Religion, Science

The Evolutionary Gorilla In The Room

-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger

One common tactic in the creationist’s war against evolution is to falsify evolution by demonstrating a counterexample. If such a counterexample existed, it would indeed spell the demise of evolution. The Precambrian Rabbit would be such a counterexample. After failing to find even one counterexample, some creationists have given up trying to falsify evolution and now seek to disabuse evolution by claiming it is not falsifiable. Other creationists, unable to falsify evolution, get all metaphysical and point out that the principle of falsifiability is not falsifiable.A recent paper in the journal Nature, Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence, after sequencing the western lowland gorilla genome, it was found that “in 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other.”

Creationists pounced, noting that depending on which DNA fragment is used for analysis, humans are more closely related to gorillas than to chimpanzees. Although this was termed “Bad News” for evolution, it would have been worse news for probability theory. While the genomes of humans and chimpanzees show a mean genetic difference of 1.37%, and a 1.75% difference between humans and gorillas, the key word is “mean.” These probabilities do not imply that there is a uniform genetic difference across all genes. Of the tens of thousands of genes, some are more similar and some are less similar. On average, humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than to gorillas.

On the genetic path from our Most Common Recent Ancestor (MCRA) to humans and gorillas, different genes mutated at different times. Although cladograms, like the one below for Humans, Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and Orangutans, show a single branch to each species, this does not imply that all the genetics differences occurred simultaneously. One would have to be a creationist to believe that all the mutations occurred simultaneously.

One would also expect to find that certain DNA fragments would more similar between humans and orangutans. This is exactly what was found in this report, based on a complete orangutan genome, published in Genome Research, in which the authors said that “in about 0.5% of our genome, we are closer related to orangutans than we are to chimpanzees.”

Even the well-funded BioLogos, a group dedicated to trying to accommodate Christianity and science, sees the errancy of these arguments:

This is exactly what one expects from the species tree: humans and chimps are much more likely to have gene trees in common, since they more recently shared a common ancestral population (around 4-5 million years ago). Humans and orangutans, on the other hand, haven’t shared a common ancestral population in about 10 million years or more, meaning that it is much less likely for any given human allele to more closely match an orangutan allele.

Creationists are engaged in a desperate, but lucrative, attempt to pull a Precambrian Rabbit out of their hat. This attempt is particularly pathetic.

H/T: Pharyngula, John Wakeley (pdf), Pharyngula.

 

238 thoughts on “The Evolutionary Gorilla In The Room”

  2. The Keystone Kops would look for the beginning of religion a bit differently than competent scientists would:

    If we were looking for ancient ancestors of humans, would we look for something that looks exactly like humans do now, perhaps a fossil with a suit and tie on?

    If we looked for the first evolutionary beginnings of war, would we look for fossilized nuclear weapon carrying fighter jets?

    No, we would look for something not yet developed to the same extent as current species, something much more primitive, because the dynamic involved is supposed to be change via evolution, that is, being one thing then, but being another thing now.

    So why, then, if we were looking for the most rudimentary essences of the evolution of religion, would we look for a pope, bishop, minister, or a church in the “fossil” record, or in any other records (why look for a fully developed human religion)?

    It would seem more sensible to look for behaviors that could become full blown religious behavior (following billions or millions of years of evolutionary change, prior to full blown human religion ever developing) …

    (Did Religion Evolve In Microbes?). Which is why the Keystone Kops never “get their man.”

  3. Science brats may be evolving out of the system:

    “Now is the time to rethink how we teach science,” said Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor of statistics and education. “What we are proposing through 8+1 Science is a new way of thinking about and teaching science, not a new set of science standards. It supports basic concepts included in most sets of state standards currently in use and compliments standards-based education reform efforts.”

    The renowned group of scientists has met with Schmidt in an effort to rethink how science should be taught since 2006, when it was originally part of the PROM/SE research project (Promoting Rigorous Outcomes in Mathematics and Science Education) funded by the National Science Foundation.

    The 8+1 concepts were derived from two basic questions: What are things made of and how do systems interact and change? The eight concepts are: atoms, cells, radiation, systems change, forces, energy, conservation of mass and energy, and variation.

    (US Students Need New Way of Learning Science, emphasis added). Hope we can experiment with.

    Stop memorizing and start thinking.

  4. Popular does not mean good, but you go ahead and try to make that argument if you like, Dredd. I’m sure it’ll be as good facile and full of wishful thinking as your bacteria practice science and religion argument.

  5. Bron 1, April 12, 2012 at 7:24 pm

    Dredd:

    OK, I think I get what you are saying now. For example the altruism in microbe communities, you are saying the gene for survival also instills a religious potential in humans. So religion started many millions of years ago in those communities of single celled organisms. Man then created religion to fill a need that was biologically installed during the very early stages of human evolution.

    So man didnt “create” “religion” he just created a system to express a biological manifestation.

    That is a rather interesting theory.
    ==================================
    Any credit belongs to the scientists I quoted.

  6. Gene H. 1, April 12, 2012 at 6:45 pm

    Dredd,

    You must really quit using the false equivalences. Box office receipts only means it’s a popular film series. It doesn’t mean it’s good science fiction let alone good art.
    =======================================
    It doesn’t mean it is bad science fiction let alone bad art either.

    Holy equivalence Batman? My equivalence is better than your equivalence? Mine is the true religion equivalence?

    Scientific jerkoffs who don’t get the principles, but do want the glamor are turning people off:

    Polls show that disturbingly large numbers of people refuse to believe in evolution. Only 40 per cent of Americans trust the scientific consensus that today’s organisms evolved from previous forms by natural selection. Britain fares slightly better, with 50 per cent signing on. Those figures might be bigger if biologists were better at explaining why nature is so beautiful, and at showing that science can enhance our sense of wonder rather than diminish it.

    (Statesman, Survival of the Prettiest). The arrogance of western establishment scientists knows no bounds.

    They are doing great damage with ignorant, stubborn desperation to maintain the status quo, even when it is quite wrong on lots of fronts, and has been for quite a while.

  7. Dredd:

    OK, I think I get what you are saying now. For example the altruism in microbe communities, you are saying the gene for survival also instills a religious potential in humans. So religion started many millions of years ago in those communities of single celled organisms. Man then created religion to fill a need that was biologically installed during the very early stages of human evolution.

    So man didnt “create” “religion” he just created a system to express a biological manifestation.

    That is a rather interesting theory.

  8. Dredd,

    You must really quit using the false equivalences. Box office receipts only means it’s a popular film series. It doesn’t mean it’s good science fiction let alone good art.

  9. Ants aren’t higher order primates and baboons still don’t have farming, science or religion. False equivalence. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

    See if you can work the Jedi Council or Jar Jar Binks into your next post instead of appealing repeatedly to your blog as if that was evidence of anything more substantive than what you’ve already offered here.

    You haven’t made your case here or there. You have not made it anywhere. Bacteria have no religion or science. No matter that is your preference. You have not made it with a goat. You have not made it with a symbiote. You have not made your case, McFly. No matter how hard you’ve tried. Metaphyiscs is not science no matter how you maul the parlance.

    Somebody stop me before I Suess again.

  10. Gene H. 1, April 12, 2012 at 1:29 am

    …

    Nor was it particularly good science fiction.
    ===================================
    He does movie reviews too!

    But calls one of the greatest box office hits of all time not good enough.

    Not surprising.

  11. Gene H. 1, April 12, 2012 at 9:33 am

    Oooo. Equivocation. It looks good on you, Dredd.
    =======================================
    I leave equivocation to you. Your rejection of scientists, by attacking those who quote them, is timid equivocation, but equivocation non-the-less:

    The oldest forms of organic life are microbes (see The Human Microbiome Congress), which have been on Earth for billions of years.

    Let’s take a look there:

    In the excellent book, “The Social Amoebae,” John Tyler Bonner, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, describes many social abilities of amoebas including communication, group activity, and individual and group decision making. Do these raise the question of cognition in amoeba?

    Some of their behavior is quite extraordinary. When food is scarce, individual cells join together and form a structure that functions as if it was a multicellular animal.  This slug-like creature, made of individual cells working together as one, crawls to a place with more food. There, the cells break apart, and form a new structure composed of a stalk and a fruiting body, with the appearance of a plant. The cells in the fruiting body live on by separating from the stalk and flying in the air, like a seed or spore, or attaching itself to a moving animal, to transport itself to a new place to start the colony over in a new location with the possibility of more food. The cells forming the stalk altruistically sacrificed themselves, by becoming a dying part of the structure. These amoebas, which had been living individually, came together to function as a multicellular creature to increase their access to food, then reverted back to behaving as individual organisms. The communication necessary for such actions is extraordinary.

    (Social Microbes, emphasis in original). We are only looking for the “seeds” of religion, not the full grown, ripe, and developed fruits of theology.

    So, since microbes exhibit altruism and community behavior for the good of all, are those “indicators, memes, or the inkling of religious behavior?”:

    Altruism /ˈæltruːɪzəm/ is a concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions, though the concept of ‘others’ toward whom concern should be directed can vary among cultures and religions. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness.

    (Wikipedia, emphasis added).

    (Did Religion Evolve In Microbes?). If I were looking for the inklings of arrogant denial, I would look in clades that contain the H gene, a backward strain that resists honest progress.

  12. Bron 1, April 12, 2012 at 9:50 am

    Dredd:

    farming is a human concept. Ants “grow” fungus for food. Doesnt mean they can create a combine, genetically engineer wheat and create the techniques of crop rotation and irrigation.
    ================================================
    Tell it to “Jacobus Boomsma, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen who studies insect farming societies“.

    It was a quote from him.

    While at it you may want to read up on word recognition by Baboon’s who have a better go of it than one would think:

    This raises interesting questions about how the complex primate mind works without language or what we think of as language, Hopkins said. While we use language to solve problems in our heads, such as deciphering words, it seems that baboons use a “remarkably sophisticated” method to attack problems without language, he said.

    (Huffpo). They belong to the reading clade, because fossils have been found of them surrounded by old dictionaries, and we know only those who understand “words” have dictionaries, as shown in the old fossil record.

  13. Dredd:

    farming is a human concept. Ants “grow” fungus for food. Doesnt mean they can create a combine, genetically engineer wheat and create the techniques of crop rotation and irrigation.

  15. On “farming” by gorillas and other little people:

    So why, then, if we were looking for the most rudimentary essences of the evolution of religion, would we look for a pope, bishop, or a church in the fossil record, or in any other records, for fully a developed religion?

    It would seem more sensible to look for behaviors that could become full blown religious behavior (following billions or millions of years of evolutionary change, prior to full blown human religion ever developing).

    One scientists fully grasps this concept, articulating it quite clearly:

    “I would never have imagined that things as simple as slime molds could do a primitive version of farming.”

    (The Scientist). That scientist used the proper term, “a primitive version” of a practice that is not the same now as it was then (billions of years ago).

    Likewise, the teachings of evolution would instruct us that the religion of ancestors, who lived billions of years ago, would not resemble human religion, or be a human religion, so why look for a human religion as defined in the dictionary today?

    (Did “” Evolve in Microbes?). The Culture Ministry of France may not approve of this use of “farming” or “religion”. Stuff shirts.

  18. Bron,

    “knowledge and information are not quite the same.” Hence noting the difference, however, there are actual uncertainties. Probablity is a slidling scale of certainty, but completely uncertain is a possibility. Compare: you think your daughter is at the store – that is information. Your certainty varies by degrees depending upon supplemental information you have, but unless you are actually in the store observing her (thus collapsing the wave function) your certainty is never reasonably 100%. What if your supplemental information is a call from her? Does that have the same value of certainty as a call from a third person reporting her? Does her call have the same value if you know she also has a boyfriend you don’t approve of? Knoweldge is information with a high certainty value attached to it, but uncertainy is built into the universe at the quantum level. It cannot be erased or moved to zero. The operation of virtual particles in quantum field theory guarantees that. The phenomena of Hawking radiation along a Schwarzchild radius or the Casimir effect both illustrate virtual particle pairing in action. Uncertainty and entropy are fundamental to the nature of things. Percieved order and certainty are the exceptions. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it indicates a beautiful symmetry in the universe at it exists today. It’s also what makes the success of civilization so important; it’s the collective struggle to provide order and a framework of certainty in a chaotic and uncertain world. But what goes up, must come down.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsSDkSOaM0g

    The heat death of the universe is an event with a high degree of certainty attached to it. Everything is transitory. However, just because a fight is futile doesn’t mean it isn’t worth fighting. Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.” He may have personally given up the fight, but that doesn’t mean the old drunk wasn’t right in that regard.

  19. Gene H:

    knowledge and information are not quite the same. For example I get information that my daughter is at the store but I do not have knowledge until I know for certain. There are no uncertainties just incomplete knowledge. Statistics is nothing but a tool to try and gain knowledge about uncertainties. To bring order to the perceived chaos. To find the equation which describes the process. And yes I understand the uncertainty within that statement.

  20. “Sure there are uncertainties but those usually are might be made clear with additional knowledge information.”

    Now your statement comports with the statistical mechanics definition of entropy.

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