I haven't posted in a couple of weeks due to a publisher's deadline--my book from the University of California Press, DENYING HISTORY: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say it, has a new urgency with the David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial in England coming to a close in the next three weeks. So we've been cranked up full coal to get it out now that Holocaust denial, dormant for the past couple of years, is now back in the news. I'll post a formal statement on it when the verdict comes in.
Meanwhile, here are some stories from the past couple of weeks that will be of interest to this group. I'm especially interested in the Neanderthal -- Native American connection. Should that pan out it could really topsy turvey pre-Columbian American history. What fun!
Friday, February 04, 2000
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (Reuters) - A requirement by Oklahoma's textbook committee that state science textbooks include a disclaimer against evolution has been thrown out, a spokesman for the state's attorney general said on Thursday.
Attorney General Drew Edmondson ruled that the Oklahoma State Textbook Committee had overstepped its bounds in trying to dictate the content of textbooks and violated Oklahoma's open meeting laws by failing to notify the public that it was taking the action, spokesman Gerald Adams said.
"It will be up to the district attorney (in Oklahoma City) to determine if they violated the law," Adams said.
The textbook committee voted in November to require new science books used in public schools to include a sticker describing evolution as a "controversial" theory.
"No one was present when life first appeared on Earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered as theory, not fact," the sticker was to read.
The action was proposed by a textbook committee member who said he wanted students to consider other human development theories such as Creationism.
Church Will Also Examine Conscience on Relation with Science
VATICAN CITY, FEB 28 (ZENIT).- The Scientists' Jubilee, which will be held from May 23-25, is a novelty in the history of Jubilees and coincides with the impetus John Paul II gave to the dialogue between faith and science with the publication of his last encyclical "Fides et Ratio." One of the most awaited moments of this celebration will be the penitential act in which scientists will ask for forgiveness for abuses of the past. The Church will also make an examination of conscience for those occasions in which her children violated science's legitimate autonomy.
When presenting the program of the Scientists' Jubilee in the Vatican Press Office this morning, Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, explained that "in the distant year 1300, the first Jubilee in history, the very concept of 'dialogue science-faith' would have been regarded as something strange, both by Albert the Great as well as Maimonides, as would also have been the case with Galileo, Kepler, Tycho Brahe and even Newton. For these eminent scientists and believers in God, Creator of the universe, the harmony between these two forms of knowledge was something natural."
"This harmony between science and faith was broken at a time that corresponds more or less with the beginning of the Enlightenment," Cardinal Poupard said.
The French Cardinal stated that at present the scientific world is experiencing "an inversion of tendency as regards religion." "The hostile attitude of positive scientism seems to have been overcome. There is a need to respond to the great ethical problems that the life sciences pose, as well as to find answers to the fundamental questions of metaphysics, that science is unable to give. For its part, religion can purify science of the idolatry of scientism."
Cardinal Poupard emphasized that "Science needs to recover its wisdom dimension, as John Paul II frequently states, that is, a science allied with conscience so that the trinomial science-technology-conscience is at the service of the real good of man, of every man and all men."
Fr. Bernard Ardura, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture, added that "from the first moment there has been a desire to avoid a restrictive interpretation of the concept 'scientific,' frequently identified with those dedicated to experimental sciences. By science is understood every rational and methodical exercise of man's intellectual activity in search of truth. Therefore, the Jubilee is also directed to those working in the field of sociology, economics, etc., without neglecting theology and philosophy, long considered the science par excellence."
One of the topics stirring most interest in the preparation of the Scientists' Jubilee is the penitential act that will take place on May 24. On one hand, it will be a kind of "mea culpa" pronounced by leaders of the scientific world who, according to Fr. Ardura, will acknowledge "the lack of professional honesty, illicit copying, anxiety for performance, attribution to self of others' merits, and indifference to the dignity of the person."
On the other hand, and in line with John Paul II's hope for this Jubilee, it will also be an act "of courage and humility in recognition of faults committed by those who have called themselves Christians, who understood sufficiently the legitimate autonomy of science."
As regards the celebrations, it is estimated that some 5,000 people will attend the Scientists' Jubilee. May 25 will be the day in which the men and women of science will solemnly cross the threshold of the Holy Door. Among them will be Professor Nicola Cabibbo, who since 1993 has presided over the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, to which some of the major scientists of the world belong. Several of them have received the Nobel Prize in their field, including Gobind Khorana Har of MIT (1968); Rita Levi Montalcini, Professor of Neurosurgery (1986); George Emil Palade, Professor of Cellular Biology of the University of California (1974); George Porter, Professor of Chemistry, Imperial College, London (1967); Carlo Rubbia, director of CERN in Geneva (1984); and Charles Townes, Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley (1964).
"To see so many scientists from many countries and all scientific disciplines gathered in Rome around St. Peter's tomb will be the best testimony of the compatibility between science and faith," Cardinal Poupard said.
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Feb. 18) - The baffling 9,300-year-old Kennewick Man, whose skeleton was unearthed in 1996 in Washington state, looks so "European" because he had Neanderthal roots, a scientist said on Friday.
The National Park Service said earlier this month it would allow a genetic analysis of the skeleton, which some Native American groups claim as an ancestor and want buried.
It has intrigued researchers because the features seem to suggest a more Caucasian than Asian origin. Others say he looks like an Ainu -- the aboriginal people of Japan who are often said to be physically closer to Europeans than Japanese.
Loring Brace, a specialist in bone measurements at the University of Michigan, says he has a simple explanation for this -- both Kennewick Man and the Ainu, along with the people of Europe, descended from Neanderthals.
"I have long maintained that Neanderthals are obviously the ancestors of living Europeans," Brace told a news conference held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
"To produce a modern European out of a Neanderthal, all you have to do is reduce the robustness," Brace said. Scale down the heavy teeth, jaws and brow of the Neanderthal and you have a European, he said.
It is a controversial theory because most scientists believe that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead-end, people who lived side-by-side with the Cro-Magnons who were the earliest Homo sapiens but who did not interbreed with them.
But Loring said his measurements that compare the skulls of people all over the world suggest a resemblance among peoples living in Europe, along the coastlines of Asia and into ancient North America.
He also found two distinct groups among the Native Americans. "It is clear there are two major groups and they are not closely related to each other at all," Brace said.
One group physically more resembles East Asians, especially modern Chinese, while the second looks a lot like the Ainu.
"Some of the Plains Indians don't look Native American at all," Brace said.
He thinks they may have come from the same lineage as Kennewick Man did. Brace has not been allowed to examine the Kennewick remains, but thinks any measurements he could make would support his theories.
Some recent evidence tends to support Brace.
In October an international team of scientists tested Neanderthal bones found in Croatia in the 1970s and found they may be just 28,000 years old, which means they would have lived side-by-side with modern humans for several thousand years.
Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, led that study and another one that a few months earlier suggested that the 24,500-year-old bones of a child found in Portugal showed characteristics of both Neanderthals and of modern humans.
Trinkaus said he believed this suggested humans and Neanderthals interbred, but Brace said it just as easily could have been an "intermediate" form of human evolving from Neanderthal into modern Homo sapiens sapiens.
Although just a few years ago everyone agreed no humans lived in the New World until about 11,000 years ago, and that everyone trekked together over the Bering Strait into Alaska, more and more evidence suggests that people started coming over in successive waves as long as 30,000 years ago.
David Meltzer, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University, noted that huge ice sheets would have blocked any passage from the Bering Strait down through Canada until 11,500 years ago.
A settlement in Monte Verde, Chile has been dated to 12,500 years ago, which suggests people must have come either a different way, or long before the ice sheets formed.
Theodore Schurr of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical research in San Antonio, Texas did genetic studies that found four separate lineages in the Americas, and using a "molecular clock" that tracks the rate of mutations in DNA, dates some of them back as far as 25,000 or 30,000 years ago.
Some seem to originate in southeastern Siberia, while one seems to have links with a relatively rare lineage found in a few modern Europeans.
Johanna Nichols of the University of California-Berkeley, who compared the structures of Native American languages to languages found elsewhere in the world, said some of the similarities when dated using a kind of linguistic clock, could date back to a common ancestral language 30,000 years ago.
One thing is clear, Meltzer said -- when people did reach what is now the continental United States they spread fast, which meant they had to be astonishingly resourceful.
"In the space of 500 years they completely covered the continent," he said. "These folk had no neighbours."
And most modern hunter-gatherers depend heavily on their neighbours for information about the landscape.
The early colonists of the Americas had no one to ask where to find water, food or herbs to cure their ills. And they had few sources of fresh genes. "You can only marry your sister so many times," Meltzer said.
Thanks to Dave Buckner: Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes' remarks on evolution were made at Hylton High school in Virginia on 2/27/00. You can listen to his speech on C-SPAN's RealPlayer at
http://www.c-span.org/Campaign2000/keyesspeeches.asp
The remarks on evolution begin about 27:00, which you can zoom to on Real Player using the slide-bar.
Here's a rough transcript made by a netfriend in which Keyes contrasts the philosophy in the Declaration of Independence with the philosophy that grows out of evolution:
But now in our schools there is a different ideology. It isn't taught in the civics courses (I don't know what we do teach in the civics courses), but we teach it in the science classes. it masquerades as science though it is taught as indoctrination. Last time I looked science you can question it; there is no scientific theory that you're not allowed to question. The questions aren't likely to work in some cases, but in other cases the fact that you were willing to question certain basic assumptions, I mean the questions that Einstein was willing to raise about Newtonian physics created the world in which we live.
Skepticism is the hallmark of the scientist's mind; always question the theory in light of the facts. There is only one so-called scientific theory where you are not allowed to do that, and where our children are not to be exposed to any alternative except the one that has been placed before them in this dogmatic fashion. And that is the ideology of evolution. Why would they insist upon it in this way? Because it represents the total subversion of the premise of our way of life. What would we have to do to the declaration of independence if we were to revise it to reflect the dogma that is now quite seriously taught to our young people and which shapes their consciousness. This is, by virtue of the claims of science, what they now believe about themselves. You do realize that, don't you. What would we have to do to the declaration to make it conform?
First we'd have to take out that inconvenient reference to truth, since it's obvious that the purpose of evolution is to explain away the appearance that an intelligent being created it in such a way as to dispense with any need to any reference to such an intelligent cause. But I've often wondered, why do we go to all that trouble? Do we go to all that trouble in the rest of science to look for a cause that is not commensurate with the effect? Usually you look for a commensurate cause. But this is the one area of so-called science where we don't look for a commensurate cause. We actually want to look for a cause that is not commensurate with the effect. That's amazing.
But having dispensed with the possibility of an intelligent creator, that does raise serious questions about the possibility of truth, doesn't it, since truth does imply a kind of intelligent cohesion that could ultimately be known and understood. If we discard that idea, then we're left with something like this: "We hold these ideas to be more or less familiar to everybody though no longer necessarily accepted by everybody, that all of us have more or less evolved to about the same point, and that as a consequence of this evolutionary process we all of us are equally inclined to whine a lot about our rights."
Sad to say, even if one could state the sort of evolutionary declaration principles with somewhat greater respect, there would still be a problem. What authority does the evolution process have? Why should one care about its results? Is there any particular reason to respect those results? If evolution says we've more or less reached the same point, but I say, no we haven't, because you reached the point without the gun and I reached the point with the gun, doesn't that put us in a position where the whole evolution thing doesn't matter, where equality is no longer of any importance, and isn't it a point that the underlying premise of evolution -- crudely stated, I know, but still I think reasonably accurate -- is the survival of the fittest. And what is the survival of the fittest? It is the domination of the stronger over the weaker in terms of the circumstances in which both find themselves. Do we experience any regret in terms of evolutionary science for those weaklings that are now extinguished? No we don't. They were extinguished because they were not able to cope, and not being able to cope, why should we shed any tears over them? We may look at them with curiosity and interest, but beyond that, why do we care?
The interesting thing about that doctrine is that, actually, dressed up in fancy scientific duds, it turns out to be for human affairs the same brutal, ugly principle that governed all along: that might makes right, and we needn't shed a tear of concern for the hindmost, for justice cares only for the strong. I point all this out not just because it's interesting theory, but because this is what our children learn. And if we don't understand what we're doing, let me put it clearly, we have thrown out the principle of justice on which our nation was founded, that promises justice to the weak as well as the strong, and we have substitute for it an ideology that offers no sympathy for the weak and confirms the domination of the strong. We have destroyed in our schools and therefore in the hearts and consciousness of our children already the principles without which our whole way of life is a meaningless sham. And don't think this is just an academic treatise -- what on earth is a politician doing talking about this stuff. I'll tell you why. The major issue we face as a moral challenge in this country today is a direct reflection of the same abandonment of principle of the same surrender to the age-old lie that might makes right. For we see there clear as day in the arguments that are made by the proponents of abortion, who tell us that that child in the womb is rightly subject to his mother's choice because it is not viable apart from her body, because it is wholly dependent upon her physically, because she has it absolutely within her power. What are we looking at there, if not the claim that absolute power means the absolute right to dispose of the being in your power in any way you choose. It is the same awful ugly premise of despotism and tyranny and slavery and conquest and oppression that has sadly consigned so many human beings to oppression, to death, through the centuries of mankind's existence.
Yet here we are, a people supposedly governed by a principle that respects all, regardless of their weakness or strength, embracing now the lie that in fact once again surrenders the very heart of our civilization to the principle that might makes right, that the one who has the power has the power to destroy the lives of those that are within its power.