Yesterday Norwegian scientists unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossil they are touting as a crucial link in the “stem group” from which humans and other mammals came. Jorn Hurum, whose Oslo museum purchased “Ida” in 2007 from a private collector who unearthed it in 1983, has been quick to label the well-preserved, cat-like fossil the “missing link” between mammals and humans, calling it the “Holy Grail” and the “Lost Ark” of science. Following yesterday’s media frenzy, a book on Darwinius masillae is releasing today, and a two-hour History Channel special is airing May 25.

What many media are ignoring, save the Associated Press, is that other paleontologists are skeptical of Ida’s close link to humans. “We are not dealing with our grand- grand- grand- grandmother but perhaps our grand- grand- grand- aunt,” German researcher Jens Franzen said yesterday.

“I actually don't think it's terribly close to the common ancestral line of monkeys, apes and people," said K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. “I would say it's about as far away as you can get from that line and still be a primate. . . . I would say it's more like a third cousin twice removed.”

The bloggers for Francis Collins’s BioLogos Foundation, a theistic-evolution think tank, responded to the announcement this way: “[E]ven if it is only in a peripheral way, the new fossil offers a glimpse at our evolutionary ancestors. While it may not revolutionize our understanding of evolution, the fossil is just another piece of evidence showing that evolution has occurred . . .”.

Young-earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, on the other hand, noted that the fossil bears no connection to apes or humans, and that neither fossils nor similarities between fossils can prove evolution. The article posits that Ida’s remarkable preservation is characteristic of rapid burial caused by a catastrophic flood.

Meanwhile, Allahpundit at Hot Air posited that perhaps Richard Dawkins planted it.

What do you think of Auntie Ida? How should Bible-believing Christians respond to announcements from the scientific community such as these?

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at May 20, 2009 | Comments (44)

Last week the Justice Department announced that drug company Eli Lilly had agreed to pay $1.42 billion to settle criminal and civil charges that it had illegally marketed its blockbuster antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. The case accused company sales reps of promoting the drug for conditions beyond its narrow FDA-approved use of treating schizophrenia and symptoms of bipolar disorder, and for populations (children and the elderly) for whom its known side effects are particularly risky. The New York Times report indicates that claims and evidence in the case were similar to a California state lawsuit which alleged that company studies of the drug circulated among its sales force were "Lilly's thinly veiled marketing of Zyprexa as an effective chemical restraint for demanding, vulnerable and needy patients."

While the settlement was the largest amount paid by a single defendant in the history of the US department of Justice, it is dwarfed by the $39 billion in sales Zyprexa has generated since its approval in 1996, and is less than half of its $3.5 billion in sales in the first nine months of 2008.

This most recent case adds to the already sordid backdrop to Marcia Angell's scathing indictment of drug companies and the physicians, medical schools, and professional organizations happy to collude with them published in the latest New York Review of Books. Angell, the Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School who served as editor-in-chief for the New England Journal of Medicine for two decades, believes these massive payouts are "just the cost of doing business" and "well worth it" for drug companies so long as the drug continues to rake in billions.

In Angell's telling, the particular offenses reported in the government Zyprexa case represent only a fraction of drug company improprieties, a discouraging litany she candidly rehearses. Yet without countenancing or minimizing their contributions to a corrupt system, she reserves her sharpest rebuke for her colluding peers.

It is easy to fault drug companies for this situation, and they certainly deserve a great deal of blame...Still, apologists might argue that the pharmaceutical industry is merely trying to do its primary job - further the interests of its investors - and sometimes it goes a little too far.

Physicians, medical schools, and professional organizations have no such excuse, since their only fiduciary responsibility is to patients. The mission of medical schools and teaching hospitals - and what justifies their tax-exempt status - is to educate the next generation of physicians, carry out scientifically important research, and care for the sickest members of society. It is not to enter into lucrative commercial alliances with the pharmaceutical industry.

Angell is concerned that unless the medical profession reasserts its independence by sharply breaking its improper financial dependence on the pharmaceutical industry, the integrity of its work will continue to decline, and with it, the trust of the public.

And no payout, however staggering, can buy that back.

Posted by Derek Keefe at January 21, 2009 | Comments (3)

Claudia Castillo, whose lungs had been ravaged by tuberculosis, has a new trachea. She made it herself . . . sort of.

Doctors in Spain took stem-cells from Claudia Castillo's bone marrow and had them form a section of trachea based on the trachea of an organ donor. The scientists transplanted the 2.75-inch piece and published the results in The Lancet:

The graft immediately provided the recipient with a functional airway, improved her quality of life, and had a normal appearance and mechanical properties at 4 months. The patient had no anti-donor antibodies and was not on immunosuppressive drugs.

The results show that we can produce a cellular, tissue-engineered airway with mechanical properties that allow normal functioning, and which is free from the risks of rejection.

Castillo is the first person to have an engineered trachea transplant, The Guardian says. She has had her new windpipe for several months without immunosuppressants - a breakthrough in surgery.

Besides giving hope to those who need transplants, Castillo's case is also important to the debate over whether to allow stem-cell research which destroys embryos.

"Engineering new tissues and organs from stem cells has long been a goal of researchers, because it would help overcome a chronic shortage of donor organs." NPR says. "But controversies over the source of stem cells have slowed research in the United States."

However the transplant, rather than highlighting limitations, is another victory for ethical (and legal) stem-cell research. In its Q&A on stem-cells, CNN says "In the past, because adult stem cells were considered stuck in their ways, the focus had been on embryonic cells but now scientists and doctors will be wanting to see if adult cells can be used to treat a wider range of conditions."

Posted by Susan Wunderink at November 20, 2008 | Comments (1)

For those invested in the evolving origins debate, Beliefnet's Blogalogue today features a lively letter exchange between Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis USA, which opened the Creation Museum last spring, and Karl Giberson, director of the forum on faith and science at Gordon College, and author most recently of Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.

Of particular interest is how autobiography has in no small way shaped each scientist's convictions. Ham's family was one of few Christians in rural Australia. His father, a school principal, showed a deep commitment to studying Scripture and defending its authority, which Ham likewise sees as part of his mission. Giberson also grew up in a Bible-believing church, in rural New Brunswick, Canada. But he faced something of a crisis of faith upon attending Eastern Nazarene University, whose science and religion faculty did not teach creationism. Giberson eventually embraced theistic evolution, or the view that God creates via natural processes over billions of years.

Both Giberson and Ham have become somewhat predictable go-to men for the sound bites necessary to write origins-related news stories, but their letter exchange nonetheless provides fresh insight:

Karl Giberson on genetics [from "Why I Am Not a Creationist"]:

Recent discoveries in genetics reveal that humans share almost all their genes with primates and other animals. If these genes were all functional and did something meaningful--like make blood clot, or give us two lungs--we could suppose that God used common genetic tools to make different species. But many of these genes are completely nonfunctional and do nothing. Some of them, called pseudogenes, are mutated copies of functioning genes.

They sit irrelevantly beside functioning genes, not needed because their neighbors are doing all the work. There are so many different possibilities for pseudogenes that we would never expect, from a statistical point of view, for different species to have identical pseudogenes, unless they inherited them from a common ancestor. The distribution of these and other genes in different species strongly suggests that these species are related and were not created independently. Why does genetic research point so strongly toward common ancestry if common ancestry is not true?

The evidence from genetics is compelling and trustworthy. We have confidence in genetics to establish biological kinship in legal cases, such as paternity suits; that same genetics now indicates biological kinship among species and we should accept that as well.

Ken Ham on Jesus' interpretation of Genesis [from "The Bible Teaches Creationism"]:

[I]f Genesis (and the rest of the Bible) is a revelation to us from an infinite God, it must be self attesting and self authenticating--and Scripture must interpret Scripture. I checked out the New Testament. Jesus (the Son of God--the Truth--the Word) quoted from Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24 in Matthew 19: 4-6 when discussing the doctrine of marriage. Obviously Jesus (and Paul in Ephesians 5) referred to Genesis as literal history in building the doctrine of marriage being one man and one woman (and the whole understanding of one flesh--Eve came from Adam, as it also states in 1 Corinthians 11:8). . . .

As a Christian, my father had also shown me that the gospel message (the good news of salvation in Christ) was founded on the literal history in Genesis--as Paul in the New Testament makes obvious in passages such as Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. I therefore saw the importance of standing on the authority of God's Word and determined there was a problem with what I was being taught at school--even if at that time I couldn't resolve it back then. I needed to search for answers--and I did. It began a journey that has led me to where I am today.

See more of Christianity Today's science-related coverage here.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at October 21, 2008 | Comments (6)

Legendary philanthropist Sir John Templeton died at 95 today in the Bahamas, where he had lived for decades, according to the New York Times.

Templeton was known for funding religion and science projects, donating millions to religious leaders, scholar, and scientists.

CT wrote a story on Templeton in 2005 with comments from Joel Carpenter, former religion officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

"Sir John's theology is very eclectic. He has pushed [grants] to be religiously and theologically inclusive. However, the people who are most vitally interested in the relation of science and religion are traditional orthodox Christians. No one in the evangelical world is doing faith and science in the same way Templeton is."

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at July 8, 2008 | Comments (0)

As a teen, I was told several times by fellow Christians that Charles Darwin recanted his theory of evolution on his deathbed. This 125-year-old legendwas believable because it played into the idea that no matter how wicked a life someone had led -- and we believed Darwin to be a vile man -- God would welcome them back, even in their final moments.

For Albert Einstein, who I will admit is one of my heroes, nearing the end did not make him a more religious man. His vague language on God had long been interpreted by the faithful that Einstein was a fellow believer. But, in a letter being auctioned in England, Einstein was quite critical of religion and the Jewish people, of which he was a proud member. From The Guardian:

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Avoiding Einstein's frank review of his people, I disagree with his interpretation of the Bible. Yes, Jesus spoke highly of a childlike faith, but does that mean the Bible's stories are "primitive" and "childish?"

Hardly. Even if you don't believe its accounts of Jewish history, the Gospels and the epistles, the complete book, covering 4,000 years from the Beginning to the End, is the greatest literary work ever.

It's more enjoyable, though, if you believe it.

This article was cross-posted at The God Blog.

Posted by Brad Greenberg at May 13, 2008 | Comments (41)

Florida's news outlets are abuzz again with the latest developments in the state's attempt to pinpoint guidelines for science education in public classrooms. This morning the Florida House of Representatives passed a bill 71?43 that requires public school teachers to offer "a thorough presentation and scientific critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution," more obtuse wording than that approved by Florida's Senate last Wednesday.

The Senate's bill, called the "Evolution Academic Freedom Act," was spearheaded by Sen. Ronda Storms and aimed at granting educators the right to present scientifically grounded alternatives to evolution, along with protecting them from disciplinary action for doing so. The bill borrows largely from an academic freedom bill drafted by the Discovery Institute, the leading research center on intelligent design, and focuses on teachers' First Amendment rights.

Proponents of both bills repeatedly stated that the legislation does not allow creationism or intelligent design to be taught in classrooms, and that neither bill includes religious language.

Florida legislators have until this Friday to come to agreement on the bill's wording. Considering the House's agreed-upon wording was already rejected by the Senate in earlier hearings, it remains dubious whether the legislators will be able to pass a bill at all.

Florida's debate over evolution began last October, when the State Board of Education adopted new science education standards that identified evolution as the "fundamental concept" underlying biology. Before the new standards, the Board of Education's statewide curriculum did not include the word evolution.

See CT Newsfeed's prior coverage of evolution and science education.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at April 28, 2008 | Comments (0)

Expelled, a new documentary that argues the case for Intelligent Design from a Judeo-Christian perspective, has been in the headlines lately, prior to its April 18 theatrical release.

The film, hosted and narrated by Ben Stein, has been screened to invitation-only audiences at churches and for various Christian groups. But several critics have worked their way in to some of the screenings, most notably Roger Moore of The Orlando Sentinel, who recently trashed the movie in his blog.

A critic of another kind "crashed" a screening in Minnesota on Thursday night--Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and arguably the most outspoken critic of Intelligent Design and Creationism. Dawkins himself appears in the documentary--but claims he was duped into believing it was going to be an objective account of Darwinism vs. ID.

Jeffrey Overstreet, a film critic for CT Movies, broke the news on his own blog Thursday night after receiving an e-mail from a college student who was at the screening.

Stuart Blessman, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities student, told Overstreet in the e-mail that Dawkins' appearance "was quite a surprise" to both the audience and associate producer Mark Mathis, who fielded questions afterward.

Blessman reported that Dawkins asked several questions, and complained that "any statement he made in the film was in fact under the assumption that he was being interviewed . . . for a film that was to take an even-handed look at the Intelligent Design/Evolution controversy."

It's not the first time Dawkins and other Darwinian experts say they were duped by the filmmakers. The Guardian reported last fall that Dawkins said, "At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front," he said. And The New York Times quotes Dawkins and other atheists who appeared in the film under a "deceptive invitation."

Blessman also wrote that "the Q&A then proceeded pretty uneventfully, with several of the questions addressed to Dawkins himself. Mathis and Dawkins also clearly had spoken on numerous occasions and appeared to continue an argument that they had started previously."

Blessman also reported that Dawkins complained that a colleague of his was turned away even though he (Dawkins) was admitted to the screening. That colleague, PZ Myers, a biologist and prof at the University of Minnesota-Morris, is actually featured in the film. Myers later blogged his own account of what happened here and here.

Myers wrote that he caught up with Dawkins and friends after the film, "which I hear is not only boring and poorly made, but is ludicrous in its dishonesty. Apparently, a standard tactic is to do lots of fast cuts between biologists like me or Dawkins or Eugenie Scott and shots of Nazi atrocities. It's all very ham-handed. The audience apparently ate it up, though. Figures. Christians have a growing reputation for their appreciation of dishonesty."

Read more about Expelled in earlier editions of Reel News at CT Movies.

3/26 UPDATE: There has been much discussion about the use of the word "crash" to describe how Dawkins got into the screening. Since this story posted, CT has learned that the screening was not an "invitation-only" event, but that attendees had simply signed up on a website--that it was open to anyone who signed up in advance. Tickets were not needed. CT regrets the choice of the word "crash" in the title and in the story, because neither Dawkins nor Myers were trying to "crash" the event, but had legitimately signed up for the screening as did everyone else who attended.

Posted by Mark Moring at March 20, 2008 | Comments (71)

Christian scientist Francis Collins landed on President Bush's list of President Medal of Freedom awards, according to the Associated Press. The director of the National Human Genome Research Institute is being honored with the nation's highest civilian award for his leadership and for expanding the understanding of human DNA.

Collins is known for his discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project, which mapped and sequenced human DNA and determined its functions. He converted to Christianity after reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.

He also landed on Christianity Today's Book Awards 2007 for his book The Language of God: 'A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Previous coverage includes:
Not Too Simply Christian | Two approaches to apologetics.
The Genome Doctor | The director of the National Human Genome Research Institute answers questions about the morality of his work
Creation or Evolution? Yes! | Francis Collins issues a call to stand on the middle ground.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at November 1, 2007 | Comments (2)

James Watson, with Francis Crick back in 1962 one of the co-discoverers of the DNA double -helix, is in rhetorical hell for saying in an October 14 interview that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."

Watson also said he sees no reason to believe different races in different parts of the world should have evolved identically, and that while we may hope all groups are equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true."

Now faced with the cancellation of his British book tour (Watson has written a new book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science) and an international outcry, a "mortified" Watson, 79, is now busily apologizing "unreservedly."

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Watson said during an appearance at the Royal Society in London. "I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways that they have."

"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

Interesting. This is the same un-boring Watson who in the past has been the author of any number of provocative comments that seek to reduce human life down to the size of the double-helix. Watson has said, "You know, the only people who say that stupid people don't exist are people who are not stupid. We know that if we go to homeless people there is an underclass with a very strong mental disease component. Those people can't pull themselves together, the brain just won't allow it. So it is not that they are weak in character, they are seriously unequal."

Watson is a persistent advocate of eugenics--improving human capacity through genetics. As practiced under people such as Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler, eugenics also became a convenient excuse to eliminate "undesirables." Watson thinks we can do eugenics right this time, though.

Should Hitler harm us for the next 200 years by saying that we cannot do genetics? People say to me that 'you are acting like Hitler'. People have accused me of being a Nazi just because I won't accept raw evolution, because I wanted to filter it a little and try to improve the quality of human life," he says. "We can say that we want to improve human beings genetically but we don't want to do it by the ways that were attempted in the past."

As William Dembski slyly comments, "Anybody willing to offer predictions about when Darwinists will be getting back big time into the eugenics business?"

For Watson now to wonder how he could have said such things seems disingenuous. The comments track very well with his reductionistic, materialistic scientism. Yes, it's good that he has apologized. But it seems odd that a man of such great learning and accomplishment would be so scientifically naive. Almost any debate in science has a nature vs. nurture component, and for Watson to boil everything down to DNA seems myopic at best. If differering "races" have different IQ or test scores, could some of that difference be explained by life experiences, nutrition, and educational opportunities? Why so quickly resort solely to biological explanations?

Certainly Watson's bias is for materialistic answers to life's questions. As he said once,

"The book of the DNA sequence would in time be regarded as more relevant to human life than the Bible.

"It tells us who we are," he says, adding without a hint of irony: "I've never read the Bible, so I'm not sure I've missed much."

One hopes that in the coming days Dr. Watson will figure out what he has been missing.

Posted by Stan Guthrie at October 22, 2007 | Comments (11)

Last week, Opinion Journal's Naomi Schaefer Riley attended a public debate between Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins, most (in)famous for his recent work, The God Delusion, and mathematician?Christian apologist John Lennox. The debate focused on the question, Does God exist?

What's newsworthy is not so much that the debate occurred or that it received so much press; it only takes a monthly glance at the New York Times bestseller list to see that this question, and the atheistic rants that often ensue, get our attention. According to Riley, the debate between the two Oxford scientists, which took place at the Alys Stephens Center in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 3, had been sold out for weeks prior, and received more buzz than Alabama football, which apparently is saying something.

What may be surprising to some about the debate, not least of all Richard Dawkins himself, is that many believers are eager to attend such events and to heartily engage the intellectual conclusions of each side. To watch two brilliant scientists construct arguments, and, in good English fashion, throw in some rhetorical punches along the way, is both entertaining and instructive. Dawkins and other atheist-apologists might envision Christians running away from such challenges, afraid and dejected. What they may be horrified to find out is that such debates actually spur many Christians to ask big questions, examine their beliefs, and arrive at even more robust reasoning for accepting the gospel as "gospel truth." As Riley quotes apologist Jonalyn Fincher as saying, "If our God is the God of truth, what are we afraid of?"

As a counterproposal, would Dawkins and the rest of the New Atheist league be willing to sit in for a session at next month's Apologetics Conference, featuring J. P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Gary Habermas? Just a thought.

*Look for our review of fellow Oxford scholar Alister McGrath's response to Dawkins in the November issue of Christianity Today.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at October 15, 2007 | Comments (8)

The Field Museum hopes a new Darwin exhibit will strike a blow against creationism, so writes the Chicago Tribune. The report by William Mullen expresses some disgust that anyone could still doubt Darwin's account of evolution. Mullen offers a brief primer on the life and work of Charles Darwin, whose theories published in the 1859 book On the Origin of Species, Mullen says, became the "foundation of all biological thinking."

I appreciated the reporter's Darwin recap. The article read a little bit like what Christianity Today tries to do in many of our stories with historical and theological context. That's when I realized what Mullen had done. He used the Field Museum exhibit as a news hook to catechize his readers about Darwin's theories. It's enough to make you wonder where science ends and dogma begins.

Posted by Collin Hansen at June 13, 2007 | Comments (3)