Thought for the Day

Where are the frantic predictions of doom? Could it be that I've just missed them?

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. (Revelation 13:18)

Do you realize it's just a few weeks until 6-6-6? That's June 6, 2006. Surely some idiot must have already put out a letter on the Internet proclaiming it's the "end of the world" and begging every reader to "send this to everybody on your list."

I do realize Ann Coulter is releasing her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism on that date. She said that the release date was her "little tribute to liberals, to have it come out on 6-6-6." Well, thanks, Ann. I guess.

Ananova reports that an unusual number of people in many areas are scheduling weddings for June 6 this year. Strange. I always heard that marriages were made in heaven. But so are thunder and lightening, of course. (I know. That's an old one.)

Mike Keith's World of Words & Numbers at http://users.aol.com/s6sj7gt/mike666.htm has enough interesting information related to the number 666 to keep a person busy wasting time for at least a good half-hour. Some of it might even be useful to a mathematician, but I'm not one. However, he ends with this jewel:

"Finally, we close with an observation that makes a commentary on the folly of attaching a specific meaning to the number 666. If the letter A is defined to be equal to 36 (=6·6), B=37, C=38, and so on, then:

"The sum of the letters in the word SUPERSTITIOUS is 666."

It's true. I added them up for myself, as any good skeptic would do.

Note: The formula quoted three lines above says "36 (=6·6)." In case it's not obvious to everybody, this just points out that 36 is 6x6, or 6². It's just two more sixes that are seemingly -- but not really -- related to the 666 we started with.

If I'm not a scientist and don't understand half the stuff they say, then how can I possibly believe crazy ideas like evolution?

Before I answer the question, I need to point out first that even scientists themselves have the same problem.

The range of modern science is far too great for any one person to understand it all. Consider just a few of the many fields of science: acoustics, anatomy, astronomy and cosmology, cryogenics, evolution, general and special relativity, geology, meteorology, microbiology, optics, organic and inorganic chemistry, paleontology, plasma physics, quantum mechanics, and zoology. These barely scratch the surface. There are hundreds -- thousands, I suppose -- of additional fields of scientific study; and any particular scientist may specialize in just a very small segment of one of these fields.

Not only is there an incredibly massive amount of material to study, but some of it's so extremely complex that even experts in a given field don't understand it very well yet. After all, the object of science is to learn new things. If we knew everything already, there would be no more need for scientists.

The solution is in the method. The scientific method has been designed and refined over the years to provide accurate information in several ways:

1. It produces many hypotheses and then designs experiments to eliminate the ones that don't work.

2. By replication, it tends to prevent both bias and fraud. That is, many scientists will check each other by repeating the same experiments in different laboratories around the world. For this reason, scientific fraud is almost non-existent. In rare cases when it does happen, other scientists usually expose it quickly. (The recent South Korean cloning scandal is a good example of this.)
   
   Bias is a more subtle problem. After all, scientists are only human; and we all have biases that affect our thinking. Still, replication by other scientists without the same bias tends to expose that, too.

3. The method completely rejects ideas that cannot be disproved (at least potentially). If there's no possible way to disprove an idea, then there's no way to be sure it is correct, either. In scientific jargon, this is known as falsifiability.

4. Science can only accept the ideas that best explain all the data and meet the requirement of the scientific method.

I want to talk more about this subject. Right now, though, I'll just point out that the scientific method works. It's not always as fast or direct as we might prefer, but it does work. Some recent events demonstrate this. You may have already heard about these things in the news.

It's obvious we haven't found all the fossils there are to find, and it seems likely that transitional fossils would be less common (and therefore harder to find) than fossils of longer-lasting life forms. Nevertheless, so-called "missing links" have always posed a problem for people who doubt the reality of evolution.

It is fortuitous that three separate and very different "missing links" have been reported in just the past few weeks:

1. Paleontologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and his colleagues, working on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada, have discovered the fossilized remains of several large, predatory fish with a number of features found in four-limbed creatures. They have given the new species the scientific name Tiktaalik roseae.

   375-million-year-old "fishapod" partial skeleton and an artist's conception of the live creature.

   They've only found the front parts, so they don't yet know what it's hind parts were like or how long it was; but they can tell it had fins and scales like those of many other fish; and it was probably about three feet long. But it had several distinctly unfishlike characteristics, including a short but well developed neck, a flat skull like that of a crocodile, and strong ribs. Most likely, it had both gills and lungs. Especially interesting is the anatomy of Tiktaalik's pectoral fin, which contains the bones of a tetrapod (four-legged animal) arm. Many of these were still articulated.

   "Most of the major joints of the fin are functional in this fish," Shubin notes. "The shoulder, elbow and even parts of the wrist are already there and working in ways similar to the earliest land-living animals." The scientists believe Tiktaalik used these fins to support its body partly out of the water on a rock shelf at the water's surface.
   
   Estimated to have lived about 375 million years ago, Tiktaalik neatly fills the gap between previously known tetrapod-like fish which lived some 385 million years ago and the earliest known tetrapods about 365 million years ago. It is believed to be one stage in the transition between fish living in water and amphibians living part of their lives on land. "Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land animals," Shubin observes. "This animal is both fish and tetrapod; we jokingly call it a 'fishapod.'"
   
   "The find is a dream come true," said Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadephia, co-leader of the team. "We knew that the rocks on Ellesmere Island offered a glimpse into the right time period and the right ancient environments to provide the potential for finding fossils documenting this important evolutionary transition. Finding the fossils within this remote, rugged terrain, however, required a lot of time and effort."

   For more information, check these sites:

   What has the head of a crocodile and the gills of a fish?

   New Fossils Fill the Evolutionary Gap Between Fish and Land Animals

   Getting a Leg Up on Land

2. A 90-million-year-old snake fossil with two hind legs was found in  the Rio Negro province of Argentina and reported just a few days ago. Part of the tail was missing, so its full length is unknown; but it is thought to have been under three feet long. It has been given the scientific name, Najash rionegrina. Najash is Hebrew for snake, refering to the mythical snake in the Garden of Eden. Rionegrina refers to the province where the discovery was made.

3. A team led by anthropologist Tim D. White of the University of California, recently uncovered fossils of a 4.1-million-year-old human ancestor in Ethiopia's Middle Awash valley. The 31 fossils from at least eight different individuals are mostly teeth and jaws, but also include foot and hand bones and part of an upper right leg bone. Dubbed Australopithecus anamensis, it is the earliest known species of the Australopithecus genus.

   What makes this find so significant is that it closes a gap in our knowledge of human evolution. In other words, it's another "missing link" that's no longer missing.

   We already knew Ardipithecus ramidus was there around 4.4 million years ago. By 3.6 million years ago, Australopithecus afarensis,  the species that includes the partial skeleton known as Lucy, was living there.

   Now we know the newly discovered species was in the same place about 4.1 million years ago -- in the gap between the other two species. (The "gap" is only a gap in our knowledge, of course. There's no reason to think the region wasn't inhabited continually during the period by at least one of the three species.)

   Anatomical similarities indicate that Ardipithecus ramidus evolved directly into Australopithecus anamensis, which in turn evolved into Australopithecus afarensis. About 195,000 years ago or so -- after several intervening species came and went -- their descendents finally evolved into a new species known to us as Homo sapiens. That's you and I.