Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

The currently dominant evolutionary story for the origin of religions might be called the "byproduct theory". It goes something like this.

The human brain evolved a series of cognitive modules, a bit like a smartphone downloading applications. One was good for locomotion, another seeing, another empathy, and so on. However, different modules could interfere with one another, called "domain violation" in the literature. The app for locomotion might overrun the app for empathy and, as a result, the hapless owner of that brain might discern a spirit shifting in the rustling trees, because the branches sway a little like limbs moving. The anthropologist Pascal Boyer calls such interpretations "minimally counterintuitive". They can't be too random or they wouldn't grip your imagination. But, clearly, they are not rational. Religion is, therefore, a cognitive mistake. It might once have delivered adaptive advantages: swaying branches could indicate a stalking predator, and so you'd be saved if you fled, even if you believed the threat was a ghost. But rational individuals such as, say, evolutionary theorists now see religious beliefs for what they really are.

Given that this is the story that often does the rounds, it is striking that Robert Bellah's new book, "Religion in Human Evolution," has no time for it whatsoever. Literally. Look up "Boyer" in the index and you are led to a footnote. "I have found particularly unhelpful those who think of the mind as composed of modules and of religion as explained by a module for supernatural beings," Bellah remarks. They have a "tendency toward speculative theorizing and [a] lack of insight into religion as actually lived". In short, the story is neither convincing when it comes to cognition, nor when it comes to describing religious practice.

Bellah's judgment matters because he is a venerable sociologist of religion who takes evolution seriously: it can be revealing about the nature of religion, he insists, though only if you are talking about religions as they actually exist. So what goes wrong? A fundamental mistake, Bellah argues, is to conceive of religion as primarily a matter of propositional beliefs. It is not just that this is empirically false. There are good evolutionary reasons for understanding religion in an entirely different way, too.

Go back deep into evolutionary time, long before hominids, Bellah invites his readers, because here can be found the basic capacity required for religion to emerge. It is mimesis or imitative action, when animals communicate their intentions, often sexual or aggressive, by standard behaviours. Often such signals seem to be genetically determined, though some animals, like mammals, are freer and more creative. It can then be called play, meant in a straightforward sense of "not work", work being activity that is necessary for survival.

Yes yes, we're all agreed that evolution is true, and that the biblical (or Qur'anic) accounts of creation are literally false and should not be taught any other way in science classes. This has been the case for at least the last 50 years. Yet studies show that the number of creationists, or at least those who deny or fail to understand the fact of evolution, is very large among the adult population. Last year's Theos study, for example, showed something like 40% of the UK's adult population unclear on the concept. There are also stupefying numbers for the proportion of the British population who think, or who at least will assent to the proposition, that the Earth is around 10,000 years old.

This is quite clearly not a problem caused by religious belief. Even if we assume that all Muslims are creationists, and all Baptists, they would only be one in 10 of the self-reported creationists or young Earthers. What we have here is essentially a failure, on a quite staggering scale, of science and maths education. The people who think the Earth is 10,000 years old are essentially counting like the trolls in Terry Pratchett: "one, lots, many". Ten thousand is to them a figure incalculably huge.

I don't think this particular innumeracy matters nearly as much as the related inability to calculate that, say 29.3% annual interest on credit card debt is in many ways a much larger and more dangerous number than 10,000 years. But you can't blame either flaw on religious belief. You could perhaps blame it on human nature. There is a lot of good research to show that children are natural creationists, who suppose that there is purpose to the world, and that we have evolved that way. That needn't worry teachers terribly much. A great deal of the world that science reveals is absurdly counter-intuitive and in one sense the whole purpose of education is to lead children away from the "folk beliefs" that they develop naturally.

It is perhaps fitting that the new prototype of a machine Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church developed to "mass produce" new genes looks a little like a high-end stove. (Linked Photo courtesy of Marie Wu.) "Cooking," as one lab director once told me, is basically what lab researchers do. They cook with genes.

The MAGE (multiplex automated genome engineering device) will allow scientists to cook exponentially faster.

One of the major obstacles to genetic engineering has been the cost and labor involved in changing even a small number of genes in an organism. The most basic of traits (for example, the redness of a tomato) can depend on a complicated network of several sequences of genetic code. If any progress is to be made in changing multiple traits in organisms (especially the kind that scientists and entrepreneurs hope can be used to synthetically ‘grow’ alternative forms of fuel), then they will need to come up with a more efficient way to do it.

One way, some have suggested, is to let Darwin do the work. And that’s where the MAGE comes in.

Church’s machine in essence allows genetic engineers to introduce multiple versions of genes–written and synthesized in the lab–into bacterial cultures. Researchers can then ‘encourage’ (zap) the bacteria into incorporating the new genes, and once assimilated into the organisms’ genomes, multiple generations can be grown in a matter of a few days. In the process, variants of the new genes evolve and the engineers can screen the new organisms for the genomes that are most useful to them.

I am at a conference in Dubai on science, religion and modernity, and the best question to come up was "should we clone Neanderthals?" Let's assume the kind of technical progress which would make this look like a possibly ethical thing to do: the failure rate with mammalian cloning has been so high that it really would be rather dodgy to inflict the process on a human being. But for the sake of argument assume a reliable technology and a sufficiency of DNA to work with.

Of course, the first difficulty from the strictly utilitarian point of view is that we don't know what the consequences would be. Neanderthal brains were physically different from ours and we have no idea how that impacted their consciousness. We assume they had speech, but this is obviously something that does not fossilise. So it's hard to judge the consequences inflicted on a sentient being when we have no clear idea of what kind of sentience is involved.

So a straightforward calculation of the likely consequences can't be done in the way that it can at least be attempted in bioethical questions as they affect homo sapiens. That doesn't mean that religion can provide answers, either. I haven't asked a Roman Catholic but assume that they would apply the same kind of precautionary principle as is applied in the case of abortion: that something which might be a human being should always be given the benefit of the doubt. But other religions, and other forms of Christianity, are not opposed to human cloning. They might not be opposed to cloning Neanderthals.

So let's not set it up as a science v religion argument. There will be ethical disagreement, but this will lie between believers as much as between unbelievers. Does it make a difference that this would be an experiment? It's science, which means that we discover things by trial and error. These trials are carefully constructed to ensure that the errors are as instructive as possible, but the outcome can't be known in advance. It's not easy to see how one could be certain of having a complete and viable sequence of Neanderthal DNA when there is nothing to compare it with and only the broad assumption that if the specimen from which it was extracted made it to adulthood it was reasonably healthy.

Some interesting items this week in the science blogosphere related to Junk DNA. As University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran points out, ID proponents are gearing up to tout a new book claiming Junk DNA is a myth–and that the human genome is filled with intelligently designed genes with functions scientists are only now beginning to understand.

Key to the "myth" talking points of creationists is the notion that when biologists back in the 1970s first began realizing how large a percentage of the human genome was non-coding, they simply asserted it was functionless ‘junk’ in line with their innate Darwinian bias. And now, suddenly, to their utter surprise and chagrin, various functions are in fact being discovered for the junk.

From which we are to conclude, the creationist argument goes, that most scientists are knee-jerk ideological Darwinists, and isn’t this another good reason to get a better theory like intelligent design into the public school science classrooms.

T. Ryan Gregory at Genomicron has tirelessly pointed out the problems with the myth argument over the past few years. He cites a number of articles from the journals of the time to show that scientists never dismissed junk DNA in the literature. His blog is a great resource on the subject in general.

But also of interest, this week, are two posts (part one, part two) by botanist Stan Rice, author of Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed Out World reviewing John C. Avise’s book on just how not-so-intelligently designed the human genome actually is.

This week the National Center for Science Education awarded paleontologist and writer Niles Eldredge its Friend of Darwin award for 2011. Eldredge, who is Curator and Research Paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, is the author of several books on evolution and a leading opponent of creationist attempts to undercut the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

In the early 1970s, Eldredge, along with his colleague the late Stephen Jay Gould, formulated the theory of punctuated equilibrium, arguing that evolution over the eons was not as gradual as Darwin argued in his Origin of Species.

While Eldredge and Gould engaged in spirited debates about their theory with more ‘gene-centric’ biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, creationists tried to take advantage of the sometimes acrimonious discussion by claiming that Eldredge and Gould had fundamentally undermined "Darwinism" at its core.

I contacted Eldredge about this on the day after receiving his award and asked him if this made his theory harder to defend in the early days.

"Yes," he said. "Last night when I accepted the NCSE Friend of Darwin award, I started off by saying that in our early years, Steve and I were indeed considered by many, professionals and not—to be no friends of Darwin’s. And creationists did indeed seize on this."

For example, he said, in 1980 former aerospace engineer Luther Sunderland, a widely known creationist, prevailed upon Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters to have Reagan allege at a fundamentalist preachers’ gathering in Texas, that evolution is only a theory—and that some scientists were beginning to have problems with it.

"The syllogism was Evolution equals Darwin," said Eldredge. "Thus any criticism of Darwin was an expression of doubt about evolution. Ironically, all that was the prime mover to get me to write The Monkey Business [his first book]—to begin to confront this sorry mess."

Despite winning court battles at every turn, advocates for teaching evolution as the unshakable bedrock of high school biology courses have been losing on the ground to an astonishing degree.

In a recent essay in Science, Penn State political scientists Eric Plutzer and Michael B. Berkman reported that their survey of U.S. public high school biology teachers show that only a relative small minority unambiguously teach the mainstream scientific view of evolution. Only 28 percent of the 926 instructors surveyed consistently implement the recommendations of the National Research Council, which calls on high school biology instructors to present without qualification the overwhelming evidence for evolution. About 13 percent of these public school instructors are active advocates for creationism or Intelligent Design as "valid scientific alternatives" to evolution — and, says Plutzer, "an additional five percent of teachers take the same position, though typically in brief responses to student questions."

Plutzer, co-author (with Berkman) of Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms (Cambridge, 2010), discusses in a Big Questions Online interview more surprising facts uncovered by the survey, and their implications for science education in America.

Many assume that resistance to evolution is something largely confined to the rural South. Do the survey data indicate that the phenomenon is limited to one or more regions of the country?

Prior to our study, there were many surveys of teachers that also pointed to widespread teaching of creationism. But these earlier studies never included studies of the California, New York and the New England states. Our national probability sample of teachers confirmed what several scholars had suspected, that active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts. Skepticism about evolution can be found all over the country, and many future teachers begin their education as evolution deniers. Those with strong feelings are unchanged by their college science education and bring these feelings to their classrooms.

What role does the local community play in the kind of biology taught in their public high schools?

The local community plays several important roles, and perhaps the most important is in the hiring and retention of teachers. We found that (on average, of course) teachers who do not accept human evolution tend to find jobs in the most socially conservative districts. Thus many teachers share values with their communities and find it easy to teach in accord with those values. Of course, "mismatches" are quite common, and teachers who find themselves at odds with local sensibilities may try to leave or fit in as best they can without stirring up controversy.

However, fitting in and avoiding controversy is not always possible. Many communities have large pro- and anti-evolution constituencies. We found that the teachers who experienced the most pressures to teach in a particular way were those in school districts with both a large number of doctrinally conservative Protestants and a large number of highly educated citizens. In these districts, there is no easy path for teachers to teach in accord with local opinion because local opinion is polarized.

Here are three questions of the kind evolutionary theorists love. First, why do most mammals walk on four legs? Second, how come some single-celled protists have genomes much larger than humans? Third, why have camera eyes evolved independently in vertebrates and octopuses?

They're important questions as they challenge certain versions of Darwinism that are dominant today in popular discourse. They are posed, alongside many others, in a rich mix of high theory and low knockabout in a new book by Conor Cunningham, Darwin's pious idea: How the ultra-Darwinists and creationists both get it wrong.

Ultra-Darwinism is the kind associated with the new atheism, the selfish gene and what Daniel Dennett calls evolution's "universal acid". Cunningham has form when it comes to critiquing its flaws. You may have seen his TV documentary, Did Darwin Kill God? In the book, he has not one hour but several hundred pages to persuade us that a new consensus is on the way in evolutionary circles and, moreover, it's remarkably amenable to Christian theology. Consider, then, the questions.

First, why do most mammals walk on four legs? It may be because four is an optimal adaptation for walking on land. Or it may be because the number four originates with the four fish fins that predate mammal legs. The difference is subtle but much hangs on it. If the number four is an optimal adaptation – not merely a byproduct of fins – then it exemplifies the power of natural selection to explain all sorts of traits. Only, consider a millipede. It would presumably think there's nothing optimal about four at all. I'd blame the fish, it might muse. And we might remember the millipede's contribution because, if it's hard to say whether features of organisms are adaptations or not, that causes all sorts of problems for the universal acid of ultra-Darwinism.

Strongly adaptationist explanations are common in ultra-Darwinism and the work of the acid. But as Cunningham repeatedly – actually, obsessively – points out, when they are rehearsed as gospel, they exact a terrible price. They describe such humanly invaluable features as mind, ethics and free will as delusions – akin to what Nietzsche called "true lies". The resulting nihilism is one of Cunningham's prime objections to the paradigm.

Philosopher Mary Midgley on morality, mythology and the story of the Selfish Gene (interviewed by Andrew Brown and Richard Sprenger)

This has not been a good year for the Discovery Institute. I'm sure book sales to their core creationist audience of Biblical literalists are steady. And, as Barbara Forrest has shown, they're hoping the Louisiana State Education Act, which is directly based on their own template for state public education policy, allows Fundamentalists in at least one state to disallow biology science textbooks that teach evolution.

But that's not the same thing as having one of your Institute Fellows get a paper published in Nature. Or Cell. Or Science. It's not the same thing as celebrating a grant from the NSF to pursue some promising research.

The Discovery Institute has from its beginning claimed it would in short order get actual scientists to consider intelligent design as a viable scientific theory, by publishing peer-reviewed articles in the leading science journals.

But they've failed. And no matter how much cheering the Institute Fellows get from friendly audiences at Bible schools and church socials, the reality is: this was not the way things were supposed to turn out.

And now, they're losing the Catholics.

This past year, prominent Catholic conservative intellectuals at once ID-friendly magazines and web sites, started to break their silence about the vapidity of intelligent design.

First, Edward Feser, professor of philosophy at Pasadena College, began posting a series of essays showing up the hollow philosophical shell at the heart of intelligent design. Feser's main point is that, at least for Catholics, ID is hopelessly devoid of solid metaphysical grounding:

"The problems are twofold. First, both Paleyan 'design arguments' and ID theory take for granted an essentially mechanistic conception of the natural world. What this means is that they deny the existence of the sort of immanent teleology or final causality affirmed by the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic tradition, and instead regard all teleology as imposed, 'artificially' as it were, from outside."

It's hard to believe it's already five years since the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial was underway at the Federal courtroom in Harrisburg, Pa. There, 11 parents of high school students successfully challenged the attempt of the school board's creationist majority to require that intelligent design be taught as an alternative to evolutionary theory.

Judge John E. Jones III agreed with the plaintiffs when he ruled on Dec. 20, 2005 that the school board's action, to have students informed that evolution was not established and that intelligent design should be considered, was unconstitutional pursuant to the establishment clause, the imposition of a religious proposition into a public school science class.

Ever since, the Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that actively promotes intelligent design for ideological reasons, has been trying to spin the events surrounding the trial and to denigrate the judge's decision.

For a recent example, in the spring of this year, Lehigh professor of biochemistry, Michael Behe, a Discovery Institute Fellow who was a star witness for the defense during the trial, made the claim that the judge was simply not competent to understand what was truly at stake in the case.

In a May interview for the Salem News with a friendly correspondent , Behe was asked whether Judge Jones was impartial and unbiased:

In a press release at the Discovery Institute's Evolution News, Institute Fellow John G. West recently attacked British scientist Denis Alexander for downplaying Darwin's use of the term "survival of the fittest" in his work.

The philosopher Herbert Spencer first coined the term, and Darwin had reservations about employing it in his book The Origin of Species. But this is of small consequence to West and conservatives of a certain bent who loathe evolution. As far as they're concerned, evolution simply means survival of the fittest, and the application of natural selection to society in their view has inspired dangerous social movements, from Social Darwinism to Nazism.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. West writes:

"Darwin opposed slavery (to his credit), but he also was a thoroughgoing racist who thought natural selection provided a scientific rationale for why we should expect to see races with different intellectual capacities. In his book The Descent of Man, Darwin disparaged blacks and observed that the break in evolutionary history between apes and humans fell "between the negro or Australian and the gorilla," indicating that he considered blacks the humans that were the most ape-like. [Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), vol. I, p. 201] Darwin also predicted that "[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races." [Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), vol. I, p. 201] Darwin's contribution to scientific racism is hard to deny, no matter how much contemporary Darwinists try to rewrite history.

Now, what's interesting about this broadside is the selective quoting to make the point that Darwin was not just your average Victorian with a condescending bias against the intellectual capacity of non-whites. After all, this is an attitude even Abraham Lincoln shared, and he waged a destructive civil war to end slavery and keep the Southern States from seceding from the U.S."

West wants his readers to realize that Darwin's racism had murderous overtones and that therefore the science of evolution must be suspect. It goes without saying that neither West nor anyone else at the Discovery Institute has any peer-reviewed research papers to counter the massive scientific evidence for evolution (a healthy sample of which can be found in this new book, already headed for its second printing: Evolution: The Extended Synthesis).

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the papal encyclical "Humani Generis," that laid out the Catholic Church's official relationship with Darwinian evolution. The pastoral letter, issued on Aug. 12, 1950 by Pope Pius XII, confirmed, in broad terms, that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the scientific theory of evolution. Considering that this was three years before the nature of DNA was even discovered, the pope's foresight in deciding to address the topic is remarkable.

Eugenio Pacelli, as Pius XII was known until his papacy, 1939-958, was the first pope to regard science and technology as subjects deserving their own encyclicals, or pastoral letters to Catholics world-wide.

For example, one of Pius's longest (and last) encyclicals, "Miranda Prorsus" ("Utterly Amazing," on Motion Pictures, Radio and Television), issued detailed guidelines on how Catholics in the entertainment industry should conduct themselves. In these days of downloadable pornography, and movies and music rife with sex and violence, the pope's enthusiasm for the positive social potential of entertainment, what he termed "food for the mind especially during the hours of rest and recreation," is touching.

In an ironic way the pope's hopeful attitude leaves one with a much stronger sense of dismay over how the industry has evolved—or devolved—than if he had simply issued a blanket condemnation of the media as a whole.

But it was another encyclical that earned Pius XII a chapter in the annals of the history of science. "Humani Generis" (Of the Human Race) laid out the Catholic Church's accommodation with Darwinian evolution—provided Christians believed the individual soul was not the product of purely material forces, but a direct creation by God.

Biology has a long history with ideology. At times, the conflation of the two has led to substantial human suffering. A new collection of essays, published as Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins, amply demonstrates the diversity of such mashups. Contributors examine matters from colonialism to eugenics.

Here, on Cif Belief, the boundaries between science and polemic blur pretty regularly, and the book has a broad lesson for our forum: whilst it is possible to disentangle past uses and abuses of biology it is more difficult to do so when it comes to instances in our own times.

Consider one paper, written by philosopher, Michael Ruse, who looks at the links between evolutionary science and the politics of progress. His account serves as a cautionary tale.

He notes that notions of progress, whilst common amongst pre-Darwinian evolutionists, disappeared from the literature once the science became established. This is partly because progress, as an idea, took a "heavy knock" in the Origin of Species. Natural selection relativised everything. Is a big beak an advance on a small one? Is a human an enhanced ape? The answer depends entirely upon context. Hence, although Darwin indulged in a little progressivism in his later Descent of Man, he had previously noted: "Never use the word higher or lower."

Mendelian genetics confirmed as much by insisting that the mutations which power natural selection are random. So the palaeontologist Jack Sepkoski could write: "I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd whilst being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival." That his colourful turn of phrase implicitly questions progressivism, only demonstrates how hard it is to write about biology without ideological intent – a point to which we'll return.

More and more these days it seems like evolution is turning into a litmus test with only two possible results. If you accept evolution, creationists consider you a heretic. If you question evolution, Darwinists denounce you as a moron. But history shows that a qualified acceptance of evolution was, from the moment Darwin published his Origin of Species, a default position for many who were open to the theory, even when they were deeply disturbed by it.

Sixty years ago the controversial pope Pius XII, for example, made an accommodation with evolution the official position of the Catholic Church, when he wrote in his encyclical Humani Generis, that the scientific investigation of the material origins of the human body was perfectly legitimate, provided Catholic theologians kept in mind that the soul was to be considered always the direct creation of God.

This is not a position that would win friends amongst creationists or materialists. But it was a step forward for the Catholic Church, as it had not been nearly so accommodating to theologians even a generation before Pius XII. In two noteworthy cases in the late 19th century, Father Rafaello Caverni in Italy, and Father Dalmace Leroy in France were forced to withdraw from publication thoughtful books they had written attempting to reconcile Christianity with evolution.

What's fascinating about the cases of both priests, is that their books were quite modest, and very conservative: both argued—as many theists do today—that all species, with the exception of the human race, could be considered the products of evolution, while reserving for humanity alone a special status as the direct creation of God. [You don't have to be religious to believe that humans are special; it has been the default position of Hollywood filmmakers since Kubrick produced

2001: A Space Odyssey.]

This was not good enough for critics in Rome, and after long deliberations and reviews by the Holy Office, which decided whether certain works should be placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, both men good naturedly submitted in writing retractions that today would be considered utterly humiliating for any scholar. History would prove kinder to them, however. Indeed, one of the reasons Pope Pius XII decided to address evolution formally in 1950 was to alleviate some of the embarrassment the Catholic Church felt over of its treatment of scholars like Caverni, Leroy and others.

Today’s most cutting-edge scientific thinking: from switching off ageing to "enhancing" our babies; understanding consciousness to finding dark matter. You read it here first.

Humans are still evolving

The modern world hasn't stayed evolution's hand. Comparisons of different genomes show that natural pressures are still doing their thing. The gene for digesting lactose, for example, is slowly spreading from European populations to the rest of humanity. A gene that appears to enhance fertility is also becoming more common across Europe. Disease is still a big driver of human evolution: people with particular genetic arrangements are more likely to survive malaria and HIV, for example. And almost all humans have lost the caspase 12 gene from their genomes, probably because those who have it are more susceptible to bacterial infections. It happens slowly, but we're still changing.

This is one of many universes

Physicists like to know why things are as they are. Which makes it frustrating that some facts about the universe appear inexplicable. There are certain constants of nature - the numbers that determine how strong forces such as gravity are - that seem to be "just so" for no good reason. That wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so exquisitely perfect for allowing life to develop in our universe. Naively speaking, it looks as if someone designed the universe. That doesn't seem like a satisfying explanation to most physicists, so they have come up with a better one: that there are many universes, all with different properties. It is impossible to move from one to another, so we can't test this idea, but it does take away the "specialness" of the conditions we find ourselves in. Of course the universe is perfect for us: if it were any different we wouldn't be here to observe it.

We might be able to turn off ageing

Can we flick a switch in our genome that will greatly extend our lifespan? Experiments on worms, mice and fruit flies indicate that stopping certain genes from functioning, or altering others so that they flood the body with particular combinations of chemicals, can dramatically slow the rate at which an organism ages. It can even be done by more low-tech means: changing the chemical environment of the body by altering the diet or by injecting certain hormones can slow ageing, too. It's an alluring avenue of research, but it is also controversial.

Plenty of biologists still say it's a mirage because we will never overcome the biological programme whereby cells die after a certain time, or indeed the rigours of wear and tear on the genome. Add that to the dangerous genetic copying errors that occur as cells divide and, for these naysayers, growing old remains an unavoidable future for humanity. Nevertheless, the consensus is that the fight against biological ageing has moved from impossible to enormously difficult, and that is exciting progress.

You really do get by with a little help from your friends. Recent US research indicates that if you have lots of friends, you are likely to live much longer. The study tracked more than 300,000 people over seven years and concluded that having a good support network is as influential a factor in your long-term health as whether or not you're a smoker. The researchers involved are calling for doctors to add patients' social networks to the health-care checklist.

If your doctor asking about your friends seems unlikely (more unlikely, at least, than insurance companies pushing up premiums for loners), perhaps that's because this finding seems entirely unsurprising. Friends keep you happy, which helps keep you healthy. They also assist with practical issues, such as getting to a hospital check-up. But research into life expectancy can throw out surprises. Take its relation to teenage pregnancy, for example: people in low life-expectancy groups become parents earlier.

It has been known for a while that, in the face of deprivation, stress or direct threats, many animals embark on reproduction much quicker. It is now becoming clear that the animal we know as Homo sapiens is no different. Young teenagers' experiences of being threatened, getting into fights or being offered drugs provoke a biological reaction: they become parents much sooner. Teenage pregnancies aren't just another fact of life in a difficult upbringing. When biologists use controls for all the social factors, an early exposure to menace or mortality seems to be a biological trigger for reproduction. A brush with death makes you broody.

Perhaps it shouldn't really come as a surprise. If your primary goal is to live for ever by passing your genes on to the next generation, there is always a balance to be struck. You want to maximise your progeny's chances of survival by providing a good, stable upbringing. But you also don't want to die childless while waiting for the right conditions. Poverty brings low life expectancy, a low chance of future prosperity, an increased chance of debilitating illness and greater exposure to life-threatening crime. The genes' response? Get on with getting it on before it's too late.

Anyone hoping for a quick fix to teenage pregnancy would do well to step back and look at this bigger picture; the recent announcement that 28 per cent of all teenage girls who are eligible for free school meals have been pregnant at least once (and 7 per cent twice) makes perfect evolutionary sense.

By his own admission, Francisco J. Ayala has had "a very chequered career". After graduating in physics in his native Spain, he studied theology and became a priest, before moving to the United States, where he has dedicated the rest of his career to evolutionary genetics and molecular biology.

This varied intellectual path has, however, put the 76-year-old Ayala in a good position to explore the relationship between science and religion, which he believes provide complementary perspectives on our existence and are not in conflict with one another. It has also landed him this year’s Templeton Prize, an award given by the Templeton Foundation in the United States to an individual "who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery or practical works", and which is accompanied by a cheque for £1 million.

Born in Madrid in 1934, Ayala grew up under the dictatorship of General Franco. He was ordained as a Dominican priest in Salamanca in 1960 but realised that his true vocation lay in science. He remained a priest for about four years, agreeing with his superiors that he would go off and study genetics as long as he continued to obey his vows during this time. He travelled to New York, where he studied under celebrated biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky at Columbia University and then moved west to California in the early 1970s.

Among his many contributions to genetics and evolutionary biology, Ayala has pioneered ways of using variations in DNA sequences to reconstruct evolutionary history. He has also carried out much research on malaria and other tropical diseases, for example recently discovering that malaria was probably passed from chimpanzees to humans just around 5,000 years ago and that chimpanzees may serve as reservoirs for malarial parasites, leaving humans vulnerable to the disease even if a vaccine is developed.

I was at a conference just recently, where we told tales of vampire bats that share their blood, bacteria that work together, and monkeys that ease group tensions by making love. It set me thinking about the evolution of morality, for there is one story of it that’s often told, and it begins with a problem. Natural selection favors the best-adapted individual: it’s called survival of fittest. It explains why we feel fear or lust. But how can this ‘selfish’ account of natural selection explain moral emotions like altruism that might lead the individual to abandon their self-interest in favor of others, even to the point of self-sacrifice?

The problem is resolved by pointing out that it’s only the gene that is ‘selfish.’ That take allows for circumstances in which the survival of the individual may not best serve the transmission of the gene. For example, the interests of the gene may be better served if the individual is sacrificed for the sake of the group, when the group is composed of kin—other carriers of the gene. That’d explain why parents will surrender all for the benefit of their children. Alternatively, the gene may be best served if the individual is prepared to form cooperative relationships with others, on the basis that if I scratch your back, you might scratch mine.

Blessed Mistakes

Now, this story accounts for many instances of kin and reciprocal altruism in the natural world. However, it comes unstuck with humans. We look odd from an evolutionary perspective because we will sacrifice ourselves for individuals with whom we don’t share our genes, and when there’s no prospect of the favor being returned. Call it our Good Samaritan tendency.

Francisco Ayala has been awarded the 2010 Templeton Prize. A distinguished evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist, he is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a holder of the American National Medal of Science. His work on parasites has opened up new approaches in the development of vaccines against malaria. The prize is noted for the size of its award: £1m. Ayala will donate the money to charity.

He has been chosen for his longstanding championing of the distinctiveness of science and religion. He was an expert witness in the 1981 court case that overturned the Arkansas law mandating the teaching of creationism alongside evolution. He is the principal author of the National Academy of Sciences publication, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a refutation of creationism and intelligent design. "Darwin was right in all the respects that are most important to natural selection," Ayala remarked, when I spoke with him at a recent seminar in Cambridge.

His position on the relationship between science and religion is close to that of Stephen Jay Gould. They are non-overlapping magisteria. As Gould put it:

"The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise – science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives."

Are we evolutionarily programmed to be selfish or to be cooperative? To care primarily for self, kin and survival or to sacrifice for the strength of survival of our "group?'' Can science be truly neutral in this discussion? Or are the findings of science fair game for political and social policy ammunition?

Such questions -- and contesting answers -- date to Charles Darwin, August Comte (who invented the term "altruism" in 1881) to Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and on up to contemporary critics of both, says historian Thomas Dixon, a professor at the University of London and author of The Invention of Altruism.

Dixon gave one of the concluding lectures at this weekend's seminars on the brain and morality at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion. He also highlighted authors who look at cooperation through the lens of a social or political agenda and conclude, as Joan Roughgarden does in The Genial Gene, that "cooperation is every bit as natural and obvious as competition."

Darwin did indeed give credence to the ruthless competition model of nature dictating organisms to "multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."

And yet, he also concluded in The Descent of Man, that love and sympathy and cooperation also exist in the natural world, like the way pelicans might provide fish for a blind pelicanin their flock?

"Communities with the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best and produce more offspring" and, Darwin wrote, in an outburst of Victorian moral emotionalism, "virtue will be triumphant."

Dawkins flips this in his work to say that the visitors of evolution are the selfish ones and that altruism must be taught. If we serve each other it's a "blessed misfiring" of genetics.

How do we know we evolved to be ethical when "morality doesn't leave any fossils? "

That question, from Martin Redfern of the BBC, was just one of many on the origins of ethics and morality at seminars this weekend. I've invited F&R; readers to join me here at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion where the ideas are flying among scientists, theologians, philosophers and the reporters who cover them.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, traced humanity's evolutionary development and linked the capacity for ethics to advanced intelligence, the development of language and the unique-to-humans concept of self-awareness.

"If I know I exist, I know that I am going to die," said Ayala, professor of biology and philosophy at University of California, Irvine, who then linked this to the rise of religion. Humans are the only ones who practice ceremonial burial of the dead, he said,

"We develop anxiety over our life ending so we try to look for answers beyond our life. This is likely why religion emerges in every society -- as a way to relieve this anxiety."

He thinks ethics -- which can also exist apart from religion in his view -- evolved at the same time as aesthetics, the awareness of beauty. Art and aesthetics, like human altruism, require value judgments and the ability to compare.

Even with his celebrated skill for making meticulous observations of nature, Charles Darwin never could have seen anything like the E. coli glowing fluorescent green in a laboratory at the University of Minnesota.

The natural forces of evolution Darwin described so famously 150 years ago did not craft these bacteria.

Laboratory workers did. They took the basic parts list for life — DNA's four defining chemicals — and created a suite of genes that aren't naturally present in E. coli. The synthetic genes transformed the bacteria into living microprocessors, capable of the logic exercises you find on a silicon chip.

Such are the products of an exciting and controversial scientific thrust called synthetic biology.

Biologists are poised to take over evolution, diverting species from their natural Darwinian courses and turning them in directions scientists want them to take.

Darwin observed evolution. Synthetic biologists are learning to control it — breaking down and reassembling life's basic parts as if they were so many Lego bricks on the floor on Christmas morning.

In the process, they are amplifying debate over one of the most profound questions humans face: Is the world ours to make and transform as we wish?

Ordering life by email

Instead of waiting for Darwinian evolution to produce useful mutations as it has for some 4 billion years, synthetic biologists

Here's professor Sehoya Cotner's "Five Cent Tour of Human Evolution" in summary: Fossils, DNA and other evidence add up to the unassailable conclusion that humans gradually emerged more than 100,000 years ago as part of the great ape family.

For many of the 200 students in Cotner's University of Minnesota biology class her "tour" was the first serious exposure to the subject, even though evolutionary theory is a foundation for biology and many other courses they should have prepared to study in college.

"They didn't allow evolution to be taught in my high school because of the controversial issues," student Brandi Ziegler said after the class.

It is 150 years ago today since Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of the Species," laying down a theory for understanding the intricacies of life on the planet. If Darwin could come back today and walk through laboratories and libraries in Minnesota alone, he surely would be amazed see the vast body of knowledge built upon that theory.

Still, evolution remains so culturally volatile that many high-school teachers shy away from it, leaving students with major gaps in their understanding of basic science, according to research by Cotner and professor Randy Moore, another U of M biologist who has written books about evolution.

Here are highlights from survey findings they reported in BioScience, a journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences:

• Minnesota law requires that academic standards — including the theory of evolution — be taught in the state's public schools. Yet,

The admirable Theos project on Darwin concludes with the publication of a study on how British creationists think (pdf). To forestall the entirely predictable accusation that it's not science if Christians do it, this research was actually carried out on Theos's behalf by the ethnographic research firm ESRO. By interviewing 50 prominent anti-evolutionists, mostly Christians, but some Muslims and agnostics too, whose views ranged from intelligent design to young earth creationism, the researchers managed to get a picture of a movement whose most interesting characteristic is that it isn't one. In fact one of their interviewees was taught at Sussex by John Maynard Smith, an experience he describes as "a real privilege".

Interviewees did not seem to be united in either a geographical or a political sense. They did not necessarily belong to or attend any creationist groups or organisations and, where they did, they belonged to different ones. They did not keep contact with their counterparts in the US and they did not necessarily communicate with each other. There were vehement disagreements over theological matters and over the means by which evolution scepticism could be promoted. Intelligent design had not successfully created a paradigm through which all evolution sceptics might engage in the debate around evolution.

About half of their interviewees were full-on young earth creationists, believing in the literal truth of the Bible, and hence of a 6,000-year-old earth: but the interesting thing about this is that much of their propaganda was directed not against the evil Darwinians, but against the backslidden old-earth creationists, or, worse, ID-ers.

Although the interviewees were anonymous, one of these backsliders is described as the principal of a theological college. But it is important, I think, to notice that the reason for rejecting evolution, for those who put biblical authority first, is not that biology couldn't work that way (a later rationalisation) but that an evolutionary story is incompatible with the age of the earth.

Although both terms creep into the debate over evolution, being YEC [young earth] or OEC [old earth] does not in itself imply anything necessarily about beliefs regarding the truth of evolution; rather, they are positions on the age of the earth (as taught by the Bible) which have implications for beliefs about evolution

This is an important example of the way in which rejecting evolution leads inexorably to the rejection of the whole of modern science – history, ecology, and physics as well as biology.

Published 150 years ago, Charles Darwin's seminal work, On the Origin of Species, continues to cause debate between scientists and some people of religious faith for whom the idea that man evolved from more primitive animals remains controversial.

Bridget Kendall chairs a debate about evolution and faith from a conference at the famous Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

She is joined by an audience of students and academics and a panel including: John Hedley Brooke from the Theology Department of Oxford University; Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates; Salman Hameed, Professor of Integrated Science and Humanities at Hampshire College in Massachusetts; Eugenie Scott, Director of the US National Centre for Science Education in California; and Samy Zalat, Professor of Biodiversity at the University of the Suez Canal.

They discuss how Darwin’s ideas were received around the world in his own time, and how attitudes vary today, from the Christian fundamentalist heartland in the USA to faith schools in the Middle East. Will there always be conflict between evolution and religion? Do they apply to different, non-overlapping worlds? Or can science live in harmony with faith?

Related Links

Darwin Now
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
British Council Conference on Evolution and Society

It's easy to suppose that the whole vast apparatus of modern creationism has taught us nothing at all. All those books, the endless arguments on usenet and then on the web, the museums, the theme parks, the teaching materials – all of it dedicated to teaching lies; none of it contributing so much as a moment's thought to the advance of knowledge.

But I think there is one important thing which all these millions of hours of labour has shown that could not have been learned any other way. It wasn't intentional. But creationists have proved that most scientists have a very naïve and inadequate idea of evidence. In particular, they believe that the justification for believing scientific claims is that they are reproducible and produce irrefutable evidence. The creationists have shown this is mistaken. Of course the experiment must be reproducible. Of course the results must be clear. But it's just as important that we take both these things on trust. When scientists report results we take them at their word. Without a belief that they are trustworthy, nothing they do compels belief. That is why fakery, when detected, must be so severely punished.

This was known before creationism was a problem. Richard Lewontin has written about the way in which even scientists cannot still less reproduce and judge, experiments outside their fields. But he's a sort of Marxist and easy to ignore. In any case, his assumption was

ISTANBUL -- Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students' ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.

But she was taken aback when several of her Marmara University students recently accused her of being an atheist, or worse, for teaching anything but the doctrine that God created the Earth and everything on it.

"They said I was a liar if I called myself a Muslim because I also accepted evolution," she said.

What especially disturbed -- and amused -- the veteran professor was that the arguments for creationism presented by some of the students came directly from the country where she was educated in the biological sciences years before -- the United States. Translated and adapted for a Muslim society, the purported proofs that Darwinism and evolution were wrong came directly from American proponents of Christian creationism and its less overtly religious offshoot, intelligent design.

Ergezen's experience has become increasingly common. While creationism and intelligent design appear to be in some retreat in the United States, they have blossomed within Muslim Turkey. With direct and indirect help from American foes of evolution, similarly-minded Turks have aggressively made the case that Charles Darwin's theory is scientifically wrong and is the underlying source of most of the world's conflicts because it excludes God from human affairs.

"Darwin is the worst Fascist there has ever been, and the worst racist history has ever witnessed," writes Harun Yahya, the most assertive and best-known critic of evolution in Turkey, and long a favorite of more conservative American creationists.

The evolution-creationism battle is playing out against a backdrop of a much larger conflict between the forces of secularism -- as represented by the Turkish military and many of the country's more educated citizens -- and forces, including the popular ruling party, that want to make religion more important in national affairs. The Islamic anti-evolution campaign is taking place in Turkey, and not Egypt or Saudi Arabia, because it is the Muslim nation where evolution has been taken most seriously. Like the Bible, the Koran says that God created the Earth and everything on it, and in many Muslim nations that ends the discussion.

But Turkey, which is officially secular, appears to be joining its Muslim neighbors on evolution. A recent survey, quoted in a 2008 article in the American journal Science, found that fewer than 25 percent of Turks accepted evolution as an explanation of how modern life

Sacrifice. It doesn't seem the most promising subject with which to commend Christian thought to a sceptical world. Surely compassion or wonder would play better, as experiences everyone has anyway. But sacrifice. It seems primitive, bloody, irrational. Part of religious history to overcome and leave behind.

In fact, there has been a revival of sacrifice amongst philosophers of religion in the 20th century. The man here is René Girard. His idea, roughly, is that our desires are mimetic – we desire what others desire – and that this leads to conflict, since we therefore desire the same things. This instils cycles of violence in human cultures, as desire provokes conflict provokes revenge. And the only way to break the cycles is to load the build up of violence onto a scapegoat, a party innocent of the original mimesis who acts as a sacrifice. Christ's death on the cross might be the supreme example.

But on Tuesday this week, Sarah Coakley, delivering her inaugural lecture as Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge – the one that covers philosophy of religion – contested Girard's interpretation of sacrifice as irrational (because of the mechanism upon which it's based), but commended sacrifice to us nonetheless – a commendation based upon evolutionary theory, no less.

Her argument stems from her collaboration with Martin Nowak, professor of biology and mathematics at Harvard University. He's been working on the possibility of a new principle in evolution, that of co-operation, without which, he's shown using game theory, "competitiveness dethrones itself" – which is to say that natural selection couldn't work. By co-operation he means something quite specific: foregoing of fitness advantage so that others may have it. His work resonates with that of other evolutionarists, notably Lynn Margulis, who's argued that multicellular life could never have evolved without symbiosis. The point is that this kind of co-operation is not just a supervenience on essentially selfish mechanisms, as advocated in the work of Richard Dawkins. Individual advantage cannot explain it, co-operationists say. If that's right, co-operation must be as fundamental in evolution as mutation and natural selection.

The quarrel between religion and evolution has taken an interesting turn. Instead of attacking religion, some Darwinists have embraced it as a product of human evolution. Now they're debating to what extent this evolution was biological. Evolution and biology are coming apart.

This is a tricky concept to grapple with in today's biologically dominated era of science. Let me try to explain where we are. Three years ago, while on a Templeton fellowship at the University of Cambridge, I heard one of those ideas that not only sticks in your head but starts to reorganize your thinking. The idea was convergence. The speaker was Simon Conway Morris, the Cambridge paleontologist and author of Life's Solution. Conway Morris affirmed evolution as a mechanical explanation of animal and human development. But he also argued that evolution takes place in an ordered world. Because similar features evolve repeatedly in different contexts, there must be something about the world that favors such features.

There's nothing inherently spooky or religious about this idea. We have a straightforward model of it in the well-known pattern of phase changes. At certain temperatures and pressures, this or that element will naturally change from solid to liquid to gas. The fact that such transitions can be explained mechanically doesn't erase the fact that the points at which they'll happen can be predicted independently. In that sense, they're caused not just by heating or cooling but by the pre-existing structure of the

The findings were unnerving: We are not the favored creation of God. Species that have vanished forever are greater in number and possibly more important that those that live. Change may not be an uninterrupted progress toward perfection.

Small wonder that Charles Darwin was slow and frightened to finally publish his great work, The Origin of Species, and face "scandal" over his theories of "kinship, extinction and the great family," says Dame Gillian Beer, emeritus professor of English literature at Cambridge and author of Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction.

Beer set Darwin's extraordinary and revolutionary work in a social and literary context in today's lecture at the Templeton-Cambridge program I'm attending this week in England.

She talked about how a man who felt a "backbone shiver" of pleasure with music and poetry when he was young lost this as an older man, troubled by the antipathy to his ideas. He still found pleasure of novels, particularly those with a happy ending. This fits a man obsessed with the questions of the novels of his time, all about descent, inheritance and family.

"He thinks about where is the human. What is the scale of the human?" Beer says. And "he was going to show that human beings had a very brief part of the history of the world."

Darwin would also redefine the "great family" so that "great" no longer meant aristocratic, educated, landed and wealthy but "great" as in large and wide and old, part of organisms past and present, "not a very privileged place."

Want your scientific discoveries to make the kind of impact that Darwin made? Write them up like pulp fiction.

I'm at a seminar on science and religion at Cambridge University. Gillian Beer, a distinguished professor of English Literature, has been arguing today that Darwin's voracious consumption of the Victorian novel, with all its adultery, racial and class politics and family scandals, was a big factor in the lasting success of the Origin Of Species.

Darwin was a great fan of fiction. He had his wife read to him from novels every afternoon. In his autobiography he stated that novels "have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists." He loved a happy ending, and characters that he could root for - "and if a pretty woman all the better," he said.

Beer's analysis of the language of the Origin of Species leads her to believe that his use of metaphor and his instinct for storytelling earned the Origin a much wider audience than any scientific work would normally get. "He used things that were familiar to his readers," she said.

Even on a broad level, the Origin has the elements of the world's most successful narratives. The idea that there are only a handful of basic plots - overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; rebirth - is widely established in Hollywood.

Continuous and often strident opposition by religious believers to Darwin’s theory of evolution has marked the past century and a half. The heartland of this opposition has been the United States, where so-called "Creation science" was born and where "intelligent design", an attempt to demonstrate the need for a designer in nature, has taken hold. However, religious opposition to Charles Darwin’s ideas have in recent years become a feature in many other countries around the world. Yet some biologists argue just as stridently as the creationists that Darwinian evolution is all we need to explain man’s place in nature and that this scientific idea makes God redundant.

It was against this background that the Vatican hosted a conference in honour of Darwin at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome earlier this month entitled "Biological evolution: facts and theories". The aim of the meeting, according to the organisers, was to give scientists, philosophers and theologians the opportunity to discuss the progress and implications of evolutionary biology without, on the one hand, turning ideas about Creation into scientific theory or, on the other, reducing evolutionary thinking to scientific dogma.

Plotting such a course is a tricky business. As Fr Rafael Martínez of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome told the conference, the Catholic Church has itself not always been entirely reasonable in its response to Darwin’s ideas. Martínez pointed out that although there was no Galileo-style condemnation in the case of evolution, the Church did place a number of books sympathetic to Darwin’s ideas on its Index of Prohibited Books. The Church’s position on evolution softened in the twentieth century, moving from a policy of no comment, through saying – in the 1950s – that it did not forbid research on the subject, to the statement by Pope John Paul II in 1996 that evolution is "more than a hypothesis".

Darwin’s theory of evolution – descent with modification through natural selection – is remarkably simple. "Descent with modification" refers to the gradual emergence of new species over time from changes to previously existing species. "Natural selection" is the process responsible for these changes. It means that over time the average fitness of creatures increases, leading to new species.

Last month, scientists from around the world partied into the small hours on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Darwin.

But as we celebrate the work of one of the most influential scientists ever, let's take a moment or two to remember others who contributed ideas in the history of evolutionary thought. Many came from Britain as well as other countries in Europe. Others came from further afield, and their writings are increasingly coming to light thanks to the painstaking work of historians of science, and historians of ideas.

One of them is an East African writer based in Baghdad in the 9th century called al-Jahiz. In a book describing the characteristics of animals, he remarked:

"Animals engage in a struggle for existence, and for resources, to avoid being eaten, and to breed." He added, "Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming them into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to their offspring."

Or there's Muhammad al-Nakhshabi, a scholar from 10th century central Asia. He wrote: "While man has sprung from sentient creatures [animals], these have sprung from vegetal beings [plants], and these in turn from combined substances; these from elementary qualities, and these [in turn] from celestial bodies."

In their excellent Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, Adrian Desmond and James Moore describe

In the 5th century B.C., pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Empedocles developed a rather fanciful theory of the evolution of life. For the following thousand plus years, other philosophers and scientists offered their own evolutionary theories, and by the late 18th century, such ideas had become increasingly common.

In particular, members of Britain’s Lunar Society, including industrialist Josiah Wedgewood and especially physician Erasmus Darwin, promoted a theory of evolution informed by the Industrial Revolution.

But none of these thinkers managed to solve what 19th century astronomer John Herschel referred to as the "mystery of mysteries" — none could explain the mechanism by which evolution operates, by which new species come into being.

None, that is, until the arrival of Darwin’s and Wedgewood’s grandson, who was born shortly after both of his grandfathers died, and who would revolutionize science just a half century after their deaths.

Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England on February 12, 1809. As the son of physician Robert, who had followed in the footsteps of his father Erasmus, Darwin was expected to pursue a career in medicine and was sent to the University of Edinburgh.

Darwin’s distaste for medicine was evident to him early on, but his education at Edinburgh did prove important as he met physician Robert Grant, who would introduce Darwin to marine biology, which became a lifelong passion.

Grant also introduced Darwin to the ideas of French evolutionist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, whose theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is now entirely discredited, but was accepted by Darwin until his death.

When Darwin informed his father of his disinterest in medicine, he was sent to Christ College, Cambridge in 1827, to read for a degree in divinity. While he had no more interest in becoming an Anglican clergyman than a doctor, Darwin did graduate near the top of his class in 1831.

But Darwin’s years in divinity school did prove to be undeniably important, for it was at Cambridge that he met the men who would

Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?

1 The missing universe

Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there's not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff - "dark energy" and "dark matter" - but that doesn't really tell us anything about them. And it's not as if they're not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.

2 Life

I know you think you're more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time you see a tree, ask yourself why that is alive when your wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define - instead they're investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.

3 Death

Here's the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there's no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn't have survived natural selection. Then there's the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly - if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).

4 Sex

Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn't understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning - sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don't know the answer. The suggestion that sex's gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.

5 Free will

If you want to keep your sanity, look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our

intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and

science as our guidelines.

- Bertrand Russell

In the Creation-Evolution Struggle, historian and philosopher of biology Michael Ruse writes, "in both evolution and creation, we have rival religious responses to a crisis of faith - rival judgments about the meaning of life [and] rival sets of moral dictates . . . ."

This is a startling statement, for several reasons. First, while we often hear creationists equate Darwinism with religion, Ruse, an agnostic, has spent much of his career defending evolutionary theory against creationist attacks.

Second, as we discussed in Part II, science is a method for understanding, explaining and controlling the natural world. Nowhere does this method provide us with the basis for making moral judgments or discerning the meaning of life. In other words, science is a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, enterprise - it concerns itself with what is the case, not what ought to be the case, or how we ought to behave.

For example, the science of evolutionary biology describes the world by telling us that all living things are descended with modification from a common ancestor, and that this produces a branching tree-like pattern of life. This tells us nothing about how to live or about the meaning of life.

Those matters are the province of religion and ethics, which are at least partly prescriptive disciplines. Yet if evolution does concern

Given the often amicable relationship between science and religion throughout the history of Islam and Christianity, the current hostilities, centred around creationism and evolution, seem something of a historical anomaly. And many commentators suggest that they are also a geographical anomaly, in that the promotion of creationism and intelligent design is restricted to Islamic countries and the United States.

But the latter suggestion is not quite true. While creationism and ID enjoy more "official" support in

Islamic countries than anywhere else, and while the U.S. has been the epicentre of the creationism-evolution wars, battles have also been fought in many European countries, Australia and Canada.

Witness the 2007 Ontario provincial election, when Progressive Conservative candidate John Tory, in an

effort to bring parochial schools within the purview of public education, echoed the American sentiment

that evolution is just a theory, and hence advised that schools should teach "that there are other theories that people have out there that are part of some Christian beliefs."

Or witness the 2006 controversy in Quebec, after the Ministry of Education, knowing some independent schools were teaching creationism, ordered the schools to teach the theory of evolution or close their doors. Suffice it to say, then, that the creationist movement has been highly successful in its efforts to influence education in Canada. And this is all the more astonishing given that the creationist movement was itself created only about a century ago.

Many people believe that young Earth creationism -- the dominant form of creationism, which aintains that God created the world, in roughly its present form, in six literal days some 6,000 years ago -- was widely accepted until the advent of modern science.

Yet the young Earth creationist movement is of a much more recent vintage. Most early Christian theologians accepted that parts of the Bible, including the creation story in Genesis I, were meant to be read allegorically, rather than literally. For example, in the fifth century, St. Augustine argued against a literal six-day creation in The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Augustine also displayed a wonderfully cientific mindset, remarking that we should be willing to change our minds in light of new information, and should be wary of reflexively interpreting the Bible literally, for it could discredit the faith.

Although you're probably not aware of it, scientists, lobby groups, the media and the courts are all united in a massive conspiracy to destroy your freedom. But have no fear, freedom fighter Ben Stein is here.

That, in effect, is the thesis of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new anti-science "documentary" which opens across Canada on June 27, was produced by Vancouver's Premise Media, and stars Stein, the lawyer, actor, game show host and speechwriter for former U.S. president Richard Nixon.

The subtitle of the film is wholly appropriate as there is precious little intelligence displayed in its more than 90 minutes. But the subtitle's reference to the content of the film was unwitting -- it was meant to refer to a giant conspiracy to banish intelligent design theory from the halls of academe and the culture as a whole.

Now, you might ask, what exactly is intelligent design? But don't ask the producers of the film, since they don't even bother to define it. Don't ask Stein, either: I did, but all I got from him was a suggestion that the meaning of the term comes through in the film.

Since the producers evidently saw no need to define what their movie is about, allow me: Though proponents deny it, ID is the latest form of creationism, as it states that the apparent design in nature reveals that there must have been a designer. While proponents insist that ID has nothing to do with religion, they inevitably conclude that the designer is none other than the Judeo-Christian God.

ID is therefore a religious theory, rather than a scientific one. Scientific theories must yield testable hypotheses -- that is, they must make predictions and we must be able to test whether those predictions come true. But since we never know what God will do next,

Scandal A: A prominent politician gets caught sleeping with a campaign aide and plunges himself into an ugly paternity dispute -- all while his cancer-stricken wife is fighting for her life.

Scandal B: A prominent politician's signature health-care plan turns out to have been put together badly, and he is forced to confess that the plan will cost taxpayers billions more than expected.

It's a no-brainer which scandal is likely to catch -- and keep -- our attention. The interesting question as the presidential election heads into the homestretch is why we care more about some stories that do not affect us directly, even as we tune out other stories that do.

It isn't just about sex. John F. Kerry was damaged by accusations about his military service in Vietnam; George W. Bush fended off endless accusations that he dodged military service using family connections -- events that allegedly occurred more than three decades earlier. Rumor mills on the Internet today insinuate that John McCain once admitted to being a war criminal (he did not) and that Barack Obama is a Muslim (he is not).

The question is not which scandals are true but why certain story lines hook our interest. Why are we more likely to discuss a gossipy rumor at a party than a policy error that can actually make a material difference to our own lives?

One explanation is that cultural mores attune us to certain stories -- we live in an era where gossipy scandals rule. To test this, psychologist Hank Davis at the University of Guelph in Ontario examined hundreds of sensational stories on the front pages of newspapers in eight countries over a 300-year period, from 1701 to 2001.

Remarkably, he concluded that the themes of sensational news were identical not only across the centuries but also in diverse geographic locales -- from the United States to Bangladesh, from Canada to Mauritius. The stories that editors put on the front pages of newspapers -- presumably stories that interested readers -- included headlines such as "Crocodiles Tear Apart Thai Suicide Woman."

The stories were sometimes about important things and sometimes not, but they nearly always involved the kind of themes that people who are part of small groups like to know about one another: lying and cheating, altruism and heroism, loyalty and disloyalty.

The 2009 Darwin celebrations are officially under way, now that we are halfway through Richard Dawkins' flagship TV series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. But I can't help but feel they have not begun well. Dawkins' exploration of the science seems to be driven mostly by his desire to score atheistic points: this is not evolution as survival of the fittest but as zero-sum game.

It is a wasted opportunity on at least two accounts. First, making much of creationism and intelligent design only feeds them the oxygen of publicity. Most Christians find accommodation with evolution, and welcome it. "Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend," wrote Aubrey Moore, the late-Victorian Anglo-Catholic theologian. Why not celebrate that? Wouldn't it be a better strategy than giving creationism prime time?

It would leave more room for the science too. Which leads to the second point. The science of evolution is becoming much more interesting than a black and white presentation of it allows. Moreover, for believers, it is starting to look far less bleak than the phrase "survival of the fittest" implies.

Such directions are explored in a new collection of essays by leading evolutionists, philosophers and theologians in a book, entitled The Deep Structure of Biology. The central issue under discussion in this case is that of evolutionary convergence. The editor of the book is also the great champion of convergence, namely the Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris.

The work of Conway Morris, and now many others, is showing that evolution keeps coming up with the same solutions to natural problems. One of the better-known examples is that sabre-toothed cats. They evolved on at least three different occasions along independent Darwinian paths. And yet they look almost exactly the same. Dozens of examples of convergence have now been documented across a wide variety of biological phenomena, from animal and plant physiology to molecular biology.

More than 350 years after the inquisition hounded Galileo over charges of heresy, physicist Howard Van Till, of Calvin College in Michigan, confronted a little inquisition of his own. Van Till roused a small but fervent pack of enemies at the conservative college with his book, "The Fourth Day," in which he argued that the stories of the Bible and science’s account of evolution could both be true.

His critics on the school’s board of trustees had no interest in reconciling the religious account of creation with a naturalist explanation of how life and the universe have evolved over the ages. For years after the book’s release in 1986, Van Till reported to a monthly interrogation where he struggled to reassure college officials that his scientific teachings fit within their creed. Van Till’s career survived the ordeal, but his Calvinist faith did not. Over the next two decades, he became the heretic his critics had suspected.

Maybe the inquisitors were right to see contradictions between his science and their religion, he thought. Their beliefs demanded a God of absolute power who intervened constantly in the history of life and in human affairs. But Van Till found that picture increasingly at odds with his conviction that everything from stars to starfish has evolved according to natural laws. The college inquiry, he says now, "shook me awake."

He could have dropped all faith in God, in the long tradition of scientific atheists, whose most recent champion is British biologist Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion."

The $27 million Creation Museum opened its doors in northern Kentucky on Monday. Hundreds of people came to the opening of the museum, which promotes the Biblical story of creation over evolutionary science.

Protesters outside the museum criticized it for trying to replace science with fiction.

Twenty-five years ago, Ken Ham says, he felt a calling to build a museum to promote creationism.

A quarter-century and $27 million later, The Creation Museum has opened in Petersburg, Ky., just outside Cincinnati.

The displays offer the creationists' view of how the world came to be, which differs sharply from the teachings of science.

Ham, a native Australian, breaks down the differences for Steve Inskeep:

"There is a conflict if you try to add evolution to the Bible and take Genesis as literal history," he says. "For instance, the Bible teaches man was made from dust in [the book of] Genesis … whereas evolution would teach that man came from some ape-like ancestor.

"I know there are many Christians who say they believe in evolution [over] millions of years," he says. "I would say they're being inconsistent in their approach to scripture. A literal Genesis is actually the foundational history for the rest of the Bible for all doctrine.

Ham's view explains why visitors enter to see two animatronic baby dinosaurs alongside two children.

"When you have dinosaurs and people together, that makes a statement concerning one's belief about the age of the Earth and evolution," he says. "Obviously it flies in the face of what secular evolutionists will teach."

Ham says the museum – which drew protesters on Monday – does try to cover both sides of the debate.

"We actually do give both sides as people walk in," he says, explaining that a fossil exhibit has "a creation paleontologist" and "an evolutionary paleontologist" offering different interpretations of the same fossil.

He rejects the idea that science has a lock on empirical evidence.

I’m curious: Is there anybody on the stage that does not… believe in evolution?

That was the question put to the 10 GOP presidential hopefuls during a May 3 Republican presidential debate on MSNBC.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) already had said he did.

But when the rest were asked the same question, three hands went up: those of Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Ah, the flood of facile jokes!:

Those Luddite Republicans!

They don’t believe in evolution because, in their case, it didn’t happen!

Et cetera. Hardy har har.

Three candidates do not a party make. But it was a telling moment for those wondering where the GOP is headed.

Petersburg, Kentucky, is in the middle of North America. It is supposedly within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the US population.

For the rest, it is just 10 minutes from Cincinnati International Airport. That is why it was picked as the site for a new museum, due to open in a couple of months.

We enter the landscaped grounds through gates flanked by wrought iron stegosaurs.

The lobby is modelled on a cliff in the Grand Canyon. But this is no ordinary museum of science and geology.

It is the dream of Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian ministry that promotes the idea that the Biblical book of Genesis should be taken literally in describing the creation of the world, life and humans as carried out by God over a six-day period a few thousand years ago.

We get as far as the museum bookshop—already well-stocked with creationist titles—but no further.

Officials tell us that state regulations forbid it. It is still under construction and closed to visitors.

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