Feedback for May 2004

1. We do, in fact, distinguih between macroevolution (evolution at or above the species level) and microevolution (evolution without speciation). It's just that macroevoultion really is nothing more than microevolution over more time. See our article entitled Macroevolution.
2. The scientific evidence conclusively supports macroevolution as the explanation for the diversity of species on Earth. It is extremely well-supported by multiple independent lines of evidence. See the article entitled 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
3. Transitional forms are abundant. For just one of our articles detailing them, see Transitional Vertebrate Forms. Also see the articles entitled Observed Instances of Speciation and Some More Observed Speciation Events.
4. What you describe as "fits and starts" sounds to me like a garbled description of punctuated equilibrium. PE is fully consistent with evolution. See the article entitled Punctuated Equilibria.

Also, the registration data on flat-earth.org indicates that it is owned by an Australian at Melbourne University. It seems unlikely that someone living in Australia would honestly doubt the existence of Australia.

Once chirality is dominant one way or the other, there are catalytic effects which select that chirality to make it even more dominant in a solution. Thus it is only to be expected that most organic molecules should show the same handedness. For references and a little more detail, see CB040: Left-handed amino acids.

Lamoureaux begins by equating the creation of the universe with "evolution", and therein lies the main confusion. "Evolution" means the changing makeup of life. Stellar and cosmic evolution are separate matters, and are not necessarily part of a worldview that has to accept evolution of life.

A dichotomous division goes back to Plato in the Phaedrus, where he tries to "cut nature at its joints", and to a discussion in the Sophist (219a–221a). It literally means "to cut into two pieces", and it is usually understood to mean contraries but it need not be.

The proper way to divide up opinion on evolution is, indeed, to look only at the scientific community. When you do, you will find those who oppose some aspects of what is called the "Darwinian" or "neo-Darwinian" perspective, but nobody of which I am aware who works in the science of living things rejects either evolution itself or the notion of common descent. Moreover, you would look a long way to find someone who denies that natural or sexual selection has a causal role to play in evolution.

The only folk who make the dichotomy into creation or evolution are creationists, and only in the context of a political and social debate. There really is no scientific issue here.

There is no fossil data that can be presented as the last common ancestor (LCA) between humans and chimps. Based on the number of mutations found in non-expressed portions of endogenous retroviral insertions, and estimates of the amount of time that these mutations would have taken to accumulate, it was estimated that the LCA lived about 5 million years ago.

The discovery of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, provisionally dated to about 6 to 7 million years ago strongly suggest that the division between the lineages that lead to chimps and humans diverged earlier than estimated from molecular data, perhaps as much as 10 million years ago.

In your question, you used the divergence figure 10,000 years ago which is at least 500 times less than the most likely number, and maybe even 1000 times less.

BTW, humans and chimps have about the same number of hairs per square inch of skin; the big difference is in the thickness and perseverance of the hair.

BRUNET, MICHEL et al, 2002 "A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa" Nature 418, 145–151

Johnson, Welkin E. John M. Coffin 1999 "Constructing primate phylogenies from ancient retrovirus sequences" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 96, Issue 18, 10254-10260, August 31,

Taking creation literally is the problem of literalist fundamentalists, not science. If you have some meaning to it that doesn't cause science to be ignored, attacked or taught falsely, we here will have no problem with it...

As for the supposed hydraulics: NASA's own Lunar Module Orientation course (1966) [.PDF] contains no reference to any such system, despite documenting all controls and systems on the LM. Also, the landing gear (see p. 14) appear too frail to support "jumping" and have no connectors for hydraulics.

As we are primarily focused on debunking creationist claims, you will not find much on why whales evolved, or information on their fossilisation processes. You will find that the so-called gaps are smaller than you might think, though. Here are some other useful sites:

Cetacean evolution (whales, dolphins, porpoises: evidence of common ancestry of cetaceans and certain species of land mammals"PBS site accompanying the "Evolution" series, which also has a video entitled "How do we know evolution happens" in Quicktime and RealPlayer, which focuses on whale evolution. Careful - this one needs broadband.

The "Whale Origins" page at Hans Thewissen'shome site. Thewissen is a leading specialist on whale evolution.

The Land to Sea page.

This ought to be enough to get going. Read the creationist sites if you like, but they will be full of errors.

As to why, we will never know for sure, but we do know that when an animal moves into a new environment, it is because there is food available that is not being used by a competing species. Typically, this is called niche adaptation. Whales may have found that marine life was a good source of fish food, as seals and otters do today. Selection favoured those who moved best until whales were barely able to move on land. We can see this in walruses for example. It took less than 10 million years to move from an ancestor that looked like a wolf or bear (but was neither) to something very like a modern cetacean.

By the way; if you want us to send information to you, you have to leave a valid email address.

The seven-day week originates in Babylonian astronomy, which assigned days to a repeating sequence of the seven known planets (counting the sun and moon). The names of the days of the week are derived from the same seven planets, or the god each was thought to represent, in the same sequence used by Babylonian astronomers. Their custom held sway in Rome centuries before the empire converted to Christianity.

As with Easter and Christmas, early Christians co-opted an existing pagan practice which happened to mesh well with their own rites. The Christian creation story is not the origin, let alone the only explanation, for the seven-day week. Besides, it's a bit silly to suggest a "contradiction," even if the premise had been correct. Religious traditions can be borrowed without buying wholesale into the religion, as with the pagan symbols incorporated into Christmas and Easter celebrations of Christians.

See also:

• Take Our Word For It #104 - Origin of the seven-day week.
• Take Our Word For It #105 - Origin of the weekday names.
• Seven Day Week - Astronomical details.

CERN's atom-smashing is not a mini-big-bang, but it does replicate high-energy conditions present during (part of) the big bang. It does not replicate important aspects of the big bang, such as the inflationary period that may have started it. Calling it a big bang is rather like adding a little salt to a drop of water and saying you have an ocean in your kitchen. Also, it does not create something from nothing; it changes energy and matter into other energy and matter.

Yes, it is possible to warp space. That's what gravity is. I don't know of anything that could produce a large, localized warp for warp drive, but I wouldn't rule it out. Another method of faster-than-light travel is to find a wormhole, which allows (conceivably) travel across the universe in just a moment. Warp drive, as I envision it, is the technology to build your own portable wormhole. The subject brings up problems about the relativity of time, though, that I have trouble wrapping my mind around (see the September 2002 Scientific American for more on this).

Since matter is a form of energy, you could say we are already energy beings. I expect consciousness requires a stable core. I can't think of any way to hold such a core together without using matter somehow. The confining force could be gravity, which might allow a conscious gas being, but the scale would be so large that the simplest thought would take days at least.

There have been a couple prospects for tabletop fusion devices already, one by confining hydrogen in palladium, the other by using sound waves in a liquid to create bubbles whose collapse concentrates energy. Neither amounted to anything, but they were plausible enough for respectable scientists to take seriously.

Native telepathy is impossible. The little electomagnetic signal produced by the brain is lost in noise just a few feet away. However, we can already add electronics in a body that are crudely controlled by one's brain. Extending the technology, we could potentally implant what would effectively be a mind-controlled cell phone in everyone.

Transporter technology would require sending much more information than just one's DNA. Who you are is largely determined by your development and learning, too. As I think they say on Star Trek, the transporter requires sending information about every atom in you. Such a technology is still a ways away.

It is possible for the plant material in the gut of a mammoth to be preserved without being frozen. For example, Lepper, et al. (1991) found plant remains comprising intact gut fills associated with a mastodon skeleton excavated from a bog within Ohio. Also, intact gut fillings consisting of plant remains have been found associated with mastodon skeletons excavated from bogs in New York, New Jersey, and other states as discussed by Dreimanis (1968). In these cases, the water-logged bog sediments preserved the plant material long after the soft tissues of the mammoth had decayed. These finds and what is known about the digestive systems of modern elephants demonstrated that fast frozen mammoths created by an imaginary climatic catastrophe is unneeded to explain the preservation of stomach contents within mammoths.

References Cited:

Dreimanis, A., 1968, Extinction of Mastodons in Eastern North America: Testing a New Climatic-Environmental Hypothesis. The Ohio Journal of Science, vol. 68, no. 6, pp. 257-272.

Lepper, B. T., Frolking, T. A., and others, 1991, Intestinal Contents of a Late Pleistocene Mastodont from Midcontinental North America. Quaternary Research vol. 36, pp. 120-125.

van Hoven, W. and Boomker, E. A., 1985, Digestion. In R. J. Hudson and R. G., White, eds., pp. 103-120, Bioenergetics of Wild Herbivores, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.

Recommended Readings:

Kurtn, Bjorn, 1986, How to Deep Freeze a Mammoth. Columbia University Press, New York, New York.

Lister, A., and Bahn, P., 1994, Mammoths. Macmillan, New York, New York.

Ukraintseva, V. V., 1993, Vegetation Cover and Environment of the "Mammoth Epoch" in Siberia. The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs of South Dakota, 1800 Highway 18-Truck Route, Hot Springs, South Dakota. 57747-0606.

Some Related Web Pages are:

1. A4. Mammoths: Were They QuickFrozen?
2. Woolly Mammoths: Evidence of Catastrophe
3. Frozen Mammoths
4. Mammoths have been found quickly frozen: From EvoWiki, the Evolution Education Wiki.

An excellent article on climate change and the North Atlantic Current that I recommend people to read is:

Broeker, W. S., 1999, What If the Conveyor were to Shut Down? Reflections on a Possible Outcome of the Great Global Experiment. GSA Today. vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1-7 (January 1999).

1. Broeker (1999) PDF file (Large - 1.9 Mb)
2. Broeker (1999) PDF file (Small - 194 Kb)

Some useful scientific papers that discuss the role of North Atlantic Current and thermohaline circulation in abrupt climate change are:

1. Clark, P. U., Pisias, N. G., Stocker, T. F., and Weaver, A. J., 2002, The role of the thermohaline circulation in abrupt climate change: Nature, vol. 415, pp. 863-869.
2. Clark, P. U., Marshall, S. J., Clarke, G. K. C., Hostetler, S. W., Licciardi, J. M., and Teller, J. T., 2001, Freshwater forcing of abrupt climate change during the last glaciation: Science, vol. 293, pp. 283-287.

1. Group selection does indeed occur, but it is rare due to the fact that it needs to have many subpopulations that vary according to random sampling and which differentially go extinct. A form of group selection, known as "kin selection" is well understood and widely accepted. A few hold-outs (including one Stephen Jay Gould prior to his untimely demise) think that species are also subjected to selection, but I do not.

2. There have been surveys done on how many biologists and other kinds of what Darwin would have called naturalists accept evolution, but the overall figure you want is >100%. There are disagreements about the rate, scale and mechanisms, but we should expect that. Scientists are notoriously disputative (unlike philosophers...). How many scientists per head of population there are I have no idea. But we do have results of surveys ranging from around 35% to 60% of western audiences accepting creation against evolution. It varies from country to country. It appears that European countries are nearly all in the much lower range than America.

The Religious Tolerance site has a nice article with some figures.

3. America and those English-speaking nations that are strongly inlfuenced by it, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, tend to have the majority of creationists and antievolutionists. European continental nations such as Germany tend to reinterpret evolution in ways that do not conflict with religious belief, and the Pope has made it legitimate for Catholic nations to accept it without trouble.

There is a strong creationist movement in Islamic Turkey that goes by the collective name Harun Yahya. All the arguments are exactly those of Protestant Christian creationists, except for a strong (and also not unknown in Protestant history) dislike of the Freemasonry movement.

Nations that do not educate their students in primary and secondary school in science well tend to have more antievolution, by my observation.

4. Your contrast is badly chosen. "Nature" doesn't select for anything but for reproductive ability based on genetic inheritance. There are no observable genetic differences that make one tend to religion or not, that I know of. Acceptance of religious belief is much more likely to be due to cultural evolution than biological.

As to whether we live in a demon haunted world any more than before, all I can say is, I think the level of demonism is pretty constant...

As I say, personal opinion only. I know a good many good Christians and adherents of other faiths who are in dispute with me, and who I respect.