Sleeping with the Other

Advances in the study of ancient DNA have led to the finding that modern non-African humans have 1-2% of our DNA coming from Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals also had human DNA.

This exchange, the scientists conclude, took place about 100,000 years ago. That’s a puzzling date, because a great deal of evidence indicates that the ancestors of today’s non-Africans did not expand out of Africa until 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

 Neanderthals are either a closely related species, or subspecies of our own Homo sapiens.  They split off from the last common ancestor about 600,000 years ago, and left African for Europe.   Studies suggest they had a distinct culture including the burial of the dead.

And these genes have effects on our health:

Snippets of Neanderthal DNA contribute to the contemporary risk for myriad ills, including heart attack, nicotine addiction and mood disorders as well as incontinence, foot callouses and precancerous skin lesions.

The identification of these sequences is made because they exist in the Neanderthal genome, and not in the genomes of Africans.

So, you have to wonder;  how did it happen?  what sort of communication occurred between these different groups of early humans that they interbred, and did so sufficiently to leave permanent records in the genomes of both?

I mean, we can't even get along with one another.

Quote of the day: Darwin on chance

From a letter to the Harvard botanist Asa Gray in 1860:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.—I am bewildered.—I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd. wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.—Let each man hope and believe what he can.

QUoted in an article, The Truth about Darwin and God. 

Shocking and shameful

42% of people in the US are creationists.   with the increase in those who say God has no role,  and the decline of the pro-science believers, we see another polarization coming.  I do not live in the same world as these people-- and yet I do.

From Gallup

Science, faith, mythos, logos

 It is a fact that most scientists retain a sense of wonder along with the intense curiosity that drives us to explore the world around us,regardless of our faith or lack thereof.  Evangelical  Fred Clark  makes the case that Christians should be the most passionate scientists.

To all the many practical and pleasurable reasons anyone has to explore the sciences and to be excited and enthralled by science, evangelical Christians can add one more: It’s God’s world, God’s cosmos. God made it. God is redeeming it. God loves it. Anyone who loves God ought to love the world as well — and to love learning about the world.

We Christians ought to be famous for our love and devotion to the best, deepest, broadest and most ambitious science. We ought to be known for the same half-goofy, starry-eyed wonderment that the late Carl Sagan showed toward science.

But alas, Houston, we have a problem. He goes on

Perversely, the opposite is true. …And for American evangelical Christians the track record is even worse. American evangelicals tend to treat science as the enemy and to regard scientists as guilty until proven innocent. This is due to a host of reasons, foremost among them being the perception that evolution poses a threat to the Bible. 

And so, as we move into election season, we are treated once again to the spectacle of Republican candidates for president denying evolution, climate change, and science. Think about it. People who want to be President of the US are setting themselves as deniers of rational, fact-driven evaluations. They will be making choices by treating science as just another interest group.

Physicist Karl Giberson blames the Discovery Institute

The rhetorical strategy employed by the Discovery Institute does a great disservice to American evangelicals who, understandably, are drawn to faith-friendly discussions of science. In their eagerness to dismantle scientific objections to intelligent design the Discovery Institute drives yet another wedge between evangelicals and the scientific community, making it harder for religious believers to distinguish science from pseudoscience, in particular, and real knowledge claims from fake ones in general.

The relentless assaults on the integrity of science by groups like the Discovery Institute have made it impossible for many people to understand the significance of a "scientific consensus." If the members of the National Academy of Sciences are just another political group with their own agenda -- left-wing Tea Partiers with Ph.Ds -- we are under no obligation to take them seriously. We can even compare ourselves to Galileo for opposing them, as Rick Perry did in explaining why he rejected the scientific consensus on climate change.

He goes on to explains how the attacks on evolution have led to rejection of science overall, with profound consequences for our political debate

In our new book, "The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age," historian Randall Stephens and I look at the widespread and disturbing inability of American evangelicals to distinguish between real knowledge claims, rooted in serious research and endorsed by credible knowledge communities, and pseudo-claims made by unqualified groups and leaders that offer "faith-friendly" alternatives. Across the board we find evangelical Christians attracted to indefensible views in many areas: American history (the Founding Fathers intended America to be a Christian nation), sexual orientation (you can "pray away the gay"), climate change (not happening), evolution (never happened), cosmology (Big Bang is a big joke) and even biblical studies (the bible tells us what is about to happen in the Middle East).

The tragedy is that nothing within the faith commitments of evangelicals requires the adoption of these various knowledge-denying views.

How did we get to this point? Alex Knapp steps back, after reading Karen Armstrong:

The problem is that with the success of the Enlightenment, science, and our modern culture, we seem to have discarded the idea of mythos as part of our mainstream culture. As a consequence, there are those of faith who confuse mythos with logos - that is, they read a story or sacred text and interpret what is intended to be a symbolic aspect of spiritual life and treat it literally, as though the story happened historically or happened exactly as described. And in rejecting religious belief, a lot of atheists make the same mistake.

This is not to say that I want to reject reason or science – quite the contrary! My point here is that understanding distinction between these truths of mythos and logos points the way towards realizing the compatibility of scientific and religious thought. We need them both. They don’t have to be enemies, as they represent different aspects of the human search for truth.

Philosopher John Gray agrees:

If you go back to St. Augustine or before, to the Jewish scholars who talk about these issues, they never regard the Genesis story as a theory. Augustine says explicitly that it should not be interpreted explicitly, that it's a way of accessing truths which can't really be formulated by the human mind in any rational way. It's a way of accessing mysterious features which will remain mysterious. So it was always seen right up to the rise of modern science—as a myth, not a theory."

I wonder if it is significant that the science-denying Biblical literalists tend to be from a very different practice of Christianity. It seems to me that mainline Protestants and Catholics are more comfortable in balancing "the mysteries of faith" and the concrete facts of the real world. Think about trans-substantiation: that's simply wild as a concept. To believe in that is to believe in a sort of suspension of "real" world laws, that is so extreme, that of course it's in a different realm. Christian faith traditions that are full of paradox and mystery are by this argument, far more able to keep faith and science apart, rather than attempting to impose black-white conformity. Because if there has to be conformity, as in the more literalist views, then religion and science really are the same thing.

John Gray agrees

What these creationists are doing is retreating, they're accepting the view of religion promoted by scientific enemies of religion, and saying, no, we have got science and it's better than your science.

And of course, black and white conformity is what the anti-thesists offer as well--those are the ones I would call "scientific enemies of religion". (As we have discussed before at some length, most scientists are simply not interested in religion or faith issues, so this is not a science v. religion, much as Dawkins and his ilk might like to make it so.)

Whether these experiences are simply all in our heads (as in the patterns of neuronal behavior) or not is, in the end, utterly irrelevant. Can we experience mystery, ambiguity, and transcendence, yet still recognize the facts of the "real world"? I believe that we can, and must. After all, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Darwin's legacy

The Pew foundation has examined views of evolution, in this anniversary year of Darwin's birth.

According to an August 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 63 percent of Americans believe that humans and other animals have either always existed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being. Only 26 percent say that life evolved solely through processes such as natural selection.

This view is not shared by the nation's scientists, most of whom contend that evolution is a well-established scientific theory that convincingly explains the origins and development of life on earth. Moreover, they say, a scientific theory is not a hunch or a guess but is instead an established explanation for a natural phenomenon, like gravity, that has repeatedly been tested through observation and experimentation. Indeed, most scientists argue that, for all practical purposes, evolution through natural selection is a fact.

There are times when I feel that all intellectual accomplishment and everything I value is under attack by religious troglodytes. These days I feel that a lot.

Let me be clear, it is perfectly possible to believe in God and Darwinian evolution. The point is that the theory of evolution is not about the "why" things happened, it's about the "how". If you feel God tilted the decisions at each stage of selection, fine. But the point is that the theory doesn't require that a God did so. It is perfectly workable without invoking anything outside. So a "theistic evolution" is distinct from, say, intelligent design which says that evolution could not have happened without a God, which is not the same thing at all. (added in update)

Meanwhile we celebrate Darwin's accomplishments, which along with Abbot Gregor Mendel's codifying of genetics, provides the foundation for our understanding of how we are who we are.

For more fascinating info on how modern genetics and the science of DNA supports Darwin's studies, read this National Geographic story on Darwin's legacy. Also, visit the UK's Darwin bicentenary site .