Magi Mike’s Blog

My book (What Evolution Is, 2001) attempts to explain evolution. I don’t need to prove it again, evolution is so clearly a fact that you need to be committed to something like a belief in the supernatural if you are at all in disagreement with evolution. It is a fact and we don’t need to prove it anymore. Nonetheless, we must explain why it happened and how it happens.

Ernst Mayr, 1904-2005

Ernst Mayr was a long lived and very eminent biologist, who based his thinking on the theory of evolution, just as all successful biological scientists must. He was interviewed by edge.org, just a few years before he died and was asked:

“How do you account for the fact that in this country, despite the effect of Darwinism on many people in the scientific community, more and more people are god fearing and believe in the 8 days of creation?”

To which he replied: “You know you cannot give a polite answer to that question”.

The Edge interviewer insisted:

We appreciate impolite, impolitical, answers.

So Mayr replied, saying:

They recently tested a group of schoolgirls. They asked, “Where is Mexico?”. Do you know that most of the kids had no idea where Mexico is? I’m using this only to illustrate the fact that—and pardon me for saying so—the average American is amazingly ignorant about just about everything. If he was better informed, how could he reject evolution? If you don’t accept evolution, then most of the facts of biology just don’t make sense. I can’t explain how an entire nation can be so ignorant, but there it is.

The Reason a Whole Nation can be Ignorant is Religion

In the Dark Ages, Europe was called Christendom. It was under Christian dominion, and few people could read because the Christians neglected all scholarship, and the whole of classical learning in favour of devotion to God. Only clerics were supposed to be able to read, and what they were supposed to read was devotional writing, especially, of course, the bible, although it was available only in Latin. Many monks could not even read their bibles, and simply learnt passages off by heart to mumble their way through Mass, which was also given in Latin. A few scholarly monks could read and write, and are now famous—they are remembered for it! They were, of course, the teachers of the ordinary clerics, who didn’t bother to do their lessons. So it continued for 600 years.

The situation in the USA now is getting similar to how it was in the fifth and sixth centuries in Europe when classical scholarship and even cleanliness was being discouraged as vanity by the clerics. The modern clerics, right wing pastors interested more in money than morals, oppose modern learning, like the theory of evolution, and large numbers of Americans follow them in decrying evolutionary theory and science in general. The outcome can only be bad—a parallel with medieval Europe. The USA cannot possibly remain the leading technological nation while teaching religious dogmata rather than modern science. Already the USA is falling completely behind countries like China and India, and is in a state of economic collapse.

Americans have to decide whether they want to retain the leadership they established over the twentieth century, or rapidly fall into a vainglorious yet worthless piety ending in the destitution of a new Dark Age.

Superstitious and ritual behavior can be recognized in many animals, not just humans. The first description of superstitious behavior in animals came from psychologist B F Skinner in 1948. He put hungry pigeons in cages, offering them a few seconds of access to food trays at regular intervals. As long as the intervals were short, the birds began offering up behaviors—like turning round in a particular direction, rocking from side to side or tossing their heads up as if they were lifting a bar. They did these things “as if there were a causal relation between behavior and the presentation of food” (Skinner). Once the behaviors were established, they tended to persist, even as time intervals between feeding lengthened. Skinner’s work compared pigeon behavior to conditioned responses—the birds evidently thought their actions were causal when they were not. Moreover, they persist even when experience shows they are false.

Yet such behavior is not free—they have a cost in terms of energy and lost opportunities. It makes no sense for organisms to think something they do influences the future when it cannot. How then can superstitious and ritual behavior arise by natural selection?

In 1977, Peter R Killeen, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, challenged Skinner’s analysis. He gave his pigeons opportunities to detect whether or not a result was due to their actions or simply random. Killeen found that the birds could judge cause and effect, at least when they had all the information they needed. They could distinguish subtle differences, even scoring as well as humans making the same discriminations. He found it was insufficient data that led birds to the wrong conclusions. The data they had led to the false belief and they had no way of rectifying it.

Kevin Abbott, biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, and co-author with Thomas Sherratt of study published in Animal Behaviour, explains:

From an evolutionary perspective, superstitions seem maladaptive.

Perhaps superstition is adaptive as a placebo, or for social bonding, or maybe it is maladaptive now, but came from traits that once were adaptive, rather like behavioral wisdom teeth.

Foster and Kokko, in 2009 compared superstition to a bet. A mouse, hearing a rustle in the grass, quickly finds a cat leaping on it, and dives into a hole. Subsequently the mouse figures it as an odds on bet it’s a cat whenever it hears a rustle, and dives underground, even when the rustle is just the wind. Its diving habit reflects the mouse’s lack of data—it can’t tell whether the rustle is a dangerous cat in the grass or just the wind.

Abbott and Sherratt’s work goes a step further, designing choice, multiple trials, and experience into their model, so the animal can learn from experience, allowing for change or retention of the superstition or ritual. On any given trial, the animal must decide whether to give the action that maximizes its expected fitness based on current information—exploit—or to give the action that provides the most information about the true nature of the causal relationship—explore. Now the results tend to follow common sense. The animal will stop a superstition if it is not too expensive in comparison with its old ways—the model predicts what we tend to see in real life.

Superstitions are more likely when the cost of the superstition is low relative to the perceived benefits, and when the individual’s prior beliefs suggest that the superstition is true. Both the total number of learning trials available, and the nature of the individual’s uncertainty affect the probability of superstition, but the nature of these effects depends on the individual’s prior beliefs. Humans will be convinced a lucky charm doesn’t work, the more times they carry it only when they originally believed it would. If they did not believe initially, carrying it long enough could give enough apparent positives that they might begin to believe it has some effect. Adaptive learning can be leading us to places we shouldn’t go. But Killeen thinks something is left out of their model:

Sometimes simpler answers suffice. For beasts like us who are never quite sure that we are well enough informed, taking that multivitamin and knocking wood puts the semblance of control back in our hands, and that feels good.

So we have to have some way of distinguishing the validity of a belief, but when the belief is deliberately involved, and is justified whatever the outcome by pseudoscientific explanations and sophistry, it is hard to make the distinctions. That is the case with religions. They certainly offer false feelings of having some control over things through ritual and prayer, and so professional clergy can generally find arguments to pacify doubters. Thus when horrific events shock us as they just have in Oslo, the clergy will say, “Thank God it wasn’t worse”, and immediately hold a memorial service… and lo! people feel better about it!

Francis Hutcheson introduced the notion of “moral sense” or “moral sentiment” (Hume), the feeling one has of approval or disapproval of a human act. The moral sense is not arrived at by reason as the rationalists would have, it is noted empirically, by observation and experiment. It is a feeling, a passion or an emotion, the feeling we have as part of our human nature that a deed is right or wrong. It implies that:

1. Human beings can act out of reasons other than self interest, for the good of others. In particular, we can act out of benevolence—kindness, compassion, altruism, generosity, magnanimity—the lovingkindness of the Jews or the love of the Christians.
2. Humans consequently can approve of deeds that they feel are right, they are kind, and disapprove of those that they feel are wrong, they are spiteful or simply thoughtless.

It is tempting to see malevolence as the opposite of benevolence, and sometimes it is, but Hutcheson did not think it was usually the case. Our instinct is to help bond with others for our mutual benefit by being kind to each other. The idea of an evolutionary bonding mechanism makes sense for social animals like humans. A disruptive mechanism makes no sense. Our inclination to be kind has been selected over hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer, because we stand better in the face of our rivals for food by working together. Any antisocial mechanism cannot benefit us. It tends to put us back in the state of individual, solitary hunter gatherers, with naught but antagonism between us, and no chance therefore of the co-operation that has allowed us to thrive. It follows that we disapprove of apparent acts of malice for this reason, but that any such acts are unlikely to be persistent now, having been selected out, one hopes, long ago.

Hutcheson concluded that the failing was not one of active malice but one of the absence of sufficient inclination to be kind, and the main reason for that was “self love” taking the place of love of others. Disapproval of selfishness and greed—acts based on putting regard for oneself before that of deserving others—was aroused in spectators because of their sympathy for the “victim”, the member of the group who was deprived through another member’s greed. Sympathy or compassion is at the core of our group bonding instinct, and its arousal when we see an unfortunate colleague stiffed.

Those of whom we approve we consider virtuous, while those with a reputation for unkindness we disapprove of as vicious. Virtue is the approval of others earned by having a reputation for generosity and kindness, and vice is disapproval of others earned by having a reputation for miserliness and unkindness, stemming from self love. Those who love themselves are attracted to vice because self indulgence is harmful to others in some respect, and all such acts are gathered under the label of vice. The humanity of such people is not fully developed in some way, either because they lack the moral instinct, or it is weak, or, perhaps more commonly, having had no cause to use it through being able to indulge themselves throughout their lives without disapproval, they have got used to neglecting it. They become mean by a form of auto conditioning. They reward themselves through self gratification and thereby weaken the instinct to do right. Such people, persistently failing to act morally in the formative stages of the group, would eventually have aroused intense hostility among group members, who would have taken stern measures, evicting the freeloader or even eliminating them all together.

Utilitarianism

Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense as the social approval of kindness became an important pillar of Utilitarianism—mutual benevolence makes the members of the group feel secure and happy. Once everyone was happy, by definition they lived in a happy community. The Utilitarians therefore sought to do those acts which yielded the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people in society. The flaw in it is that it seems to be ready to condone unhappiness in a substantial portion of society as long as the majority is happy. That portion of society could be notionally up to a half and yet be a minority, even if hardly. Any such society could not be stable. The minority would have to be kept suppressed, and in fact any small minority could be habitually oppressed by a majority, yet that society would meet the Utilitarian criterion. So, on the face of it Utilitarianism can justify the oppression of minorities, and that cannot be right.

Moreover, it removes the motivation for being benevolent, the direct approval of one’s peers, in favor of assessing the consequences for the majority, something that might not be known until way down the line. It is the spontaneity of kindness and its social approval that makes it work so effectively. Spontaneity needs no thought. It is done instinctively, and is instinctively approved. One does not need a philosophy of happiness for this number or that, lovingkindness will lead to social happiness—spontaneously! The benefits of greater happiness and a stronger society are consequences of it all right, but indirectly. The whole point about love and kindness is that you do not have to think of the consequences, you just get them.

Empirical

Hutcheson was an empiricist, and a moral instinct is a phenomenon of the real world, which can be observed and tested. A sense is thought of as a physical means of being able to know what is happening outside our bodies, but senses tell us what is happening inside our bodies too. We feel a headache and a stomachache. We also “feel” emotions. We see a sharp slap in a drama and say, “Wow! I felt that”. When we have that sort of feeling, it is sympathy, and it can be much more subtle—the sadness of a mother who has found her child dead. If we are human we want to cry too. We have all experienced such emotions unless we are psychologically defective in some way.

David Hume did not think the human moral sense was a mystery, because sympathy with the feelings of others explained it adequately. A spectator of a benevolent act sees happiness produced as a result of it, and by sympathy the spectator also feels pleasure, and that brings moral approval. The one who does the benevolent deed will feel the approval of their peers as honor or pride, while those who act selfishly will feel disapproval as shame and guilt. All presuming they are not psychologically defective or damaged.

The source of all this in the primitive human group is scarcity—the scarcity of food. Security, caring and sharing are the motives for prehumans to band together. Food was not always abundant, and, when it was scarce, sharing it was a vital reason for sociality, and a necessary act of bonding. The band were foraging socially, that is to say, different groups of them would go foraging separately but when someone made a desirable discovery, they neither kept it for themselves, nor tried to get an advantage by selling it to someone in the group for the highest bid. Whatever they gleaned, they shared. It is natural for a normal human being to want to share. They knew they were expected to share it, as they expected anyone else who made such a find to share it with them. It was the done thing, because by so doing, they were held in esteem by the rest of the group, and could feel proud of the admiration. It is the origin of benevolence.

Had they tried to keep the find to themselves, or even tried to keep an unfair portion of it, they would not have been approved but would have been frowned upon and treated with disdain, inducing guilt and shame. A persistent offender would have been expelled from the group. Of course, there would be cases of dispute, and then the community, under the guidance of the leader, would have to decide the outcome. Whence the issue of fair shares led to the need for justice.

A Criticism

Adam Smith, being more focused on the individual than the group, thought it impossible that everyone had the same sense of sympathy, and that was sufficient to discount any moral sense universal among human beings. In arguing his case, however, Smith begs the question by referring to the sense of propriety of a “normal” man, from which his ideas of virtue, merit and duty derive. If Smith allows that a “normal” man can have a “normal” sense of propriety, there is no reason why he should not allow him a “normal” sense of morality. Normal does not have to mean identical, any more than saying a normal US woman lives 86 years means they all live to the same age. Humans have an evolutionary experience stretching back 200,000 years, a period that covers the time when we lived in small hunter gatherer groups, and evolved our common moral instinct. We no more have the identical same moral instinct than we all live to the same age, or all have the same height, but qualitatively, it is the same in all of us, differing only in degree. Smith’s argument is therefore merely nit picking.

It is because human beings, all of us or at least the vast majority, have inherited the moral instinct with their genes, that something which is entirely a subjective personal experience can be treated as a universal human emotion, and therefore as something true for us all. God did not have to imbue us all with a moral sense because we developed it through our evolutionary experience, notably the experience of coming together to live in groups rather than remaining solitary and fending only for ourselves. Human morality was not handed down as a universal truth, it became universally true because it was necessary for us to evolve the way we did—communally.

As our sociality is essential to our being human, and our moral instinct keeps us social, to lose or ignore our moral instinct will destroy our communities and then our humanity will be destroyed too. That is the importance of morality and sociality. Why are we ignoring them?

According to polling data, most Americans doubt that evolution is true, and many biology courses and textbooks dwell on the mechanisms of evolution—natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow—but see no reason to repeat the evidence for. How do we know that species change?

In a slim volume, The Evidence for Evolution, University of Chicago (2011), University of Utah anthropologist, Alan R Rogers, fills in pieces that were missing from Darwin’s argument. He aims to answer persistent and inaccurate arguments against evolution with scientific evidence that was not available in Charles Darwin’s day.

Rogers points out that Darwin didn’t know about genetics, continental drift or the age of the Earth. He had never seen a species change. He had no idea whether it was even possible for a species to divide into two. He knew of no transitional fossils and of almost no human fossils. Rogers says:

[Later] evidence might have gone the other way. It might have refuted Darwin’s theory, but instead we have 150 years of evidence all of which supports his theory. My book tells the story of these discoveries.

Rogers has been teaching courses on evolution since the 1980s. Mostly, he didn’t say much about the evidence that evolution actually happens, feeling the issue was settled scientifically more than a century ago, and anyone interested could read the original books like The Origin of Species. The emphasis for today’s students was on what was still not properly known and what had been newly discovered. Classes and textbooks emphasize the aspects of evolution that are being actively researched. Rogers changed his approach in 2006 after he read a poll reporting that only about half of Americans believe humans evolved:

It occurred to me after reading this poll that it didn’t make much sense to teach students about the intricacies of evolution if they don’t believe that evolution happens in the first place. So, I decided that my introductory classes henceforth were going to have a week or two on the evidence for evolution, and I started looking for a text.

Rogers determined to write an “easy to read” book that gave modern support for evolution, without it being either too advanced or taking too much for granted:

I’m trying to convince skeptics that evolution really happened. If they’re skeptics, then as soon as I get to the point where I say, “trust me”, they’re going to say “no. The reason I’m skeptical is because I don’t trust you”.

Rogers hopes The Evidence for Evolution will encourage readers to think critically. He thinks it will be valuable to evolution skeptics as well as those already convinced. Evolutionists should be prepared to offer evidence when challenged, and even people familiar with biology will have something to learn. Despite spending 30 years studying evolution, Rogers still found material that was new to him.

All scientists are skeptics if they’re any good, but they’re not stubborn about it. In science, you have to be able to change your mind when confronted with evidence. It seems to me that learning that skill is important, not only for scientists, but for everybody. It makes us better citizens.

With The Evidence for Evolution, Alan R Rogers provides a straightforward text that gives the evidence for evolution. He gives the creationists’ arguments and offers the best evidence to counter them. He covers changes within species, which are much easier to see and believe, to much larger ones, such as from fish to amphibians, or from land mammals to whales. For each case, he explains evidence illustrating the changes, including fossils, DNA, and radioactive isotopes. His comprehensive treatment stresses recent advances in knowledge but also shows how we can be sure.

Alan Rogers addresses the political controversy over the theory of evolution—there’s no longer any scientific controversy—in the best scientific spirit—with evidence and logic. For anyone with an open mind, a curiosity about the natural world, and a desire to see controversies settled with evidence rather than rhetoric, this is an invaluable contribution and a fascinating read.

Steven Pinker, Harvard University

Fear of death has long been considered a basic reason why people choose irrationally to believe in God rather than face up to the reality of mortality. God will save Christians from death merely because they are Christians, or so many of them believe, following S Paul’s distortions of Jewish Christianity. Even so, most are not so convinced of the certainty of the afterlife to want to test it personally ahead of their alloted time, and anxiety about it remains. Attendance at church and mass seems to increase once people are old and conscious of their impending death.

Researchers, University of British Columbia psychology professor, Jessica Tracy, Union College (Schenectady, NY) psychology professor, Joshua Hart, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens, have now shown that people support theories of intelligent design and reject evolutionary theory because of their anxiety about death. The paper is the first to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Although so called intelligent design theory is not science, 25 percent of high school biology teachers in the US unconstitutionally spend class time on intelligent design. Most get away with it without reprimand, but very occasionally they are diciplined. Even in Canada, often thought to be sensible by comparison with the USA, Alberta passed a law in 2009 for parents to remove children from courses covering evolution.

The research showed that death anxiety also inclined people towards Michael Behe, intelligent design’s main proponent, and against British evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, perhaps the best known proponent of evolution. Professor Dawkins, like all but a handful of the myriads of scientists in the world, argues that the origins of species are best explained by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Intelligent design advocates like Professor Behe, a US author and biochemist, say that some biochemical and cellular structures are too complex to be explained by evolutionary mechanisms and should be attributed to a supernatural creator. It is a “God of the Gaps” argument—the Christian idea that what science has not explained must be an act of God. Repeatedly it has been shown to be false, and such a prominent Christian as the professor of theoretical chemistry, professor C A Coulson warned against it, as disastrous for Christianity because every scientific explanation of a Gap filled by God, erodes God and belief in Him further. Jessica Tracy, leading author of the paper, says:

Our results suggest that when confronted with existential concerns, people respond by searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in life. For many, it appears that evolutionary theory doesn’t offer enough of a compelling answer to deal with these big questions.

The researchers carried out five studies with 1,674 US and Canadian participants of different ages and a broad range of educational, socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. In each study, participants were asked to imagine their own death and write about their subsequent thoughts and feelings, or they were assigned to a control condition—imagining dental pain and writing about that. The participants were then asked to read two similarly styled, 174 word excerpts from the writings of Behe and Dawkins, which make no mention of religion or belief, but describe the scientific and empirical support for their respective positions.

After going through these steps, participants who imagined their own death showed greater support for intelligent design and greater liking for Behe, or a rejection of evolution theory coupled with disliking for Dawkins, compared to participants in the control condition.

However, the research team saw reversed effects during the fourth study which had a new condition. Along with writings by Behe and Dawkins, there was an additional passage by Carl Sagan. A cosmologist and science writer, Sagan argues that naturalism—the scientific approach that underlies evolution, but not intelligent design—can also provide a sense of meaning. In response, these participants showed reduced belief in intelligent design after being reminded of their own mortality. Tracy says:

These findings suggest that individuals can come to see evolution as a meaningful solution to existential concerns, but may need to be explicitly taught that taking a naturalistic approach to understanding life can be highly meaningful.

Similar results emerged in the fifth study, carried out entirely with natural science students at graduate and undergraduate levels. After thinking about death, these participants also showed greater support for the theory of evolution and liking of Dawkins, compared to control participants. Tracy says:

Natural science students have been taught to view evolutionary theory as compatible with the desire to find a greater sense of meaning in life. Presumably, they already attain a sense of existential meaning from evolution.

The researchers say these findings indicate a possible means of encouraging students to accept evolution and reject intelligent design.

12 February is Darwin Day, the day when Charles Darwin was born in 1809. It commemorates Darwin, his remarkable scholarship and science in general, the methodical application of human curiosity and ingenuity to benefit us all.

Charles Darwin published his seminal book, On the Origin of Species in 1859. In it he laid out the evidence for natural selection as the mechanism behind biological evolution. The idea of evolution was already in the air. It was not evolution that Darwin discovered, but a feasible mechanism by which it could occur.

It was similar to the way even schoolchildren a hundred years ago could wonder at the way the South American and African continents seemed to fit each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces, as if the two continents had split apart and separated. It looked obvious, and geological features fitted too. But no one could figure out how massive volumes of rock—whole continents—could move. So, the theory of continental drift was pooh-poohed by many who discarded any notion that could not be explained.

Now it is accepted, just as evolution is, unless you are a Christian fundamentalist, because it has an explanation—plate tectonics, the fact that the continents are floating on molten masma. Darwin similarly allowed evolution to be accepted because he had an explanation for it.

Darwin proposed that all living beings—including humans—were related! Life is one enormous family—a kinunity! It means we are all descended from a common ancestor, far back in time. Though the idea that all of life are linked by family bonds sounds very spiritual or religious to some, the Christian fundamentalists want to be personally created by God, and not be in a mighty living family, even though they could continue to believe that this familial arrangement of life was God’s own doing! It does not actually match what their real God, the inerrant bible, says.

Religious fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, so they oppose evolution. Genesis has God specifically making Adam out of earth and Eve out of Adam, and it must be so, even though it is manifestly a myth, because the inerrant bible is… well, inerrant! However absurd the myths in it, like the three mile deep flood, the talking ass, the star that moves and stops and starts and ends over a stable, the earth stopping from rotating, the contradictions, etc, etc, it is inerrant, full stop. Humans were specially created out of red mud, and evolution must be wrong—not just wrong, evil! Yet a silent majority of Christians find nothing in evolution to object to. A Chicago Lutheran pastor, the Rev Steve Swanson, says:

It’s hard to believe that fundamentalism has taken such deep roots in our culture, but it has.

A Presbyterian pastor adds that religious believers think science will destroy their faith, but that scientists think religious belief interferes with the teaching and practice of science:

It’s important to have a dialogue and show these fears aren’t necessary.

Sadly, the religious opposition to evolution shows that it is indeed impeding the teaching of it, and even some pastors are alarmed by that. The consequences of turning away from science could be disastrous to the future of our civilization. The Rev Swanson thought it was important to confront the impression that creationism is necessary for Christian belief, and that all pastors believe in it. Christians had to be loud and clear in pronouncing that creationism is not science and also that it is bad religion. Unless they do, people will think creationism is necessary for Christian belief.

It ought to be plain that, given that God meant to transmit into human minds the reality of creation 2500 years ago, it could not be done. If it were done, it had to be in terms that people this long ago could comprehend. It had to be done in myths, for that is how people thought at that time. Now the believer can call them allegories or metaphors, if they think the word “myth” is demeaning.

Christians who remain puzzled, can look up Michael Zimmerman’s the Clergy Letter Project, which has collected 12,000 signatures of vicars who oppose creationism. They think intelligent design or creationism is not science and cannot be taught as science in public schools, as American creationists want.

That is the question the Rev Howard Bess (email), a retired American Baptist minister, asks in the Wasila, Alaska, Frontiersman.

He comes to it from a discussion of the 45 pastors of large Presbyterian churches who wrote an open letter with a litany of the problems of their declining church, and their proposed solutions. Besides Presbyterians, United Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Mormons and Baptists of every kind, including Southern Baptists are, Rev Bess says, losing members. Baptisms are down by half from their peak last century, if Presbyterians are typical.

For the 45 ministers who are speaking out, the key issues are about theology and basic beliefs. Princeton Theological Seminary, related to the Presbyterian denomination, from its theological debates gave birth to American Fundamentalism. The Christian Faith was refined into five fundamentals. The 45 Presbyterian ministers seem to be beckoning the entire denomination into fundamentalism.

One aspect of the Princeton debates was the call from modern church scholars that the bible be read and interpreted as a book written by human beings in a historical context. Neither God nor the Holy Ghost sat down and wrote out the bible perfectly in a perfect place, before delivering it into the cesspit of the material world, where it miraculously remained perfect. Whatever role theirs was in the writing of the bible, it was done through imperfect human hands. Any reasonable Christian must agree, but many if not most of them are not reasonable, and they insisted the bible, as the divine word of God, could not be read critically or historically. It just was.

The debaters also considered Darwin’s approach towards a theory explaining evolution. The same unreasoning churchmen, as many still do, saw it to be declaring the biblical creation stories as false, and therefore Christianity itself—dependent as it is on the myth of Adam’s Fall. Howard Bess sensibly writes:

Evolution speaks of the ongoing, developing nature of life, but even more, evolution speaks to our understanding of God. All static understandings of God goes away. Even God is evolving and changing.

He goes on to point out that we all are in the communications age. The internet is bringing more and more people out of isolation. The events in Cairo perhaps demonstrate it best. It means that more than ever…

We can all talk to everyone else. The letter of the Presbyterian clergy entered the network and can now be read by anyone interested. These Presbyterian clergymen seem intent on forming their own purer version of Presbyterianism, united in theology and practice. First, though, they have to get some churches. People might swap denominations but the churches themselves, the hardware, belong to the parent denomination as a corporate entity. The dissident vicars therefore include among their proposals that all property be given to the local congregations!

Rev Bess was left wondering how how correct theology and the ownership of church property became so important to Christians, putative followers of the words and deeds of Christ.

I thought following Jesus was about loving, serving, giving, kindness, and peace making.

Maybe the reverend Bess is not saying openly that the God of US Christians is not God or Jesus Christ. But one infers that Jesus is a nosegay to hide the smell of their true God, capitalism—the Mammon of the bible—who has tempted them into the selfishness, greed and acquisitiveness of the age, without their ever knowing. The boiling anger of fanatical fundamentalists is a result of their own unexpressed guilt at their abandonment of the uncomplicated human morality of Christ.

Their rage is to mask their subliminal knowledge that they have abandoned their God and every principle he told them they must hold to, to be rewarded. For Christian belief makes zero sense if salvation is not a reward, but simply an automatic perquisite of those who decide to award themselves it by calling themselves saints!

Indeed, to return to theology, salvation for anyone is not, and cannot be, certain, for if it were, God would not be omnipotent! Even a genuine saint cannot be certain of entering God’s kingdom, and since humility was essential to Christ, according to the gospels, it follows that anyone who expects to be saved is assuredly not. Those people have forgotten that the first are last, and the last first. Reverend Bess seems to be one of the few Christians who remember some Christian principles.

History and archeology are today scientific in approach and give us a right and a duty to question and correct the plain errors in ancient screeds like the compilation of them called the bible. The first thing we have to do is to stop using the bible’s own chronology. It is part of its aim of exaggerating its own antiquity, a failing common to the history of most nations, certainly in ancient times. Nothing in the bible is anything other than myth up until the appearance of Omri. Besides Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon are all mythical people. It means Moses could not have written even the Torah (Pentateuch), as is evident from a reading of it.

After Omri some known kings are mentioned, so the chroniclers knew about them, but they will have known from the records kept by some major state because small insignificant states were mostly illiterate and had no reason for keeping elaborate records. In fact, the historical evidence for the state called Judah barely exists, at least until a few decades before it was wiped out. It seems likely that Judah was an Assyrian puppet carved out as a rump of Israel around the time the Assyrians annexed Samaria. Only the last few kings of Judah seem authentic, and Josiah, the famous reforming king seems to have been an invention to justify the change of worship in Judah from the familiar Canaanite mythos to a new one introduced by a conqueror.

Who then could have made this change and when? Well, if the bible existed in anything like its present form in the fifth century BC, Herodotus could never have been called the father of history, because the bible presents itself as a detailed history right back into the bronze age. The sixth century is when Cyrus took over the neo Babylonian empire which included Judah. The bible itself regards Cyrus as the messiah of the Jews because he “allowed them to return”. In fact no “return” happened before the fifth century in the time of Darius II, when the Persian empire was largely based in Babylon, and it is then when people were deported into Judah with the cover of being themselves former inhabitants of the country, the “Exiles”.

Not until this time, around 400 BC, did the bible start to be compiled, and it was not written in its present form until the Egyptian Ptolemies commissioned it in the third century. That is when we first begin to read in historical records that the bible existed.

From a posted comment to Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog at Science Blogs.

In places with a long history of urban living, a genetic variant which reduces the chance of contracting diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy, is more prevalent. Nowadays, cities’ inhabitants are more likely to possess the genetic variant.

In ancient cities, poor sanitation and high population densities would have provided an ideal breeding ground for the spread of disease. If, in the early days of city life, anyone had a gene which conferred some small degree of protection against infections, over time in long-standing urbanized populations, their descendants possessing the gene will be more resistant to disease. It is because natural selection means anyone without the protective gene is more likely to die, leaving more people with the gene behind. The general population of the city therefore gradually gets more immune to the diseases of urban life like TB. It is, though, hard to confirm in practice, especially in prehistory.

Scientists from University College London (UCL) and Royal Holloway have now searched archaeological and historical literature to find the oldest records of the first city or urban settlement in 17 different human populations living across Europe, Asia and Africa. Then they were able to confirm evolution of disease resistance in city populations in these regions by analyzing DNA samples. Dr Ian Barnes, from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, said:

The method we have employed here makes novel use of historical and archaeological data, as a means to explain the distribution and frequency of a genetic variant, and to identify a source of natural selection. This seems to be an elegant example of evolution in action. It flags up the importance of a very recent aspect of our evolution as a species, the development of cities as a selective force. It could also help to explain some of the differences we observe in disease resistance around the world.

By comparing rates of genetic disease resistance with urban history, they showed that past exposure to pathogens led to disease resistance spreading through populations, with our ancestors passing their resistance to their descendants. Professor Mark Thomas from the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at UCL said:

The results show that the protective variant is found in nearly everyone from the Middle East to India and in parts of Europe where cities have been around for thousands of years… Population density seems to play an important role in shaping so many aspects of our species. It was a vital factor in our species maintaining the complex skills and culture that distinguish us from other primates. It drove many of the genetic differences we see today between different populations from around the world. And now, it seems, it also influenced how infectious diseases spread in the past and how we evolved to resist those diseases.