Uncommon Descent has featured blog entries recently which highlight a disturbing trend, namely, the use of science to advance socio-political ends. That was essentially the complaint used against advocates of Intelligent Design. A mostly successful attempt was made to link ID to a socio-political movement based on a document of the Discovery Institute popularly known by the term wedge. Yet the Discovery Institute is a very minor player in the overall scheme of things with very little discernable impact on larger socio-political events. It does not even merit campaign talking points by either major U.S. political party during a busy election period. If the DI is intent on making its mark on the world it would do well to study from some masters at advancing socio-political agendas.

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…A New Generation Of Denial

Today - May 1 - is official Holocaust Memorial Day. Being as I am a political leftist, I got myself into a strange back-and-forth over on DailyKos that started innocently enough when someone mentioned the Godwin aspect of the Expelled movie. Given the remembrance today, and the UMC's official apology for eugenics, I innocently mentioned that I'd like to see - sometime before I die and my promise to my godparents dies with me - an official apology by science for its support of eugenics. Particularly biological and evolutionary science.

Talk about opening a can of Holocaust Denial worms! At first I got complaints that 'science' has nothing to apologize for, since science played no part in eugenics. We know that's not true, and the truth is voluminous out there for anyone to access, so I mentioned that. Quite levelly and without rancor. Yes, 'Darwinism' was indeed used to justify eugenics in this and other countries, gladly handed to Hitler as legislative models for his racial purity policies in 1934. That's history, it's well-documented.

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A news release this week from biologists at the University of Manchester in England reports some world-shattering findings…

St. Bernard Study Shows Human-directed Evolution at Work

They report that by looking at 47 St. Bernard skulls spanning a period of 120 years - since the time that the breed standard for these dogs was first defined - they could see that the skulls steadily conformed to these standards over time. Because the breeders of St. Bernard dogs had bred for those traits.

Whoa. You're telling me that dog breeders can breed toward desired traits? What'll they think of next… breeding black and white spotted milk cows or fast race horses?

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A New York Times article entitled Science of the Soul? "˜I Think, Therefore I Am' Is Losing Force, illustrates how science can be misused to advance a mataphysical agenda. From the article:

Although he (Pope John Paul II) noted that in the intervening years evolution had become "more than a hypothesis," he added that considering the mind as emerging merely from physical phenomena was "incompatible with the truth about man."

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges "” not just in people but in other animals as well.

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We here at TT often make light of the outlandish 'emo' [emotive] gloom and doom prophesies of the many erstwhile spokespersons of big-s Science in their attempts to sell failed or highly debatable theories to the public for ideological or political reasons. We focus primarily on the stalwart defenders of Neodarwinian Orthodoxy, but the tendency for groups of like-minded scientists to propagandize in favor of their pet theories and projects as if there were no alternatives - or simple facts - to get in the way, crosses all the disciplinary borders.

This blog is intended to highlight how this propagandizing - a.k.a. "spin" - works in other areas of science, engineering and government, on an issue I am familiar with. It's a bit of a departure from the usual biological focus, but the information herein may serve to promote a little skepticism of "authority" in the perennial science wars that Telic Thoughts so often challenges.

As the new century's propaganda push to re-invest in "clean, safe, too-cheap-to-meter" nuclear energy kicks into high gear, a new PR effort to address issues related to the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island has also taken flight. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology held a 2-day seminar on January 22-23 entitled Three Mile Island - failure of science or spin?

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If you'll remember, over a year ago, we took a look at the Gregory Paul "study" that purported to show a negative correlation between societal health and religiosity. It appears that this study has become the darling of the New Atheist movement and even someone like Michael Shermer recently abandoned critical thinking in order to peddle these "results" to his readers at Scientific American.

What Shermer failed to mention is that in the next issue of the Journal of Religion and Society, social scientists Gerson Moreno-Riaño, Mark Caleb Smith, and Thomas Mach responded to Paul's study.

Here are a few of their observations:
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A news item of BBC News: Human species 'may split in two' details predictions of Dr. Oliver Curry. From the article:

Humanity may split into an elite and an underclass, says Dr Curry

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

EVOLUTIONARY THEORIST Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said- before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and afar cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

Race 'ironed out'

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair,and even features, he adds.

Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.

Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.

Receding chins

Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.

Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.

There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.

Further into the future, sexual selection - being choosy about one's partner - was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.

The logical outcome would be two sub-species, "gracile" and "robust" humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.

"While science and technology have the potential to create an ideal habitat for humanity over the next millennium, there is a possibility of a monumental genetic hangover over the subsequent millennia due to an over-reliance on technology reducing our natural capacity to resist disease, or our evolved ability to get along with each other, said Dr Curry.

Dr. Curry could have more accurately prognosticated that in 10,000 years we would witness an increasing genetic load, zero positive results in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, origin of life models that tinker with biochemical building blocks and life on earth that is substantially similar to life as it exists today.

Do you remember the Gregory S. Paul study? Sure you do. It was that study that purported to show that there is a correlation between the religious belief and the dysfunction of a society, but it was shown to be riddled with errors by statistican Scott Gilbreath as well as by my fellow Telician Mike Gene. Now, none of this has prevented the "study" from being featured in Skeptic Magazine, where Matthew Provonshan uncritically repeats Gregory Paul's flawed claims. This has caused Scott Gilbreath to write another post about the article, finding even more howlers than he did at first.

The claim that Paul utilised "a database of 800 million people" is laughable. The sample size of Paul's study was precisely eighteen: one data point from each country for each data series. To claim this represents the combined population of all the countries is like the market research firm Ipsos Canada conducting a survey of 1200 Canadians and then claiming they accessed a database of over 32.5 million people.

(HT: Tom Gilson)

As Mike pointed out, almost a year ago, this paper suffers from so many flaws that, had it been an intelligent design paper, critics would have been screaming bloody murder over it, hunting down the responsible editor, like they did with Richard Sternberg. Yet on this paper, the self-proclaimed Defenders of Science have remained silent. I wonder why.

Update: Turns out the paper is also being featured in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Grey Thoughts and Verum Serum has more.

The article in Nature, claiming that ancestors of humans and chimpanzees were interbreeding, is making a lot of noise, with big names like Carl Zimmer and PZ Myers touting it. Fortunately, John Hawks is there with the cold hose:

I've read the paper, and I have to say it doesn't deliver on its promises. It fails to cite previous work on the topic, it discards without explanation the hypothesis supported by most previous studies, and it promotes a "provocative" hypothesis for which there is no good evidence. It doesn't even show that the speciation of humans and chimpanzees was "complex".

It's just a mess.

See the rest of his post, as well as this update, for a detailed critique.

I've long been reading John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, which is a good source of information, not just about anthropology, but about evolution and biology in general. So when blogging about Carl Zimmer's doubts about the wrist-walking family in Turkey having "evolved backwards", I jokingly wondered why John Hawks wasn't also covering this. Well, it seems like I wasn't the only one, and after having received nummerous e-mails about this, John Hawks is now ready with his analysis:

Of course, the most important question is whether any of this actually contributes to understanding human origins. Generally, I think the answer is no — not just an itsy-bitsy no, but a great big honking no.

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