When I was a kid I was essentially convinced that the Loch Ness Monster (“Nessie”) was real. There were so many photos, videos, books, and crappy B-movies that there had to be something in the lake, right? Although I didn’t have a clue what all the blobs and smudgy bits on some of the most famous photographs might show, in my heart I wanted Nessie to be a Plesiosaurus, and I drew sketches of the monster continuously for a while. My semi-obsession with Nessie was prior to the famous outing of the “Surgeon’s Photograph” and I doubt there is any long-necked seal, Tullimonstrum, Cretaceous hold-over, giant Conger Eel, or enigmatic sea slug inhabiting the lake, but that hasn’t stopped some people from claiming that they have evidence of a monstrous creature in the Loch, even if they strain credulity (see here and here for one such instance from this past year).
As any well-informed lake monster buff knows, however, Scotland isn’t the only place in the world to claim lake monsters, legends of serpentine creatures being prevalent all over the world. Many of the sightings have been shown to be myths or hoaxes, but even now and then news breaks of some more shaking, out-of-focus, and distant video of something moving through the water, and that’s just what happened this past week. A tourist visiting Kansai Lake in the Heavenly Mountains area of the Xinjiang region claims to have shot footage of a number of “monsters,” the video shown on the Chinese national news;
The video is not much different from many other such videos I’ve seen, and the long-range shots don’t prove anything one way or another. The closer shots, showing something moving just under or just over the surface, are more interesting, but they don’t seem to show anything that I would call “monstrous.” Indeed, large fish like salmon do inhabit the lake, and the video is more likely to be of fish (if it is indeed showing something alive) than any sort of “monster.” This story is also relatively close on the heels of another “monster” sighting from Tianchi Lake, reported on Sept. 10 of this year. As the graphic on the bottom of the Cryptomundo posting about the Kansai video shows, though, some are already jumping to conclusions about the rather traditional (and far-fetched) identity of the mysterious creatures (if unknown creatures they be).
Are there creatures in the world that have as yet escaped discovery or are new to science? Of course there are, but poorly-shot video such as the one shown above does not prove that giant marine reptiles are living in freshwater lakes all over the world. Nature is strange and beautiful enough on its own without needed myths concocted or promulgated about it, and even if the creatures in the footage mentioned above are new, I don’t think they are going to represent any whole new Class or Order of organisms that has escaped detection thus far.
I rarely listen to the radio, but when I do, I always turn on NPR (usually WHYY from Philadelphia). While I much prefer their news coverage and features to that of the “major” news outlets, every once in a while I hear something really crazy come over my computer speakers, as I just did moments ago. As I’m writing, author Diane Ackerman is being interviewed on Radio Times about her book The Zookeeper’s Wife, focusing on the true story of Warsaw Zoo keeper Jan Zabinski during WWII. On the air, Ackerman described how Jan had an uncanny ability of calming animals that were said to be vicious or overly aggressive. In explaining why Jan may have been able to do this, Ackerman suggested that at one time in our evolutionary history it would have been advantageous for mother and child to have a telepathic link, some kind of natural “Fall” degrading that ability in most people. According to Ackerman, Jan may have retained such an ability, intimating that she somehow telepathically soothed the beasts. The discussion on such a topic did not go further, but this is very strange coming from a woman who (even as I speak, oddly enough) prides herself on her understanding of natural history. Telepathy between mother and child has even less support for it than another idea of evolution that is heavily based upon woo, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, and it seems like a continuation of the popular mythology that humans were once “in harmony” with nature and have since fallen from grace, losing any number of senses or sensitivities along the way. Indeed, it’d be best to leave telepathic hominids to trashy summer novels, and although The Zookeeper’s Wife sounds like an extraordinary story, Ackerman’s interview definitely turned me off. I know it’s not rational, judging a book I haven’t read by a kooky idea on a different subject, but I would be lying if I said I was going to go out and read it straight away.
A representation of our modern understanding of horse evolution, having some beginning diversity, a sort of “Oligocene Bottleneck,” and then a wide profusion of diversity throughout the New and Old World. From McFadden, Bruce. 2005. “Fossil Horses – Evidence of Evolution.” Science Vol. 307. no. 5716, pp. 1728 – 1730
As discussed previously in my summary of horse evolution, the development and radiation of various equids over the past 55 million years is one of the most celebrated examples of evolution in action. While we are fortunate to have such detailed examples of past evolutionary transitions, the presentation of the evolution of horses proceeding in a straight line from small, four-toed Eohippus to the extant Equus has sometimes done more harm than good. While the branching bush of horse evolution has been recognized in scientific circles since the middle of the 20th century (at the latest), a more orthogenic model has often still been presented in popular works and taught in schools, and David Godfrey has corroborated this in the comment thread of my previous essay. It is this weakness in using a “simple” illustration that has opened the door up to creationist complaints, and in this appendix to my original work I will attempt to review some of the more recent remarks made by the likes of Jonathan Wells (affiliated with the Discovery Institute) and Ken Ham (president of Answers in Genesis) on the evolution of horses.
Comparison of Eohippus to Equus. There’s a lot of evolution in that dashed line. From “The Dawn Horse or Eohippus” by Chester Stock (1947).
The book that introduced me (albeit painfully) to intelligent design and critics of evolution was the infamous Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells, and in it Wells spends an entire chapter attempting to discredit the idea that horses evolved. This is not surprising, especially given that horse evolution was so triumphantly heralded by none other than “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley in 1876. Indeed, the rich amount of fossils uncovered, plus public interest and prestige allowed horses to take on an iconic status, caused the transitions among fossil horses to become one of the most widely-cited examples of evolution, the change from small, multi-toed ancestors to large, one-toed descendants making for a very compelling scientific narrative.
Despite the vast amount of fossil evidence available that proves, beyond doubt, the evolution of horses, Wells spends little time addressing the very topic that gives the chapter “Fossil Horses and Directed Evolution” it’s name. Wells quickly covers most of the history that I have myself summarized (and, at the risk of sounding conceited, I believe more aptly summarized), but he quickly turns to an attack on G.G. Simpson, Charles Darwin, and Richard Dawkins on tenuous philosophical ground rather than bring any closure to his chosen subject. In fact, it seems like the selection of horse evolution as one of his “Icons” was merely a set-up, and while it is not explicitly stated, the purpose of the chapter is to dust off the old idea of orthogenesis. Working primarily from the work of Matthew and Stirton (see the previous essay) from the first half of the 20th century, Wells states the following about the illustrations of horse evolution that appeared in the AMNH papers;
Despite having been revised, the picture of horse evolution still includes a line connecting Hyracotherium with its supposed descendants, all the way up to the modern horse. Ironically, this very Darwinian line of ancestor-descendant relationships still presents a problem for neo-Darwinists like Simpson, because it is as consistent with directed evolution as the linear series in the old icon. The mere existence of extinct side-branches doesn’t rule out the possibility that the evolution of modern horses was directed. A cattle drive has a planned destination, even though some steers might stray from a herd along the way. Or, to use another analogy, the branching pattern of arteries and veins in the human body has some randomness to it, but our very lives depend on the fact that the overall pattern is predetermined.
This doesn’t prove that directed evolution is true, but only that a branching-tree pattern in the fossil record doesn’t refute it. A straight line and a branching tree are equally consistent (or inconsistent) with the existence (or non-existence) of either a predetermined goal or an inherent directive mechanism. In other words, even if we knew for sure what the pattern was, that alone would not be sufficient to establish whether or not horse evolution was directed.
From Stirton, R. A. 1940. “Phylogeny of North American Equidae”. Bull. Dept. Geol. Sci., Univ. California 25(4): 165-198.
So there you have it, folks. Horse evolution appears to have a branching pattern because some lineages didn’t follow God’s plan during his 55-million-year-old evolutionary cattle drive. Wait, what? Either intentionally or as a result of lack of thought on the subject, Wells speaks out of both sides of his mouth in this passage, attempting to be a sort of Devil’s Advocate. In classic intelligent-design style, the identity of the force that Wells contends could have given direction to horse evolution is never mentioned, and it is only stated that such considerations cannot be ruled out. This sounds tentative, but the rest of the chapter is an attack on the concept that evolution does not have any sort of direction to it, diversity being a result of entirely natural processes (and not a divergence from some ill-defined bauplan ordained by a supernatural force). This sort of doubletalk is maddening and will appeal to those already inclined to agree with Wells, the gaping holes in his argument being obvious to anyone who is more familiar with the topic that the DI writer.
Wells also attempts to confuse the reader as to how evolution proceedings by taking certain ideas to extremes. By Wells’ logic, a branching pattern means that every genus must have a diversity of descendants, and if there seems to be any sort of anagenesis then that shows that evolution had direction. This view is certainly mistaken, but Wells seems to use it primarily as a rhetorical device to spark incredulity in the reader, and it might be all-too-easy for those unfamiliar with evolution to be taken in. The truth of the matter is that we can create a lineage of representative types showing the transition of horses from Eohippus to Equus to the exclusion of other genera, but such is a narrow view. This sort of representation, which persisted much longer than it should have in general or popular accounts, has done much to confuse the issue, even though the very people who have put forth the “simplified” model have recognized there was a greater diversity. It seems to be something of a fight between showing evolution as we know it to be and between trying to convince the reader that evolution has occurred, usually showing a phylogeny that is close to that of O.C. Marsh.
O.C. Marsh’s concept of “The Geneology of the Horse,” a decidedly straight-line progression. From Marsh, O.C. 1879. “Polydactyly Horses, Recent and Extinct.”
The bait-and-switch tactic of Wells in his book, as we have seen, is not very straightforward or even conclusive, but young earth creationists (YEC’s) tackle the problem in a different way, attributing the existence of horses to a definite intelligent agent: God. While generally silent about horses in their popular tracts The Lie and Refuting Evolution, the #1 creationist group in the United States (for the moment, anyway, as creationist ministries seem to have a bang-and-bust cycle) Answers in Genesis has a few articles on the subject available on their website. In an 1999 article, Jonathan Sarfati (now with Creation Ministries International,due to a schism within AiG) wrote “The non-evolution of the horse: Special creation or evolved rock badger?” in which he pontificates on why there are so many fossil horses with extra toes, low-crowned teeth, and of smaller stature;
An important part of the biblical creation model is that different kinds of creatures were created with lots of genetic information. Natural selection can sort out this pre-existing genetic information, by eliminating creatures not suited to a particular environment. Thus many different varieties can be produced in different environments. Note that this sorting process involves a loss of information, so is irrelevant to particles-to-people evolution, which requires non-intelligent processes to add new information.
Also, much of this (created) genetic information may have been latent (hidden, i.e. the features coded for are not expressed in the offspring) in the original created kinds. They also had other controlling or regulatory genes that switch other genes ‘on’ or ‘off.’ That is, they control whether or not the information in a gene will be decoded, so the trait will be expressed in the creature. This would enable very rapid and ‘jumpy’ changes, which are still changes involving already created information, not generation of new information.
Applying these principles to the horse, the genetic information coding for extra toes is present, but is switched off in most modern horses. Sometimes a horse is born today where the genes are switched on, and certainly many fossil horses also had the genes switched on. This would explain why there are no transitional forms showing gradually smaller toe size. [emphasis mine]
As can be easily seen, Sarfati attempts to escape into the realm of genetics, throwing around lots of scientific-sounding arguments in a feeble attempt to dazzle readers. One of the central philosophical doctrines of modern creationists is the necessity of the Fall (or the entrance of death and disease into the world as a result of Adam & Eve’s sin in Eden), and much of what creation ministries write circles around the degeneration or “devolution” of all life since the eviction from Eden. This is not the entire story, however, as the Noachian Deluge is of nearly equal importance, all animals alive today being (in the YEC view) descendants of survivors of the great flood. In order to make the vast diversity of fossil horse species consonant with such views, Sarfati even has to invoke a kind of punctuated equilibria (although I’m sure he’d never admit it), three-toed horses evolving at an exceptional rate within the last few thousand years, only to instantaneously go extinct. Sarfati could have said that horses like Pliohippus were alive before the Flood (their fossils being explained by the catastrophe), and while still horribly wrong it would at least make a little more sense. Sarfati decides to stick with saltational changes in horses in a post-flood world, however, pointing to the products of artificial selection in horses (especially in terms of size) as if they had occurred on their own in nature.
As is often the case with creationists, Sarfati’s thesis seems based on what was cutting-edge science during the end of the 19th century, and there is nary a mention of newer research by scientists like Bruce MacFadden (or even many of the paleontologists who worked on horses during the mid-20th century like Stirton and Matthew). Indeed, it seems as if he merely picked up some other creationist tracts, dumped them into a blender with some snippets from a basic genetics book, mixed it up, and wrote down whatever came out of the amalgamated bits and pieces. Sarfati must be given some credit in putting forth an idea as to the origins of the vast diversity of fossil horses (see the illustration at the beginning of this appendix); most other creationists have been content to signal the “death knell” of horse evolution and merely state it as an abandoned hypothesis that evolutionary scientists no longer want to discuss. In the book The Amazing Story of Creation From Science and the Bible, YEC-fave Duane Gish writes;
Even evolutionists acknowledge, however, that we cannot find transitional forms between these various kinds of horses. There are no fossil horses with part-browsing, part-grazing teeth. We cannot find fossils of a horse with three-and-a-half toes or two-and-a-half toes. The fossils show no progressive increase in size. In fact, some “later” horses were smaller than “earlier” horses. The number of ribs did not progressively increase. The number of ribs in fossil horses go up and down. Just as there are different kinds of primates today – lemurs, monkeys, apes, and humans – so there were different kinds of horses in the past, with no evidence that one kind of horse evolved from another kind of horse. Just as dinosaurs and many other kinds of creatures have died out since creation, so, also, many different kinds of horses died out. Evolutionists still search, and will continue to do so, without success, for the transitional forms which much exist, if evolution is true.
What is truly odd about Gish’s statement is that he expects modern scientists to believe in an orthogenic progression (similar to the rhetorical attempts of Wells, as mentioned above), anything that runs counter to that decimating Gish’s straw man. Just like Wells, he also attempts to spark some amount of incredulity in the reader, suggesting that toes disappear piecemeal, bone by bone, rather than overall reductions and changes that have left vestiges in Equus today. Gish’s comment about teeth is also strange, as if he expected horses to think “Hmmm, I want to be a grazer, not a browser; better start changing my teeth!” It is the changes in ecology in which a population exists in and the branching out into new niches that puts pressure on existing characters to shape the organisms, and there is no cosmic force that decides that in 10 million years time the teeth of the animal should look a certain way and push it towards that goal. In fact, Gish’s creationist views are far closer to the straw man that he mocks than the scientific truth of the matter, but it seems that such a philosophical relationship is often lost on YEC’s.
Even stranger and false than Gish & Sarfati’s works, however, is Lawrence Richards’ It Couldn’t Just Happen. Rather than suggesting that scientists are merely misguided or that they have abandoned horses as an example of evolution, Richards attributes to them some amount of dishonesty (or at least fanciful thinking);
But why did evolutionists ever think fossils from different parts of the world should be linked together in the first place? Part of the reason is that they were tricked by their own theory. The Theory of Evolution said that modern animals should develop from similar but different animals of the past. It said that hooves should be an adaptation and have developed from several toes to one. Size would help a horse survive by enabling it to run faster, so animals should gradually become larger. Simply put, evolutionists fit the fossil bones of different animals into a series and said they were horses, because the bones fit their Theory of Evolution!
It’s almost as if you were outside one day and found a tennis ball, a soccer ball, and a basketball in a weedy field. You noticed that each ball is hollow, and each has an increasingly thicker skin. You’re really excited, and figure that each evolved from some common ancestor! Then you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how that could possibly have happened. You invent story after story to explain that evolution, and even though the evidence is against each suggestion you make, many people believe you. They don’t seem to realize that finding the balls lined up in a particular order doesn’t prove descent at all.
If you’re spending all your time stealing equipment from PE class and trying to tell people that basketballs evolved from a tennis ball, I’d say you’ve got some rather important mental health problems. That aside, Richards’ example is yet another poor YEC analogy (I swear, half of creationist literature is bad analogy) that intimates that scientists are deluded fools that have essentially created a hypothesis and constructed a lineage to prove the ideas they already possessed. As can be seen from my earlier essay, that is most certainly not the case, and Richards’ passage is at best grossly misinformed and at worst malicious.
To be entirely honest, I was rather surprised by the overall paucity of creationist literature as pertaining to horse evolution. Given it’s prominence in textbooks and museums (and even though many books and institutions still present such evolution incorrectly) I would have expected at least a semi-rigorous creationist explanation for horses, but they seem content to merely criticize the work of Marsh and Huxley, praising Richard Owen for not associating the European Hyrcaotherium with living horses. Even in the one book (Icons of Evolution) that specifically targets horse evolution, the phylogeny is only a set up in order to allow Wells to attack Darwin and Dawkins, hinting that orthogenesis should still be considered as being a good hypothesis for evolution. If such attempts are the best that creationists can muster, I really must wonder how they have gained so much influence with such weak arguments. My question is a rhetorical one, being that pre-existing religious leanings often dictating what will be swallowed and what will be spat out when it comes to science, but perhaps the influence of creationist talking heads like Wells and Gish show just how intellectually lazy Americans have become, citizens being willing to agree with anything that won’t upset anyone during Sunday dinner after church.
As mentioned here and in my previous work, however, museums and those who write books (be they popular or for students) mentioning horse evolution are far from blameless. The “branching bush” of horse evolution is often ignored so that a general type of anagenesis from one type to another can be put forward, and this sort of technique does not serve anyone well. It will only cause confusion if presented alone, and over and over again it is apparent that evolutionary images are far more powerful than the text of any given book. While those who wish to bring about scientific understanding to the public should not let up in terms of accuracy within their writings, we must be mindful of what images we use to illustrate evolution, an inaccurate image being able to haunt educators for far longer than an obscure reference in a book. Often unintentionally, writers of popular science books and museum curators/designers have created “monstrous memes” that reproduce at an astonishing rate, persisting long after their original source material is forgotten, and if we are to be successful in getting the public to understand science, we must supplant and replace the illustrative errors of those who have come before.
On our occasional trips to the New Jersey shore, my wife is always the first one in the water. While I’m cautiously wading in, dreading that final slap of cold water just below my waist, she’s already frolicking in the waves, egging me on to just jump in and get it over with. Eventually I too become submerged (either willfully or by force of a wave I never saw coming), salt water inevitably shooting up my nose. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy warm days at the beach, but on each visit it seems that I as an individual, if not a representative of a population or species, am not well-adapted to a near-shore marine existence. Followers of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis* (AAH), however, beg to differ.
[* I say “hypothesis” and not “theory” (AAT) because the writings of Elaine Morgan and others do not have enough supporting evidence to garner it the more prestigious title of “theory.” Given the current paucity of evidence and research, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is precisely that and no more.]
Before discussing the current manifestation of the AAH, we need to go back to a time when the truth of evolution had yet to fully take hold in the minds of scientists and philosophers. The Ionian philosopher Anaximander (610-546 BCE), student of Thales, suggested that the world first existed in an entirely aquatic state, the recession of the globe-consuming waters creating life. In From the Greeks to Darwin (1905), famed American Museum of Natural History president Henry Fairfield Osborn described the views of Anaximander as follows (a similar treatment is given in Osborn’s Man Rises to Parnassus, as well);
He conceived of the earth as first existing in a fluid state. From its gradual drying up all living creatures were produced, beginning with men. These aquatic men first appeared in the form of fishes in the water, and they emerged from this element only after they had progressed so far as to be able to further develop and sustain themselves upon land. This is rather analogous to the bursting of a chrysalis, then to progressive development from a simpler to a more advanced structure by a change of organs, yet a germ of the Evolution idea is found here.
We find that Anaximander advanced some reasons for this view. He pointed to man’s long helplessness after birth as one of the proofs that he cannot be in his original condition. His hypothetical ancestors of man were supposed to be first encased in horny capsules, floating and feeding in water; as soon as these ‘fish-men’ were in a condition to emerge, they came on land, the capsule burst, and they took their human form.
Like the works of many Ionian philosophers, the ideas and opinions of Anaximander do not seem to have taken hold (Aristotle ultimately becoming the preferred scientific and philosophical source for further consideration in Europe in centuries to come), and not much of his work remains. It is curious to note, though, that wrong as Anaximander was about the origins of humans, the reasons he uses to support his ideas (as relayed by Osborn) are very similar in approach to those of Elaine Morgan and some modern-day AAH adherents, as we shall soon see.
To the best of my current understanding, the hypothesis that man was a product of the sea did surface again until 1942 when Max Westenhofer of the University of Berlin published the book The Unique Road to Man. According to Donna Kossy’s book Strange Creations, Westenhofer’s treatment of an aquatic origin of mankind consisted of little more than mention of it as a promising hypothesis, however, and the outbreak of war prevented the professor from pursuing the line of inquiry further. The hypothesis would have to wait until March 5, 1960, when marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy presented a lecture on “Aquatic Man: Past, Present, and Future” to the British Sub-Aqua Club. The address caused quite a stir and led Hardy, who had been inspired by the layers of sub-cutaneous present in humans and some marine mammals he had seen skinned on a journey to the Antarctic in 1927, to write a series of articles in the magazine New Scientist to clarify his position on the subject. Kossy relates the words of Hardy from an April issue of the magazine (although the year is not specified);
My thesis is that a branch of this primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the seashores and to hunt for food, shell fish, sea-urchins, etc., in the shallow waters of the coast. I suppose that they were forced into the water just as we have seen happen in so many other groups of terrestrial animals. I am imagining this happening in the warmer parts of the world, in the tropical seas where Man could stand being in the water for relatively long periods, that is, several hours at a stretch. I imagine him wading, at first perhaps still crouching, almost on all fours, groping about in the water, digging for shellfish, but becoming gradually more adept at swimming. Then, in time, I see him becoming more and more of an aquatic animal going further out from the shore; I see him diving for shell fish, prising out worms, burrowing crabs and bivalves from the sands at the bottom of shallow seas, and breaking open sea-urchins, and then, with increasing skill, capturing fish with his hands.
Thus the more familiar image of the amorphous “Aquatic Ape” was born, wading out into the surf and feeling in the shallow sands for food. The early stage of such a transformation is awfully raccoon-like, as raccoons have incredibly sensitive hands that they use to feel about in streams and shallow waters for mussels, crayfish, and other morsels without being driven to become fully aquatic themselves. Nevertheless, the idea that man had his origins in a shallow sea rather than on a hot and brutal savanna was certainly controversial. Ever since Raymond Dart described the skull of the Taung Child in 1925 (shifting attention away from Europe and Asia for the origins of man) and the fossil assemblages of the South African caves were discovered, humans were thought to have evolved through a hunting culture, nearly every specialization that separates us from living primate relatives being due to our meat-craving societies. Indeed, the remains of Australopithecus found in South African caves (especially the jaw of a 12-year old child whose jaw appeared to have been fractured by a direct and accurate blow) like those Makapansgat suggested to Dart that these “proto-men” were not only skilled hunters, but also murderers and cannibals. Even though our understanding of these assemblages has greatly changed since Dart’s time (see C.K. Brain’s The Hunters or the Hunted?), the overall image of human evolution being intricately linked to meat-eating and hunting has dominated the discussion of our origins. Even more specifically, the considerations of our ancestors have nearly always focused on the male of the species, and even Hardy’s early ideas of an aquatic ape focused primarily on males.
In 1964, zoologist Desmond Morris published the bestseller The Naked Ape. Today the book is nearly useless outside of understanding the history of thought about human evolution, but when it was first published a short discussion of the AAH caught the attention of a woman named Elaine Morgan. On page 37 of the 1967 paperback edition, Morris states;
Another, more ingenious theory is that, before he became a hunting ape, the original ground ape that had left the forests went through a long phase as an aquatic ape. He is envisaged as moving to the tropical sea-shores in search of food. There he will have found shellfish and other sea-shore creatures in comparative abundance, a food supply much richer and more attractive than that on the open plains. At first he will have groped around in the rock pools and the shallow water, but gradually he will have started to swim out to greater depths and dive for food. During this process, it is argued, he will have lost his hair like other mammals that have returned to the sea. Only his head, protruding from the surface of the water, would retain the hairy coat to protect him from the direct glare of the sun. Then, later on, when his tools (originally developed for cracking open shells) became sufficiently advanced, he will have spread away from the cradle of the sea-shore and out into the open land spaces as an emerging hunter.
…
Unfortunately, [searching for fossils in marine or fluvial deposits or further research into the AAH] has yet to be done and, despite its most appealing indirect evidence, the aquatic theory lacks solid support. It neatly accounts for a number of special features, but it demands in exchange the acceptance of a hypothetical major evolutionary phase for which there is no direct evidence. (Even if eventually it does turn out to be true, it will not clash seriously with the general picture of the hunting ape’s evolution out of a ground ape. It will simply mean that the ground ape went through a rather salutary christening ceremony.)
[Emphasis mine]
Elaine Morgan read the brief treatment and qualifications (some of which has been omitted here for the sake of brevity) and wanted to know more about the possibility of our ancestors going through an aquatic stage of evolution. No information seemed to be available, and so Morgan wrote to Hardy in 1970, and he encouraged Morgan to push ahead with her research and desire to write a book about the AAH. The result was the bestselling The Descent of Woman, published in 1972. My copy is a little bit newer than that, being the Bantam 1973 edition, and featuring what appears to be a nude mother and child on the cover. Closer inspection reveals that something isn’t quite right, however; the mother I previously assumed was a representative of Homo sapiens looks like she’s been hit in the face with a frying pan. I didn’t know it at the time, but the text would reveal that the plump, nude, and long haired female on the cover was not drawn from life, but rather was Morgan’s idea of the Australopithecus specimen “Lucy” as Aphrodite.
Morgan’s first book is certainly a unique one, weaving in between “Just-so story” type paleo-fiction and long arguments about the female orgasm, including it’s fallacious mythical status. Indeed, the AAH only seems to occupy the first 1/3 of the book, only cropping up here and there in the following chapters, and receiving only a brief mention in the conclusion. Still, the way Morgan structures her argument in her first book will tell us much about her later works and the rise of the AAH as a popular idea. Early on in the work, we are introduced to a hypothetical female ape, not unlike Proconsul, living in Africa sometime during the Pliocene (~5.3-1.8 million years ago). During this time a hard life trying to find food and avoid predators was becoming even harder, Morgan hypothesizing that a terrible heat wave would change the way of life for many populations of these unnamed apes (from what I understand, however, the climate of the Pliocene began to approach our own and became cooler, drier, and had more seasonal distinctions rather than being a global hot-house).
Morgan’s ape was in a bit of a jam, that’s for sure. The water holes are said to be stalked by hungry cats and food was becoming scarce, and the imaginary female was not as fearsome or powerful as the males in her group. Eventually she was chased into the water by a large cat, and decides that, despite her distaste for water, “the seaside not at all a bad place to be. She found to her delight that almost everything on the beach and in the water was either smaller or more timid than she was herself.” Indeed, Morgan’s ape appeared to have found paradise. While other animals cooked during the “dog days of the Pliocene”, her ape (and by extension the population of apes) found what seems to be a sheltered and peaceful lagoon devoid of predators, scavengers, or other threats from either land or sea. “Leopards don’t come so far into the sea, nor sharks so near to the land,” we are told, and while leopards may not be attracted to water, sharks are well-known for their shallow water hunting habits. Crocodiles are not even considered, nor are stingrays, poisonous urchins, jellyfish, disease, infection, or any of the other biological problems that may come with an aquatic existence or change in ecological setting. The new home of the apes sounds better than Club Med, a watery Eden lacking in devious serpents and forbidden fruit.
As suggested by Morris and Hardy, the population of apes gets by on a diet of shellfish and relatively stupid sirenians that happen to come by, males making short work of the water-going creatures with rocks found along the shore. Given the amount of time that the apes would be spending in the water (they couldn’t have just subsisted by wading in or eating what washed up, or at least this is what is implied), bodies started to change. Males are paid little attention by Morgan, and the warm relationship between mother and child takes center stage. While most of the hair on the body would be lost as an adaptation to water (an odd conclusion given that otters, seals, and sea lions all are covered in hair), the hair on the head would be allowed to grow long, the water babies being able to curl their fingers into it and stay close to mom for a nap when they got tired of exploring off on their own. Conversely, breast feeding would still have to take place on shore, but the upright posture of the females (acquired from so much time in the water) would require the baby to be held at an awkward position in which they could not reach their mother’s nipples. This was solved by developing larger “hemispherical” breasts to reach down to the infant, even though larger breasts may cause infants problems when they try to get their mouths on them to breast feed (if the breast is so large that the infant’s nose is covered by it, breathing and feeding becomes difficult).
In searching for an aquatic example of such a striking characteristic, Morgan turns to the Florida manatee and other sirenians, many who have seen females with young noting the presence of “breasts” on the aquatic mammals. Interestingly enough, however, the manatee shares it’s ancestry with living elephants, the females of which also exhibit some rather sizable swellings when lactating. Robert Sapolsky, in his book A Primate’s Memoir, describes seeing such an unexpected shape on the chest of a female elephant for the first time;
Did you know that female elephants have breasts? I do not mean rows of teats, a mama elephant lying on her side with dozens of little piglet elephants nursing with their eyes still closed. I mean breasts, two huge voluptuous billowy mounds, complete with cleavage. I bet you had no idea, did you? Nor did I – it is a subject rarely broached in our public schools. I’m out in the bush that first month, armed with binoculars and stopwatch and notepad, spending the days carefully watching baboons mating left and right. And then, suddenly, some pachyderms come cruising past, and I see some elephant with these, well, breasts. And the natural first reaction is to think, Oh, great, I’m such a horny lascivious pathetic adolescent that after a mere month of isolation in the bush I’ve already cracked, I’m hallucinating breasts the size of Volkswagens on the elephants. Horrors, to have one’s psychotic break occur so soon, and to have it take the form of a puerile sexual obsession many embarrassing steps below gawking at National Geographic nudies. I was greatly relieved to eventually discover that the elephant’s breasts were real, that I was not having some Marlin Perkins wet dream.
It should be noted, however, that Morgan attributes an aquatic origin to elephants as well, primarily based upon their ability to shed tears (and therefore salt), as well as the ability of living Indian elephants to swim long distances in the ocean. Such considerations are a side trip from the main thrust of her argument, and no detail is given as to when, where, why, or how elephants arose from a water-dwelling species, only that a few characteristics in living animals point to an Aquatic Pachyderm Hypothesis.
Going back to the AHH, given about 10 million years in the water Morgan’s ape is substantially different than the one that was first driven into the waves by a predator. Referring to her as “Mrs. Australopithecus,” Morgan paints the following portrait (the artistic manifestation of which is found on the cover of the book);
So our hominid has a nose. I have no doubt that she also had fleshy nostrils, but considerable doubt that they evolved to make sex sexier for her mate. I think she was by no means the simian, cadaverous, lipless creature that artists sometimes reconstruct by covering her dug-up skull with a tightly fitting layer of hairy skin. The layer of fat which was rounding out her arms and legs and adding bulk to her breasts was also filling out her cheeks, and her nostrils, and her earlobes, and everting her lips… We would not have accounted her beautiful, with her low forehead and prognathous jaw, but the chances are that she was a chubby little creature with several superficial features resembling our own more nearly than they resembled any ape’s. And as for the expressions that flitted across that prehistoric countenance, her millions of years in the water had certainly left their mark on those also.
This is quite a different picture of “Lucy” than is often seen, but is there anything to it? Part of the advantage of the AAH is that Morgan doesn’t specify her ideas down to a scientific level, allowing her to poetically play with her ideas in any way she wishes, the female becoming more beautiful while the men continue to try and kill dugongs with rocks. This type of feminist reaction to the “Man the Hunter” narrative is the main connective feature throughout the book, and Morgan’s writing is far more concerned with the more graceful and beautiful evolution of woman, with sex ultimately bringing “sin” into the Garden.
In Morgan’s story, the genitals of the ancestral females went from facing backwards (making rear-mounting positions by the male easy) to facing downwards, a position that Morgan insists will not work for males, face-to-face mating being adopted as a must. Morgan’s reasoning for the change is that aquatic animals often undergo this type of genital shift (cetaceans are her primary example), but she generally ignores why the genitals should be shifted in the first place. In terms of cetaceans, the ancestors likely had their anal-genital openings in the position typical for quadrapeds; facing backwards at the location of the pelvis just under the tail, usually being at the most distal end of the body. As they evolved, the archaeocetes lost their hind limbs and their spines elongated, being the main source of propulsion, so rather than keep moving backwards with the spine the genitals stayed in the pelvic region “settled” on the ventral side of the body; where else they would have gone, I do not know. Given this morphological necessity, face-to-face mating became the only way cetaceans could copulate. Seals and sea lions, on the other hand, still have their anal-genital openings near the distal most parts of their bodies because that is where the pelvis is and there was no need to change mating styles, and males still mount females from behind. Even beyond such considerations, I do not see how the rear-mount strategy can be dogmatically ruled out, and I have a feeling that because such a position is considered “kinky” by some it was essentially ruled not to have happened. In fact, the retention of rear-mounting with the shift in female genitals could help explain elongation of the penis in males (they’d have to extend a bit farther), although this matter is far from settled. Curiously, Morgan generally ignores the bonobo and it’s face-to-face mating habits, even in her later books. She’s clearly aware of these apes (she does mention them and one graces the cover of The Descent of the Child), but they are conspicuously absent from discussions about sex.
Still, if we are to follow Morgan’s model, the apes would have to switch from mating using a rear-mount position to face-to-face (the males, we are told, couldn’t penetrate any other way), such a position causing much trauma for females. Males wouldn’t know how to calm the female for a face-to-face encounter, and it essentially led to either rape or an unfruitful attempt to mate. Morgan describes such a scene;
The primate was a totally different shape. Her new aquatic streamlining had been unable to prevent her becoming lumpy in the middle, and as a littoral biped her legs were developing in the opposite direction from the seal’s – they were becoming not smaller and thinner but farther apart, but longer and thicker and closer together. The seal’s solution was impossible for the aquatic apes. Their dilemma was unique.
So we left her on her back, kicking and struggling and frightened out of her tiny anthropoid mind, with her mate beginning to get irritated. When she saw him snarl and bare his canines she was finally convinced that he wanted her for dinner, and that her last hour had come. Further resistance was useless. She stopped fighting and signaled her submission, defeat, and appeasement as strongly as she could with so little room for maneuver.
Immediately, the incident was over. The male was a properly programmed animal, and it was impossible for him to go on clobbering a member of his own species that was giving clear indications that it had stopped fighting back. He moved a little way off, wearing a puzzled expression. He had thought for a moment that he was on to a good idea, but obviously there was a snag to it.
Such events removed us from our Eden along the shores, males taking up hunting on the plains soon after the eviction. Rains that quenched the African drought allowed the apes to leave the habitat that they had become so accustomed to (it seems like the males led the charge, being sick of their prolonged day at the beach), moving on to evolve in ways that fit the scientific orthodoxy of the times a bit more closely. Even so, Morgan suggests that women have retained the peace, beauty, and grace of their aquatic origins while males are more shaped by violence and hunting, her parting words being;
He is the most miraculous of all the creatures that God ever made or the earth ever spawned. All we need to do is hold out our loving arms to him and say: “Come on in, the water’s lovely.”
Oddly enough, such arguments seem more specific and in-depth than those in Morgan’s later works The Descent of the Child (1995) and The Scars of Evolution (1990). The Descent of the Child can largely be ignored, being that it’s primary focus is on doing for human babies (from conception through early childhood) what The Descent of Woman did for women, all-in-all being a string of facts presented to the reader in an easy-to-digest manner but without much further discussion. In covering past evolution, the “savanna hypothesis” and “man the hunter” are both alluded to or pointed out to be wrong, although no rigorous refutation is made. Instead the reader is referred to the earlier The Scars of Evolution for the “scientific” argument, but Morgan’s earlier poetry contains far more detail than the 1990 work. I breezed through the 178 pages of the book easily enough, but there was little positive evidence within it’s pages for the AAH. Certain physiological systems were pinpointed and deemed to be of aquatic origin since Morgan deemed no other hypotheses to be adequate (which, of course, assumes that all possibilities have been discovered and have received proper consideration).
I actually would love to write up a longer discussion of The Scars of Evolution but there is surprisingly little actual AAH evidence to be considered, and Morgan even makes some fairly basic mistakes about fossil preservation. Early on in the book she writes;
So if the prospecting had started in the north [of the Rift Valley] and worked down, popular illustrations of groups of Australopithecus would have shown them reclining under a shady tree at the water’s edge, living perhaps on fruit and greenery and fish. Instead, they are depicted as shaggy creatures trekking through parched grass and a scatter of stunted thorn bushes, turning to scavenging and hunting to supplement their diet.
This conclusion comes from Morgan’s assertion that some specimens of Australopithecus are found associated with fossils like crocodile remains and turtle eggs, suggesting an aquatic habitat. This largely ignores taphonomy, however, and an animal that dies in or near water being much more likely to be preserved and fossilized than one that drops out on the plains, the body undoubtedly being ripped apart by scavengers and leaving little or nothing to the fossil record. Most of the rest of the book covers material already mentioned in The Descent of Woman, like the fallacious notion that pheromones are essentially nonexistent or non-influential in humans because we went through an aquatic phase of evolution where scent wouldn’t have counted for much. Also curious is one of Morgan’s final statements about how evolution works, especially in regards to water. Rather than gaining specializations mentioned in so many of her works (i.e. the ability to cry and remove saline from the body, nostrils with possible flaps to keep water out, enlargement of the female breasts), a kind of de-volution of our ancestors is favored;
Conceivably, a species finding itself in a radically new environment (such as water) begins to shed the more advanced features which fitted it for its old environment. It back-tracks to a more unspecialized foetus-like form, before re-adapting to the new habitat. If that were the case, then our own ancestors, having moved from the land to the water and subsequently from water to land, would have been subjected to an impetus towards neoteny on two successive occasions. It would explain why in our case the trend was unusually powerful.
In all, Morgan’s work seem to be lacking of any rigorous research or hypotheses, and it led me to wonder why the AAH will simply not go away. Perhaps some of it is the mental appeal and the common error of linking correlation in evolutionary convergence to causation, working backwards to whatever ideal we hold most dear. Even if I’m incorrect as far as social motivation goes, the AAH has shown up in the scientific literature in the past few years, and it’s primary advocate seems to be Marc Verhaegen. Although the majority of his papers seem to be currently unavailable online, there is no name that more frequently appears in terms of AAH literature in scientific journals, giving the hypothesis some visibility (and credibility, as far as AAH advocates may be concerned). Some of the papers published on the AAH I could find are;
As is immediately apparent, the great majority of the papers have appeared in one journal (Medical Hypotheses) and can be attributed to one author, Verhaegen. Judging from what I was able to find, many of the arguments that Verhaegen employs are very similar to those of Morgan, working backwards from somewhat contested or enigmatic human features to an aquatic origin to the exclusion of other hypotheses. Where Verhaegen differs, however, is that his aquatic hypothesis is far more broad than that of Hardy or Morgan. While Morgan implied that the aquatic apes were an isolated group that ended up leading to man (what happened to populations elsewhere is never spelled out), Verhaegen suggests that the last common ancestor of living gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans was at least semi-bipedal and semi-aquatic, likely living in a habitat like a mangrove swamp. From the paper “Aquaborel ancestors?”;
A vertical posture and an ability to climb with the arms raised above the head could have helped a wading primate to enter or leave the water by grasping overhanging branches or waterside vegetation, and to grasp fruits above the water. Body enlargement and tail reduction would hinder agile arborealism, whereas a larger body is more easily supported in water and helps reduce heat loss (explaining why aquatic mammals are larger than related terrestrial forms). Tails would be of little use for a wading and/or swimming primate and would cause both drag and heat loss.
Thus Verhaegen attempts to separate New and Old World monkeys from apes by making the ancestors of all living apes at least partially water-bound, standing up to wade through water. Ultimately humans would have stayed in the pool while gorillas and chimpanzees got out, although gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos do not seem to show the same signs of being adapted to water that are often associated with humans under the AAH. Of further note is the fact that living primates like baboons, macaques, and proboscis monkeys have been known to swim and stand upright in water, although none seem to show signs of becoming exclusively adapted to an aquatic lifestyle. In the recent BBC series Planet Earth, baboons of the Okovango Delta in Botswana were shown wading through the water;
The baboons are not especially comfortable in the water, just as many other animals in the delta like cheetahs and lions don’t especially like crossing the waterways. Indeed, crocodiles are the primary danger in the water, and many animals seem to know of the threat all too well (but must cross from time to time, anyway). Such modes of moving through water, also seen in chimpanzees (see the final episode of the BBC’s Life of Mammals, entitled “Food for Thought”), seem to constitute the “weak” version of the AAH, and isn’t entirely unreasonable in explain possible motivation to become bipedal. It does require a certain ecology, however, (i.e. flooded plains, a swamp, shallow mangrove forest, lagoon, etc.) and has little explaining power out of such a context. Still, there are even more aquatic primates that were also featured in Planet Earth; the crab-eating macaques.
If we’re looking for a model of what an aquatic ape would look and act like, surely these monkeys would be it, and Morgan does note some of the aquatic habits of macaques (especially the behavior of washing food in water, as seen in Japanese Macaques). The problem is that macaques are monkeys, not apes, although they seem to get along in the water just fine. Unfortunately the adaptation of these primates to water is going to be slow and take many generations, but the study of these animals could give us some clues as to what the AAH can and cannot explain, although it seems that many of the features explained by the AAH don’t fit with what we see in the macaques. Looking at the underwater behavior, it would seem that the monkeys would be adapted to swim in a matter similar to that of quadrupeds rather than to start wading in, becoming bipedal, and then doing a breast-stroke. Indeed, the video shows that becoming bipedal is not a necessary precursor to being able to swim or becoming semi-aquatic, and it is quite possible (even probable) that primates could abandon the upright stage altogether. Standing upright seems to be generally uncomfortable for many primates, and it’s hard to see how primates introduced to a fruitful aquatic habitat would want to stand up before just jumping in if there was really nothing to fear in the waters. Even in the weak version of the AAH, it is hard to see how standing upright while crossing a river would have selected for bipedalism as it seems that many primates are capable of doing it over short periods and it does not hold any strong advantage that would relate to mating success or overall survival. Unless the hypothetical apes lived in an area constantly flooded, requiring them to stand up much of the time, it is difficult for me to imagine how water could have helped to select for an upright posture.
The overall problem I have with Morgan’s hypothesis about apes becoming almost exclusively aquatic is that it forces us to make a choice of one habitat or another. Mentions are made of Proboscis Monkeys and Macaques enjoying a swim, washing off food, or living near water, but they don’t seem to be bent on the same path as the one Morgan proposes. Organisms certainly are plastic, and they don’t rigidly abide by the “rules” set down by those that describe them as to where to live, what to eat, and how to act properly. In fact, it seems more reasonable to me that primates past and present would take advantage of an aquatic resource if readily available, but still maintain their terrestrial life unless they were so isolated that they had no choice for food other than the water. Time will tell if some of today’s semi-aquatic primates ever become more fully at home in the water, but I see no reason to believe that our ancestors decided to take a prolonged summer vacation on the beach, proceeding in a way that just so happened to explain everything neatly (if un-parsimoniously).
The AAH hinges on apes willingly going into the water for safety from predators, but this is only a Just-So story without the details. It also ignores the fact that the water can be almost as dangerous, if not moreso, than the land, and there are predators in the water just as there are in terrestrial habitats, not to mention rip-tides and other problems inherent to the ocean itself. While Morgan, in The Descent of Woman, states that newborns could be left to paddle about on their own while mom went about her own business, such maternal inattention doesn’t seem like it would be especially effective in making sure that young made it to adulthood. Only the calmest, most sheltered, and safe of lagoons would have allowed for this. If the AAH is to be taken seriously in whatever form, it is going to require rigorous ecological study, and so far it seems that it relies far more on post hoc arguments than actual evidence.
While Jim Moore has already done a fantastic job dismantling the various problems with the AAH, I hope I have helped to illuminate the overall lack of evidence for the idea. As an idea it’s not a bad one, but it seems to have never gone beyond hypothetical situations and Just-So stories, and most of the ideas associated with the AAH seem to be criticisms of other hypotheses, therefore leaving the AAH as the only alternative. While I can certainly appreciate the frustration Morgan and others must have felt (and even still feel) towards a male-dominated field in science and consideration being mainly given to the strong, archetypal male, I feel that the AAH is taking things too far in the other extreme. It is hard to ignore the feminist underpinnings of Morgan’s writing and the overall disregard for the big picture in order to bring women and children into closer focus. Combating a hypothesis you don’t like with an equally narrow one, just reversed, is not the way to bring greater understanding of our evolutionary history, and given that hominids and apes are so close to us, it’s easy to fall into trapping of preference. Being that I am no expert on the matter, however, I will close with T.H. Huxley’s final words from his work Man’s Place in Nature, as they seem to resonate with the big questions about our origins that remain unknown;
Where, then, must we look for primeval man? Was the oldest Homo sapiens pliocene or miocene, or yet more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an Ape more anthropoid, or a Man more pithecoid, than any yet known await the researches of some unborn paleontologist?
Time will show. But, in the meanwhile, if any form of the doctrine of progressive development is correct, we must extend by long epochs of the most liberal estimate that has yet been made of the antiquity of Man.
Why does Ben Stein have to go ahead and ruin the month in which I was born? According to a link supplied by PZ, the deadpan actor is going to release a film called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” about how us crazy “Neo-Darwinists” are trying to take over the hearts and minds of America’s youth through the public education system. (Also, the conservative screed Indoctrinate U is also meant to premiere this September) This propaganda piece documentary looks like it wants to be the answer to Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos, although it appears that Stein’s venture is better financed. Still, having a look around the site already points to the overall lack of research and downright stupidity employed by our “hero” Stein in trying to scare conservatives into believing him. From the site’s blog;
Freedom of inquiry is basic to human advancement. There would be no modern medicine, no antibiotics, no brain surgery, no Internet, no air conditioning, no modern travel, no highways, no knowledge of the human body without freedom of inquiry.
This includes the ability to inquire whether a higher power, a being greater than man, is involved with how the universe operates. This has always been basic to science. ALWAYS.
Some of the greatest scientists of all time, including Galileo, Newton, Einstein, operated under the hypothesis that their work was to understand the principles and phenomena as designed by a creator.
Operating under that hypothesis, they discovered the most important laws of motion, gravity, thermodynamics, relativity, and even economics.
Now, I am sorry to say, freedom of inquiry in science is being suppressed.
Under a new anti-religious dogmatism, scientists and educators are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator. Do you realize that some of the leading lights of “anti-intelligent design” would not allow a scientist who merely believed in the possibility of an intelligent designer/creator to work for him… EVEN IF HE NEVER MENTIONED the possibility of intelligent design in the universe?EVEN FOR HIS VERY THOUGHTS… HE WOULD BE BANNED.
In today’s world, at least in America, an Einstein or a Newton or a Galileo would probably not be allowed to receive grants to study or to publish his research.
The first thing that Stein does, in classic neo-con fashion, is equate science with technology. The only things vaguely biological mentioned are antibiotics and human anatomy, but these are directly tied to medicine and not understanding how humans (or other organisms) work in any other sense. This is one of the most difficult battlegrounds in any debate about science/religion/politics, as many see natural science as ultimately pointless. “Why do I need to know what sort of animal Pakicetus was when technology supplies me with MTV and plenty of porn via the internet?” This “What, me worry?” sort of mindset can be traced all the way back to the first Christians, who felt it was essentially pointless to study nature (or even medicine) because Jesus’ return was imminent. “Why learn about botany when the world will be destroyed and created anew next week?” Sooner or later people got the idea that such a way of thinking was impoverished and worthless and started to investigate the natural world, although new discoveries were often met with opposition from those who attempted to uphold the religious orthodoxy of the time (certain areas of science, like medicine, becoming acceptable as they could be brought into the ideological fold of helping others in Christianity).
Stein then goes on to play the name game; everyone will recognize the names Newton, Galileo, and Einstein, but how many people actually know anything about them? Stein is merely trading in on their recognition and seems to know little else about these men of science other than that they had some sort of idea about a creator god. If Stein had done his homework he would have found that Newton and Einstein did not hold concepts of a Judeo-Christian God that exactly fits the Old Testament bully so loved by modern evangelicals (Einstein over and over again professing his belief in “Spinoza’s God”, or the nature of the universe as God). The inclusion of Galileo was curious as well, especially given what the Church of Galileo’s time perpetrated upon the man and the overall resistance to his ideas. If we’re going to include Christian scientists, why not go ahead and add a young Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, William Buckland, Gideon Mantell, or any number of other 19th century scientists involved with paleontology, geology, and evolution that showed the world was not created in the way the creation mythologies of the Bible state? Stein also seems to be ignorant of the many attempts through the early to mid-1900’s to reconcile science and evolution after the Modern Synthesis was formed, so why not mention some of the Christian and Jewish leaders from the first part of the last century who had no problem with evolution? I guess they’re on the naughty list.
Stein then moves on to an attempt to spread paranoia, picking up where Jonathan Wells left off in the latter part of Icons of Evolution. Evolutionary science (or at least evolutionary scientists) are said to be cultish, rabid bigots, stopping at nothing to stomp out any mention of a Christian god. They may as well burst into flames at the mention of the name “Jehovah.” No evidence is given for this assertion (I guess I’ll just have to watch the movie), but Stein goes back to trading in on the names of intellects far greater than his own by suggesting that such men would have been figuratively “burned at the stake” by modern academia. I guess it doesn’t matter to Stein that how religious a person may be is more a product of how they’re brought up rather in “Darwinist indoctrination” in public schools. Stein also doesn’t provide any reason why we should take creationists and ID advocates seriously, either; they’ve come up with absolutely no actual research to prove their point, despite continuous calls to do so (I guess Behe and his buddies would rather just keep pumping out the popular books). Why should we allow intelligent design into science class when it simply is not science?
Anyway, the film looks like it’s going to be absolutely horrible, and judging from the fact that Stein can’t even be bothered to open up a history book I’m sure the film is going to be a propaganda piece that will appeal primarily to those who already tend to agree anyhow.
Update: Mike P, in the Pharyngula comment, has provided us with the Press Release for this atrocious bit of drek.
Update the 2nd: The DI has now weighed in (how could I ever have guessed that they were involved?), and the film is set to come out on Darwin’s birthday, February 12th. I can’t imagine it getting a wide release, but I have to wonder if the production company is going to go around wooing churches as other companies did for The Passion of the Christ, The Chronicles of Narnia, and other films. Still, the movie will probably be greeted with cheers by those already convinced and be thoroughly trashed by those who can already smell that it’s rotten inside and out.
Holy smokes! Apparently evolution has been entirely debunked by a new Nature paper that shows evidence that Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived, at least for a bit, at the same time. The media, always looking for a hook, has burped up titles like “Evolution theory challenged,” and those inclined towards creationism have already jumped on the news reports. For those of you who have a subscription, the new paper “Implications of new early Homo fossils from Ileret, east of Lake Turkana, Kenya” by Spoor, et al. is up online, and a popular summary of the work (and it’s implications) is available as well. Even though I have a pile of posts that are begging for completion, given the amount of attention this story has been getting I’ll write up my own thoughts on it tonight, but in the meantime you can check out some of the responses of those who oppose evolution, based on the popular press reports (not one of them, as far as I can tell, has actually read the research).
John Hawks and Afarensis can probably do a much better job than I can when it comes to the overall significance of the new paper, but from everything I’ve seen so far it’s not a “death blow” to evolution. The stereotyped notion of the “March of Progress” has been known to be incorrect for some time, yet creationists and ID advocates continue to keep bringing it up as if it were the #1 scientific hypothesis for human origins. For people so concerned with how incorrect evolution is, I’m surprised (well, not really) that they can’t even be bothered to pick up a copy of this edition of Nature on the newsstand or pop over to read the abstract or news summary on the journal’s web page. No, the popular press spits out of few short summaries with seemingly provocative titles and overnight the whole of evolutionary science is disproved, or at least that’s what some of the aforementioned bloggers would have us believe. Rather than say “Hmm, this is really interesting. I wonder what this means?” and putting forth their own ideas, they seem content to sit back, quote Scripture, and say “See! I was right! Case closed!” I’ll leave it up to you which is the more enlightened response to new ideas.
Update: Some of the Scienceblogs folks are starting to chime in (you’ll have to wait for my take on the subject until I get home and get my hands on some books to put the straight-line evolution model in context);
Update: Many thanks to Chris for reminding me of one of my most favorite SNL sketches;
In March I blogged about a Malaysian woman who claimed to have found a shark with webbed feet, although anyone with even a cursory knowledge of shark anatomy could see that the “webbed feet” were really the paired male reproductive organs indicative of sharks known as claspers. [Not that I expect others to have this understanding, but rather that it’s obvious if you do have that knowledge] Now the story has resurfaced, probably due to it being featured on this blog, and plenty of folks are blathering away about how the shark does or does not support evolution. Apparently this has become the evolution equivalent of the New Zealand “plesiosaur” mix-up, at least among evolution supporters who are woefully uninformed. I was content to keep my mouth shut about this issue, just letting the issue fade away into obscurity, but then I received this comment from “bnutler”;
yeah but the first feet probably were not “feet” either. the process of evolution involves mutations, and this is an example of a mutation could have lead to feet. it would be unintelligent to assume that the first feet were actually intended to be used in the way land animals use them. It would be even more unintelligent to think that something hand designed everything on earth..
This is why the evolution debate frustrates me; even amongst people who support evolution, understanding can be absent. Tetrapods did not evolve their limbs from paired claspers; the bones of our limbs (and the limbs of our ancestors all the way down to the first tetrapods) are homologous with those of fish belonging to the Class Sarcopterygii, an extant example being the Coelacanth. The living coelacanth is not ancestral to us however, as it is too young in age and belongs to the wrong group. The group that led to tetrapods were the Rhipidistia, a subgroup of the Sarcopterygiian fish, and it was the bones in the fleshy fins of these animals that gave rise to the tetrapod limb. Indeed, even though living coelacanths are not our ancestors, they give us a clue as to how fins could have been modified to limbs; in addition to having the proper structure, they can “walk” through the water using their fins, moving them independently. Epaulette Sharks can walk along the bottom as well, using their pectoral and pelvic fins, although their skeletons are a long way from being anything close to that of the Rhipidistians.
Anyway, shark claspers are only found in male sharks, and although they are supported by cartilage they are not otherwise connected to the spine or skeleton. Thus, in order for claspers to be the antecedents to feet, they’d have to become present in all sharks of that species (including females), somehow change their musculature, change their skeletal structure, allow attachment to the rest of the skeleton, and also duplicate themselves in the front part of the skeleton and undergo the same changes (unless you’re going to argue that claspers made the back feet and pectoral fins made the front feet). This is obviously ridiculous, and furthermore what is being suggested by bnutler is a major saltation; a major change from having paired reproductive organs to having feet overnight (it would bring a new meaning to foot-fetishes, I’ll tell you that much). This isn’t even mentioning all the other physiological changes that would have to occur in the body (which we have evidence for in tetrapod evolution, especially in the spine and skull), and overall sharks are an extremely poor candidate for tetrapod ancestors, then or now.
I don’t mean to be so overly harsh, but I simply cannot believe all the back and forth over this picture. If anything, it’s a lesson that it’s not simply enough to get people to agree that evolution has occurred; if they do not understand it no good will come from it. Without understanding, people will have “faith” in evolution rather than knowledge of it, and even if a school isn’t teaching ID or creationism it doesn’t mean that they’re teaching evolution accurately (or at all!). I especially liked bnutler’s ending sentences, wherein he (she?) insinuates that because I don’t agree that the shark claspers are really freaky feet, I must believe that limbs were “intelligently designed” or created for a purpose. I guess they don’t stop by here much, huh?
[Update: Changed some of the language as it was a bit harsh; such comes from blogging out of frustrations. Also I was writing feverishly using the Mac at home, which does not highlight spelling/grammatical errors, which I have now fixed as well.]
In the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, out today, there is a new “Perspective Article” entitled “A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat.” It is clearly a puff piece, describing how a resident cat named Oscar at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island curls up to patients that only have a few hours to live. The tone of the article is a bit more mystic however, suggesting that Oscar sniffs the air in order to figure out when someone’s “time” is, acting like a feline Grim Reaper (although to the best of my understanding Death does not purr and nuzzle those about to die, despite his well-known fondness of cats).
Still, the fact remains that this particular cat has attended 25 people who died shortly after Oscar curled up to them, and the cat generally ignores other people. This has led Yahoo! to put the story “Oscar the cat predicts patients’ deaths” on the front page, referring to the NEJM article as if it were some kind of new paper or research. The only real rationality in the Yahoo! story is found in this quote;
Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa’s article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.
If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it’s also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.
Still, I’m sure plenty of people will latch on to the story as proof of psychic connections with animals, ESP, and other woo despite the fact that an observation has been made but no actual research has been done. I’m not even sure if there have been any studies about how animals react towards the sick or dying, although there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that pets can pick up on signs that we may miss (my parents’ dog knew my mother was pregnant with me before she did, at least that’s how the story goes). Hopefully someone will have a look at this case and determine what is actually going on, but I have the feeling that even if such a study was undertaken many people would ignore it in preference of ideas about special connections with animals.
Update the 1st: Aydin brings up something I didn’t think about at first; maybe Oscar’s actions are a variation on those of Clever Hans the horse. For more, visit Snails Tales.
Likewise, Julia pointed me to a BBC article where it states that Oscar becomes quite upset if he’s removed from the room. This is likely an important clue, and (as morbid as it sounds) maybe there is some sort of chemical/pheromone/scent or something else about the dying that attracts this cat. It would explain the behavior of selecting and being affectionate with those who are about to pass away. Hopefully someone will look into this, and I’d love to see if a reason could be found for Oscar’s behavior.
I finished Kossy’s Strange Creations last night, reading the book to my wife as she practiced her knitting, and I have to say that I was not very impressed. While the book is informative (it contained some lesser known-creationist tracts and odd beliefs about human origins I had not heard previously), Kossy seems to give a bit too much credit to kooks and crackpots. It’s almost as if she tried to be objective, but her opinions on certain hypotheses and nutty claims (especially in the sections on creationism [against] and the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis [slightly pro]) clearly come through. The last section of the last chapter dealing with the Heaven’s Gate Cult even ends with a call towards respect for the beliefs of “Bo” and “Peep” (the leaders of the group) and those who committed suicide because they wanted to ascend in a UFO to Heaven, their actions spurred on by the coming of the Hale Bopp comet in 1997.
Kossy’s general appeal is that we’re all looking, in one way or another, for spiritual fulfillment (or, in evangelical parlance, the “God-Shaped Hole” argument, is vulnerable to plenty of dirty jokes), so who is she to judge what someone else believes? What is they were right and are in heaven right now? While Kossy describes herself as a skeptic, the book shows that she does have some fair New Age leanings, and she is far more critical of traditional religious beliefs than crystal power or alien breeding experiments. If Kossy wanted to give her opinion on matters, she should have been forthright and stated what she thought, although such a book might have been very different. She does admit that she became enamored with the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis early on as well, and while she does present criticism against it, she frames it as more of a promising “theory” that just needs more evidence, evidence which I don’t believe exists.
Anyway, the book, as a whole, is a fair index of weird claims and oddball beliefs, and is probably best utilized as such (it’s not written in a way that’s especially friendly to reading it straight through). If you’re looking for some examples of strange origins for humans, then you’ll likely find a fair resource, but otherwise I’d say avoid the woo and read The Demon-Haunted World instead.
There are lots of crackpot beliefs and ideas in the minds of people the world over. Some believe that Jesus really traveled to India, where his body rests in a tomb. Others believe that Gigantoraptor was really a magical bird called a “Fandor” that carried Adam and Eve around the Garden of Eden. Some of the most surprising and strange beliefs, though, have to do with the origin of our own species, Homo sapiens.
In the first chapter of Strange Creations: Aberrant Ideas of Human Origins from Ancient Astronauts to Aquatic Apes, Donna Kossy reviews many of the strange New Age/Gnostic/pesudo-religious/UFO-obsessed hypotheses that have been invoked to explain how humans came to be, some with great success that others (i.e. Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? is the popular standard by which other idiotic UFO books seem to be judged by). While there are plenty of similar creation myths to choose from (and I could probably devote post after post to such woo), I did notice a strange misogynistic trend among the books which (with the exception of the highly eccentric Helena Blavatsky) were predominantly written by men.
The first example that caught my attention was that of George Van Tassel, author of Science and Religion Merged, and he certainly broke his own spine bending backwards to try and accommodate “science” with religion and paranormal buffoonery. Here is Kossy’s summation of Van Tassel’s mythology;
Van Tassel reveals the true meaning of evolution and the book of Genesis in a chapter of Religion and Science Merged entitled “The Missing Link.” God created Man, Van Tassel tells us – on many planets in many solar systems – before He created Earth. We didn’t evolve from “lower animals,” but were created “to serve as the instrument of God’s doing.” Adam wasn’t the first man, he was an entire race of men brought here by the Adamic Federation in a spaceship. But the colonizers forgot to bring women along – a rather large oversight for a supposedly perfect race. If they wanted to people the earth, the Adamic race would have to mate with female Earth creatures. Fortunately, they were able to breed with one of the animals races here on Earth, the race of Eve, which Van Tassel describes as “upright walking animals… the highest form of lower animal life” on Earth, but they were not apes.
The Bible story of Adam and Eve and the serpent, writes Van Tassel, is really an account of God’s displeasure with this coupling between man and beast; eating the wrong apple is a metaphor for mating with the wrong species. “This,” says Van Tassel, “is where Man became hu-man.” “Hu” represents the animal, killer nature of the tribe of Eve, while “man” is the higher nature, created by God.
Likewise, the authors of Mankind – Child of the Stars (Otto Binder and Max Flindt) tried to find “the missing link” through supposed breeding experiments between early hominids and aliens. Kossy explains;
All [the enigmas of human evolution] Flindt and Binder claimed, were solved if we realized that our species is a hybrid between “Apeman” and “Spaceman.”
Although they try very hard to look scientific, Flindt and Binder find their clearest evidence for the improbable coupling of apeman and spaceman in the Bible. From Genesis 6:2, in which the sons of God marry the daughters of men – “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose” – they conclude that “starmen visited Earth and mated with early females (perhaps hominids) to sire the modern human race of Homo sapiens.”
Flindt and Binder conclude that not only humans – but just about every species on Earth – were originally brought here by aliens. The space people first arrived here long before hominids appeared, making countless trips to Earth, each for a different “hybridization project.” They brought with them such creatures as the coelacanth and the duck-billed platypus… The aliens also imported the first apes and then returned about 12 million years ago, in time to breed with Ramapithecus, an early hominid. Not quite 12 million years later, the offspring of this strange coupling had developed into Australopithecus, an early ancestor of Homo sapiens.
As mentioned earlier, Erich von Däniken was perhaps the most successful of the UFO nutjobs, and he borrowed from science, the Bible, and other writers like Blavatsky to come up with his brand of alien breeding project;
Von Däniken’s version of humanity as an alien breeding experiment, like those that came before, loosely follows the Bible. Like Blavatsky’s narrow-headed Lemurians and Van Tassel’s alien-beast hybrids, some of Adam’s genetically altered progeny were unable to control themselves, and continued to mate with animals. This “backsliding” represented the Fall of Man because it “impeded evolution,” and retained the bestial in man.”
These sentiments actually echoed other racist/religious arguments that preceded von Däniken, the racist Edward Long writing (sometime between the late 18th and early 19th century);
Oranguatans, he wrote, “did not seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the negroe race; with some of whom it is credible that they have the most intimate connexion and consanguinity… the negroes themselves bear testimony, that such intercourses actually happen; and it is certain that both races agree perfectly well in lasciviousness of disposition…” Mulattoes, Long proclaimed, are infertile, like mules. They come in two types: first, the offspring who result from the coupling of a Negro and a Caucasian; and second, the offspring of a Negro and an orangutan. The latter are often the result of “the passion the male Orang-Outang has for the Negress.”
Utterly disgusting and despicable, and yet such notions found favor among many. While there are plenty examples of humans at their worst in trying to figure out their own origins, I picked these examples primary because they showed the overall bias towards the white male as being the most godlike. According to the racist and idiotic mythologies, men are degenerate gods/aliens while women are directly connected with bestial and stupid apes; the bias could not be more clear. Just like the classical Genesis mythology, “Eve” gets the blame for the Fall or man’s degenerate condition, and the males in these stories are always placed nearest to godliness (if they aren’t already gods).
While I would like to believe that such misogynistic and untenable beliefs no longer exist today, I would be a fool to do so. It is absolutely incomprehensible to me how, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have seemingly changed so little in our prejudices and habits. Like Kossy writes in another chapter of the book, there has never been a “Golden Age” of humanity (nor were “The Good ‘Ol Days” really that good), but still I am continually shocked and amazed by the sort of untenable nonsense that is all-too-readily accepted.
This is the blog of Brian Switek, a (hopefully) soon-to-be-graduating student at Rutgers University studying ecology & evolution. Here you'll find ramblings and the occasional asinine assertion involving evolution, intelligent design/creationism, conservation, paleontology, and a myriad of other topics that occupy his mind on a daily basis. What, exactly, is Laelaps? Find out here. Other questions, problems, or trauma can be addressed to evogeek_at_gmail_dot_com.
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