Creationist Lunacy in North Carolina

UNC Professor says God designed apes so humans could cage them.


And God said it was good?

(Many thanks to Pharyngula for the link. For more on the exciting world of creationist logic see my posts Parsimony and the Origin of Life in the Universe and The Feeling of What Happens. This story was picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, join the discussion on their blog.)

As a recent émigré to the South from the heathenistic West Coast I'm often reminded of some of the cultural differences between my fellow countrymen. A case in point is this gem from David A. Plaisted, professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (just a stone's throw from where I live in Durham). After quote-mining select news items and science journals to claim that anthropologists are confused by the fossil evidence connecting humans and other apes (we aren't) he offers this suggestion of God's motives:

But why would God create a creature that is so close to a human, but not quite? To answer this, we have to reason from what we know or can infer about God's motives in the creation. This may lead us to considerations that seem far removed from those that are expected in this context. The original creation was intended to contribute to the happiness of man and animal. We can assume that in many cases the Lord created animals that would be a delight to man, and created man to be a blessing to the animals. Even today, both children and adults enjoy seeing gorillas and chimpanzees in zoos. It is reasonable to assume that these creatures were partly made for just this reason, to be a joy and entertainment to us.

So, in His infinite wisdom the purported Creator of the Universe specifically chose to make great apes because He knew, one day (six thousand years hence), little Jimmy could point at one with amusement. And He said it was good. This is what passes for a "reasonable" explanation in creationist circles (and from a university professor at that)? No wonder people are turning from religion in droves.

A further tour through his university hosted website demonstrates that he uses the UNC web server to advocate teaching creationism in public schools. I wonder what the university policy is concerning religious evangelism using public resources?

Many thanks to Vanessa for bringing this loony to our attention.

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Why People Are Good

Your Sunday Skepticomic from Jesus and Mo.



To view last Sunday's comic click here.

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The Bonding Brain

How the evolution of primate sociality is linked to brain networks for pair bonds.

Social conservatives are fond of linking morality with monogamy and will be quick to condemn the moral crimes of adulterous felatio while ignoring the moral crimes of cutting social programs for poor mothers. However, in a bizarre twist, it seems that morality and monogamy are closely intertwined, though it’s doubtful many conservatives will champion the reasons why.

Those of you who are regular readers of these pages know that I’ve touched on the issues of evolution, cooperation and altruism on several occasions (for example see here and here). In the latest issue of the journal Science, Robin Dunbar revisits this question with a unique perspective on why some species (including humans) succeed so well as members of a group.

While it may come as a shock to the Milton Friedman’s of the world (proponents for the brand of capitalist theory often referred to as “free market fundamentalism”) human beings are a distinctively socialist species. While we come nowhere near the extreme for the natural world (the eusocial bees, ants and termites win the Karl Marx utopian award for selfless behavior on that one) we humans are far and away the most social species of the most social order of the most social class in the animal kingdom (for those of you not up on your Linnaean terminology I refer to primates and mammals respectively). How can I claim such a thing? A very simple measure will suffice: social group size.

Humans have the largest group sizes of any primate. Baboons are known as having the largest group sizes of all non-human primates with an average of about 40-50 individuals and only approach as many as two hundred under extreme circumstances. Humans, in contrast, have an average group size of about 150-200 individuals in hunter-gatherer societies and a maximum group size in the millions under the unique conditions we experience as the result of industrial agriculture. And these large social groups require substantial brain power. All organisms need to successfully predict and navigate their environments and this becomes far more complicated when there are multiple actors interacting in the same social circle.


In the 1990s Robin Dunbar championed an idea known as the Social Brain Hypothesis. He found that mammals who lived in the largest social groups often had the largest neocortex to brain ratio. Since the neocortex is associated with complex and abstract thought he suggested that the demands of group living selected for an increase in neocortex size. In his latest paper in Science he and Susanne Shultz have suggested that there is even more than simply group size that may have influenced this selective process. When the authors analyzed the mating strategies of those highly social mammals that had the largest neocortex they found that pair bonds were significant in all groups except primates.


All social mammals except primates show connection between brain volume and pair bonding
Pair bonds occur when an animal stays with their partner for extended periods rather than simply meet up during the mating season. Pair bonds are cognitively tricky because monogamy is a risky business. In order to avoid getting stuck with a bad partner (either one with bad genes or one who won’t share the costs of reproduction) individuals have to be careful in choosing a good-quality mate. Also, pair bonded individuals have to carefully coordinate their activities to be in synchrony with the other. This may require substantial brain power to predict the other’s behavior and adjust your own behavior accordingly. But why is it significant that the social primates don’t show this connection between a large neocortex and pair bonding like other mammals do? Well, whenever there is a consistent pattern in nature that is violated in a single case a good scientist will want to know why. Primates are already unique among mammals, so any unique qualities that jump out could help us understand the evolution of our lineage.


As mean group size rises so does neocortex ratio
What Dunbar and Shultz have suggested is that the social brain that was selected under conditions for pair bonds in other species has been coopted and utilized for strangers in primate social groups. As the authors state in their paper:

This would explain why, as primatologists have argued for decades, the nature of primate sociality seems to be qualitatively different from that found in most other mammals and birds. The reason is that the everyday relationships of anthropoid primates involve a form of “bondedness” that is only found elsewhere in reproductive pairbonds.

Primates, and humans in particular, are such good social cooperators because we can empathize with others and coordinate our activities to build consensus. Rather than natural selection being a process of selfish individuals maximizing their own fitness, this “bonding brain” hypothesis suggests that natural selection, at least in primates, was a process of maximizing individual fitness through the promotion of the group as a whole. There is already a vast literature on the proximate mechanisms (the hormonal and neurobiological aspects) that promote both pair bonding and affiliative behavior. While there are still many more questions that need to be answered, this research is a promising candidate for understanding the evolutionary origins of primate sociality and human morality itself.


This research doesn’t imply that monogamy causes increased social cooperation, merely that the brain mechanisms selected for in the evolution of pair bonds have been extended to additional members of the primate order. But it’s unfortunate that so many conservatives are adamantly opposed to understanding evolution. Finally a connection between morality and monogamy has been established by Science and their refusal to understand means they'll miss a terrific opportunity to pound the bully pulpit.

Reference:

R.I.M. Dunbar and Susanne Shultz (2007). Evolution in the social brain. Science 317:1344-47. DOI: 10.1126/science.1145463

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Shamanic Visions of Selective Sweep

The evolution of schizophrenia reveals the nature of contingency


Shaman from the Mbukushu of Namibia

J.B.S. Haldane famously quipped that, if there is a God, he’s inordinately fond of beetles. Others may choose to be somewhat less kind and argue that, with around 2 million species of the beastly little things, such a design could only be the product of a disorganized mind. Perhaps that’s the solution Intelligent Design proponents have been looking for: God is schizophrenic! However, as it turns out, schizophrenia is the perfect metaphor for how our evolutionary history is not a well ordered and implemented design, but is rather full of twists and turns and ill-adapted consequences that are best explained through the contingencies of natural selection.

Several years ago Robert Sapolsky suggested that genes promoting schizophrenia may have been selected for in human evolution because some of them conferred benefits that outweighed the 1% of people worldwide that were disabled by the disorder. Like the sickle-cell trait that confers resistance to malaria (so long as you don’t receive two recessive alleles and develop full fledged sickle cell anemia) a partial schizophrenia may be beneficial in some way. He observed that relatives of schizophrenics have a high likelihood of “schizotypal personalities,” or a mild form of the disorder that just makes these people a little strange and allows them to see the world in a unique way. What if, he wondered, schizophrenia maintained itself in human populations because of selection for schizotypal personalites? As luck would have it, for a hundred years anthropologists had observed such individuals thriving in nearly every society they encountered: shamans.

As Sapolsky stated in 2003 while accepting an award from the Freedom from Religion Foundation:

The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic. This is not somebody babbling in tongues all the time in the middle of the hunt. This is someone babbling during the right ceremony. This is not somebody hearing voices all the time, this is somebody hearing voices only at the right point. It's a milder, more controlled version.

Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit. Shamans are not leaving fewer copies of their genes. These are some of the most powerful, honored members of society. This is where the selection is coming from.

Sapolsky hypothesized that the evolution of schizophrenia was ultimately a byproduct of selection for beneficial cognitive adaptations. In the early edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences Bernard Crespi, Kyle Summers and Steve Dorus have found that schizophrenia evolved in human populations in just this way. By analyzing specific selective sweeps (or the non-coding regions of DNA that get “pulled along for the ride” when a coding region undergoes a beneficial mutation) they’ve determined that 28 of 76 genes that have been linked to schizophrenia have undergone positive selection during human evolution. These 28 genes are all closely linked to cognitive abilities involved in complex thought.

As the authors summarized their findings:

[G]enetic liability to schizophrenia has evolved as a secondary consequence of selection for human cognitive traits. . . The selective forces underlying adaptive evolution of these genes remain largely unknown, but these findings provide convergent evidence consistent with the hypothesis that schizophrenia represents, in part, a maladaptive by-product of adaptive changes during human evolution.

In other words, the same genes that make us so smart and our species so successful can sometimes (specifically, about 1% of the time) result in a debilitating mental disorder. The other 99% of us are doing so well that these genes continue to perpetuate themselves. In the evolution of complex thought, schizophrenia was accepted as a devil’s bargain.

Whether sexy shamans are the ultimate source for this selection or not remains to be seen. However, what Crespi, Summers, Dorus and Sapolsky have emphasized is that evolution is a messy business and is rarely as straightforward as we might assume. There is no long-term view or plan in the evolutionary narrative. Organisms make do with the raw materials they’re born with and the occasional beneficial mutation simply adds additional supports to a jury rigged foundation. God, if such a being exists, must be inordinately fond of such haphazard construction, his “design” is chock full of them.

Reference:

Bernard Crespi, Kyle Summers and Steve Dorus (2007). Adaptive evolution of genes underlying schizophrenia. Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.0876

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Sex for a Handshake

Bonobo research continues despite Congo unrest.


Vanessa Woods and friends

Researchers have gone to the Democratic Republic of Congo to study the social behavior of bonobos -- a close relative of the chimpanzee -- in the Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Kinshasa.

Vanessa Woods, an author and a participant in the study, will be posting daily updates at http://bonobohandshake.blogspot.com.

"We're always comparing ourselves to chimpanzees, but they're only half the picture," said Woods. "Bonobos and chimpanzees are so opposite in many ways, that we really need to understand bonobos if we're ever going to understand ourselves."

Woods and her colleagues from the Max Planck Institute in Germany will look at cooperation, play behavior and altruistic characteristics in the primates.

"A lot of our experiments look silly, like when I throw a bright red soccer ball back and forth, or wave a red porcupine around. But a lot of these games help us understand the way bonobos think. Are they as obsessed with objects as we are? Are they scared of new things?"

Bonobos are smaller than chimps and live in female-dominated societies. They are widely known for the prominent role that sex plays in conflict resolution.

Because the researchers are studying psychology, they can observe bonobos in the unnatural setting of a 35 hectare forest reserve in Kinshasa.

Source: Mongabay.com

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Parsimony and the Origin of Life in the Universe

The all-too-common descent to arguments from personal incredulity


The micro-manager at work in His workshop (Monty Python's The Meaning of Life).

Intelligent Design creationists are fond of using the strategy of denial based on personal incredulity. “I can’t explain how protein motors with multiple parts could evolve so, therefore, no one can and Darwin was wrong.” However, while Michael Behe may not have been able to explain the bacterial flagellum others seemed to have no difficulty. That Behe abandoned this centerpiece in his latest book suggests that he was smart enough to realize he was wrong.

William Dembski and friends haven't figured that out yet and proudly display the flagellum as their website image at Uncommon Descent. Today they've found a new fallacy to flog with the recent Biology Direct paper on multiverses as an explanation for the improbability of life's origin.

Origin of life is a chicken and egg problem: for biological evolution that is governed, primarily, by natural selection, to take off, efficient systems for replication and translation are required, but even barebones cores of these systems appear to be products of extensive selection. . . In an infinite universe (multiverse), emergence of highly complex systems by chance is inevitable. Therefore, under this cosmology, an entity as complex as a coupled translation-replication system should be considered a viable breakthrough stage for the onset of biological evolution.

Invoking the argument of parsimony, or the idea that the simplest explanation requiring the fewest number of steps is the better explanation, BarryA asks:

The question for the class today is which is the most parsimonious hypothesis: One designer or infinite universes?

BarryA is correct in bringing up parsimony to critique this paper but he's ludicrously foolish in assuming his position is somehow a less complex explanation. The designer God that ID proponents taut is a micro-manager that assembles bacterial power supplies, initiates the catalyzing cascade in blood clots and directs the maddeningly complex interactions of organic evolution (Behe accepts human ancestry with apes but thinks God intended humans to emerge). This would mean that the designer is ultimately more complex than the design itself.

I'm glad BarryA isn't teaching my class, or any class for that matter. It's bad advice to propose a hypothesis that is more complicated than the question you're trying to answer. All this hypothesis does is lead to the next question of what or who created the designer? The more parsimonious hypothesis IS that the universe always existed. BarryA can't explain how this could be (and frankly I can't either) so he descends to the position of personal incredulity.

However, invoking the infinite multiverse as an explanation for how life evolved is the same misguided argument that has been used for years as the anthropic principle. It basically boils down to the statement, "Life exists because we happened to live in a universe with physical laws that made it possible for life to exist." It's no more clever than that, just fancied up with metaphysical flourishes.

Rather than invoking an infinite multiverse as an explanation for a coupled translation-replication system, I think that a more parsimonious explanation is that we don't yet fully understand the conditions under which RNA trancription could evolve from basic amino acids in the chemical soup of early Earth. You shouldn't rush to a "God of the gaps" or an "everything is possible with multiverses" argument until you're sure all other explanations have been eliminated.

I only wish I could use this multiverse explanation for difficult problems I'm working on. "The least-squares regression line is correct for this data set because we live in a universe where least-squares regression lines are able to be correct." Brilliant!

Reference:

Eugene V. Koonin (2007). The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life. Biology Direct 2:15. doi:10.1186/1745-6150-2-15

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Congolese Rebels Invade Gorilla Sanctuary

Rebel takeover raises fears of more gorilla deaths


Several gorillas were killed and eaten by rebels earlier this year who have now
taken over Virunga National Park.

Rebel forces loyal to a renegade general in the Democratic Republic of Congo have seized control of large swaths of conservation reserve, placing the rare mountain gorillas that live there in grave danger.

Conservationists fear for the safety of the 380 gorillas living in the forests of the Virunga National Park, in the North Kivu province. There are only 700 of the gorillas worldwide.

North Kivu has been the scene of violent clashes between the Congolese army and forces loyal to General Laurent Nkunda. The army claims to have killed 28 rebel soldiers in recent weeks, while the general described the situation as "a state of war" over the weekend.

Conservationists reported that General Nkunda's forces surrounded ranger stations in the park on Monday, seizing rifles and equipment and forcing the evacuation of park workers and their families. The UN refugee agency estimates that 170,000 people have fled the fighting in North Kivu in the past year.

It is thought that General Nkunda's forces entered the park in pursuit of Rwandan Hutu rebels, who have bases there. His forces, which are frequently accused of human rights violations, purport to be acting in the interests of ethnic Tutsis. General Nkunda maintains that the Congolese government is collaborating with the Hutu-led FDLR, a group accused of involvement with the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis.

The current fighting appears to have further escalated yesterday, when it was claimed that the army used a helicopter gunship against rebel troops in the region for the first time, killing 50.

The difficulties of protecting endangered species in such a region are clear, and five national parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo are listed by Unesco as World Heritage Sites "in danger". In Virunga, nine mountain gorillas have been killed since the beginning of the year. In January two lone males were shot in an attack which was widely attributed to General Nkunda's troops. A female was then killed in June, and three females and a male slaughtered in late July. It is thought these attacks were carried out by charcoal traders, who are illegally felling the park's trees for fuel. The Congolese government has brought in various measures to try to protect wildlife, yet the job of policing the parks has become increasingly dangerous, with more than 120 rangers killed by poachers and rebels in the past 10 years.

Source: The Independent

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African Exodus Linked to Global Climate Change

The climate crisis helped us emerge from the Stone Age, will it return us to it?


Drought stricken regions of Africa today may have looked the same for
our early ancestors.

As I wrote earlier (see The Evolution of Metapopulations and the Future of Humanity) the earliest migration of fully modern humans out of Africa occurred approximately 70,000 years ago. I argued that the most likely explanation was that global climate change, as the last ice age was beginning, prompted this migration.

This hypothesis found support today in the early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Christopher Scholz and colleagues who have evidence from deep sediment cores of Lake Malawi in Africa. These cores suggest a series of megadroughts that occurred between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago that reduced Lake Malawi by as much as 95% and caused many lakes throughout Africa to dry up completely. Approximately 70,000 years ago the climate stabilized in the region and was more favorable for human populations.

There has been much speculation as to why humans didn’t invent farming until only 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent of the Middle East. This early climate crisis was probably the main reason. For sixty thousand years the climate fluctuated and droughts would strike our fledgling species. This undoubtedly made it difficult for hunter-gatherers who had the freedom to follow the herds but near impossible for any would-be agriculturists tied to one area of land. Couple this with few potential large game animals suitable for domestication in Africa (see Guns, Germs & Steel) and it’s easy to understand why there was such a delay.

This might also give us modern humans pause as we hear more reports every day about catastrophic climate change. We are a species beholden to the land we occupy in ways that are easy to forget with modern technology. Sixty thousand years may be the blink of an eye in geologic terms, but it’s fifteen times longer than humans have had the written word. The last global climate change may have been caused by fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit, but the current one is the result of our own societal imbalance.

Reference:

Christopher A. Scholz et al. (2007). East African megadroughts between 135 and 75 thousand years ago and bearing on early-modern human origins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Early Edition September 3, 2007. www.pnas.org doi 10.1073 pnas.0703874104

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Atheist and Humanist Carnivals

Some great heathen reading for a lazy Sunday.

The Humanist Carnival #7 is up at Bligbi.

Carnival of the Godless #74 is up at Atheist Faq.

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Secular Humanist Revisionists

Your Sunday Skepticomic from D.C. Simpson.



To view last Sunday's comic click here.

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