Christopher Hitchens in 2007. (Click for credit)Christopher Hitchens died yesterday at the age of 62. In 2010, he publicly stated that he was being treated for esophageal cancer. He ended up dying of pneumonia, which doctors said was a complication from the disease. He was a journalist and writer, best known for his caustic defense of atheism.
While he was a prolific author, I read only two of his books. The first, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, was actually a collection works from other writers. The authors ranged from Lucretius to Dawkins. As such, it was a rather hit-and-miss book. Some of the works (like those from Shelley, Hume, and Dennett) were quite good, and some (like those from Hardy, Sagan, and Dawkins) were quite bad. Hitchens wrote an introduction to each work, which gave me some idea of his views and the methods by which he came to them.
Based on that, I also read God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It contained very little of note, although Hitchens’s style did make it interesting to read. After finishing the book, I was left to wonder why some consider him to be such a powerful voice for atheism. There are very powerful voices in atheism, but based on what I have read, Hitchens doesn’t even register as a whisper compared to them.
Dr. Daniel Botkin holds a PhD in ecology and is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is best known for his books about nature, and has been called “one of the preeminent ecologists of the 20th century.” His website has a lot of good material, including an excellent FAQ regarding global warming.
The reason I am blogging about Dr. Botkin is that he authored a fantastic article in the December 2, 2011 issue of the Wall Street Journal. The article starts with an incredibly unscientific quote which comes (ironically enough) from NASA senior scientist Michael J. Mumma:
Based on evidence, what we do have is, unequivocally, the conditions for the emergence of life were present on Mars—period, end of story.
This kind of statement might excite people, but it does nothing to promote science. In fact, it does quite the opposite. As Dr. Botkin masterfully points out in his article, the phrase “period, end of story” should never be uttered by anyone who is trying to be scientific. The fact is that in science, we never have the end of the story. New information comes in constantly, and sometimes, it overturns old ideas, despite the fact that those ideas might be accepted by virtually every scientist on the planet. As the title of Dr. Botkin’s article correctly proclaims, absolute certainty is not scientific.
Dr. Botkin goes on to discuss how global warming advocates hurt their cause by making statements with absolute certainty, and I agree with his assessment. As I read his article, however, I couldn’t help but think about the hypothesis of evolution.
I spend a lot of time discussing the creation/evolution debate. It is a popular topic on this blog, I have an entire series of young-earth creationist textbooks that discuss the debate, and I even discuss it among my own friends, many of whom are either atheists or theistic evolutionists. Every now and again, I even get the chance to publicly debate an evolutionist. This is a rare occurrence, however, as it is incredibly difficult to find an evolutionist willing to actually defend his or her view in a public debate. My last opportunity was in 2009, when I debated Dr. Robert A. Martin, vertebrate paleontologist and author of Missing Links: Evolutionary Concepts and Transitions Through Time. The debate was held at West Kentucky Community and Technical college. The audience was huge, and their response was enthusiastic. After the debate, I talked with many students, some of whom disagreed with me. Nevertheless, they all said that they appreciated the debate and were very happy that they attended.
Of course, the bigger question is whether or not such debates make any difference at all. Do any minds actually get changed as a result of a debate? I can tell you that mine did. I was an atheist at one time, and what led me down the road to accepting the truth of Christianity was an “Atheism versus Christianity” debate that I attended. The debate made me actually investigate the evidence for the existence of God, and when I did so, I found the evidence to be overwhelming. As a result, I ended up believing in God and, eventually, I came to realize that He is the God of the Old and New Testaments. However, I often wonder if a debate has changed anyone’s mind on the creation/evolution issue.
Well, I received an E-MAIL from a homeschool graduate who is now a biology major pursuing an MD/PhD. He says:
I was home educated from preschool all the way through high school and thoroughly enjoyed all of your science textbooks throughout high school…In fact your biology textbook was what got me interested in science in the first place.
The reason I am blogging about his E-MAIL, however, is that he tells me from his own experience that a good debate about evolution can change people’s minds.
As I have mentioned previously (here, here, here, and here), the earth has a wide array of negative feedback mechanisms that help it cope with change. This, of course, is exactly what you would expect for a system that was designed by an incredibly intelligent Designer. Unfortunately, many people who study the earth don’t understand these negative feedback mechanisms or don’t appreciate how incredibly powerful they are. As a result, they overstate the severity of certain trends that scientists observe. One excellent example of this comes from the observation that in recent years, the amount of sea ice in the Arctic has dropped significantly.
Arctic sea ice as measured by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (Click for more info)
In the graph above, a 21-year average of Arctic sea ice extent is shown with the heavy gray line. The gray band that extends above and below that line shows the variation one would expect from random fluctuations. Now look at the green dashed line. That’s what was measured in 2007. Clearly it is far, far below the average, and it is well below what you would expect from random fluctuations. As a result, the drop in sea ice is probably the result of a systematic change that is occurring in the Arctic. Not surprisingly, some doomsayers went off the deep end when they saw such data.
An artist's rendering of Kepler 22b.
NASA image in the public domain.More than a year ago, I discussed a planet named Gliese 581g. It was hailed as a “Goldilocks planet,” which means it is not too far away from its star and not too close to its star. Instead, it is at just the right distance, allowing it to receive the right amount of energy from the star so that stays warm enough to support life. Unfortunately, it’s not even clear that the planet really exists. One team of astronomers is confident that it does exist, but another team is confident that it does not. The latest analysis that I have seen adds more evidence to the “does not exist” side of the debate.
Well, the Kepler project has found another Goldilocks planet. I blogged about the Kepler project just a few days ago. It is a project designed to find planets that are roughly the same size as earth. They have found many, many such planets, and one of them, currently called Kepler 22b, is about 2.4 times the size of earth. What makes it special, however, is that it orbits a star similar to the sun, and it orbits that star at a distance which would allow it to receive just the right amount of energy to keep it warm enough to support life. Unlike Gliese 581g, there seems to be no doubt that the planet exists.
The white fuzz on this root is a mycorrhizal fungus that lives in partnership with the plant. Click for credit.If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I am fascinated by symbiotic relationships that are common throughout creation. Some of these relationships are between two specific species, others are between three specific species, and others are between many, many different species. Of all the incredible symbiotic relationships out there, one of the most ubiquitous is the relationship between plants and fungi. It is estimated that 90% of all plant species form a relationship with one or more species of fungus.1 Because these relationships are so common, we give them a special name: mycorrhizae.
In this relationship, the fungus invades a plant’s roots and takes carbon-based nutrients from the plant. At first glance, you might think the fungus is a parasite that infects the plant and takes nutrients from it. If you look at the picture above, for example, you might be inclined to think that the root is infected with a fungal parasite. That’s not the case, however, because while the fungus does, indeed, take nutrients from the plant, it also supplies the plant with critical nitrogen- and phosphorus-based chemicals that the plant has a hard time extracting from the soil. Thus, this is a mutually-beneficial relationship, which is often called a mutualistic relationship.
Because mycorrhizae are common throughout creation, there are many species of plants and fungi that participate in them. Nevertheless, the details of how mycorrhizae work are poorly understood. A new study has started to unravel those details, and the results are truly fascinating.
Dr. Seth Shostak has a B.S. in physics from Princeton and a PhD in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. Obviously, then, he knows a thing or two about astronomy. His original research started out using radio telescopes to measure the motion of distant galaxies, but for quite some time now, he has been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). He is currently the senior astronomer at the SETI institute.
In a recent report, CNN interviewed him to lead off a discussion about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Here’s what he said:
…one thing that strikes you is that every time we learn something new about the universe, what we learn is that our situation doesn’t seem to be all that special, and that suggests that life is not all that special, either.
When I heard that statement, the first thing I wondered was, “How can such a well-educated astronomer say something that absurd?” Really? Our situation isn’t all that special? We live on a special planet that orbits a special star (at just the right distance) that resides in a special part of the galaxy. Yet our situation isn’t all that special?
I was hoping that the rest of the video would explain how in the world anyone could consider such a statement to be even remotely reasonable. However, it never did.
Nobel Laureate Dr. Dan Shechtman (Click for credit)Dr. Dan Shechtman is a courageous scientist. Starting in 1975, he was on the faculty at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. He taught in the department of materials engineering, which investigates how the atomic structure of a material affects its observable properties. Back in the early 1980s, he spent his sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied rapidly-solidified alloys of aluminum, and he discovered something that was revolutionary. It was so revolutionary that when he first saw it, he said to himself:
Eyn chaya kazo
which is Hebrew for “There can be no such creature.” Nevertheless, the more he studied, the more he was convinced of what he saw.
What revolutionary thing had Dr. Shechtman discovered? He discovered a kind of crystal that the scientific consensus said could not possibly exist. Until Dr. Shechtman’s discovery, it was thought that when substances form crystals, their atoms form an arrangement that is both ordered and periodic. An ordered arrangement just means there is a discernible pattern to the arrangement, and a periodic arrangement is one that repeats the same pattern in all directions. Thus, once I find the basic unit of a crystal’s pattern (called the “unit cell”), I can tell you what the entire crystal looks like by just repeating that pattern over and over again in three-dimensional space.
Well, chemists have been studying crystals for a long, long time, and because of the way atoms pack together, the mathematics of an ordered, periodic arrangement of atoms has been thoroughly worked out. These mathematics produced an absolute statement: There are only certain possible patterns for crystals. Some crystals can be rotated by one-half and end up looking the same as they did before they were rotated. Others can be rotated by one-fourth and end up looking the same as they did before. Others can be rotated by one-sixth and end up looking the same as they did before. However, it is impossible, quite impossible for a crystalline substance to have a structure that can be rotated by one-fifth or one-tenth and end up looking the same as it did before. Such atomic arrangements, called quasicrystals, simply cannot exist in this universe.
Nevertheless, that’s what Dr. Shechtman saw. Some of the crystals he saw forming in his experiments were quasicrystals. They were ordered, but not periodic. As a result, they had a structure that could be rotated by one-fifth or one-tenth and end up looking the same as it did before. As is typical for most scientists, he was initially very skeptical. But as he continued his experiments, he became more and more convinced of what he saw. Thus, as is typical for most scientists, he decided to communicate his findings to others.
Most birds aren’t very active in the rain. They can fly in the rain if they have to, but they prefer not to. After all, the longer they are in the rain, the soggier they get. This adds to their weight, meaning they have to work harder to generate the lift necessary to stay in the air. So in general, birds tend to wait out the rain. Like most rules in biology, however, this one has an exception. The activity of hummingbirds is not significantly affected by most rainfall.1
How these incredible birds can fly even after being in the rain a long time was a bit of a mystery to scientists, but thanks to some artificial rain and high-speed photography, we now know that hummingbirds regularly dry themselves off by shaking like a dog.2 The shaking propels the water off their feathers so that the tiny birds don’t get too waterlogged. If you watch the video above (which comes from the referenced study), you can’t help but be reminded of a wet dog coming in out of the rain. Of course, the dog isn’t flying at the time, but the similarity is remarkable.
Skeleton of the titanosaur Epachthosaurus at the National Museum, Prague, Czech Republic. Note the plant, a cycad, in the display. (Click for credit)
If a display of dinosaurs or dinosaur skeletons includes plants, it usually shows the dinosaurs walking among ferns or cycads, like the picture shown above. There usually aren’t any grasses in the display. Why not? Because according to the geological column, grasses and dinosaurs didn’t live at the same time. After all, dinosaurs mostly died out by the end of the Cretaceous period, which was supposed to have closed about 65 million years ago. According to You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, grasses didn’t evolve until much later:1
Rabbits and hares appear 55 million years ago. The Himalayas begin to rise 50 million years ago. The face of the earth looks recognisably as it is now, except that Australasia is attached to Antarctica. Bats, mice, squirrels, and many aquatic birds (including herons and storks) appear during this period, as do shrews, whales, and modern fish. All major plants make their appearance and grasses evolve.
Notice how certain the author is. He is telling you the story of the history of life as if he is watching it happen. According to his “observations,” grasses didn’t evolve until about 50 million years ago, long after the dinosaurs went extinct.
The evolution and spread of grasses UNDOUBTEDLY resulted from their ability to adapt to seasonally dry habitats created as tropical-deciduous forests developed in the Eocene (58 to 34 mya, million years ago). Considering their importance and taxonomic diversity, grasses have a relatively poor fossil record. While the earliest potential fossil grass pollen was described from late Cretaceous sediments, the oldest reliable megafossil grass fossils were spikelets and inflorescences from the latest Paleocene (about 58 mya). These were PRIMITIVE proto-bamboos with broad leaves, QUITE UNLIKE the narrow-leaf modern grasses of desert grasslands and deserts. (emphasis mine)
Of course, as is often the case, current research is demonstrating just how wrong this evolution-inspired reasoning is.
