Christian Geneticist: there's nothing incompatible about religion and modern biology

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Kathleen Parker as a worthwhile column today on Francis Collins, the physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project for the National Institutes of Health. Apparently, Collins is also an evangelical Christian who was home-schooled until sixth grade. In addition to his work in science, Collins, Parker explained, devotes quite a bit of time to explaining to those who share his faith that there's nothing incompatible about religion and modern biology. To that end, Collins has created the BioLogos Foundation as part of a larger effort to "raise the level of discourse about science and faith, and to help fundamentalists -- both in science and religion -- see that the two can coexist."

Parker said Collins can "advance an alternative to the extreme views that tend to dominate the debate." I'm not sure which "extremes" she's referring to -- accepting modern biology without a supernatural explanation hardly seems "extreme" -- but Collins' efforts seem worthwhile, especially given the woeful state of the public's scientific understanding.

Having earned a PhD and a medical degree, Collins is nonetheless a scientist with little patience for those who insist that evolution is just a theory that one may take or leave. Most human genes, he points out, are similar to genes in other mammals, "which indicates a common ancestry."

Even so, a Gallup Poll found last year that 44 percent of Americans believe God created human beings in their present form within the past 10,000 years.

"You can't arrive at that conclusion without throwing out all the evidence of the sciences," says Collins.

The problem of not believing in evolution as one might not believe in, say, goblins or flying pigs has repercussions beyond the obvious -- that the United States will continue to fall behind other nations in science education.

The point about falling behind other nations is probably one of the key parts of the larger issue, at least for me. At first blush, if millions of Americans choose to be wrong about science, it doesn't seem especially consequential.

But I think Collins is right about the national interests here. The country just can't afford confusion on a grand scale about scientific basics. The competitive advantage the United States used to enjoy is vanishing, and an anti-science push comes with too high a burden for the country.

The country needs to start taking science seriously again -- our economy depends on it -- and ignorance costs far too much. If Francis Collins can help turn some people around who reject biology for religious reasons, he's a welcome addition to the discourse.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Exactly.

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Two recent books on evolution you would enjoy are

Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne

and

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin

I recently read both, they're fascinating. Short treatises, and easy to comprehend. They both tie together the evidence from the fossil record as well as the overwhelming (and beautiful) genetic and embryonic similarities and commonality of all life on Earth.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me was in Shubin's book, in a chapter in which he considers the evolution of multicellular life at the Cambrian explosion. Just how and why did single celled amoebas, bacteria and the like manage to form multicellular organisms.

Shubin doesn't take an overtly "us against them" stand of evolution vs. creationists/IDers. He just explains his own research, particularly the discovery in the High Arctic of Tiktaalik - a fish/land creature intermediate, in the context of other discoveries in the field.

Coyne does see his mission as to set the record straight and confront the menace of ignorance posed by creationists and ID. Throughout his book he drops references to obvious gaps of logic in the ID position that are refuted by the facts. This can be useful, but I found it a bit tiring as a reader if all you want to do is understand the science and leave the nutters to their own devices. Still, it's a great book.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Believe systems are not mutually exclusive. The idea that science is the end all removes humanity from the equation. I have yet to meet a person who accepts nothing that is not scientic fact. Evolution is still just a theory, but a useful theory if you are studying genetics.

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Believe systems are not mutually exclusive. The idea that science is the end all removes humanity from the equation. I have yet to meet a person who accepts nothing that is not scientic fact. Evolution is still just a theory, but a useful theory if you are studying genetics.

Allow me to respond by quoting from the Introduction to Coyne's book:

"Indeed, if ever the was a time when Darwinism was "just a theory", or was "in crisis", it was the latter half of the nineteenth century, when evidence for the mechanism of evolution was not clear, and the means by which it worked - genetics - was still obscure. This was all sorted out in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and since then the evidence for both evolution and natural selection has continued to mount, crushing the scientific opposition to Darwinism. While biologists have revealed many phenomena that Darwin never imagined - how to discern evolutionary relationships from DNA sequences, for one thing - the theory presented in The Origin of Species has, in the main, held up steadfastly. Today scientists have as much confidence in Darwinism as they do in the existence of atoms, or in micro-organisms as the cause of infectious disease."

The "evolution is just a theory" line simply won't wash.

[Niels Bohr 72]

A theory is a changing hypothesis. Not theory in terms of speculations.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

A theory is a changing hypothesis. Not theory in terms of speculations.

Not too far off the mark. Darwinism is dead. Long live neo-Darwinism:

At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution

Two hundred years after Darwin’s birth, the theory of evolution is still evolving — and finding relevance in realms far outside the biological.

Evolution is being scaled up to the level of populations, even whole ecosystems. Moreover, scientists say evolution is intertwined with other dynamics in ways science is just starting to understand.

"The process of evolution is fundamental to the universe,” said Carl Woese, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign microbiologist and one of the first proponents of this newly revised evolutionary framework. “Biology is the most obvious manifestation of it.”

Darwin described how changes in an organism are passed from generation to generation depending on their contribution to survival. Biologists later combined this with genetics, which hadn’t been discovered in Darwin’s time.

The fusion — called neo-Darwinian evolution — describes evolution as we know it today: Genetic mutations produce changes that can become part of a species’ heritage and, when enough changes accumulate, produce new species.

It’s one of the most powerful descriptions of the world dreamed up by humans, central to understanding the natural world and applicable to engineering, economics and even software design.

But to Woese and other scientists, neo-Darwinism isn’t so simple. Change and selection need to be studied at other levels — and there are lots of big, unanswered questions.

Bacteria, for example, engage in what’s known as horizontal gene transfer: Genes drift from one microbe to another without any need for reproduction. What this means for microbiology isn’t yet clear, let alone biological history — how did multicellular organisms evolve, anyway? But it’s hugely important to figure out.

Another mystery is the tendency of some genes to mutate at unusually high rates. The driver appears to be a process called biased gene conversion, which goes against the notion that evolution is driven by random mutations. Natural selection still operates on its outcome, but is not driving the process itself.

Scientists are also studying evolution at levels beyond the single organism. Some insect colonies — ants and honeybees being the best-known examples — can be collectively regarded as individuals, known as superorganisms.

Superorganism dynamics are still a mystery — how, for example, does a colony evolve different traffic rules? — but they may apply to other ecological collectives, including human societies.

When taking this macro-scale approach, some of the trickiest non-Darwinian evolutionary phenomena become apparent. Properties emerge at critical points — known as saltations — in complexity, but again can’t be explained by mutation and selection in a sub-unit of the whole.

Superorganisms, for example, are sometimes the only way to make sense of phenomena like eusociality, in which individual insects care for offspring unrelated to them.

Another example of this may be the jump from unicellular to multicellular life; another may be the fantastic forms taken by human societies in a networked age, with millions of once-isolated people linked by data networks whose visual representations are uncannily similar to the neural connections of a brain.

Evolution has moved not only beyond the individual, but beyond the biological. It is being used to understand the transition of a few primitive compounds to the chemical building blocks of life. Somewhat more pertinently, language seems to evolve towards efficient, easily propagated linguistic constructs.

Applying an evolutionary framework to language may seem strange, but at least it’s relatively simple. Cultural evolution, on the other hand, may be just as complicated as biological evolution.

Selection and mutation — and whatever other biological analogues apply — may act simultaneously at the levels of the meme, of traits like boat design or tool use, and of entire bodies of thought.

What, exactly, is a cultural organism — and how does its evolution affect the development of, say, individual humans and their community, which itself might be an organism?

Maybe by the time Darwin turns 300, we’ll have some answers.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/darwinbirthday/