Happy Science Popularizer Day - and, yes, I just made that holiday up

Today, coincidentally, is the birthday of not one but two scientists who are notable for writing books about scientific subjects for the general public. The work of the popularizer is often a thankless job, but one that I think is important because I believe that the more one knows about the world, the better off one is, and the sad fact is that each person cannot be an expert in every field. Therefore, popular works that inform about fields that can be technical to the point of confusion for one who is not an expert can be quite valuable.

So, today is the birthday of Jared Diamond, who was born on this day in 1937. Diamond has written such books as The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005), and The World Until Yesterday (2012). His training was in physiology, and that is what he has taught at UCLA, in the medical school there. His writing, however, has seen him branch out into a number of fields, including anthropology, human evolution, and history.

Diamond has come into for his share of criticism for his work, including charges that he is too Eurocentric, that the arguments he makes in his books are weak, and that the large roles he assigns to geography and environment in the shaping of civilization are misplaced.

Like Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, who was born on this day in 1941, has been criticized for things he wrote and said in the course of his career as a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian, and prolific author of both specialist and popular books and articles. Among those criticisms were, like Diamond, that some of his explanations and arguments were weak. It is probably important to note that, especially in Gould's case, this criticism particularly has mostly come from those who disagree with his ideas and want to discount them.

It also probably has to be said that Gould did indeed take some stands that were controversial. He was co-developer, with Niles Eldredge, of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which claims that evolutionary change is not a slow, steady process, but occurs rapidly and in bursts, with long periods of stability in between. Gould was very vocal, as well, about his rejection of sociobiology, the idea that social behaviors are rooted in biology and evolution. Additionally, Gould did not approve of cladistics, a method of biological classification, which brought him a measure of criticism as the use of cladistics became more and more widespread.

Gould was also criticized for his politics, which some critics characterized as "Marxist," charging that he let his politics interfere with his scientific positions. This was probably exacerbated by Gould's willingness to discuss his father's Marxism and his statements that his own politics were probably to the left of center. But, he also claimed that his politics were different from those of his father. Still, today, there are those people who discount Gould's contributions by pulling out the "Marxist" label.

Gould did not hesitate to address the subject of religion, and claimed that science and religion are not, as some argue, in conflict. However, he also claimed that the two areas comprised "non-overlapping magisterial" that, while they do not conflict, also do not really have anything to say to or about each other. He spent some of his time writing about this idea in a book called Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999).

While Gould did not criticize religion as a category of knowledge as some scientists, notably Richard Dawkins, do, he also spent a significant amount of his time arguing against creationism and intelligent design and against their inclusion in public school science classrooms. Among his efforts on this topic, Gould testified against giving creationism equal time in the classroom in the landmark case McLean v. Arkansas in 1982. The case, which ruled that "creation science" is actually religion and not science and that its inclusion in public school science classrooms violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Unites States Constitution, has been influential in subsequent rulings relating to the teaching of creationism and intelligent design.

Gould was a prolific and eloquent writer. He wrote nearly 500 peer-reviewed papers during his career, around 100 book reviews, 22 books, and a long series of essays that included a series called "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine. He published several collections of these essays in book form. Gould was also a fixture in science documentaries on PBS and elsewhere.

Sadly, Gould died in 2002, at the age of 60, cutting short a remarkable career that, among many other accomplishments, saw him named a "Living Legend" by the US Library of Congress in April 2000.

In honor of the day, your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to go out and find some good popular science writing to read. I don't care what subject you choose, and it doesn't have to be something by either Gould or Diamond - although as a huge fan of Gould's writing, I would certainly not be sad if you chose to read some of his work, which can be challenging but is always rewarding.

I was reading while the internet was down...

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that my cable service was out for a couple of days. During that time, it occurred to me more than once how dependent we have - I have - become on being able to access umpteen channels on television and on being able to run to the computer and hop on the Internet to look something up or play a game whenever I want to or need to. While I'm not addicted to it (I don't think), I am a writer who does a lot of research and I really miss the Internet when I don't have access to it and don't have just the right book at hand to look up something that I'm researching or something that has caught my interest.

There were advantages, though, to not having the Internet at the ready to distract me. One of those advantages was that I had the time to more quickly finish reading a particularly good book that I had been taking a long time to get through. Although it is a good book, it is dense, difficult reading, and the subject matter was such that I had to take a break from time to time so that I wouldn't throw the thing and break something or put a hole in the wall.

The book is Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press, 2005; 401 pages), by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross. I picked it up at the library as part of research for a couple of projects I'm working on, and I didn't really expect to read it all the way through, but I found it fascinating as well as frustrating and, sometimes, infuriating.

I have to preface what I have to say about the book by saying that I was raised to see no contradiction between believing in deity and accepting the fact that evolution happens. Or, more accurately, it was just not a question that came up. The existence of God just was not seen as an impediment to evolution occurring, and evolution was not seen as ruling out the possible existence of God. It never occurred to me that anyone might think differently until I was in the fifth or sixth grade and a girl in my class flipped out when we saw an educational film that talked about evolution. She was incensed that any idea other than a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis was advanced for the creation of species. Never mind that there are two pretty much mutually exclusive accounts of creation just in the first few pages of that book, a reality that wasn't on my radar at the time.

In the years that followed, however, especially when I got interested in anthropology and started reading widely in that and other subjects, I learned just how opposed some people are to the idea of evolution, and of it being taught in public school science classrooms. I was especially interested in the way they progressed from calling their stand creationism, to calling it "scientific creationism", to calling it "intelligent design", changing what they called their ideas as the US courts, and especially the United States Supreme Court, ruled over and over that creationism, then creation science, and then intelligent design, were really religious ideas, not science, and were not to be taught in public school science classrooms.

What this book does is look specifically at the proponents of intelligent design and how they insist, at least in public, that their ideas are not creationism and are not religion. The authors spend a great deal of time and use more than sufficient documentation to show that, on the contrary, there really isn't much difference between creationism and intelligent design. For example, they show that while ID proponents claim that they don't believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, particularly in the short period of time allowed for the age of the Earth by that text, that there are a number of Young-Earth believers (those who believe that the Earth is only between 6 thousand and 10 thousand years old) among ID proponents.

The authors also spend a great deal of time refuting the claim of ID proponents that while the propose that the universe, the Earth, and life were designed by an intelligent entity, they do not necessarily identify that Designer with God. Forrest and Gross produce plenty of evidence of what these same people say to religous audiences and write for religious audiences that show they really are theists who have as one of their main objectives bringing religion into the schools by first introducing ID into public school classrooms.

Especially disturbing to me is their evidence showing the ties of the ID movement to Christian Reconstructionism. If you read here regularly, you know that I've written about the Reconstructionists here before and that I do not approve of them and their aims, the main goal being turning the United States into a theocracy.

All of the information the authors present is exhaustively documented in 64 pages of endnotes, many of them to web pages of the organizations that advocate ID and support the proponets with their money. They list the organizations, the name names of those pushing the ID agenda. Within the text, they quote these individuals and organizations at length. These quotations are part of what make the book difficult reading, considering that some of the folks who publish in favor of ID really aren't very good writers. These passages also show exactly how far ID proponents are willing to go to tailor their message to their audience, insisting to school boards that ID is not religious but talking in almost exclusively religious terms when addressing religious audiences.

Despite its fairly academic tone (the authors are a philosopher and a physiologist), I think this is a valuable book. It isn't a quick, easy read, but the information it contains is important, and I think the time spent reading is time well spent for those interested in the subject matter and for anyone concerned about what young people are being taught, especially when you consider that ID proponents have as part of their specific program "recruiting" students to their ideology and encouraging them to "challenge" their teachers over the creationsim/evolution issue.

On this day in 1859, a controversy was born...

If you read here often, you might recall that just after the election I wrote about a Congressional race in Georgia where the Republican candidate was running unopposed but had riled up some voters because of his statements against evolution. In protest, over 4,000 voters wrote in Charles Darwin on the ballot to make the point that the candidate's statements were not universally approved in the district.

Well, today is the anniversary of the publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the book, that started the modern controversy over whether the Christian God created all species as is, or whether Darwin was correct and life has evolved over the millennia.

Not that Darwin was the first to propose that species change and become new species, of course. But his book took the question wide, as one might put it if it had been a movie. It was written not just for other scientists, but for the general public. And the general public bought it in droves. The first edition sold out immediately, and a second edition published on January 7, 1860, also sold out within the day. In total, six editions, each with revisions, were issued before Darwin's death in 1882.

Reaction to the first edition was immediate but, surprisingly considering the history of the controversy over Darwin's take on the idea, not completely negative. Even some clergy immediately seized on Darwin's concept of natural selection and declared it simply God's mechanism for the creation of species. Still, there was much negative reaction and the erroneous charge that Darwin had written that humans descended from monkeys started circulating almost immediately. This occurred even though Darwin did not address the origin or evolution of humans at all in the Origin, except in his conclusion, where he wrote that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." He did not apply his ideas on natural selection, in writing at least, to humans until a later book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871.

The debate over Darwin's theory has raged, with greater or lesser heat, pretty much ever since, although the volume of those religious voices raised in opposition to evolution give a slightly inaccurate picture of religion's official stance on the subject. I wrote in my earlier post about a survey that showed most Christian denominations having no real argument with Darwin and evolution, and I'm reading an interesting book right now, Joel W. Martin's The Prism and the Rainbow: A Christian Explains Why Evolution Is Not a Threat (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010; 170 pages), which expands on that conclusion. Martin is a scientist by training. He is also an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church USA, where he teaches Sunday school and confirmation classes.

Martin's book takes time to show which Christian denominations in the United States officially accept evolution and which denominations reject it or have not made official statements regarding Darwin's theory. His conclusion is that denominations claiming 45.85 million members in the US have come out as opposing evolutionary theory, while denominations claiming 94.05 million members in the US have issued statements saying that there is no conflict between Christianity and evolution, and denominations claiming 8.5 million members have not come out clearly one way or the other (Martin, p. 10). Martin is careful to say that his numbers are not complete for various reasons, including but not limited to the fact that it is sometimes very difficult to determine memberships in denominations and that some denominations are so small that they do not make it onto lists of US Christian denominations (Martin, p. 11). He also points out that not all members of denominations agree with every official position of their denomination (Martin, p. 12). However, the thoroughness of Martin's research lends credence to the numbers he has arrived at on this topic.

So, the controversy remains, even as scientists find more and more evidence confirming that evolution does occur. Which brings me to another of the day's anniversaries - the discovery of "Lucy", a 40-percent-complete skeleton of an species called Australopithecus afarensis, by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in Hadar, Ethiopia, on November 24, 1974. Famously named for the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", the find led to the naming of her species, although some partial specimens of her species had been discovered earlier.

Lucy lived around 3.2 million years ago, while her species has been determined to have existed from around 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago in East Africa, primarily in Ethiopia but also in Kenya. There is still discussion over whether Au. afarensis is a direct ancestor of modern humans or a close relative of our species, a cousin of sorts, but whichever position on the evolutionary tree Lucy and her species occupy, they give further fossil confirmation that our species did evolve.

Religion and science, and a clever electoral protest...

Do you remember, back in September, when Representative Paul Broun (R-Georgia) was revealed to have given a talk to a religious group in which he called Darwin's theory of evolution, embryology, and cosmology "lies straight from the pit of hell"?

Well, he won his seat again on Tuesday. Not a difficult thing for him, since he was running unopposed in his district. However, he had an unexpected write-in opponent: it seems that at least 4,000 people in his district voted for Charlies Darwin.

The write-ins were suggested by critics of the physician/representative, and were apparently first suggested by plant biologist Jim Leebens-Mack to protest the remarks.

I like this. It is a non-violent and creative way of telling Rep. Broun that they don't agree with his characterization of settled scientific principles. This is especially important, considering Broun's position as a member of the House Science Committee. He needs to know that not everyone agrees with his characterization of the sciences.

Now, I understand that some people sincerely hold the religious belief that God created the Earth, indeed the whole Universe, in six 24-hour periods less than 10,000 years ago. And that's fine. However, it should also be noted that this belief is not universally held by the religions of the world, nor even by all Christian denominations.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has, on its website, a summary of several religions' and denominations' positions on evolution. There is far from consensus on the subject.

Just among Christian denominations, while the Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, have rejected evolution, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Roman Catholic Church have all affirmed that there is no conflict between their theologies and the theory of evolution.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has not issued a definitive statement, but has said that while they believe that God created the universe, he did not necessarily do so in six 24-hour days and may have used evolution in the process. When it comes to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), it kind of depends on who you ask, but as early as 1931, the First Presidency of the church issued a statement asking the membership of the church to "leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research..." In other words, believing in evolution is not an impediment to being a good Mormon.

There is similarly "no inherent conflict" between Judaism and belief in evolution, and the same is true of Buddhism. The Pew organization also found that while there is no single teaching on evolution within Hinduism, most Hindus do not see any conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution.

Muslim belief is not united on the matter of evolution. Those who interpret the Qu'ran literally reject evolution, but theologically liberal Muslims do not necessarily see any conflict between their beliefs and evolution.

As it usually happens, rank-and-file members of denominations and religions do not necessarily follow the lead of the religious organizations they belong to. The Pew Forum did a survey in 2007 which found that, overall, 48 percent of Americans agree that "evolution is the best explanation for the origins of human life on earth". That means, of course, that more than half of those surveyed either do not believe that evolution explains how we got here or have no opinion on the matter.

But, more than half of American Catholics (at 58 percent), Orthodox Christians (at 54 percent) and mainline Protestants in America (at 51 percent) do believe that evolution explains the development of human life. That's a lot of observant Christians who have no problem with evolution. The numbers are smaller among members of historically Black Protestant churches, with only 38 percent believing in evolution, while among Evangelical Protestants surveyed, just 24 percent agreed with the statement that evolution explains how we got here. Just 22 percent of Mormons and 8 percent of Jehovah' Witnesses agreed that evolution is the best explanation for how we got here.

The highest numbers of agreement came from non-Christian religious respondents and from those unaffiliated with any specific religion or denomination. Among Buddhists, 81 percent of believers agreed with the statement approving of evolution, while 80 percent of Hindus believed in evolution, 77 percent of Jewish respondents agreed, and 72 percent of those unaffiliated with any religion did so. Forty-five percent of Muslims surveyed agreed that evolution can explain the development of humans.

Yes, that's a lot of numbers to go through. I think it is important, however, to look at that information in order to understand that, despite what those like Rep. Braun who are vocal proponents of creationism and Intelligent Design seem to believe, it is not a given that in order to believe in God and be a religiously observant person, one must reject evolution or believe that Darwin's theory is of the Devil.