August 10, 2007 5:51

Comment about the latest evolution post

I asked commenter Zachary Petit, who isn't so sure about evolution but wants others to accept creationism, how he responds to people who think they've been abducted by aliens, or who think the moon landings were faked.

He responds, in part.

ML: How is that at all relevant? Aliens?

Yes, aliens. You ask people to be open to opposing views, but many think your acceptance of Biblical creationism is about as poorly founded as the examples I quoted above. That's why it's relevant: show us by example how we should respond to you.

E

veryone (again): My personal evidence, as I've stated, is a physical experience. However, I can logically make sense of creationism with all of today's observations. Give me an instance in nature and my belief can support it. How is a belief of evolution any different? However, if you'd like something to chew on for a bit, consider that drawing an ace, king, and queen of the same suit out of 6 cards in a deck has the odds of (I think) something over 10,000:1. Now lets get more complex... like for example the appropriate level of hydrogen and oxygen to exist on a planet to support life of this magnitude. And let's make it the correct temperature. And let's make the air pressure bareable. And so on and so forth. I can't imagine all of that happening on a whim. I'm sure you all can support this with your own theories, but there you have it.

--No, I can't imagine it happening on a whim either, but since nobody (except creationists, come to think of it) suggested that it did happened on a whim (that is, God's whim), this is strawman. As is the card analogy: if you give me a billion dealers with a billion decks of cards and a million years, I'll give you so many ace-king-queens of the same suit that your head will spin. You also falsely imply that only one precise set of temperature, pressure and so on could have led to life. Who says? You damage your credibility with such comparisons.

I can make sense of creationism with today's evidence too. I can just say "whatever it is, God did it." But that's hardly an explanation.

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August 9, 2007 2:31

Astonishing News on Human Evolution! Or...Maybe not.

News reports are buzzing today with the announcement of two newly identified fossils, published in Nature, that purport to upend the conventional view of human evolution. "Fossils in Kenya Challenge Linear Evolution," shouts the New York Times, and others emphasize this amazing fact as well. What happened is that a team of fossil hunters including Maeve and Louise Leakey, of the world's greatest paleontological dynasty, discovered two sets of remains not far from Lake Turkana, in Kenya. One was the 1.5-million year-old skullcap from a Homo erectus; the other, part of the jaw of a Homo habilis, dated to about 1.44 million years ago.

But...but...Homo habilis arose earlier, and was supposed to have given rise to Homo erectus, which gave rise to us. This new discovery implies that both species were actually walking around at the same time!

It might seem incredible, until you read these words:

At just about any given moment in prehistory, our family tree included several species of hominids--erect, upright-walking primates. All were competitors in an evolutionary struggle from which only one would ultimately emerge. Then came yet another flowering of species that would compete for survival.

That's an excerpt from the TIME cover story on human evolution my colleague Andrea Dorfman and I put together—in 1999. In short, the linear evolution of one species into another hasn't been the conventional wisdom for a long, long time, so the amazing discovery isn't so amazing after all.

It's too bad we journalists tend to feel the need to make everything seem "astonishing," since this discovery is plenty interesting in any case. The Homo habilis bones are younger than any yet found, which extends that species' survival longer than anyone suspected. And the H. erectus skullcap is quite small. Because it's believed to be from a female, that suggests a significant difference in size between the genders. That's not astonishing either, just intriguing.

Which really should be enough for anyone, don't you think?

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August 3, 2007 1:19

A Reader Comments on Scientific Expertise

Corey writes

M.L., I think at this point it might be useful to point something out to you. There's nothing magical about scientists. I'm one...I should know.

The only difference between myself and a non-scientist is that I took a whole bunch of graduate level courses and did some research-secondary and primary.

You're a science writer so I assume that you can read scientific articles. That's all you really need to be able to do-along with the ability to conduct logical analyses-in order to evaluate theories.

Yes...you do need some expertise, but that's something attainable with a little bit of reading.

That's flattering, but this comment is so sweeping that it's quite wrong. A couple of things it might be useful to point out to you":

Simply reading a paper and understanding what it says is only the first step. You also have to have a sense of context--what is generally believed about this subject by experts, and why? What are the major unanswered questions? What experiments have been tried to answer them? How does this paper fit in to this context? Is the experimental setup reasonable for testing what it attempts to test? What are the uncertainties in such an experiment, and have the authors addressed them convincingly?

If you think a science writer has requisite expertise to answer these questions in every field of science he or she has to write about (and many of us have to cover a lot of fields), then you're kidding yourself badly. Most of us do have some depth in one or two areas, but when someone proposes a "revolutionary" idea, even in one of these areas, let alone one we're not so knowledgeable about, we'd be quite arrogant to think we can judge such things without calling on actual experts.

A good science writer should certainly be equipped with a B.S. detector that can weed out obviously nutty ideas. But plenty of ideas that are not obviously nutty turn out to be wrong. Trust me, you don't want science writers embracing or rejecting scientific research based on their own expertise.

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