I’m not a scientist, but…

I still think I can still offer some commentary on Olivia Judson’s take on an Evolve-By Date.

I’ve written before about what an important book it was and why it mattered so much, so I won’t do that again now. Instead, I want to mark the occasion by looking at the limits of evolutionary potential.

To see what I mean by this, consider the following paradox. Whenever we do evolution experiments in the laboratory or on the farm, we can cause pronounced and rapid change in the traits we are interested in — we can evolve bigger horses, smaller dogs, cows that make more milk, viruses that thrive at higher temperatures and so on.

That’s not natural evolution; those are examples of genetic engineering. That’s human beings forcing their way into a species’ inner workings to manipulate natural ability until it results in what might be a very unnatural ability. Evolution is the natural process by which a species adapts to its environment over time. Specialized breeding and gene tweaking and drugs work faster than evolution does. Every breed of dog or cow or horse or sheep or chicken out there has been humanly guided into those breeds over hundreds of years. Just look into the history of husbandry.

Nature maybe could have changed these animals, given thousands of years, or it might not have. If there was no need for the animal to change that much, it wouldn’t have changed. Humans wanted them to change, so we changed them.

In the laboratory, in other words, evolution has huge potential. But if it has that much potential — how come organisms keep going extinct in nature? In other words, why does evolution keep failing?

Evolution isn’t failing. Humans are. Humans killed off the dodo. That’s not the fault of the dodo. There was no way the species could have evolved in such a short time into a critter wise enough to hide or run from human beings. Humans knock forests down with little regard to what kind of species might rely on it. Humans want the pelts, teeth, bones, eyeballs, feathers, blubber, off all kinds of animals often without caring about poaching laws. There’s big money to be had if something’s hard to get. Humans got it into their heads that rhinoceros horns were an aphrodisiac. The rhinos are incapable of debating that. Tigers can’t stop people from taking their penises for the same reason. And plants are also at risk of extinction.

The question matters as never before. We humans are busily changing the environment for most of the beings on the planet, and often, we are doing so very fast. To know what effect this will have, we badly need to know how readily different creatures can evolve to deal with changes to their environment. For if we’re not careful, many groups will soon be faced with an evolve-by date: if they don’t evolve rapidly enough to survive in this changing world, they will vanish.

Look at the trouble Florida residents have with alligators. Land developers encroached on the swamps they’ve lived in for thousands of years and now there’s a swimming pool where a nesting site used to be. You can’t explain to an alligator that it’s time he moves on. If he even understood the concept, what land is left for him anyway? Cities have wild cat problems for the same reason. They’ve spread into the areas cougars used to have to themselves so they’re adapting in a way humans don’t like very much at all. Raccoons do the same. I’ve heard they’re quite nasty and destructive once they squat in an attic or under a porch and are hellish to get rid of. Animals are incapable of evolving into anything else that would save their lives. All they can do is attempt to change the way they behave, but since a lot of that relies on evolved instinct, fat chance. Evolution isn’t a Kevlar vest they can strap on to stop bullets. Everything can adapt to a point, but humans are unstoppable unless we stop ourselves.

Suppose you put bacteria into test tubes where their usual sugar source is in short supply, but an alternative one — which they can’t consume at all — is abundant. (If you put them with just this alternative source, they would all die of starvation at once.) Then, you can watch how long it takes for the bacteria to evolve so they can digest the alternative. The answer, in one famous case, was more than 31,000 generations! Which just goes to show: just because a particular trait would be useful does not mean that it will soon evolve.

To me, all this is a bit sobering. If most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a useful new trait — they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that — if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment — many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.

Sobering thought indeed.

What’s more important, Communion or human rights?

Since this is a Catholic conundrum, the answer is obviously Communion.

Shea, who has left the Catholic church, says he doesn’t understand why Tobin is targeting Kennedy.

“Everybody, including these priests, deserve Communion. Because that’s the whole point of it. That’s part of the point of the church. I don’t think anybody should be disqualified from it,” he said. “It’s politics. I think the bishop’s playing politics.”

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts called Tobin’s action an “act of courage, fidelity and charity, intended to prevent scandal and sacrilege.”

“Bishop Tobin is being a good pastor by urging Congressman Kennedy not to commit the mortal sin of receiving Communion while in a state of grave sin,” said the league’s executive director, C.J. Doyle.

Sinners like Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy who supports the abortion rights. It’s a mortal sin to swallow the Savior.

Know what the article is really about? 125 priests in Rhode Island are accused of molesting children and Tobin is choosing to pick on a politician rather than clean house.

“He claims that it’s important that we protect the unborn. But it’s equally as important to protect those who have been born and those young children who have been raped and sodomized by clerics and priests. But yet he seems to protect those clerics,” said Ruth Moore, of Hull, Mass.

The group called on Tobin to publish the names of priests from the diocese who have been convicted of or admitted molesting children, or if a thorough investigation has turned up credible evidence of child molestation, even if no conviction resulted.

The diocese has said in court papers that 125 of its priests have been accused of molesting children. While many of their names are known from lawsuits and news accounts, others have never been released.

But all the priests deserve Communion because “that’s the whole point of it.”

Still the single greatest idea ever

Still the simplest and most sensible explanation for species adaptation, still the most misunderstood concept by all those who claim it’s wrong.

On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago today. And no, I haven’t read it. I suppose I should but I haven’t gotten around to it. I don’t have to read it to know it’s on target, though, because scientists all over the world agree it’s on target and experimentation over the years has verified the inherent truths of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary model. It’s the best scenario we’ve got that can explain how we got to this point that doesn’t rely on any supernatural nonsense to make it work.

Religion Dispatches has a nice article about the evolution/ID argument today. Lauri Lebo does make the mistake of claiming Kirk Cameron was on Family Ties; it was actually Growing Pains, but I can see how she’d mix those up. Still doesn’t excuse something that easy to check, but anyway, the article:

Most recently, last week, former Family Ties child actor and born-again Christian Kirk Cameron and evangelist Ray Comfort, led a crusade at college campuses around the U.S. and Canada, distributing free altered copies of Origin of Species.

Because Origin is in the public domain, Comfort was legally able to add to the book his own new 50-page introduction, in which he quotes from Mein Kampf in order to link Darwin to Adolf Hitler, accuses Darwin of being sexist, and argues falsely that there are no transitional fossils in the fossil record.

And he deleted chapters 9-12 or something. I saw a copy of it and the sneaky turd doesn’t even put his name on the cover to let people know it’s not the original Origin. Pretty much everything that made Darwin’s case got pulled out.

Next month marks the four-year anniversary of the decision of Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which Judge John E. Jones determined that intelligent design was merely religion masquerading as a scientific conceit and therefore unconstitutional to teach in the public schools.

Since then, evolution’s opponents have been struggling to redefine their message.

But the underlying point remains the same. As a woman distributing Comfort’s altered copies of Origin last week explained to CNN, it was important to her because evolution “impacts a person’s eternal destiny.”

I don’t see how, personally. Evolution has nothing to do with a person’s personal belief in heaven or hell. Why would it have to be one or the other? Is it totally necessary to faith to buy into the 6000 year old earth, or is it possible to finally admit that’s an unfounded fallacy and move on to what’s proven fact? Of course I already know the answer to that one. I recently found a comment by someone basically claiming God made a mature earth just to take the mickey out of future scientists and their radio carbon dating. I’m surprised I haven’t seen any arguments claiming osteoporosis killed the dinosaurs because their bones were already “millions of years” old and fragile when they hatched in the first place…

It’s going to take a lot more than scientific evidence, rational thought and reasoned debate to get people to accept the very real fact that in the scientific community, there is no debate over whether evolution is real. Sadly, most of the fighting continues to take place in the U.S., where our tradition of anti-intellectualism and history of religious fundamentalism provided fertile ground for the battle over religion versus science. (In a 2006 survey of western nations, Turkey was the only country in which fewer people accepted evolution than in the United States.)

According to Ron Numbers’ The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, in the wake of the publishing of Origin, Christians in America were, for the most part, able to make peace with Darwin’s theory and evolutionary principles. It wasn’t until the early 1900s, when a series of religious pamphlets, The Fundamentals, were published arguing for the acceptance of the Bible as literal truth that a widespread backlash to evolution was born.

Four books worth of Fundamentals pamphlets were published in 1915. 1925 marked the official banning of evolution in the classroom, but Intelligent Design as an idea grew out of scientific advancements in the late 1950s, according to Lebo, and have continued to make headway. Four years ago, Kitzmiller v. Dover took science’s side but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to manipulate science classes to make room for creationism as a theory equal to (or better than) everything we’ve built on since Darwin wrote his book.

The new creationist/intelligent design strategy has been to pressure states and school districts to water down the teaching of evolution until it’s virtually meaningless and to raise doubts in children’s’ minds about the validity of science.

As Don McLeroy, one of the members of the Texas Board of Education, who led efforts to instill intelligent-design friendly language into his state science standards, said during hearings this spring, “Somebody has to stand up to the experts.”

And that should be up to other experts who have a better theory and can demonstrate it with verifiable scientific experimentation. Don’t just point at some dude caressing a piece of fruit while he jabbers towards a camera and some dopey child star oohs and ahhs. That’s not proof of anything.

Last week, Comfort was quoted in Charisma saying he doubts intelligent design will ever be taught in schools alongside evolution. “That’s because we have to remember who we are as Christians,” he said. “We’re the folks who believe in Adam and Eve [and] Noah’s Ark … and so in the name of science, they are going to resist as much as they can.”

Well of course we will. Bible stories are for religion class. Science class is supposed to introduce kids to how the world works and what we think we know about the universe. It’s not the place to fill their heads with shit they’ll need to take on faith. It’s the place to fill their heads with facts that have been demonstrated as most likely answers to life, the universe and everything and encourage them towards those fields to prove or disprove any fact or hypothesis or theory they dare to take on. We will never have all the answers. We will always find more puzzles that need solutions. But no matter what, “God did it” will never be a sufficient or verifiable answer to anything.

“Thou shalt not steal” — and yet…

$40,000 is a hefty chunk of change, and roughly the amount stolen by 70 year old Leah M. Wonyetye over her few years playing treasurer for her church. Her deception and felonies went unnoticed until church leaders got word that bills were behind.

Richland investigators brought in an outside auditor to go over the records back to 2006, when Wonyetye took over as treasurer.

The audit detailed a history of missing deposits and double paychecks totaling $40,104.39.

Confronted with the auditor’s report, Wonyetye admitted to the thefts, court papers said.

She remains free on her own recognizance, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for Jan. 12.

“She is not a young woman,” Keirn said. “We did not incarcerate her, but she is going to have to figure out how she’s going to come up with this money. There is a chunk there.”

Churches, social clubs and other organizations should have multiple sets of eyes on all financial business, Keirn advised, and two employees should count and check deposits.

I’m glad she got caught and I’m glad she faces some charges. Stealing is a crime and anyone caught doing it is guilty of criminal behaviour. Call theft a sin if you want, but it’s also illegal and punishable by law. Asking God’s forgiveness is not going to get her out of this.

I wonder why she needed the money. I wonder why she thought it’d be okay to take it from the church. God wouldn’t mind? All for a good godly cause? God wanted her to have the money? Who knows what way she would have justified giving herself the money. Why she thought she’d get away with it..

The Bible Bee winners announced

Who cares? Parents, probably. I don’t know why anyone else would. It still seems like a waste of memory skill to me. I can quote Shakespeare but it doesn’t make me a thespian. I can quote bible verses and it doesn’t make me Christian. What’s the point of making Christians do it? Does it really make a person a better Christian to be able to parrot portions of the book? But I suppose it looks good, which is probably the point. Look how biblical my kid is. My home-schooled kid won a Bible Bee. Nevermind if he never learns about evolution, he knows the bible backwards and forwards..okay, not backwards, because that’s a sign of the devil, probably…

Well anyway, the Salt Lake City tribune:

Under the bright stage lights, Daniel Staddon, an 18-year-old home-schooler from Salem, W.Va., squeezed his eyes shut as he methodically recited verse after verse from the Bible at the inaugural National Bible Bee.

The concentration technique came in handy as he recited the first 20 verses of the fifth chapter of Ephesians and the 21 verses of Psalm 145 in the tie-breaker round on the stage of the JW Marriott Hotel ballroom. His skills paid off, earning Staddon first place and a $100,000 prize.

“Dad suggested closing my eyes,” said Staddon, adding that his seven siblings helped him study for months for the contest earlier this month.

Competitions for spelling and math long have brought young people to national stages to test their vocabulary and prodigious memories. But now the “bee” concept has gone biblical. Culled from more than 17,000 students ages 7-18, the National Bible Bee finals grilled 21 children on their knowledge of Scripture. The five-hour finals were preceded by regional competitions in 49 of 50 states in September, oral contests and SAT-like tests for 300 contestants.

Spelling is a necessary skill in order to communicate ideas coherently. Some spelling rules might be insane, but I still follow them to the literal letter. I also remember having a fun time in English class with the vocabulary handouts. We had to write stories that included all twenty words, properly used. I’d been trying to write short mystery stories at the time so it was easy work to plop a couple characters into those scenarios. I wish I’d kept them now. I thought they were pretty good. I can’t recall if my teacher did, though.

As to math, remembering Pi to a bunch of digits makes a cool party trick, but understanding the methods required to solve the problems takes more than memorization and rote learning of multiplication tables. I was trying to divide $1.38 in half the other day at a grocery store and I couldn’t even do it in my head in time to answer someone else. How sad is that?

But why decide to memorize the bible? I suppose the money helped entice people, but still. Why that?

“Kids are learning to spell words,” Mark Rasche, executive director of the bee, recalled the benefactor saying. “That’s great, but there’s no eternal value.”

I break in to disagree with that. Spelling and language and communication is what keeps a civilization from getting stagnant. Language you can have without spelling, but without rules set down for the letters, how can two people read what each other wrote? Spelling evolves, but the need for the knowledge it can impart remains eternally.

Students and parents alike, chatting between breaks in the competition that required mastery of six books of the Bible, seemed to agree.

Jacob Manning, 14, a Minneapolis public high school student, said he considered his participation in the bee “really an investment in eternity” because he expected the words to remain with him forever.

“The Bible says my word shall never pass away,” he said. “Jesus says that.”

Manning didn’t win. While his knowledge of the Word might stay with him forever, did he really come out of this with any useful skills? He could have spent the entire time required to learn that stuff delivering newspapers instead or raking leaves or mowing grass for the elderly. Made a difference in someone else’s life. He could have taken up painting or writing or whatever. He could have learned something new instead of repeating the past verbatim.

But whatever, congrats belatedly to the winner. Don’t spend the money all in one place.

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Edit 7:34 am – Hemant Mehta has a list of things these kids needed to memorize and again about the point. What can these kids possibly do with this information afterwards? It has no use out in the world at large.

God denied the chance to take 30 kids to heaven

Some quick-thinking humans realized carbon monoxide was making a choir ill:

Police say more than 30 children and teenagers were taken to hospitals after being sickened by carbon monoxide during a church choir rehearsal in Iowa.

Des Moines Police Capt. Dave Huberty says a generator was being used Sunday to power the Lord Revival Center Church of God in Christ. He says the fumes flowed back into the building as the children and teens practiced for about three hours.

Huberty told The Des Moines Register that no serious symptoms had been reported by late Sunday.

Huberty said it was accidental and fire crews ventilated the building.

So hurrah to the nameless folks who recognized the signs and symptoms from that odorless gas and sidestepped what could have been a tragedy. Thanks nameless folks for caring about the lives of those children and making sure they’d be okay.

Quotable JFK

Via Jesse Galef @ Friendly Atheist:

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish–where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source–where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials–and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Nice one.

Campus atheism on the rise

Here’s a good story from ABC about secular organizations making headway into college life. It’s a long article so I’ll just address this part:

Campus affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance, a sort of Godless Campus Crusade for Christ, have multiplied from 80 in 2007 to 100 in 2008 and 174 this fall, providing the atheist movement new training grounds for future leaders. In another sign of growing acceptance, at least three universities, including Harvard, now have humanist chaplains meeting the needs of the not-so-spiritual.

With the growth has come soul-searching — or the atheist equivalent — about what secular campus groups should look like. It’s part of a broader self-examination in the atheist movement triggered by the rise of the so-called “new atheists,” best-selling authors who denigrate religion and blame it for the world’s ills.

Should student atheist groups go it alone or build bridges with Christian groups? Organize political protests or quiet discussion groups? Adopt the militant posture of the new atheists? Or wave and smile?

I’m of the opinion that atheist groups should try to remain friendly toward Christian (or similar) groups. I don’t think atheists should be trying to pull fish out of the Christian pond if they really want to be in there but I also think we should be visible in places where Christians take advantage of the lost and unsure and let those people know alternatives exist that can give them just as much community and acceptance as a religious group can claim. We aren’t the bad guys in this and I’d never say say Christian campus groups are worse, because they do serve a function for Christians on campus who feel they need that connection. We just want to offer a choice and we’re well aware of how Christians don’t think there is one. It’s Christianity or it’s wrong.

This is what campus atheists need to address. There’s nothing wrong with humanism and atheism. It doesn’t make us all anarchists or one step away from Hitler (who banned Darwinism, by the way – #6 under Guidelines). True, some of us want to see the end of religion, but don’t paint us all that way. Some of us are more interested in encouraging adaptation of beliefs to make room for more openness and less hypocrisy.

I think it’s good to see people willing to voice their atheist/humanist philosophies in a public arena. We shouldn’t have to stay silent on the sidelines of life just because we don’t believe whatever the majority claims is true.

Should gays be pulled out of the closet against their will?

I don’t like what I’m reading about DC gays willing to blackmail priests into admitting they’re gay if those priests don’t stand up to their institutions and make a stand against the continued banning of gay marriage. Belief.net is where I find out about this. Rod Dreher disapproves of this tactic, as do I. He quotes from Church Outing, including the disclaimer:

The goal of this site is not to force Catholic priests out of the closet against their will. The goal of this campaign is to aggregate reports on every gay priest in the Archdiocese, so that we can work with them, one on one, helping them stand up to the the church hierarchy’s stand on this important issue.

But they are encouraging anyone who has ever dallied with a priest (or knows someone who did) to let them know who the priest was:

This site was created to provide you with the opportunity to save LGBT youth from the hypocrisy of priests in the Archdiocese of Washington who are socially, romantically or sexually active gay men, yet stand silent while Archbishop Wuerl and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops increase their dogmatic war against gay families. If you have information that a priest in the Archdiocese is gay (or having a heterosexual affair) please share your story.

The person can then fill out the form, pick a priest out of the enormous list to pin the story on and tell the story. How do they find out what’s true and what’s not, call the priest and ask?

Once a story is verified, we will be contacting the priests involved to help them make the right choices. It is our hope that NO Catholic Priest is outed because of this campaign, rather that we can use knowledge of the truth of their lives to combat the hypocrisy of their silence.

That really does sound like blackmail. I get that they’re concerned about gay Catholic kids growing up under the wrongful impression that natural desires are sins, and wanting to see these kids have full lives healthy lives, not sexually abused and suicidally short ones. But still, surely a better, less intrusive way could be figured out. Some of these priests likely will get outed even if that isn’t the intent.

I don’t like the fact that they hide who they are at work. They probably are vocal against gay marriage because they have to toe the party line or run the risk of excommunication. That doesn’t seem like a big deal to me, but I’ve seen how devout Catholics seem to be about in regards to their bread products. Or would the priest just get moved to some other town where nobody knew him and what he’d done?

Last bit from their news portion:

The ChurchOuting.org campaign was greatly inspired by the work of the Survivors Network of those Sexually Abused by Priests (SNAP), which emerged to stop the cycle of sexual abuse in Catholic parishes across the country. ChurchOuting.org plans to use similar strategies, while taking full advantage of new social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

“I expect community response to this campaign to be overwhelming,” says Attey, who hopes once successful in Washington, DC, ChurchOuting.org will inspire similar campaigns in every archdiocese across the country. “The Church hierarchy has crossed the line in diverting the mission of the church from helping the poor and caring for the sick to waging political campaigns to strip LGBT citizens of civil rights protections. We can no longer remain silent while this happens. Nor can our parish priests.”

Time will tell. It will be interesting to see what results from this. I doubt it’ll work like they’re hoping.

Religion kills a man, wife lets it happen

I found out about this via The Freethinker yesterday and if I’ve ever been disgusted over a story I’ve come across, this has certainly trumped it.

Thirty-three year old Tillmon Webb died recently. He weighed around 800 pounds at the time. He’d injured his knee back in March (when he only weighed 550lbs) and he and his wife, Ada, couldn’t afford the $300 the medical facility demanded up front for an appointment. Tillmon returned home, laid naked in his recliner and never got out again. Instead, he got his wife to bring him his Bible and he spent the next eight months praying to God to heal his leg while his wife let him get fatter and fatter. When he did finally ask for an ambulance, the team had to cut around the door to get him out, and they had to cut the chair apart, too, because he was essentially fused to it after that many months. He later died in hospital. Here’s what blows my mind:

Webb says she has no regrets about leaving him in that recliner.

“If I feel anything right now, it’s envy for him because I wish he had taken me with him,” said Webb.

Greenwood County deputies will not charge Webb with a crime. They determined she had no malicious intent of neglect.

Neighbors at the trailer park said they had no idea Webb had a husband inside that trailer the whole time.

Tillmon kept busy with texting and posting sermons online while his wife cleaned him up as best as she could and kept giving him too much food, too, because how else could a person who can’t get to the fridge himself gain 250 pounds in 8 months? She could have limited his intake until he weighed two hundred pounds instead, but no. How much would he have been eating in a day to get that large?

“He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God,” said Webb. “And he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn’t think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people.”

Unlike Job’s wife, Ada did not tell him he was an ass for trusting God. Tillman told her not to call anyone and she now wishes she could join him in Heaven. What kind of upbringing must Ada have had to obey her husband to that degree and not feel any guilt over what she let him to do himself through her?

The story of long-suffering Job teaches us that God sends misfortunes not just for sins, but that sometimes God sends misfortunes even to the righteous for an even greater confirmation in goodness, for the shaming of the Devil, and for the glorification of the righteousness of God. The history of the life of Job also reveals to us that earthly welfare does not always accompany a virtuous life for men and teaches us also to be sympathetic to those in misfortune.

Be sympathetic but do nothing to fix the problem? This could have been fixed. She could have petitioned at her church back in March (assuming they even had one) to let them know why they needed money and surely a congregation would have been sympathetic and willing to each toss a couple dollars their way. A church could have tried to raise money for an operation to fix his knee, had anyone known the couple needed aid.

I don’t have a conclusion. I just have sadness.