KING MIDAS IN REVERSE?

I'm beginning to wonder about me. It seems like most of the non-science blogs that I follow have all gone strangely idle. C'est moi?

There's Amused Muse, with the usually-lively Kristine, but her posts have slowed to a trickle in the last few months. Kristine, I luv ya, post something. And, no, I haven't forgotten about that Cars mashup.

There's Wishing Doesn't Make It So, an absolutely fascinating look into the personal struggle of a lady raised Seventh-Day Adventist who's discovered that she finds the scientific consensus on evolution...compelling. A nice lady, but conflicted.

There's the former Imago Dei, in which Amanda gradually lost her conventional evangelical belief in God, then pretty much all belief (awww), and now posts only sporadically about the things that really interest her, which (depressingly) of late seems to consist of the fiction of Stephanie Meyer. Maybe she'll pick up the pace now that she's apparently dating again.

There's Science After Sunclipse, hosted by the ridiculously smart Blake Stacey, who has a penchant for posting about LaTex and other schemes for representing math stuff on web pages, and other very cool stuff that I can't say that I understand very well. Blake's a go-to guy most days, but of late apparently reality has intruded, and he's down to less than a post-per-week.

Now, all of this of course is just cover for the fact that I haven't posted much lately due to a combination of personal drama fatigue, caution over being handed over to 'Internal Affairs' and the draining demands of Finals. Still, I have to play Pepe LePew and ask, 'Is it me?'

END OF THE TUNNEL?

The school year is drawing to a close, and with it (one hopes) I'll get a bit of a wind behind me before I start teaching (gulp) summer school.

I've done it before, and I'm here on a Saturday, reviewing my previous summer school materials and calendars, doing some photocopying and (double-gulp) calling the parents of students who have dropped the ball on their essay project and are thus choosing to fail. More on that later, if I can stand to write about it.

Anyway, I've been ridiculously over-committed, and for that reason alone haven't posted much. One of the things I decided to do was submit a video for DISCOVER Magazine's contest to 'Evolution in Two Minutes', which you can read about here. Below is a still from the video's final segment, representing biological diversity:


I've privately circulated a low-res version of the thing, but I can't put it up for public consumption right now due to the contest requirements. I do, however, want to note that it is getting ridiculously affordable for people to make high-quality videos with all manners of production qualities. I don't claim, mind you, that mine is that high-quality: it's a first effort, with technology I'm not familiar with, and under a pretty severe time crunch. But I can definitely see myself setting up a 'green screen' in my own home to start doing stuff like this in the future.

Anyway, here's a still shot of my partner-in-crime (a high school student) who donated her expertise and oodles of time and energy to assist me, working on the video files. If anything looks good, she deserves the credit:




If anything looks (or, especially, sounds) yucky, that's on me. And, yes, I will put the audio tracks up for people to listen to.

NO ANCESTRAL CHAIN IMPLIED

Here's a much-publicized event: the discovery of a 47-million-year-old primate fossil. It's a gorgeous specimen that provides significant new information about the history of primates, and there's going to be a documentary airing on The History Channel which, based upon their recent efforts, will probably be entertaining and informative. I know I'll be watching. Google has commemorated the event with one of their banner tributes:






All well and good. But in the middle of this media blitz, there is more than a bit of hype. There's the usual breathless prose claiming that this specimen is 'a missing link' that 'changes everything' about what we know about the origins of mankind. Well, let me be blunt: this is crap, and one of the sure signs of lousy science journalism is when you see the term 'missing link'. At best, this term is speculative and of little use to working scientists. At worst, it's a deeply misleading and unrealistic trope about the fossil record.

Look, people: all of those hominid fossils, all of them? With a few possible exceptions of older females with well-preserved pelvic regions, we have no clue as to whether there is any likelihood any of the individual organisms of which we have specimens had any offspring, ever! Most of them probably didn't, frankly . . . and there is no guarantee that any of those that did that would have any living ancestors today, because there is no way to know if any of their offspring lived to reproduce. In the near future, the emerging Neanderthal genome may allow us to identify many genes that are strongly conserved between the former and our own genus, but that tells us nothing about whether any of the specimens are ancestral to anyone.

NO ANCESTRAL CHAIN IS IMPLIED! EVER.

Rather, what we see is a pattern of change between different specimens that have 'transitional features', and paleontologists prefer to speak of 'transitional features', rather than the special case of 'transitional forms', and they almost entirely eschew the expression 'missing link' The latter implies common descent between the specimen in question and other species, and this is not justified from the data. Even the case of 'transitional forms' is tricky, because true transitions within a lineage are not documented except in those rare cases where we see continual deposition in the same environment for extended periods of time.

It is an interesting fact that Gould studied snail populations that fit this case, and that the populations he studied by and large showed stasis, a predictable consequence of evolutionary theory. "Punctuated equilibria" was simply Gould's term for the pattern often observed when there is high resolution in the fossil record: long periods of stabilizing selection, interrupted by bursts of evolution when environmental conditions change. Creationists routinely misread this as somehow constituting 'proof' that there is something fundamentally wrong about Darwin's theory, and their clumsy attempts to shoehorn their misconceptions into the literature are aided and abetted when journalists (even well-meaning ones) use the unfortunate term 'missing link.'
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