Kruse Kronicle

This animated map shows how humans migrated across the globe

Map Shows How Humans Migrated Across The Globe

Science and Technology Links

1. Christian Science Monitor: In Kenya, selling human waste could revolutionize sanitation

Dealing with human waste has become a health crisis in many poor communities, but residents of a Kenyan slum have found a solution that turns poop into profit. ...

... Sanergy’s toilets are low-tech and low-cost, but they have a key feature: They come with removable waste cartridges. Local entrepreneurs buy and operate the toilets, charging users a small monthly membership fee. Sanergy then collects the waste and processes it into organic, sell-able fertilizer. Soon the company plans to process the waste into biogas, biochar and several types of plastic, as well.

Creating business relationships means that toilet operators earn steady income from their investments, and waste treatment pays for itself. It benefits people you would expect like the toilet users, who now have access to a clean and private space to go to the bathroom, and people you wouldn’t, like the farmers who pay less for the processed, organic fertilizer. ...

2. Jason Kolb: 5 Technologies That Will Change the World

... Here are five technologies that seem poised to break out on the world in the next few years, and how they will change our lives. The most interesting aspect of these to me is how they interact when used together–the intersections of these disruptive technologies are where you can start really understanding how these will change the world in concrete ways. Like layer cakes, they get even more delicious when you eat them together. ...

3. Wired: The Germans Have Figured Out How to 3-D Print Cars

The assembly line isn’t going away, but 3-D printing is going to reshape how we make cars. The EDAG Genesis points the way, with an beautifully crafted frame made from a range of materials and inspired by a turtle’s skeleton. ...

4. Business Insider: New Roles For Technology: Rise Of The Robots

... Since moving from the page and screen to real life, robots have been a mild disappointment. They do some things that humans cannot do themselves, like exploring Mars, and a host of things people do not much want to do, like dealing with unexploded bombs or vacuuming floors (there are around 10m robot vacuum cleaners wandering the carpets of the world). And they are very useful in bits of manufacturing. But reliable robots--especially ones required to work beyond the safety cages of a factory floor--have proved hard to make, and robots are still pretty stupid. So although they fascinate people, they have not yet made much of a mark on the world.

That seems about to change. The exponential growth in the power of silicon chips, digital sensors and high-bandwidth communications improves robots just as it improves all sorts of other products. And, as our special report this week explains, three other factors are at play. ...

5. City Journal: The Next Age of Invention

... Certainly, it is difficult to know exactly in which direction technological change will move and how significant it will be. Much as in evolutionary biology, all we know is history. Yet something can be learned from the past, and it tells us that such pessimism is mistaken. The future of technology is likely to be bright. ...

6. The Guardian: Fracking: the surprising new proving ground for water technologies

The energy industry's growing demand for water is spurring water-treatment innovation that could spill over into other sectors. ...

7.  Scientific American: How to Profit from CO2 Emissions

Pulling CO2 from the atmosphere to lessen global warming is prohibitively expensive, unless we can find ways to profit from it. Scientists and entrepreneurs are developing some ingenious processes for turning CO2 emissions into the raw materials for a wide range of products. A Nexus Media production for Scientific American.

8. Business Insider: CITI: 'The Age Of Renewables Is Beginning'

In a new note titled "The Age of Renewables is Beginning – A Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE)," Perspective, Citi's alternative energy team led by Shar Pourreza, writes that we can expect across-the-board price decreases in solar and wind, which will continue to fuel the renewable energy generation boom. ...

9. Atlantic: The UN's New Focus: Surviving, Not Stopping, Climate Change

The United Nations' latest report on climate change contains plenty of dire warnings about the adverse impact "human interference with the climate system" is having on everything from sea levels to crop yields to violent conflicts. But the primary message of the study isn't, as John Kerry suggested on Sunday, for countries to collectively reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead, the subtext appears to be this: Climate change is happening and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. As a result, we need to adapt to a warming planet—to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits associated with increasing temperatures—rather than focusing solely on curbing warming in the first place. And it's businesses and local governments, rather than the international community, that can lead the way.

“The really big breakthrough in this report is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change,” Chris Field, the co-chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study, said this week, adding that governments, companies, and communities are already experimenting with “climate-change adaptation.” ...

10. Christian Science Monitor: Thorium: a safer nuclear power

In the same month as the Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear disasters, China announces it is speeding up its research into so-called molten salt reactors that can run on thorium.  If it succeeds, it would create a cheaper, more efficient, and safer form of nuclear power that produces less nuclear waste than today's uranium-based technology. ...

11. NPR: Half Of Americans Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

Misinformation about health remains widespread and popular.

Half of Americans subscribe to medical conspiracy theories, with more than one-third of people thinking that the Food and Drug Administration is deliberately keeping natural cures for cancer off the market because of pressure from drug companies, a survey finds.

Twenty percent of people said that cellphones cause cancer — and that large corporations are keeping health officials from doing anything about it. And another 20 percent think doctors and the government want to vaccinate children despite knowing that vaccines cause autism.

"One of the things that struck us is that people who embrace these beliefs are not less health conscious," says , a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who led the study. "They're just less likely to embrace traditional medicine." ...

12. CBS: New colon cancer test could be alternative to colonoscopy

13. Forbes: Scientists Reconstruct Faces From DNA Samples

Sometime in the future, technicians will go over the scene of the crime. They’ll uncover some DNA evidence and take it to the lab. And when the cops need to get a picture of the suspect, they won’t have to ask eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist – they’ll just ask the technicians to get a mugshot from the DNA.

That, at least, is the potential of new research being published today in PLOS Genetics. In that paper, a team of scientists describe how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces extrapolated from a person’s DNA. ...

14. Mashable: The Cause of Earth's Largest Mass Extinction: Microbe Sex

Around 252 million years ago, 90 percent of all species on Earth were wiped out in an extinction event commonly called The Great Dying. Now, a team of MIT researchers from the U.S. and China might have the answer for the largest mass extinction our planet has ever seen.

It wasn’t asteroids or volcanoes, but methane-producing microbes called Methanosarcina having sex — or rather, passing genetic material in a strange microbial form of sex. ...

Science and Technology Links

I've gotten very behind on my links pages. Here is my attempt to catch up on science and technology links. Sorry for the length, but there is some good stuff here. I'll have another post with environment links shortly.

1. Ancient Origins.net: Entire Neanderthal genome finally mapped – with amazing results

This incredible research has revealed the following:

• There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
• Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
• The Denisovans share up to 8 percent of their genome with a "super achaic" and totally unknown species that dates back around 1 million years.
• The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
• About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of all people with European ancestry can be traced to Neanderthals.
• Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.
• 6 percent of the genome of Australian Aborigines and indigenous Papua New Guineans belong to the Denisovan species.
• The Han Chinese, native to East Asia, and the Dai people of southern China are related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
• Some indigenous people from Brazil, such as the Karitiana, are not only related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but they show relatively high genetic contributions from the Denisovans.
• Only 87 genes responsible for making proteins in cells are different between modern humans and Neanderthals. Intriguingly, some of the gene differences involve ones involved in both immune responses and the development of brain cells in people.
• Somewhere within these 87 genes may lay the answer to why Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct.
• And least consequential of all, the Neanderthal woman's parents were related, possibly half-siblings, or an uncle and niece. As evolutionary biologist Mattias Jakobsson stated, the incest finding "is more of an anecdote". The results from one individual cannot be applied to an entire species, in the same way that the recent discovery of an incest family in Australia does not apply to the whole of the human race.

- See more at: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/entire-neanderthal-genome-finally-mapped-amazing-results-001138#sthash.XmA90FGI.dpuf

Here are a few of the findings:

• There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
• Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
• The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
• Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.

2. Science: How Farming Reshaped Our Genomes

Before farming began to spread across Europe some 8500 years ago, the continent's occupants were hunter-gatherers. They were unable to digest starch and milk, according to a new ancient DNA study of a nearly 8000-year-old human skeleton from Spain. But these original occupants did already possess immune defenses against some of the diseases that would later become the scourge of civilization, and they apparently had dark skin. The findings are helping researchers understand what genetic and biological changes humans went through as they made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. ...

3. Atlantic: Male and Female Brains Really Are Built Differently

By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres. ...

... By analyzing the subjects' MRIs using diffusion imaging, the scientists explored the brains' fiber pathways, the bundles of axons that act as highways routing information from one part of the mind to the other. After grouping the image by sex and inspecting the differences between the two aggregate "male" and "female" pictures, the researchers found that in men, fiber pathways run back and forth within each hemisphere, while in women they tend to zig-zag between the left, or "logical," and right, or "creative," sides of the brain.

Because female brains seem to have a stronger connections between their logical and intuitive parts, "when women are asked to do particularly hard tasks, they might engage very different parts of the brain," said Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the report. "Men might over-engage just one part of the brain."

This could mean, for example, that men tend to see issues and resolve them directly, due to the strong connections between the "perception" and "action" areas of their brains, while women might be more inclined to combine logic and intuition when solving a problem. ...

4. Atlantic Cities: How Far You Could Get From New York in One Day, From 1800 to Today

5. Huff Post Tech: Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone

6. Huff Post Tech: Isaac Asimov's Predictions For 2014 From 50 Years Ago Are Eerily Accurate

Fifty years ago, American scientist and author Isaac Asimov published a story in The New York Times that listed his predictions for what the world would be like in 2014.

Asimov wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime, including science fiction novels and nonfiction scientific books, so he was well-versed in thinking about the future.

In his article, called "Visit to the World's Fair of 2014," Asimov got a whole bunch of his guesses right -- and his other predictions are making us a little envious of his imagined future. ...

7. Huff Post Tech: This 1981 News Report About The Internet Is Adorable, But Totally Wrong

As you might have guessed, they get virtually nothing right. Memes, cat videos, Miley Cyrus, even Facebook -- all are mysteries to the people of the past. Take a look and glory in your superiority. But beware - the world of 2034 is laughing at you behind your back.

 8. New York Times: Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All

... Hampton found that, rather than isolating people, technology made them more connected. "It turns out the wired folk — they recognized like three times as many of their neighbors when asked," Hampton said. Not only that, he said, they spoke with neighbors on the phone five times as often and attended more community events. Altogether, they were much more successful at addressing local problems, like speeding cars and a small spate of burglaries. They also used their Listserv to coordinate offline events, even sign-ups for a bowling league. Hampton was one of the first scholars to marshal evidence that the web might make people less atomized rather than more. Not only were people not opting out of bowling leagues — Robert Putnam's famous metric for community engagement — for more screen time; they were also using their computers to opt in. ...

…this was Hampton's most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It's not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston's Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. "The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles," Hampton writes. Men seem to be "taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine."

Across the board, Hampton found that the story of public spaces in the last 30 years has not been aloneness, or digital distraction, but gender equity. "I mean, who would've thought that, in America, 30 years ago, women were not in public the same way they are now?" Hampton said. "We don't think about that."...

9. Space.com: Scale of Universe Measured with 1-Percent Accuracy

WASHINGTON — An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion.

A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement. ...

10. Atlantic: Almost No Americans Die From Lightning Strikes Anymore—Why?

In the lightning-death literature, one explanation has gained prominence: urbanization. Lightning death rates have declined in step with the rural population, and rural lightning deaths make up a far smaller percent of all lightning deaths (see figure at right). Urban areas afford more protection from lightning. Ergo, urbanization has helped make people safer from lightning.

11. Huff Post Science: Creationist Beliefs Linked To Personality Type In New Survey Of Churchgoers

... A new study suggests that people who believe in creationism are more likely to prefer to take in information via their senses versus via intuition. In contrast, religious believers who see the Bible's creation story as symbolic tend to be more intuitive. ...

12. Atlantic: Why Has Republican Belief in Evolution Declined So Much?

There's been a drop of more than 10 points—to just 43 percent—in the last four years. ...

... What does that leave? Maybe the gap represents an emotional response by Republicans to being out of power. Among others, Chris Mooney has argued that beliefs on politically contentious topics are often more rooted in opposition to perceived attacks than anything else—an instance of "motivated reasoning." Given that Democrats have controlled the White House and Senate since 2009, this could be backlash to the political climate, though it will be hard to tell until Republicans control Washington again.

Of course, motivated reasoning might help explain why many Democrats also believe in evolution.

13. Business Insider: MakerBot Launches' Mini' 3D Printer For Consumers For The Same Price As A Laptop

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis unveiled the "MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D" today, a smaller, cheaper, simpler 3D printer that he believes will finally make all consumers want to start extruding corn-based plastic in their own homes, and printing objects on demand. ...

14. Mashable: The Answer to Affordable Housing Could Lie Within a 3D Printer

... The process involves a giant robot with a hanging nozzle and a flexible arm on a gantry-type crane — the whole rig is known as a "contour crafter" — above the foundation. The contour crafter then proceeds to layer concrete based on a computer-generated pattern. The layers eventually take shape into walls, embedded with all the necessary conduits and passages for electricity, plumbing and air conditioning.

The research team envisions a future where contour crafters could be used for disaster relief to build emergency housing and to create affordable housing for those who are displaced, homeless or in desperate living conditions. ...

15. Business Insider: Biotech Firm: We Will 3D Print A Human Liver In 2014

2014 could be a landmark year for an amazing medical technology: human organs built by 3D printers.

San Diego biotech firm Organovo promises that its "bioprinting" technology will successfully print a human liver by the end of 2014, the company told Computerworld's Lucas Mearian. ...

16. Conservable Economist: First Burger Grown from Stem Cells Served in London

"On August 5, 2013, the first hamburger grown from stem cells in a laboratory, and not in a cow, was served in London. ... If this technology continues to evolve and is deployed at scale, it will have significant social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications." Carolyn Mattick and Brad Allenby launch the discussion in "The Future of Meat," in the Fall 2013 Issues in Science and Technology.

To be sure, the technology isn't quite ready for fast food. "From an economic perspective, cultured meat is still an experimental technology. The first in vitro burger reportedly cost about $335,000 to produce and was made by possible by financial support from Google cofounder Sergey Brin." Mattick and Allenby discuss a number of technological challenges.

But the potential for altering the environmental footprint of meet the global demand for meat is remarkable. ...

17. Project Syndicate: The GMO Stigma

... In September, an eminent group of scientists called upon the scientific community to "stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances, such as golden rice, that have the potential to save millions" of people from "needless suffering and death." But this passionate appeal fails to address the fundamental problem: the unfounded notion that there is a meaningful difference between "genetically modified organisms" and their conventional counterparts.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe fact is that GMOs and their derivatives do not amount to a "category" of food products. They are neither less safe nor less "natural" than other common foods. Labeling foods derived from GMOs, as some have proposed, thus implies a meaningful difference where none exists – an issue that even regulators have acknowledged.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphHumans have been engaging in "genetic modification" through selection and hybridization for millennia. Breeders routinely use radiation or chemical mutagens on seeds to scramble a plant's DNA and generate new traits.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphA half-century of "wide cross" hybridizations, which involve the movement of genes from one species or genus to another, has given rise to plants – including everyday varieties of corn, oats, pumpkin, wheat, black currants, tomatoes, and potatoes – that do not and could not exist in nature. Indeed, with the exception of wild berries, wild game, wild mushrooms, and fish and shellfish, virtually everything in North American and European diets has been genetically improved in some way. ...

18. New York Times: Is Moore's Law Over? Designing the Next Wave of Computer Chips

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Not long after Gordon E. Moore proposed in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be etched on a silicon chip would continue to double approximately every 18 months, critics began predicting that the era of "Moore's Law" would draw to a close.

More than ever recently, industry pundits have been warning that the progress of the semiconductor industry is grinding to a halt — and that the theory of Dr. Moore, an Intel co-founder, has run its course.

If so, that will have a dramatic impact on the computer world. The innovation that has led to personal computers, music players and smartphones is directly related to the plunging cost of transistors, which are now braided by the billions onto fingernail slivers of silicon — computer chips — that may sell for as little as a few dollars each.

But Moore's Law is not dead; it is just evolving, according to more optimistic scientists and engineers. Their contention is that it will be possible to create circuits that are closer to the scale of individual molecules by using a new class of nanomaterials — metals, ceramics, polymeric or composite materials that can be organized from the "bottom up," rather than the top down. ...

19. Business Insider: Here's Why 'The Internet Of Things' Will Be Huge, And Drive Tremendous Value For People And Businesses

The Internet Of Things represents a major departure in the history of the Internet, as connections move beyond computing devices, and begin to power billions of everyday devices, from parking meters to home thermostats. 

Estimates for Internet of Things or IoT market value are massive, since by definition the IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire consumer, business-to-business, and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCs combined. ...

20. Extreme Tech: Cold fusion tech picked up by major US partner, prepares for launch in the American and Chinese energy markets

... Cold fusion, also known as low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), is a technology that promises to create huge amounts of green energy from very cheap fuel. In the case of Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyser), nickel and hydrogen are fused into copper — a process that has 10,000 times the energy density of gasoline, and 1,000 times the power density. For more background information on cold fusion/LENR, and why it's safer and cleaner than normal nuclear reactors, read our previous E-Cat story. Suffice it to say, the scientific community's main contention is whether this reaction is actually possible or not. Rossi says he's found a special catalyst that makes it possible; lots of other scientists, though, claim it's hogwash. (Read: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.) ...

21. Real Clear Science: Debunking Myths on Nuclear Power

... There are five declared and four other nuclear-armed countries (assuming Israel's warheads detonate). There are 31 nations with nuclear power stations (and 58 with research reactors). Only seven of the nine nuclear-armed countries have civilian power programs.

All of the technical factors can be circumvented with sufficient time and money. Uneconomic fuel cycles can be run and warheads built with high levels of radioactivity. However, no country has developed indigenous nuclear weapons after deploying civilian nuclear power stations.

Historically, if a country wants to produce a nuclear bomb, they build reactors especially for the job of making plutonium, and ignore civilian power stations.

22. Breaking Energy: Terawatt Era: Solar Technology's Next 40 Years

... Whereas the past 4 years saw an incredible halving of cost seven times, this will not continue. There may only be one halving left to achieve. The action will be in deployment, and it will be phenomenal. The next 40 years should see seven doublings of in-place capacity. In Solar 1.0, the megawatt-era has given way to today's gigawatt-era. In the next 40 years the gigawatt-era will give way to the terawatt-era. By 2054 we should see over 17 terawatts of solar capacity in place around the world, which would equate to more than 10% of global energy demand at that point. At an average installed cost of $1/watt (which we will have passed by then), this represents a $17 trillion opportunity. ...

23. Wired: Watch: How Super-Efficient Nanomaterials Could Herald a Design Revolution

The Great Pyramid of Giza is 174 meters tall and weighs 10 megatons. The Eiffel Tower is over twice that height but weighs just five and half kilotons–some 10 times lighter. The difference, according to materials scientist Julia Greer, is that "elements of architecture" were introduced into the design that allowed it to be stronger and more lightweight while using far less materials. Where the pyramids are four solid walls, the Eiffel Tower is more skeletal in structure–and vastly more efficient as a result. ...

 

Science and Technology Links

1. Scientific American: Scientific American's Top 10 Science Stories of 2013

A carbon threshold breached, commitments to brain science made, mystery neutrinos found and human evolution revised—these and other events highlight the year in science and technology as picked by the editors of Scientific American

2. Reuters: "Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study

(Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.

Their report, conflicting with United Nations studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7 billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland". ...

... "We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York.

"Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and Development Review. ...

3. Mashable: The Universal Translator Is Real and Its Name Is Sigmo

Ever since Star Trek explained away how all alien races could speak English through a piece of future tech called the Universal Translator, technology companies have worked to create just such a device. One may have succeeded in developing a 1.0 version with the Sigmo.

The Sigmo is a small, pillbox-sized device equipped with a microphone and speaker, but with a cloud-connected twist. Select the language you'd like to translate into, then hold the Sigmo up and speak to it. The Sigmo records your voice, then sends the recording to the cloud for translation via Bluetooth connection with your smartphone.

4. Inhabit: Africa's First Plastic Bottle House Rises in Nigeria

... the nearly-complete home is bullet and fireproof, earthquake resistant, and maintains a comfortable interior temperature of 64 degrees fahrenheit year round!

5. Wired: The World’s Largest Mega-Ship Launches for the First Time

... At 600,000 tons and 243 feet wide, when the Prelude left its dry dock in South Korea after a year-long build, it unseated the Emma Maersk (1,302 feet) as the world’s largest ship. But calling it a ship is almost a misnomer. The Prelude is a floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility that will be posted off the coast of Western Australia and will stay there for the next quarter-century.

As an FLNG plant, the Prelude handles everything involved in capturing, processing, and storing liquid natural gas, sucking the stuff from deep within the Earth and refining 3.9 million tons each year before it’s offloaded onto smaller ships that bring it back to the mainland. ...

6. Business Insider: The Number Of Smartphones In Use Is About To Pass The Number Of PCs

7. Scientific American: China Moon Rover Landing Marks a Space Program on the Rise

China cemented its reputation as the fastest rising star on the space scene this weekend by landing a rover on the moon—a challenging feat pulled off by only two nations before: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. “This is a very big deal indeed,” says lunar scientist Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “Landing on the moon is not something easily attained—it requires precision maneuvering, tracking, computation and engineering. It is a delicate task and the Chinese success reflects a mature, evolving and capable program.” ...

8. Scientific American: Study Linking Genetically Modified Corn to Rat Tumors Is Retracted

Bowing to scientists' near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats, after the authors refused to withdraw it.

The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012,  showed “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,” said a statement from Elsevier, which publishes the journal. But the small number and type of animals used in the study mean that “no definitive conclusions can be reached.” The known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague–Dawley strain of rat ”cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups,” it added. ...

9. Forbes: Scientists Make More Eye Cells - With An Inkjet Printer

British researchers have used an inkjet printer to successfully print retinal cells for the first time, in what could be a breakthrough for the treatment of optic nerve injury and diseases like glaucoma. ...

10. Berkley Earth (via Watts Up With That): Explaining and Understanding Declines in U.S. CO2 Emissions

11. Carpe Diem: Fossil fuels will continue to supply > 80% of US energy through 2040, while renewables will play only a minor role

12. Slate: $7 Trillion to Fight Climate Change? Bjorn Lomborg

The EU proposes spending that much on projects that will barely reduce temperatures or lower sea levels. ...

... This does not mean that climate change is not important; it means only that the EU’s climate policy is not smart. Over the course of this century, the ideal EU policy would cost more than $7 trillion, yet it would reduce the temperature rise by just 0.05^o Celsius and lower sea levels by a trivial 9 millimeters. After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference. ...

... We need a smarter approach to tackling climate change. Rather than relying on cutting a few tons of incredibly overpriced CO₂ now, we need to invest in research and development aimed at innovating down the cost of green energy in the long run, so that everyone will switch. ...

13. New York Times: The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels

... About 3.5 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes — about 200,000 more than the number who die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air outside, according to a study by the World Health Organization.

There’s no question that burning fossil fuels is leading to a warmer climate and that addressing this problem is important. But doing so is a question of timing and priority. For many parts of the world, fossil fuels are still vital and will be for the next few decades, because they are the only means to lift people out of the smoke and darkness of energy poverty. ...

... The developed world needs a smarter approach toward cleaner fuels. The United States has been showing the way. Hydraulic fracturing has produced an abundance of inexpensive natural gas, leading to a shift away from coal in electricity production. Because burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, this technology has helped the United States reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the lowest level since the mid-1990s, even as emissions rise globally. We need to export this technology and help other nations exploit it.

At the same time, wealthy Western nations must step up investments into research and development in green energy technologies to ensure that cleaner energy eventually becomes so cheap that everyone will want it.

But until then they should not stand in the way of poorer nations as they turn to coal and other fossil fuels. This approach will get our priorities right. And perhaps then, people will be able to cook in their own homes without slowly killing themselves.

14. NPR: Environmentalists Split Over Need For Nuclear Power

15. BBC: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

Harnessing fusion - the process that powers the Sun - could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion. ...

 16. Popular Technology.net: 97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists' Papers, according to the scientists that published them

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.

To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists' papers as "endorsing AGW", apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors. ...

Saturday Links

1. The United States had its financial bubble. Europe is having one too. Is China next? If it is, it could reshape the global economy and radically reshape the Chinese government. Here is an interesting piece about China's real estate bubble.

2. Robert Tracinski thinks we are in the midst of a Third Industrial Revolution.

... I like the idea of a breaking the Industrial Revolution into stages, but I would define them in more fundamental terms. The first Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of large-scale man-made power, which began with the steam engine. The internal combustion engine, electric power, and other sources of energy are just further refinements of this basic idea. The second Industrial Revolution would be the development of interchangeable parts and the assembly line, which made possible inexpensive mass production with relatively unskilled labor. The Third Industrial Revolution would not be computers, the Internet, or mobile phones, because up to now these have not been industrial tools; they have been used for moving information, not for making things. Instead, the rise of computers and the Internet is just a warm-up for the real Third Industrial Revolution, which is the full integration of information technology with industrial production.

The effect of the Third Industrial Revolution will be to collapse the distance between the design of a product and its physical manufacture, in much the same way that the Internet has eliminated the distance between the origination of a new idea and its communication to an audience. ...

3. Tyler Cowen has some thoughts about the impact of our technological revolution as well Are we living in the early 19th century?

... Eventually all of the creative ferment of the industrial revolution pays off in a big "whoosh," but it takes many decades, depending on where you draw the starting line of course.  A look at the early 19th century is sobering, or should be, for anyone doing fiscal budgeting today.  But it is also optimistic in terms of the larger picture facing humanity over the longer run.

4. You may have seen a deeply flawed viral video about wealth inequality this past week. I am working on my own response, but economist Mark Perry's response is here.  In response to the viral 'Wealth Inequality in America' video

5. What are the contours of income inequality in the United States? This 40-minute video by Emmanuel Saez offers some important insights.

6. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is a little too sensationalist for my taste, but this vid offers interesting food for thought about nanotechnology and the future of sports. Will we even be able to have meaningful sports competitions?

7. Atlantic takes up a frequently perpetuated myth. 'Women Own 1% of World Property': A Feminist Myth That Won't Die

8. First, there was I, Pencil. Then I Smartphone. Now "I Coke." What Coke Contains

9. U.S. household wealth regains pre-recession peak but ...

The recovered wealth - most of it from higher stock prices - has been flowing mainly to richer Americans. By contrast, middle class wealth is mostly in the form of home equity, which has risen much less.

10. When looking at decisions in your own context, Seth Godin explains why Macro trends don't matter so much

11. It's a big, fat myth that all scientists are religion-hating atheists.

Whether or not you think science is wonderful, the stereotype of all scientists being atheists is unrealistic. There is, however, a special dance.

12. I consider this good news. Old Earth, Young Minds: Evangelical Homeschoolers Embrace Evolution

More Christian parents are asking for mainstream science in their children's curricula.

13. Remember to keep Syria and Egypt in your prayers. Nearly 1 in 20 Syrians are now refugees

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/03/07/4106038/us-household-wealth-regains-pre.html#storylink=cpy

Saturday Links

Today is the day our advanced technological culture turns to a cute furry rodent in Pennsylvania for a weather forecast. (The only thing a groundhog foretells in my yard is that I'm probably going to need some new landscaping.) Happy Groundhog Day!

1. Strategic Planning and the "Vision Thing" -- Fire, Not Fluff.

"In the course of our strategic planning work with clients, we've identified the things that make the difference between visions that fall flat and those that turn on. Here's a no-nonsense summary of those elements that you can use as a guide when you develop your strategic plan."

2. Some good thoughts on strategies we should all consider in trying to address controversial issues. Five simple lessons from Shane Windmeyer's friendship with Chick-fil-A's Dan Cathy

3. Anticipating a move? Here's Everything You Should Consider Before Moving To A New City

4. Jordan Ballor has some thoughts on subsidiarity at Political Theology. Subsidiarity 'From Below'

"In this way a conception of subsidiarity "from below" is focused on the location of sovereignty from the "bottom up" rather than on the delegation of authority from the "top down." We see these variegated approaches to subsidiarity and sovereignty work out in diverse ways in later centuries. It is with these different lenses of subsidiarity "from above" and "from below" that we can better understand the developments of the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity as such and the neo-Calvinist articulation of "sphere sovereignty" in the late nineteenth century and beyond."

5. Business Insider offers 21 Surprising Facts About Illegal Immigration.

6. Sarah Posner has an interesting piece. 'New Evangelical’-Progressive Alliance? Not So Fast

"Pally's essay is framed around the thesis that these evangelicals have "left the right." But left it for what? What she describes is really another vision of conservatism: church-based charity in lieu of a government safety net; exemptions from government regulation for religious groups; federal funding of religious activities; and persistent sexual puritanism. Perhaps it's more accurate to say they've left the radical right and are in the process of creating a new religious right, stripped of harsh rhetoric but still undergirded by conservative ideology. Which is a movement worth chronicling, but not, as Pally intimates, as the new saviors of civility in our religiously-inflected politics."

7. What has the iPad meant to Apple? A picture says a thousand words. A decade of Apple' computer' sales

8. Extinction of millions of species' greatly exaggerated'

"In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development.

But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated."

9. It Turns out once the culprit in species extinction may be curled up in your lap. Cats Are Ruthless Killers. Should They Be Killed?

10. I've written before that fear is not an effective motivator for long term change. This is particularly true for some climate change and environmental activism. You need to make new behaviors fun and engaging. WWF appears to have taken this strategy to heart. (Hard to go wrong with anthropomorphized critters but maybe they should consider the article immediately above.)

11. The evolutionary plot thickens. Who Was the First Human Ancestor?

From the time of Charles Darwin science has painted a picture of our earliest ancestor in the image of a chimpanzee. Scientific American editor Katherine Harmon explains how new fossil evidence is redrawing the lines of human evolution.

Actually, I think we already know who our first ancestor was.

12. For the most part (with a few exceptions), when it comes to movies, if you can't tell your story in less than two hours, then I think you didn't edit the movie well. Hollywood would apparently beg to differ. Why Movies Today Are Longer Than Ever Before

"The average of the highest-grossing films from 20 years ago is 118.4 minutes compared to this year's 141.6 minutes."

13. More interesting findings of early civilization in the Americas. Research Confirms Massive Louisiana Mound Was Built By Archaic Native Americans In Less Than 90 Days.

14. Melissa and I love history and have always loved old cemeteries. This story makes me sad. Black history dies in neglected Southern cemeteries

15. Okay, purists, Rule Change Eliminates a Fake Pickoff. Pitchers can no longer fake a throw to third before throwing to another base. Good idea or bad?

Saturday Links

Here are the links. BTW, if you haven't already, you can "like" the Kruse Kronicle Facebook page and see daily links in your Facebook feed.

1. As a kid, I watched Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturdays. That was the beginning of my life-long appreciation for big cats. One of the organizations we support is the Turperntine Creek Wildlife Refuge for big cats in Arkansas. Check out this Nat Geo super slo-mo video of a running cheetah. Be sure to go to this five-minute video and see him from the front. His head barely moves. Just amazing!

Cheetahs on the Edge--Director's Cut from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo.

2. Good news! Charitable giving increased slightly in 2011

3. Counting sheep not putting you to sleep? Eat These Foods For A Better Night's Sleep

4. Tiny Swarming Robots Play Beethoven.

5. Just a reminder. That Ebook you bought? You don't own it. That Barnes & Noble Ebook is Only Yours Until Your Credit Card Expires

6. Speaking of books, how about a Book-Scanning Robot Reads 250 Pages Per Minute?

7. If you are a man, getting along with the in-laws means you have a 20% higher chance of not getting divorced. If you are a woman, getting along well with the in-laws makes you 20% more likely to get divorced. Getting Along With The In-Laws Makes Women More Likely To Divorce

8. Could the first billion-dollar athlete be less than a decade away? Why the World's First Billion-Dollar Athlete Is Just a Few Years Away

9. A business icon died this week. Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar dies at age 86.

10. This was pretty cool. An Inspiring Story Of A Grocery Store Owner Who Gave His Business To Employees

11. One of the challenges of colonizing the moon or Mars is all the supplies you would need to bring to construct a habitat. 3D printing may help solve that problem. 3D printer on moon or Mars could make tools from local rocks

12. Give us this day our monthly bread? "American company has developed a technique it says can make bread stay mold-free for 60 days." Bread that lasts for 60 days could cut food waste

13. The Next Web has an interesting piece on the history of 3D printing. The Rise of 3D Printing

14. Supreme Court to Decide if Human Genes Are Patentable

"The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer. A 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed among other things the First Amendment is at stake because the patents are so broad they bar scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. In short, the patents issued more than a decade ago cover any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others."

I am guessing there are some bioethics questions to consider here as well. ;-)

15. 4.5 billion years of the earth's evolution as if it happened in 24 hours.

16. The Real Story on the Falling U.S. Birth Rate

"The Pew Research Center announced Nov. 29 that the U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest level since at least 1920, when reliable record-keeping began. That was true—but not news. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that way back on Oct. 3.

What was news was Pew's analysis of the government data, which showed that the birth rate decline was greatest among immigrant women. "We were the first to point that out," Gretchen Livingston, the lead author of Pew's report, said in an interview. ..."

17. Small-business optimism is tanking. Gallup

18. Also from Gallup. As it turns out, maybe Democrats really are socialists.

19. What's Driving Evangelical Enthusiasm?

"Data shows growing Catholic-evangelical "intensity gap"—but it doesn't indicate exactly why. ...

... New research shows that Catholics now report the lowest proportion of "strongly affiliated" followers among major American religious traditions, while the data indicates that evangelicals are increasingly devout and committed to their faith.

According to Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in the 1970s there was only a five-point difference between how strongly Catholics and evangelicals felt about their religion.

By 2010, he said, that "intensity gap" had grown to around 20 points, with some 56 percent of evangelicals describing themselves as "strongly affiliated" with their religion compared with 35 percent of Catholics. Even mainline Protestants reported a higher level of religious intensity than Catholics, at 39 percent. ..."

20. For Amish, fastest-growing faith group in US, life is changing.

"Indeed, for America's Amish, much is changing. The Amish are, by one measure, the fastest-growing faith community in the US. Yet as their numbers grow, the land available to support the agrarian lifestyle that underpins their faith is shrinking, gobbled up by the encroachment of exurban mansions and their multidoor garages.

The result is, in some ways, a gradual redefinition of what it means to be Amish. Some in the younger generation are looking for new ways to make a living on smaller and smaller slices of land. Others are looking beyond the Amish heartland of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, seeking more space in states such as Texas, Maine, and Montana."

21. Finally, one of the things I found interesting about the presidential election was Team Romney's seeming confidence they were winning. I think every losing candidate often tries to spin things positively until the very end, but I had the sense that Team Romney wasn't faking it. They believed they were winning. I think post-election analysis reveals that it was true. From The New Repbulic The Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win

The State of Evolution (Infographic)

BioLogos Forum: The State of Evolution (Infographic)

As I looked at the map, I noticed how it compares with red vs. blue state breakdowns. Red states are supposed to be anti-science Republicans, while blue states are supposed to embrace it fully. Yet red states like Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, and Louisiana get B grades, while Hawaii, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts get Ds. Interesting.

Primal Roots of Relative Deprivation?

Atlantic: Income Inequality Enrages Monkey

Many humans have highly developed senses of fairness and morality. Some monkeys may not be far behind. Watch as one gets cucumbers and the other gets delicious, delicious grapes.

[This is a 2013 version of the video to replace the removed 2012 version.]

The author says that income inequality tends to make us unhappy. That needs qualification. The degree of national inequality is not that relevant to personal happiness. People don't evaluate their personal lives in those terms. Inequality figures in when we talk about people in our immediate social networks, especially neighbors and family. As some have quipped, inequality is when my brother-in-law makes 10% more than I do.

Once More, With Feeling: Adam, Evolution and Evangelicals (Peter Enns)

Huffington Post: Once More, With Feeling: Adam, Evolution and Evangelicals

... Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, "What does the Bible say about that?" And then informed by "what the Bible says," they are ready to make a "biblical" judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about "human origins." It isn't. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch -- an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about "the beginning," however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question "Where do humans come from?" They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious -- and often political -- beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

Likewise, Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel's monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.

Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver. ...

I love Enns ... even if he is a diehard Yankee fan. (Just shows that even great minds have been corrupted by sin. ;-) )

Technology Advances; Humans Supersize

New York Times: Technology Advances; Humans Supersize

For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel and a small clutch of colleagues have assiduously researched what the size and shape of the human body say about economic and social changes throughout history, and vice versa. Their research has spawned not only a new branch of historical study but also a provocative theory that technology has sped human evolution in an unprecedented way during the past century.

Next month Cambridge University Press will publish the capstone of this inquiry, "The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700," just a few weeks shy of Mr. Fogel's 85th birthday. The book, which sums up the work of dozens of researchers on one of the most ambitious projects undertaken in economic history, is sure to renew debates over Mr. Fogel's groundbreaking theories about what some regard as the most significant development in humanity's long history.

Mr. Fogel and his co-authors, Roderick Floud, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong, maintain that "in most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia." What's more, they write, this alteration has come about within a time frame that is "minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution."

"The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable," Mr. Fogel said in an telephone interview from Chicago, where he is the director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago's business school. "Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two."

This "technophysio evolution," powered by advances in food production and public health, has so outpaced traditional evolution, the authors argue, that people today stand apart not just from every other species, but from all previous generations of Homo sapiens as well.

 "I don't know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity," said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world's leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century's improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said. ...

On a side note, there is an interesting aspect to this evolution. Ask yourself, "What height must you be to be tall?" For an American male living today, I am just about average at 5'11." Though taller than my great-great-grandfathers, do I experience myself as tall? No. Because while I'm taller than my ancestors, so is everyone else taller than their ancestors. I experience myself as average, just as most of my ancestors did, but my objective quality of tallness most certainly has improved (assuming taller is better, as implicated here.)

The same problem applies to poverty. The poor in America are substantially better off in absolute terms than many of the well-to-do of three generations ago. Still, they see no improvement in comparison to their contemporaries. And this is one of the oddities of economic development. Observers correctly note that economic growth does not increase the overall happiness of society (once a certain minimal threshold is passed). That is because people do not experience a change in their relative positions. But these observers incorrectly conclude that economic development is not making life better for members of society. Witness the findings of Fogel et al. about techno-physio evolution. Despite not making people happier, economic growth considerably improves people's lives over time.

On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan

New York Times: On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan

Teaching creationism in public schools has consistently been ruled unconstitutional in federal courts, but according to a national survey of more than 900 public high school biology teachers, it continues to flourish in the nation’s classrooms.

Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.

That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise.

The survey, published in the Jan. 28 issue of Science, found that some avoid intellectual commitment by explaining that they teach evolution only because state examinations require it, and that students do not need to “believe” in it. Others treat evolution as if it applied only on a molecular level, avoiding any discussion of the evolution of species. And a large number claim that students are free to choose evolution or creationism based on their own beliefs. ...

The Economics of Belief

At Science and the Sacred today, there is a post by Joel M. Martin, What Do Most Christians Really Believe About Evolution? He writes:

... But we live in a world that hungers for simple answers to complex problems. We Americans in particular seldom take the time to come to our own conclusions on complicated matters; we often defer to others to tell us what to do, how to feel, what to believe, how to think. I’m as guilty as anyone else here.

Rather than following a complicated regimen of exercise and diet, we look for a pill to help us lose weight. Rather than reading the president’s health plan, we want someone to summarize for us what’s wrong (or right) with it. Rather than studying the political landscape in detail, we rely on talk shows to find out how we should vote. Instead of increasing our science literacy, we adopt someone else’s take on cloning, or global warming, or the Gulf oil spill, or evolution. And there is no shortage of persons eager to step in to do just that, to distill the world’s major issues into simplistic terms. ...

I hear these complaints a lot, mostly from intellectual types like me. While I resonate with it partly, another part says not so fast.

Imagine that I need a paper clip for a stack of papers. Which type of clip should I use? One of those traditional metal ones? Maybe one of those plastic ones? Or maybe one of the V-shaped things that open their jaws and clasp the papers together? I suppose I could go on the internet to look for product reviews, buy samples and do some tests, and ask others about their experience with paper clips. You might think I have become a little eccentric if I did so. I would suggest the same is true for many of the issues Martin lists above.

Most people do not have the compulsion to dig that deep. And for most, what is the relative benefit of nailing down nuanced aspects of evolution or having an expert grasp of the Gulf oil spill versus a) the impact these issues have on their daily lives, b) the ability they have to influence these issues if they knew more, and c) the cost they pay in forgoing other activities to develop expertise in these areas? 

Now I will say that I agree that more people should delve deeper into some of the issues, but to expect the great majority of the population to delve deeply into every issue that confronts us is not realistic. The economics of becoming that informed don't add up. To keep expecting that depth of analysis can and should be so is to set yourself up for continued frustration. (I think those who try to shape belief  ... whether Dawkins on religion, Mohler on evolution, or McLaren on economics ... should be held to a different standard.) And this is one of my great challenges: How to address complex issues in an age of information overload and busy lives?

First Large-Scale Formal Quantitative Test Confirms Darwin's Theory of Universal Common Ancestry

Science Daily: First Large-Scale Formal Quantitative Test Confirms Darwin's Theory of Universal Common Ancestry

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2010) — More than 150 years ago, Darwin proposed the theory of universal common ancestry (UCA), linking all forms of life by a shared genetic heritage from single-celled microorganisms to humans. Until now, the theory that makes ladybugs, oak trees, champagne yeast and humans distant relatives has remained beyond the scope of a formal test. Now, a Brandeis biochemist reports in Nature the results of the first large scale, quantitative test of the famous theory that underpins modern evolutionary biology. ...

... Harnessing powerful computational tools and applying Bayesian statistics, Theobald found that the evidence overwhelmingly supports UCA, regardless of horizontal gene transfer or multiple origins of life. Theobald said UCA is millions of times more probable than any theory of multiple independent ancestries.

"There have been major advances in biology over the last decade, with our ability to test Darwin's theory in a way never before possible," said Theobald. "The number of genetic sequences of individual organisms doubles every three years, and our computational power is much stronger now than it was even a few years ago."

While other scientists have previously examined common ancestry more narrowly, for example, among only vertebrates, Theobald is the first to formally test Darwin's theory across all three domains of life. The three domains include diverse life forms such as the Eukarya (organisms, including humans, yeast, and plants, whose cells have a DNA-containing nucleus) as well as Bacteria and Archaea (two distinct groups of unicellular microorganisms whose DNA floats around in the cell instead of in a nucleus). ...

RTS, Bruce Waltke, and Statements (and Non-Statements) of Faith

John Stackhouse: RTS, Bruce Waltke, and Statements (and Non-Statements) of Faith

Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) has dismissed  Dr. Bruce Waltke because he recently stated publicly two radical convictions: (1) that a Bible-believing Christian could believe in evolution; and (2) that the church needs to beware of becoming a cultural laughingstock for retaining anti-evolutionary views that cannot be supported scientifically.

What’s pathetic about this action is that those points weren’t even radical in the nineteenth century, when Darwin himself had a number of orthodox defenders. So RTS apparently is not quite ready to catch up with almost two centuries of theology/science dialogue. ...

People sometimes ask me how I can stay with the PCUSA in light of my views on certain issues. And there is no question that a lot of squirrely stuff is going on with my tribe. But if you want reasons why I don't look to more conservative denominations, here is one prime example. Unbelievable.

X Woman: Not human, not Neanderthal, what is she?

Christian Science Monitor: X Woman: Not human, not Neanderthal, what is she?

Scientists have found evidence of what might be a 'new creature' that is neither Neanderthal nor human. X Woman could revise theories about human ancestors and when they left Africa.

A mystery female known as X Woman may add a new chapter to the story of human ancestors leaving Africa to inhabit much of the planet.

Genetic material from a pinkie bone discovered two years ago in Siberia is challenging scientists' understanding of when humans and their evolutionary brethren left Africa, and whether a distinct and previously unknown species might have existed.

Researchers estimate the age of the pinkie bone to be between 30,000 and 48,000 years old. At that time, Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans also lived in that region of Siberia, deep in the Altai Mountains.

But to the researchers' surprise, the bone's genetic signature contained many distinct features compared with those of the remains of Neanderthals or modern humans. Indeed, the team's DNA analysis suggested that the bone came from line of so-called hominins that last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals and modern humans about 1 million years ago. The team dubbed this potential common ancestor X Woman.

By contrast, Neanderthals and modern humans last shared a common ancestor about 500,000 years ago, anthropologists say – making X Woman about twice as distant from humans on the evolutionary tree as from Neanderthals.

"This was absolutely amazing," says team member Svante Paabo, with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Whoever this was that left "Africa 1 million years ago is some new creature that has not been on our radar screen so far." ...

Staying Faithful to Genesis 1

Richard Mouw: Staying Faithful to Genesis 1

... I don’t mean to be flippant about the issues. How we understand the Bible’s authority in all areas of life, including scientific investigation, is a supremely imporant topic. But on these particular issues, the notion of staying faithful to the orthodoxy of the past simply does not ring true. The fact is that those defending a “literal” Genesis on age-of-the-earth issues are more rigid than those 19th century stalwarts—Hodge, Warfield, Kuyper, Bavinck—whose theological formulations they typically hold up as the benchmarks of Reformed orthodoxy.

While I was reviewing the discussions of the present-day controversies, I came across a report of a survey of preachers about how they treat the first chapter of Genesis. The findings were instructive. It turns out that pastors who take a more literal approach to the creation account  preach on it much less than those who do not hold to a literal interpretation. There is a lesson there. The literalists hold to a “scientifically accurate” Genesis 1 in which, it turns out, they can’t really find much to preach about. ...

Why (most) women like to shop

MSNBC: Why (most) women like to shop

Mall-loving behavior may be linked to our hunting and foraging past.

Our ancestors didn't shop for holiday gifts, but the way we buy may owe credit to thousands of years of evolution.

In a new study, researchers propose that our mall-visiting behaviors harken back to the days when men hunted and women foraged.

Modern men, for example, generally want to get into a store and get right back out — just like their hunting forefathers wanted to find and bring meat home as quickly as possible. On the other hand, women get back to their foraging roots by sorting through racks of sweaters on sale — as if scanning plants for signs of ripeness.

Plenty of people defy these general trends, of course, but the findings might help men and women better understand each other and limit arguments that surround shopping, said lead author Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, Mich.

His new theory could also help marketers design better stores that cater to gender differences.

"Women would want to have more things to search through and to be able to experience them, touch them, feel textures and see colors," Kruger said. "With a guy, he knows the properties he wants. It may be more efficient to have a counter that the guy walks up to, says what he wants, and they go get that item from a storage room." ...

What do you think? Evolution at work or influenced by culturally created gender roles?

Innovation and Projection of the Future

One of the persistent, recurring fallacies in social/economic analysis is to project the trajectories of current trends indefinitely into the future to the point where there is a collapse. Ignored is the market's dynamic feedback loop indicating resource availability and changes in people's preferences. Here is an interesting piece titled "The Cure for Manure in the Streets":

Every decade has a far-reaching cure for its ills. Around 1900 the problem was pollution. Three million horses inhabited urban America, with the healthier ones contributing from twenty to twenty-five pounds of manure each day. On every street their presence was evident as swarms of flies circulated and pungent colors permeated the air. To add to the atmosphere, almost every block boasted stables packed with urine-saturated hay.

Four-legged pollution was not alleviated by a change in the weather. When it rained, the streets turned to a muddy manure mush. During dry spells heave carriage and foot traffic beat the dung to a fine dust which, as one contemporary put it, blew "from the pavement as a sharp piercing powder, to cover our clothes, ruin our furniture and blow up into our nostrils."

New York alone was home to approximately 150,000 horses or, pessimistically, to some ten million pounds of manure a year. The offerings of the 15,000 horese of Rochester, New York, in 1900, would have covered and acre of soil wiht a heap 175 feet high. In light of ever-increasing production, many Americans feared that their cities would soon disappear under the dung.

But a godsend from turn-of-the-century pollution was becoming available. At last, rejoiced Americans, the curtain was closing on the age of equine air. Cities would now be cleaner, quieter, healthier places in which to work and live. At last, the age of the automobile arrived.

(Published in One Night Stands With American History, 197. Originally Otto L. Bettman, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible (New York: Random House, 1974) p. 3.)

Imagine if thinkers of the day had constrained social and economic development to horse-and-buggy technology because continuing the trends would spell our doom. Where people have the freedom to make their preferences known, and businesses have the freedom to respond, problems get solved. Sometimes government must get involved in ensuring those benefiting from externalities bear their fair share of the economic costs, but the solutions come from iterative feedback loops in the market. My guess is that, just as with the auto replacing the horse, marketplace innovation will bring the best green technologies into being.

The End of Intelligent Design?

First Things: The End of Intelligent Design? 

It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.

Very few religious skeptics have been made more open to religious belief because of ID arguments. These arguments not only have failed to persuade, they have done positive harm by convincing many people that the concept of an intelligent designer is bound up with a rejection of mainstream science.

The ID claim is that certain biological phenomena lie outside the ordinary course of nature. Aside from the fact that such a claim is, in practice, impossible to substantiate, it has the effect of pitting natural theology against science by asserting an incompetence of science. To be sure, there are questions that natural science is not competent to address, and too many scientists have lost all sense of the limitations of their disciplines, not to mention their own limitations. But the ID arguments effectively declare natural science incompetent even in what most would regard as its own proper sphere. Nothing could be better calculated to provoke the antagonism of the scientific community. This throwing down of the gauntlet to science explains not a little of the fervor of the scientific backlash against ID. ...

Great article.

Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin

(I blogged about this several days ago but wanted to remind my readers.)

The Pastor's Monthly Roundtable at Princeton will be hosting a free webinar on Feb 8 called:

Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin

"February's "PMR" lecture is titled "Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin" and will ask the question: If we take human evolution seriously, and can no longer appeal to an historical Fall and the accompanying idea of Original Sin, then what is human sin and where does come from?

Kenneth A. Reynhout is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology and Science at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he is working on a dissertation on Paul Ricoeur’s importance for interdisciplinary theology. Mr. Reynhout is a Co-Director of the Science for Ministry Institute."

Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin

The Pastor's Monthly Roundtable at Princeton well be hosting a free webinar on Feb 8 called:

Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin

"February's "PMR" lecture is titled "Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin" and will ask the question: If we take human evolution seriously, and can no longer appeal to an historical Fall and the accompanying idea of Original Sin, then what is human sin and where does come from?

Kenneth A. Reynhout is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology and Science at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he is working on a dissertation on Paul Ricoeur’s importance for interdisciplinary theology. Mr. Reynhout is a Co-Director of the Science for Ministry Institute."

One Hundred and Fifty Years...and Counting

Science and the Sacred: One Hundred and Fifty Years...and Counting

This past Tuesday marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, undoubtedly one of the most influential books of all time. It seems there have been dozens of Darwin conferences this year commemorating not just the publication of the book, but also the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on February 12, 1809. Most biologists, including myself, would likely consider Darwin to be the most thorough and insightful biologist in history. As a biologist, and as a Christian committed to seeking truth, I believe there is much to celebrate during this anniversary year.

On the day before the official anniversary, I was talking with a friend who had attended one of the Darwin conferences. The meeting had included some of America's most well-known experts, who weighed in on the social ramifications of the 150 year old evolution/creation debate. My friend told me that the experts at this conference had been somewhat stumped when someone in the audience asked how it could be that when faced with the enormous amount of data in support of Darwin's theory, good honest thinkers could remain young earth creationists--a line of thought so out of touch with scientific reality. I was somewhat incredulous that the experts would have been stumped by this question. Perhaps I'm the one who is naïve, but to me the answer is simple. As I see it, all it takes is a couple of one-on-one dinner conversations with a couple of articulate persons and I think you come to understand their dilemma.

I am going to discuss three people with extremely impressive academic scientific credentials who believe in a young earth. They all have something in common and, even though these three individuals know the science much better than most in our society, I think they epitomize why millions of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians refuse to blink in the face of the mass of scientific data. Since some of what I will write is based on informal conversations over a meal, I have decided not to name them. I hope you will see that I deeply respect each one of them. ...

RJS over at Jesus Creed also has a post about this post.

Darwin debate rages on 150 years after "Origin"

Reuters: Darwin debate rages on 150 years after "Origin"

PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) - Even 150 years after it first appeared in print, Charles Darwin's "On The Origin of Species" still fuels clashes between scientists convinced of its truth and critics who reject its view of life without a creator.

This "Darwin Year" -- so named because February 12 was the 200th anniversary of the British naturalist's birth and November 24 the 150th anniversary of his book -- has seen a flood of books, articles and conferences debating his theory of evolution.

While many covered well-trodden ground, some have taken new paths. But no consensus is in sight, probably because Darwinian evolution is both a powerful scientific theory describing how life forms develop through natural selection and a basis for philosophies and social views that often include atheism.

"People are encountering and rejecting evolution not so much as a science but as a philosophy," Nick Spencer, director of studies at the public theology think-tank Theos in London, told Reuters.

"Today's most eloquent Darwinians often associate evolution with atheism ... amorality (and) the idea there is no design or purpose in the universe."

He said many people had embraced anti-evolution views in the United States and Britain in recent decades "not so much because they are rejecting evolution as a science, although that is often how that sentiment is articulated, but because they're rejecting it as a philosophy about life."

"It's quite possible to be an evolutionist and not to hold that philosophy about life, to be an evolutionist and still believe in God and purpose and design," he said. ...

Birth of New Species Witnessed by Scientists

Wired: Birth of New Species Witnessed by Scientists

On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.

In many ways, the split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song.

This miniature evolutionary saga is described in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s authored by Peter and Rosemary Grant, a husband-and-wife team who have spent much of the last 36 years studying a group of bird species known collectively as Darwin’s finches. ...

"The Lost World of Genesis One" - Book Review

What to make of Genesis 1? I've never considered the chapter a straightforward historical account of creation. To the degree that the passage is about historical events, it had to be an accommodation to a pre-scientific culture … as evidenced by passages like verses 6-8. But maybe the passage … taking into the cultural accommodation … still concords with what we know about the scientific record. The general sequence of events is remarkably similar to the order in which scientists understand the world to have developed. Hugh Ross has persistently championed this concordist view and Reasons to Believe. I've read several of his books and find much of his analysis intriguing, but several aspects of his theories are just too big of a stretch. Then, of course, it is entirely possible that the passage doesn't correspond with historical events. It is a literary device to communicate some basic theological truths about origins but little more (i.e., Framework Hypothesis). This is probably the most commonly held view by many within my Mainline PCUSA world. This has always seemed a real possibility to me, but I haven't been able to shake the sense that there was more going on with this passage than crafting great literature. In short, I've never found a key that satisfactorily makes sense of the Genesis 1 … until now.

I've just finished reading John H. Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. Walton is a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and an expert in ancient Near Eastern (ANE) culture (a topic I've been trying to better acquaint myself with in recent years.) Walton points out that there was no distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" in the ANE. The gods and not natural laws ran the cosmos. This is significant for ontology … the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of being. Walton proposes that post-Enlightenment folks like us are heavily disposed to think in terms of "material ontology," while the ancients thought in terms of "functional ontology."

Walton asks to consider a chair. We examine its physical properties to ascertain whether it is a chair. This is material ontology. But what do we mean when we say a corporation exists?

Does a company exist when it has filed the appropriate papers of incorporation? Does it exist when it has a building or website? In some sense the answer to these would have to be yes. But many would prefer to speak of a company as existing when it is doing business. (23)

The corporation is understood to "exist" only when it exhibits its function. This is functional ontology.

Walton turns to the phrase tohu wabohu in 1:2 ("fromless and empty" in NRSV). The central point here is not that the earth was barren. The issue is that it served no function. Days one through three describe the establishment of functions, and days four through six describe the installment of functionaries. The functions relate to the three basic needs of humanity: Time, weather, and food.

• Day 1: Time Measurement (light and darkness)
• Day2:  Weather (expanse between waters above and below)
• Day3:  Food (formation of land with vegetation)
• Day 4: Celestial bodies function to mark off days, seasons, and years.
• Day 5: Sky and water creatures are told to be fruitful and multiply… their function is to fill the environments for which they've been created.
• Day 6: Various creatures are "produced by the land" that (like the plants on day 3) reproduce according to their kind … new generations emerge as a function of the previous generations.

Of course, the climax of day six is the creation of humanity … God's supreme functionary with the most important function. Humanity is to exercise dominion over all that God has created. Walton challenges the notion that the repeated phrase "it was good" had to do with assessing aesthetic beauty. Instead, the text refers to the fact that these things served their function, namely, to serve humanity, which in turn serves God. But there is more.

Walton notes that the climactic end in the ANE creation stories was when the gods built their temples and "rested." Rest was not in the sense of becoming idle and taking a siesta. Instead, rest meant ceasing extraordinary labor and settling into life's natural, peaceful ongoing rhythms. So here is Walton's revelation. Creation is God's temple:

"' Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things so they came into being?' Declares the Lord." (Is. 66:1-2a)

On the seventh day, God "rests" from his work and resides within his temple … the earth … with his co-regent human functionaries exercising dominion over all God has made. The Genesis 1 story is not an account of how various material items came into existence but rather an account of the inauguration of God's temple. Walton calls his understating the cosmic temple inauguration view.

The interpretive problem for us is that we are deeply immersed in the post-Enlightenment fixation on material origins. It is not that the ancients would be incapable of thinking about material origins, but they would undoubtedly have been perplexed by the question. What useful purpose would such knowledge serve? The issue is what function things serve and who established their functions.

In light of this, young earth creationism and concordist theories are way off the mark because both presume the text is about material ontology. The Framework Hypothesis may get a little closer to the mark, but even here, there is an assumption that the text is poetically dealing with material origins. The richness of understanding is severely restricted. 

Peter Inns sums up our problem well in a recent post on his blog:

If I may continue a rather reductionistic analysis (which is not accurate on the level of historical analysis, but is alive and well, nonetheless—indeed, perpetuated—in some popular circles): liberals looked at our developing knowledge of the ancient world of the Bible and said "A ha, I told you. The Bible is nothing special. Israelite religion is just like any other ancient faith. You conservatives need to get over yourselves." The fundamentalist response was (fingers firmly planted in ears) "La la la la la la, I do not hear you. There may be a millimeter of insight in some of what you are saying, but if what you are saying is true, our theology—which is the sure truth of Scripture, handed down through the ages—is false, and that is unthinkable."

Battle lines were drawn rather than theological and hermeneutical principles reassessed. ...

Walton has given us a careful reassessment of looking at the text through ancient Near Eastern eyes. I've given you only a cursory overview. The book is laid out in a series of eighteen propositions that build his cosmic temple inauguration view. The book is written for non-specialists and is relatively short. I read it in afternoon. It is, without a doubt, the most helpful book I've read on the topic.

Scot McKnight is starting a discussion of the book in a series of posts beginning this week (I believe) on his Jesus Creed blog. I highly recommend you get a copy and join the conversation.

CS Lewis: Outside the Pale? (RJS)

Jesus Creed: CS Lewis: Outside the Pale? (RJS)

... One of the comments on the last post noted that Augustine's view of  the doctrine of original sin, causes the most significant conflict for many of us today.  This came up again in an e-mail I received dealing with the doctrines of Adam, Eve, and Original Sin. The letter writer sent the following (and I quote excerpts with permission):

I went through considerable emotional turmoil when a Presbyterian pastor I respect responded to my statement that I am not sure that the human race descended from a single pair and that I believed descent from more than one pair is not necessarily in conflict with biblical teaching. This pastor declared that my views are "outside the pale" of Christianity, not just Reformed Christianity, but all Christianity (including Roman Catholic doctrine), and that if I were to attend his church, he would consider me like the Oneness Pentecostals who deny the Trinity. I am not a Christian, even if I am a nice guy. He qualified by saying that he cannot judge my state before God, but doctrinally I am not a Christian.

The letter writer went on to note that this "pastor is generally a model of charity and would not say what he said if he did not feel conscience-bound to do so." This letter poses the question I would like to consider today.

Is any position other than monogenesis of the human race with Adam and Eve as unique historical individuals outside the pale of orthodox Christianity?

To begin to consider this question I will lay out a few perspectives on the question of Adam and Eve within the boundaries of orthodox Christianity.   ...

Evolution, the Image of God, and Speech (RJS)

Jesus Creed: Evolution, the Image of God, and Speech (RJS)

... To ask if God is necessary for the evolution of mankind as we stand today misses the point. As a Christian I believe that there is no "natural mechanism" without God - because there is no creation without God. He made and sustains all. But we won't be able to prove that his "natural" mechanisms are insufficient And if people choose to assume "ontological materialism" - science won't prove them wrong.

God's design in creation is not a scientific question and shouldn't be brought into the science classroom.  Science is the study of God's creation and the "natural" mechanisms of that creation. Neither should it be asserted that science proves that there is no God, no purpose, no plan. This is a statement of faith not science. ...

Bingo!

Intelligent Design on Trial

Last month I linked a review by John Armstrong of a Nova documentary on the Dover School Board case concerning intelligent design called Intelligent Design on Trial, filmed in 2007. I finally had a chance to watch all two hours of the documentary (in 12 segments), and I agree with John; it is really quite good.

My dad was a research chemist all his life, and I've been around science and scientists all my life. I'm fully aware that many scientists have let methodological naturalism (which is essential to science) spill over into philosophical materialism. I sympathize with Christians who find such scientists arrogant and offensive. They often are. But intelligent design does not fit the strictures of science; the attempt to insert errant scientific methods to counteract obnoxious philosophical materialists is of little benefit. I'm a theistic evolutionist, and I think this documentary does a great job illustrating the reasons I find ID unhelpful. I'm sure some ID enthusiasts would differ with me, but I felt, for the most part, it was a respectful treatment of the events in Dover and of ID. If you haven't seen it, I'd encourage you to whirl it.

Belief in Evolution by Country

The Economist: Untouched by the hand of God (HT: Brad Wright)

I suspect the low numbers in Turkey are due to Islamic beliefs. The low numbers in the United States are likely due to the persistent residual impact of Scottish Common Sense Realism, which so heavily influenced American Christianity in the 18th and 19th Centuries, with its insistence on a "fact-to-fact" utterly historical reading of the early chapter of Genesis.

At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution

Wired: At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution

Two hundred years after Darwin's birth, the theory of evolution is still evolving — and finding relevance in realms far outside the biological.

Evolution is being scaled up to the level of populations, even whole ecosystems. Moreover, scientists say evolution is intertwined with other dynamics in ways science is just starting to understand.

"The process of evolution is fundamental to the universe,” said Carl Woese, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign microbiologist and one of the first proponents of this newly revised evolutionary framework. “Biology is the most obvious manifestation of it.”

Darwin described how changes in an organism are  passed from generation to generation depending on their contribution to survival. Biologists later combined this with genetics, which hadn’t been discovered in Darwin's time.

The fusion — called neo-Darwinian evolution — describes evolution as we know it today: Genetic mutations produce changes that can become part of a species' heritage and, when enough changes accumulate, produce new species.

It’s one of the most powerful descriptions of the world dreamed up by humans, central to understanding the natural world and applicable to engineering, economics and even software design. ...

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

John H. Armstrong: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

No subject stirs up more fear and opposition among a lot of conservative and fundamentalist Christians than science and faith. And nothing stirred up passions, at least in recent years, quite like the famous Dover (PA) court case regarding the school board's mandate to teach Intelligent Design (ID) alongside of evolution. In 2004 the school board ordered teachers of science to read a statement to their high school biology students about an ID alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.

For those who do not know the term Intelligent Design (ID) is the argument that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and thus there must be an intelligent agent behind the forces of nature. In Dover a textbook was donated to the school district, a book that taught ID. This prompted the teachers to sue the school board. The town was deeply and bitterly divided and the rage and emotional tempest reached a boiling point that finally impacted people and school boards all across the nation. The court case played itself out in a place where there was no jury. A lone judge, who was appointed by President Bush and was a man with a conservative judicial philosophy, heard the arguments and wrote the ruling.

The celebrated case of Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District produced arguments advanced by expert lawyers, scientists and witnesses for both sides in the debate. Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial is the television program that just aired on Public Broadcast (PBS), and is now available on DVD. (The link in the previous sentence will take you to the site where the entire presentation is discussed and argued.) This documentary, in my estimation, is both riveting and well done. ...

Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain

The Onion: Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain

DAYTON, TN—A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

"I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits," said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain, which appeared last Monday on one side of the Rhea County Courthouse. The building was also the location of the famed "Scopes Monkey Trial" and is widely considered one of Darwinism's holiest sites. "Forgive me, O Charles, for ever doubting your Divine Evolution. After seeing this miracle of limestone pigmentation with my own eyes, my faith in empirical reasoning will never again be tested."

Added Freiberg, "Behold the power and glory of the scientific method!" ...

HT: Lingamish

The Evolution of Darwin

Christianity Today: The Evolution of Darwin

It was in 1859—exactly a century and a half ago—that Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species. It is perhaps the most controversial book of the past millennium, and the work that has since made Darwin the patron saint of modern atheism. According to Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

Evolution does seem to turn many Christians into unbelievers. A famous example is the distinguished Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. Evolution gave him a profound sense of intellectual liberation from his Baptist upbringing in the South. Evolution also makes some people secular evangelists for the Darwinist cause. Michael Shermer was an evangelical Christian studying at Pepperdine University when his study of evolution convinced him to give up his faith. Shermer is now the editor of Skeptic magazine.

So does a belief in evolution automatically lead to disbelief in God? Actually, Darwin didn't think that. Darwin was not an "intellectually fulfilled atheist"; rather, he called himself an agnostic. Atheists say God does not exist, while agnostics say they don't know one way or the other. Moreover, Darwin did not boast about his unbelief; rather, he approached it with marked public caution. Shocking the mores of traditional believers may be Dawkins's thing, but it certainly wasn't Darwin's.

Here we must distinguish between Darwin the scientist and Darwin the unbeliever. Darwin, who was raised Anglican and even considered becoming a clergyman, did eventually relinquish his Christian faith. But he did not do so because of evolution. ...

At Peace With Science? (RJS)

RJS, a scientist at a first-rate University, has been doing a series on science and faith on Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog. Her installment today is a good one. Here is an excerpt from At Peace With Science? (RJS)

... In the opening of his lecture of  24/7/2008 Dr. Falk relates his experience speaking in his defense. He gave his personal testimony of faith, presented the testimony of former students in his defense, and related the beauty of the evolutionary mechanism of God's creation. All went well, a standing ovation even, until the President of the University opened the floor for questions and the question of human evolution was raised. When Dr. Falk defended human evolution and common descent the change in mood was immediate and palpable. This was neither surprising nor unexpected. Many in evangelical circles are open to the possibility that evolution was God's general method of creation - yet will retain the necessity for the special creation of Human Beings through an original pair, Adam and Eve.

The important question today is just this: Is the Christian story, the Christian faith tied to the special creation of mankind separate from all the animals or is it tied to creation in the image of God? What gives mankind a soul, an identity created in the image of God? ...

Good stuff! Check it out.

Will the real dinosaurs stand up?

BBC: Will the real dinosaurs stand up?

Most of the newly discovered dinosaurs are just that - new to science, an assessment concludes.

With many past fossil finds named on the basis of partial remains, there has been concern that a lot of double counting has been taking place.

Recent studies had even suggested this error rate might be as high as 50% - with some species being catalogued with several aliases.

But the journal Biology Letters reports that modern practice is now very good.

"My research suggests we're getting better at naming things; we're being more critical; we're using better material," said Professor Michael Benton from Bristol University, UK.

The scientist looked at the original descriptions of all 1,047 species of dinosaurs ever named, from 1824 to the present day.

He assessed the quality of the specimens on which the names were founded - the type specimens. Professor Benton said some 500 were genuinely distinct, and the confidence surrounding the latest discoveries - about one new species a fortnight - was now very high.

"The bane of the dinosaurologist's life is species that have been named on the basis of incomplete specimens," Professor Benton explained.

"In Victorian times, palaeontologists were keen to name new species, and in the excitement of the great 'bone wars' for example, from 1870 to 1890, they rushed into print with new names for every odd leg bone, tooth, or skull cap that came their way.

"Later work, on more complete specimens, reduced more than 1,000 named dinosaurs to 500 or so."

Professor Benton said science had now put in place far more rigorous naming protocols, dramatically reducing the "alias problem".

Since 1960, the great majority of new species are founded on more or less complete specimens, sometimes even whole skeletons.

Professor Benton has a critical interest in the topic because he studies the evolution of dinosaurs. He tries to understand how this famous animal group changed and diversified over almost 200 million years.

"There's no point somebody such as myself doing big statistical analyses of numbers of dinosaur species through time - or indeed any other fossil group - if you can't be confident that they really are genuinely different," he told BBC News.

"This is important also for studies of modern biodiversity. People have also been looking at our current knowledge of mammals and insects and other animal groups and asking the simple question: are the species totals and lists we use for important conclusions - including to give political advice about endangered species - are they correct?

"There's been a big debate about vast extinctions among amphibians. We have to know what the species are first, before we can talk about that."

Jesus Rode Dinosaurs?

Fellow Kansas City blogger Kevin Cawley found this one. I presume this thing is for real.

Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God

New York Times: Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God

For a university professor, Francisco J. Ayala spends a lot of time on the road.

An evolutionary biologist and geneticist at the University of California, Irvine, he speaks often at universities, in churches, for social groups and elsewhere, usually in defense of the theory of evolution and against the arguments of creationism and its ideological cousin, intelligent design.

Usually he preaches to the converted. But not always.

As challenges to the teaching of evolution continue to emerge, legislators debate measures equating the teaching of creationism with academic freedom and a new movie links Darwin to evils ranging from the suppression of free speech to the Holocaust, “I get a lot of people who don’t know what to think,” Dr. Ayala said. “Or they believe in intelligent design but they want to hear.”

Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.” ...

Experts plot humans’ course on evolutionary road

Kansas City Star: Experts plot humans’ course on evolutionary road

RALEIGH, N.C. | Scientists have mapped the evolutionary steps taken by a protein that links modern humans to a creature that swam in the oceans 450 million years ago.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, provides further rebuttal to creationists by filling in the gaps that show how evolution occurred on a molecular level.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Oregon looked at a precursor to a modern protein called the glucocorticoid receptor. In humans, the protein lives in the adrenal glands and helps regulate the body’s stress response. ...

Discussing Evolution with Care

Mouw's Musings: Discussing Evolution with Care

...Not that I have no thoughts about that subject. When I was a teenager, Bernard Ramm’s A Christian View of Science and the Scripture was quite controversial in my part of the evangelical world. So I read it, and he convinced me that something in the neighborhood of “progressive creationism” and “theistic evolution” was quite acceptable for those of us with a high view of biblical authority, and that is where I have been on the subject ever since. So if anyone asks me, I feel quite free to say that I do not believe in a literal six-day creation, and that an acceptance of the Genesis account is quite compatible with a belief in evolution.

But I worry some about giving too much encouragement to the defenders of evolution, especially because of a controversy that took place a few years ago.  It hasn’t gotten a lot of notice, but it should inject a note of caution into the views of those of us who distance ourselves from the “young earth” types. ...

Churches gear up for Evolution Sunday

Cushing Daily Citizen: Churches gear up for Evolution Sunday (HT: Presbyweb)

NORMAN, Okla. — Hundreds of churches across the globe will mark Evolution Sunday Feb. 11 with sermons and educational events dedicated to the idea that religion and science don’t have to be sworn enemies.

So far, 535 congregations from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, American Virgin Islands, and five foreign countries are scheduled to participate, including Norman Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

Local author and Norman Unitarian Universalist member Susan Cogan will speak on “Why Darwin Matters,” a talk that will focus on the validity of evolutionary theory.

“It’s a way to fight back,” Cogan said. “It’s a way to show that you can believe in God and accept evolution. The scientific debate has kind of been forced into a political and religious one.”

The church also will host “Darwin Day” Feb. 12 which will feature a screening of the 1960 film “Inherit the Wind,” which portrays a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. ...

Fossil fills gap in move from sea to land

Fossil fills gap in move from sea to land is a story in the Christian Science Monitor about scientists finding another missing link in the evolution chain.

Reflections on Intelligent Design

The most recent edition of the Presbyterian Outlook has articles focused on Intelligent Design. I found Mark Achtemeier's article Reflections on Intelligent Design interesting.

Even a casual glimpse at current headlines leaves little doubt that the Intelligent Design debate has become yet another battleground in the culture wars, with culturally-aggressive fundamentalists and equally-militant secularists well represented among the contending parties. Beneath the surface-level politics, however, there are substantial scientific and philosophical issues at play that ought to be of interest to any thinking Christian. It is the purpose of this essay to highlight some of these more substantive issues, lest they disappear beneath the waves of partisan politics.

Intelligent Design is not Creationism

Intelligent Design is not Creationism is an interesting article explaining the origins of Intelligent Design. Here is his conclusion:

Thus, ID is not based on religion, but on scientific discoveries and our experience of cause and effect, the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. Unlike creationism, ID is an inference from biological data.

Even so, ID may provide support for theistic belief. But that is not grounds for dismissing it. Those who do confuse the evidence for the theory with its possible implications. Many astrophysicists initially rejected the Big Bang theory because it seemed to point to the need for a transcendent cause of matter, space and time. But science eventually accepted it because the evidence strongly supported it.

Today, a similar prejudice confronts ID. Nevertheless, this new theory must also be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not philosophical preferences. As Professor Flew advises: "We must follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

I fully agree that ID is not Creationism and that it comes from scientific observations. But that does not make it a scientific theory. What would ID predict? (Prediction is a fundamental element of a scientific theory.)  It seems to me that the only thing ID can predict is that we will find more things we can't explain. ID is not an unreasonable conclusion. I am just questioning whether it is a scientific one.

No wonder atheists are angry: they seem ready to believe anything

Presbyweb had an article linked from the Guardian today called No wonder atheists are angry: they seem ready to believe anything. It focuses on a British program about Richard Dawkins, someone I put decisively in the camp of a secular fundamentalist. The author's closing paragraphs:

Let's be clear: it's absolutely right that religion should be subjected to a vigorous critique, but let's have one that doesn't waste time knocking down straw men. It's also right for religion to concede ground to science to explain natural processes; but at the same time, science has to concede that despite its huge advances it still cannot answer questions about the nature of the universe - such as whether we are freak chances of evolution in an indifferent cosmos (Dawkins does finally acknowledge this point in the programmes).

Dawkins seems to want to magic religion away. It's a silly delusion comparable to one of another great atheist humanist thinker, JS Mill. He wanted to magic away another inescapable part of human experience - sex; using not dissimilar arguments to Dawkins's, he pointed out the violence and suffering caused by sexual desire, and dreamt of a day when all human beings would no longer be infantilised by the need for sexual gratification, and an alternative way would be found to reproduce the human species. As true of Mill as it is of Dawkins: dream on.

If Pat Robertson is a poster child for Christian fundamentalism, then surely Dawkins is one for secular fundamentalism.

Find a Place for Intelligent Design in Public Schools

Find a Place for Intelligent Design in Public Schools is an opinion piece at Real Clear Politics by Mark Davis. I like what he has to say.

This is driving the rest of us nuts. There are millions of Americans of faith who are willing to have evolution taught as what it is – a theory. Conversely, there are staunch believers in evolution who have no quarrel with a school curriculum that finds room for the discussion of whether all of creation is a happy accident or the plan of a supreme being.

The battle is over where that subject comes up.

Religious people have had it up to their eyeballs with the clumsy overreach of school districts that have perverted their responsibility for religious neutrality by exercising genuine religious hostility.

They want the notion of intelligent design taught in science class, right alongside Darwinism, and let Madalyn Murray O'Hair whine all she likes in whatever dark corner of the afterlife she occupies.

But there's a problem: Intelligent design is not science.

....

We will not know the answers to these matters in our time on Earth. So let's work together to find a way to bring the scientific, philosophical and even religious teachings into schools – not to compete in a loser-leaves-town brawl, but to blend onto the plate of a thorough education.

Orthodoxy of a Liberal Sort

I am not inclined to view intelligent design as a scientific theory. Nevertheless, I think the judge in the recent Dover case was breathtakingly prejudiced and an enemy of open debate in education.

Law professor Paul Campos wrote a great opinion piece today called Orthodoxy of a Liberal Sort. His opening was:

A sure sign that a belief system has triumphed over its opponents is that it stops thinking of itself as a belief system at all. Instead it becomes "what every rational person knows to be the case," or "simple common sense," or, more concisely still, "the truth." In other words, the truly orthodox never think of themselves as orthodox. This allows them to crush all dissent to their orthodoxy with a good conscience, since what reasonable objection could there be to sincere attempts to stamp out self-evident falsehoods?

This syndrome applies to so much more than just intelligent design debates in our public discourse.

Idea not Based on Religion

Idea not Based on Religion is an editorial in USA Today. The closing paragraph says,

"Efforts to mandate intelligent design are misguided, but efforts to shut down discussion of a scientific idea through harassment and judicial decrees hurt democratic pluralism. The more Darwinists resort to censorship and persecution, the clearer it will become that they are championing dogmatism, not science."

I don't believe ID should be mandated, nor do I believe ID to be a scientific theory. (If a theory can't be falsified, it isn't science. You can't prove a negative, namely that an intelligent designer didn't do something. All you can say is that when X happens, Y follows. Repeated enough times, you can come to reasonable certainty about the relationship between X and Y and theorize about related variables. From there, you begin to build scientific paradigms.) Science requires a kind of methodological atheism. The operative word here is methodological. You have to assume a natural cause. Otherwise, why would you go looking for one? You can't do science without this assumption.

The problem is that many scientists take this methodological tool as an ontological reality. That is unscientific! By definition, the scientist, speaking as a scientist, has to remain silent on matters beyond the natural world (i.e., intelligent design, God, etc.)

ID backers are right to be angry about being dismissed as stealth religious fanatics. Based on evidence from science and reason, ID is a reasonable conclusion. It just isn't a testable one in the scientific sense of theories. On the other hand, scientists have a right to be angry about mandates to teach non-scientific ideas as science.

I don't think most people on any side of these issues are even trying to listen to what others are saying. This is about overreaching ideologies. Such are the days we live in.

For another interesting take on the topic, check out What's wrong with intelligent design, and with its critics at the Christian Science Monitor. We may differ about the ability to define science, but I think he has good insights into the topic.

Belief in the Balance

Denis Hancock of the Reformed-Angler sent me a link to Belief in the Balance, an article in the Columbia Missouri Tribune. I thought the article made some helpful distinctions. I especially like this quote:

"It's not that science refutes religion," Miller said. "It's that science looks for natural answers to questions, and if you say, 'Well, we have a tailbone just because our designer put it there,' then you can't make any predictions based on that. You can't explain it. And there's no way to test for that designer."

The ability to test a theory is elemental to science and there is no way to test for an intelligent designer. But science-generated knowledge is limited precisely because science is limited to empirical observation only. Other types of knowledge point to an Intelligent designer, but I question whether the science class is the place to teach that knowledge.

Thanks Denis.

Science and Religion Share Fascination in Things Unseen

Denis Hancock had this article from the New York Times linked today. Science and Religion Share Fascination in Things Unseen. If you live anywhere near the state of Kansas (.4 miles away, in my case), you can't escape this topic right now.