Last week I blogged about the strange story of our past encoded in the DNA of lice. We carry two lineages of lice, one of which our Homo sapiensancestors may have picked up in Asia from another hominid, Homo erectus. I always get a kick imagining human beings, having migrated out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, coming face to face with other species of upright, tool-making, big-brained apes. It’s pretty clear that it happened in Europe, which was occupied by both humans and Neanderthals for several thousand years. But encountering Homo erectus would be even weirder. Studies on DNA suggest humans and Neanderthals share an ancestor dating back half a million years or so. But Homo erectus moved into Asia 1.8 million years ago. These were long-lost cousins, to put it mildly. What’s more, they almost certainly had nothing along the lines of human language. Their brains were very different too; they kept making the same stone tools they had been making since they had left Africa. I can’t help imagining it would have been an awkward encounter, or even a bloody one. Yet it was close enough for us to pick up their lice.
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Here’s the most important thing about The Ancestor’s Tale that I couldn’t fit in my review. I kept noticing how little Richard Dawkins mentioned the other celebrity evolutionary biologist of our time, Stephen Jay Gould. After all, Gould was a prominent character in many of Dawkins’s previous books, cast as the brilliant paleontologist misled by leftist ideology.
The New York Times is running my review of Richard Dawkins’s new book The Ancestor’s Tale this weekend.
Yesterday I blogged about how the National Park Service is selling a young-Earth creationist book about the Grand Canyon in its stores. Today the Washington Post wrote an article on the subject. It contains a response from the National Park Service, which I find pretty unbelievable. They claim that they are in fact reviewing the matter. The review was supposed to be done in February, but it’s been delayed while lawyers at the Interior and Justice Departments “tackle the issue.” No deadline is set for the decision, and the book will continue to be sold until one is made.
Continue reading “Further Adventures in Geological Cowardice”
David Appell points to some depressing news about how our government deals with science.
Continue reading “Ignorance For Sale, Thanks To Your Tax Dollars”