Abominable mysteries

One of the most annoying things I run across regularly is when someone takes a perfectly good piece of scientific research and twists it to support their own highly unscientific pre-existing beliefs.

The latest in this long parade of frustration I found out about because of my good friend, the amazing writer Gil Miller, who is a frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia.  Gil sent me a link to a fascinating paper that came out a month and a half ago in Nature about one of the most perplexing puzzles in evolutionary biology -- the sudden diversification of flowering plants during the Cretaceous Period, something on the order of 150 million years ago.  They went on to outcompete every other plant group, now comprising ninety percent of the known plant species, totaling about 13,600 different genera.  If you look around you, chances are any plant you happen to see that isn't a moss, fern, or conifer is a flowering plant.

What caused their explosive rise and diversification, however, is still unknown.  Their success might well be due to coevolution with pollinators, especially insects, which had a sudden spike in diversity around the same time, but that's speculation.  The current study vastly expands the genetic data we have on current genera of flowering plants, rearranging a few groups and solidifying what we know about the branch points of different clades within the group.  However, it still doesn't solve the reason behind what Darwin called "the abominable mystery" of why it all happened -- something the authors are completely up front about.

[Angiosperm phylogenetic chart from Zuntini et al., Nature, April 2024]

Well, any time an evolutionary biologist says "we don't yet understand this" -- especially if it's something Darwin himself noted as odd or mysterious -- it's enough to get all the anti-evolution types leaping about making excited little squeaking noises, and it didn't take long for this paper to appear in an article over at Evolution News (don't let the name fool you; the site is sponsored by the staunchly creationist Discovery Institute).  The article (so I can save you the trouble of clicking the link and adding to their hit rate) glosses over all of the stuff Zuntini et al. did explain, and highlights instead the fact that they never accounted for the reason behind flowering plant diversification (which wasn't even the purpose of the study).  The article ends with, "Nature clearly did make jumps in the history of life and this cannot be explained with an unguided gradual accumulation of small changes over long periods of time, but requires a rapid burst of biological novelty that is best explained by intelligent design."

Basically, what we have here is yet another iteration of the God-of-the-gaps argument; "we don't yet understand it, so musta been that God did it."  The problem is, you can't base a conclusion on a lack of data.  For the intelligent design argument to work, you'd have to show that it explains the data better than other models do.  Simply saying "we don't know, therefore God" isn't actually an explanation of anything, something that atheist philosopher Jeffrey Jay Lowder brought into sharp focus:

The objection I have in mind is this: the design hypothesis is not an explanation because, well, it doesn’t explain. ...  [I]t seems to me that a design explanation must also include a description of the mechanism used by the designer to design and build the thing.  In other words, in order for design to explain something, we have to know how the designer designed it.  If we don’t know or even have a clue about how the designer did it, then we don’t have a design explanation.

Which is it exactly.  Science works because it not only self-corrects, it holds explaining things in abeyance until there's enough data there to warrant a robust explanation.  A mystery is just a mystery; maybe we'll figure it out at some point and maybe we won't, but until then, it doesn't prove anything.  Science doesn't simply look at a lack of information and then throw its hands in the air and say, "Well, must be X, then."

To quote eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, "If you don't know what it is, that's where the conversation stops.  You don't go on and say it 'must be' anything."

Honestly, it's astonishing that the creationist types are still using the God-of-the-gaps approach, because the truth is, it's more damaging to their position than it is helpful.  The reason was noted by German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "[I]t is [wrong] to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.  If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat."

But that line of reasoning -- from a respected theologian, no less -- doesn't seem to be slowing them down any.

So I'll apologize to Zuntini et al. on behalf of the entire human race for these unscientific yayhoos taking a really lovely piece of research and claiming it supports their beliefs.  The tl;dr summary of this post is: it doesn't.  At all.  At worst, the study indicates that there's still stuff we don't understand, which is a damn good thing because otherwise the scientists would be out of a job.

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Leading the way into darkness

New from the "I Thought We Already Settled This" department, we have: the West Virginia State Legislature has passed a bill, and the Governor is expected to sign it, which would allow the teaching of Intelligent Design and other "alternative theories" to evolution in public school biology classes.

It doesn't state this in so many words, of course.  The Dover (PA) decision of 2005 ruled that ID is not a scientific theory, has no place in the classroom, and to teach it violates the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution.  No, the anti-evolutionists have learned from their mistakes.  State Senator Amy Grady (R), who introduced the bill, deliberately eliminated any specific mention of ID in the wording of the bill.  It says, "no local school board, school superintendent, or school principal shall prohibit a public school classroom teacher from discussing and answering questions from students about scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist" -- but when questioned on the floor of the Senate, Grady reluctantly admitted that it would allow ID to be discussed.

And, in the hands of a teacher who was a creationist, to be presented as a viable alternative to evolution.

I think the thing that frosts me the most about all this is an exchange between Grady and Senator Mike Woelfel (D) about using the words "scientific theories" without defining them.  Woelfel asked Grady if there was such a definition in the bill, and she said there wasn't, but then said,  "The definition of a theory is that there is some data that proves something to be true.  But it doesn’t have to be proven entirely true."

*brief pause for me to scream obscenities*

No, Senator Grady, that is not the definition of a theory.  I know a lot of your colleagues in the Republican Party think we live in a "post-truth world" and agree with Kellyanne Conway that there are "alternative facts," but in science you can't just make shit up, or define terms whatever way you like and then base your argument on those skewed definitions.  Let me clarify for you what a scientific theory is, which I only have to do because apparently you can't even be bothered to read the first paragraph of a fucking Wikipedia article:

A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results.  Where possible, some theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment... Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.

Intelligent Design is not a theory.  It does not come from the scientific method, it is not based on data and measurements, and it makes no predictions.  It hinges on the idea of irreducible complexity -- that there are structures or phenomena in biology that are too complex, or have too many interdependent pieces, to have arisen through evolution.  This sounds fancy, but it boils down to "we don't understand this, therefore God did it."  (If you want an absolutely brilliant takedown of Intelligent Design, read Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker.  How, after reading that, anyone can buy ID is beyond me.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe, Watch with no background, CC BY 3.0]

And don't even get me started on Young-Earth Creationism.

What gets me is how few people are willing to call out people like Amy Grady on their bullshit.  People seem to have become afraid to stand up and say, "You are wrong."  "Alternative facts" aren't facts; they are errors at best and outright lies at worst.

And if we live in a "post-truth world" it's because we're choosing to accept errors and lies rather than standing up to them.

As historian Timothy Snyder put it, in his 2021 essay "The American Abyss":

Post-truth is pre-fascism...  When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.  Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves.  If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions...  Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.

But Carl Sagan warned us of this almost thirty years ago, in his brilliant (if unsettling) book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.  I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

People like Amy Grady are leading the way into that darkness, and it seems like hardly anyone notices.

We cannot afford to have a generation of children going through public school and coming out thinking that ignorant superstition is a theory, that sloppily-defined terms are truth, and that pandering to the demands of a few that their favorite myths be elevated to the status of fact is how science is done.  It's time to stand up to the people who are trying to co-opt education into religious indoctrination.

In the Dover Decision, we won a battle, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that we have not yet won the war.

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The kludge factory

Know what a kludge is?

Coined by writer Jackson Granholm in 1962, a kludge is "an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole."  Usually created when a person is faced with fixing something and lacks (1) the correct parts, (2) the technical expertise to do it right, or (3) both, kludges fall into the "it works well enough for the time being" category.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Zoedovemany, Screen Shot 2015-11-19 at 11.54.48 AM, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Evolution is essentially a giant kludge factory.

At its heart, it's the "law of whatever works."  It's why the people who advocate Intelligent Design Creationism always give me a chuckle -- because if you know anything about biology, "intelligently designed" is the last thing a lot of it is.  Here are a few examples:

• Animals without hind legs -- notably whales and many snakes -- that have vestigial hind leg bones.
• Primates are some of the only mammals that cannot synthesize their own vitamin C -- yet we still carry the gene for making it.  It just doesn't work because it has a busted promoter.
• Human sinuses.  Yeah, you allergy sufferers know exactly what I'm saying.
• The recurrent laryngeal nerve in fish follows a fairly direct path, from the brain past the heart to the gills.  However, when fish evolved into land-dwelling forms and their anatomy changed -- their necks lengthening and their hearts moving lower into the body -- the recurrent laryngeal nerve got snagged on the circulatory system and had to lengthen as its path became more and more circuitous.  Now, in giraffes (for example), rather than going from the brain directly to the larynx, it goes right past its destination, loops under the heart, and then back up the neck to the larynx -- a distance of almost five meters.
• Our curved lower spines were clearly not "designed" to support a vertically-oriented body.  Have you ever seen a weight-bearing column with an s-bend?  No wonder so many of us develop lower back issues.
• One of the kludgiest of kludges is the male genitourinary tract.  Not only does the vas deferens loop way upward from the testicles (not quite as far as the giraffe's laryngeal nerve, admittedly), along the way it joins the urethra to form a single tube through the penis, something about which a friend of mine quipped, "There's intelligent design for you.  Routing a sewer pipe through a playground."  It also passes right through the prostate, a structure notorious for getting enlarged in older guys.  C'mon, God, you can do better than that.

The reason all this comes up is that the kludging goes all the way down to the molecular level.  A study from a team at Yale, Harvard, and MIT that appeared last week in the journal Science looked at the fact that when you compare the human genome to that of our nearest relatives, you find that one of the most significant differences is that our DNA has deleted sections.

That's right; some of why humans are human comes from genes that got knocked out in our ancestors.

The researchers found that there are about ten thousand bits of DNA, a lot of them consisting only of a couple of base pairs, that chimps and bonobos have and we don't.  A lot of these genetic losses were in regions involved in cognition, speech, and the development of the nervous system, all areas in which our differences are the most obvious.

The reason seems to have to do with gene switching.  Deleting a bit of switch that is intended to shut a gene off can leave the gene functioning for longer, with profound consequences.  Often these consequences are bad, of course.  There are some types of cancer (notably retinoblastoma) that are caused by a developmental gene having a faulty set of brakes.

But sometimes these changes in developmental patterns have a positive result, and therefore a selective advantage -- and we may owe our large brains and capacity for speech to kludgy switches.

"Often we think new biological functions must require new pieces of DNA, but this work shows us that deleting genetic code can result in profound consequences for traits make us unique as a species," said Steven Reilly, senior author of the paper.  "The deletion of this genetic information can have an effect that is the equivalent of removing three characters -- n't -- from the word isn't to create the new word is...  [Such deletions] can tweak the meaning of the instructions of how to make a human slightly, helping explain our bigger brains and complex cognition."

So yet another nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design Creationism, if you needed one.  Of course, I doubt it will convince anyone who wasn't already convinced; as I've observed more than once, you can't logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.

But at least it's good to know the science is unequivocal.  And, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The wonderful thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

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The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Dear readers:

I am going to take a long-overdue two-week break from writing here at Skeptophilia, so this will be my last post until Thursday, August 25.  Until I return, keep suggesting topics, keep reading, keep thinking, and keep hoisting the banner of critical thinking!

cheers,

Gordon

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Sometimes I see a piece of scientific research that is so brilliant, so elegant, all I can do is sit back in awestruck appreciation.

Such was my reaction to Nicholas J. Matzke's paper in Science entitled, "The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover."  And if you're wondering... yes, he did what it sounds like.

He used the techniques of evolutionary biology to show how anti-evolution policy has undergone descent with modification.

I read the paper with a delighted, and somewhat bemused, grin, blown away not only by how well it worked, but how incredibly clever the idea was.  What Matzke did was to analyze the text of all of the dozens of bills proposed since 2004 that try to shoehorn religious belief into the public school science classroom, and generate a phylogenetic tree for them -- in essence, a diagram summarizing how they are related to each other, and how they have changed.

In other words, a cladistic tree of evolutionary descent.

"Creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats, but techniques from the study of evolution reveal how creationist legislation is evolving," Matzke said in an interview.  "It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than ninety percent probability.  I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece—they are all ‘stealth creationism,’ and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations."

"They are not terribly intelligently designed," Matzke added. "Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another state and changed without thought."

He linked the bills to each other by doing statistical analysis of patterns in the text, much as evolutionary biologists use patterns in the DNA of related organisms, and arranged them into a cladistic tree using the "principle of maximum parsimony," which (simply put) is the arrangement that requires you to make the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

So without further ado, here is Matzke's tree linking 65 different, but related, pieces of legislation:

In particular, he was able to show where the documents incorporated language from a 2006 anti-evolution proposal in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, and how subsequent generations had pieces of it remaining, often -- dare I say -- mutated, but still recognizable.

"Successful policies have a tendency to spread," Matzke said.  "Every year, some states propose these policies, and often they are only barely defeated.  And obviously, sometimes they pass, so hopefully this article will help raise awareness of the dangers of the ongoing situation."

So when there are iterations that are better fit to the environment, in the sense that they went further in the court systems before being defeated or (hard though this is to fathom) were actually approved, the anti-evolutionists passed those versions around to other states, while less-successful models were outcompeted and become extinct.

There's a name for that process, isn't there?  Give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Okay, it's not that I think this paper will make much difference amongst the creationists and supporters of intelligent design.  They don't spend much time reading Science, I wouldn't suppose.  But even so, this is a coup -- using the techniques of cladistic analysis to illustrate the relationships between bills designed to force public school students to learn that cladistic analysis doesn't work.

I can't help but think that Darwin would be proud.

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Viral reality

If you are of the opinion that more evidence is necessary for demonstrating the correctness of the evolutionary model, I give you: a paper by biologist Justin R. Meyer of the University of California-San Diego et al. that has conclusively demonstrated speciation occurring in the laboratory.

The gist of what the team did is to grow populations of bacteriophage Lambda (a virus that attacks and kills bacteria) in the presence of populations of two different potential food sources, more specifically E. coli that had one of two different receptors where the virus could attach.  What happened was that the original bacteriophages were non-specialists -- they could attach to either receptor, but not very efficiently -- but over time, more of them accrued mutations that allowed them to specialize in attacking one receptor over the other.  Ultimately, the non-specialists became extinct, leaving a split population where each new species could not survive on the other's food source.

Diagram of a bacteriophage [Image licensed under the Creative Commons GrahamColm at English Wikipedia, Phage, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Pretty amazing stuff.  My response was, "If that isn't evolution, what the hell is it?"  Of course, I'm expecting the litany of goofy rejoinders to start any time now.  "It's only microevolution."  "There was no novel gene produced."  "But both of them are still viruses.  If you showed me a virus evolving into a wombat, then I'd believe you."

"Anti-evolutionists," see "Goalposts, Moving the."

Nevertheless, this sticks another nail in the coffin of both Intelligent Design proponents and the young-Earth creationists, the latter of whom believe that all of the Earth's species were created as-is six thousand or so years ago along with the Earth itself, and that the two hundred million year old trilobite fossils one sometimes finds simply dropped out of God's pocket while he was walking through the Garden of Eden or something.

So as usual, you can't logic your way out of a stance you didn't logic your way into.  Still, I have hope that the tide is gradually turning.  Certainly one cheering incident comes our way from Richard Lenski, who is justly famous for his groundbreaking study of evolution in bacteria and who co-authored the Meyer paper I began with.  But Lenski will forever be one of my heroes for the way he handled Andrew Schlafly, who runs Conservapedia, a Wikipedia clone that attempts to remodel reality so that all of the ultra-conservative talking points are true.  Schlafly had written a dismissive piece about Lenski's work on Conservapedia, to which Lenski responded.  The ensuing exchange resulted in one of the most epic smackdowns by a scientist I've ever seen.  Lenski takes apart Schlafly's objections piece by piece, citing data, kicking ass, and taking names.  I excerpt the end of it below, but you can (and should) read the whole thing at the article on the "Lenski Affair" over at RationalWiki:

I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior.  And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve.  However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange.

Sincerely, Richard Lenski

And if that's not spectacular enough, check out one of the four P.S.s:

I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.”  That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another.  Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong.  For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’”  You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.

I can only hope that there was a mic around after that so that Lenski could drop it.

So there you have it.  Science finding out cool stuff once again, because after all, that's what science does.  The creationists, it is to be hoped, retreating further and further into the corner into which they've painted themselves.  It's probably a forlorn wish that this'll make Ken Ham shut up, but maybe he'll eventually have to adapt his strategy to address reality instead of avoiding it.

You might even say... he'll need to evolve.

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The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

An idea takes flight

There's a fundamental misunderstanding that even some people who understand and accept evolution have, and it's called teleology.

Teleology is the interpretation of events in terms of their final purpose.  Now, there are some things you can look at teleologically; at least some historical events, for example, occurred because someone (or a bunch of someones) had a goal in mind and purposefully drove toward it.

The problem is, evolution isn't goal-driven.  As I mentioned a couple of days ago in the post on the re-evolution of flightlessness in the Alhambra rail, it's the law of whatever works at the time.  But teleological thinking sneaks in all too easily -- all you have to do is to ask your average scientifically-minded fourth grader why giraffes have long necks, and you'll probably get the answer, "So they can reach high branches in trees for food."  This conjures up the image of a herd of short-necked giraffes looking longingly up at the tender, juicy foliage out of reach, and thinking, "Wow, sure would be nice," and over the next generations, that desire to reach the end goal of more food resulted in longer-necked giraffes being born.

It's a subtler distinction than it might seem at first.  The truth is that the variation comes first; the blind forces of mutation and recombination result in baby giraffes with varying neck lengths.  But the better food being higher up means that those with longer necks survive better, passing those genes on -- so over time, the population's average neck length increases.  No goal-driven, forward-thinking forces necessary; it's all driven by what is an advantage in the environment as it currently is.  Change the environment, and you change those selective pressures, and the population (if it has sufficient variability to do so) responds.

The situation is simple enough with giraffe necks (which is why every middle-school textbook on biology uses that as an example), but what about more complex structures?  This is when the subject of things like eyes and wings inevitably comes up, often along with the intelligent-design aficionados' favorite buzzwords -- "irreducible complexity."  A half an eye or half a wing, they say, isn't good for anything, so there has to be forward thinking, teleological design involved.  Modification of an arm into a wing only makes sense if there was intent, because the intermediate forms along the way are worse than what you started with.

There are two flaws in this argument.

The first is brilliantly described in Richard Dawkins's amazing book The Blind Watchmaker, which explains in clear layman's terms why the intelligent design argument doesn't work.  He takes the vertebrate eye as his example, which is admittedly an amazing device with dozens of working parts and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of kinds of proteins, all of which have to work together in order to generate the capacity for clear vision.  As Dawkins points out, though, all of these didn't have to evolve simultaneously -- that would indeed be hard to explain.  Starting with simple light-detecting eyespots (like in a flatworm), the structure evolved to become more and more complex, more and more sensitive, and all that had to happen is at each tiny step the improvement gave the animal an advantage over the previous form.  So the ID-proponents' claim that "half an eye isn't worth anything" is actually incorrect.  An eyespot (which isn't even half an eye -- maybe five percent of one) is clearly better than no ability to detect light at all.  And after that, each refinement made it better and was selected for, until finally you have a complex structure like your own eye, capable of color vision, light intensity accommodation, focusing, and depth perception.

The second flaw, though, is a fascinating one, and is the reason this whole topic comes up in today's post.  For something to be selected for, all it has to accomplish is to confer some sort of benefit on the organism -- not necessarily the one for which it will eventually be used.  This phenomenon, called preaptation (or preadaptation), is usually explained using the example of feathers and wings in birds.  The theory is -- supported by the presence of feathers in fossils of a number of species of dinosaurs -- that feathers evolved in the context of keeping warm (and possibly protecting the skin from sun exposure), and only afterward became useful for the ability of lightweight/arboreal species to glide, and finally to fly.

A second example of this was the subject of a paper last week in Nature, which I was alerted to by my friend, the amazing scientist and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber.  The topic was the hypothesis that preaptation had also occurred in insect wings -- they had evolved as gill extensions in aquatic larvae, and through minor modifications widened and lengthened, and in the adult became full-fledged wings.  The embryonic structures for larval gills and adult wings were certainly homologous, so it seemed like a good guess, but hard evidence was lacking...

... until now.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michael Palmer, Yellow mayfly on leaf, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In "Genomic Adaptations to Aquatic and Aerial Life in Mayflies and the Origin of Insect Wings," a team led by Isabel Almudi of the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology (in Sevilla, Spain) completely knocks it out of the park by identifying the genetic basis of both wings and gills in insects -- and demonstrates that the preaptation hypothesis was spot-on.  Here it is in the authors' words:

The evolution of winged insects revolutionized terrestrial ecosystems and led to the largest animal radiation on Earth.  However, we still have an incomplete picture of the genomic changes that underlay this diversification.  Mayflies, as one of the sister groups of all other winged insects, are key to understanding this radiation.  Here, we describe the genome of the mayfly Cloeon dipterum and its gene expression throughout its aquatic and aerial life cycle and specific organs.  We discover an expansion of odorant-binding-protein genes, some expressed specifically in breathing gills of aquatic nymphs, suggesting a novel sensory role for this organ.  In contrast, flying adults use an enlarged opsin set in a sexually dimorphic manner, with some expressed only in males.  Finally, we identify a set of wing-associated genes deeply conserved in the pterygote insects and find transcriptomic similarities between gills and wings, suggesting a common genetic program.  Globally, this comprehensive genomic and transcriptomic study uncovers the genetic basis of key evolutionary adaptations in mayflies and winged insects.

As Sheldon Cooper might say, "Bazinga."

This completely dismantles the "irreducible complexity" argument for insect wings, if there was any basis for that argument left.  The evolutionary model is vindicated again.  As Almudi et al.'s research shows, the genomic basis in an organism can be modified in such a way as to give structures multiple purposes -- and that if the environment is right, one purpose (e.g. flight) can supersede another (e.g. maximizing oxygen absorption) in importance, causing the evolutionary path to take off in a different direction.

So cheers to Almudi and her team.  I read their paper while grinning like a loon just because it was such a perfect wrap-up to a conjecture I was telling my AP Biology classes about twenty years ago.  It's so gratifying to study a model that has this kind of robust predictive power -- and further reinforces my opinion that in order not to accept evolution, you have to be willfully ignorant of the actual evidence in its favor.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one: acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way: A New Look at how Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.

It's been known for some years that a lot of birds are a great deal more intelligent than we'd thought.  Crows and other corvids are capable of reasoning and problem-solving, and actually play, seemingly for no reason other than "it's fun."  Parrots are capable of learning language and simple categorization.  A group of birds called babblers understand reciprocity -- and females are attracted to males who share their food the most ostentatiously.

So "bird brain" should actually be a compliment.

Here, Ackerman looks at the hugely diverse world of birds and gives us fascinating information about all facets of their behavior -- not only the "positive" ones (to put an human-based judgment on it) but "negative" ones like deception, manipulating, and cheating.  The result is one of the best science books I've read in recent years, written in Ackerman's signature sparkling prose.  Birder or not, this is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in biology or animal behavior.

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The end of the social experiment

In case I needed another reason to be glad that I'm only a few years from retirement, a few days ago President-elect Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education.

Betsy DeVos [image courtesy of photographer Keith A. Almli and the Wikimedia Commons]

It would be hard to find a less qualified person.  It is debatable whether DeVos has ever set foot in a public school.  She did not attend one as a child, nor did she send her own children there.  She does not have a degree in education, nor has she ever taught, even in a private school.  Her sole connection to schools is her near-rabid support of vouchers, which would funnel money away from public schools and into private (including religious) schools.

It's worse, however, than a simple lack of qualifications.  The Acton Institute, where DeVos is a board member, recently published a piece called "Bring Back Child Labor: Work is a Gift Our Kids Can Handle" which included passages like the following:

Operating out of a justified fear of the harsh excesses of “harder times,” we have allowed our cultural attitudes to swing too far in the opposite direction, distorting work as a “necessary obligation of adulthood,” a gift too dangerous for kids.  Working from these same distorted attitudes, the Washington Post recently published what it described as a “haunting” photo montage of child laborers from America’s rougher past. 

The photos surely point to times of extreme lack, of stress and pain.  But as Jeffrey Tucker rightly detects, they also represent the faces of those who are actively building enterprises and cities, using their gifts to serve their communities, and setting the foundation of a flourishing nation, in turn.

The author, Joseph Sunde, was the recipient of a firestorm of criticism over the article, so he changed the title to remove the "Bring Back Child Labor" part, and appended the following disclaimer:

Given the recent attention drawn to this post, permit me to clarify that I do NOT endorse replacing education with paid labor, nor do I support sending our children back into the coal mines or other high-risk jobs, nor do I support getting rid of mandatory education at elementary and middle-school ages.

No?  So what does "Bring Back Child Labor" mean?

What is the most maddening about all of this is that the majority of students I teach do work, and I see the stress that they deal with trying to juggle school, homework, job, extracurricular activities, and family obligations.  The idea that kids today are lazy whiners who need a return to some 1920s-style discipline is a convenient falsehood for those who want to gut the public school system.

DeVos and the Acton Institute are deeply invested in what amounts to defunding public education.  They focused for a time on Michigan, trying to push a "school choice" agenda there (an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful), showering huge amounts of money and gifts on Republican candidates in exchange for their support.  Detroit Free Press writer Stephen Henderson denounced DeVos as engaging in "a spending spree that would swell to $1.45 million in contributions to the party and to individual candidates by the end of July," adding that "in Michigan, children’s education has been squandered in the name of a reform “experiment," driven by ideologies that put faith in markets, alone, as the best arbiters of quality, and so heavily financed by donors like the DeVos clan that nearly no other voices get heard in the educational conversation."

Michigan Board of Education President John Austin, in an apt if somewhat mixed metaphor, said that "It’s like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, and hand-feeding it schoolchildren...  DeVos’s agenda is to break the public education system, not educate kids, and replace it with a for-profit model."

And if you needed anything else, there's also a good likelihood that she's an Intelligent Design Creationist.  She grew up in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church; her parents, Edgar and Elsa (Brockhuizen) Prince, are major donors to the Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council;  and her husband, Dick DeVos, came right out with "teach the controversy" bullshit when he was running for Michigan governor in 2006:

I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design — that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory — that that theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less.

By the same argument, I suppose teaching students alchemy in chemistry class and astrology in physics class would "expose them to more ideas, not less."

And funny how whenever one of these clowns tries to ramrod ID or creationism into public school classrooms, they always say that "many scientists" are in favor of it without telling us who these scientists are.  "Cite your sources" apparently doesn't carry any weight in politics, for some reason.

So in the next four years -- assuming DeVos is confirmed, which is likely given the Republican majority in both the Senate and the House -- look for a further siphoning of funds away from public schools, more emphasis on draining resources and talent from poor inner-city schools, and more efforts to hamstring science education.  I've taught for thirty years, and I've weathered some ups and downs in that time, but I can't recall a point at which I felt so genuinely pessimistic about the future of public education.  In a purely selfish sense, I'm glad I'm retiring, probably some time in the next five years, and can get myself right out of this mess.  But it breaks my heart that this great social experiment in educating all children, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or religion, may be coming to an end.

A win for the scientists

Some days, we all need some good news, and I got mine when I heard over on Patheos that the CEO of a public school district has ordered their science faculty to stop using creationist materials for teaching biology and geology.

Of course, the fact that they were doing this in the first place is kind of appalling.  According to Zack Kopplin, who has been crusading since he was a teenager for teaching actual science in science classes:

A curriculum map… recommends teachers in this public school district show a creationist video, Cambrian Fossils and the Creation of Species, as part of 10th-grade science education.  The video claims that the Cambrian Explosion “totally invalidates the theory of evolution.”  The Cambrian Explosion was a time period, nearly 550 million years ago, where, over the next tens of millions of years, the number of species on Earth experienced a (relatively) rapid expansion by evolutionary standards.  Christian creationists regularly point to this explosion of life as evidence for creation by God and against evolution.

Which is using one of the strongest pieces of evidence from the fossil record for evolution as evidence against evolution.  It's as if you used the fact that there are different constellations in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere as evidence that the Earth was flat.

Oh, wait, there are people who do that.  Never mind.

Anyhow, Krish Mohip, the new CEO of Youngstown (Ohio) City Schools, has put a stop to this nonsense.  He has mandated that Youngstown, just like every other public school district in Ohio, has to use curricula consistent with the Ohio State Science Standards, which mention the words "evolution" and "evolutionary" almost fifty times, and (surprise!) never mention "creation," "creationism," or "intelligent design" at all.  Mohip doesn't pull any punches.  In his memo, he says that "beginning this 2016-2017 school year any reference to intelligent design, creationism, or any like concepts are eliminated from the science curriculum."

Which is exactly as it should be.  Materials from the Discovery Institute, such as the video Darwin's Dilemma, have no place in the public school.  They are religious indoctrination, pure and simple, claiming that there is a controversy where no controversy -- among the scientists, at least -- exists.

However, I'm sure that this will just open up more fun lawsuits from aggrieved hyper-Christians who think that the bible needs to be the basis of science classes throughout the nation.  They're not nearly defeated yet, considering the borderline white supremacist history texts being adopted statewide in Texas, which make it look like the Founding Fathers copied the Constitution straight from the bible, and the Native Americans and African slaves were just thrilled to pieces to be taught about the American Way by the white settlers.

So it's not that I think the war is over, but at least this particular battle is won, thanks to a forward-thinking CEO who actually cares whether the students in his district come away understanding how science works.  And at the moment, I'll take all the good news I can get.

Information revolution

One of the most common tropes that you hear in anti-evolution arguments is what they call the "problem of information."  The idea is that random mutations can't create new information -- perhaps they can modify the information that is already there, but evolution provides no way to generate novel genes (and therefore novel structures).

As Royal Truman put it over at the True Origin Archive:

Selection inevitably removes information from the gene pool... [C]onsider regulatory genes that switch other genes ‘on’ or ‘off’.  That is, they control whether or not the information in a gene will be decoded, so the trait will be expressed in the creature.  This would enable very rapid and ‘jumpy’ changes, which are still changes involving already created information, not generation of new information, even if latent (hidden) information was turned on...   Now, it is questionable whether any mutation can be shown to lead to some kind of improvement without causing deleterious functioning of some processes already encoded on the DNA (this is very different from the question whether one mutation could allow some members to temporarily survive some drastic environmental change).   Presumably a very bad mutation leads to death, weeding out such mutated genes from that species’ gene pool forever.

Despite Truman's confidence and the apparent sophistication of his argument -- he spends a long time, for example, wandering about in the realm of Bayesian information theory to support his views -- almost all biologists consider this view dead wrong.  As an example, consider preaptation  -- the evolution of a gene (and its gene product) in one context, and a small change in the gene resulting in a novel gene product with a completely different function.

The most striking instance of preaptation is the class of proteins called crystallins, which make up the lens of the vertebrate eye.  This is wryly amusing given the fact that the eye is one of those structures that the anti-evolutionist types call "irreducibly complex," even though as Richard Dawkins writes:

[P]lausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom.  A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye.  Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human.  Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours.  It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all.

Another blow to the "irreducible complexity" of the eye was dealt a blow when it was found that the transparent proteins in the lens are related genetically to a gene that produces heat-shock proteins, proteins produced during various types of physical stress (including thermal stress, which is what gave them their name).  One small mutation in the gene for heat-shock proteins creates a gene that makes a clear protein that can be used for focusing light.

If that's not "new information"...?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Even with examples like this, people of Truman's stripe aren't convinced.  They argue that okay, you can modify what's already there, but no one has been able to show how mutations create anything genetic that is genuinely new.

Until two days ago.

A team led by Jorge Ruiz-Orera of the Hospital del Mar Research Institute of Barcelona, Spain published a paper in PLOS-One called, "Origins of De Novo Genes in Humans and Chimpanzees," in which they show exactly how this can happen.  In their groundbreaking analysis, they have basically given a death blow to the so-called "problem of information."  Ruiz-Orera et al. write:

For the past 20 years scientists have puzzled over a strange-yet-ubiquitous genomic phenomenon; in every genome there are sets of genes which are unique to that particular species i.e. lacking homologues in any other species.  How have these genes originated?  The advent of massively parallel RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) has provided new clues to this question, with the discovery of an unexpectedly high number of transcripts that do not correspond to typical protein-coding genes, and which could serve as a substrate for this process...  We have found thousands of transcripts that are human and/or chimpanzee-specific and which are likely to have originated de novo from previously non-transcribed regions of the genome.  We have observed an enrichment in transcription factor binding sites in the promoter regions of these genes when compared to other species; this is consistent with the idea that the gain of new regulatory motifs results in de novo gene expression.  We also show that some of the genes encode new functional proteins expressed in brain or testis, which may have contributed to phenotypic novelties in human evolution.

I think they show admirable restraint in not taking at least a sidewise swipe at the Intelligent Design advocates.  But in their discussion, even the most diehard IDer couldn't fail to catch the drift of their last statement:

Our results indicate that the expression of new loci in the genome takes place at a very high rate and is probably mediated by random mutations that generate new active promoters.  These newly expressed transcripts would form the substrate for the evolution of new genes with novel functions.

Which I think is about as close to a "boo-yah!' as is allowed in an academic paper.

The history of evolutionary research has been a long series of struggles against objections from individuals who have a vested interest -- usually religious in nature -- in the evolutionary model being wrong.  This assume-your-conclusion stance is pretty transparent to those of us who subscribe to the scientific method as a means for understanding, but their certainty has been remarkably resistant to attack.  Whether the research by Ruiz-Orera et al. will convince anyone remains to be seen, but at least it does one thing; it shows up yet another facet of their argument as specious.

And that, after all, is progress.  Or as Ruiz-Orera might put it, "new information."

The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Sometimes I see a piece of scientific research that is so brilliant, so elegant, all I can do is sit back in awestruck appreciation.

Such was my reaction to Nicholas J. Matzke's paper in Science this week entitled, "The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover."  And if you're wondering... yes, he did what it sounds like.

He used the techniques of evolutionary biology to show how anti-evolution policy has undergone descent with modification.

I read the paper with a delighted, and somewhat bemused, grin, blown away not only by how well it worked, but how incredibly clever the idea was.  What Matzke did was to analyze the text of all of the dozens of bills proposed since 2004 that try to shoehorn religious belief into the public school science classroom, and generate a phylogenetic tree for them -- in essence, a diagram summarizing how they are related to each other, and how they have changed.

In other words, a cladistic tree of evolutionary descent.

"Creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats, but techniques from the study of evolution reveal how creationist legislation is evolving," Matzke said in an interview.  "It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than 90 percent probability.  I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece—they are all ‘stealth creationism,’ and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations."

"They are not terribly intelligently designed," Matzke added.  "Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another state and changed without thought."

He linked the bills to each other by doing statistical analysis of patterns in the text, much as evolutionary biologists use patterns in the DNA of related organisms, and arranged them into a cladistic tree using the "principle of maximum parsimony," which (simply put) is the arrangement that requires you to make the least ad hoc assumptions.

So without further ado, here is Matzke's tree linking 65 different, but related, pieces of legislation:

In particular, he was able to show where the documents incorporated language from a 2006 anti-evolution proposal in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, and how subsequent generations had pieces of it remaining, often -- dare I say -- mutated, but still recognizable.

"Successful policies have a tendency to spread," Matzke said. "Every year, some states propose these policies, and often they are only barely defeated.  And obviously, sometimes they pass, so hopefully this article will help raise awareness of the dangers of the ongoing situation."

So when there are iterations that are better fit to the environment, in the sense that they went further in the court systems before being defeated or (hard though this is to fathom) were actually approved, the anti-evolutionists passed those versions around to other states, while less-successful models were outcompeted and become extinct.

There's a name for that process, isn't there?  Give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Okay, it's not that I think this paper will make much difference amongst the creationists and supporters of intelligent design.  They don't spend much time reading Science, I wouldn't suppose.  But even so, this is a coup -- using the techniques of cladistic analysis to illustrate the relationships between bills designed to force public school students to learn that cladistic analysis doesn't work.

I can't help but think that Darwin would be proud. 

Creationist street theater

Is it just me, or are others noticing that the creationists seem to be getting a bit... desperate?

I ask the question because this Saturday (November 1) they're holding a conference at Michigan State University called the "Origin Summit."  This strikes me as a little like a guy tiptoeing up to a sleeping grizzly bear to boop him on the nose.  MSU is a highly regarded research institution, and in fact is the home of both Richard Lenski, whose decades-long study of evolution in bacteria is considered one of the best right-in-front-of-your-face examples of natural selection in action, and Robert Pennock, who testified as an expert witness in the landmark Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District court case, which found that teaching intelligent design in public schools was against the law.

So the whole thing is a good example of chutzpah, if nothing else.  But that hasn't stopped the creationists.  Amongst the topics in the conference will be the role of evolution in the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, "why the Big Bang is fake," a talk called "Natural Selection is NOT Evolution," and a "critique of Lenski's research."

It's hard to see what exactly they hope to accomplish, here, and even its organizers seem a little shaky on what they're doing.  "The Origin Summit is not overtly evangelistic," wrote Mike Smith, executive director of the group who is sponsoring the event.  "We hope to pave the way for evangelism (for the other campus ministries) by presenting the scientific evidence for intelligent design.  Once students realize they're created beings, and not the product of natural selection, they're much more open to the Gospel, to the message of God's love and forgiveness."

[image courtesy of photographer Amy Watts and the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole thing sounds more like street theater than a serious academic conference, though, given that there is no scientific evidence for intelligent design, much less young-earth creationism.  Lenski himself was asked to comment on the summit, and he responded, "In my opinion, this event will be just another forgettable blip in the long history of antiscience, antievolution screeds.  I suppose the speakers chose to target our research… because their event is being held here, and maybe because they find it confusing to their worldview that evolution isn’t supposed to happen."

"Confusing" is an understatement.  The amount of science that you have to ignore outright in order to accept creationism is staggering.  The summit has, of course, left some legitimate scientists a little uneasy; is having this kind of foolishness hosted at a university sending the wrong message?

"Free speech is at the heart of academic freedom and is something we take very seriously," wrote Kent Cassella, MSU’s associate vice president for communications.  "Any group, regardless of viewpoint, has the right to assemble in public areas of campus or petition for space to host an event so long as it does not engage in disorderly conduct or violate rules.  While MSU is not a sponsor of the creation summit, MSU is a marketplace of free ideas."

Which is, of course, exactly the right approach.  The creationists should be given every opportunity to publicly embarrass themselves.  I was initially against Bill Nye debating Ken Ham, for example, but in the end Ham showed so abysmally that even Pat Robertson said, "The dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn't comport with anything that is found in science and you can't just totally deny the geological formations that are out there...  (W)e have skeletons of dinosaurs that go back like 65 million years.  And to say that it all came around six thousand years ago is nonsense...  I don't believe in so-called evolution as non-theistic.  I believe that God started it all and he's in charge of all of it.  The fact that you have progressive evolution under his control.  That doesn't hurt my faith at all."

"I think it's time we come off of that stuff and say this isn't possible," he added.  "Let's be real, let's not make a joke of ourselves."

Wise words, albeit from a guy who usually gives every evidence of having a screw loose.

So about the Origin Summit: my thought is, let 'em have their fun.  If they want to go over to the Big Kids' Yard and put on a play, they can knock themselves out.  It's not going to slow down the real research for a moment, and may actually highlight how devoid of reason their stance is, which is all to the good.

Choosing an intelligent designer

Here we go again.

Last week, the Springboro (Ohio) City Community School District announced that they are considering a policy that would "encourage students to 'think critically' about 'controversial' issues like evolution, abortion, climate change, UN Agenda 21 and sustainable development. The policy directs teachers to fully explore 'all sides' of these issues."

To take the two pieces of the proposed policy that I actually know enough to comment on, there is no controversy in scientific circles about evolution and climate change -- a point I have made often enough that I don't see the need to defend it further here.

What makes this situation interesting was something that appeared on Reddit yesterday -- a back-and-forth email exchange between an Ohio resident who is outraged by the policy, and Kelly Kohls, president of the Springboro School Board.  I quote the posted emails below:

Ms Kohls et al,

As someone who grew up in Cincinnati during the 70s and 80s, I well remember the attempts to bring religious teachings into the classroom. As it has been ruled clearly unconstitutional many times, you are merely wasting time and resources better spent on actually helping children of your school district. Please keep religion at home or in your houses of worship. It has no place in a science classroom. There is no scientific controversy with respect to Evolution except within the ranks of the fundamentalists.
In case you or your board are unsure about the legal precedents, please see:
Epperson v. Arkansas (1968)
Segraves v State of California (1981)
McLean v Arkansas BOE (1982)
Edwards v. Aguillard (1897)
Webster v New Lenox (1990)
Peloza v Capistrano (1994)
Freiler v Tangipahoa Paris BOE (1997) - this one SPECIFICALLY mentions "critical thinking" by the way, and calls it what it is, a ruse.
Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005)
There are more but I think you get my point.
Please, please, please...focus on facts. You are educators. You should act like it.
Thank you for your time,

Stuart Thomas

Ms. Kohls responded as follows.  I would run out of "sics" so you'll just have to keep in mind that this is verbatim:

Please read the rulings, they are not saying unconstitutional or illegal. Please also go to the Discovery Institute and view the science the blows gigantic wholes in Evolution. I also went to school in the 70's and 80 and and do not agree with you.

Please focus on the facts and read the rulings for yourself.

Kelly Kohls

The original poster, in apparent bafflement at getting a response from a school board president that barely qualified as English, wrote back the following:

Ms Kohls,

I'm, first of all, surprised that you would actually cite The Discovery Institute, which is clearly a heavily biased lobbying group and advances only one view, the completely unscientific concept of creationism.

Second, you ask me to "read the rulings", which I have. I would not have cited the cases if I hadn't. Granted, in some cases, it may have been a lower court ruling which may not be citable in a higher court but, and I know you know this, the Circuit Court or the Supreme Court cases clearly define constitutionality. In no case did creationists prevail. This should be of particular interest and goes back to my earlier point that this attempt to inject religion into a secular environment is futile at best, and ultimately harmful to the students in your district.

Let me address your points one by one, and, while I grant that not every case was lifted to the Supreme Court, creationism was never upheld and religious rights were never violated by the teaching of evolution:

"they are not saying unconstitutional or illegal"
I'll just start at the first three...
Epperson v. Arkansas - The U.S Supreme Court found that, ultimately, it was unconstitutional. The Arkansas Supreme Court ruling was overturned by the US Supreme Court. "The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools." Please note the use of the word "constitutional".
Segraves v State of California - Summarized as "learning about evolution in public schools does not infringe upon the free exercise of religion." Your First Amendment rights are not violated. Note that if you teach the Christian version, you then automatically violate the rights of people of other religions.
McLean v Arkansas - "the Act was passed with the specific purpose by the General Assembly of advancing religion," which violates the First Amendment.

"I also went to school in the 70's and 80 and and do not agree with you"
Whether or not you agree with me is not the issue here. The issue is Constitutionality. On this point, you are already at a disadvantage. I am unclear why you think you can overturn decades of previous rulings.
Would you like me to continue or do you understand that your "facts" are not, in any way, facts.

"blows gigantic wholes in Evolution"
Honestly, I'm appalled that in your reply, you, as an educator, did not even know the difference between "whole" and "hole". Now, I know this is not a specific refutation of your argument and normally I would have overlooked it, but you are on the Board of Education. By now, I would have hoped that the simple act of proof-reading would have been second nature.

This is a battle which you will not win. Again, you are welcome to your beliefs, but keep them out of the classroom unless you are willing to allow scientists into your church to "teach the controversy".

Regards,

Stuart Thomas

At this point Ms. Kohls had evidently had enough of Mr. Thomas and his damn logical, rational thinking, because she sent back a one liner:

Thanks for your opinion and I respectfully disagree.

 I, too, thought it was interesting that she would immediately blow her cover and mention the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based "think tank" (although I use that phrase with some reluctance) that has championed forcing Christian intelligent design and climate change denialism into public school curricula.  They are adamant especially about the former, and more than one of the posts on the Institute website tears into the idea of abiogenesis, stating that the origins of life required a "skilled technical chemist" -- i.e., a deity who got life going.

Fine.  God started life, did he?  I'll be sure to teach that next year in my biology classes.  The problem is, which Scientific Theory of God do you want me to use?  Intelligent designers abound in the mythology of humanity.  We have more than a few to choose from:

The first humans were generated by the Sky (Marduk) having sex with the Earth (Tiamat).  [Babylonian]

The Earth is made of the dead body of a frost giant, and the first humans were carved out of logs.  [Norse]

Dry land was formed by a deity (Izanagi) stirring the Celestial Sea with his spear.  The first humans were the children of Izanagi by his wife (Izanami), but she had also previously given birth to a leech, a floating island, and a child who was on fire, which musta hurt like hell.  [Japanese]

The first people were made out of rocks and minerals by a god called "Black Hactcin."  [Jicarilla Apache]

The first life was created out of pond muck by a guy named Obatala.  Some of the weirder-looking creatures in the world were made while Obatala was drunk, which I would expect accounts for the duck-billed platypus.  [Yoruba]

So, anyhow.  I'd guess that Mr. Thomas is right, and that this latest assault on science is doomed to fail, but for cryin' in the sink, it does get tiresome fighting the same battles over and over again.  In any case, keep your eye on Ohio.  As for me, I'm off to go prepare my lesson on how the different races of humans came about because a god named "Kche Mnedo" didn't bake some of them long enough, and the half-baked ones came out as white people.