Seeing is believing, and now there's VPRO Beagle, a wonderful new project to help educate our youth by recreating Darwin's amazing voyage, only this time with modern technology to document it in real time.
Decades ago, my own understanding of evolution was revolutionized when PBS broadcast an amazing recreation of Darwin's journey. I got to see Darwin's discoveries "first hand," through his own eyes.
I still remember one episode vividly: Darwin encountered fossilized seashells at 4,000 meters altitude while crossing South-American mountains on horseback. Shortly after he returned to the Beagle, a huge earthquake struck the region. Over the next few days, watching the tides, Darwin and the ship's crew realize the shoreline had risen a full meter higher – the mussels, barnacles and sea life that marked the high-water line were all dying. The mystery of why seashells were on mountain tops suddenly became obvious: Darwin actually witnessed that very mountain rising from the sea.
Education and knowledge are the enemies of creationism. No single project can cure the current state of mis-education in the USA, but I hope that projects like VPRO Beagle and others, each in its own way, can push back the darkness a bit.
Monday, September 14, 2009
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Friday, September 11, 2009
Remembering 9/11: If Atheists Ran the World
Three thousand innocent people would still be alive today if Osama bin Laden were an atheist. He wouldn't have started a terrorist network that flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center, because atheists know that we only get one chance on this beautiful Earth, and the waste of even one human life is tragic.
If President Bush had been an atheist, 150,000 innocent civilians (mostly women and children in Iraq) who were killed by American bombs would instead be alive today. Bush wouldn't have responded to bin Laden's attack with irrational, hate-laced retribution, fueled by the "Jericho Complex" that says it's OK to murder innocent civilians, "men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep, and the donkeys, slaughtering them all." (Joshua 6)
If American society was non-Christian and non-religious, we would not have put up with Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's immoral, holier-than-thou war against innocent Muslims in Iraq who never did anything to us. The majority of Americans would have quickly realized what the atheist minority saw all along, that it was all about oil and money, and that the Christianity-versus-Islam flames that were fanned by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate was nothing more than cynical manipulation of public opinion by evil men to achieve political/economic gain.
If the American Congress was full of elected atheist congressmen and senators, they would have quickly seen through the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld smokescreen. Instead of prayers on the Capitol steps, they would have worked with our military experts to devise a sensible, restrained campaign to root out the terrorists without killing ten times more civilians than terrorists.
Unlike some atheists, I don't blame all the world's evils on religion. Most wars, including Afghanistan and Iraq, are about money and power. But religion is used as a tool of war; without it, most wars couldn't be fought in the first place, because people would come to their senses and realize that we're all just humans, stuck here on this Earth together, and that life is too precious to waste.
The 9/11 attacks, and everything that followed, simply wouldn't have happened without religion to fuel the hatred on all sides.
If President Bush had been an atheist, 150,000 innocent civilians (mostly women and children in Iraq) who were killed by American bombs would instead be alive today. Bush wouldn't have responded to bin Laden's attack with irrational, hate-laced retribution, fueled by the "Jericho Complex" that says it's OK to murder innocent civilians, "men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep, and the donkeys, slaughtering them all." (Joshua 6)
If American society was non-Christian and non-religious, we would not have put up with Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's immoral, holier-than-thou war against innocent Muslims in Iraq who never did anything to us. The majority of Americans would have quickly realized what the atheist minority saw all along, that it was all about oil and money, and that the Christianity-versus-Islam flames that were fanned by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate was nothing more than cynical manipulation of public opinion by evil men to achieve political/economic gain.
If the American Congress was full of elected atheist congressmen and senators, they would have quickly seen through the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld smokescreen. Instead of prayers on the Capitol steps, they would have worked with our military experts to devise a sensible, restrained campaign to root out the terrorists without killing ten times more civilians than terrorists.
Unlike some atheists, I don't blame all the world's evils on religion. Most wars, including Afghanistan and Iraq, are about money and power. But religion is used as a tool of war; without it, most wars couldn't be fought in the first place, because people would come to their senses and realize that we're all just humans, stuck here on this Earth together, and that life is too precious to waste.
The 9/11 attacks, and everything that followed, simply wouldn't have happened without religion to fuel the hatred on all sides.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
50 New Species: The Biblical Nightmare
The exciting discovery of "lost worlds," people and places never before seen by Westerners, used to be commonplace during the colonial era as European powers tried to claim the whole world. But the days when scientists and explorers would regularly discover whole new ecosystems and amazing new species are long gone ... or are they?
An amazing discovery of fifty new species in a volcano in Papua New Guinea brought back a little bit of that excitement this week. A BBC film crew returned with fascinating pictures of a giant woolly rat as big as a cat, a frog with fangs, three new kinds of new fish, and even a new bat.
Some of the best, and most instructive, ecosystem on the planet are small, isolated islands, such the Galapagos that were famously studied by Darwin. Such islands were "seeded" by a few species that blew in, flew in, or floated in long ago. These species then evolved independently of their continental brethren, largely undisturbed by new arrivals and interbreeding, and provided a natural "experiment" that proved and illustrated the principles of evolution.
But it doesn't take an island to make this happen – anything that isolates an ecosystem can have the same effect. One of my favorite examples is the Rocky Mountain peaks of Northern New Mexico. Some of these mountains reach over 4,000 meters, and support a rich diversity of plants, trees, and animals. But these species, highly adapted to the thin air and bitter winters, can't cross the dry, hot, lower-altitude deserts that separate the mountain peaks. Each mountain range becomes a virtual island, an isolated ecosystem, and there is often significant genetic drift between the plants and animals on adjacent mountains that are only a few dozen kilometers apart.
The volcano in Paupua New Guinea proved to be just such a system: steep, tall walls isolated the caldera from the outside world, allowing the species inside to evolve independently.
This has got to be a Biblical literalist's nightmare.
It seems unlikely.
An amazing discovery of fifty new species in a volcano in Papua New Guinea brought back a little bit of that excitement this week. A BBC film crew returned with fascinating pictures of a giant woolly rat as big as a cat, a frog with fangs, three new kinds of new fish, and even a new bat.
Some of the best, and most instructive, ecosystem on the planet are small, isolated islands, such the Galapagos that were famously studied by Darwin. Such islands were "seeded" by a few species that blew in, flew in, or floated in long ago. These species then evolved independently of their continental brethren, largely undisturbed by new arrivals and interbreeding, and provided a natural "experiment" that proved and illustrated the principles of evolution.
But it doesn't take an island to make this happen – anything that isolates an ecosystem can have the same effect. One of my favorite examples is the Rocky Mountain peaks of Northern New Mexico. Some of these mountains reach over 4,000 meters, and support a rich diversity of plants, trees, and animals. But these species, highly adapted to the thin air and bitter winters, can't cross the dry, hot, lower-altitude deserts that separate the mountain peaks. Each mountain range becomes a virtual island, an isolated ecosystem, and there is often significant genetic drift between the plants and animals on adjacent mountains that are only a few dozen kilometers apart.
The volcano in Paupua New Guinea proved to be just such a system: steep, tall walls isolated the caldera from the outside world, allowing the species inside to evolve independently.
This has got to be a Biblical literalist's nightmare.
The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.How does the good Reverend Falwell explain this new discovery? Did Noah go to Papua New Guinea, climb the volcano, scale the cliffs, and grab two of each of these fifty new species (plus many others that the BBC probably didn't discover), carry them back to the arc, and then after the flood, return them to the volcano?
— The Reverend Jerry Falwell
It seems unlikely.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Evolution's Big Mystery: In the Beginning (part 3)
Where did evolution start? Where did that first tiny self-replicating particle come from? This is the third in a three-part blog (see part 1 and part 2).
One of the oft-used arguments against evolution is that, even if the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, there wasn't enough time for life to start, much less to evolve to its present state. But most people who assert this have no idea what 4.5 billion really means.
Here's a fact: If you had a billion dollars on the day Jesus was born, and you spent $1000 every day since then, you'd still have $266,000,000 left today.
Most people understand that Jesus was born a long time ago, but somehow the idea of "two thousand years" is not that different in their minds from "four billion years." But the idea of spending $1000 each day for two thousand years, and still not getting to one billion puts it into perspective. Four billion years is two million times longer than the time since Jesus was born.
And that's the problem with understanding evolution: Most people just can't grasp the scale, not even within a factor of ten or a hundred, of what "four billion" means.
Innumeracy, our inability to truly grasp large numbers, is a surprisingly high barrier to widespread acceptance of evolution. The evolution of the human mind did not include any necessity for understanding concepts like thousand, million, or billion. Even scientists, engineers and economists who work with these terms daily only understand them in the abstract mathematical sense, not in an intuitive way.
But it's even worse than that, because the human mind is also innumerate when it comes to sizes. When we think of evolution, we thing of animals, plants, maybe insects and fish, and finally down to the scale of bacteria. But most people have no idea just how small a bacterium is compared to the plants and animals they see every day.
A single bacterium from the gut of an elephant is (very roughly) 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1018) times smaller than the elephant. Consider the population of Earth at six billion people: If each person were the size of a bacterium, it would take over 1.6 million Earths for the people to equal one elephant. To a bacterium, a small pond of muddy water is a virtual universe, one that could hold billions, trillions and more, bacteria. Most people can't grasp just how many billions of cubic meters of rock, water, beach sand, and other places exist here on Earth where life might have originated.
Compared to the human lifespan, or even all of human history, the dimensions of both time and space available to evolution on Earth are unimaginably large. This is what "innumeracy" means: We're not capable of understanding these numbers intuitively, It's our intuition that gives us common sense, yet anyone who applies common sense to the timescales of evolution simply comes up with the wrong answer.
We started this series of blogs with the question, Where did evolution all start? I've attempted to answer this with three points: First, just because we don't have a final answer to any scientific question doesn't mean we won't someday, and falling back to magical explanations is wrong. Second, a lot of good science has shown that there are possible answers to the origin of life. And third, common sense leads many people astray when evaluating the evidence, because the timescale and physical dimensions in which life originated are beyond human intuition.
One of the oft-used arguments against evolution is that, even if the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, there wasn't enough time for life to start, much less to evolve to its present state. But most people who assert this have no idea what 4.5 billion really means.
Here's a fact: If you had a billion dollars on the day Jesus was born, and you spent $1000 every day since then, you'd still have $266,000,000 left today.
Most people understand that Jesus was born a long time ago, but somehow the idea of "two thousand years" is not that different in their minds from "four billion years." But the idea of spending $1000 each day for two thousand years, and still not getting to one billion puts it into perspective. Four billion years is two million times longer than the time since Jesus was born.
And that's the problem with understanding evolution: Most people just can't grasp the scale, not even within a factor of ten or a hundred, of what "four billion" means.
Innumeracy, our inability to truly grasp large numbers, is a surprisingly high barrier to widespread acceptance of evolution. The evolution of the human mind did not include any necessity for understanding concepts like thousand, million, or billion. Even scientists, engineers and economists who work with these terms daily only understand them in the abstract mathematical sense, not in an intuitive way.
But it's even worse than that, because the human mind is also innumerate when it comes to sizes. When we think of evolution, we thing of animals, plants, maybe insects and fish, and finally down to the scale of bacteria. But most people have no idea just how small a bacterium is compared to the plants and animals they see every day.
A single bacterium from the gut of an elephant is (very roughly) 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1018) times smaller than the elephant. Consider the population of Earth at six billion people: If each person were the size of a bacterium, it would take over 1.6 million Earths for the people to equal one elephant. To a bacterium, a small pond of muddy water is a virtual universe, one that could hold billions, trillions and more, bacteria. Most people can't grasp just how many billions of cubic meters of rock, water, beach sand, and other places exist here on Earth where life might have originated.
Compared to the human lifespan, or even all of human history, the dimensions of both time and space available to evolution on Earth are unimaginably large. This is what "innumeracy" means: We're not capable of understanding these numbers intuitively, It's our intuition that gives us common sense, yet anyone who applies common sense to the timescales of evolution simply comes up with the wrong answer.
We started this series of blogs with the question, Where did evolution all start? I've attempted to answer this with three points: First, just because we don't have a final answer to any scientific question doesn't mean we won't someday, and falling back to magical explanations is wrong. Second, a lot of good science has shown that there are possible answers to the origin of life. And third, common sense leads many people astray when evaluating the evidence, because the timescale and physical dimensions in which life originated are beyond human intuition.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Evolution's Big Mystery: In the Beginning (part 2)
Where did evolution start? Where did that first tiny self-replicating particle come from? This is the biggest remaining question of evolution, the one creationists still like to claim is the fatal flaw of Darwin's theory. (This is part 2 of a three-part blog; you can read part 1 here.)
What do we actually know about the very beginnings of life?
Creationists start this question from a false premise. It's an exact analogy with their classic, "You can't prove God doesn't exist!" That is, they start by asserting that some magical fact is true, and then challenge you to prove them wrong. Since there can't be any evidence one way or the other (it's magic, after all), they cry, "Aha! See, I'm right!"
With the origins-of-life question, creationists' position amounts to the same assertion: They claim that God created life, and then challenge science to prove them wrong. But that's backwards. Anyone who claims they know how life started, including creationists, shares the same burden of proof!
I thought this blog was going to require a huge amount of research, but thanks to the power of collaborative editing, also known as Wikipedia, I discovered not only was all the information readily available, but the breadth and depth of the research into the origins of life is breathtaking. Here is the main article:
What's amazing to me is not how little we know, but how much we know. Investigating an event that happened 3.8 billion years ago is an very hard task, and even if we find plausible answers, we can never be sure we're right since we weren't actually there to watch it happen. But there is a lot of really good science that has been done, and some very exciting answers that are emerging.
Getting back to our friendly creationists: If we're comparing apples to apples, what sort of evidence have they provided for their magical (i.e. God) theory of the origins of life? Have they done experiments? Found evidence? Presented peer-reviewed publications subject to scrutiny and debate?
Of course not. All they've done is to assert, with no justification, that their magical explanation of how life started is the prove-me-wrong default answer. They're trying to claim that, because their answer was around long before science, that it's the "king of the hill" that we have to knock down.
Scientists dismissed that specious argument long ago, but unfortunately it still permeates the debate.
What do we actually know about the very beginnings of life?
Creationists start this question from a false premise. It's an exact analogy with their classic, "You can't prove God doesn't exist!" That is, they start by asserting that some magical fact is true, and then challenge you to prove them wrong. Since there can't be any evidence one way or the other (it's magic, after all), they cry, "Aha! See, I'm right!"
With the origins-of-life question, creationists' position amounts to the same assertion: They claim that God created life, and then challenge science to prove them wrong. But that's backwards. Anyone who claims they know how life started, including creationists, shares the same burden of proof!
I thought this blog was going to require a huge amount of research, but thanks to the power of collaborative editing, also known as Wikipedia, I discovered not only was all the information readily available, but the breadth and depth of the research into the origins of life is breathtaking. Here is the main article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbiogenesisI was struck by the variety of proposals. Everything from the classic "primordial soup" proposed clear back in 1924, to this sample of modern theories:
- Deep sea vents. These volcanic vents spew nutrient-rich superheated water full of reactive chemicals. "Extremophiles" live there, bacteria and such that thrive in 300-degree water!
- Deep underground. Scientists were amazed to discover bacteria living two miles underground in microscopic fissures in the rocks. Heat, minerals, and organic matter are abundant, and scientists have proposed chemistry that could have created life.
- The radioactive-beach theory. Billions of years ago the moon was much closer and tides were much stronger than today. Uranium particles and other radioactive material, more prevalent back then, could have been concentrated at the high-water mark, leading to enough radioactivity to trigger chemical reactions that don't occur under normal conditions.
What's amazing to me is not how little we know, but how much we know. Investigating an event that happened 3.8 billion years ago is an very hard task, and even if we find plausible answers, we can never be sure we're right since we weren't actually there to watch it happen. But there is a lot of really good science that has been done, and some very exciting answers that are emerging.
Getting back to our friendly creationists: If we're comparing apples to apples, what sort of evidence have they provided for their magical (i.e. God) theory of the origins of life? Have they done experiments? Found evidence? Presented peer-reviewed publications subject to scrutiny and debate?
Of course not. All they've done is to assert, with no justification, that their magical explanation of how life started is the prove-me-wrong default answer. They're trying to claim that, because their answer was around long before science, that it's the "king of the hill" that we have to knock down.
Scientists dismissed that specious argument long ago, but unfortunately it still permeates the debate.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Why Didn't I Think of This??
Damn! This is such a great idea, why didn't I think of it? It's post-rapture pet care, from Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA! Imagine you're a good Christian who will be called to Jesus at the Rapture. Who's going to take care of your pets? The Atheists, of course! For a fee, that is...
Evolution's Big Mystery: In the Beginning...
The other day, a close friend of mine asked me the hardest question of evolution: "Where did it all start?" She, like many others, accepts the overwhelming evidence that evolution is real, and the beauty and explanatory power of the theory. "But," she asks, "where did the first itsy-bitsy teensey-tinesey particle that started it all come from?"
This is really the "final frontier" of evolution: How did that first self-replicating molecule, protein, creature — whatever it was — come into existence in the first place? We understand virtually every aspect of evolution, from the high-level theory right down to the molecular mechanics of mutation. But we don't know where it all started. Or do we?
There are really three separate parts to the answer, which I'll call: 1) God in the gaps; 2) What we actually know; and 3) Innumeracy. So let's get started!
God in the Gaps
The "God in the Gaps" argument asks: Just because we don't yet understand something, does that mean it's magical?
As science started to learn more and more, God's active participation became less necessary. Science started demystifying vast bodies of knowledge, leaving only occasional gaps where God's magic was still needed. As science advanced even more, the gaps became smaller and smaller, squeezing the need for God to just the farthest reaches of time and space. God used to have to guide the planets and stars daily, but science pushed Him back to the Big Bang. God used to have to cause a miracle for every birth, but now we know how sperm and ova work so only the unquantifiable "soul" is left to God. And so forth. As science progresses, the gaps get smaller, and God gets squeezed even more.
Let's now go back to our original question: Where did evolution start?
It's been less than 100 years since serious research on the biochemistry of life's beginnings started in earnest. Darwin published Origin of the Species just 150 years ago, and since then science has filled in vast swaths of knowledge, leaving very few "gaps" indeed.
Just because a few of those gaps are still with us is no reason to give up and resort to magical explanations. The answer is, we don't know yet what that first molecule was that started it all. But that doesn't mean we won't know some day.
There are unanswered questions about evolution, but that doesn't make it false. It means that there is still room for some great scientific work.
Next: Part 2, What we actually know
This is really the "final frontier" of evolution: How did that first self-replicating molecule, protein, creature — whatever it was — come into existence in the first place? We understand virtually every aspect of evolution, from the high-level theory right down to the molecular mechanics of mutation. But we don't know where it all started. Or do we?
There are really three separate parts to the answer, which I'll call: 1) God in the gaps; 2) What we actually know; and 3) Innumeracy. So let's get started!
God in the Gaps
The "God in the Gaps" argument asks: Just because we don't yet understand something, does that mean it's magical?
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."God in the Gaps" is a phrase that describes what's happened to God with the rise of science. Long ago, pretty much everything was a mystery, and God was seen as the reason and motivating force behind everything. A baby's conception, a bird's ability to fly, the regularity of the moon and stars, were all simply due to God's guiding hand.
— Isaac Asimov
As science started to learn more and more, God's active participation became less necessary. Science started demystifying vast bodies of knowledge, leaving only occasional gaps where God's magic was still needed. As science advanced even more, the gaps became smaller and smaller, squeezing the need for God to just the farthest reaches of time and space. God used to have to guide the planets and stars daily, but science pushed Him back to the Big Bang. God used to have to cause a miracle for every birth, but now we know how sperm and ova work so only the unquantifiable "soul" is left to God. And so forth. As science progresses, the gaps get smaller, and God gets squeezed even more.
Let's now go back to our original question: Where did evolution start?
It's been less than 100 years since serious research on the biochemistry of life's beginnings started in earnest. Darwin published Origin of the Species just 150 years ago, and since then science has filled in vast swaths of knowledge, leaving very few "gaps" indeed.
Just because a few of those gaps are still with us is no reason to give up and resort to magical explanations. The answer is, we don't know yet what that first molecule was that started it all. But that doesn't mean we won't know some day.
There are unanswered questions about evolution, but that doesn't make it false. It means that there is still room for some great scientific work.
Next: Part 2, What we actually know
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