The Last Neandertal

Ever since I first seriously studied Neandertals (yes, that's the correct spelling) as an undergrad, I have had this rather sad, poignant image in my head:

It's somewhere between 24,000 and 30,000 years ago. It's night time. There's a young man sitting alone by a small camp fire fire. I always imagine him as young but an adult because someone who is old enough to have learned survival skills and yet young enough to be able to fight off disease and starvation is the one who is likely to have survived. I imagine him as male because I am male, and therefore have an easier time putting myself in his position if he is as well. He is the last Neandertal on Earth.

His band is gone, except for him. This band may have included his parents and siblings, and likely included his mate (assuming, and it is an assumption, that they were given to monogamy) and children. He's the last one, though. The others may have died in a violent conflict with the other creatures, the tall and thin ones with the high foreheads who are the ancestors of you and me, or they may have died of starvation due to a changing climate, or they may have simply been pushed away from their normal food sources by the other creatures. It doesn't matter now, because they are gone and only our young man remains, and he is starving to death.

He sits by his fire not knowing that he is the last of his species. Bands as small as his was are fluid, members come and go, and maybe he expects that he will find more of his kind and life will go on, should he survive.

Is this pondering likely to have been true? Of course not. The last Neandertal is just as likely to have been female as male, may have been a child or may have been elderly. They may have met a violent fate at the hands of an anatomically modern human (our species) or a wild animal. There is some evidence to suggest that Neandertals could have interbred with anatomically modern humans and therefore there may not have been a last Neandertal, but rather an elimination of the species as their genes were spread within (or phased out of) the Homo Sapien sapien gene pool.

Stories like this one about the last Neandertal occupy a weird place in archaeology. On the one hand, there is rarely data to support them, and therefore they are on shaky ground from the start. They often create images in our minds that can interfere with our ability to judge data more clearly. At the same time, these sorts of stories are often what keep us interested in our work and prevent us from making the mistake of thinking of past people as little more than statistics.

The Neandertal vanished somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago. We don't know what their last days were actually like, whether they vanished slowly, were victims of violence, or simply integrated into the anatomically modern human population. The last unequivocal evidence we have for them is from southern Spain, and it dates to approximately 25,000 years ago. In the same cave that holds this evidence, there is cave painting associated with anatomically modern humans that dates to approximately 20,000 years ago. Whether we pushed them out or they simply faded away, we ultimately took their niche.

Piltdown Men, Cardiff Giants, and Creationism

Every now and again, I meet a Biblical literalist who decides that they are going to try to show me what a house of cards evolution is. Typically this involves making statements that indicate a rather stunning ignorance of the fossil record, DNA, mutation, and the basic scientific method, and more often than not a strange misunderstunding of the second law of thermodynamics. Not typically, but often enough that I have taken notice, I will be presented with the example of the Piltdown Hoax, an episode in anthropology's history that is apparently supposed to make me feel like scientists don't know what they're doing and therefore all of their results are invalid.

For those who don't know, the Piltdown hoax occured at the village of Piltdown in England. In 1912, Charles Dawson claimed to have been given fragments of a skull by workmen at the Piltdown Gravel pit, who he said told them that they had dug it out of the pit. The cranial vault (the part that forms the part of the head where are brains are) and face were those of modern humans, but the jaw was that of an ape. Many of the early paleoanthropologists* were won over and thought that this was an example of an early human in Europe - someone who was not quite a modern human but was well on his way to being such. Four decades later, advances in microscopes and other lab tools, as well as a much fuller understanding of the homonid fossil record, led to the skull being shown to be a fake - a human skull and an orangutan jawbone that had been carved, ground, and stained to make them look as if they belonged together. The identity of the hoaxer was never entirely determined (though many people have their own pet theories as to who it was), but the supporters of the skull as a part of the fossil record were forced to concede.

The implication that the creationists often give is, essentially, if anthropologists/paleontologists could be fooled by a hoax then all of their results must be false. Putting aside the logical problems here (proving one result false doesn't necessarilly prove another result false, and even if evolution were proven false, that doesn't prove Biblical creationism true), the fact of the matter is that this still doesn't work to show the folly of evolutionary scientists because it was the evolutionary scientists who demonstrated that this was a hoax and who revised their views based on the demonstration of thsi fact.

However, the thing that is most interesting to me about the times when the Piltdown Hoax has been brought up is that it is treated as a "gotcha' moment" by the people bringing it up, I have been told, each time, some variation on "Well, you don't know the true history of the study of evolution, because the Piltdown Hoax has been hidden from you!" These people are always shocked, and a bit confused, when I inform them that not only has the Piltdown Hoax not been hidden from me or anyone else who has studied human evolution, but every single introudctory paleoanthropology, archaeology, and physical anthropology book I used as an undergraduate discussed the Piltdown Hoax at length. It's a great instructive tale - it tells us about how enthusiasm can lead someone to the wrong conclusions (and therefore why we should be cautious in examining data) and it tells us about how a decades-old conslusion can be reversed by new information. It's good both as a cautionary tale and as a description of how science corrects itself over time. So, um, no, this wasn't hidden from us. In general, science doesn't try to hide it's dirty laundry, but instead scientists try to learn from it (otherwise, no scientist working now would ever have heard of the ether, hyper-diffusionism, phrenology, or any of a number of other things that we have all heard of).

In order to understand Piltdown a bit better, it is necessary to understand not only the nature of the hoax, but also the context in which it occured. By the early 20th century, most biologists and paleontologists had accepted evolution (remember, the theory of evolution by descent with modification was, at the time that the Piltdown Hoax occured, only around 50 years old). Human ancestors were being found throughout Europe, and Germany had one in the Neanderthal and France had one in the Cro Magnon. While these species represented by these finds would eventually be found throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, they were for some time thought to be endemic to those regions in which the fossils were found. Even after it was discovered that they were spread more widely, there was astill a certain amount of national pride tied up in the "first find" of each.

To this end, the British very much wanted an "early man" of their own. When the Piltdown skull was found, it was just what they wanted: early man, but with the cranial vault (and hence the brain) more modern (or as they would think it, "more developed") than those found in France or Germany. This was in keeping with the British ideal of themselves as intellectual leaders. So, at least a portion of the early belief in Piltdown resulted from wishful thinking on the part of the British scientists examining it. Some of it also probably was due to, frankly, novelty. These pre-modern homonids were a new discovery, and were just beginning to really be appreciated. So, just as nationalistic wishful thinking likely led some to accept the hoax as real, so too did the excitement of finding another example of "early man."

So, the story does work well as a cautionary tale against assuming that all scientific conclusions are correct - and in that the creationists who have pointed me to it have a small point, though their overgeneralization that this dismisses all science (or at least all science that disagrees with their assumptions) is foolish. It also works well as a description of how science can be self-correcting, which is ultimately one of the great strengths of science, and one that is lacking from any system of belief where the subscribers assume that they know the answer before they start gathering evidence.

When the Piltdown Hoax gets brought up, I usually try to contrast it with the Cardiff Giant.

In 1869, a farmer named Stub Newell, in Cardiff, New York sent a group of laborers to dig a well behind his barn. They had only dug a few feet when they hit stone. Digging a bit around the stone, it rapidly became clear that they had hit a large, stone man. Although the laborers report that Newell was annoyed and suggested re-burying the figure, it was only a short time later that a tent was erected and people were charged admission to come and see the Cardiff Giant. And people came by the thousands, making Newell rather wealthy in a very short time. The businessmen of Syracuse, the nearest large city, even bought a 3/4 interest in the giant for $30,000 (which amounts to several million when converted to modern currency) in order to ensure that it stayed in the local area and kept the money rolling in to Syracuse.

The hoax was, of course, eventually uncovered. Harvard's professor of paleontology, Othniel Marsh (and you think you have problems, look at that guy's name!) was asked to examine it, and proclaimed it a fake based on it being a soft stone that wouldn't preserve well for long in the local soils, and the little fact that there were tool marks obvious on the "giant." People in town began to talk, and it came out that a large heavy container had been moved by wagon to Newell's farm the previous year, and that Newell had been heard bragging about the hoax to family members.

Finally, late in 1869, George Hull, a friend and distant relative of Newell's, confessed that he and Newell had created the hoax. And with that, the Cardiff Giant became one of the better known hoaxes of American history.

Okay, so why do I bring this up when others bring up Piltdown? Simple: it's the same basic thing, but from the creationist side. The Bible states flatly that there were giants on Earth in the early days, the most famous of which was, of course, Goliath. Now, it needs to be remembered that Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published ten years earlier in 1859, and while it hadn't quite reached complete scientific acceptance, it was at least seriously considered by most scientists and accepted by many. Contrary to popular belief, the concept of evolution existed well before Charles Darwin, but it was a concept that was hard to grasp and even harder to test scientifically, until Darwin had the insights that solved the puzzle. For the first time, creationism had a strong cultural competitor, and one that explained more while requiring less assumptions, and was supported by all physical evidence**.

So, people flocked to see the Cardiff Giant in part because of the simple novelty and spectacle of it, and in large part because it seemed to provide physical evidence for the truth of the Bible. Where the evidence proving the hoax was visible, wishful thinking wiped it from the public's minds. Sermons were written, visitors were moved, and it was all a hoax. However, while scientists teach the younger generation about Piltdown, I've not yet heard of a creationist church telling it's memberships about the giant, and in fact I often hear members of such churches claiming other known hoaxes as evidence for the truth of the Book of Genesis.

So, no, the Piltdown Man hoax doesn't disprove evolution, and the Cardiff Giant demonstrates that those on the other side can be just as ready to accept a hoax as truth.







*Though, contrary to many claims, far from all. This was a period in which such hoaxes were not uncommon, and so there were many who suspected the skull from the start.

**this may seem to some like an over-statement, but it must be taken into account that both paleontology and general biology had been recognize similarities between animals both living and extinct for a couple of centuries, and so the notion of evolution was very strongly supported by the state of the observable world, but there was no plausible causal mechanism known, so many people dismissed it out of hand. That is what Darwin changed - he didn't introduce the idea of evolution, he just introduced a mechanism that explained all of the evidence for evolution in a way that was testable and could predict further evidence, which has been consistently found.

Hyena Vomit and Human Evolution

The 1950s through 1980s were a time of very active change in archaeology. New technologies coupled with changes in the way that humans are viewed by archaeologists (less mythic "man the conqueror", more practical "humans as a specieis adapted to life on Earth") spurred a number of advances in the way that archaeologists study our evolutionary past.

One of the first steps along the path to re-evaluating our evolutionary past was determining whether or not many of the archaeological sites that had been used to argue for the particular model of the human past were, in fact, archaeological sites at all. High on this list were caches of animal bones that litter the African landscape. Often found in caves or rock shelters, these caches of bone indicate selection - only certain pieces of bone are found, not entire skeletons, and the types of bones are fairly consistent across sites - and show signs of modification - marks on the bones and bone breakage. The selection of bone and the signs of modification had long been taken as evidence of homonid (the family of animals to which humans belong, and of which humans are the only surviving member) activity, and specifically of hunting and butchering.

This changed as archaeologists began to look at the behavior of other animals that are present in the parts of Africa where our ancestors wandered. Researchers discovered that the feeding habits of certain large cats likely created some of the bone caches that had been found, with the marks on the bone coming from teeth or post-depositional environmental factors.

One particularly important book, The Hunters or the Hunted?, by a fellow with the delightful name of C.K. Brain, discussed bone caches found in African caves with an eye towards evaluating what materials came from homonid activities, and what was due to animals, both large and small, that also selectively leave bones behind.

However, the study that really grabbed my attention as an undergraduate involved the examination of hyena vomit. Yes, the study was done in the 1970s, and everyone was on drugs then, but there actually was a valid reason to study hyena vomit.

You see, hyenas have been around for approximately 26 million years, meaning that they were wandering the African savannah along with our early ancestors. Hyenas also are scavengers, meaning that they get access to carcasses after other animals have already had a chance to take what they want from them. Hyenas are well-adapted to scavenging because one of the many things that they can do is swallow bone and vomit it back up on demand. "How does this help them" you ask? Simple - the swallow the bone and their stomach begins to digest the grease and meat left on and in the bone, allowing them to gain nourishment from remains for which other animals would have little use. Once their system has extracted what it can from the bone, they vomit it back up, leaving behind select pieces of bone in piles that might look like a homonid had gone about picking up choice cuts of meat and leaving the bone behind to be discovered by it's descendants a couple of million years later.

With the results of this study, people studying homonids were better able to eliminate hyena puke sites from their lists o' potential archaeological sites. A useful thing to be sure, and a tool that allowed the view of humanity's evolutionary past to be refined.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the study of homonids during this period is that it reflected how a change in how we think about ourselves can allow data to be more fully examined. Prior to this period, it had been common to think about "man the hunter" and "man the conqueror" - whether this was glorified or villified, we were seen as beings that could and did take the world by force and make it as we wished, and this was reflected in many of the models of our evolutionary past. With Post-WWII social change, not to mentiont echnological change, we began to look at ourselves and our ancestors in a different light, and began to consider that the data might be saying something different than what we had initially assumed. The image that began to emerge as the data was evaluated with better techniques was that our homonid ancestors did eventually become hunters, but that they likely spent quite a bit of time scavenging, and we were shaped by our environment at least as much as we would eventually shape it (probably more so).

Australopithicene Meat Eaters

There are alot of very good arguments in favor of vegetarianism, and even veganism, in our modern world - where food is relatively plentiful compared to our species' past. However, despite the existence of very good arguments, I typically hear very poor arguments put forward. I have commented before on how the Caveman Fallacy is often used as a way to justify vegetarian diets (the claim being that humans didn't evolve to eat meat), and recent findings again add to the pile of evidence that this is an argument based on false claims.

We knew that our early hominid ancestors ate meat - the remains of both tools with morphology consistent with meat processing and animals remains exhibiting tell-tale signs of butchery are found in early archaeological sites. This is noteworthy in that our nearest relatives - the chimpanzees - can and do eat meat, but nonetheless typically subsist on vegetable foods. The consumption of meat (and the introduction of cooked food) allowed our early ancestors to absorb more calories and specific rare nutrients, which was vitally important as our lineages brain size increased (growing a brain requires alot of energy and nutrients, and living in a feast-or-famine situation makes every possible source of calories, proteins, and fats vitally important).

What is interesting is that the date at which butchering and meat consumption began appears to be earlier than previously thought. Until recently, the best evidence indicated that this behavior dated to something in the neighborhood of 2.5 million years ago. However, new evidence indicates that it began closer to 3.4 million years ago, and was engaged in by Australopithecus afarensis (you'd know her as Lucy).

I suspect that these early hominids were scavengers or opportunistic hunters at best, and if either modern primates or modern hunter-gatherers are any indication, the majority of the calories consumed by the Australopithicenes probably came from vegetable foods. But this paved the way for what our evolutionary lineage would become, and as such, was an important step in human evolution.

What the....?

I have always found inappropriate juxtopositions hilarious, so regardless of the science/religion content, I find this funny. But, is it just me, or do these two look like they're somewhere around the age of 12?

Damn Fine Journalism

Ah, The Onion, how I love thee.

The Caveman Fallacy

Anyone who talks to me, reads this blog, or has been in a room with me for more than ten minutes knows that I am possibly the world's youngest curmudgeon. So, bear that in mind as you read...well, any of my blog entries.

Okay. So, I have been noticing a trend common in both certain types of marketing and in defending particular lifestyle choices that people make. It is really a form of the Appeal to Nature fallacy, but it's a specific form that, as an anthropologist (and especially as an archaeologist) tends to get under my skin. I tend to refer to it as the Caveman Fallacy - and it is the notion that whatever humans do in our "natural" state is what is best for us physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

Before I get into one of the big problems with this, I should note that dealing with this fallacy is complicated by the fact that there is a kernel of good sense buried deep, deep within the recesses of it's ungainly edifice. Examining our evolutionary past can reveal good, useful, and important information about the problems that cause us grief now. For example, understanding the world of our ancient ancestors can help us to grasp why we process information the way that we do in our modern world. Looking at the food gathering habits of modern hunter-gatherers can help us to look for possible ways to address diseases such as diabetes (though, to be fair, it can also reveal why our ancestors tended to die at a young age and have high rates of infant mortality). So, the notion that looking into the human past can yield valuable information for modern peoples is not an unreasonable one. What makes the Caveman Fallacy a fallacy is both the over-simplification of the human past that goes into it, and the way in which it tends to be applied unthinkingly.

Okay, first off, there is the problem of defining humanity's natural state. Some folks refer to this as the "cave man", but of course the cave man, with his tiger-skin cloak and a club with which to whack his intended prey and mate (often one in the same), is really just a creation of popular culture and doesn't actually describe the true human past. This version of the human past has been used to promote everything from high protein diets to aggressive foreign policy. It's bullshit, and is one side of the 18th/19th century tendency to see all non-Europeans as primitive.

The other version, ascendant in the here and now, is that the natural state of humans is that of innocent farmers (occasionally hunter/gatherers), in balance with nature, living a peaceful and idyllic life, with nothing in the way of disease or hunger. This variation is used to sell everything from herbal supplements to manufactured (but allegedly "native") religions aimed at white folk. This version is also bullshit, and is the flip-side of the 18th/19th century tendency to see all non-Europeans as primitive (or in this case, "noble savages").

With a bit of variation, the Caveman Fallacy routinely groups all past (and some present) humans into one of these two categories.

But the truth of the human past is much, much messier. First off, what the hell is humanity's natural state? Ever since we became our present species, a few hundred thousand years ago, we have been using tools. Technology pre-dates us as a species, and therefore if we are to define a natural state as one in which there is no technology to alter the environment, then humans, by definition, do not have a natural state. Some folks will try to skirt this by pointing to some point in our collective past - mobile bands of hunter-gatherers, sedentary bands of hunter-gatherers, early farmers, early town-dwellers, etc. - as humanity's natural state. However, the claim that any of these are more our natural state than any other point in human history is completely arbitrary. Each stage of human culture has held the seeds of everything that was to come later, and each stage bears the marks of what came before. If we have a different society now than that of our early ancestors, it is because of incremental change beginning with the first hominids (or even earlier), and everything we are now is derived from what we were before. We have always used technology to alter our environment, whether it was made of wood and stone or made of silicon and copper - technology is just as much a part of our evolutionary path as upright walking and depth perception. The truth is that we are just as much in our natural state now as our ancestors in the African Savannah were and this belief that human-manufactured things are unnatural comes purely from the rather arrogant belief that we are separate from the rest of the species on the planet*.

In short, either we have no natural state, OR we are still in our natural state. Any claim otherwise is nothing but the creation of an arbitrary and meaningless label.

The second problem comes when the people using the Caveman Fallacy make their claims about the specifics of the human past. They are typically factually distorted, if not outright false (where I come from, people call such claims "fuckin' lies").

For an extreme example, let's take a claim that I have heard made by many raw food proponents. I have heard many of these folks claim that the introduction of cooked foods into the human diet is responsible for many of our current maladies, and that the use of raw foods led to a shortening of the human lifespan. This is not true in precisely the same way that the surface of the sun is not cold. In fact, cooking predates anatomically modern humans, and while there are some foods that are better for us raw, cooking actually "pre-digests" many foods for us allowing us to get more nutrition from most, and making some that would otherwise be inedible both palatable and nutritious. The paleoanthropology and archaeology both back this conclusion up very firmly, and any claim to the contrary betrays an individual completely out of touch with reality.

Then you have variations on a theme used by both the ravenous meat eaters and the pro-vegetarian folks. These folks both claim that our ancestor's diets were very different from our own, and that we should eat as they did for improved health. It is true that their diets were very different, but to claim that eating as they did would lead to better health is debatable at best - bear in mind that it is very recently in human history (really, with the advent of the modern diet, modern sanitation, and modern medical technology) that human lifespans have nearly doubled and our infant mortality rates have dropped. That being said, looking to our evolutionary past may provide useful information about how we process foods as well as why we crave what we crave, and this may be useful in looking to our current health, provided that we remember that what our ancestors ate was not necessarily the optimal diet either (what with limited food choices and seasonal starvation and all).

The difference between the meaties and the veggies lies not in their basic claim, though, but rather in what they believe the past to be like. The meaties see humans of the past as mighty hunters, killing beasts and eating their meat, keeping lean and healthy through the exercise necessary to catch the animals, and through the intake of animal proteins itself. The veggies, on the other hand, look to the past of human the gatherer (interesting to note that the veggies tend to be more gender inclusive in their view of the human past), and see us as natural herbivores eating off of the landscape without need for animal proteins.

Both of these views contain elements of truth, unfortunately filtered through a thick membrane of ideologically-driven psuedoscience. For the meaties: the human lineage has engaged in meat-eating probably since the time of the Australopithecines, if not before. However, this has probably been a mix of hunting and scavenging, "man the noble hunter" is a myth and nothing more. Meat has been important to human evolution (if you look into how we digest it, it is one of the more nutritious foods a human can eat), but most humans gained the vast majority of dietary calories from vegetable foods.

As for the veggies, everything from the tools that accompany early archaeological sites (pre-dating anatomically modern humans by millions of years) to the evidence from biology and physiology (humans have numerous traits of both carnivores and herbivores, an unusual combination) and from primatology (contrary to what many people believe, other primates - most notably chimpanzees - will eat meat when they can get it) indicate that meat has been a part of the human diet from the beginning. It has been a small part of our diet, but if the archaeology, paleoanthropology, ethnography, and biology are any indication (and, umm, they are), then it has been an important part of our diet even if small.

All of this brings us to the third problem with the caveman fallacy - most of the claims about the past ultimately, even if they were true (and they rarely are), have little to do with today. So what if meat has been important to human diets in the past? With the variety of foods available to most of us, the average person living in the U.S. or Europe can gain all of the nutrition they need from vegetable resources today, and there may even be beneficial side-effects to doing so***. By the same token, even if past humans gained most of their nutrition from vegetable foods, a fair (and non-ideological) assessment of the biological and medical literature shows that including meat as part of our diet makes it easier to maintain a healthy diet (although most of us in the U.S. do tend to overdo it and could stand to consume less meat).

Likewise, claims about how human relations worked in the past, about how our ancient religions worked, etc., even if they are true, must be filtered through modern culture, meaning that the past is not as relevant as the present.

But, it must be remembered that the Caveman Fallacy is different from the examination of our past to look for clues to how we evolved or for keys into underlying elements common to humans. For example, consideration of early human environments, such as the African savanna, may help us to understand why human cognition evolved as it did, or why our senses are calibrated as they are. But this is fundamentally different from saying "X is good, because X is what 'natural' humans did!" That is just plain stupid.








*That being said, an argument can be made that we have used technology in a way that has, or soon will, extend our environment's carrying capacity to its limits, and we may be looking forward to a major population crash. If this happens it will not, however, be proof that our current level of technology is unnatural. On the contrary, it will be proof that we are still very much part of the natural world, and that we are just as subject to resource stress and environmental degredation as everything else.

**There are, however, many exceptions, and unless you are going to claim that hunter-gatherers in vegetable poor environments are somehow less natural than you, you can't claim that humans naturally eat little to no meat.

***As someone who enjoys meat, I take little pleasure in informing my fellow meat-eaters that the reality is that cutting down or eliminating our meat eating will likely have good effects on our environment, as well as our wastelines. However, it won't be the panacaea that many folks seem to think it will be, so while it may be a worthy goal, reducing or eliminating meat consumption will only solve a few problems.

What if Satan and God Played Cards?

Every now and again, somebody comes up to me with this "amazing new idea" called Intelligent Design. Despite what its proponents claim, the idea is neither new nor amazing. However, trying to explain this to people often results in their eyes glazing over. So, from now on, I'm just going to show them this video:



Via Hemant Mehta

"Transitional Fossils"

I have been reading The Dragon Seekers, a fascinating book about the early fossil hunters of western Europe. One of the things that really interests me in this book is the use of certain pieces of terminology that make sense in the context of the early 19th century understanding.

One such term is "transitional fossil" AKA "the missing link", something that young-Earth creationists (YECs) often claim doesn't exist. A transitional fossil would be a fossil that clearly stands midway between two species, say between a Homo erectus and a Homo sapien sapien (yes, our species is Homo sapien sapien, which differentiates us from Homo sapien neandertalis, sometimes simply called Homo neandertalis, or the Neanderthals). The problem with this notion of transitional fossils is twofold.

First off, it's prone to "moving goalposts." A YEC may say "there is not transitional fossils linking humans to other apes." Then you show them Australopithecus Afarensis, which is a fossil descended from other apes and ancestral to humans. Once you have provided them with this "transitional fossil", they then claim that it is invalid because you can't show a connection between A. afarensis and humans. So, you show them Homo habilis, which is, again, a link between modern humans and Australopithecines, and they will then claim that you can't show a transition between H. habilis and modern humans...and on and on it goes, every time that you show them what they ask for, they find a way to worm their way out of accepting reality. I have even had conversations with YECs where I have shown them every homonid fossil I could think of, clearly linking humans and other orders of apes*, only to have the YEC then shift the goal posts even further and demand that the only suitable evidence for evolution would be blood tests proving that these creatures were ancestral to the humans - and I can only imagine what their excuse would have been for denying that if I had been able to produce such a thing.

So, shifting goal posts is one problem with the use of the term "transitional fossil", but there is another problem, one that dogs scientific spokesmen and the public alike. That is that species are not fixed types, but are constantly changing due to the forces of evolution (genetic drift, mutation, natural selection, etc. etc.). So, any given species is constantly undergoing subtle modifications which are likely to cause new species to arise, and those that we identify either in the world around us or in the fossil record are merely "snapshots in time" of the process of change. In other words, depending on how you look at it, either there are no transitional fossils or EVERY fossil is a transitional fossil.

Now, given our modern understanding of the mechanisms of reproduction and genetic change, the term "transitional fossil" as a marker of change from one species to another becomes, really, meaningless except as a rhetorical tool, and as a rhetorical tool it's prone to mis-use by those who deny the reality of evolution (such as the YECs). However, as I have been reminded of by The Dragon Seekers, there was a point in time when this term did make sense, within the context of the knowledge of the day.

The early fossilists worked out that the animals that populated the earth had changed over time. However, most of them believed that species were fixed, and did not "transmutate", to use the terminology of the day. The reason for this was partially religious, most of these early fossilists were Christians and a solid foundation for geology and biology had not yet been worked out, making the overall creation story as good an explanation as any for the world they observed**. The reason was also partially cultural but non-religious, these people were part of a movement that sought to explain the world through categorization, and these categories tended to be thought of as both objective and fixed, an error that still creates problems.

At any rate, the thought was that species were fixed (or at least very stable), and therefore a transitional fossil representing a volatile intermediate stage would be expected if one stable species changed into another stable species. Such a fossil would be a "missing link" or transition between two stable classifications.

But, we now understand biology well enough to recognize that terms such as "missing link" and "transitional fossil" aren't very useful, but they still continue to be used, nearly two centuries after the last nails should have been hammered into their coffins. I think that there are two reasons for this. The first is that those who have a stake in viewing species as fixed, primarily the YECs mentioned above, keep trotting the terms out, claiming that they mean something in order to try to persuade others that evolution is not true. As these folks are vocal and have a fairly strong political and media presence***, they have been able to keep these terms, which serve their cause and create grief for scientists, active.

The second, and probably larger, reason is that these terms are, let's face it, catchy. Especially "the missing link." As such, the media likes to use them, and they continue to be in circulation.

As a result, these terms remain in popular culture, despite the fact that we would all be better off if they were just dropped.

And then today, I see this article, thanks to Kay. And, again, the term "missing link" is used to describe the find. However, in this case, it is a bit more appropriate. This fossil provides information about the point when primates deviated from other types of mammals, and so the term isn't complete nonsense.





*"Ape" is a taxonomic designation - in other words, it's a label used to group together animals that share certain common traits. Humans have the ape traits, and as such, we didn't "come from apes" - we are a type of ape, just as a Chihuahua and a German Shepperd, though very different animals, are both dogs.

**Contrary to popular belief, Darwin was not the first person to propose evolution, it was an idea that had been floating about, he was just the first to comprehend the mechanism and to explain it in a way that accounted for the evidence better than any other explanation that had been proposed up to that time. So, prior to Darwin, there were people who saw the evidence for evolution, but they lacked the necessary clues to put it together into a viable scientific theory.

***Think I'm wrong? Think back to the debates between the Republican candidates, and remember how several were willing to deny reality - evolution, that is - when asked? This is one of the major political parties, expected to get a huge chunk of the popular vote, and they represent the views of alot of people. Reality denial and opposition to good science isn't as fringe as many people like to think it is.

Thinking About Morality

What is morality, and where does it come from? Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? Most of us treat it as if it’s a simple thing, but it really isn’t. If you live in the U.S., you will most often hear morality discussed as a function of religion. In fact, I find that because I do not share the majority position regarding religion, I am often (in fact, typically) accused of being immoral or amoral – the basic idea being that if I do not believe in a supernatural source for morality, I must be “cut off from moral bearings” or, as Banana Man Ray Comfort puts it, a “moral free agent.”

The first problem is that this particular claim is that, like most of the folks that I know who share my views on religion, I’m pretty boring on the whole sin front. For the most part, I don’t have any particular vices that aren’t also shared with the religious people I know, and I lack even many of those (I don’t drink, never been unfaithful to a partner, no drugs, tend to be a goody-two-shoes as applied to other people’s property, etc.). Where I tend to differ from them is that I do not view arbitrary things that don’t harm anyone as sins – I have no problem with gay people, I don’t really care if someone “blasphemes”, and so on.

In other words, I’m a good citizen, decent neighbor, and all without thinking that there is some sort of being hanging doom over my head if I do wrong. And I am not alone. Time and again, research into the relationship between violent crime, divorce, substance abuse, willingness to cheat others, and so on has shown that these things are not negatively correlated with religious belief. If the non-religious were truly adrift in a sea of immorality, the situation would be quite the opposite.

In fact, as a general rule*, high rates of religious belief in a nation or region correlates with higher rates of crime, drug use, divorce, unplanned pregnancy, abortion, poor social and personal health, etc. (see here and here). This is not necessarily to say that religion causes all of the strife – there are many factors that play a role (some of which have non-causal correlations with religion) – but it doesn’t prevent these problems and may bear some responsibility (by making some topics taboo – such as accurate information about sex education and STDs - or placing some legitimate solutions arbitrarily off-limits – such as the Catholic Church’s official refusal to accept that condoms may be of use in combating the spread of HIV – or placing belief ahead of action – such as the tendency amongst many Christian sects to argue that belief in Jesus is more important than behaving morally, or sanctifying anti-social actions as moral – such as suicide bombers in the Middle East or the murder of people who leave Islam in many Middle-Eastern nations). That religion is not the bulwark of morality against a rising tide of social ills is further illsutrated by the fact that the non-religious make up a smaller portion of the prison population than of the general population (see here and here). Independent of the question of whether or not religion causes social ills (a very complex question outside the scope of what I am writing here), it should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that if religious belief was in fact the source of morality, then belief in gods would correlate with higher rates of moral behavior, but this proposition is demonstrably false.

There is a further problem with the notion that religion is the source of morality: most religious believers don’t actually follow the moral codes that they claim to believe – and, for the record, this reflects well on the believers. For example, in the recent Proposition 8 debate here in California, believers frequently stated that the Bible condemned homosexuality, and therefore gay marriage should not be allowed. They are, of course, correct that the Bible condemns homosexuality**, but they ignored that the Bible also calls for the death penalty for homosexuals – for that matter, most of them even feel that the mandatory prison sentences for homosexuality that were common up through the first half of the 20th century were overly harsh. And we see a similar rejection of harsh punishment for other religious “crimes” amongst most modern believers. In other words, the average believer today demonstrates a stronger sense of compassion and, well, morality than the authors of their holy texts did, and in demonstrating these commendable traits, they are, by the standards of the texts that they claim to follow, committing a sin***. And good for them I say, they are clearly better people, citizens, and neighbors than the original authors of the texts, and I think that this shows some degree of moral progress. But it also shows that even those who claim religion is the source of morality don’t actually behave as if it is.

So, if the majority view is wrong, and morality does not come from religion, where does it come from? How can we be moral? Why aren’t we doomed to nihilism and wickedness?

Well, the answer seems to come from a rather obvious place, really: our evolutionary origins. Put simply, we are social animals, and as such, we have had to evolve both biological and cultural traits that allow us to function in groups.

Let me phrase my argument as a hypothesis to be tested. If our sense of morality comes from our evolutionary origins, then it follows that other animals that are close to us either genetically or in their social organization will demonstrate similar traits to deal with social organization – constrained by their own biological capacities, that there would be evidence of moral behavior across all human societies and not just those with the “correct” religions, and that those traits that are universally “moral” should have adaptive use to mobile hunter-gatherers (our ancestors).

So, let’s start with other animals. When we look at other social animals, we see development of social rules that allow these animals to interact successfully and with minimal conflict – even the fights observed amongst packs of dogs are geared at determining the leader to be followed rather than violence for the sake of violence. As we come closer to humans, we see more and more traits that are recognizable. Chimpanzees, for example, show such human behaviors as warfare and outgroup exclusion (both part of most human moral codes, interestingly), but also show our better traits such as compassion and cooperation. As Jane Goodall, puts it:

They kiss, embrace, hold hands, pat one another on the back, swagger, shake their fists, and throw rocks in the same context that we do these things. There are strong bonds of affection and support between family members. They help each other. And they have violent and brutal aggression, even a kind of primitive war. In all these ways, they’re very like us.

For more information, look into the work of Dr. Goodall, or the work of others researching the origins of morality.

Likewise, we do find certain universals amongst human populations, and I have seen these time and again in my studies and research as an anthropologist: the preservation of the in-group is seen as good; altruism is good; harm to the in-group is bad; harm to the out-group may be neutral, good, or bad, depending on the impact that this has on the in-group; individual compassion is used as a guide to correct treatment of others, but is influenced by the relation of the other to the individual acting; the definition of in-group and out-group is flexible and dependent upon the situation, but is generally correlated to the social and genetic relationship of the individual being acted upon to the individual doing the acting.

So, we do see universals that make sense for mobile, stone-age hunter-gatherers, but not necessarily for modern humans. For example, look up the “Trolley Problem” (listen here) to see how the interjection of technology into the equation causes us to view what is logically an equivalent situation as being morally right or wrong (long story short – technological harm to an individual is seen as being more “okay” than directly-caused harm, even if the resulting harm is identical), or check out how an action that would generally be considered evil can be made acceptable through the phenomenon of groups absolution or the placement of those being acted upon into the out-group. These traits are not adaptive to a modern post-industrial society, in which we have the ability to impact masses of people both positively and negatively, but make perfect sense in the context of stone-age hunter-gatherers.

Now, of course, religion is itself probably a result of our evolutionary histories, and so it is no surprise that it often becomes conflated with morality. But the difference is that when we drop the notion that religion is the source of morality, rather than something that evolved along with it, we can see that morality is a natural thing – that is, it is something that has come about because we need it, rather than being enforced on us by an external force. This has an important implication: we can use the needs of living people as guides to moral behavior, and we can see where there is wisdom to be gained from our evolutionary past, rather than continuing to claim arbitrary and silly traditions from bronze-age societies.

A lot of people find this idea of a changing and fluid morality uncomfortable, and as such they declare that such a notion is bad (some particularly bigoted individuals will then go on to claim that the non-religious are unable or unlikely to be moral – but this says more about the insecurities, and, let’s face it, immorality of the people who claim this than the immorality of non-religious people). However, even these people subscribe to the notion of a fluid and changing morality, whether they admit it or not. As noted above, most believers are not in favor of the execution of blasphemers and homosexuals, though that is what their religious texts call for and their ancestors would have demanded. The reason for this is that our society has changed – for the better – and these old ways are seen as harsh and maladaptive now. Religion has not tamed society and made it more moral, rather, culture has tamed religion and forced it to actually behave in a more moral way. Anyone who clings to the notion of an eternal and unchanging code of morality is lying, either to themselves or to you.

Some may claim that giving up even the illusion of an unchanging morality from the divine will lead to moral decay - gulags for the sick, eugenics, violence against those of a different intellectual bent, etc. Assuming that such a thing is true - which is a debatable point - this claim in favor of a religion-based morality still doesn't hold water, and is in fact rather dishonest (and, ironically, therefore probably immoral) for a simple reason: through most of human history, people have clung to models of morality either dictated by or justified through perceived divine revelation, and that has resulted in persecution of dissenters, genocidal wars, torture, suicide bombings, honor-killings, etc. etc. Even if an openly fluid non-religious moral ethos completely replaces religious ones, and even if it is the worst that all believers claim it might be, it would not really be any worse than the religion-based versions. At worst, it would be pretty much the same, and then we're in the same place that we've always been - except that now we're honest about it.

In truth, those who push the notion (even if they don’t actually subscribe to it) of an un-changing morality handed down by god are the ones who are unmoored from moral anchors. They are allowing arbitrary codes that they themselves only half-heartedly hold to take precedence over the very real needs of people. They are more concerned with having their own prejudices and psychological comforts unquestioned than with actually doing good. They will often try to misdirect you – claiming that you are entering into a dangerous moral relativism, when they are the ones who are holding that their own arbitrary a-priori beliefs are somehow more important than the suffering or joy of others - and the assumption that arbitrary positions are somehow equal to verifiable facts is the very definition of relativism.

In other words, don’t buy it. Think about morality, consider that we do have moral impulses that we can sharpen and make use of for the good of ourselves and those around us, and don't allow yourself to be sold on something that may be doing more harm than good.





*I say “as a general rule” because there are, of course, some exceptions.

**Or, at least, most modern translations do – but what the original Hebrew and Greek said, and whether it was a blanket condemnation or rather a rejection of ritual homosexuality (common in the ancient Middle East), is a matter better discussed by people who know more about the subject than I currently do.

***There are, of course, many rationalizations that believers may give for ignoring these rather evil commandments – “that was a ritual requirement that Jesus did away with,” “that was specific to that time and place,” “God’s subsequent commandments show that this changed.” The problems with these rationalizations are twofold: 1) the same believers will still cling to commandments that can be easily dismissed in exactly the same way (such as the general condemnation of homosexuality), and 2) the same believers often claim that the moral codes of the Bible are “eternal and unchanging” while simultaneously admitting that they have changed.

Happy Darwin Day

This Wednesday (February 12th) is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Darwin, of course, was the first person to work out the basic principles of natural selection. Contrary to what many people believe, Charles Darwin was not, in fact, the first person to propose the idea of the evolution of species – the idea had been considered in scientific and philosophical circles for some time, in no small part due to the frequent discovery of fossils – but he was the first person to work out the basic mechanism for evolution, and in so doing was able to link the field observations together into a coherent explanation of life on Earth.

Also contrary to what many believe, the theory of evolution* was not cooked up by “godless scientists” or agreed upon rapidly by those who wanted to remove miracles from the world, or any of the other variations I have heard on that theme. Darwin didn’t publish his work at all until he met someone else who had reached the same conclusions and was about to publish them, and even then he felt as if he had done something wrong in publishing them. They were not adopted immediately, but were subject to hard scrutiny and harsh criticism – but they stood up to both, and, more importantly, provided testable predictions that consistently proved correct.

In the end, Darwin’s work proved a great boon not only to our understanding of how we, and every other species, came to be here, but also to all fields that rely on biology – for example, it’s Darwin’s work that provides us with the models we need to understand the development of viruses and bacteria in order to fight them with new medicines (which is why I am always amused when creationists use vaccines and antibiotics – if their view is correct, these things shouldn’t work).

So, take a chance to ponder how well the breakthroughs of this particular 19th century scientist have improved our lives and views of the world. Oh, and if you have some time, look up the works of Charles Darwin online.




*I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, theory is one of the most mis-used words in the English language. Contrary to what many a middle school teacher tells their students, theories are not simply hypotheses that have not been tested enough to be considered laws. A theory is something completely different – it is the body of observations and linking arguments, and can be highly hypothetical, but can also be considered a “fact” – gravity, electricity, the notion that diseases are caused by viruses and bacteria, these are all theories, but nonetheless are absolutely real.

So, really, when someone says that they don’t believe something because it’s “only a theory” they are saying a sentence that A) makes no sense at all, and B) shows their complete and utter ignorance of the subject that they have chosen to talk about.

I Love the Onion

Check this one out -
Darwin-shape stain on a wall.

A few favorite quotes:

Available for sale are everything from small wooden shards alleged to be fragments of the "One True Beagle"—the research vessel on which Darwin made his legendary voyage to the Galapagos Islands—to lecture notes purportedly touched by English evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace.

And

"Over millions of successive generations, a specific subvariant of one species of slime mold adapted to this particular concrete wall, in order to one day form this stain, and thus make manifest this vision of Darwin's glorious countenance," Cosgrove said, overcome with emotion.

"It's a miracle," she added.

And to think, Ben Stein was once kinda' cool...

(Note: this post is a response to the essay linked below - I do not claim to have knowledge of the precise contents of the film itself, as I have not seen it. However, the essay is featured on the film's official website, so it seems likely that the statements made in it are likely consistent with the opinions expressed in the film. After I have seen the film - probably after is is released to DVD - I may re-post portions of this with modifications as appropriate. Regardless, the claim made in the essay is a common one in the anti-science circles, so it seems appropriate to address it)

I would like to point you to two quotes both from the website for the new Ben Stein movie "Expelled" (both can be found at http://www.expelledthemovie.com/chronicle.php?article=11)

The first is towards the bottom of the page, the second is at the bottom of the page, but is "whited out" to prevent spoilers.

paragraph 1:

"Ben Stein’s “Expelled” is one of the more evenhanded, clever, and well-produced documentaries currently on the market. While the Evolution/Intelligent Design debate can spark much emotion, anyone walking away from this film will be convinced that the merits of Intelligent Design should be on the same level playing field as Evolutionary Theory. This film is about the freedom of speech, the freedom of ideas and ability to express those ideas…not about whether God created the heavens and the earth."


paragraph 2:

"Many scenes are centered around the Berlin Wall, and Ben Stein being Jewish actually visits many death camps and death showers. In fact, Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany."


So, it's an even-handed movie about free speech and showing the merits of intelligent design as a scientific theory by showing that people who believe in evolution are on a path straight towards something like Hitler's Germany. Umm...

Okay, before you try to reach a conclusion about what I am saying below, read all of it. Having re-read it, it's clear that you may get the wrong conclusion pretty easily if you don't follow it to the end.

Even if the claim that the film relies on this is exaggerated, the author of the essay is still trying to make ties between acceptance of evolution and the Nazis. This is an old lie that we are all familiar with. Hitler's eugenics programs were the culmination of a long tradition of anti-semitism and xenophobia in Europe that has direct roots in the history of European Christianity. Remember, before Hitler got people to revile the Jews as racially inferior, there was a long history of them being reviled as "Christ-killers." While the Nazis tried to dress the old bigotries up in scientific-sounding terminology, they were, nonetheless, still the same old bigotries.

Now, I am not claiming that Christianity caused the Holocaust either - however the bigotries started, they had taken on a life of their own by the 20th century. However, the notion that an acceptance of the fact of evolution (and, contrary to what people like the lying demagogues at the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis like to claim, there is no doubt in science that evolution occurred) leads to atrocities like those of the Nazis is nothing but an outright lie.

Consider, the Ku Klux Klan long considered itself a Christian organization (I do not claim to know if they currently do), and much of its membership thought Hitler had the right idea. Although it is popular to claim that Hitler himself was an atheist, this is far from clear (in fact, he appears to have believed in some form of a higher power, whether it's a Judeo-Christian God is largely the matter of debate). And it is worth noting that the Apartheid government of South Africa frowned on the teaching of evolution because it would teach the blacks that they were part of the same humanity as the whites, and were no less entitled to the rights that the whites received.

Again, I am not claiming the Christianity is itself the cause of these problems - but to ignore the fact that the doctrines of special creation and original sin played into them is dishonest (and the folks behind the "Intelligent Design" movement have a history of dishonesty - consider Behe's comeuppance at the Dover trials). The doctrine of special creation has long been used to justify bigotries based on the notion that different ethnic groups were "created to be inferior", and original sin has been used by advocates of the notion that some ethnic groups had "fallen deeper into sin than others."

Now, I know that someone is going to try to correct me and say that this is misinterpretation of the Bible - so it may be worth noting that I actually agree with you. I am not saying that these claims are true or correct views, but whether true or not, they have been used for nearly two thousand years to justify atrocities - and they were often used by people in 1930's and 40's Germany to justify the Nazi regime.

While the Nazis may have used scientific-sounding language to justify their actions, they also used religious explanations. Using the same tortured reasoning that people used to claim that an acceptance of reality leads to Nazism, I can just as easily "prove" that Christianity leads to Nazism. And my claim will have the same accuracy as that of the "Intelligent Design" crowd.

Also, whether Hitler and his posse really believed in evolution or not, it is indisputable that the majority of the German population was Christian, primarily Lutheran and Catholic, and their religious beliefs were routinely manipulated by the Nazi leadership. This was, as my friend Dave puts it, not a nation of evolutionary biologists inclined towards some form of genetic cleansing, but rather a nation of the devout whose bent towards authority and revealed "truth" was easily manipulated to build the gas chambers and push the buttons. To claim that a belief in a "higher power" would have stopped the Holocaust is to deny the reality of history.

The reality is that evolution - the real science, not the psuedo-science supported by bigots and "Intelligent Design" pundits alike - demonstrates that there is no significant biological difference between ethnic groups. It demonstrates that we need a wide range of genetic diversity in order to ensure survival and that traits that are disadvantageous in one setting may be advantageous in another. In short, evolution is, ultimately, the strongest argument against things such as the Holocaust. The roots of these bigotries go deep, and by encouraging people to shy back from reality and re-embrace mysticism, the "Intelligent Design" liars are pushing an agenda that is far more likely to be manipulated by bigots - in the end, it relies on faith (though Behe and Dembski use false information to claim otherwise) - and the problem with faith is that it can be used to justify anything, bad or good. Evidence and reason can only be used to help point towards reality - and the reality is that genocide is bad for the gene pool.

I would add one last thing. Everyone I know who has studied evolutionary science, whether through biology or anthropology, has learned in their science classes about the ways in which groups such as the Nazis used scientific-sounding arguments to support their claims. We have learned about the ways in which our work can be mischaracterized and abused, and to urge us to be honest in our reporting of our work in order to help prevent this sort of abuse.

However, while I suspect that there are some out there, the very fact that people honestly believe that the Nazis only used a false caricature of evolution and did not make religious arguments suggests rather strongly that most churches do not provide the same level of self-examination and criticism. So, the notion that the "intelligent design" crowd feels that it has the right to attack us for alleged dishonesty in keeping out "intelligent design" (which is really a "god-of-the-gaps" argument, one of he purest forms of logical fallacy) makes them nothing but hypocrites. The fact that they do so through this kind of fear mongering and dishonesty just makes them pitiful and disgusting.