After Darwin Day: Vestiges of the Unnatural History of Creationists

Miracle Girl: After Darwin Day: Vestiges of the Unnatural History of Creationists

Why would God create non-functional eyes in cave-dwellers? It's almost as if these cave animals evolved from sighted ancestors who once dwelled above ground....

Creationists accept as fact a book in which God orders the slaughter of unicorns, but spares not a word for dinosaurs. They thrive in the darkness of ignorance, blinded to insight.

Darwin Day: 4 Snapshots from the Evolution of Evolution

Miracle Girl: Darwin Day: 4 Snapshots from the Evolution of Evolution

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin!

Take a Darwin Day trip through the evolution of evolutionary thought, as you tour four key moments on the journey to a biological Theory of Everything.

Many who paved the way of evolutionary thought clung to the holy writ their theories undermined. Not so, Charles Darwin. 

Evolution Caught in the Act: A Darwin Day Sampler Pack

Miracle Girl: Evolution Caught in the Act: A Darwin Day Sampler Pack

Just in time for Darwin Day, new research has revealed evolution -- and even speciation -- in real time. And in one case an instant.

Wanna see Ken Ham's head explode?

Humans and Neanderthals: Kissin’ Cousins in More Ways Than One

Miracle Girl: Humans and Neanderthals: Kissin’ Cousins in More Ways Than One

Our early Homo sapien ancestors shagged Neanderthals and any related species, looking past superficial differences.

Were our supposedly primitive human ancestors more "evolved" than us?

Global Warming and Extinction: Is the Great Dying Coming to an Epoch Near You?

Miracle Girl: Global Warming and Extinction: Is the Great Dying Coming to an Epoch Near You?

What would T-Rex do if it had a chance to prevent the asteroid from crashing? More meat for us!

There have been 5 or 6 major extinction events in the history of the earth. Would those species have been as short-sighted as humans if given the chance?

Darwin’s Day: 4 Snapshots from the Evolution of Evolution

Miracle Girl: Darwin’s Day: 4 Snapshots from the Evolution of Evolution

In celebration of Darwin Day, I survey the contributions of Darwin and other scientists of his day to our understanding of evolution...whether they liked it or not. The implications of natural selection caused Charles Darwin to lose his faith. Others didn't, but contributed to our evolutionary understanding anyway.

Seeking a New Year's Evolution

Miracle Girl: Seeking a New Year's Evolution

Will humanity ever evolve away the need to believe in an all-powerful god? Well, I believe religion isn't hard-wired in the human brain. That's a hopeful sign for the future.

A Change of Hobbit

Homo floresiensis, AKA a hobbit.

Miracle Girl: A Change of Hobbit

I must've read at least a half dozen articles about Homo floresiensis when on the news about their discovery broke. In the months to follow, it grew to dozens.

And we're still learning more. And what we've found is further evidence that our lineage was far from immune to the creative whims of natural selection.

Message from a Time Before Creation

Miracle Girl: Message from a Time Before Creation

170, 500 years ago in Bruniquel Cave in SW France, Neanderthals built rings made of stacked stalagmite, which had been deliberately broken. Why?

The discoverers can only guess. But it took several people to do the work, likely supervised by another. Was it for ritual purpose? Perhaps further excavation will reveal further clues.

But the fact remains that this complex behavior happened 164,500 years before the universe was created, according to creationists.

That's a dumb as Neanderthals were once thought to be.

Which Came First, the Science or the Atheism?

The Secular Spectrum: Which Came First, the Science or the Atheism?

Surely scientists--especially in the natural sciences--couldn't help but let go of the idea of supernatural agency in the creation of physical or biological forces. Where does God fit into it when the process of adaptation and speciation seems to run just fine on its own? To me, it seems obvious, but of course I'm biased.

So are most of the studies I found online while researching the subject. I felt I needed to add more detail to my coverage of studies of the religious beliefs of scientists in my SecSpec post, Unnatural Selection.

Though I found more studies that seemed to find what I expected, they all seemed to have been conducted by partisans themselves.

I'd love to read a dispassionate study that breaks religious beliefs down by scientific specialty, because the one thing that is clear is that when it comes to belief in God, all scientific disciplines are not the same.

Is it a coincidence that the handful of contemporary creationist scientists the Ken Hams of the world trot out are all in such fields as chemistry?

Unnatural Selection

No, he isn't saying pull my finger.

The Secular Spectrum: Unnatural Selection

I admit that I still have trouble understanding creationists. Having been raised without religion, I have enough difficulty relating to believers in the first place.

But even though I think theistic evolutionists like Francis Collins have partitioned the scientist in their brains from their faith, this form of contortionism has a long history in evolutionary thought. And it's certainly preferable to creationists and its intelligent design offshoot.

When I think of those two groups of evolutionary denialists, I imagine them sticking their fingers in their ears and saying la la la la la whenever they think about archaeopteryx's or read of a new hominin like Homo naledi.

It's a very small world they live in inside that contradictory and morally despicable book.

Glimpsing Truth through the Blinders of Religion

The Secular Spectrum: Glimpsing Truth through the Blinders of Religion

I've been a fan of paleontology since my childhood days as a future paleontologist. The first place I wanted to see when I moved to LA with my mom when I was twelve was the La Brea Tar Pits.

Georges Cuvier was intimately involved with many of the species in the Tar Pits: mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths (though not Megatherium).

Given my longstanding interests, I can't resist posts that link my favorite subjects, evolution, paleontology, history, and secularism--it's four great tastes in one!

A Columbian mammoth at the Tar Pits. 

The Abuse of Use and Disuse

The Secular Spectrum: The Abuse of Use and Disuse

Keith and I have different memories of the incident I recount in The Abuse of Use and Disuse. He remembers it as him reading aloud to me the encyclopedia passage about how Lamarckism had displaced Darwinian natural selection. But I distinctly recall staying up until the wee hours of the morning, after deciding to thumb through the delightfully Art Deco Funk and Wagnalls volumes from 1934 he had just purchased. Before my coma, I had the bad habit of staying up late to read things when I should be getting ready for bed. And how could I resist finding out what they had to say about my favorite subject, evolution?

The next day--or should I say later in the day--I told him excitedly about what I had found. I remember struggling to find the relevant passages. Was it in evolution or natural selection? Where was that quote about Lamarckism?

When I mentioned the idea for the SecSpec post recently, we dug out the encyclopedias. I initially didn't remember thumbing through such small volumes. But as I looked through them again in preparation for writing the post, the memories flooded back. My eyesight had deteriorated enough for me to require a magnifying glass to read the tiny print.

Who was right? Well, obviously, I think I am. My memory of the incident is more detailed and defined, and I have a better long-term memory than Keith has. That afternoon, we read through all the relevant entries, reading aloud the juiciest bits. That could be what Keith is remembering.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Fear is not magically delicious

Some of the difficult terrain I navigated on my first hike of 2016.

For the past week, I've been less unstable than usual. No, not my personality, it was my walking. I'll leave it to others to judge my emotional stability.

As some point, my exercising and increasingly strenuous rehab walks/hikes became more about retraining my brain than merely strengthening my muscles. I was originally told that most of my leg weakness was due to inactivity during my six-week coma. But I eventually reached a level where I could walk longer distances and for far longer than I could before my coma. I realized that the stroke-related weakness in my right leg, which seems slight when tested by my neurologist, has a much more profound effect on my walking than we recognized.

Wobbling from stroke-caused vertigo has a major effect as well. My balance exercises have helped tremendously in that regard, mostly by keeping me from falling on my face. But some of my exercises are directly aimed at reorienting my brain, encouraging it to get it's little synapses in gear and get on with the business of rewiring around its damaged areas.

Thank you, evolution.

Though I've said that I had nothing to do with the early days of my recovery--evolution again--I can own my later milestones. That took hard work. And my recovery is still a work in progress.

Yesterday, I had a follow-up appointment with my rheumatologist. My labs are still good, and she told me that after my next round of tests in three months, I don't need to see her if they remain that way. But the conversation soon turned to a few nagging concerns I've had.

Unfortunately, she confirmed a suspicion I've had for a while. My dermatomyositis (DM) is not in remission, after all. It's simply being well controlled. If I had been in remission, she would've taken me off my meds. At least I was finally able to get off the prednisone.

So long, and thanks for the brittle bones and nearly fatal immunosuppression.

The good news is she said that the fact that I haven't gone into remission doesn't mean I might have an underlying cancer triggering my DM. That's been a worry since my DM was diagnosed. That's a possibility I uncovered when I first discovered that I matched a list of symptoms of DM.

I'd crow about the fact that I diagnosed myself, except it hardly feels like a triumph that I have this serious rare autoimmune disease.

I haven't looked it up again because I quit Googling the condition cold turkey. It always depressed me because there are some deeply scary aspect to it. The foremost of which is my increased cancer risk.

She recommended that I do what I can, but forget about the things that I can't control. Well, I have been doing everything I can, exercising and getting cancer tests. But I have a hard time letting go of the known unknowns.

I told her that I don't believe there's a higher power making things come out alright for me. I need that sense of control, even if it's not real. But I'm not about to believe in a great big genie in the sky to give me that comfort.

But what can serve as a rabbit's foot for someone who doesn't believe in fate or lucky charms?

Seeking a New Year's Evolution

The Secular Spectrum: Seeking a New Year's Evolution
I admit to a bias against evolutionary psychology. Obviously, it does indeed provide a valuable prism through which to view human behavior. We are part of nature, after all, not above it. But too often, evolutionary psychology presents just-so stories that seek to explain observed or assumed traits by cherry picking evidence to support previously held beliefs. That's a recipe for bad science.

But if, as theorized by some, the human brain evolved a need for religion--out damn God spot!--is there any chance that humanity will shed it's religious magical thinking?

Yes. There is reason to hope, with or without evolution.

Winning the Everlasting Gobstopper of Life

My latest post for the Secular Spectrum: Winning the Everlasting Gobstopper of Life

This is my brain on strokes. But despite what my doctors proclaimed, the damage wasn't "profound." They knew that my damage was in the watershed areas--as my hospital records attest--but didn't take into account that my relative youth and the nature of watershed-area stroke damage gave me a better chance of recovery, which they listed as poor.

My neurologist told me that the watershed areas tend not to control the most vital systems and they tend to bounce back faster after they've been damaged. My relative youth also meant that I had a better chance of recovery.

To me, the fact that the less important systems blink out first and recover better strongly suggests that this is an evolutionary triage system,

Natural selections saved my life, even though I was hardly the fittest.

A watershed moment

This isn't my MRI, but it demonstrates the"string of pearls" pattern of watershed area stroke damage in my brain.

According to Wikipedia, a common classification system for strokes is called TOAST (Trial of Org 10172 in Acute Stroke Treatment). Toast, I was fortunately not, thanks to the watershed area stroke damage I suffered. If you absolutely have to have multiple strokes on both sides of your brain--and I would recommend against it--this is the kind you want.

Here is how I described watershed stroke damage in my Skeptical Inquirer article:

My neurologist told me that the reasons I've recovered so well are I was younger than the average stroke victim, and most of my brain damage was in the watershed areas. Watershed areas lie between two major arteries. By the time blood reaches these sections, there’s less oxygen in it. It’s a bit like a wetland fed by two trickling tributaries. Together, they provide just enough water, but when the flow diminishes, the land between the tributaries dries up. As she explained, watershed areas don’t generally control vital functions. They die more quickly than more important regions, but also spring back faster after damage has occurred. Ain’t evolution grand?

But why is this natural selection in action? I'm glad you asked. What would aid your survival if you experienced a sudden loss of blood or blood pressure to your brain--say a sabertooth chomping down on your skull? It looks like you're about to be sabertooth cat chow, but in the nick of time, members of your tribe come to your rescue. You've lost a lot of blood, but you're still alive. So far, you're brain has sacrificed the areas that will cause the least amount of long-term damage. You won't be the same for some time, but you will eventually recover. Fortunately for you, humans instinctively help others who need assistance (especially if they are kin), as indicated by some of the crippled skeletons of early humans and our close cousins, the unfairly stereotyped Neandertals. Now it's only a matter of time before you recover enough to once again be a productive member of the clan.

Substitute sepsis for the sabertooth, strokes for the cranial trauma, and writer for the productive member of society part, and you have what happened to me. 

What evolution gave my survival in general is humanity so intelligent in the aggregate that it could develop medicine and technology advanced enough to maintain my life while my other bodily systems recovered according to their evolved survival mechanisms. An early modern human in my situation would have indeed been toast.

As I mentioned in the article, dialysis and a respirator gave my kidneys and lungs time to begin healing so that they could eventually start working again. Later, the nursing home permitted my body time to recover enough to begin walking somewhat. Still, the evolution of care in our society, namely our healthcare "system," meant that Kaiser handed me my walking papers when I could still barely walk.

Further proof that evolution is not unidirectional.