and the Discovery Institute. https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZTlYl8E_B14?wmode=transparent&start=0
In this sermon, MacArthur paraphrases “a scientist at Cal Tech” (except not a scientist at all, but the novelist Michael Crichton, best known for Jurassic Park), as saying in a lecture:
Consensus science is the first refuge of scoundrels … invoked only in situations where there is a political, social, financial agenda but no scientific support.
The reverend has the most serious reasons possible for rejecting the scientific consensus concerning the age of the Earth, the origins of humankind, the history and prehistory of the ancient near East and the peopling of continents: it is totally incompatible with the Genesis account of creation, Adam and Eve, the flood and the dispersion of peoples from the Tower of Babel.
Error, denial and misunderstanding
As for global warming itself, the reverend channels standard climate change denial, but all his arguments are unsound and have been convincingly refuted to the satisfaction of an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists (see in-depth discussion at Skeptical Science). He understates the amount of global warming, incorrectly describes the full record as dating back only 30 years, and cites the Little Ice Age as evidence that the changes currently taking place are natural. There’s more:
Here’s the key, friends, this is the real deal. Legitimate science recognises a close correlation between sunspots and climate change … The sun is the source of temperature changes because of its infrared variations. … There is absolutely no evidence that CO₂ contributes to warming. On the contrary the opposite is true. Warming produces CO₂ … It’s the other way round.
Here we have a collection of half-truths and misunderstandings, typical of denialists claiming to represent “legitimate science”. As the graph below shows, the 11-year sunspot cycle is a minor deviation, and the temperature increase since 1980 has occurred despite the fact that over that period the amount of solar energy falling on Earth has gone down slightly. Incidentally, this solar energy input is concentrated mainly in the visible, not the infrared, region of the spectrum, and it is the roughly balancing heat outflow from the Earth that is in the infrared.
MacArthur offers a false dichotomy between saying that CO₂ warms the oceans, and warmer oceans release more CO₂. Unfortunately, both these statements are true. There is a positive feedback loop: human-released CO₂ is the primary driver, but its effect is amplified by the fact that yet more CO₂ is then released from non-human sources. Regarding CO₂ itself, MacArthur seems to be even more confused:
By the way, plants produce CO₂. What man produces is marginal … Industry doesn’t affect CO₂ in the environment or atmosphere.
Plants do produce CO₂ but they absorb more than they emit. However, when it comes to humans, their activity may cause only a small imbalance each year between CO₂ emission and natural uptake, but this imbalance is cumulative. CO₂ levels are now 50% above pre-industrial, and subtle atomic differences clearly show that fossil fuel is the source. But according to MacArthur, “There is no scientific reason to believe that ice caps are melting”. https://www.youtube.com/embed/O9uunW_DBZE?wmode=transparent&start=0
Despite the Arctic Monitoring and Assement Programme’s video on this subject, the reverend does not think that the evidence for ice-cap melting is scientific, and that other factors are at play:
This is all political [and] financial agendas, class warfare, class envy … By the way, US$100 billion has been spent to make a case for global warming … driven by the socialist mentality … even some of the feminist mentality that resents male success.
All is now clear. Talk of global warming is part of a politically motivated conspiracy. But US$100 billion? That’s 600 years’ worth of all federal climate research spending. Clearly, those pesky socialists and feminists are formidable fundraisers. However, none of this matters because environmentalism is fundamentally misplaced. As MacArthur puts it, citing Revelation and the integrity of scripture:
God intended us to use this planet, to fill this planet for the benefit of man. Never was it intended to be a permanent planet. It is a disposable planet. Christians ought to know that.
And that is a statement that would leave anybody who cares about this world speechless.
This article is republished from The Conversation,where it has received over 340,000 reads, under a Creative Commons license. It has also been republished at PoliticsMeansPolitics , Metro News, Yahoo News California and UK, and Church and State. Read the original article.
Sensory Worlds Beyond Our Imagining
An Immense World; How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong, Random House/Bodley Head, June 2022
This book is an enormous achievement. A thrilling read, taking us into the Umwelt, or perceptual world, of numerous mammal, fish, reptile and insect species. A major work of scholarship, with over a thousand references to a 45-page bibliography, as well as accounts of interviews with numerous researchers and visits to their laboratories. An exploration of many ways of sensing the world, some of which we share, while others are beyond our imagining. The evolving interplay of perception and action, communication and deception, environment and response. And an enhanced insight into what it is like to be a bat, a bird, a blue whale, a beetle, or a human.
From the wealth of detail in the book, a consistent grand narrative emerges. Some physical process interacts with living matter. This is the raw material for sensation. Sensory abilities then shape a creature’s Umwelt, being developed according to the demands of its environment. But every perceiver is itself an object of perception to others, and we have colour displays and camouflage, smells as signals and identifiers, sound as communication to others and, by echolocation, back to the creature who generates it, and the same is true of other senses that we do not share, such as the detection of tiny electrical fields. Senses combine and even, we suspect, merge, and what we ourselves perceive is but part of an immense pattern. But the heedlessness with which we amplify our own signals disrupts this pattern, contributing to our destruction of nature, and we ourselves are the poorer for it.
Let me offer a few samples from the book’s wealth of detail.
Yong starts with taste and smell, two ancient senses that operate by direct molecular contact. It is not long before he surprises us. Snakes use their forked tongues to smell in stereo. Humans are poor compared with other mammals at detecting smells at low levels, but are rather good at telling different smells apart. No one knows how smell relates to chemical structure (contrast this with how seeing relates to the wavelength of light, hearing to frequency, or touch to pressure). As every well-trained dog-owner knows, smell is central to the Umwelt of dogs, but I would never have guessed that the same is true of elephants. And the molecules involved in smell include opsins, which are central to vision. As Yong puts it, in a way we see by smelling light.
It is sometimes said that dogs, and most other mammals, are colour blind. This is only half true; they have just two kinds of colour receptors, while we (like other apes, and our cousins the Old World monkeys) have three.[1] The colours that we perceive arise from subtle interactions between these receptors. Thus some neurons are excited by blue cones but inhibited by red or green, while others are stimulated by red but inhibited by green. So the colours are we experience are the result of a kind of neuronal arithmetic, below the level of conscious awareness. I still feel surprise when someone superposes red and green beams of light on a screen, and I see the result as pure yellow. Our colour vision can be represented by a triangle, with red, blue, and green at the corners, and yellow halfway along one edge.
But hummingbirds, like many birds and reptiles, can see four kinds of colour; red, green, blue, and UV. If human colour vision can be represented by a triangle, that of a hummingbird is a pyramid. And while for us the overlap of red, green, and blue are enough to produce white, four kinds of sensor need to be activated to look white to a hummingbird.
Among humans, different individuals have slightly different sensitivities, and some women show a degree of four-colour vision, having inherited different pigments from the sites on their two separate X chromosomes that are responsible for colour vision. Words cannot convey this added perceptual dimension, but the fact that they really do have four-colour vision can be demonstrated by discrimination tests. (This by the way answers a philosophical riddle that intrigues me. How do I know that you are seeing colours the same way that I am? It turns out that there is a real chance that you aren’t.)
Many flowers that appear white to us are coloured in the UV, and appeal to insect pollinators with green, blue, and UV three colour vision. And UV vision evolved in insects long before there were flowers, so the flowers evolved the pigments to attract the pollinators.[2] Thus the ability to see directly influences the evolution of what is there to be seen.
Temperature detection overlaps other senses. There are sensors that can detect hot or cold temperatures, but can also be stimulated in different ways. The sensor for painful heat can be activated, on the skin as well as in the mouth, by habanero peppers, while menthol feels pleasantly cool in the mouth or the smoker’s throat. Menthol also happens to be addictive.
The ability to detect heat at a distance is useful to species that suck blood, from bedbugs and mosquitoes to vampire bats. Ticks can detect body heat from up to 13 feet away, and common insect repellents work with them, not by interfering with smell, but by blocking the heat sensors. These sensors are in spherical pits on their legs, and the pits are covered by a film with a hole in it. So the sensors give directional information as well as detecting the heat source. Rattlesnakes and other pit vipers also have pits with a narrow opening, falling on a sensing membrane that carries around 7000 nerve endings. They can detect the presence and approximate direction of an increase in temperature of 0.001oC, which means that a viper can locate a rodent 1 m away. Information from the temperature sensing pits is combined with information from the eyes, so maybe for them the sense acts as an adjunct to vision, rather than on its own.
Touch organs can be modified for special purposes. The emerald jewel wasp paralyses cockroaches by stinging their brains, and has a touch sensor at the end of her sting to locate the exact location. A wide range of mammals, including the opossum, a marsupial, as well as rats and mice, use touch sensors at the base of whiskers to explore their surroundings several times a second. Since each whisker has its own connection to the somatosensory cortex, this builds up a map of the surroundings. So whisking, as it is called, is perhaps more like seeing than like touch. It would seem to be a very ancient trait indeed, since the last common ancestor of placentals and marsupials was back in the age of dinosaurs. The whiskers of seals are so shaped and angled as to minimise the forces on them as they move through the water, which would otherwise overpower the pressure waves caused by passing fish.
Sound detection is fast, precise, 24 hour, and useful for detecting predators or prey. Sound is also used in communication, as in the finding and assessment of mates. But mating calls come at the cost of giving away one’s location. There is a species of parasitic fly that has developed ears remarkably similar to those of the crickets it preys on, to eavesdrop on their mating calls. On Hawaii, which was once seriously infested by such flies, the crickets have fallen silent. Once again, the overlapping Umwelten of prey and predator drives evolution.
Surprisingly, the first insects were almost certainly deaf, since hearing has evolved separately among them at least 19 different times, on many different parts of the body, having in general been developed from organs that respond to vibration and pressure.
We can only detect parts of how animals use sound to communicate. Birdsong contains more structure than the human ear can resolve, unless it’s played back slowly. In fact, the structure within each note may be more important to the birds than the order that the notes are played in. Whales and elephants both use what we call infrasound, vibrations too low in pitch for our ears to hear, as a way of keeping in touch over long distances. Mice, however, communicate using ultrasound, frequencies too high for us to detect. The terms infra and ultra are arbitrary, relating to our own capacities, but since we are deaf to such sounds they were not even detected, let alone studied, until a few decades ago, and may be much more important in nature than we realise.
Echolocation in particular may be much more extensive than our knowledge of it, when it uses frequencies that our own ears cannot detect. Even bat echolocation, although suspected much earlier, was not clearly demonstrated until 1938. It enables bats to navigate and catch insects in complete darkness. This is an impressive feat; the bats need to generate short pulses of high-frequency sound, and then detect the direction and timing of the faint echo from a small moving target. Some bats can even tune their ears to respond to a frequency slightly different from the one they are emitting, and detect the movement of their prey using the Doppler effect. [3]
But moths are not merely passive prey. They have ears that can detect bat cries, and dodge and loop to evade capture. Tiger moths produce clicks of their own, which confuse the bats. Some moths even have long flexible tails at the end of their wings, which may also add to the confusion.
Infrasound echolocation by dolphins was detected in the 1950s, and since the 1960s the U.S. Navy has been training them to find sunken equipment and mines, and aiming to reverse engineer their abilities. Humans avoid walking into obstacles using echolocation, and some blind people have developed this to a high skill, building up a model of the world in their visual cortex, in much the same way that most of us do so using sight.
Darwin was puzzled by so-called electric eels, which use electric shocks to stun their prey. After all, evolution regards present organs as the result of a series of incremental improvements, but what use would the electric organ have been in its feeble first stages of development? It took a century to find the answer. Many fish possess a lateral line, sensitive to pressure, and in some cases this has been modified to detect electricity. This confers an obvious advantage, since any living thing moving through water generates tiny electric currents. And electrodetection gains in sensitivity and acuity when combined with the ability to generate one’s own more powerful electric field. So we have passive electroreception and active electroreception, just as we have hearing and the use of echoes. The cells that detect the electrical fluctuations are hair cells, basically similar to the same cells that detect pressure waves on the lateral line, or pressure oscillations in our own ears. Active electroreception operates in every direction, will work as well in cloudy as in clear water, and is so sensitive that some fish can be trained to detect the difference between a clay pot full of river water, and one also containing an insulating glass rod.
Passive electroreception is extremely widespread among vertebrates, being used by sharks, catfish, and salamanders, while the platypus has over 50,000 electroreceptors in its bill. Bumblebees can detect the electric fields that surround flowers, and it may well be that electroreception is much more common than we as yet realise among insects, equipped as many are with touch- and current-sensitive hairs.
Yong concludes his list of the senses with the ability to detect magnetic fields. This is a difficult area, if only because magnetic effects are extremely weak, and show subtle variations on a global scale in direction, intensity, and angle of dip relative to the surface. To complicate things further, no one even knows what the magnetoreceptor would look like or how it operates. Some bacteria grow small crystals of magnetite, and can distinguish North from South, but no one has managed to find similar structures in the birds and animals that are known to use magnetic fields as an aid to migration. One current theory invokes what are called radical pairs, molecules raised to high-energy states by the influence of light, but such states are short-lived, and I as a chemist would require a lot of convincing.
Senses interact. Mosquitoes are attracted by body warmth, but only if they can smell carbon dioxide. Electric fish that have learnt to distinguish shapes using their electric sense are then able to do so by sight, and vice versa. I have already mentioned how the mental maps constructed by blind people, who have learnt to navigate using echolocation, reside in the visual cortex. And finally, we need to remember that sensation requires discriminating between the signals that come to an organism from outside, and those that it generates by itself.
So all complex animals, including ourselves, perceive only a small part of the immense world of possible sensations, and construct their own Umwelt from the part accessible to their own senses. But we show brutal insensitivity in how we influence this world. We brighten the night sky and blur the distinction between the seasons, confuse forest insects with the sound from our machines, scatter huge amounts of material that must distract the sense of smell, and make the very oceans reverberate, so that whales navigating by infrasound end up stranding themselves in response to naval sonar.
And when did you last see the Milky Way?
***
Ed Yong’s earlier book, I contain multitudes: the microbes within us and a grander view of life, was a New York Times bestseller, and in June 2021 he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his writing on the COVID-19 pandemic
***
1] Red colour perception evolved by accidental duplication of the gene that codes for the green-sensitive receptor, followed by Darwinian selection for a new use – the ability to detect ripe fruit, or tender young leaves, against a green background. A nice example of how evolutionary change generates new information.
2] Yong does not tell us how we know this, and to do so would have required a chapter in itself. But, in brief, the methods involve cross-species comparisons, and, these days, the use of molecular biology to reconstruct family trees for the relevant genes. The simplest assumption is then that a trait prevalent in one particular clade was present in its last common ancestor.
3] This is the familiar increase in the perceived frequency of a sound wave when the distance between source and observer is decreasing. Here the decrease is in the length of the round trip, from bat to target and back again, but with further fine tuning from the motion of the prey, and even the flapping of a moth’s wing has a detectable effect.
This post first appeared in 3 Quarks Daily
At a popular evangelical tourist site, the image of a ‘wrathful God’ appeals to millions
Susan L Trollinger, University of Dayton and William Trollinger, University of Dayton
The Ark Encounter, an evangelical theme park located near Williamstown, Kentucky, has welcomed between 4 million and 5 million visitors since its opening in July 2016. Hundreds of thousands more are sure to visit this summer.
This theme park boasts a re-creation of the story of Noah’s Ark from the Bible. As described in Genesis 6:14-16, God directed Noah to build this ark to spare eight humans and a male and female pair of every kind of creature from the flood that God was going to unleash on the world as a punishment for sin.
As scholars of fundamentalism and creationism, we have visited the Ark Encounter multiple times. We have also written a book, “Righting America at the Creation Museum,” about the ark’s companion site, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
What we find particularly striking about Ark Encounter is that it is a tourist site devoted to emphasizing – with great specificity – the wrathful nature of God and the eternal damnation that awaits unrepentant sinners.
What is Ark Encounter’s argument?
According to Answers in Genesis, the fundamentalist organization that launched Ark Encounter, and its CEO, Ken Ham, Ark Encounter is a centerpiece of AiG’s mission to “expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas and bedfellow: a ‘millions of years old’ earth (and even older universe).”
So, according to AiG, when Genesis 1 says God created the Earth in six days, it literally means six 24-hour days. Similarly, when the Bible says Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day and gives details about their descendants and how long they lived, this is interpreted as recounting real history. And all of this means that, according to AiG, the Earth is “about 6,000 years old.”
While scientists have estimated the Earth to be about 4.5 billion years old, AiG counters by claiming that radiometric dating is not reliable. Instead, they assert that the catastrophic biblical flood created all the geological formations that make the Earth look ancient.
Over the past few decades, this argument has become a doctrinal touchstone for many American evangelicals.
An enormous structure
We most recently visited the Ark Encounter on March 15, 2022. Measuring 510 feet (155 metres) long, 85 feet (25 metres) wide, and 51 feet (15 metres) high, the Ark Encounter is, to quote one visitor we overheard, “so huge!”
After purchasing tickets that cost US$54.95 per adult, we and other visitors boarded buses and made the ascent up a long hill. Getting off the bus, we walked to the Ark, keenly aware of how small we were in relation to this ginormous structure.
Inside the Ark, visitors walk through three enormous decks, encountering rows of clay food storage containers, burlap sacks and animal cages. They observe over 100 bays featuring placards and digital animations that, among other things, go far beyond the Bible to explain Noah’s training in shipbuilding, carpentry and blacksmithing. The same creativity applies to the various displays explaining how eight human beings on the Ark fed, watered and managed the waste of 7,000 or so creatures.
Visitors also walk through a life-size diorama of the plush living quarters of Noah’s family, where they learn about the skills, gifts and interests of Noah’s sons – details not included in Genesis. They also learn about Noah’s wife and his sons’ wives. The Bible never identifies these women by name, much less describes them. Nevertheless, the Ark gives them names, different ethnic complexions, biographies and even hobbies.
Notwithstanding the occasional placard acknowledging that designers have taken “artistic license” with these dioramas, we couldn’t help but notice how much of what is in the Ark is not actually found in the Bible.
But visitors to the Ark seem to embrace these dramatic additions to the biblical text. As religion scholar Paul Thomas observes in his new book, “Storytelling the Bible at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and the Museum of the Bible,” the world created by the designers of the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter satisfies the evangelical longing “for a time and place governed by biblical principles, even if that idealized time and place … never really existed.”
A very angry God
AiG requires all Ark Encounter employees to affirm a 46-point faith statement. They must agree, for example, that “gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated,” modern understandings of “social justice” are “anti-biblical,” and all humans “are sinners” and “are therefore subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.”
This emphasis on the overwhelming wrath of God is perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Ark Encounter as a tourist site.
Genesis 7:16 states that, as the flood waters rose, God slammed shut the door into the Ark. Once shut, all the humans and animals on the other side of the door were doomed to drown.
According to a placard displayed at Ark Encounter, there may have been upwards of 20 billion people on Earth at the time of the Genesis flood, a number that would have included children and infants, not to mention the unborn.
Another placard asks, “Was it just for God to judge the whole world?” The answer: “Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Secondly, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve death and judgment.”
Remarkably, Ark Encounter has placed a “keepsake photo” placard near the door that, in the Ark’s depiction, sealed the fate of all those on the other side. As we have witnessed every time we have toured Ark Encounter, happy visitors line up to have their photos taken in front of this door.
According to AiG, this ancient divine slaughter prefigures a future divine slaughter. As the Ark Encounter website puts it, “God will judge this wicked world once again, but this time it will be by fire … God always keeps His promises – judgment will come.” According to AiG, we can escape this fate by believing in Christ, but for the billions (past and present) who have not or do not, the result is “everlasting, conscious punishment in the lake of fire (hell).”
As historian Doug Frank makes clear in his 2010 book, “A Gentler God,” this understanding of a wrathful God is alive and well in American evangelicalism. Frank’s argument is supported by a 2014 Pew Research report that revealed that 82% of American evangelicals believe in a literal hell.
Millions of evangelicals visit Ark Encounter for all sorts of reasons, including, perhaps, its sheer immensity. That said, the message they get from Ark Encounter is clear and simple.
The wrathful God has determined that those who do not accept Jesus as savior, those who are resolutely on the wrong side of culture war issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, will pay for their sin eternally.
Susan L Trollinger, Professor of English, University of Dayton and William Trollinger, Professor of History, University of Dayton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Damage limitation at Imperial
Disaster has been averted at Imperial. But much damage has been done, the group appointed to implement the decisions taken faces an impossible task, and the process has aggravated the very problem that it was meant to address.
For months, as I described elsewhere earlier, Imperial College has been contemplating the possibility of dis-honouring T. H. Huxley, one of its founders, on the basis of early remarks that we would now condemn as racist, but did no more than express the general assumptions of his time and place. This despite the fact that Huxley was a lifelong opponent of all forms of discrimination, a fierce opponent of slavery at a time when many cultivated Englishmen were sympathetic to the Confederate cause, and clearly changed his views about race over time.
The President and the Provost have both been urging a whitewashing (if I can use this term) of the College’s history by such measures as removing Huxley’s name and bust from one of Imperial’s most prominent buildings. As I explained earlier, they attempted to accomplish this using a deeply flawed process. A History Group lacking in any higher level expertise in Huxley’s own areas of biology and palaeontology was set up, with the College archivist restricted to a consultative role, as was the Imperial faculty member best qualified to comment on historical matters. Two outside historians were consulted, but their areas of expertise did not really include Huxley.1 Adrian Desmond, Huxley’s biographer, was consulted but as I documented in my earlier article, his unambiguous vindication of Huxley was completely ignored. In October (revised version November), the History Group’s report recommended that Huxley’s name be removed from the Huxley Building, and his bust on display there relegated to a museum.
A request for comments on this report drew over 200 submissions. Despite earlier commitments, the Provost refused to publish these, alleging confidentiality, and instead a summary was prepared by two outside facilitators from Goldsmith College’s Department of Social, Therapeutic, and Community Studies, neither of them biologists nor historians. As might be predicted, this summary was obviously bad, suppressing all quantitative information about the general thrust of the submissions and giving equal weight to views that did, or did not, reflect historical reality. This summary was then made available to the President’s Board, a group of senior advisers to the President, with whom the final decision rested. Board members also had access to the full submissions, but as we now know these add up to around 90,000 words, and one wonders how many people at such a level of seniority could possibly have found time to read them all.
Fortunately, loud voices had been raised in protest both inside and outside Imperial, the tenor of a forum held to discuss the History Group report was unmistakable, and I know that at least some Board members were directly lobbied by academic staff opposed to the removal proposals. It may also be relevant that the President, a firm advocate of removal, is now in the last few months of her term of office, and has been further weakened by other controversies.
The board met on February 21, and an official account of its conclusions was published on February 25. According to this account, its main recommendations were as follows:
The Board committed to finding new ways to mark the impact and contributions of brilliant figures from underrepresented groups, having connections to Imperial, such as the Nobel Prize physicist Professor Abdus Salam , Dr Margaret Fishenden, who conducted seminal studies of combustion and heat transfer at Imperial , and Dr Narinder Singh Kapany, known as the father of fibre optics. This recommendation had met with widespread approval.
A working group has been established to implement these recommendations, and “To establish new ways for the Imperial community to continue to expose, engage with and learn from its history.”
The name and bust of TH Huxley will be retained, but put in context. This makes sense, provided the contextualising material comes from someone well informed about its subject matter. The submission to the History Group by Adrian Desmond, Huxley’s most noted biographer, would be a good start. The College will also consider a joint name for the building, linking Huxley to “a pathbreaking scientist from a Black, Asian or other minority ethnic background.”2 Here the working group faces a daunting challenge. There are very few scientists of any background whose names could be linked to Huxley’s without suffering by comparison, let alone if consideration is restricted to the underrepresented.
Similar recommendations made regarding commemoration of the Beit brothers, whose profits from mines in South Africa did much to finance the College, seem to me sensible although I have no expertise in this area. Specifically, the College will seek to direct its Beit scholarships to African scientists. Other de-naming recommendations seem to have been quietly dropped.
The Board also decided to release an anonymised version of the written submissions. This has the effect of showing the degree of distortion in the previously publicised summary. For example, the summary says that “Some participants felt such items [statues, busts, and historical artifacts] should be removed when possible as they are a daily reminder of enslavement and colonial legacy and not a reflection of the College current values.” In the full version, slavery (or slave, enslavement, etc.) is explicitly mentioned in 45 submissions. Two of these deal with a side-issue, the slave owner Sir Henry de la Beche. (Here the first version of the report was criticised for being too kind, but the matter had by then already been dealt with with at the Department level by removing his name from an award, renaming the geology society, and archiving his bust ) . Of the remaining 43, only 5 favour removing existing names or statues, 2 are ambiguous, and 36 are opposed to removal. 26 mention Huxley by name and all but twoof these oppose removal, with frequent mention of his enlightened attitudes and opposition to slavery. (It took me less than half an hour to establish all this, using simple word searching to scan the relevant submissions, which were generally quite unambiguous.)
Again, according to the summary,
Other [respondents] said they felt unwelcomed and rejected by Huxley’s links to eugenics, leading to feelings of marginalisation, disrespect, hurt and offence. Some that marking his legacy without this context had a negative effect on Imperial’s aspirations to equality and inclusion and its global standing.
This is flat out untrue.
By my count, 20 separate submissions mentioned eugenics. Of these, only one was in favour of renaming. 19 were opposed, and of these 18 mentioned Huxley by name, many pointing out that nothing in his writings could be said to support eugenics. As one respondent put it, capturing the general flavour of the responses, “taking down Huxley because his work contributed to eugenics is about as logical as cancelling Jesus because his name has been used to justify crusades.” Others also pointed out that to link Huxley to eugenics is unhistorical, since we can date the very term to Galton’s writing in 1883, some years after the work for which Huxley is chiefly remembered. (I would further add, since such charges are often raised by creationists against evolution science as a whole, that eugenics was deeply rooted in older beliefs2 about hereditary inferiority.
So how did the summary come to say what it did? Its authors, remember, were from Goldsmith College’s Department of Social, Therapeutic, and Community Studies, with no expertise either in history or in the relevant science. I must presume that, as non-experts, they wrongly imagined that the History Group spoke from a position of expertise, and allowed their perspective to be influenced accordingly. I emphasise this point because it helps explain the very real harm that this process has done to the College, and to the reputation of science in general.
Consider the History Group’s overall impact. To quote its own report,
The Group’s project was set up as part of a series of initiatives to address racial injustice. An important rationale for the project was to develop an understanding of how Imperial is perceived by a wide range of stakeholders, how this is influenced by its history (or perception of its history) and the extent to which this perception will hinder our ambition to establish a truly inclusive environment which allows all to flourish and to feel at home.
How well has the History Group succeeded in attaining these objectives? Not very. The recommendation to dis-honour Huxley achieved the rare distinction of being attacked both by the strongly Conservative Telegraph and the left-leaning Observer, sister paper to the Guardian. The Telegraph printed and re-echoed the letter of protest by 40 academics that the journal Nature had refused to publish. In the Observer , Kenan Malik, who himself studied at Imperial and is, for what it is worth, himself a member of a minority ethnic group, criticised the entire notion that real inequalities were being usefully addressed by such symbolic actions, while pouring scorn on a process that treated Huxley, an agent of scientific and social progress, in the same way as the slave trader Colston whose statue had been thrown into Bristol Harbour (or, I would add in the context of Imperial, the slave owner de la Beche discussed above). As Malik puts it,
Damning both equally as racists who do not deserve commemoration is to abandon historical evaluation for a crude mode of moral judgment.
The Times also gave sympathetic treatment to criticism of the history group report from within Imperial.
By the time the College’s decision was announced, Russia had invaded Ukraine, moving public attention away from this, as with so many other matters. The only newspaper accounts of the decision that I could find were in the Daily Mail online and, again, the Times.
The headline in the Daily Mail reads
Ethnic minority scientist’s name will be added to Imperial College building named in honour of Thomas Henry Huxley after claims that biologist who discovered birds were descended from dinosaurs was racist
Its bulleted summary states that the History Group had accused Huxley of ‘scientific racism’, while the full article reports academics’ rebuttal and praise of him as a role model.
The Times article, however, is extraordinary, not only restating the refuted claim that Huxley’s work had somehow led to eugenics, but describing him as a eugenicist himself.
Notice that this article appeared under the byline, not of a reporter, but of the Social Affairs editor. I can only surmise that it is playing a role in some wider agenda.
So, returning to the history group’s objectives, how will all this activity have affected “how Imperial is perceived” and the worthy “ambition to establish a truly inclusive environment which allows all to flourish and to feel at home”? Not, I fear, very well. The College has given us a shameful exhibition of poor scholarship, and besmeared the reputation of its founder. It created a false impression of impartiality and expertise in the setting up and naming of the History Group, thus enhancing the opprobrium it will attract from some for ignoring its recommendations. For those who, like the vast majority of historians, life science scholars, and respondents to the call for submissions, the accusations against Huxley were ill-informed and misguided, the exercise will leave them dismayed by the History Group’s recommendedations. For those, if there are any, who do really feel excluded and less able to flourish because of Huxley’s belief, in 1865, in a hierarchy of races, they will be dismayed that the Group’s central recommendation was not implemented, and will be feeling more excluded than ever. Who can blame them when the report itself and its Press coverage have given them so much cause?
One final irony. Within the UK at least, the biggest single cause of imbalances of power and education between groups is social class. Imperial itself is well aware of this problem, and includes this factor among others in its ambitious plans to widen access. What better role model, then, than a child forced by family poverty to leave school at age 10, who rose to the highest levels of accomplishment, whose scientific achievements continue to earn our admiration 150 years later, and who did more perhaps than any other person of his time to broaden educational opportunity? I give you
Thomas Henry Huxley
This article first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily, as an update of my earlier Intellectual Disgrace at Imperial College. As before, I thank numerous colleagues for discussions and relevant information, including Joe Felsenstein, Steve Hollenhorst, Nick Matzke, Andrew Petto, Betty Smokovitis, and members of Imperial’s academic staff. RCS Building image, Barabbas1312, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Bust of Huxley, photograph George P. Landau, via https://victorianweb.org/victorian/religion/agnos.html . Huxley sketch by his daughter, Marian, via Wikipedia
***
1] To be fair, there was some overlap with the other main target for reconsideration, the Beit brothers, major donors towards the College, whose wealth derived from South African mines. Imperial College has no history department at such, but the academic staff member best qualified to pronounce on historical matters was also relegated to a consultative role.
2] Pet peeve: I wish people would not say “minority” when they clearly mean “underrepresented”. Albert Einstein came from a minority ethnic background, and as a result had to flee his country of birth, but I do not think that is what the College has in mind.
Evolution 101, with reference to coronavirus
By T. Ryan Gregory. Reproduced with permission
Mutations occur as chance errors in replication. They’re just mistakes in copying. Most have no effect. Some are detrimental to the organism (or virus), a few may happen to be beneficial — this depends on the environment.
Three main evolutionary processes determine what happens to genetic variation once it arises (and these are independent of the process that generates new variation, namely mutation): genetic drift, natural selection, and gene flow.
We call different versions of a gene “alleles” and we can talk about the proportion of those versions in a population as “allele frequencies”. Genetic drift is a random change in allele frequencies that occurs by chance.
Genetic drift is basically sampling error, in which the genetic variation in a new generation does not accurately reflect what was present in the previous generation. The most obvious mechanisms of genetic drift are founder effects and population bottlenecks. (But see below about genetic drift being common in small populations generally). Founder effects occur when a random, non-representative subset of a population moves to a new location and founds a new population. The allele frequencies in that founder population won’t be the same as in the source population, and there will typically be less variation overall.
Population bottlenecks are sudden, severe declines in population size in which survival happens at random. So, for example, a drought or storm causes a major die-off and the individuals who survive were just lucky (rather than having traits that helped them survive).
Gene flow is movement of genetic variation from one population to another. The overall effect is to introduce new variation into an existing population (if the source population has different alleles) and to make two populations that exchange alleles more similar to each other.
When we think about the early stages of new species evolving, we generally are considering ways that gene flow is being blocked. Lots of gene flow means two populations are less likely to diverge genetically.
The final evolutionary mechanism is natural selection. In this case, the reason some individuals survive and reproduce better than others is *non-random*. It doesn’t occur by chance. It is specifically related to heritable traits that make survival and reproduction more likely.
This is where the concept of “fitness” is relevant. In evolutionary terms, fitness refers to the advantage in survival and/or reproduction due to heritable traits. Fitness depends on the environment. What is fit in one environment may be neutral or unfit in another environment.
There are different forms of natural selection, depending on what part of the distribution of traits is fit/unfit in the population: directional selection, diversifying (or disruptive) selection, and stabilizing selection.
Under directional selection, one extreme of the distribution is fit and the other is unfit. This drives the distribution of traits in a particular direction from one generation to the next.
For example, if the largest individuals leave more offspring on average than smaller individuals in each generation, then the average size will increase over time. Not because individuals start being born larger in response, but because more offspring are born of large parents.
In diversifying selection, it is the two extremes that are fit and the average traits that are unfit. This can cause a population to split into two. For example, if the smallest and largest individuals do well but the medium-sized are at a disadvantage.
Finally, in stabilizing selection the average value is fit and the extremes are both unfit. The result is that this prevents the distribution of traits from changing in the population because deviations from the current average are detrimental in that environment.
I have added an image from Wikipedia to show these three types of natural selection. A is the original distribution of traits, B is the new distribution. 1) Directional, 2) Stabilizing, 3) Diversifying selection.
There are many factors that affect these evolutionary mechanisms. Mutation rates can be high if there is weak quality control and repair of errors, or if there is some environmental factor (mutagen) that messes up replication.
It also matters how much replication is happening. Every time a genome is replicated, there can be errors. Lots of replication means lots of opportunities for mistakes to occur. (In multicellular organisms, only mutations in the germline are relevant in evolution, of course).
As to what happens to alleles, this depends on the environment as well as population size. Genetic drift, which is sampling error, is stronger when samples (i.e., populations) are smaller. Natural selection, which is non-random, is stronger when populations are large.
Whether an allele is fit or unfit (will be subject to non-random natural selection) or neutral (will evolve by random genetic drift) depends on the environment.
Natural selection and genetic drift can happen at multiple levels. The main one is, of course, among organisms within populations, but these can also happen within organisms. Cancer is an example of cell-level selection that is usually suppressed in multicellular organisms.
When it comes to viruses, there are two levels as well: within hosts and among hosts. Because viruses mutate so quickly (by chance, because their repair mechanisms are weak), there can be new variation arising within a single host.
Some mutants will do better within the host — that is, they will be better at invading host cells or will be replicated more quickly than other versions of the virus within a host.
So, there is natural selection within the host.Some mutants will do better at getting into new hosts. For example, maybe they form smaller aerosol particles and spread father when sneezed out. Or maybe they are in high concentration in the nose rather than deeper in the lungs, so they get shed more easily.
The mutant viruses that do best within a host are not necessarily the same ones that do better at infecting new hosts. In fact, a highly virulent version might be very effective at invading host cells but do so much damage that the host never spreads it to another host.
There can be a trade-off between virulence (replication within a host that causes damage to the host) and transmissibility (spread to new hosts). Which versions of a virus evolve depends on the mutations that happen to occur by chance replication errors and the outcome of genetic drift and natural selection both within hosts and among hosts.
Whether viral evolution involves increased or decreased virulence and/or higher or lower transmissibility depends on many factors. Number of replication events happening. Rates of replication errors. Selective pressures within and among hosts. Viral and host population sizes.
Virulence and transmissibility are not the same thing, and there may be trade-offs between them, but it’s also a concern that a virulent (damages or kills the host) virus can still be successful at the host population level if it is able to spread to many new hosts.
Viruses that are both highly virulent and transmissible will eventually run out of hosts to infect, but they can do great damage before that happens.
One of the many positive effects of reducing transmission (e.g., with vaccines, masks, etc.) is that this imposes a selection pressure for less virulence. If only versions of the virus that don’t incapacitate or kill the host manage to reach new hosts, then those are fitter. Reduced transmission also means fewer replication events happening and this means fewer new mutations.
A mild but highly transmissible version of a virus can spread quickly through a population and then fizzle out as hosts become immune, and many people seem to be assuming this will happen with Omicron, but that also means a lot of replication and new mutations.
The Omicron variant in particular has many, many mutations specifically in the spike protein, which is one reason it is so much more transmissible and escapes previous immunity. And this may now be the starting point for new variants.
It is possible that Omicron is milder (than Delta, at least) and that it will infect pretty much everyone and that this will be a step toward SARS-CoV-2 becoming endemic (like flu, requiring seasonal vaccinations).
But it is also possible that Omicron may undergo more chance mutations that make it more virulent as well as highly transmissible. Then it spreading rapidly will mean many hospitalizations and deaths before it runs out of hosts. We do know it is still evolving.
Viruses don’t want anything. They just spread to new hosts or they don’t, and replicate effectively in hosts or they don’t. Mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, natural selection. There are many factors we can’t control, but there are some that we can. We really ought to try.
Teaching Indigenous thought as science in New Zealand
As Michael says, this project is patronising, since it values Matauranga not for what it is, but for somethng that it is not. Such muddled thinking does nothing but harm to the admirable project of decolonising the curriculum
Exactly 40 years ago this December the hot topic in science was the trial over the teaching of Creationism in Arkansas. A bill had been passed a few months earlier to give equal time of the teaching of “Creation” and “Evolution” in schools. (Creation mean a 6 day creation some 6 -10,000 years ago according to a literal view of Genesis and Evolution meant an earth some 4.5 billion years old and humans evolving ultimately from a unicellular creature.) At first Creationists in America were rejoicing at their success, but soon forces were mobilised against them.
Soon the bill was challenged in the courts, with a court case running from 7th to17th December 1981. A vast number of witnesses were called on both sides and on Jan 5th 1982 Judge Overton gave a 38 page ruling concluding that Creation Science was not science but religious doctrine and thus could not…
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Tall el-Hammam; an airburst of gullibility; it gets worse
I shared the excitement when I read at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3 that
in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea
and that this event could have given rise to the biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Then I learned that the work was conducted by a group based on an unaccredited Bible college (Trinity Southwestern University, TSU), that the world’s leading authority on airbursts has denounced the claims as impossible, that eight separate major research groups have questioned the assumptions, reproducibility, and factual accuracy of related earlier work by the corresponding author, that there is an unusually active thread criticisng the work on PubPeer, and that Retraction Watch, which says that criticism has engulfed the paper, is in correspondence with the Chief Editor of the journal, part of the Nature group, where the work appeared.
Problems listed by acknowledged experts in PubPeer include misuse of Mark Boslough‘s account of airbursts (Boslough is a long-standing critic of the claims of the TSU group); and no clear evidence that the destrution of the palace walls was catastrophic, absence of qualified examination of skeletons, anatomically misdescribed bones, claims without evidence that bone damage was associated with traumatic death, rather than later damage, the mixing of kinds of debris is commonplace and not evidence of catastrophe, the connection of the carbon-14 dates to the alleged destruction is not established, and claims of burning of bone lack evidence and consistency (Megan Perry of the Petra North Ridge Project, who knows what this kind of stuff looks like.) There is undeclared image manipulation, eventually admitted, but described as without significance. And the account of diamond vs graphite in the paper
Each diamonoid typically contains carbon atoms that are sp3-bonded (i.e., 3 bonded carbon atoms), as in diamond, rather than with sp2 bonding (i.e., 2 bonded carbon atoms), typical of graphite
does not inspire conidence.
In the paper’s Figure 44c, shadows are cast by a sun shining from the direction labelled North. This obviously cannot happen at Tall el-Hammam, giving rise to further concerns about the quality of the work.
My own browsing in what are for me odd places1 shows that other archaeologists, including Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University, agree in finding nothing unusual in the report compared to “normal” destruction by fire or warfare) Maeir is quite explicit:
[T]he destruction the report described was not that unusual. “I see some things that remind me of phenomena that we have in the Iron Age IIA (1000–925 BC) destruction at Tell es-Safi/Gath (e.g. vitrified or “melted” bricks, ultra-high temperatures, and other things)—a destruction that is most likely caused by the conquest and destruction of the site by Hazael of Aram,” he said.
Mark Boslough, an expert on cataclysmic events who even has an asteroid named after him, tells me that he is tired of repeated rebuttal of what he considers to be obviously false claims, and of seeing his own theoretical analysis of the effect of airbursts invoked as an explanation of claims completely inconsistent with such a process, or perhaps any credible process. For this reason, rather than publishing yet another counterblast that will be ignored, he has taken to describing the controversy, extending over many years, on Twitter (see here, here, and subsequent threads, and PubPeer).
Phillip Silvia, the author from whom soil samples can be obtained, is an electrical engineer by training, who received his PhD training in archaeology at TSU, and published much of this material through TSU press in 2016 as a paperback, in which his PhD advisor, Steven Collins, strangely absent from the author list of this paper although not from an earlier abstract, states (Foreword, page x) that “the Genesis 19 description of Sodom’s destruction was about good a phenomenological description of a cosmic airburst as one could imagine” and describes Tall el-Hammam as “the site I had identified as Sodom based on geographical details embedded in the boblical text”.
Like I suspect many of the journalists and interested readers who swooped on this story, I failed at first to notice that the paper was not, despite the link, an article in Nature but in Scientific Reports. This is one of the stable of less exclusive journals closely linked to Nature being published by Springer, now controlled by the publishing giant Hotlzbrinck, and profiting from Nature’s reputation for excellence. I was only vaguely aware of the authors’ long history of invoking airbursts, took the many kinds of evidence listed at face value, and did not even blink at the claim that “[a]n airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) [from the Dead Sea, apparently] produced hypersalinity”.
The authors have since described this work to a much larger audience in The Conversation, where they repeat their claim, also published in Scientific Reports, of a similar catastrophe at Abu Hureyra in what is now Syria, around 10,800 BCE, assert that “it almost certainly won’t be the last time a human city meets this fate”, claim that such events “pose a severe modern-day hazard”, and advise that “unless orbiting or ground-based telescopes detect these rogue objects, the world may have no warning, just like the people of Tall el-Hammam.” The Abu Hureya paper also repeats a litany of earlier claims that the Younger Dryas, a period of severe cold in the northern hemisphere from around 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present [Present is fixed at 1950 CE], was caused by a series of impacts with cometary debris, spread over at least four continents. These claims have been severely disputed; see papers listed below.
There are numerous additional reasons for concern about the TSU researh group.
The paper tells us that “The project is under the aegis of the School of Archaeology, Veritas International University, Santa Ana, CA, and the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University, Albuquerque, NM, under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” Veritas International University believes in “the full historicity and comprehensibility of the biblical record”. It is accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS), which I have discussed here before. Trinity Southwest University, which now operates from an office in a strip mall in Albuquerque, was formerly in Tulsa, Oklahoma, under the name Southwest Biblical Seminary, and rejects any government accreditation whatsoever as intrusive violation of the separation of Church and State. While the traditional site of Sodom is in Israel (and within the pre-1967 boundaries).
The corresponding author is Allen West, who has been publishing prolifically in this area since 2005 (Evidence for the Extinction of Mammoths by an Extraterrestrial Impact Event) and in 2006 co-authored a book, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture, which claims that the debris of a shattered comet was responsible for “a cosmic chain of events [that] began 41,000 years ago and culminated in a major global catastrophe 28,000 years later.” These events include everything from the extinction of the mammoths to the landform of the Carolina Bays to the legend of Atlantis to a purported “mysterious layer of black sediment” found spanning North America to the Younger Dryas discussed in the Abu Hureya paper. West has no academic qualifications or affiliations, and gives his address as Comet Research Group (CRG), Prescott, Arizona (several of the other authors are also members of this group, which is linked to the Rising Light Group, a 501(c)3, tax-exempt charitable organization with a clear Christian and biblical agenda, registered in Allen West’s name.). As detailed by Pacific Standard Magazine, discussing how thing stood regarding CRG’s work in 2017, there have been calls for a for a formal inquiry and
University of Wyoming archaeologist Todd Surovell and his colleagues couldn’t find increased magnetic spherules representing cosmic debris at seven Clovis sites. Nicholas Pinter and his colleagues at Southern Illinois University Carbondale argue the carbon spherules are organic residue of fungus or arthropod excrement. And Tyrone Daulton of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues reported that supposed nanodiamonds formed by the impact were misidentified.
On the other hand, in an acrimonious exchange with me in the Comments section of The Conversation, West pointed out that
Our group included, among many others: Dr. James Kennett, emeritus professor at UCSB, specializing in stratigraphy, micropaleontology, paleobiology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which recognizes the contributions of just 0.1% of all scientists. Dr. Ted Bunch, former NASA section chief and a world-leading meteoriticist. Dr. Robert Hermes, retired from Los Alamos National Labs, world-recognized expert in trinitite or atomic glass. Dr. Wendy Wolbach, chemistry professor who discovered high-temperature soot at the K-Pg boundary.
I replied with a listing of some papers that I have examined criticising West’s own earlier work regarding airbursts, including sampling techniques and claimed evidence for very high temperatures:
Scott AC, Hardiman M, Pinter N, Anderson RS, Daulton TL, Ejarque A, Finch P, Carter-champion A (2017). “Interpreting palaeofire evidence from fluvial sediments: a case study from Santa Rosa Island, California, with implications for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis”. Journal of Quaternary Science. 32 (1): 35–47. doi:10.1002/jqs.2914.
*Boslough M, Harris AW, Chapman C, Morrison D (November 2013). “Younger Dryas impact model confuses comet facts, defies airburst physics”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 (45): E4170. doi:10.1073/pnas.1313495110.
*Boslough M (April 2013). “Faulty protocols yield contaminated samples, unconfirmed results”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 (18): E1651. doi:10.1073/pnas.1220567110
Van Hoesel A, Hoek WZ, Pennock GM, Drury MR (2014). “The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: a critical review”. Quaternary Science Reviews. 83: 95–114. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.10.033.
*Meltzer DJ, Holliday VT, Cannon MD, Miller DS (May 2014). “Chronological evidence fails to support claim of an isochronous widespread layer of cosmic impact indicators dated to 12,800 years ago”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 111 (21): E2162-71. doi:10.1073/pnas.1401150111.
*Holliday VT (December 2015). “Problematic dating of claimed Younger Dryas boundary impact proxies”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 112 (49): E6721. doi:10.1073/pnas.1518945112.
Thy P, Willcox G, Barfod GH, Fuller DQ (2015). “Anthropogenic origin of siliceous scoria droplets from Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites in northern Syria”. Journal of Archaeological Science. 54: 193–209. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2014.11.027.
*Van der Hammen T, Van Geel B (2016). “Charcoal in soils of the Allerød-Younger Dryas transition were the result of natural fires and not necessarily the effect of an extra-terrestrial impact”. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences. 87 (4): 359–361. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2014.11.027
See, however, in defence of the Younger Dryas impact theory, *Sweatman MB (2021). The Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence. Earth-Science Reviews. 218: 103677. doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103677. I thank Christopher R. Moore, one of the authors of the paper I am criticising, for drawing my attention to this review.
*Freely accessible via doi; for other papers, doi gives access to abstracts but not full text.
We await further developments with interest.
1] Bit for a rebuttal by a biblical archaeologist involved in the dig, though not an author on this paper, see here
An earlier edition of this post appeared on pandasthumb.org
Primate's Progress 
