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San Jose Mercury News, Sunday morning May8, 1988

Why astrology believers should feel embarrassed

By Andrew Fraknoi

Recent revelations that first lady Nancy Regan consulted astrologers in arranging the president’s schedule have generated snickers in some quarters. Unfortunately, belief in the power of astrology is much more widespread than many people realize. A 1984 Gallop Poll indicated that 55 percent of American teen-agers believe that astrology works. Astrology columns appear in over 1,200 newspapers in the United States; by contrast, fewer than 10 newspapers have columns in astronomy, the scientific study of the heavens. All around the world, people base personal, financial, and even medical decisions on the advice of the astrologers.

Furthermore, astrology is only one of a number of pseudoscientific beliefs whose uncritical acceptance by the media and the public has contributed to a disturbing lack of skepticism among youngsters ( and apparently presidents) in the United States. Life is complex these days, and it is tempting to look for simple solutions to the challenges we face. But instead of encountering healthy doubt and critical thinking in our children, we are raising a generation that is welling to believe just about any far-fetched claim printed in the newspapers or reported on television.

Youngsters (and adults) who want to practice skeptical thinking might enjoy asking few embarrassing question about astrology:

For those who follow newspapers or magazine columns on astrology, how likely is it that 1/12 of the world (more than 400 million people for each sign of the zodiac ) will have the same kind of day? This question sheds some light on why astrology columns are always so vague that they can be applied to situations in almost everyone’s life.

Why is it the moment of birth, rather than the moment of conception, which is the critical one for calculating a horoscope? To figure this one out, it’s helpful to know that when astrology was first set up thousands of years ago, the moment of birth was considered a magic time. But today, we understand that birth is the culmination of roughly nine months of complex, intricately orchestrated development inside the womb. Many aspects of a child’s personality are set long before the time of birth.

Therefore we must ask how the mother’s thin layer of skin and flesh “protects” her unborn baby from the influence of the planets and the stars? (And could one perhaps postpone the beginning of some unpleasant astrological effect by surrounding a newborn with a thin wall of steak for few days?)

I suspect that the reason the astrologers still adhere to the moment of birth has little to do with astrological “theory”. The simple fact is almost everyone knows his or her moment of birth, but it is difficult (and perhaps embarrasing ) to find out one’s moment of conception.

“Serious” astrologers claim that the influence of all the major bodies in the solar system must be taken into account to arrive at an accurate horoscope. they also insist that the reason we should believe in astrology is because it had led us to accurate predictions or personality profiles for many centuries.

But wait. The most distant known planets, Neptune and Pluto, were not discovered until 1846 and 1930, respectively. So why aren’t all the horoscopes done before 1846 incorrect, since the astrologers were not including two important planets? Moreover, why did the problems or inaccuracies in early horoscopes not lead astrologers to “sense” the presence of these planets long before astronomers discovered them?

Even after thousands of years of study and perfecting their art, different schools of astrology still violently disagree on how to cast a horoscope and especially on how to interpret it. You can have your horoscope cast and read buy different astrologers on the very same day and get completely different predictions, interpretations, or suggestions. If astrology were a science-as astrologers claim- you would expect that the same experiment or calculation would always give the same result.

But even if we put all these nagging thoughts aside for a moment, one overriding question still remains to be asked. Why would the position of celestial objects at the moment of our birth have an effect on our characters, lives, or our destinies?

What force, what influence, what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human beings and affect our development and fate?

One can see how the astrological world view might have been appealing thousands of years ago when astrology first arose. In those days humanity was terrified of the often unpredictable forces of nature and searched desperately for regularities, signs, and portents from the heavens that would help them guide their lives.

But today, when our spacecraft have traveled to the planets and have explored them in some detail, our view of the universe is very different. We know that planets are other worlds and the stars other suns-physical bodies that are incredibly remote and mercifully unconcerned with the daily lives of creatures on our small planet. No amount of scientific sounding jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central problem with astrology- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which celestial objects can influence us in so specific a way.

Let’s take an analogy. Imagine  that someone proposes that the positions of all the jumbo jets in the world at the moment that a baby is born will have a significant effect on the child’s personality or future life. Furthermore, for a fee, a “jetologer” with a large computer might offer to do an elaborate chart showing the positions of planes at the right time and to interpret the complex pattern of the plane positions to help you understand  their influence on your life. No matter how “scientific” or complex the chart of jet positions turned out to be, any reasonably skeptical person would probably ask the “jetologer” some rather poited questions about why the positions of all those planes should have any connection with someone’s personality or with the events that shape human lives.

Greater pull

Indeed, in the real world, it is quite simple to calculate the planetary influences on the new-born baby. The only known force that is acting over interplanetary distances in any significant way is gravity. So we might compare the pull of the neighbor planet like Mars with other influences on the baby. It turns out that the pull of the obstetrician is significantly greater than that of Mars. (And the hospital building- unless the baby happens to be in its exact geometric center- has an even greater pull than the doctor. Given the situation at most urban hospitals, many children should probably have ” No Parking” as their sign.)

Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents the astrological influence. Suppose we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that there is something connecting us to the heavens even if we do not what it is. If so, astrological predictions- like those of any scientific fields-should be easily tested. If astrology predicts that Virgos And Aries are incompatible signs- to take a simple example-then if we look at thousands of marriages and divorce records, we should see more Virgo-Aries couples getting divorced and fewer of them getting married than we would expect by chance.

Astrologers always claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them.

10 percent accuracy

In addition, astronomers Roger Culver and Philip Ianna tracked the specific published predictions of well-known astrologers and astrological organizations for a period of five years. Out of more than 3,000 predictions (including many about politics, film, stars, and other famous people) in their sample, only about 10 percent came to pass. Veteran reporters on most newspapers-can do a good deal better than this just by educated guessing.

If reading the starts has led astrologers to incorrect predictions nine times out of ten, they hardly seem like reliable guides to the uncertainties of life or the affairs of our country. I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest in the real ( and fascinating ) universe beyond our planet, and not let them keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by the firelight, afraid of the night.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Fraknoi

Author: John Freely. Was born in Brooklyn, NY, and joined the U.S. Navy in WW II. Taught physics and history of science since 1960 in Bosphorus University in Istanbul, with intervals in New York, Boston, London, Athens and Venice. He is the author of more than forty books.

Published in 2009, and of 300 pages.
Ever wonder why did Moslems have a civilization in the 9th, through the 13th century? What was their motives and what provoked their scientific advancements? And what was the reason of their decline afterwards? Why Europe of the medieval ages picked up where Moslem’s left and who or what provoked them? And who were the pioneers from Antiquity till present day, who put science (and philosophy) on its right path? And why Europe flourished after that?
All those questions and more; the relationship between religion, metaphysics, superstition, astrology, magic, astronomy and modern science, all in one bundle presented in this book of no more than three hundred paged, which makes it truly a magnificent work.
The book is an encyclopedia of information in a story-telling style that makes it very interesting, and not a bit boring. It does not only touch base with listing such information, but rather goes deep into the lives and circumstances, or environments of his actors to deduce his own conclusions bequeathed by empirical evidences and referenced by well documented sources. Actually, the book relieves the pressure off researchers’ backs, the ones who are interested in these eras, when it provides detailed information of certain events that would help in creating a wider perception.

In short; the book is a summary of events presented chronologically in a beautiful story-telling style.

I will present here two passages from the book only to give an idea:

“Islamic astronomy was dominated by Ptolemy, whose works were translated into Arabic and also disseminated in summaries and commentaries. The earliest Arabic translation of the Almagest is by Al-Hajjaj ibn Matar in the first half of the ninth century. The most popular compendium of Ptolemaic astronomy was that of al-Farghani (d.ca.870) produced a set of astronomical tables in which he introduced the trigonometric functions of the sine, cosine, and tangent, which do not appear in Ptolemy’s work.”

“Al-Kindi’s ideas on visual perception, which differed from those of Aristotle, together with his studies of the reflection of light, laid the foundation for what became, in the European renaissance, the law of perspective. His studies of natural science convinced him of the values of rational thought, and as a result he was the first noted Islamic philosopher to be attacked by fundamentalists Muslim clerics. His Letter on Banishing Sadness says that the cure for melancholia is applying oneself to the only enduring object, the world of the intellect.”

I can go on, the subject is very dense and the author did an excellent job to bring history to life and show its misgivings.

I advice all, especially Muslims to read it for it bears a lot of lessons we can learn from.

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13- Is nature as perfectly designed as it seems?

Years of false education programmed our brains to believe in the illusion that we are designed in the most perfect model. We tend to look at things in a holistic non-detail, and reductionist perception that gives us a picture of the world as if it was designed by a master engineer. Just like looking at the brightness of color layout of a building without testing or seeing the deficiencies of its room layout or sewage and electrical systems. But if we look at it through a telescope and watch the details we would be able to see that this world is not only imperfect, but it also lacks the basics for a good design. A closer look reveals that, “Eyes and nerves, sperm tubes, sinuses and backs are poorly designed from the point of view of individual welfare.” As Dawkins explains while presenting each case. Yet, he consented that ” the imperfections make perfect sense in the light of evolution.” And that “The same applies to the larger economy of nature.” He says that, “An intelligent creator might be expected to have designed not just the bodies of individual animals and plants but also whole species, entire ecosystems. Nature might be expected to be a planned economy, carefully designed to eliminate extravagance and waste. (but) it isn’t ” Therefore he explains in detail in chapter twelve why the intelligent designer is not intelligent after all. And how complexity arising from simplicity makes perfect sense in light of natural selection. And why there is no ‘theodicy’  (literally, ‘justice of God’) with nature’s arm race.”

14- Does the theory of evolution contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

“The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, although energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can – must, in close system – become more impotent to do useful work. ‘Work’: that is what it means to say that ‘entropy’ increases. ‘ Work’ includes things like pumping water uphill or – the chemical equivalent – extracting carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide and using it in plant tissues… both can be achieved only if energy is fed into the system, for example electrical energy to drive the water pump, or solar energy to drive the synthesis of sugar and starch in green plant. Once the water has been pumped to the top of the hill, it will then tend to flow downhill, and some of energy of its downward flow can be used to drive a water wheel, which can generate electricity, which can drive an  electric motor to pump some of the water uphill again: but only some! Some of energy is always lost – though never destroyed.” as Dawkins explain the meaning of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Creationist usually claim that according to this law which states that, “almost all  the energy in the universe is steadily being degraded from the forms that are capable of doing work to forms that are incapable to do work. There is a leveling off, mixing up, until eventually the entire universe will settle into a uniform, (literally) uneventful ‘heat death’.” And therefore, complexity cannot rise from simplicity. Dawkins, on the other hand says that the ones who make this claim do not understand the Second Law of Thermodynamic, as they don’t understand the theory of evolution. He says, “There is no contradiction ( and that is)  because of the sun!” The sun is a constant source of energy. The whole system , “while never actually disobeying the laws of physics and chemistry – and certainly never disobeying the Second Law – energy from the sun powers life, to coax and stretch the laws of physics and chemistry to evolve prodigious feats of complexity, diversity, beauty, and uncanny illusion of statistical improbability and deliberate design…life evolves greater complexity only because natural selection drives it locally away from the statistically probable towards the improbable. And this is possible only because of the ceaseless supply of energy from the sun.”

15- How did evolution start in the first place?

Before going into how evolution started we have to know the difference between life and non-life. To this Dawkins answers, “The difference between life and non-life is a matter not of substance but information. Living things contain prodigious quantities of information. Most of the information is digitally coded in DNA, and there is also a substantial quantity coded in other ways.” which he explains in detail as four memories of information. As for how did it all start Dawkins says that, ” although we know a lot about evolution’s mechanics, we know little about how it all started, It could have been an event of supreme rarity. It only had to happen once, and as far as we know it did happen only once…One thing we can say, on the basis of pure logic rather than evidence, is that Darwin was sensible to say, (that life started) ‘from so simple a beginning’. The opposite of simple is statistically improbable. Statistically improbable things don’t spontaneously spring into existence: That is what statistically improbable means. The beginning had to be simple, and evolution by natural selection is still the only process we know whereby simple beginning can give rise to complex results.” Then in chapter thirteen Dawkings presents several theories presented in the scientific communities to explain how life started, whereby he assures us that there is no consensus among scientists on any of them. But he adds that he personally finds RNA World theory plausible, ” the ‘Catch -22′ of the origin of life is this. DNA can replicate, but it needs enzymes in order to catalyse the process. Proteins can catalyse DNA formation, but they need DNA to specify the correct sequence of amino acids. How could the molecules of the early Earth break out of this bind and allow natural selection to get started? Enter RNA.” And then he elaborated that, ” RNA belongs to the same family of chain molecules as DNA, the polynucleotides. It is capable of carrying what amount to the same four code ‘letter’ as DNA, and it indeed does so in living cells, carrying genetic information from DNA to where it can be used. DNA acts as the template for RNA code sequence to build up. And then protein sequences build up using RNA, not DNA, as their template. Some viruses have no DNA at all. RNA is their genetic molecule, solely responsible for carrying genetic information from generation to generation.” Then he adds, “Now for the key point of ‘RNA World theory’ of the origin of life. In addition to stretching out forms suitable for passing on sequence information, RNA is also capable of self-assembling…into three-dimensional shapes, which have enzymatic activity. RNA enzymes do exist. They are not as efficient as protein enzymes, but they work. The RNA World theory suggests that RNA was good enough enzyme to hold the fort until proteins evolved to take over the enzyme role, and that RNA was also a good enough replicator to muddle along that role until DNA evolved.”

And now that we are done with the most frequently asked questions, I would like to go to the last chapter (13) of the book where Dawkins presented a philosophical analysis (line by line) of the last paragraph in Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. there is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

And by doing this he proved that science is not callous and cold, but more grandeur in its view of life. And before I leave the subject I would like to add one more argument I personally was subjected to whenever a debate for the theory arises, and that is the claim that Darwin was a creationist. And their proof was this line in the paragraph above ‘there is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the creator into few forms or into one’. As we can see that the bold words in the line did not exist in the paragraph that Dawkins included in his book, but it does exist in the copy I have. And the reason it exists in my copy and not his, Dawkins says, is because Darwin’s book went through six editions, the first one which he has (only 1,250 copies) did not include those words because, “presumably bowing to pressure from the religious lobby, Darwin inserted ‘by the creator’ in the second and all subsequent editions.” And he included a letter of 1863 Darwin wrote to his friend the botanist Joseph Hooker regretting this ‘sop to religious opinion’. As for the word ‘breathed into’ we have to understand that Darwin knew little about how life started. In fact, much less than we know now. Besides, “Darwin didn’t discuss how evolution began in On the Origin of Species. He though the problem was beyond the science of his day. In the letter to Hooker…Darwin went on to say. ‘It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.’ He didn’t rule out the possibility that the problem would eventually be solved (indeed, the problem of matter largely has been solved) but only in the distant future: ‘ It will be some time before we see “slime, protoplasm, etc” generating a new animal.”

Coming to the end here I have to stress that this book is a must, especially to Muslims who are not only blinded by miseducation but also by the media. I remember when Ardi was discovered in 2009, while all TV channels of the world presenting it as a discovery of one of the ‘intermediates’,  Aljazeera Channel broadcasting it as a testimony against evolution, and deliberately manipulating the translation for that purpose. Alas Dawkins is right; this kind of audience want to hear this kind of nonsense.

The End

Finished

This question always pups up whenever the subject of evolution is debated, I personally heard someone saying that the only problem with evolution is the fact that it has many ‘missing links’ or lacking the ‘intermediates’. This question in fact is misleading and is an indication that the questioner does not understand how evolution works, as Dawkins says. If by the term ‘missing link’ he means that, what Dawkins termed, ‘hairpin’ or the base of the fork of which two species or more evolved into different lines, then there are plenty of those available and Dawkins presented many examples in chapter 6* . And I would add to his collection Ardi; the undeniable intermediate between حumans and apes. And I’m pretty sure that if Dawkins’ book was delayed till her discovery, she would have been included in the book as well. Yet, Dawkins believes that this question does not inquire about intermediates, it goes much deeper than that; it portrays the creationists’ mindset,”Underlying much of the fallacious demand for ‘missing links’” Dawkins says, ” is a medieval myth, which occupied men’s minds right up to the age of Darwin and stubbornly confused them after it. This is the myth of the Great Chain of Being, according to which everything in the universe sat on a ladder, with God at the top, then archangels, then various ranks of angles, then human beings, then animals, then plants, then down to stones and other inanimate creations…But it was the alleged hierarchy within the animal kingdom that had the greatest capacity to muddy the water when the idea of evolution burst upon the scene. It seemed natural to suppose that ‘lower’ animals evolved into ‘higher’ animals. And if this were so, we should expect to see ‘links’ between them, all the way up and down the ‘ladder’.” And then Dawkins goes on with the suggestion that there is no higher or lower animals, only differently developed animals depending on the environment in which their DNA had better chance to survive and therefore spread in the gene pool. And so he moves on to show that “the entire ladder myth is deeply misconceived and un-evolutionary.”

12- What would be evidence against evolution?

Dawkins quotes the geneticist and evolution biologist J.B.S. Haldane saying, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian !’ when asked to “name an observation that would disprove the theory of evolution.” What Haldane meant is that there is no fossils in the era that they did not belong to as per the theory of evolution. Or as Dawkins asserted, ” No such rabbits, no authentically anachronistic fossils of any kind, have ever been found. All the fossils that we have, and there are very very many indeed, occur, without a single authenticated exception, in the right temporal sequence. Yes there are gaps, where there are no fossils at all, and that is only to be expected. But not single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved.” And that is an assurance that evolution is a sound theory, “A good theory, a scientific theory, is one that is vulnerable to disproof, yet is not disproved.” Then Dawkins take this argument further by challenging anyone who would come up with a fossil that does not belong to its era in the evolution period.

13- How new species are born?

“Every species is a cousin of every other species. Any two species are descended from an ancestral species, which split into two.” Dawkins says. And the reason why they took different routes to develop is that they ” somehow separated from each other, most likely by geological barrier such as a strip of sea separating two islands, or separating an island from mainland. It could have been a mountain range that separated two valleys, or a river separating two forests…all that matters is that the two populations were isolated from one another for long enough so that, when time and chance eventually reunited them, they found they had diverged so much that they couldn’t interbreed any more.” But “even if conditions on either side of the barrier are identical, two geographically separated gene pools of the same species will eventually drift apart from one another, to the point where they can no longer interbreed when geographical isolation eventually comes to an end. Random changes in the two gene pools will gradually build up, to the point where, if a male and a female from the two sides meet, their genomes will be too different to combine to make a fertile offspring. Whether by random drift alone, or with the aid of differential natural selection, once the two gene pools have reached the point where they no longer need the geographical isolation to stay genetically separate, we call them two different species.” Therefore, ” An earthquake opens up an impassable gorge, or changes the course of a river, and a species that had been a single breeding population finds itself severed in two. More usually, the barrier was there all along, and it is the animals themselves that cross it, in rare freak event.” which brings to mind last month’s mystery of the disappearance of sea lions of San Fransisco’s Pier 39.

14- Did the earth move?

Dawkins elaborates in chapter nine on the theory of continental drift that was first “championed by the German climatologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930)” who proposed that “All the great continents of the world…had once been joined up in a gigantic super-continent, which he called Pangaea.” and that “Pangaea gradually dismembered itself to form the continent we know today, which then slowly drifted to their present position and have not finished drifting yet.” And although Wegener was right in his theory of drift, yet not right in its mechanics though, as Dawkins explains, “I have to make it clear that this hypothesis of continental drift was significantly different from our modern theory of plate tectonics.” where he spent the rest of the chapter explaining how moving of earth plates causes continents to drift away from each other . And the most interesting information, for me at least, was a picture he presented with this caption ‘The San Andreas Fault, a great gash up the length of California.’ Where ‘one day the western part of the state, with Baja California, will be an island in the Pacific.’ Earthquakes like the recent one in Haiti and tsunamis like the one that hit Indonesia not long ago are caused by tectonic plate movements. And it is happening all over the earth indifferent to human affairs. So yes, the earth moved and still is moving, there are ” modern evidence that entire continents move over the face of earth.” as Dawkins says, and this “provides by far the best explanation of certain major facts of animal and plant dispersion, especially of fossils. For example, there are similarities between the fossils of south America, Africa, Antarctica, Madagascar, India and Australia, which nowadays  we explain by invoking the once great southern continent of Gondwana, uniting all those modern lands.”

15- How did the discovery of DNA add evidence to the theory of evolution?

“just as the vertebrate skeletons is invariant across all vertebrates while individual bones differ, and just as the crustacean exoskeleton is invariant across all crustaceans while the individual ‘tubes’ vary, so the DNA code is invariant across all living creatures, while the individual genes themselves vary.” Dawkins explains, and he asserts that, ” This is a truly astounding fact, which shows more clearly than anything else that all living creatures are descended from a single ancestor. Not just the genetic code itself, but the whole gene/protein system for running life…is the same in all animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea and viruses. What varies is what written in the code, not the code itself. And when we look comparatively at what is written in the code – the actual genetic sequence in all these different creatures – we find the same kind of hierarchical tree of resemblance. We find the same family tree – albeit much more thoroughly and convincingly laid out – as we did with vertebrate skeleton, the crustacean skeleton ( he explained them thoroughly in the book), and indeed the whole pattern of anatomical resemblance through all living kingdom.” Then he elaborates that, “If we want to work out how closely related any pair of species is – say, how close a hedgehog is to a monkey – the ideal would be to look at the complete molecular texts of every gene of both species, and compare every jot and tittle, as a biblical scholar might compare two fragments of Isaiah.”

* Some examples of the intermediates:

Fish/Amphibian evolution

Eusthenopteron
Ichthyostega
Acanthostega
Tiktaalik

Whale evolution
Click Here

The ancestor of modern seals
Puijila darwini

Human/Ape ancestors
Java Man
Peking Man
Mrs. Ples
Lucy
Ardi

To be continued
An Update
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5- How many millennium do we have available to use in accounting for the whole history of life? Or from the time when fish emerged on to the land?

It is very important for us to know what is the age of our earth so that it would be easier for us to grasp the huge time it took for all forms of life to develop upon her face. Dawkins said that “The measured age of our planet is about 4.6 billion years.” and the time “that has elapsed since the common ancestor of all today’s mammals walked the earth is about two million centuries (200,000,000). A century seems a pretty long time to us. Can you imagine two million centuries, laid end to end? The time that has elapsed since our fish ancestors crawled out of the water on to the land is about three and a half million centuries: that is to say, about twenty thousand times as long as it took to make all the different-really very different- breeds of dogs from the common ancestor that they all share (less than 1000 years).” 4.6 billion is a humongous number if compared to three and a half million, but if we consider the age of the universe since the big bang ( which is estimated to be no less than 13.5 billion years), according to the late astronomer Carl Sagan, then the whole period of any form of life on earth to appear is but in the last few minutes on the Cosmic calender, baring in mind that the 13.5 billion years is equal to one cosmic year. So when we are taking about evolution we are talking about deep geological time and not a change that happens overnight or something that is clear and palpable in each generation.

6- How do we know the age of any particular rock? How do we know the age of the earth?

In chapter four, Richard Dawkens presents a variety of geological clocks and he shows how they work. He presents radioactive clocks for dating volcanic rocks and shows the mechanics of  deducing their age. The atoms in these rocks change the number of their electrons with a regular emission over fixed time frames and become atoms that belong to other materials close to them in the periodic table. In other words the material keeps changing over specific time rate to another.  A sample of these rocks can be tested for the ratio of the original material and the new material to which it changed and therefore deduce the time it was solidified from lava, with an error ratio of only one percent. And thus estimate the age of the formation of that rock.  Another natural clock Dawkins presented was counting tree rings. Trees withstand seasons of variable weather conditions that affects the outer layer of its trunk. It even tells a story of years of good rain and years of drought. Coral reefs have annual growth rings as well which have been used to detect the age of ancient earthquakes. The same principals are used with Varves which are layers of sediments laid down annually in geological lakes . Carbon dating is used to deduce the age of a fossils. Every living organism, including plants contain two types of Carbon; Carbon 14 and Carbon 12 with a specified ratios when alive. And when dead this ratio changes. From this ratio we can deduce the time of death and consequently the age of the layer it is buried in. In fact, we are fortunate that nature has provided us with a vast variety of natural clocks to choose from. And as Dawkins said, ” praise be, nature has provided us with just the wide range of clocks that we need. What’s more, their ranges of sensitivity overlap with each other, so we can use them as checks on each other.” In other words the process is not just an estimated guesses; it is a measured process that is constantly subjected to mathematics and auditing.

7- Does evolution take course only over a long period of time that we can’t witness?

“Although the vast majority of evolutionary change took place before any human being was born, some examples are so fast that we can see evolution with our own eyes during one human life” as Dawkens said. He then elaborated on that by providing some examples in nature where he presented a statistical chart to show the reduction of the Ugandan elephants’ tusk weight over thirty-three years period (1925-1958). The reason for this reduction Dawkins said is human hunting for elephants with bigger tusks while leaving the ones with smaller tusk to reproduce. And as a consequence bigger tusk elephants went extinct in a mere 33 years. He also presented experiments done in nature as well as in controlled labs where he showed how the lizards of Pod Kopiste, an islet off the Croatian coast, developed differently over thirty-seven years period when moved to another islet off the same coast called Pod Mrcaru . And in the controlled lab he presented the Lenski’s forty-five thousand generations of evolution of bacteria over twenty year period (and still ongoing), divided into twelve jars and manipulated differently where some were frozen and then brought back to life for the sake of comparison.  But  the most interesting part was when he demonstrated the evolution of an embryo especially in the early stages of pregnancy, starting with the development of the first fertilized cell, and so onto divided cells to show the mechanics of the process and the role of genome which carries the history of hereditary traits and how it is misleading to say that they work as blue prints, but more like a recipe (where the production of the dish is subjected to local laws  and the final dish depends on many factors like chef”s taste etc.), and how the cells work in the same way abiding to local laws while developing in the womb ( hereditary traits turned on and off like a toggle switch)  to show that evolution can take place under our own eyes over a nine-month period. ” One of the surprising things we learned about evolution that it can be both very fast” as Dawkins assures us, yet  “under other circumstances, as we know from fossil record, very slow. Slowest of all are those living creatures that we call ‘living fossils’. They are creatures that “changed so little since their remote ancestors that it is almost as though they were fossils.” And therefore evolutionary change is not proportional to elapsed time for all creatures. “Animals are inconsiderate enough to evolve at different rates, and might even be inconsiderate not to evolve at all.” as Dawkins said.

8- Did humans descend from monkeys?

No, humans did not descend from monkeys, we share common ancestor. “The common ancestor would have looked a lot more like a monkey than a man, and we would probably have called it a monkey if we had met it, some 25 million years ago. But even though humans evolved from an ancestor that we could sensibly call a monkey, no animal gives birth to an instant new species, or at least not one as different from itself as a man is from a monkey, or even from chimpanzee. That isn’t what evolution is about. Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.  Huge leaps in a single generation – which is what a monkey giving birth to a human would be – are almost as unlikely as divine creation, and are ruled out for the same reason: too statistically improbable.” As Dawkins elaborated.

9-  Are there  ‘gaps’ ?

“Actually”, Dawkins said, ” We are lucky to have any fossils at all, let alone the massive number that we now do have to document evolutionary history – large numbers of which, by any standards, constitute beautiful ‘intermediates’. In chapters 9 Dawkins showed that the distribution of animals on islands and continents is exactly “What we should expect if they are all cousins that have evolved from shared ancestors over very long periods”. And in chapter 10 he compared modern animals with each other, looking at the distribution of characteristics in the animal kingdom, especially comparing their sequences of genetic code to come to the conclusion that ” We don’t need fossils to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure, even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized.” He said that, ” It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day”. “The fossil evidence in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong” he said, ” Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps.” And these gaps are found in the scarcity of fossils before the Cambrian era.

10- Why, on the evolutionary view, are there so few fossils before the Cambrian era?

Before going into the speculation on the reason for the scarcity of fossils before the Cambrian era, Dawkins presented the flatworm, Platyhelminthes. ” This great phylum of worms includes the parasitic flukes and tapeworms, which are of great medical importance.” As he defined them. And elaborated specifically on ” the free-living turbellarian worms, of which there are more than four thousand species: that’s about as numerous as all the mammal species put together.” He said that they are common both in water and on land, and presumably have been common for a very long time, yet they have no fossils. So “whatever factors applied to the flatworms throughout geological time to this day,” he deduced, “those same factors applied to the rest of the animal kingdom before the Cambrian.” Then he explained that, ” probably, most animals before the Cambrian were soft-bodied like modern flatworms, probably also rather small like modern turbellarians – just not good fossil material. Then something happened half a billion years ago to allow animals to fossilize freely – the rising of hard, mineralized skeletons (like shells), for example.”

To be continued

Duke's first grooming

In my last post I mentioned that I would try to present some of the frequently asked questions as was presented in the book, and summarize Richard Dawkins answers to those questions, in addition to my own opinion on some, if there were any, for those who are curious enough to know about evolution science. But before going into that, it is worthwhile to mention that no reputable scientist nor educated clergy or theologian rejects evolution, as Dawkins mentioned  (of course he’s talking about the West). The Bishop of Oxford, the Archbishop of Canterbury (remember his infamous lecture of implementing Sharea law on Muslims of Britain?) Or even the Pope has no problem with evolution. “(Western) educated clergy have given up the struggle against it after attending the evidence”, yet they continue misleading the populous, “preachers who believe in evolution do not exert efforts in educating people that Adam and Eve never existed. If pressed they’d protest that they only intended ‘symbolic’ meaning.”

1- Is evolution ‘just a theory’?

To answer this question, Dawkins dedicated the first chapter of his book to show that there is a misconception of the term “theory” when it is used in a general sense. In fact; Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions. But a theory in scientific sense is closer to a theorum, and ” Theorums often start off as ‘mere’ hypothesis .” And hypothesis is defined  as an “idea awaiting confirmation or falsification”, where Dawkin elaborated that, “an idea may even begin its career mired in ridicule, before progressing by painful steps to the status of a theorum or undisputed fact.”  And ” the more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.” And no theory in human history was subjected to assaults  since its outset and until today as did evolution, although it has become a reality of life.  A theory becomes  a reality when humans use its application. The antibiotics prescribed by your doctor for infections, and the strict rule of its dispensing over a specified time and calculated portions  is but one of the many applications that have roots in evolution. In fact, Dawkins said, “this book is about a positive evidence that evolution is not ‘just a theory’ it is a fact”. Therefore he spent all of other remaining twelve chapters in his book  providing only some of those evidences, because, as he mentioned “we know evolution is a fact because a rising flood of evidence supports it”. And to do that he stars off by using Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of a ‘fact’ as  ‘actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred’ to demonstrate how this definition fits evolution perfectly.

Kenneth Miller, Brown University professor specializing in Cell Biology, and the author of many high-school biology textbooks used throughout the United States as well as being the author of many other best-sellers, mentioned while lecturing on “The Collapse of Intelligent Design” at Case Western University that evolution is as much a fact as gravity, although both are called a “theory” and not a fact. And by the way Miller is a devout Catholic, as he described himself.  

2- If humans have evolved from chimpanzees, how come there are still chimpanzees around?

This is a common mistake, modern animals do not descend from each other, but we all share common ancestors and each of us took a separate line to evolve. “The point is that for any two animals there has to be a hairpin path linking them, for the simple reason that every species shares an ancestor with every other species: all we have to do is walk backwards from one species to the shared ancestor, then turn through a hairpin bend and walk forwards to the other species.” And therefore this statement is false and the question is ridiculous, or as Dawkins said, “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work. Huge leaps in a single generation – which is what a monkey giving birth to a human would be – are almost as divine creation, and are ruled out for the same reason: too statistically improbable.”

3- Why did it take Darwin so long to get on the scene?

Although the idea of evolution has roots in Greek philosophy  ( Carl Sagan said in his book – and his famous TV show – Cosmos that Empedocles, Anaximander and  Democritus, “Clearly anticipated some aspects of Darwin’s great idea of evolution by natural selection”. Yet evolution was not brought to public attention until Darwin’s evolution ( and Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently co-discovered it) by natural selection. Why is that?

There could be many reasons as Dawkins mentions, ” perhaps minds were cowed by the sheer time it must take for great change to occur – by the mismatch between what we now call geological deep time and the lifespan and comprehension of the person trying to understand it. Perhaps it was religious indoctrination that held us back. Or perhaps it was the daunting complexity of a living organism such as an eye, freighted as it is with the beguiling illusion of design by a master engineer.” And I will add perhaps politics and politicians’ pact with theologians to keep the public in the dark for easier control, of which Islamic countries today provide a perfect ‘ living’ example.

Dawkins also added Ernest Mayr’s suspicion on essentialism, where the idea was coined as “The discovery of evolution was held back by the dead hand of Plato.” Plato was a geometer, and according to him there is a master design and all varieties of an animal in a single class are but a shadow of that design, shadows may change, but the master design is constant; i.e. rabbits might change in shape, dogs might change in type, yet they remain to be a distorted copy of the original design. This perception opposes the core idea of evolution. Evolution works in small incremental changes from generation to generation that originally sprouted out of the same seed and branched into different lines and varieties. Varieties are unique to each individually developed line. So there is no master plan for a rabbit as there is no master plan for dogs. It’s like a single tree of which each branch developed differently from the other due to different circumstances and effects ‘mutations’ .  “According to Mayer” Dawkins said, “the reason Darwin was such an unconscionable time arriving on the scene was that we all – whether because of Greek influence or for some other reason – have essentialism burned into our mental DNA.”

Before Darwin it was thought that hereditary traits passed into generations and worked like mixing colors where the result is a mixture that loses its origin;  gray is the result of mixing black with white for example. After discovering genes and the gene pools, the idea shifted to something more like shuffling cards, and that brought Darwin’s natural selection more into focus. Darwin himself did not know about genes (although the first who wrote about them was his contemporary the German monk Gregor Mendel), yet what he wrote about breeding (of dogs and birds, especially pigeons as well as orchids) in light of evolution fit perfectly with what was discovered and much researched later on. Animals carry genes, pass them and shuffle them across by natural selection, genes do not mix to produce varieties, animals carry them and spread them into generation to produce varieties. And so on and so forth from generation to generation. Some may not appear as traits in an animal but the living cell always carries them as information (genome).  Dog breeders use artificial selection to ‘sculpture’ dogs for having shorter tails and longer snouts. Same thing happens in nature only it is done naturally.  And this is the power of Darwin’s natural selection.

4- What is natural selection?

There is a common mistake in attributing the term ‘survival of the fittest’ to Darwin, this term was invented by Spencer who was Darwin’s contemporary. Apparently; Darwin never used the term to avoid the misconception it might entail. Instead Darwin used artificial selection, to show by the use of experiment how natural selection works, only without human intervention. Breading dogs is artificial selection, breeding cows for better milk, and horses for jumping competition is an artificial selection. Nature works in exact same way; only the intervention is different for each animal or plant. And here Dawkins presents a variety of examples to show the mechanics of artificial selection, as well as natural selection in action, starting from chapter two onwards.  “Artificial selection is not just an analogy for natural selection.” Dawkins assured us, “Artificial selection constitutes a true experimental -as opposed to observational – test of the hypothesis that selection causes evolutionary change.” Flowers in nature, for example,  that have better scents and more beautiful colors have better chances to survive because they have higher chances to attract insects and birds, and therefore better chances to spread their pollen and reproduce. While insects and birds that are better equipped to draw nectar from flowers have better chances to survive and pass their genes to future generation. If this process takes enough time, in a sense one becomes the sculpturing tool for the other. This is how natural selection works in general, and it is not only akin to flowers and insects or scent and vision.  The genes in the gene pool was selected over a vast period of time to sculpture who we are today. And in chapter two Dawkins showed how “the human eye (vision), working by selective breeding over many generations sculpted and kneaded dog flesh to assume a bewildering variety of forms, colors, size and behavior patterns’.  While in chapter three he embarked on “a step-by-step seduction of the mind as we pass from the familiar territory of dog breeding and artificial selection to Darwin’s giant discovery of natural selection via colorful intermediate stages” as he put it in his own words.

To be continued

And here

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A book of 480 pages, published in September 22, 2009.

Whoever thinks that science is cold, callous and unromantic has to read the last book published by Oxford University biology professor Richard Dawkins – and the second after his retirement – to understand how wrong he is. Richard Dawkins with his skillful, powerful and scientifically resourceful abilities, as well as  his masterful control of scientific and poetic languages, not only made understanding science easy to fathom, but also made it awe-inspiring and rather enjoyable.  And although Dawkins had published many books on evolution – of which I have personally read most – but none was as strong and as mind-boggling and inspiring as this one. He, practically speaking, demonstrated evolution by bettering himself in each successive book he wrote;  the incremental changes in his style was clearly evident and vivid. Though it was not the author’s intention to discuss the mechanics of evolutionary science in this book, as he mentioned, because his previous books The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker were written for that purpose and for making evolution more understandable to the none-scientific minds. And his largest book The Ancestor’s Tale – a rather rich source of information – was written to lay out the full course of the history of life. So, as far as he is concerned, he had done the subject enough justice. Yet he felt that there was a gap that he had to fill, or a ‘missing link’ that he needed to attend to by providing evidence for evolution. And that was the purpose of this book. But regardless of his original  intention, in my opinion, Dawkins caught two birds with one stone, and created a masterpiece for the commemoration of Darwin in the”bicentennial year of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species“.

Dawkins assured us that with the much advancement in different fields of science on the light of evolution, the subject does not need a book or even a scientist like him to defend it; evidences are palpable everywhere. Nature provides this evidence everyday. Evolution does not only take course over millions of year, it is the process that is taking action every minute, in a sense  that it could even be witnessed during our lifetime. Alas populous ignorance prevails due to other none-scientific concerns.  He mentioned that since 1982, Gallup, America’s best-known polling organization had shown that, “more than 40% of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that – and by implication all of life – were created by God within the last 10,000 years”, and that “earliest humans co-existed with dinosaurs”  which made the publishing of this book “necessary” in his opinion. Regrettably, he said, this wave of ignorance is not only spreading throughout The United States, but also reaching Britain and Europe lately, as other polls, like Eurobarometer conducted on 2005 showed, and that’s due partly to American Influence, and partly to “the growing Islamic presence in European classrooms – abetted by the official commitment to ‘multiculturalism’ and the terror of being thought racist”. The fact that made the efforts exerted by science teachers dealing with the principles of evolution a dire loss “they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs”. He called those people who rejected evolution “history deniers” and the “40 percenters” and to them he wrote this book. He also mentioned that the information he provided in the book would come handy for those who know that evolution is a fact of life, yet they don’t have the background to support their debates with history deniers, or creationist, or the – New Age – advocates of Intelligent Design (ID). He said that he is “trying to reach the history deniers in this book, and also to those who are not history deniers but inadequately prepared to argue the case with history deniers.” And he accused history deniers of  denying “not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.”

The book is definitely not addressed to Muslim readers because, obviously, if polls like the ones mentioned were to be conducted in Muslim countries, the result would have been not only worrisome, but also horridly shameful. Dawkins only scurried back to a safe distance when mentioning Muslims for obvious reasons.  Other than showing some high percentages in Turkey – the only secular country among Muslim countries, – which  qualified its populous as the largest history deniers considered in the polls, Dawkins mentioned how he and tens of thousands of other scientists received a large, colorful book – something similar to coffee table type – as “a gift” from Harun Yehya.  Explaining how Harun did not have  a faintest idea of taxonomy in evolutionary science, on which he gibber-gabbed his cases, let alone the “missing links” in a subject that he did not properly represent in the first place .  He wrote ” An equally ludicrous example (of ignorance) is to be found in the Muslim apologist Harun Yahya’s enormous lavishly produced, glossily illustrated and fatuously ignorant book Atlas of Creation. This book obviously cost a fortune to produce, which makes it all the more astounding that it was distributed free to tens of thousands of science teachers, including me. Notwithstanding the prodigious sums of money spent on this book, the errors in it have become legendary. In the service of illustrating the falsehood that most ancient fossils are indistinguishable from their modern counterparts, Yahya shows a sea snake as an ‘eel’ (two animals so different that they are placed in different classes of verterbrates), a starfish as a “brittlestar’ (actually different classes of echnoderms),  a sabellid (annelid )worm  as a crinoid  ‘sea lily’ ( an echinoderm: this  pair come not just from different phyla but from different sub- kingdoms, so they could hardly be more distant from each other if they tried, while still both being animals) and – best of all – a fishing lure as a ‘caddis fly’.

The icing on the cake though was this sentence that grabbed my attention and prompted me to write this review ” I therefore cannot help suspecting that he knows his audience all too well, and is deliberately and cynically exploiting their ignorance.” And that’s why I will try draw light on some frequently asked questions and summarize his answers in this review and also include my comments, not to the ignorant, hopeless majority of the Islamic society, but to the bright few that really want to understand but have language barriers. You have to bear in mind though that whatever I write here is not sufficient as knowledge on Evolution and by no means suffice the need to read the book. And to those who can understand English I strongly recommend reading it. Evolution is not only a branch in science, it is the knowledge of life. It is the bases for understanding our nature as humans, our relationships, and our position in this universe.

To be continued