Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Creationist tourism
(Editorial, Louisville Courier-Journal, December 2, 2010)

Gov. Steve Beshear needs a vacation. Indeed, he should have taken it this week.

Other than extreme fatigue, how else can one explain his embrace of a project to build a creationism theme park in Northern Kentucky (near the Creation Museum) and the apparent willingness of his administration to offer tourism-development tax incentives to developers of the park?

Even if technically legal (in that the law allowing the tax breaks doesn't discriminate against other religious or anti-religious views), a state role in a private facility that would be built by a group called Answers in Genesis and espouses a fundamentalist view resting on biblical inerrancy indirectly promotes a religious dogma. That should never be the role of government.

Moreover, in a state that already suffers from low educational attainment in science, one of the last things Kentucky officials should encourage, even if only implicitly, is for students and young people to regard creationism as scientifically valid. Creationism is a nonsensical notion that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old. No serious scientist upholds that view, and sophisticated analysis of the Earth's minerals and meteorite deposits generally lead to an estimate that the planet is about 4.5 billion years old. Furthermore, creationism teaches that the Earth (including humans) was created in six days, thus rejecting the well-established science of evolution.

But if the Beshear administration is determined that Kentucky should cash in on its stereotypes — and wants to fight Indiana to snare the theme park — why stop with creationism? How about a Flat-Earth Museum? Or one devoted to the notion that the sun revolves around the Earth? Why not a museum to celebrate the history and pageantry of methamphetamines and Oxycontin? Surely a spot can be found for an Obesity Museum (with a snack bar).

And while we're at it, let's redo the state's slogan. Let's try: Kentucky — Unbridled Laughingstock.

why stop with creationism? How about a Flat-Earth Museum? Or one devoted to the notion that the sun revolves around the Earth? Why not a museum to celebrate the history and pageantry of methamphetamines and Oxycontin? Surely a spot can be found for an Obesity Museum (with a snack bar).

They are polymerized dessicated tissue that has been preserved inside mineralized pockets in the skeletal mass of these dinosaurs.

Sex, evolution, and amorality
(BY SHAY O'REILLY | University of Iowa Student Newspaper | December 03, 2010)

It's 2010 and we're living in the future.

Our scientific understanding of evolution and psychology has advanced to the point that researchers, using carefully documented methods, can determine that women don't call their fathers while they're ovulating as an inherent protection against inbreeding. Men and women shop differently because of sex roles from hunter-gatherer days, when women gathered plants and men hunted animals (which explains frustrating mall adventures the world over). And, yes, men are meant to be promiscuous because of evolution and genetic selection.

If you thought that was just a throwaway joke on "30 Rock," you're in for a treat: It's what some evolutionary psychologists, notably including London School of Economics researcher Satoshi Kanazawa, actually endorse given their knowledge of the data.

These hypotheses, however, prove worrying — not because evolutionary biology is inadequate in explaining human behavior, although concerns about socialization are not misplaced; rather, there is a distressing tendency among scientists, students, and the general public to misinterpret descriptive findings as prescriptive.

While we're still waiting on our hover cars and cloned organ donors, a thousand science-fiction writers got this right: Science and scientific processes are no more of a moral force than sledgehammers, despite the human tendency to apply facts in a normativefashion.

This is true for everything from evolution to nuclear physics to gravity. Anything dropped from a tall building will accelerate at a rate of 9.8 m/s2, but falling is not necessarily valuable.

"There is a misconception of directionality/improvement that isn't supported by the science," University of Iowa biology Assistant Professor Andrew Forbes wrote in an e-mail. Forbes is slated to teach Evolution & Ecology next semester. "I think it just stems from misinformation about what the actual definition of 'biological evolution' is."

The actual definition, as one of my former professors at Bennington College drilled into me: There is variation in the population. By chance, certain organisms have a trait. There is differential reproduction between organisms with that trait and those without. If the trait is genetic, it becomes more prevalent.

To ascribe a moral value to the evolutionary process is to introduce a level of teleology — that is, to say it is directed toward a final cause. The truth is, "reproductive fitness" has no bearing on right or wrong or on the "improvement" of a species.

It is reproductively favorable for a female animal whose male mate dies to kill and eat the offspring of that male. This is biologically advantageous because she could then more easily attract a new mate, and her future children will be more likely to survive. That is not something, dare I say, that we would find acceptable in human populations.

The strict gender roles laid out by evolutionary psychologists such as Kanazawa are no more morally righteous. Women may be less likely to contact their fathers during ovulation, but that does not mean that they should consciously avoid it.

Simply put, we are not headed toward some ultimate evolutionary destiny. Selection pressures make a species more accustomed to dealing with that individual pressure, not an overall existence.

Evolutionary psychology has merit when it helps us understand some instinctive human actions. But we must take care not to interpret descriptive findings as normative; we must not cage ourselves within a prison of biological imperative. There is a difference between how the world was and how it should be.

Human consciousness demands that we emphasize the latter.

Indeed, for many critics of this movement [ Behaviourism in social control], the cult of self implies a narcissistic denial of the importance of rules, morality and the existence of anything or anyone outside the self.

The comparison here is also with classical, pure Freudianism. The never ending quest for well-being*, psychic energy and true self is not an attempt to bring unconscious wishes to light and analyse the causes of repression. It is, rather, to dissolve the very machinery of repression, to put an end to all inner restraints, inhibitions and hang ups.

Complete genetic information from more animals would be required to reconstruct the entire genome of the common ancestor, which was a small, furry nocturnal animal. Currently, nearly complete genomes are available for five mammals and Haussler predicts that about 20 would be required for an accurate complete reconstruction. "We will be able to trace the molecular evolution of our genome over the past 75 million years," he says. "It's a very exciting new way to think about our origins, a kind of DNA-based archaeology to understand how we came to be."

... in two papers in the new issue of Science, a team of researchers announced that a chemical analysis of the T. rex peptides suggests the king of the lizards is most similar to a present-day chicken. Although that is probably not the lineage one might have expected for this mighty and fearsome dinosaur...