The Telegraph writes:

A growing number of biology and medical students are rejecting the very basis of their chosen subject in favour of creationism.

Read the full article here:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8931518/Islam-Charles-Darwin-and-the-denial-of-science.html

Sheffield Christian Free School are hoping to set up a creationist Free School in 2013, as are the previously rejected Everyday Champions Church. And yet, the Government was clear in its rejection of the latter. Richy Thompson asks, why do these groups keep applying?

Fairy DNA by kyz

Richy Thompson is the BHA’s Education Campaigner. The BHA’s e-petition, Teach evolution, not creationism!, is now approaching 15,000 signatures. If you’re a UK resident, please sign, and urge all your friends, family and colleagues to do likewise.

Last week we broke the news that a group applying to open a Free School, Sheffield Christian Free School, intends to teach creationism throughout the curriculum. The group behind the bid, Sheffield Christian Family Schools Ltd, already runs two private schools in Sheffield, including the Bethany School. The group has said that it is ‘unashamedly creationist’.

We have been leading the way in countering creationism in the UK. For example, in September we coordinated the new campaign, Teach evolution, not creationism! This garnered support from big names such as Sir David Attenborough, BHA Vice President Richard Dawkins and Revd Prof Michael Reiss. It was also supported by a number of other organisations, such as the British Science Association, Association for Science Education, Campaign for Science & Engineering and Ekklesia.

The story about the Sheffield school has been picked up by a number of places. It was in Friday’s TES, will be in the Guardian next week, and also led to me debating Ken Walze, head of Bethany School, on BBC Radio Sheffield. You can listen to the full debate, or read a transcript, on the BHA’s website.

Although the government has told us that it does not support creationist schools and even recently rejected Everyday Champions Church’s bid solely for that reason, it has failed to take action on any of the recommendations of the Teach evolution, not creationism! campaign which would prevent many future problems. In fact, Everyday Champions Church has said it intends to bid again. Representatives are meeting with civil servants at the Department for Education today in an attempt to get the decision overturned, and their local MP, Patrick Mercer, is meeting with Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove next Monday to attempt the same thing.

Sheffield Christian Free School are also undeterred. In the interview, referring to the government’s opposition to creationist Free Schools, I asked, ‘I wonder if Ken can explain how he hopes to get past this barrier?’ Ken explained that,

‘We’re just offering the model that we’ve got. As I said, we do tick a lot of the boxes about how Free Schools can be set up. We do, obviously, very clearly have creation as part of our curriculum… We’re hoping that Michael Gove, as he begins to investigate this a little bit further, will start to see that we’re providing very good schools… There’s nothing to fear from creationism, it’s a valid part of our society. Millions have a faith, and believe the Christian story and way of life. It’s something I’m hoping Michael Gove – as he gets more and more applications from schools like ours – will begin to investigate a bit further.’

In other words, they’re hoping that Gove will change his mind.

The only way Gove can send the right message to these groups, and stop these and others, like Creation Ministries International, from teaching creationism as science in schools, is to make statutory and enforceable the government guidance that its portrayal as science is unacceptable.

Richy Thompson describes a typical day in the office

Richy Thompson

Richy is the British Humanist Association’s Campaigns Officer (Faith Schools and Education) and the UK’s only dedicated campaigner against ‘faith’ schools. The BHA is currently fundraising to support the post for 2012. Please donate today at http://www.justgiving.com/nofaithschools

It’s been a while since I’ve written an article for HumanistLife. The previous two were both written when I was President of the AHS, before I started working as the BHA’s ‘faith’ schools campaigner. I’ve been in this job for slightly over four months now, and I thought it’d be interesting to talk about some of the things I get up to by exploring a typical day – yesterday.

I started the day doing our internal media review, replying to some queries from parents about collective worship, worked in support of local campaigns against ‘faith’ schools, and navigating creationist attack mail. The first big thing I looked at was an email I had received from a member of Milton Keynes Humanists, who I had arranged last week to attend a public meeting being held by anti-choice group, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), in association with a number of local Muslim groups. SPUC’s “Safe at School” campaign works against good Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) in state-funded schools, particularly focussing on the primary level. Our local member took extensive notes, which should prove very helpful in understanding their tactics. We had another member at their Wakefield meeting last night, who I’m looking forward to hearing more from shortly.

After that, I spent a while investigating a tip-off I had received about a bid from some creationists for a Free School. The bid, on the surface, appears to be from an evangelical Christian group that has nothing to do with creationism, but someone who had met them found that the leadership privately holds creationist beliefs, and intends to ‘teach creation and evolution, but not creationism’ – whatever that means. A number of evangelical groups have bid for Free Schools – more evangelical than any group already providing state-funded education – and serious questions need to be asked about what these groups actually believe, and what they intend to teach, about all sorts of things, not just creationism. I imagine many will have seen the negative publicity that Everyday Champions Church’s bid has attracted, and decided to mask their true colours, perhaps even from the Department for Education. With regards to this particular bid, we’re considering appropriate further steps.

The Education Bill finished its Committee Stage in the House of Lords yesterday, and we’re busy preparing for the Report Stage. Our aim for the law to be changed to put an end to discrimination against teachers and pupils and, really importantly, to stop the huge proliferation of new ‘faith’ schools of all different denominations that we are seeing. We worked with peers in the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group to get a wide range of amendments tabled during Committee Stage, and during Report Stage we’ll be looking to take a number of these forward for further debate, though perhaps tightening the focus on some in response to what was said during Committee Stage. So yesterday I prepared an internal document where for each of the amendments debated, I looked at what we wanted, what was said, what the Government’s response was, and what I would recommend for further action at the next stage.

Finally, I’ve been doing a lot of work lately around Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education (SACREs). About half of the 151 SACREs in England and the 22 in Wales have a humanist as a member, but ideally we’d like to see that expanded to all of them. Yesterday we gained three new humanist reps. One of them, Zelda Bailey, I arranged to observe a meeting of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ SACRE  last week, and she attended that first meeting this week. At the meeting they happened to be putting the finishing touches on the RE Syllabus for the borough, and she found that it didn’t mention the non-religious in any way. Thanks to her last minute interventions, she was able to add “secular worldviews” to the religions and beliefs to be studied each year in Tower Hamlets’ community, voluntary controlled and foundation schools, and most of the Academies – therefore meaning that thousands of children should now learn about non-religious beliefs such as atheism, agnosticism and humanism, when they otherwise wouldn’t have done. New RE syllabuses are only agreed once every five years, so Zelda’s appearance at the meeting was particularly well-timed! And the meeting finished with her being unanimously voted onto the SACRE as a co-opted member.

I finished the day looking at the Humanist SACRE Reps handbook, and how we can improve it to help further instruct all reps in how they can best carry out their role on their SACREs, and doing some preparation for a talk I’m giving to King’s College London Atheist, Humanist and Secular Society I’m giving next week.

All in all, I think this is a really great, tremendously interesting job, but also a hugely important and highly unique one – there’s no-one else in the country (perhaps the world?) working full time to abolish ‘faith’ schools, and yet many non-religious people in the UK would agree that education is the single biggest area in which we are disadvantaged due to our lack of belief.

I would very much like to continue this job, and I think it’s really vital that the British Humanist Association continues to employ a ‘faith’ schools campaigner. So please donate to our JustGiving appeal at http://www.justgiving.com/nofaithschools so that this work can continue.

Rightly or wrongly, the eye is often held up as the crowning achievement of evolution (or indeed as something beyond evolutionary explanation. Wrongly).

School biology always seems to cover the “rods and cones” cells that detect light on the retina. But another class of cells has now been found to have a direct role in detecting light.

Russell Foster remembers his first human subject, an 87-year-old woman, as she sat in a dark room facing a backlit pane of frosted glass. A genetic disorder had destroyed the light-sensing rod and cone cells in her eyes, leaving her blind for the past 50 years. She was convinced that she would see nothing. But as the wavelength of light in the room shifted to blue, she reported — after some hesitation — a sort of brightness.

“That just blew us away,” says Foster, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the senior authors of a 2007 study reporting the finding[Zaidi, F. H. et al. Curr. Biol. 17, 2122-2128 (2007)].

Foster and his collaborators had done nothing to treat the woman’s blindness. Instead, her awareness of light owed itself to a class of light-sensitive cells discovered in 2002. Studies of these intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) have since revealed many surprises. Scientists initially thought that, rather than contribute to vision, the cells simply synchronized the circadian clock, which sets the body’s 24-hour patterns of metabolism and behaviour, with changing light levels. However, recent work suggests that ipRGCs have been underestimated. They may also have a role in vision — distinguishing patterns or tracking overall brightness levels — and they seem to enable ambient light to influence cognitive processes such as learning and memory.

Full story: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110119/full/469284a.html

A fossil human jawbone discovered in southern China is upsetting conventional notions of when our ancestors migrated out of Africa.

The mandible, unearthed by paleontologists in China’s Zhiren Cave in 2007, sports a distinctly modern feature: a prominent chin. But the bone is undeniably 60,000 years older than the next oldest Homo sapiens remains in China, scientists say.

In fact, at about a hundred thousand years old, the Chinese fossil is “the oldest modern human outside of Africa,” said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Full article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/101025-oldest-human-fossil-china-out-of-africa-science/

Susan Blackmore discusses genes, temes, and a new future creation story in which humanity is the “Pandoran” species unleashing a third level of evolution on planet Earth.

I want to make three arguments here.

The first is that humans are unique because they are so good at imitation. When our ancestors began to imitate they let loose a new evolutionary process based not on genes but on a second replicator, memes. Genes and memes then coevolved, transforming us into better and better meme machines.

The second is that one kind of copying can piggy-back on another: that is, one replicator (the information that is copied) can build on the products (vehicles or interactors) of another. This multilayered evolution has produced the amazing complexity of design we see all around us.

The third is that now, in the early twenty-first century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next.

http://onthehuman.org/2010/08/temes-an-emerging-third-replicator/

One of the arch-proponents of the view that religion is a kind of cultural “virus”  – i.e. conferring no evolutionary benefit to its hosts, or even costing it, while propagating itself to new believers – has changed her mind. Religions are adaptive from the point of view of our genes, Professor Susan Blackmore now argues, because the evidence links religious belief with fertility rates. So religious belief is more like a friendly “bacterium of the mind” than a virus, although that probably won’t catch on. (And of course, such a change of perspective doesn’t leverage the truth value of religious beliefs at all, which shouldn’t need to be said, but obviously it will need to be said.)

Are religions viruses of the mind? I would have replied with an unequivocal “yes” until a few days ago when some shocking data suggested I am wrong.

This happened at a conference in Bristol on “Explaining religion“. About a dozen speakers presented research and philosophical arguments, mostly falling into two camps: one arguing that religions are biologically adaptive, the other that they are by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for other reasons. I spoke first, presenting the view from memetics that religions begin as by-products but then evolve and spread, like viruses, using humans to propagate themselves for their own benefit and to the detriment of the people they infect.

This idea began with Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, was developed in his later article “Viruses of the mind” and taken up by others, including myself in The Meme Machine and other works. It is one version of “dual-inheritance” theory in which genes and culture are both seen as evolving systems.

The idea is that religions, like viruses, are costly to those infected with them. They demand large amounts of money and time, impose health risks and make people believe things that are demonstrably false or contradictory. Like viruses, they contain instructions to “copy me”, and they succeed by using threats, promises and nasty meme tricks that not only make people accept them but also want to pass them on.

This was all in my mind when Michael Blume got up to speak on “The reproductive advantage of religion”. With graph after convincing graph he showed that all over the world and in many different ages, religious people have had far more children than nonreligious people.

Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/sep/16/why-no-longer-believe-religion-virus-mind

Tom Chivers picks his favourite five books from a scientific field, this time evolutionary biology, including Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.

…

It’s pretty much obligatory nowadays to prefix Stephen Jay Gould’s name with the term “late, great”, but it is easy to forget how controversial he was in his lifetime. His most famous contribution to evolutionary biology was the idea of “punctuated equilibrium” – claiming that evolution was not steady, gradual progression, but long periods of stasis interspersed with periods of rapid change. It was hailed in some quarters as a threat to Darwin’s theories. But Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, among others, dismissed them as a storm in a teacup. Dennett was particularly harsh, calling Gould’s work a “self-styled revolution” and sparking an entertaining ding-dong battle between the two in The New York Review of Books.

But Gould, fairly or otherwise, will probably be best remembered for his popular works. A splendid writer (as Dennett acknowledged), he was able to make complex ideas, of genetics and biochemistry and probability, accessible to lay readers.

Continues: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8002833/Best-evolutionary-biology-books-from-Stephen-Jay-Gould-to-Richard-Dawkins.html

The whole problem with RE lessons is not that they exist but that they amount to religious instruction in some schools. There is no basis for allowing state-funded schools to indoctrinate their pupils, even if that is what their parents want. They can provide this in optional after-school (or lunchtime) classes or clubs. They could even have something on a Sunday where children are taught to be believers. They could call it Sunday School!

The recognition that RE lessons can be proselytising is reflected in the right that parents have to withdraw their children from these lessons. In contrast, they can’t withdraw their children from biology lessons even if they have profound religious objections to their being taught about sexual reproduction or evolution – these subjects are recognised as non-proselytising.

Secularists like me believe that RE is a valid subject for study in the curriculum but should be about what different religions (and other world views like humanism) believe; it should not be about what ought to be believed. So Catholic schools should be allowed to use RE lessons to teach that the Catholic church opposes contraception and believes that homosexuality is a sin, but not that the children ought to believe those things. The lessons should set out contrasting views on that subject.

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/political-science/2010/aug/27/science-teaching-religious-education-re

Kin-selection is often used to describe how “moral” inclinations may evolve in social species, the idea being that relatives can share enough genetic code to warrant self-sacrifice, even if it is fatal to the martyr, if enough relatives are thereby helped to survive.

In the Aug. 26 Nature, [E. O.] Wilson and two Harvard colleagues argue that the concept of kin selection is “limited” and “unnecessary.” And they propose steps for the evolution of ants, honeybees and other highly social species with such altruistic behaviors by just the broad “survival of the fittest” forces of natural selection without specifically invoking the power of kinship.

In recent years, Wilson has argued that the close family ties in ant colonies and other highly social groups may be consequences, rather than causes, of the evolution of such extreme social forms. In the new paper he combines his perspective with two co-authors’ mathematical critique of the methods used to calculate kinship effects, arguing that the techniques are as unnecessarily complicated as Ptolemaic astronomy.

“Babylonian astronomers look up in the heavens, and they see the planets moving in ‘epicycles,’” says paper co-author and mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. “But if you put the sun in the center, there are no epicycles.”

Some kin selection adherents are firing back that, even with new math, the challenge itself is old-fashioned. “This is such a tired old debate,” says Ben Oldroyd of the University of Sydney, who studies social insects.

Full article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/evolution-scrap/

The ancestors of early humans used stone tools to butcher animal carcasses nearly 1m years earlier than previously thought.

Archaeologists revised the date after spotting distinctive cut and crush marks made by stone tools on animal bones dating to 3.4m years ago.

The remains, including a rib from a cow-like creature and a thigh bone from an animal the size of a goat, were recovered from riverbed sediments in Dikika in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia during an expedition last January.

The marks show where stone tools were used to slice and scrape meat from the carcasses and where the bones were crushed to expose the nutritious marrow inside.

The discovery suggests meat was on the menu far back in our evolutionary history, and long before the arrival of the first human species, Homo habilis, 2.3m years ago.

“We were just walking along when we discovered the two bones,” said Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “We picked up the rib fragment, flipped it over and there were these two, clear marks. Soon after, we found the second bone, also with a lot of marks on it. Right away we knew we had something potentially important.”

Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/aug/11/bones-stone-tools-meat-eating

Neo-Darwinism is, very roughly, the claim that natural selection is by far the most important explanation of biological form, the particular characteristics of particular kinds of organism. … Neo-Darwinism is, however, a perspective under ever-growing pressure, not (or not only) from the antiscientific assaults of the religious, but from the advancement of science. The decline of this intellectual monolith is generally to be welcomed, not least because it may be expected to bring down with it some of its less appetising academic fellow travellers, most notably Evolutionary Psychology. At the same time those contributing to the demise of neo-Darwinism must be aware of the risk, especially in the United States, that they will provide succour for fundamentalist Creationists and aficionados of so-called Intelligent Design.

Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini’s (henceforth FPP) book is intended as a contribution to the critical task just mentioned, and they are well aware of the potential hazards. Sadly, however, the book is an almost tragic failure: it is unlikely to be taken seriously as a contribution to the dismantling of neo-Darwinism and it has been, and will continue to be, picked up by the fundamentalist enemies of science.

The first half of the book does a decent job of summarising the recent scientific insights responsible for the growing difficulties facing neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism, by virtue of its emphasis on natural selection, sees evolution as driven from outside, by the environment. Central among the difficulties that FPP emphasise are crucial respects in which evolution is constrained, or even driven, by internal features of the organism. This realisation has been promoted by evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”), which has also highlighted the unacceptable black-boxing of development in mainstream evolutionary theory, a concomitant of the exclusive focus on external determinants of change. Also crucial has been a gradual move away from excessively atomistic views of organisms and an appreciation of the necessity of treating them as integrated wholes, illustrated by the impossibility of analysing the genome into a unique set of discrete elements, “genes”. And equally important has been the disclosure of the complexity of the relations between genomes and phenotypes.

While much material is presented that does indeed reveal the dire straits in which neo-Darwinism finds itself, the overall argument is generally elusive.

Continues: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1398

From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. … As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.

The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,” it read, “the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”

Continues at New York magazine: http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/

Professor Richard Dawkins is perhaps the single most prominent atheist. John Wayland introduces the evolutionary biologist and author of the best-selling The God Delusion.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is my Humanist Hero because without him, I would have never had the confidence to say so. Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He is noted for his books, The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He has also made various documentaries.

Like so many young people, I was confused about the world. There seemed to be so many different conflicting attitudes and ideas. During my first year of my degree I came across Richard’s 1992 Christmas Lectures. It changed the way I looked at the world forever. Slowly and patiently, I read my way through his books, and watched his documentaries while carefully considering everything. Richard’s words and ideas fitted in with everything I knew deep down about the world. His championing of science, reason, and truth spurred me on to care as well, to encourage others to really look at the world, and consider the evidence.

Slowly, my academic self-confidence grew. Whenever I feel concerned or worried, I read one of Richard’s books. Many are quick to criticise him, but if they just listened to what he says, the honesty, integrity and truth of his words, whether in a book or video, I cannot see how anyone could fail to be moved by such words.

Richard Dawkins is my Humanist Hero because he makes me feel confident in my ability to say “I don’t believe in a God”, and has made it possible for thousands of people just like me, to declare aloud that we are not afraid, and that we will keep searching for the truth, with reason and understanding in the driving seat.

This post is part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

John Wayland is a psychology undergraduate, with a profound interest in evolutionary psychology, science, and Humanism.

New Humanist magazine has a very interesting article from Professor Timothy Taylor on the co-evolution of technology and humanity. Taylor argues that the first inventions of our hominid ancestors were strokes of outrageous luck at a time when our brains were no bigger than those of other apes. Rather, slings for carrying babies and flinging stones, followed by the first chipped stone tools, came first, and only then did our brain size begin to rocket.

Although we are, by most physical measures, far inferior to our great ape cousins, we are the earth’s dominant species. Where lions, crocs, sharks and chimps have powerful puncturing teeth, bears and eagles have claws, and ants have formic acid, we have guns, knives, rockets, poison gas, land-mines, grenades – a virtually endless list, not of natural attributes, but of artificial creations that far exceed our competitors’ natural strengths. These lethal inventions are predicated on our intelligence, the usual story of which involves competition, the accumulated advantages of smartness, and the extinction of the weak. Yet we are the weak, and without technology cannot be strong. So the standard evolutionary tale of us becoming brainier by degrees until we were able to make stuff cannot be true. The alternative, that things came first, evolving us, seems counter-intuitive. But it fits the evidence.

Continues: http://newhumanist.org.uk/2330/slings-arrows

Writer of several books on evolutionary anthropology Elaine Morgan naturally selects a kind and brave Charles Darwin as her humanist hero.

Charles Darwin

I would like to put the case for Charles Darwin as a humanist hero.

He was not overtly anti-religious, although he strongly advocated “free thought on all subjects.” He gratefully adapted Huxley’s coinage of “agnostic” to describe his own standpoint. It is also true that in his old age he preferred not to have Edward Aveling’s collected articles dedicated to him, and arguably that is not the stuff that heroes are made of.

But all the oft-recycled myths of his “deathbed conversion” are pure invention on the part of the creationists. He made it clear in his autobiography that he had “no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward.”

If Darwin had a fatal flaw in his character it was certainly not cowardice. From an early stage in his researches into the origin of species, he knew perfectly well where they were leading him, and how they would be received – not only by the bishops, but also by friends and mentors whom he respected and admired. He could foresee only too clearly the wrath and scorn of established scientists, and the howls of joyous satire from the cartoonists and the music hall comedians – and it all came to pass.

The flaw in his character was accurately pinpointed by Stephen Jay Gould, who described Darwin as “kind, to a fault”. It was not only friends that would be deeply hurt and dismayed by the implications of his theory. His wife Emma, unable to engage in face-to-face arguments on the issue, once wrote him a letter explaining her anguished fears that they would spend eternity apart because of his unbelief. Darwin scribbled at the bottom of that letter: “When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cryed over this.”

Only one thing kept him on track. Not contemplating whether his ideas would win or lose him friends or fame, bring comfort or despair to individuals or to mankind. He was interested in whether or not they were true. Dedication to that criterion doesn’t always come cheap, and in Darwin’s case I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to call it heroic.

This post is part of  a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

Elaine Morgan is the writer of several titles in evolutionary anthropology, famously including The Aquatic Ape and The Descent of Woman. As a screenwriter she wrote most of Dr. Finlay’s Casebook.

New archaeological digs in Kenya may represent the moment (in geological time!) when humans  expanded their herbivore diet to include seafood, possibly a contributing factor in the evolution of our unique brains.

A CACHE of turtles, crocodiles and catfish butchered some 2 million years ago has been uncovered near the eastern banks of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The remains, which are some of the earliest evidence of meat-eating in our ancestors, suggest that our early humans may have found it easier to get protein from aquatic animals than to compete with other land hunters.

The fossils lie alongside hundreds of stone tools that were probably used to butcher the animals. “It’s a massive amount of material,” says David Braun, an archaeologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, whose team began excavating the remains in 2004.

There are no hominin bones at the site, making it difficult to determine who made the tools and ate the meat. The cache was found below a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption 1.9 million years ago, but before a 2-million-year-old geomagnetic shift. That’s too early for Homo erectus. Braun says smaller, stockier hominins such as Homo habilis or even late australopithecines were responsible.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627633.600-early-humans-had-taste-for-aquatic-diet.html

Years of research has been carried out to assess whether apes and monkeys have a decipherable language.

Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him.

That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.

The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.

But with a few exceptions, teaching animals human language has proved to be a dead end. They should speak, perhaps, but they do not. They can communicate very expressively — think how definitely dogs can make their desires known — but they do not link symbolic sounds together in sentences or have anything close to language.

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12monkey.html?pagewanted=1

New Scientist explores the ways in which music may or may not be “universal” to human beings. The claim that consonance and dissonance are shared is controversial, with one scientist quoted saying, “I think the idea that there are universal preferences for particular harmonic or melodic intervals reflects a pervasive western-centric bias in the science of music … It’s pretty clear that intervals that are considered dissonant by westerners are sometimes prevalent in other cultures.” But the emotional ethos conveyed by different rhythms may be a better candidate.

Music psychologists agree that these associations probably do come from the way music mimics emotional speech and behaviour. Happy people the world over speak moderately loudly, with animated voices and gestures, while sad people speak and move in slower, softer ways. We can judge music’s emotional state just as we can often tell when someone speaking an unfamiliar language is joyous, woeful or angry.

However, the emotional quality of music is more complex than just conveying a basic emotion such as happiness and sadness. Most music aims to represent not a single, uniform mood but one that is constantly changing. Many music psychologists believe that the key to picking up on this emotional flux rests on our ability to discern patterns in the notes and rhythms and use them to make predictions about what will come next. When our anticipations are violated, we experience tension; when the expectation is met we have a pleasurable sense of release.

If this model is correct, our emotional response depends on identifying patterns and regularities in the first place. So the question then arises: can we experience this moment-by-moment emotional landscape in the music of unfamiliar cultures?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627591.300-harmonious-minds-the-hunt-for-universal-music.html?full=true

Are you free on the 19th June? Chris Jenord introduces an evolutionary walk back in time to the origin of all life on earth.

Imagine, if you will, the evolutionary tree of life, its branches bristling resplendent with countless leaves, each representing a single species of life on earth. A simple enough analogy, but there is no denying the potent truth sparkling within Darwin’s original  sketchbook scribble; a truth that has changed forever our perception of who we are.

Our human “leaf” on the tree flutters beside all the rest, and so many other leaves have long since perished, or seem destined to lose their precarious hold. However, unlike every other survivor, only human beings  are able to understand the full profundity, and vulnerability, of our existence. Humanity has now had more than a century to ponder this incredible truth, and still we struggle to understand and come to terms with everything this means. Last year we celebrated Darwin’s 150th anniversary. His contribution was rightly and properly recognised. But is that it?  Must we now sit patiently and wait for his 200th?

It seems humanity is always up for a celebration. There already exists a super abundance of annual festivals around the world. They mark all manner of things, from steam rallies to the birth of religious deities. And yet nowhere do we find celebration of the mother of all birthdays; our shared origins with all life on earth. Why not? This simply isn’t good enough!

So how do we try to make up for this embarrassing oversight? Well, the Taunton Humanist Group, with some support from the British Humanist Association to which they are affiliated, have made efforts to establish a wholly new festival and so, it is with much excitement, that we invite you to join us in our just-a-bit belated homage to life’s remarkable 3.7 billion year journey. The Ancestor’s Trail is a pilgrimage, but a pilgrimage wholly unlike any other.

The event was inspired by Richard Dawkin’s magnificent book, The Ancestor’s Tale: a pilgrimage to the dawn of life, and, if you have not already done so, we would recommend finding the time to read this book ! It will undoubtedly hugely amplify your pilgrimage experience. Like most pilgrimages, the Ancestor’s Trail is a backwards walk. Not physically backwards, but a symbolic journey back in time, only in our case we go back further than ever before. Of course, we should not forget that it’s  not just our birth story, but that of all life on earth, and consequently the event also promotes theInternational year of Biodiversity.

So how will it work? At this point you’ll need to manipulate Darwin’s evolutionary tree in your head. Lie it flat along the spine of some picturesque hills in Somerset; its branches approximately lining up with its many tributary footpaths (see our map!). Now add yourself at the end of one particular branch, representing one particular life form. As you journey from your starting point you will “rendezvous” with the walkers representing other species. These convergences represent the points at which single species original diverged to form whole new branches of the tree of life.

Your choice of life form will dictate the distance you walk. But if we walked the whole tree of life to scale then chimpanzees would meet with humans in just the first few steps! So if we are to reach our goal in a sensible time frame, each step must represent thousands or even millions of years. We decided to create three different scales over the trail. The first expands the mammalian renaissance period since the terrible climatic catastrophe that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Here you will walk back 10,000 years every step. Beyond this point, our time travel increases by an order magnitude to 100, 000 years per stride. Finally, for the last 2.7 billion years, we increase by another order of magnitude to around a million years every stride. In this way we ensure a relatively constant procession of rendezvous throughout the trail.

The event is participatory. This is important. Indeed, it is within this collective dimension that we hope it will take on a deeper meaning. As an overwhelmingly social species, our sense of belonging strikes right to the heart of our very nature, and so, although alone we may start, together we shall gather. Eventually our symbolic re-enactment will reach its ultimate origin; the dawn of life itself.

The walk will be staged along the rolling green hills of the Quantocks (an area of outstanding natural beauty) and we are very fortunate to have nearby a fitting place to represent the origin of life; a beautiful, rugged, rocky beach called Kilve, appropriately famous for its fossils.

Given the hugely long periods of geological time involved, it seemed only fitting to choose a date close to our longest day. Consequently, for 2010, we have chosen the week end of the 19th June.

This whole project has, rather appropriately, developed a life of its own, and is now growing wings (and probably legs, fins, twigs amongst other appendages). For instance, we have just acquired an educational grant to run a school’s version of the trail at a local secondary school.  A single class of students will begin a walk around their playing field representing the human race. As they walk further back in time, they will be joined by other classes representing their ancestors in a similar fashion. Each joining group will have a placard announcing their life form identity, and students  walk by, teachers will flash them cards showing their current time period. At around 65 million years a large replica asteroid will be carried into the middle of the field and the children (or most of them) will be asked to lie down briefly to represent a major extinction period! Eventually the whole year group will be led into our main hall where they will be greeted by a large birthday cake with 3.7 BIG candles. The events they will have represented are, after all, a celebration of our original birthday with each candle symbolising a billion years! A small group of student dancers, trained by the Rambert Dance Company, will then provide a more artistic interpretation of evolution through dance (inspired by the Rambert piece called a ‘Comedy of Change’) and this will be followed by an explosion of rap from the evolutionary rapper Baba Brinkman. To finish up we will all sing happy birthday ‘to life’ and blow out the candles. At this point, the students will be encouraged to make a wish  to preserve the wonderful biodiversity of life on earth.

We haven’t got time to tell you about our plans to create an evolutionary ‘cell’ sculpture at Kilve, or about our plans to create a permanent Ancestor’s Trail accessible all year round, but hopefully next time!

In the mean time, we are all hugely looking forward to meeting you on June 19th at Kilve.

You can find out more and register to walk at http://ancestorstrail.net.

Chris Jenord is a teacher, a member of the Taunton Humanist Group, and a keen Darwinian!