john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

creationism

  • Hawks lecture at University of Birmingham Sept. 22

    Mon, 2011-09-19 19:25 -- John Hawks

    I'll be in the U.K. the rest of this week. The University of Birmingham has invited me to give a lecture for their "Great Read" event as they begin the new academic year. If you're in the area, the talk is at 3:30 on Thursday, September 22, in the Concert Hall of the Barber Institute. I'll be appearing after Ken Miller, widely known for his work in evolutionary biology and his advocacy of evolution education in the U.S.

    As for myself, I'll be talking about Neandertal and Denisovan DNA and what they tell us about human evolution. All my talks have new, unpublished stuff in them, and this is no exception.

    I notice that the topic of evolution education has really hit the news this week in the U.K, as a group of 30 prominent scientists, including Paul Nurse and Richard Dawkins, have signed a letter protesting lax evolution education standards ("David Attenborough joins campaign against creationism in schools", "Scientists demand tougher guidelines on teaching creationism in schools"). Looks like I'll be going there just in time.

    My host has planned some exceptional activities later this week for us, and I'll plan to report back when I can.

    Tags: 
    Hawks sightings
    travel
    education
    creationism
    Neandertal DNA
    Denisova

  • Science Pub, day of creationism

    Tue, 2011-03-29 18:52 -- John Hawks

    I had a wonderful afternoon Sunday at the Madison Science Pub. The featured guest was Ron Numbers, the historian of science at UW-Madison whose research has focused on the origins and history of the creationism movement in the U.S. and worldwide. Ron drew a crowd well over 50 people -- I didn't count, but the large salon at Brocach was packed high and tight.

    The conversation was a rollicking exchange -- Ron told a story about his meeting with Turkish creationist guru Harun Yahya, gave some insight on the very earliest origins of the creationism movement, and shared his good humor. He reminded us that the fraction of Americans who claim belief that humans were created within the last 10,000 years has basically remained unchanged above 40 percent for three decades.

    Attendees came from every walk of life and many had their own stories. My favorite was the inside view of the home-schooling movement, with some groups banning publishers that print science curricula, others banning prominent creationists.

    Invariably, when a group of well-thinking people get together and start talking about creationism, the discussion drifts toward speculation about why folks would turn to creationism -- especially young Earth creationism -- when it means they must reject the most basic principles of almost every branch of natural science. In a crowd of people there will always be several who turn to stupidity as an explanation for different beliefs. Very few things irritate me more than witnessing people's biases coming out in this way. Yet there were many at the Pub who had close and direct experience working with and confronting creationism, and I think we gave some needed perspective.

    Science Pub organizer Skip Evans, speaking from experience at the NCSE and as an organizer of the Wisconsin Citizens for Science, noted that most students who resist the idea of evolution are actually driven by convictions about what will happen to them after they die. Many perceive that religious doctrine about eternal life and personal salvation can be maintained only if other literalist aspects of religion are accepted without question.

    Explaining the history and diversity of life is simply not an issue of great concern to most people except as a marker of belief system. On that score, many "evolution believers" have knowledge that is just as shallow as creationists. They simply nod and smile in response to different cues. Professing a belief in evolution or creation is a not-so-secret handshake that signals membership in a loose clan. That's why the press is so insistent that presidential candidates take some position on the issue; it marks them like a scarlet letter.

    Some committed creationists are simply ignorant of biology -- not stupid, but unschooled in the facts. These can be foiled, and sometimes even persuaded, with a few simple, widely-known examples.

    But many are well practiced in the art of debate and will not easily play into your hands. They will have taken your measure and they know the ground well. The stakes are higher for the creationist, souls hanging in the balance. Wrestling with skunks, you'd be a fool to think you'll keep the stink off.

    As with most things, becoming skilled at advocating for evolution requires much practice. When it comes to debate, many trained students of science are not merely wet behind the ears, they are still tadpoles breathing with gills. Producing simple, effective examples of evolution does not come easily to those untutored in the skills of rhetoric. Yet few things serve a teacher so well as a handful of two-minute examples, told with some style. Saying something credibly means saying it easily and self-evidently, in terms that are familiar to the audience.

    This is the essential skill for every kind of science communication.

    Tags: 
    teaching
    Hawks sightings
    politics
    creationism
    science communication
    education

  • Mailbag: Mutations and perfect people

    Fri, 2011-01-21 08:14 -- John Hawks

    A friend of mine and I were discussing evolution, my friend is a Christian and told me that the human mutation rate is 1 in ten billion cell duplications, and with this rate you can track back to the 'genetically perfect human' around 6000 years ago, which is apparently when God created man. I'm quite sceptical of this, considering i have learnt about mutations in science and biology this year at school, so i was wondering whether you could tell me what the rate is and whether it is even possible for there to have been a 'genetically perfect human', after all when it comes to genetics what is classified as perfect?

    If you could answer this question it would be greatly apprectiated.

    I appreciate your question. To really explore the topic, I suggest the free materials from Nature education. For example, this article about mutations has links to many other related topics.

    http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetic-mutation-1127

    The short answer is that human DNA has mutated around 2/100000000 per generation per base pair. The average two copies of a gene in people today differ by 1/1000, making their common ancestor around 50000 generations (1 million years) ago. No person is genetically perfect -- even discounting new mutations, some of our genes work only in combination with others. Natural selection has eliminated many deleterious mutations but thousands of them remain and have always existed.

    Tags: 
    mutation rate
    creationism

  • Graphic biology teacher survey results

    Sun, 2010-07-18 16:46 -- John Hawks

    Several people (e.g., P. Z. Myers, Jerry Coyne) have passed along a poster representation of some statistics on evolution, creationism, and other stuff in secondary biology education.

    These statistics are from the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, taken in 2007 and reported in a 2008 paper by Michael Berkman and colleagues [1]. I wrote about the survey results at greater length when the paper by Berkman and colleagues reported on them.

    Biology teachers creationism chart

    What I want to know is where are these high school biology classes that include more than 20 hours of human evolution? That's four weeks! Two percent of the survey is 18 teachers. Good for them, and I hope they're using the blog!

    The 17% who say they don't cover human evolution at all... I think that it wouldn't be too hard to make a real dent in this statistic. It does not take extra time to instill basic knowledge about human evolution, if you're already discussing basic genetics. All of the good examples of Mendelian inheritance are good examples precisely because they illustrate recent human evolution. Any discussion of human variation really is a discussion of human evolution. You just need to include the missing evolutionary frame, the one that makes sense of these things.

    Still it's true that many biology classes don't touch on issues related to humans at all. Even these are missing an obvious opportunity -- other organisms are relevant to our biology precisely because of our shared evolutionary history.

    The part of the survey that I found dismaying was the low number of hours devoted to evolutionary biology in general. As I put it then:

    We're entering an age in which health decisions will be made based on genetic information -- when everyone may know their own gene sequences if they want to. New diseases are emerging, new crops are being developed, and new organisms are being transplanted from one continent to another. Decisions about the economic development of entire regions -- perhaps entire nations -- are now subject to the evaluation of biodiversity, including threatened and endangered species.

    The people making these decisions ten to twenty years from now will have an average of 13.7 hours of education about evolution.

    Looking at the distribution of numbers, it's clear that the average of 13.7 is buoyed by a tail of high-instruction classes. The median and mode are between 5 and 10 hours. This has to change, if we're going to have a populace capable of using genetic information.

    References

    1. Berkman MB, Pacheco JS, Plutzer E. Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait. PLoS Biol [Internet]. 2008;6:e124+. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124
    Tags: 
    teaching
    education
    creationism

  • Mailbag: Chance and evolution

    Sun, 2010-05-16 21:47 -- John Hawks

    I have read your Evolution blog for a while now. It seemed to me that
    you might be able to provide a brief comment on the anti-Darwin position
    put forward here.

    The science is well beyond me but I find it hard to accept that such a fundamental rejection of
    Darwin would have gone unnoticed .It is [name redacted] opinion that the rich and the upholders of
    capitalism such as those who own and/or run scientific journals have suppressed the knowledge he
    and his collaborators have uncovered that refutes Darwinism in whatever form it takes.

    I apologise for sending this via email as it does not seem your preferred way of receiving mail.
    If you do comment on this I don't care if you use my name as I don't profess any scientific expertise so
    have no reputation in that sphere to sully by displaying my ignorance.

    [link to mailing list entry redacted]

    Thank you for writing, I don't mind e-mail at all.

    Generally speaking, the answers to questions like these are quite easy to find. The Talk.Origins archive has a good list of answers to creationist criticisms of evolution, including the one you note here.

    http://www.talkorigins.org

    The "protein changes are wildly improbable" claim has been made recurrently by creationists and others who either have not taken the time to understand the basics of natural selection. Or, much worse, snake oil salesmen who understand very well but deliberately try to mislead others.

    I can suggest this essay by John Wilkins, philosopher of science who also maintains an active weblog:

    http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/chance/chance.html

    The essay includes an annotated bibliography of sources that may also be helpful, and quotes another work by Richard Dawkins which addresses itself to the same question.

    The entry from the mailing list that you forwarded appears to be the work of someone intent on wasting others' time.

    Tags: 
    creationism

  • Intelligent Design article

    Sat, 2010-02-20 07:30 -- John Hawks

    Intelligent Design Creationism is not science. I wrote about it a few years ago in a local op/ed.

    But maybe you're looking for a different point of view -- why ID is bad theology as well as not science. In that case, I can recommend an article in First Things by Stephen Barr. From the last few paragraphs:

    The question I am raising is whether this quixotic attempt by a small and lightly armed band to overthrow “Darwinism” and bring about a new scientific revolution has accomplished anything good. It has had no effect on scientific thought. Its main consequence has been to strengthen the general perception that science and religion are at war.

    Cui bono? Only those people whose religious doctrines entail either Young Earth creationism or a rejection of common descent. Such people already and necessarily were in a state of war with modern science and have no choice but to fight that war to the bitter end.

    You know, come to think of it, my old column had its moments:

    ID proponents hope to cheat into schools what they cannot win fairly in science. They hope to persuade fair-minded people that their children should hear "both sides."

    The truth is, only one side is science. The other is the vain hope that God left the lid off the cookie jar, just enough to prove He was there.

    Tags: 
    creationism

  • Texas, the textbook gorilla

    Tue, 2010-02-16 22:52 -- John Hawks

    The other New York Times Magazine article that I found interesting this weekend (following up on yesterday's post) is about the Texas State Board of Education and its attempts to revise textbook standards for history teaching.

    Texas is regularly in the headlines because of its heft as a textbook buyer. Its statewide education guidelines influence what will be available to the rest of the country, which becomes a frequent source of aid and comfort for creationism whenever the state's biology education standards are revised.

    It's not biology this year, its history -- but some similar conflicts have arisen. The main point of contention is the way to portray religion's role in the early United States, and the article, by Russell Shorto, reviews some pertinent facts and opinions, and profiles the nationwide forces behind members of the Texas Board of Education.

    IN 1801, A GROUP of Baptist ministers in Danbury, Conn., wrote a letter to the new president, Thomas Jefferson, congratulating him on his victory. They also had a favor to ask. Baptists were a minority group, and they felt insecure. In the colonial period, there were two major Christian factions, both of which derived from England. The Congregationalists, in New England, had evolved from the Puritan settlers, and in the South and middle colonies, the Anglicans came from the Church of England. Nine colonies developed state churches, which were supported financially by the colonial governments and whose power was woven in with that of the governments. Other Christians — Lutherans, Baptists, Quakers — and, of course, those of other faiths were made unwelcome, if not persecuted outright.

    Nowadays people think that "disestablishmentarianism" is just an example of an inordinately long word to use in spelling bees. They don't seem to remember meaning of the word, from the movement to disestablish State religions within the United States. A good nutshell version of the history is given by Olds (1994, who, as an aside, was mainly interested in whether the resulting "privatization" of religion could explain the high religious identification in the United States). The movement to disestablish churches was in part driven by Jeffersonians, and in part by churches themselves, which became more and more unwilling to cede doctrinal decisions to a public vote of their congregrations. Until disestablishment, people in these states were taxed to support the church.

    Now, I'm betting that little historical episode isn't part of many high school history curricula. I imagine students are still forced to learn about the Bank of the United States, going on around the same time, but how many of those history lessons even try to connect the concept to the Federal Reserve?

    Anyway, the article is mainly interesting for its cast of characters, including perennial creationist board member Don McLeroy and frequent-flying Liberty University law professor and Texas board member Cynthia Dunbar. These people are able to demand extraordinary changes from publishers, supported as they are by an ersatz network of legal activists and foundations around the country. I think the article makes essential background to understanding the issues with evolution education.

    Tags: 
    history
    education
    creationism

  • Quote: Marge Simpson on evolution

    Tue, 2010-02-09 18:26 -- John Hawks

    The local station is playing the "creationism" episode of The Simpsons today -- maybe in honor of Darwin this week? A Marge Simpson quote from the end:

    Thank you for opening my eyes, Lisa. I can't wait to see what evolution will do next! Maybe a bird with a people face. Or a bear with pants on.

    Tags: 
    humor
    creationism
    quotes

  • The high cost of teacher removal

    Wed, 2010-01-20 00:16 -- John Hawks

    Ian Urbina in the NY Times reports on the case of a middle school teacher in Ohio accused of creationist leanings:

    To some, Mr. Freshwater is a hero unfairly punished for standing up for his Christian beliefs. To others, he is a zealot who pushed those beliefs onto students.

    “Freshwater’s supporters want to make this into a new and reverse version of the Scopes trial,” said David Millstone, the lawyer for the Mount Vernon Board of Education, referring to the Tennessee teacher tried in 1925 for teaching evolution. “We see this as a basic issue about students having a constitutional right to be free from religious indoctrination in the public schools.”

    I don't know how outrageous this guy's teaching was. Students and other teachers certainly are claiming that it was outrageous, and "calling a news conference" to announce you're removing religious posters from your classroom is outrageous behavior for a teacher.

    But one thing certainly is outrageous about the case:

    After an investigation, school officials notified Mr. Freshwater in June 2008 of their intent to fire him, but he asked for a pre-termination hearing, which has lasted more than a year and has cost the school board more than a half million dollars.

    Why should it cost a half million dollars for a school district to fire a teacher for cause?

    The barriers to firing bad teachers directly cause bad science education. Here's the choice school administrators have: put up with your bad teachers, or find $500,000 in the budget to cut while you slug it out.

    There can't be any effective reform of science education without making the people who hire teachers able to support, promote and retain good ones. In the U.S., that means local school districts.

    Line in the article that had me laughing really hard:

    Among those attending school board meetings were members of a local group called the Minutemen.

    If you know Watchmen, you'll understand the image I had in my mind.

    UPDATE (2010-01-21): Some readers seem to think I don't even read the articles I link to. Yes, other folks have reported that this guy did some outrageous things. He apparently doesn't deny some of them, although for the most bizarre ("burning cross into students' arms") he has a non-religious explanation.

    I wonder how many Tesla-ignorant school administrators are wheeling their Van de Graaff generators out the door today so they won't risk that lawsuit.

    The Panda's Thumb has been carrying reports on the hearings from a correspondent in attendance. They're the best source if you want to dig into this case.

    I'm amazed at how certain people become about how evil this teacher must be, just from reading about him in the media. Can't you see that it's in many people's interest to make him appear as evil as possible because that's the only way they can overcome the extreme barriers to firing him? That it's in the administrators' interest to have this in the New York Times, to show their small town why it was so important to spend $500,000 of the taxpayers' money on this teacher?

    That it's in the teacher's interest to have this story as widely reported as possible, because what's he going to do after he loses his job but live off the adulation (and book contracts?) of the evangelical community?

    There will always be bad teachers. The question is whether the system protects them, or protects students from them.

    A major feature of the current hearing is how school administrators and school board members seem unable to figure out how to prevent exposing the district to legal problems! That's because the current system is rigged so that only a lawyer can figure it out. This case shows that the system does not protect students. The system does do a good job of skimming money out of the schools to put into the pockets of bad teachers.

    Tags: 
    creationism

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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.