Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Just a few random notes. I don’t read much of John Cole’s web-site any more. Lately, there hasn’t been much there that hasn’t already been said on Daily Kos. But I was glad to see him counter the idea that we should go after McCain for his crony’s big payments to terrorists. It’s good that he is providing some perspective on this. Prior to that, I was inclined to accept a worse interpretation of Chiquita’s actions. Not that Chiquita are saintly by any stretch… And, I still have questions - like, why if this was the case, was Chiquita forced to pay a big fine for their actions, and what happened after they stopped making those payments? And, of course, Fox News, McCain, and their media friends will seldom stop to include the context making perspective on Barack Obama and his time spent serving on the board of a community organization alongside a former Weatherman… or anything else. But that’s a separate battle, I guess.

Also from BJ, I think it’s sad that Cristopher Hitchens has to try it out to figure out that waterboarding is torture. And I don’t like Hitchens, his attitude, and some of his politics. But if there is an honest doubter left, let him read this piece.

Finally, a thought of my own about the W Clark - J McCain dustup. I preface by saying that no - nothing Clark said could sanely be construed as an attack on McCain’s service or POW status. That’s stupid. But there’s a meme going around that because his service was not a wartime command and did not involve any strategic operations, that it does not go as a qualification for the Presidency. I disagree. First, having directly experienced years of torture, McCain has been less craven than others in his party where it comes to the U.S. implementation of the practice. That’s not a unique qualification. Obama has opposed torture - I think more forcefully than McCain - and has arrived at a qualifying position on the matter without having directly experienced it. But, it is a qualification. The contrary position is a disqualification and is part of the reason that George Bush fails to pass the Commander In Chief threshhold. The other qualification is one that the pundits have mentioned some: that his perserverance as a POW shows character, and character is a relevant qualification. Now, McCain has character flaws - he’s proven that over and over again… but so does Obama. The point is that McCain’s service is a qualification, even if it isn’t a unique or necessarily sufficient one.

That’s my political ramble for today.

One other thing worth mentioning:
Paul House is free on bond, awaiting a new trial.

Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded he would not have been convicted based on the DNA evidence that emerged years after his trial, and a federal judge ordered prosecutors to retry House or free him.

House, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair, left prison in a white sport utility vehicle with his mother and his state-appointed public defender.

I met his mother at our performance of The Exonerated. I expect Mr. House to become the next in a long string of exonorees who would otherwise have been poisoned to death by our government, with our approval, using our tax dollars.

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I was going to wish everybody a Happy 4th of July on July 4th but that won’t be possible.

I am leaving tomorrow morning for Charleston, SC and will celebrate the 4th down there at a concert. I am going to see the Old Crow Medicine Show and the Dave Matthews Band at the Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Park.

So if you hear a tremendous roar coming from the direction of Charleston it simply means that OCMS is performing my theological altar call and I have gotten caught up in the moment.

If you hear two roars it means that they are performing this one.

Ya’ll have a good holiday.

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Hopefully, this week, I’ll have time to post another in the Universal Common Descent series, and I just wanted to say a word or two about the importance of it.

First - it isn’t very important. In the grand scheme of things, it is certainly no-where near as important as the big things in life: family, friends, community, or the things that threaten them: war, famine, plague, hatred.

Even by standards of the interblag, it isn’t of supreme importance. Certainly, when someone is WRONG on the INTERNET, it must be corrected. But really, there are a lot of issues that are more interesting to many people, and a lot of them that are more fun to a lot of people.

But in real life, the only reason to be right about UCD (and evolution more generally speaking) is if your career or your hobbies are directly related to the life sciences. Generally speaking, we want quality education, and we want to keep sectarian religion from being taught as a science class. And, really, that’s about it. The rest of us can live just as well wrong about it, or unthinking of it as right about it.

What about people who interpret the Bible to mean evolution is untrue? This stance requires one of four options for those folks - none of which are necessarily terribly important. Some have some undesirable aspects, though:

1) Believe that one’s Biblical exegesis is more important than observed evidence. Not the end of the world, but one can imagine ways that this could lead to a bad situation. I’m thinking of those whose Biblical exegesis leads them to believe that doctors and medicine should be eschewed in favor of prayer. I personally would encourage people not to adopt this viewpoint, especially when they are responsible for getting their kids to the doctor.
2) Remain ignorant, willfully if necessary, of the science. This can include actively and knowingly disseminating incorrect information about the science. Or it can mean simply listening to the creationists rather than looking at the evidence or listening to the scientists. Again, not harmful except if taken to extremes. My objection to this stance is that it employs or empowers dishonesty. Those who actively and knowingly disseminate incorrect or misleading information about the science are employing dishonesty. Those who are listening to them empower it. I generally object to deception, including self-deception. On the other hand, none of us are completely innocent in that regard. The other side of this option is to form no opinion and listen to no one: refusing to care about the question. This is a perfectly valid viewpoint for those who aren’t science aficionados or employed in the sciences or science education.
3) Re-think one’s interpretation of the Bible. For some, this isn’t a difficult option because their perspective on the Bible is that it is authoritative spiritually but not necessarily scientifically. For others, trying to interpret Genesis in light of science in such a way that there are no contradictions is a bit of a task, and may require some mental gymnastics that bring one dangerously close to self-deception.
4) Re-think one’s fundamental ideas about the Bible. About what it is, and what it means. The problem is, that evolutionary science is a pretty thick subject, and one shouldn’t really have to wade through it to discover that science contradicts some ideas about the Bible. If you have a viewpoint about the Bible that requires you to believe its literal statements of material fact are literally true, then you probably have bigger problems in your perspective than the contradiction with what is ultimately a somewhat esoteric branch of science. A good place to start is with Bart Ehrman’s misquoting Jesus, which is a good, if overly simple, overview of the difficulties in reconstructing the original “Bible” from the surviving manuscripts we have of it - focusing only on the New Testament. It doesn’t get much into the evidence of how the books themselves were put together and sourced, and how they might have been redacted before reaching the forms that are represented in those manuscripts - so something that deals with that area might be a good next step. Certainly being forced to the position by evolutionary science would be taking the long way round to arrive at the point where one got curious about what the Bible really is, enough to change perspectives on it.

Finally, we have two more issues that may seem important to some people, but really just don’t add up to much if you ask me. They are creationism as an apologetic and evolution as a counterapologetic. Some folks like to deny evolution to prove the existence of God, but this doesn’t work even if evolution is false. It only means that whatever brought us the diversity of life on earth wasn’t evolution. It doesn’t prove that it was God any more than it proves that we owe our existence to some New Age “life force”, a cosmic egg, the Tao, or any number of other conjectures about the origin of life. One creationist truism is that it takes intelligence to bring forth intelligence… but the fact is that we have never observed intelligence being brought forth by intelligence. We’ve never observed life being created by intelligence. In fact, the only analogs we can find - new life arising through reproduction - shows us life and intelligence coming about by ordinary, natural means - at least as far as we can see. So, while this by itself does not prove that natural forces are all that are at work, or that our current diversity of life are owed only to natural forces, it certainly does not do anything to provide a basis for the notion that life and intelligence must come from an intelligent agent. This notion is simply an intuition that westerners are fond of, trained as we are to think by analogy to the machine. It is a hunch entirely devoid of empirical or logical basis.

On the other hand, some fear that if it is taught that evolution can produce the diversity of life on Earth without need for a Creator, then it is natural to discard our notions of God - that evolution is proof of atheism. It isn’t, any more than power steering is disproof of a human steerer. Certainly, as is mentioned above, there are notions about God - or more precisely the mode of Creation - which can be answered in a way that is inconsistent from what we know of evolution, but people like Francis Collins, Keith Miller, and Kenneth Miller could not exist if evolution actually disproved God.

So, for those of you who aren’t just entertained by science and the stories of ingenuity, serendipity, and cautious investigation that lie behind all of modern scientific thinking, there isn’t much reason to pay attention. Whatever your worldview, the sciences should not present a major obstacle to you. Whatever your career - as long as it doesn’t deal directly with the sciences, you should be able to make your living without knowing too much about it - or even knowing whether it is right or wrong.

For those of you who are interested, but who have doubts about what the evidence says - stay tuned!

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Personally, I thought the Heinz mayo commercial was hilarious.

The kids definitely didn’t get their accents from their mum!

It surprised me that the ad was pulled from the airwaves in the UK but that is because I just assume the British are a little less uptight than Americans. Maybe I am wrong about that. Maybe being uptight is universal.

O’Reilly said it was “obviously a gay thing” but I am not so sure about that.

The company claims that the message they were trying to convey is that using the product is “like having a New York deli man in your kitchen”

Just make very sure you kiss him before you take off for work.

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Please, please, do not let election 2008 become Bible Wars 2008. For the record, it’s very doubtful that Dobson or Obama have a proper understanding of the book behind their religion. Obama’s may have the advantage of being more vague and more self-consciously informed by modern ethical notions. Dobson’s may have the advantage in better understanding (slightly) the consensus moral viewpoint of the original authors, at least on some issues.

Obama portrays a commonly growing trend of thinking that the only bad ideas about gay people in the Bible are in Leviticus with the dietary codes. He probably believes that Jesus rejected the Hebrew Law.

Dobson most likely thinks that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Matthew wrote Matthew, Paul wrote Timothy, and that the original autographs (copies originally written down by the authors) of he Bible - which cannot be reconstructed, and in some cases may never have existed until long after the authors’ deaths - were the inerrant Word of God… and somehow transfers this notion to our modern Bibles, which actually are merely the best possible reconstructions of documents that are now lost forever in their original forms.

These are subjects for the seminary and the Bible history classes, not a Presidential election in the 21st century United States of America.

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I have stated before on this blog and in other contexts that universal common ancestry is “proven” by multiple lines of very strong evidence. I sometimes take it for granted that most people are at least dimly aware of this, even if they haven’t looked into the question personally in any depth. That is a patently absurd assumption, as a majority of Americans doubt evolution. This is a sad artifact of a program of deliberate deception, carried out largely as a project of fundamentalist Christian churches, dating back to Darwin’s own day. The end result is that many people have been more exposed to people whom they are inclined to trust repeating or casting aspersions on this science than have been to the science itself.

It’s not a very simple issue. It’s difficult for anyone to spend enough time on the subject to get a clear picture of what the hard evidence conveys, despite the fact that the evidence is enormous, and the picture it conveys is strikingly clear and incontrovertible.

I’ve been asked by a skeptic to lay out some sources for the evidence that will back up my claim that anyone aware of the evidence will find that, rather than a leap of faith being required to accept evolution - a giant leap of faith is required to reject evolution.

It is no simple task, but I feel confident that anyone who reads this post and subsequent posts fairly, and checks the claims that seem dubious to them against trustworthy sources until they are satisfied of each claim’s overall accuracy, will find themselves in the same position I am in. That is to say, they will consider universal common descent (UCD) proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Or put more eloquently, they will find it ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ (-Stephen Jay Gould)

This first post in the UCD series is about the fossil record, discussed very broadly. We learn in grammar school that the fossil record is one of the most important sets of evidence for evolution.

We live in a life-rich world, full of diversity, populated with more varmits, literally, than we can count the species of. In this world, we have an abundance of rocks, whose ages we can estimate. And in many of those rocks, we find the fossil remains of a grand diversity of life that lived here in eras long past. Many of these remains are familiar - or at least similar to organisms that still live today. Others are unfamiliar to modern eyes. But there is a curious point that must bookend the discussion of present life and ancient life. That is the point that the oldest rocks we find show no trace of life. Rocks only slightly younger than those oldest show unicellular life and unicellular life only.

Scientists don’t know how that unicellular life got here. But they know that for hundreds of millions of years, that is the only life that left us remains in the rocks. And, they know, in general terms, how life changed over time so that the unicellular life of 3 billion years ago gave way to the diversity we see today.

I’ve created a chart of now-living organisms, broadly speaking. The chart shows estimations of how old are the fossils that can be found that would be categorized in these groups. I must stress that these oldest fossils were *not* the same types of organisms as exist today. They were different species - different genera - different families. These oldest fossils referred to are only those that carry the signature that makes these groupings unique. Whether it’s mouse, man, or pachyderm we know a mammal when we see one. The oldest mammals on the chart probably resembled mice more than anything else living today, but they were not mice by any useful scientific definition. The point of the chart is to show that before that time, there were no mammals of any sort in the fossil record. And, though there may have been mammals alive prior to that time - perhaps by a few million years - it is very unlikely that there mammals were alive from 300 million years ago to 195 million years ago (a space of over 100 million years) without leaving a single fossil trace. In other words, there was a very long time when there were no mammals on the earth.

If evolution is true mammals could not be here before the reptiles from which they evolved. If we stretch our imaginations, we could think that they could preexist reptiles if they evolved from amphibians or from fish. There are reasons, independent of the fossil record to show us that they could not have evolved from amphibians or fish, but even if we ignore these, we cannot stretch so far as to see how mammals could have evolved from an invertebrate.

If most anything other than evolution is true (one can contrive exeptions - and this has been done) then we could find mammals three billion years ago, find them extinct two billion years ago, and find the wide array of them we see today only in the rocks a million years old or younger. In fact, we could find almost any arrangement of mammals in the fossil record. Instead we find them continuously from a time only about 100 million years after the oldest reptile fossils to the present.

According to evolution, humans must appear at some point after the oldest great ape, since it is the apes from which we evolved (or, cladistically speaking, we are apes). If evolution were not true, there is no reason we should expect not to find humans older than the apes, or even older than the other primates. Humans could be the among the oldest mammals - assuming that they did not have to evolve from reptiles that resembled rodents as much as they did any other non-reptilian creature.

The following chart is not 100% accurate. New fossils are found every day, and occasionally, the “oldest” specimen moves the date back a few million years. The figures behind the chart were gathered in haste, and may not reflect the best scientific values. However, the figures used for this chart are at least close approximations to the most ancient ranges for fossils of each category represented.

The chart is not a very good representation of the various forms of life on Earth. Only a few broad categories are presented, representing the most familiar of our moden flora and fauna. To make a more comprehensive chart would be onerous work for someone who has so little time, and would make following the genesis of individual groupings in the fossil record a difficult task for the reader. I’ve left out all the invertebrate animals, many interesting varieties of vertebrate animals, many interesting varieties of plants, and several other major groups like fungi and protists. Nevertheless, what I have preserved in the chart makes a striking picture about how the set of organisms living on earth has changed over time. Each group makes an appearance before which it is entirely absent from the fossil record for millions or billions of years. Each group appears only after its evolutionary predecessors have appeared - predecessors which, by multiple independent sets of evidence, must be their evolutionary ancestors. There is not a single mammal fossil that is found older than the oldest reptiles. Not a single flowering plant as old as the oldest algae (neither unicellular nor multicellular algaes are included on this chart, but both are much older than anything that appears on it!). Not a single reptile as old as the fishes:

The horizontal axis is scaled as “mya” or million years ago.

Had there been room, I might have included the dinosaurs. Had I, you would have found that the oldest dinosaurs were younger than the oldest reptiles, and the oldestest birds were younger than the oldest dinosaurs. As it is, you can see that birds are much younger than the reptiles (specifically dinosaurs) from which they evolved. If nothing else, let your eyes find the “fish” line, and read upward from there until you reach “modern humans”.

My chart may be a tad sparse, but this same thing can be done ad infinitum with any set of organisms, those still living or those extinct. Each time, the same thing will be found. A vacuum over millions or billions of years, then an appearance some time after the appearance of their evolutionary predecessors.

As I hinted earlier, if we had no other evidence to guide us, we would be able to explain this arrangement in other ways, if very contrived ones. “Young Earth” Creationists, who reject the various means of testing the ages of our rocks, nevertheless must acknowledge that “older” fossils appear in “deeper” strata of rock. They propose that these strata represent depths at which the fossilized organisms were buried during the great flood, and that humans and birds were best at finding the “high ground”. Their model doesn’t speak very well of itself, since fishes should have done at least as well for themselves as aquatic mammals, rather than being among the first buried. And, of course, multiple lines of extremely strong evidence - attested to by all but the most backward of Creationists - prove that our methods of estimating the ages of these fossil rocks may be flawed, but not nearly so flawed as to consistently produce results millions of years off and fitting so perfect a pattern of evolution.

Others - including some “Old Earth” creationists and their more reticent cousins in “Intelligent Design” suggest that God created (or designed) the species in exactly the order that evolution would predict, but without making use of its mechanism, for His own inscrutable reasons. If this possibility seems hopeful now, it should begin to appear less hopeful as we get into some of the other pieces of evidence that come to bear on this question.

For now, this has been a primer on the broadest strokes of evolution as it applies to a few major groupings of living organisms.

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Got this in my email box today

****CAN OBAMA BE PRESIDENT?
It seems that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president afterall for the following reason:
Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between “December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986? . Presidential office requires a natural-born citizen if the child was not born to two U.S. citizen parents, which of course is what exempts John McCain though he was born in the Panama Canal. US Law very clearly stipulates: “.If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.” Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. citizen and Ob ama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawai’i being a territory) the mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama’s birth, but *after* age 16. It doesn’t matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth when she was 18 in Hawai’i. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen. As aformentioned, she was a young college student at the time and was not. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Cizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office.
*** Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President. *** Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. citzen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia. Now you can see why Obama’s aides stopped his speech about how we technically have more than 50 states, because it would have led to this discovery. This is very clear cut and a blaring violation of U.S. election law. I think the Gov. of California would be very insterested in knowing this if Obama were elected President without being a natural-born U.S. citizen, and it would set precedence. Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days***

Maybe this is something that has been thrown around since I have been out of town and out of touch.

Has this been debunked or is there something to it?

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I took that long lonesome trip back to work today. And now I have to wade through a ton of paper and emails. Many phone calls to return and I know if history is any indicator I will spend the next week trying to get my feet back on the ground.

I did have a wonderful time and was able to avoid almost all news. I was watching the U.S. Open when NBC broke the news about the death of Tim Russert. I was very, very sorry to hear that. You can’t spend your life dwelling on the fact that we all skate constantly on very thin ice but you can’t help but be reminded of that when you hear that somebody has fallen through.

He was only 58 years old.

So no matter how difficult it will be to get back on track this week I know it sure beats the alternative.

Life is a lot like vacation. It is very good and it is very, very short.

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Considering as how Obama already has the black vote wrapped up, and motivated to appear in force, this sounds, to this cynic’s ear, like an appeal to white America.

A Sister Souljah moment, if you will pardon the cliche’.

Bill Cosby raised the ire of many in the black community when he started his one-man crusade against all the social ills of black folk. Deserved? Yes, in that he gave every appearance of leading with his ego and had so little to say about the underlying issues that give rise to these social ills. No, in that his message had some truth to it. There are some Bad Things going on in the black community and Something Needs To Be Done About It. I don’t think that Something is to shove a sock in the mouths of mainstream music artists who portray the ills of that culture along with every other teenage obsession.

From the article text - that is, not from BO himself:

The Democratic presidential hopeful noted that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, making them five times more likely to live in poverty and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.

I fear the staff writer has confused cause and effect to a degree here. Of course, as with any cyclical feedback phenomenon, cause and effect are sometimes hard to distinguish. Nevertheless, one hopes that Barack Obama can correctly distinguish the stronger forcing in that cycle. And, of course, that he is sincere in the first place.

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Rare glimpse at the evolution of a complex new ability:

Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”

The linked text is something far too people understand about evolution. It’s worth the post just to get people to click that link.

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