1822: The College of Cardinals finally caves in to the hard facts of science, saying that the "publication of works treating of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted."

It represented a major shift in dogma for the Catholic Church, a concession that the Earth, in fact, might revolve around the sun. Unfortunately, it came 189 years too late to do Galileo Galilei any good.

Still, it would take another 13 years, until 1835, before Galileo''s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems -- the work in which he defends the heliocentric theory -- would be removed from the Vatican''s list of banned books.

As a theory, heliocentrism had existed since the ancient Greeks, who were the first to determine that the Earth is a sphere in a sky full of spheres. It remained an unproven theory directly opposed to the geocentric view held by Ptolemy and Aristotle, and embraced by Rome, that the Earth is the center of the universe.

Without a way to measure religious beliefs, anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion. Now, two anthropologists from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University have developed a new approach to study religion by focusing on verbal communication, an identifiable behavior, instead of speculating about alleged beliefs in the supernatural that cannot actually be identified.
"Instead of studying religion by trying to measure unidentifiable beliefs in the supernatural, we looked at identifiable and observable behavior - the behavior of people communicating acceptance of supernatural claims," said Craig T. Palmer, associate professor of anthropology in the MU College of Arts and Science. "We noticed that communicating acceptance of a supernatural claim tends to promote cooperative social relationships. This communication demonstrates a willingness to accept, without skepticism, the influence of the speaker in a way similar to a child''s acceptance of the influence of a parent."
Palmer and Lyle B. Steadman, emeritus professor of human evolution and social change at Arizona State University, explored the supernatural claims in different forms of religion, including ancestor worship; totemism, the claim of kinship between people and a species or other object that serves as the emblem of a common ancestor; and shamanism, the claim that traditional religious leaders in kinship-based societies could communicate with their dead ancestors. They found that the clearest identifiable effect of religious behavior is the promotion of cooperative family-like social relationships, which include parent/child-like relationships between the individuals making and accepting the supernatural claims and sibling-like relationships among co-acceptors of those claims.

Zoloft works better than God,” a Catholic priest once told me during a conversation about depression. This is not the kind of man to give up on faith; our talks always finish with his reminders to pray. But in matters of body, and in matters of mind more and more, he and many others sense the right thing to do—religiously—is to consult a scientist.

In recent years, such common sense has given rise to a new paradigm in the study of human religiosity, one founded in a laboratory understanding of biology and the human mind. Together, these researchers are attempting to “biologize” religion, recalling E.O. Wilson’s notorious call for inquiry into human values “to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized.” And, like Wilson’s, their efforts have been fraught with controversy.

Driven by a growing confidence in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and genetics, the wider public has begun to embrace truly scientific (as well as pseudo-scientific) explanations of religious beliefs and practices. This idea takes root in an era that led the first President Bush to declare the 1990s “the decade of the brain,” one in which mental illnesses are treated increasingly through psychiatric drugs rather than analysis or spiritual practice alone.

Popular magazines, from Newsweek and Time to the New York Times Magazine, have paraded the research around with catchy labels like “the God spot,” “the God gene,” and “Darwin’s God.” People with a variety of religious perspectives, from Western Buddhists to evangelical Christians to the anti-religious, have explored and discussed biological accounts of belief, each bringing to it their sometimes contradictory assumptions and interpretations. Biologizing is a research project, but it is also a manifestation of a public desire to understand religiosity in the terms of science.

“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.


Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.

The finding won’t give many physicists a moment’s worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.

But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, “God does not play dice.” And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by “hidden variables” that cannot be observed.

Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.

SOME people, notably Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, regard religion as a disease. It spreads, they suggest, like a virus, except that the “viruses” are similar to those infecting computers—bits of cultural software that take over the hardware of the brain and make it do irrational things.

Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.

Mr Fincher is not arguing that disease-protection is religion’s main function. Biologists have different hypotheses for that. Not all follow Dr Dawkins in thinking it pathological. Some see it either as a way of promoting group solidarity in a hostile world, or as an accidental consequence of the predisposition to such solidarity. This solidarity-promotion is one of Mr Fincher’s starting points. The other is that bacteria, viruses and other parasites are powerful drivers of evolution. Many biologists think that sex, for example, is a response to parasitism. The continual mixing of genes that it promotes means that at least some offspring of any pair of parents are likely to be immune to a given disease.

Mr Fincher and his colleague Randy Thornhill wondered if disease might be driving important aspects of human social behaviour, too. Their hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. They therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.

006, I was one of tens of thousands of academic scientists all around the world who received, unsolicited and completely free, a huge and lavishly illustrated book called Atlas of Creation by the Turkish Muslim apologist Harun Yahya. The thesis of the book, which was published in eleven languages, is that evolution is false. The main ''evidence'' consists of page after page of beautiful photographs of fossil animals, each one accompanied by a modern counterpart that is said to have changed not at all since the time of the fossil. It is a large-format book, a thick coffee-table book with more than 700 high-gloss colour pages. The cost of production of such a book must have been extremely high, and one is bound to wonder where the money came from to produce it and then distribute it gratis in so many copies and so many languages.

Given that the entire message of the book depends upon the alleged resemblance between modern animals and their fossil counterparts, I was amused, when I began flicking through at random, to find page 468 devoted to "eels", one fossil and one modern. The caption says,

There are more than 400 species of eels in the order Anguilliformes. That they have not undergone any change in millions of years once again reveals the invalidity of the theory of evolution.

The fossil eel shown may well be an eel, I cannot tell. But the modern "eel" that Yahya pictures (see left) is undoubtedly not an eel but a sea snake, probably of the highly venomous genus Laticauda (an eel is, of course, not a snake at all but a teleost fish). I have not scanned the book for other inaccuracies of this kind. But given that this was almost the first page I looked at . . . what price the main thesis of the book that modern animals are unchanged since the time of their fossil counterparts?

We all know we have the power to make the world a bit greener – and many feel that includes messing with DNA for environmental improvements, or just better efficiency for our gadgets. Now there’s new hope that DNA could play a major role in making computers run with little or no external power.

Researchers at the University of Toyama say they have created the world’s first stable artificial DNA molecules, made from mainly artificial bits to resemble their natural counterparts. Their findings were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society yesterday. Scientists from all over the world have been trying to do this for the promise of using artificial DNA to create biotechnology materials, including powerful DNA computers.

As Ruchi Mallya, an analyst on the use of technology in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology with Datamonitor, explains, such computers are constructed using DNA as software and enzymes as hardware, rather than traditional silicon-based components. This could then hopefully be the start of a new kind of external biological information storage system.

It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.

If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin''s natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or "intelligent design," you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication":

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

GARLAND - Digging for Late Cretaceous fossils in Garland? That''s exactly what more than two dozen volunteers did Sunday while in the hot heat.

The dig began after a Garland resident discovered a mosasaur near his home along Duck Creek.

The Dallas paleontological society members worked 400 hours to excavate the bones of the creature.

While mosasaurs weren''t dinosaurs, they were lepidosaurs, which were reptiles with overlapping scales. The carnivorous sea reptiles swam in an ocean that scientists believe covered Texas millions of years ago.

A trio of fossilized fish has finally settled an evolutionary conundrum that once puzzled Charles Darwin.

The flatfish has always been regarded as an oddity. Although the immature fish has eyes on opposite sides of its head, one of the eyes migrates around its skull before it reaches maturity. Yet there was no evidence for this development process in the fossil record.

Some evolutionary biologists, including Darwin, have argued that the trait evolved gradually over many generations of flatfish. If true, intermediate flatfish with partially offset eyes would once have lived — but no such fossils have ever been identified, giving succour to both creationists and those arguing for sudden jumps in evolution.

But Matt Friedman, a PhD student studying evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has now found three examples of these transitional forms. In the process, he unearthed an entirely new species of ancient flatfish in Vienna and re-interpreted already known fossil fish in London. His work is reported in this week''s Nature