I have no problems with people being religious per se. I think that people have the right to believe in whatever they want. If they happen to believe in something that is demonstrably wrong, well then, they should be prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of reality.

The problem tends to come in when some religious people try to impose their religion on others. If you go through my posts on religion, you’ll find that this is where I tend to step in. Want to teach creationism in the classroom? Uh uh. Want to oppress women? Sorry, fella. Think abstinence-only education works and you should get government grants to teach it? Keep it in your own pants, please.

The problem is amplified by the fact that pretty much every religion tends to think of itself as the One True Belief. And when they get some political clout, things get very itchy indeed. Or have we already forgotten what the Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamyan?

That’s why I worry when I hear politicians in the U.S. saying we’re a Christian nation. We’re not. We’re a nation of mostly Christians, to be sure, but there are other religions here as well, and a bunch of non-believers too.

When confronted with this, most of these politicians tend to say the Founding Fathers were Christians, and based this country on Christian beliefs. But that’s not true either: the basis of our country’s law is the Constitution, and the Founders took a great deal of care making sure it kept religion at arm’s length (despite what some politicians believe).

With the far-right going apoplectic every time someone mentions non-believers or religions other than Christianity (remember this?), I imagine the 2012 Presidential election will be one where every candidate tries to out-religious the next. But we have the 2010 midterms coming up, and it’ll be an issue there too.

That’s why I like very much what the Freedom From Religion Foundation is doing: they’ve created wonderful ads with quotes from the Founding Fathers showing precisely how they felt on this issue. The one above of JFK is cool, because his candidacy was attacked for him being a Catholic, of all things. The thing is, he was a religious man, and still understood that religion must be kept away from politics.

But far and away, I love this one the most:

Not a lot of wiggle room in that, is there? Sarah Palin, of course, disagrees (read that link; Barry Lynn’s — sorry, I mean the Reverend Barry Lynn’s — comment there is wonderful). But I suspect that her grasp of the actual history of this nation is somewhat tenuous, given her many inaccurate statements about it and about reality in general.

Anyway, these banners (seven in total) will run on buses, and it’ll be interesting to see how the far-right religious folks will react. I’ll note that the FFRF ran a full-page ad in the New York Times yesterday about how the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional, which I agree with. Strongly.

What strikes me as funny is how the über-religious in the US fight to tear down the wall of separation, not realizing that they are weakening themselves. What stands between their religion being dominant and, say, Muslims? This is one of the many problems with having religion intertwined with government. As long as it’s your religion, hurray. But see those guys over there praying in a place of worship with slightly different architecture from yours? They feel exactly the same way about their religion as you do about yours. The only way to protect your own freedom of religion is to protect your freedom from theirs.

There are two ways to do that. You can either emulate the Taliban… or you can make sure that laws, politics, and government are kept wholly and, I dare say, fundamentally separated from religion.

The choice is ours.

There is a powerful letter, signed by 225 National Academies members, in the latest Science. Not only does it explain why we accept the consensus of mainstream climate science (or mainstream evolutionary science, or planetary science, or cosmology), but it denounces Cuccinelli-style tactics:
We also call for an end to McCarthy- like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Read the whole statement. Bravo to the these scientists for taking such a stand. UPDATE: I now see that these scientists explicitly state they are not speaking on behalf of the National Academies. So I may have erroneously attributed the existence of the statement to the Academy in an earlier version of this post. It has been modified to remove this unwarranted assumption.

The Orion capsule is dead; long live the Orion capsule. Yesterday in the New Mexico desert, NASA successfully completed a test of the resurrected craft’s launch-abort system. Rockets blasting with 500,000 pounds of thrust carried it more than a mile into the sky before releasing it for a parachute-aided descent back to the Earth.

The launch-abort system is designed to pull the astronauts and the Orion capsule away from the launch pad in the event of a problem such as fire. It is also designed to catapult them away from the rocket if an emergency occurs during the climb to orbit [The Denver Post].

Orion, however, may never need this launch-abort system. The craft was originally intended to be the crew capsule in the Constellation program, riding into space atop heavy-lift rockets and ferrying astronauts back to the moon or to Mars. Like the rest of Constellation it was left out of President Obama’s January budget.

But when the President revised his plan in April he proposed re-purposing Orion as an escape vehicle for the International Space Station.

The aging US space shuttle fleet, which carries astronauts to the International Space Station, is due to be grounded at the end of the year, leaving US astronauts to hitch rides on Russian spacecraft to orbiting station until a replacement is developed.

Orion is now being considered as an escape module for the ISS so US astronauts do not have to rely on Russian craft for a return to Earth [AFP].

So even if President Obama’s plan comes to fruition, Orion still may not need this launch-abort system in its new role. However, NASA says the test’s success is still crucial for the future of space flight.

NASA personnel say elements of the abort system could find use somewhere, whether with Orion or on the privately operated rockets that Obama wants to hire to ferry astronauts to orbit after the shuttle’s phaseout [Scientific American].

Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy
80beats: Neil Armstrong Slams Obama’s Space Plan; President Will Defend It Tomorrow
80beats: Obama’s NASA Plan Draws Furious Fire; The Prez Promises To Defend His Vision
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: Obama’s Space Speech: We’ll Go to Mars in This Lifetime

Image: NASA

When I’ve traveled abroad, I’ve gotten my share of jabs for hepatitis and other diseases. But for malaria, the best I could hope for was to take malaria-blocking drugs like Lariam, which gave me weird dreams at night and made me feel as if someone was tugging my hair all day.

For people who live in countries with malaria, these prophylactic drugs just aren’t practical. Given that 800,000 people a year die of malaria, why don’t we have a good vaccine for it? It’s not for lack of trying–in fact, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the first attempts to make a malaria vaccine.

To understand this epic fail, I talked on my latest podcast with Irwin Sherman, a malaria expert and author of The Elusive Malaria Vaccine: Miracle or Mirage?.

Check it out.

This article is reposted from the old WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Travel back in time to about 50 million years ago and you might catch a glimpse of a small, unassuming animal walking on slender legs tipped with hooves, by the rivers of southern Asia. It feeds on land but when it picks up signs of danger, it readily takes to the water and wades to safety.

The animal is called Indohyus (literally “India’s pig”) and though it may not look like it, it is the earliest known relative of today’s whales and dolphins. Known mostly through a few fossil teeth, a more complete skeleton was described for the first time last week by Hans Thewissen and colleagues from the Northeastern Ohio Universities. It shows what the missing link between whales and their deer-like ancestors might have looked like and how it probably behaved.Whales look so unlike other mammals that it’s hard to imagine the type of creature that they evolved from. Once they took to the water, their evolutionary journey is fairly clear. A series of incredible fossils have documented their transformation into the masterful swimmers of today’s oceans from early four-legged forms like Pakicetus and Ambulocetus (also discovered by Thewissen). But what did their ancestors look like when they still lived on land?

Hooves to flippers

Until now, we had little idea and their modern relatives have provided few clues. According to molecular evidence, the closest living relatives of whales are, quite surprisingly, the artiodactyls, a group of hoofed mammals that includes deer, cows, sheep, pigs, giraffes, camels and hippos.

They all have a characteristic even number of toes on each hoof and not a single one of them bears even a passing resemblance to whales and dolphins. Among the group, the hippos are evolutionarily closest and while they are at least at home in water, their family originated some 35 million years after the first whales and dolphins did.

Enter Indohyus, a small animal about 70cm long that lived 47 million years ago. It was a member of a family of mammals called the raoellids, prehistoric artiodactyls that lived at the same time as the earliest whales and hailed from the same place of origin – southern Asia. By analysing a fossilised skull and limbs collected from India, Thewissen found compelling evidence that the raoellids were a sister group to the ancestors of whales.

Even though Indohyus had the elegant legs of a small deer and walked around on hooves, it also had features found only in modern and fossil whales. Its jaws and teeth were similar to those of early whales, but the best evidence was the presence of a thickened knob of bone in its middle ear, called an involucrum. This structure helps modern whales to hear underwater, it’s only found in whales and their ancestors, and acts as a diagnostic feature for the group.

Based on these physical similarities, Thewissen suggests that the raoellids are a sister group to the whales. Both of these groups are evolutionary cousins to all modern artiodactyls. (As a note for journalists and creationists, Indohyus is not a direct ancestor of whales, as many news sites are claiming, and nor did whales ‘evolve from deer’!)

Life in the water

Indohyus‘s skeleton also suggests that it was partially adapted for life in the water. Its leg bones were unusually thick, a feature shared by other aquatic animals including hippos, sea otters and manatees. These heavier bones stop swimming mammals from floating by default and allow them to hang in the water and dive more easily.

Because Indohyus had slender legs and not paddle-shaped ones, Thewissen pictures it wading in shallow water, walking hippo-style along the river floor while its heavy bones provided ballast.

Thewissen found more clues about the animal’s lifestyle from its teeth, and particularly the levels of certain isotopes in their enamel. Levels of oxygen isotopes matched those of water-going mammals, providing further support for Indohyus‘s aquatic tendencies. Its large crushing molars are typical of plant-eaters and levels of carbon isotopes in them suggested that Indohyus either came onto land to graze (like hippos) or fed on plants and invertebrates in the water (like muskrats). In terms of behaviour, they were close to the modern mousedeer, a tiny, secretive deer that feeds on land but flees into streams when danger threatens.

Put together, this portrait of Indohyus‘s life also tells us about the changes that drove the evolution of whales, and it looks like it wasn’t a move to water. Whales and raoellids are evolutionary sisters and since early members of both groups were happy in the water, aquatic lifestyles must have pre-dated the origin of whales.

Instead, Thewissen suggests that the key step was a switch in diet. He speculates that whales developed from an Indohyus-like ancestor that fed on plants and possibly small invertebrates on land, but fled to water to escape predators. Over time, they slowly turned into meat-eaters and evolved to swim after nimble aquatic prey.

Video: Have a look at Thewissen talking about Indohyus and the origin of whales.

Images of Indohyus are painted by the extraordinary Carl Buell

Reference: Thewissen, J.G., Cooper, L.N., Clementz, M.T., Bajpai, S., Tiwari, B.N. (2007). Whales originated from aquatic artiodactyls in the Eocene epoch of India. Nature, 450(7173), 1190-1194. DOI: 10.1038/nature06343

Some volcanoes just don’t know when to stop. Like Eyjafjallajökull:

[Click to envulcanate.]

This image is from NASA’s Terra satellite, and was taken on May 6 (yesterday). The border of Iceland is outlined, and you can see the ash plume carries on for hundreds of kilometers. Air travel is being grounded yet again.

Interestingly, according to the NASA site, volcanoes this far north don’t affect global climate much. Air currents rise at low to mid-latitudes, and sink in the high latitudes, so the aerosol particles that can cool the atmosphere (like sulfur dioxide) don’t get spread globally in eruptions like this one. But the ash particles do make it to Europe, causing havoc there.

Here it is. It's damning, and the most powerful statement yet:
We hope that Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) and the University of Virginia have the spine to repudiate Mr. Cuccinelli's abuse of the legal code. If they do not, the quality of Virginia's universities will suffer for years to come. Importantly, the Post makes the point that there is no serious evidence to justify the inquiry. You would have to have good reasons for suspecting Mann of fraud; merely disagreeing with his results certainly doesn't suffice. But there is no good reason for suspecting Mann of fraud--misreading emails and taking them out of context does not constitute any such thing. Every inquiry that has looked closely and seriously into ClimateGate has found that there's no there there. Or as the Post recaps:
For Mr. Cuccinelli's "investigation" to have any merit, the attorney general must suppose that Mr. Mann "knowingly" presented "a false or fraudulent claim for payment or approval." Mr. Cuccinelli's justification for this suspicion seems to be a series of e-mails that surfaced last year in which Mr. Mann wrote of a "trick" he used in one of his analyses, a term that referred to a method of presenting data to non-experts, ...

In Science Ann Gibbons has a very long reported piece, Close Encounters of the Prehistoric Kind. It’s well worth reading, but behind a pay wall. If you don’t have access though, I want to spotlight one particular section:

The discovery of interbreeding in the nuclear genome surprised the team members. Neandertals did coexist with modern humans in Europe from 30,000 to 45,000 years ago, and perhaps in the Middle East as early as 80,000 years ago (see map, p. 681). But there was no sign of admixture in the complete Neandertal mitochondrial (mtDNA) genome or in earlier studies of other gene lineages…And many researchers had decided that there was no interbreeding that led to viable offspring. “We started with a very strong bias against mixture,” says co-author David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston. Indeed, when Pääbo first learned that the Neandertal DNA tended to be more similar to European DNA than to African DNA, he thought, “Ah, it’s probably just a statistical fluke.” When the link persisted, he thought it was a bias in the data. So the researchers used different methods in different labs to confirm the result. “I feel confident now because three different ways of analyzing the data all come to this conclusion of admixture,” says Pääbo.

The finding of interbreeding refutes the narrowest form of a long-standing model that predicts that all living humans can trace their ancestry back to a small African population that expanded and completely replaced archaic human species without any interbreeding. “It’s not a pure Out-of-Africa replacement model—2% interbreeding is not trivial,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, one of the chief architects of a similar model. But it’s not wholesale mixing, either: “This isn’t like trading wives from cave to cave; the amount of admixture is tiny,” says molecular anthropologist Todd Disotell of New York University in New York City. “It’s replacement with leakage.”

The power of data to overwhelm human prejudice is sometimes very awesome. And the bias which Reich and Pääbo exhibited was not unfounded; Pääbo was involved in the sequencing of the Neandertal mtDNA, and found no evidence of admixture there. These data were strong, and I believe they should now shift our assessment of probabilities in relation to earlier papers which claimed some admixture between the population which derives from the Out-of-Africa expansion, and the Others.

In the second section it is notable that Chris Stringer has discarded replacement as not viable. He uses the term “not trivial,” which means that it’s a significant finding of note which one can’t simply ignore when generating inferences from a set of facts which one takes as axiomatic. Disotell’s attempt to minimize the finding is more a matter of rhetoric. He does not dismiss the admixture, he simply consigns it to the undefined category “tiny.” To some extent this reminds me of the neutralist vs. selectionist arguments of the 1970s, and more recently of the Out-of-Africa vs. Multi-regionalism disputes in human evolutionary origins. An argument over the meaning of words is a matter of law, an argument grounded in empirical data and quantitative estimates is an argument about science. No one holds to the extreme caricatures of any four of the models at this point; we’ve established that all these paradigms are unchaste, now we’re just haggling over price. We know that humans and the Others did the deed, we’re now mapping out the what, where, and how often.

But this is not the closing of the gate of itjihad. Dienekes presents an alternative model which may explain the data:

There is an alternative explanation. It involves the emergence of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis from a common ancestor and the subsequent admixture of Homo sapiens with populations that have branched out before this divergence. This would account for increased similarity between Eurasians and Neandertals, but without the problem of explaining how “Neandertal” ancestry is so similar in Europeans and East Asians.

What about Africans? Why do they stand further away from Neandertals? The answer is simple: low-level of admixture with archaic humans in Africa itself. It is fairly clear to me that the sapiens line whose earliest examples are in East/South Africa must have been an offshoot of an older African set of populations. We are lucky that Neandertals lived in a climate conducive to bone (or even DNA) preservation, while the African populations inhabiting the tropics left no traces of their existence.

In conclusion: I am not at all convinced that the authors have uncovered evidence of Neanderthal admixture in Eurasians; the alternative explanation is that modern humans and Neandertals were related, modern humans spread from East Africa/West Asia and as they entered deeper into Africa, they interacted with archaic human populations there.

In his magisterial post John Hawks has hinted at more wheels within wheels. From a Kate Wong story in Scientific American:

Intermixing does not surprise paleoanthropologists who have long argued on the basis of fossils that archaic humans, such as the Neandertals in Eurasia and Homo erectus in East Asia, mated with early moderns and can be counted among our ancestors—the so-called multiregional evolution theory of modern human origins. The detection of Neandertal DNA in present-day people thus comes as welcome news to these scientists. “It is important evidence for multiregional evolution,” comments Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, the leading proponent of the theory.

The new finding shows that “gene flow across taxonomic boundaries happens,” observes geneticist Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona. Hammer is among the minority of geneticists who have espoused the idea of gene flow between archaic and modern populations. His own studies of the DNA of people living today have uncovered, for example, a stretch of DNA that seems to have come from encounters between moderns and H. erectus.

I assume Wolpoff is exultant. I do not personally think that this finding necessarily is going to result in a renaissance in Multi-regionalism, but Wolpoff has been the subject of a rising tide of skepticism and dismissal these past few decades. But rather than a more robust discussion between a revived Multi-regionaism and Out-of-Africa, I think these findings, and those that are likely to follow, will force us to move past simplistic typologies and accept that human evolutionary history works itself out through the principles of population genetics, and so can only roughly be modeled in words. The devil is in the parameters.