Would You Call This A Mandate?

Political victors like to think they have a mandate--even when the victory is by narrow margins. However, I think this might be an actual mandate. (Hat tip to Last Lemming for the link.)

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Noah's Flood

Speaking of the Black Sea hypothesis and Noah's Flood, I recommend Duane Jeffery's article on the topic from the October 2004 issue of Sunstone Magazine. It is freely available here and I will add a link to it on my sidebar.

The article is structured in three parts:

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(I) history of interpretation, (II) the Black Sea hypothesis, and (III) the Mormon perspective. While the Black Sea hypothesis is interesting to think about, I think most of the value is in parts I and III. Jeffery raises some interesting questions to consider--especially in the Mormon context. I also recommend the endnotes, which contain much additional information and discussion.

Note #28 brings up a question of particular interest to me: "Did Noah and his family carry all the known human disease pathogens, one wonders?" This question is only the tip of the iceburg of microbiological questions a global flood raises.

Consider:

1. Many disease-causing organisms have a limited host range. Smallpox, measles, and poliovirus are all exclusively human pathogens. Furthermore, immunity to these diseases is long-lasting. How could the few number of people on the ark (and after) maintain these organsisms? The same question applies to many animals with their specific pathogens.

2. It is not uncommon for a cross-species transmission of a disease to be highly lethal for the new host. (In a human context, SARS and Ebola come to mind, or the mass seal die-off that occured when a dog virus entered a seal population.) With all of those animals concentrated together, what stopped epidemics and mass casualties from taking place? Did rabies make it through?

3. Many microbes and parasites have complex life-cyles, infecting and continuing development in several different hosts. Were these life-cycles maintained?

I suppose it could be argued that these diseases came into existence after the flood, or that they were miraculously dormant during the flood--but that raises more questions.

Anyway, you can read a creationist defense of a global flood here. Also see FAIR's resources, including an Ensign article defending a global flood and Nibley's "Before Adam."

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Geomythology

In the latest Science there is a news article highlighting geomythology, a relatively new use of geology.

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Some geologists have taken an interest in the connection between folklore and science. The idea is that stories that have been passed down for generations within ethnic/cultural groups may be based on natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc. This approach has produced some fruitful results. For example, Native American folklore in the Seattle area places the location of ground-shaking spirits in a way that correlates well with faults running through the area.

The movement traces in part to the 1980s, when scientists realized that the slow march of geologic time is sometimes punctuated by biblical-scale catastrophes, such as the giant meteorite that wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. After this was accepted, some (usually those with tenure) felt freer to wonder if near-universal myths of great floods and fires implied that such disasters also have punctuated human time. In the 1990s, Columbia University marine geologists Walter Pitman and William Ryan argued that rising Mediterranean sea levels following the last deglaciation topped what is now the Bosporus Strait and roared into the Black Sea 7600 years ago, serving as the original inspiration for the biblical flood. Their work triggered sharp criticism and a torrent of research, resulting in growing acceptance of some sort of Black Sea flooding. Whether the book of Genesis somehow grew from this is a further step, admits Ryan, who presented his latest findings at the International Geoscience Program in Istanbul, Turkey, in early October.

Of course, caution is warranted.

The pendulum may have swung too far in favor of accepting myths, says social anthropologist Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., who runs the Cambridge Conference Network, an Internet clearinghouse for catastrophist theories. Now that more people are willing to listen, he says, too many scientists are invoking myth "left, right, and center to explain everything." In a paper at a late-October workshop on natural catastrophes in the ancient Mediterranean, he asserts that no major myths have yet met scientific standards, although he does credit some regional ones, such as the Pacific Northwest earthquakes. "That's not all bad," he says. "This is all so new, you expect more speculation than hard evidence. The refinements can come later."

You might call this an example of Mormon geomythology. If you know of others, please do tell. (Note: I am not implying that the Book of Mormon is not historical.)

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Review of FARMS Review

The latest issue of FARMS Review (Vol. 17 Issue 1, 2005) is available online to subscribers. Two of the articles are worth mentioning here.

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First is "Missing the Boat to Ancient America...Just Plain Missing the Boat," by Ryan Parr, which reviews Simon Southerton's book, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church. If you've been following this issue you won't find much new in this article. However, given his background, Parr seems like the most qualified commentator yet.

I do have one concern. Concerning DNA lineages, Parr states:

each [haplotype] must be selected by a random biological lottery from generation to generation. Statistically, this is known as “coalescence.”

...Indeed, over time, the fate of most Y and mtDNA lineages is extinction through coalescence.

I don't have access to the text he cites, but I'm pretty sure that instead of "coalescence" he means "genetic drift." Compare his usage of the term with this. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think he used this term correctly. [Correction: the term is used appropriately, as I explain in this comment.] This concerns me because if he's using basic population genetics terminology incorrectly, it makes you wonder about the quality of his analysis. At the very least, it opens the door to criticism from Southerton that Parr doesn't know what he's talking about. (This after Parr attacks Southerton on Southerton's area of expertise--plant genetics.)

There is also a review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Allen Buskirk. This is basically a defense of religion against the attacks of scientism. It's a little long but worth at least a skim. (Coincidentally, I recently decided to put Sagan's book on my list of books to read.)

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Sleep Paralysis Revisited

Recently a discussion about exoricisms raised the issue of sleep paralysis and its potential to explain many accounts of demonic encounters. A new book argues that sleep paralysis also helps to account for another phenomenon: alien abudctions.

A review of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens explains the basic thesis:

1. People experience a frightening episode of sleep paralysis. The idea of alien abudction, being prominent in our culture, offers an explanation for the experience.

2. Seeking answers, they undergo hypnosis where false memories are created which help cement the explanation.

3. This is further reinforced, strangely enough, by a spiritual payoff.

The review is worth your time if you are interested at all.

I've heard stories but I've never been a true believer in alien encounters. At the same time seemingly normal people go for this stuff (including church members I have met), so it seems like more than just mental illness or something. The steps outlined above make sense to me, but then maybe some of you are true believers.

Please don't make stuff up, but if you have an alien story, please share.

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Must-Read Article by Sean Carroll

The latest Natural History Magazine (November 2005) looks like it has several articles well-worth reading. I don't have a print copy, and not all of the articles are available online, but I have to hightlight one that is. You really should read "The Origins of Form," by Sean Carroll. (I'm sorry, I don't know how to directly link to it.) The writing is interesting and the accompanying pictures are beautiful and elegant.

Advances in the new science of evolutionary developmental biology—dubbed “evo-devo” for short—have enabled biologists to see beyond the external beauty of organic forms into the mechanisms that shape their diversity. Much of what has been learned, about animal forms in particular, has been so stunning and unexpected that it has profoundly expanded and reshaped the picture of how evolution works. In the same stroke, evo-devo delivers some crushing blows against the outdated rhetoric of those who doubt that complex structures and organisms arise through natural selection.

I blogged about an article by Carroll, which is similar to this one, a few months ago. Expect to see his book on my sidebar sometime in the next few months.

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Vaccine Preventing Cervical Cancer is Controversial

I got wind of this a while ago (and commented here), but it looks like it is coming out into the open. Some groups are opposed to making the forthcoming HPV vaccine mandatory on the grounds that it will send the wrong message to kids about sexual behavior. Aetiology covers it here.

Money quote:

One can only hope that those who actively say they advocate a "culture of life" will put their money where their mouth is, and show that they value those 3,700 women who die of cervical cancer each year--deaths that may soon be completely preventable.

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The Good of Half a Wing

PZ Myers explains evidence that insect wings are derived from gills. The Panda's Thumb then highlights further corroborating evidence supporting the hypothesis. All of this helps to illustrate why the current paradigm of science is useful and fruitful--something competitors have not shown for themselves.

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