Evolution favours shorter and heavier women—like it or not

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 72 Comments

Natural selection is still at work

Photograph by Hans Neleman/ Getty

What might our granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter look like? Shorter and stouter, says a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If current trends continue, its authors predict, then by 2409 descendants of the women in the study will have evolved to be one kilogram heavier and two centimetres shorter than their 2010 foremothers.

For years, some scientists heralded the end of human evolution. The post-industrial homo sapiens, they argued, was free of the kinds of “survival-of-the-fittest” pressures that could drive large-scale genetic change. In 2008, Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, gave a much-hyped lecture entitled “Human Evolution is Over.” “Not so,” says Stephen Stearns, co-author of this latest study, professor of evolutionary biology at Yale University, and founding editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. “The basic take-home is that humans continue to evolve,” Stearns told Maclean’s.

“One [could express] the result as: women are going to get shorter and fatter,” he explains. But he prefers a different bent: “There is natural selection against women being slender.” Stearns’s work shows that plumper, shorter women tend to bear more children—who carry on those same traits. His analysis drew on data from the Framingham Heart Study: a survey, begun in 1948, that collected medical information from 5,209 subjects, and monitored them and their offspring for 60 years.

Continue…

James Lunney Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 12, 2009 at 6:11 PM - 16 Comments

The Nanaimo Daily News won’t take no comment for an answer.

Whatever his reasons for bringing creationist theory into the Canadian Parliament, Nanaimo-Alberni MP James Lunney is keeping silent.

He won’t say why he gave a speech in the House of Commons Charles saying Darwin would likely rethink his theory of evolution today, based on new knowledge creationists say disprove evolution. He failed to return numerous calls, and last week he rebuffed questions at a Nanaimo press conference…

“I won’t comment,” he said, pushing away a reporter’s recording device during a funding announcement at the Vancouver Island University library on Wednesday.
James Lunney v. Evolution (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 9:59 PM - 4 Comments

The Nanaimo Daily News would like to speak with James Lunney.

Lunney’s brief speech contained references to controversial theories espoused by Robert V. Gentry, a creationist, Seventh-day Adventist Church member and nuclear physicist. Gentry concluded, after studying radiohalos, microscopic zones of damage found around radioactive crystals in rock, that the rock must have been formed in minutes, not the generally accepted millions of years. Gentry’s theory, discredited as pseudoscience by the mainstream scientific community, has spawned a new field of study for creationists who take the story of Genesis literally.

Lunney also made reference to plate tectonic and fossil evidence theories some Christians consider proof of creationism. He gave the speech in Ottawa at 2:10 p.m. Eastern Time but has been unavailable for comment since then, despite repeated calls.
James Lunney v. Evolution

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 6:03 PM - 106 Comments

From the Conservative MP’s statement before QP.

Mr. Speaker, recently we saw an attempt to ridicule the presumed beliefs of a member of this House and the belief of millions of Canadians in a creator. Certain individuals in the media and the scientific community have exposed their own arrogance and intolerance of beliefs contrary to their own. Any scientist who declares that the theory of evolution is a fact has already abandoned the foundations of science. For science establishes fact through the study of things observable and reproducible. Since origins can neither be reproduced nor observed, they remain the realm of hypothesis.

In science, it is perfectly acceptable to make assumptions when we do not have all the facts, but it is never acceptable to forget our assumptions. Given the modern evidence unavailable to Darwin, advanced models of plate techtonics, polonium radiohalos, polystratic fossils, I am prepared to believe that Darwin would be willing to re-examine his assumptions.

The evolutionists may disagree, but neither can produce Darwin as a witness to prove his point. The evolutionists may genuinely see his ancestor in a monkey, but many modern scientists interpret the same evidence in favour of creation and a creator.
UPDATED – Alas, poor Darwin …

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 48 Comments

Okay. so I just happened to be watching post-vote Points of Order, and who should pop up but Bloc Quebecois MP Pierre Paquette with a motion to have the House recognize the birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of On the Origin of Species. Does he have unanimous consent? Sadly, he does not — and since I wasn’t actually in the Chamber, I can’t tell y’all who denied it, but hopefully someone who was there was paying attention and will be able to fill me in. I’ll keep you posted. It just seems so petty, somehow.

The text of Paquette’s motion:

M. Pierre Paquette (Joliette, BQ): Monsieur le Président, je demande le consentement unanime de la Chambre pour l’adoption de la motion suivante, et je vous la lis:

Que cette Chambre souligne le 200e anniversaire de naissance de Charles Darwin et le 150e anniversaire de la publication De l’origine des espèces par sélection naturelle ou des lois de transformation des êtres organisés, livre qui a initié la théorie de l’évolution, seule explication scientifiquement avérée et reconnue à l’origine de l’être humain.

Je pense que vous aurez le consentement unanime pour adopter cette motion.

UPDATE: An English translation, courtesy of Colleague Gohier of Deux Maudits Anglais:

Mr. Pierre Paquette (Joliette, BQ): Mister Speaker, I request the unanimous consent
of the House for the adoption of the following motion, which I will read to you:

That this House recognizes the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, the book which initiated the theory of evolution, the only scientifically-proven and recognized explanation of the origins of the human being.

I think you will obtain unanimous consent to adopt this motion.

UPDATE: Followup post now up! Turns out it wasn’t a sinister anti-science plot after all. This time.
Evolution evolving

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 4 Comments

Marx and Freud have faded badly, but Darwin still rules today

It was 200 years ago today that Charles Darwin (and Abraham Lincoln, for that matter) saw the light of day, the first-born of the secular trinity of 19th-century thinkers who created the modern world. Darwin was widely hailed in his own day—he ended up buried with other English greats in Westminster Abbey—and his fellow titans admired him as much as anyone. A new edition of Darwin’s revolutionary 1859 tome The Origin of Species (packaged like a bestselling novel, with the author’s name in type larger than that of the title) has the presumably unique distinction for a 2009 publication of bearing a front-cover blurb from Freud: “An extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world.” And in 1873, Marx mailed Darwin a copy of his earthshaking 1859 book, Das Kapital, inscribed from “his sincere admirer, Karl Marx.”

The admiration was a one-way street, though. Darwin the well-mannered English gentleman did write Marx a polite thank-you note—“I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge and that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of mankind”—but the copy itself is more revealing of his real reaction. Now on display in his home-cum-museum, the volume’s uncut pages prove the scientist got less than a third of the way through it. (It’s impossible to guess what the socially conventional Darwin, who died in 1882, long before Freud’s major works, might have made of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900.) And as it began, so it continues. With Freud and Marx dating badly in the modern era (notwithstanding Marx’s recent economic stimulus bounce), Darwin is the only one still dominant in his field today. That’s not because evolution by natural selection is, as Darwin’s more fervent admirers like to declare, the single greatest idea anyone has ever had. Even though it may well be that, at least as long as you keep your list of potential contenders to how-the-universe-works concepts, as opposed to ideas on how we should treat one another; in the former case evolution’s only real competitors are Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s relativity. No, it’s because evolution is the finest example ever seen—and possibly ever to be seen—of an idea whose time has come, the ultimate intellectual supply and demand phenomenon. Continue…
You're doing a heckuva job, Charlie (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 4:50 PM - 26 Comments

From today’s post-QP scrums.

Question: (Inaudible)

Hon. Peter MacKay: I mean obviously it’s a very significant event and his writings and his research were extremely important in the formation of people’s thoughts. The 200th anniversary would be a very significant celebration.

Moderator: Thanks very much.

Question: Are you one of his followers?

Hon. Peter MacKay: Well, I mean I remember reading about him and obviously studying him in school but I mean I haven’t kept up to date on everything that’s happened in evolution in the last 200 years.
You're doing a heckuva job, Charlie

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 9, 2009 at 5:34 PM - 38 Comments

From the transcript of Gary Lunn’s post-QP scrum this afternoon.

Question: On a different subject, it’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. I wanted to know what’s your thoughts on it.

Hon. Gary Lunn: I think he’s done a great job.