It’s been nearly a month since the complete bonobo genome was published, and it’s absolutely astounding how American creationists dispute the science.
This is the last of the great apes to be sequenced and completes a body of data that can significantly increase our understanding of human evolution.
Bonobos live in central Africa, an endangered primate now proved no closer to humans than chimpanzees. This first great discovery contrasts with primatologists’ presumptions based on anatomy and to a lesser extent, behavior, that had held bonobos were the closest of the great apes to man.
Confirmed is that great apes — chimps, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas and man — are remarkably closely related. This was never in doubt, at least not by rational thinkers. So the excitement of the genome is the evidence now being dissected that will more exactly draw the evolutionary timeline of primate divergence, and the possibility that complete genomes can provide evidence for behaviorial evolution.
The initial theories are pretty exciting. They suggest that the divergence between the common ancestor of all existing primates, including man, was as early as 4½ million years ago. This confirms further that quite a few stars of early hominid development, including the earliest Australopithecines, were not our ancestors, but divergent dead-ends from even earlier common ancestors to our common primate extant ancestor.
And much more interesting information is on the way. Such as the importance of rivers as effective separators of hominid evolution. Or whether the most successful hominid behavior is either “Make Love, Not War” or “Make War, Not Love” as the eminent University of Wisconsin scientist, John Hawks, told the Los Angeles Times.
But the sad story in all of this is how warped America has tried to deny the findings. The leading idiocy is from the heavily funded Institute for Creation Research.
Their resident “scholar”, a Ph.D. of no significance, Jeffrey Tomkins, berated the Nature article and all the corresponding good reporting about it as “misrepresented.”
In what even to this humble laymen was just plain dumb, Tomkins focused on the genetic difference that was shown to exist between the existing great apes, then tried unsuccessfully to extrapolate the notion that they are therefore not of the same stock (have no common ancestor).
As has been the case for the last several decades, scientists mostly ignore this stuff. But I did find one scientist, Ricki Lewis, whose personal analysis of the Nature paper specifically debunks Tomkins.
And has also been the case for the last several decades, Tomkins’ scientific-sounding article was picked up by literally hundreds of religious journals, which then propagated even more blatant misrepresentation and poor analysis of the facts. You can’t exactly call it a lie, but it’s very close.
Do a Google search on Tomkins’ article, and you’ll be amazed with the endless number of mouthpieces – all American – for this nonsense. It’s truly depressing.
Facts and science, today, are being cast aside by this quirky segment of America, and it’s one thing simply to call them out and move on. But we’ve tried that. And while fortunately polling is on our side, and scientific facts like global warming and evolution are miserably slowly making their way into the normal fabric of American life, the outlanders are tenacious and vicious.
So while the actual number of creationists may be slowly reducing, those that remain are getting more and more powerful. They are “cleansing” school textbooks of science, for example, and packing it with their nonsense.
Belief in the simply untrue leads people into weird behaviors, not least of which is voting against their own self-interest. So rejoice that the completion of the great ape genome project gives us so much complete science about evolution that it will be even harder to dispute.
But beware the powers amassed to suppress it. And not just because of the denial of evolution, but for the integrity of all science in America.
I’ve heard that a christian community in Wisconsin explains dinosaur extinction by preaching “they were too big for Noah’s Ark”.
/ Jim
Jim,
I thought I would point you to an old article by a Catholic Priest (a Jesuit, no less) by the name of Fr. Coyne, who was/is the head of the Vatican Observatory, a joint undertaking with the U. of Arizona, I believe. (The two institutions actually operate two observatories and fund scientific research.) Coyne gave a speech in January 2006 in which he said that intelligent design belittles God. You should be able to find an article on his speech at http://www.catholic.org by Mark Lombard on January 30, 2006.
Interestingly, in his remarks, he criticizes the cardinal of Vienna’s support for Intelligent Design and notes that Pope John Paul’s declaration that “evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis” is “a fundamental church teaching” which advances the evolutionary debate. He went on to call “mistaken” the belief that the Bible should be used “as a source of scientific knowledge,” which then serves to “unduly complicate the debate over evolution.”
Coyne has a colleague (another Jesuit) by the name of Wheeler who is in charge of the Vatican’s office of evolution and creationism (I am not sure of its proper name) and he is very outspoken on the subject and the fact that creationism is a religious view that has nothing to do with evolution and that creationism does not supplant evolution and science.
Certainly a different view from the bible thumpers.
Bill
Yes, this trend is a worry. How is the United States, in which some of its inhabitants insist will maintain “American excellence,” going to compete with the world when so much science is discarded. I sometimes feel that we are being pushed by a perverted sort of religious conservativatism, mostly American Protestant religions, back into some sort of Middle Ages. I believe that some of this is fueled by the rapid changes in American society which those who have lived for so long when there has not been many great changes are now afraid that the “America” they knew will not be there like some security blanket. Society didn’t change for a long time because of the Depression and then the war, but started to change after that. Women’s rights, equality for African-Americans were absorbed with difficulty, but now with the rise in the number of Hispanics in the population and the push for rights by the gay, lesbian, and transgender population the traditional white population feels threatened. I am not optimist about the immediate futurel, but feel that the youth of this country, for the most part, doesn’t really care about those issues, and will move past it all. But all of that will take time.
I thought the dinosaurs became extinct because they came up to the edge of the world, which is flat, and fell off.
The last time I looked into the eyes of a Mountain Gorilla I saw greater intelligence than I have seen from the evangelical pulpit.
Do check out The Clergy Letter Project, “an endeavor designed to demonstrate that religion and science can be compatible and to elevate the quality of the debate of this issue,” especially through participation in the annual Evolution Weekend when churches and synagogues deal with the subject through discussion groups, sermons, guest speakers–however a local congregation chooses. Over 13,000 pastors, priests, and rabbis have signed the letters (Christian, Jewish, or Unitarian Universalist) and over 1,000 scientists have agreed to be consultants, some of them guest speakers on Evolution Weekend. Urge your scientist friends and your pastor, priest, or rabbi (or imam–I think they are working on a Muslim version) to get involved.
In April the United Methodist General Conference, the only group that can speak for the denomination, reaffirmed support for The Clergy Letter Project which it first granted in 2008.
And yes, the Clergy Letter Project has a link to a Texas website to help Texans advocate for responsible science education.
The Texas State Board of Educators is a prime example of how right wing demagoguery, and particularly rightist Christian demagoguery is running this country off a cliff. These Texas educators (sic) have extraordinary power because Texas orders so many copies of approved textbooks that many are often then approved by other state boards simply because they are cheaper. I must say that The Clergy Letter Project is encouraging, but theirs is an uphill battle, expecially in the South.