After having dinner with Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Prof. Steve Steve was pandanapped by a man in a top hat. Perhaps one of those intelligent-design activists at Telic Thoughts, who recently accused the professor of being a panda puppet. They seem to be more familiar with him than they should be.
I know it would mean a lot to Prof. Steve Steve if you friended him on Myspace or joined his fan club on Facebook.
It is spring and dandelion season. I am performing an interesting experiment in artificial selection. Every day, I go outside and pick dandelion flowers. Dandelion flowers are practically the only vegetable waste that I do not compost.
I usually take a bucket and pop the flowers off, as well as the buds. I am more likely to miss the shorter-stemmed flowers, because they are hidden below the grass, which normally needs mowing. I am therefore selecting for dandelions whose flowers mature and go to seed in less than 1 day or whose flowers grow shorter than the grass. It remains to be seen whether growing too short a stem is adaptive; possibly the grass will then prevent the dispersal of seeds by the wind. If so, we can expect to see a period of stasis.
Even after a few days I find that I am picking shorter-stemmed dandelions. Clearly, the later-maturing dandelions are acquiring the characteristics of those I have just picked – even though they are not descended from the previous generation. More surprisingly, the previous generation was not short-stemmed but only aspired to shortness before I nipped it in the bud. The effect depends on distance: there appears to be an inverse-square law, with more-distant dandelions less likely to inherit the shortness of their neighbors.
Dandelions undergo spontaneous generation. More surprisingly, they sometimes appear in their fully mature, adult form within less than 30 minutes: I can scour my backyard, find not a single dandelion, and then come back 30 minutes later and easily find more than one.
I have developed a quantitative theory that explains how the dandelions can appear spontaneously and bring with them characteristics that their neighbors only wished they had: Goddidit.
I anticipate green dandelion flowers any day now.
I don’t typically cross-post many of my infectious disease topics over here unless they have a clear evolution slant, but I thought I’d let readers know about a recent case in Australia, where a HIV+ man was convicted of endangering the lives of three women by exposing them to the virus via unprotected sex. He appealed, and the basis of his appeal was the assertion that HIV doesn’t exist, a claim backed by some so-called “HIV dissidents” who use tactics very similar to creationists: quote-mining, misrepresentation off the literature, etc. The judge came back with his decision on the whole circus today, and I discuss the results at Aetiology.
Just wanted to inform readers of The Thumb that I’m going to be appearing on a radio debate with Dr. Cornelius Hunter. The show will broadcast live from 10:05am to 11:30am EST Saturday morning April 28th. You can call in at 904.854.1320 or e-mail your questions/comments to [Enable javascript to see this email address.].
BCH
I have been forgetting to mention that Darwin descendant Matthew Chapman‘s book 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin®, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania has just appeared in the bookstores. Here is the publisher’s website with background material, an interview with Chapman in New Scientist, the Amazon page, a review, and Chapman’s February 2006 article on the Kitzmiller trial in Harper’s.
Yesterday, I wrote about Wiley Interscience and the Society of Chemical Industry making legal threats against fair use: Wiley Interscience: Where Science Meets Legal Threats.
Today, Shelley Batts received an apology from them:
We apologise for any misunderstanding. In this situation the publisher would typically grant permission on request in order to ensure that figures and extracts are properly credited. We do not think there is any need to pursue this matter further.
Congrats to everyone who helped get the word out about the threats. You helped Shelley and the rest of the science-bloggers out.
Theodore Roosevelt Wrote:In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the signing of the bill setting aside Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park. Roosevelt was a large figure in the movement to establish the national park system, so it only seems appropriate to take up an issue about how the National Park Service is operating now.
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release on December 28th, 2006, that brought up the fact that the National Park Service (NPS) was then three years delinquent in delivering a promised review of its sale of a creationist book, Tom Vail’s “Grand Canyon: A Different View”. The release, unfortunately, included ambiguous phrasing whose most likely reading yielded a false claim that NPS had issued a “gag order” to its rangers and docents in the Grand Canyon national park to stay silent on the geological age of features in the park.
I’ve been doing some more digging concerning the situation with the national park interpretative exhibits, curricula, and bookstore merchandise. While there has not been an explicit, “Don’t talk about the age of the earth or park geology” directive given to rangers and docents, there is entirely too much credulous stuff that offers to take anti-science sources seriously. Rangers and docents are officially encouraged to tell park visitors about the “tenets and explanations of Creationism”. In evidence of a state of neglect when it comes to the accuracy of merchandise in the parks, it turns out that Tom Vail’s “Grand Canyon: A Different View” is not the only anti-science tome available for sale in park gift shops; Vine Deloria, Jr.’s “Red Earth, White Lies” may also be picked up at various stores.
Various people have accurately criticized the overblown claim of the original PEER press release concerning a gag order on interpretative staff telling visitors about deep time, essentially exonerating NPS of committing arson in its approach to science. But I feel that many have overlooked other data that does indicate a general administration strategy of encouraging dry rot instead, de-emphasizing the science content associated with park interpretative programs and credulously treating creationism and other anti-science stances.
Read on for the details.
In another observation of pop culture’s war on ID, I bring you a remark by Wired:
Apparently feeling pressured by Tux, supporters of Darwin, an open-source version of the Mac OS, decided they needed their own mascot. The result is Hexley, a curious platypus who in some images is portrayed with horns and a pitchfork – enough evidence for several intelligent design theorists to offer him as proof of the satanic origins of evolutionary biology.
This is additionally funny to us because we run FreeBSD, whose mascot, Beastie, inspired Hexley.
Shelley Batts over at Retrospectacle was contacted yesterday by a representative of Wiley Interscience, who objected to her fair use of part of one figure from a paper. Shelley has posted the exchange on her blog.
Wiley’s legal threats are baseless because fair use allows people “to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism.” In addition, this move by Wiley is very stupid given that Shelley was promoting a paper published in one of their journals. She was providing good press for them. But in one stupid move Wiley has turned that good press into bad press.
Because of this I will not be publishing in any Wiley journal for the foreseeable future, and I call on others to do the same.
If you want to email the journal about this, here is the contact information.
Update: Wiley has a record of acting dubiously. (via Afarensis.)
Update: An apology has been issued.
The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is at About Archaeology. Read!
Are you getting bored with Earth? Maybe you should consider a move to 581 c:
For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for “life in the universe.”
The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a “red dwarf,” is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
But don’t pack your bags just yet…
There’s still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it’s worth noting that scientists’ requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth’s with temperatures that would permit liquid water.
Still, it’s a neat find. No word yet if the planet is “designed for discovery”, but presumably anyone living there would have discovered those things that are easy to discover, and will therefore conclude that the planet must be situated just right for discovery. At least if their species has creationists.
Below the fold I’ll add some more excerpts from the article. Or you can just read the whole thing.
As the discussion over the Liu-Ochman flagellum evolution paper continues, it is clear that I need to do a little more arguing to defend my position. Although some were convinced that skepticism was justified based the previous PT posts (basically: 1. this goes against much prior published knowledge and 2. just look at the obviously different structures), others have defended the paper or at least suggested that the alleged problems are not as overwhelmingly obvious as they seem to me. Two primary lines of argument have been raised. First, some have pointed out, correctly, that the reputation of the authors and journal in question far outweighs the reputation of a blogger like me, so why should readers trust me over PNAS? I will concede the case when it comes to reputation; all I can say is that over the years I have developed some familiarity with the literature pertinent to flagellum evolution, and as I read through the PNAS paper it became apparent that it was going against much of what was already known. This is not necessarily bad if a direct attempt is made to rebut conventional wisdom, but if assertions are made without much evidence of awareness that they go against previous work, that is problematic.
Over the weekend, another “Egnor” post appeared on the Discovery Institute blog. This one addresses a post I wrote two weeks ago discussing the “Framing Science” article. In his “response,” “Egnor” manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the “Michael Egnor” articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes.
(For the record, I’m neither a “prominent Darwinist” nor a “prominent scientist.” Also, there are only two possible ways that someone could claim that “find a way to get people who aren’t interested in the science behind an issue to care about the issue itself” is the same thing as “recruit people who don’t care about science to the cause of Darwinism.” The author either has a level of respect for honesty that falls below the Roveian, or he has the reading comprehension skills of a repeatedly concussed chipmunk. In either case, I have real problems believing that it’s coming from a reportedly well-respected neurosurgeon.)
It’s been fun while it lasted, but the game’s over now. Would whoever is really writing this stuff please take this opportunity to own up to it? Please? Come on, I know it’s got to be someone who is a regular here.
On UcD, Salvador Cordova, makes the common and fallacious argument that ID somehow predicted function in ‘junk DNA’. In fact, there is no logical foundation for this claim as ID lacks predictive power beyond ‘Darwinism does not explain X’. At most Sal can claim that people who are also proponents of ID have ‘predicted’ function for Junk DNA. But as such they are not much different from scientists who have predicted function for Junk DNA as well. Where they differ is in what motivated them to reach such a conclusion.
Cordova Wrote:ID theory has provided positive inspiration toward scientific inquiry and participating in the reversal of “the greatest mistake in the history molecular biology”, a mistake inspired by Darwinist dogma.
ID has contributed little either in predicting or establishing function in ‘Junk DNA’ but it also seems to be basing its claims on further ignorance about the origin and evolution of the term Junk DNA (which originated from the ideas of proponents of neutral evolution and was originally limited to refer to pseudogenes). While it should not come as a surprise that ID attempts to ride on the coat tails of real science, such an attempt can be quickly countered.
Nevertheless, even in his enthusiasm, Sal seems to have downgraded ID’s contribution to ‘positive inspiration’. Even ID proponents seem to shy away from making claims that ID is scientifically fertile and are willing to settle for ‘inspirational’.
Already in 1998 Should Scientists Scrap the Notion of Junk DNA? Bob Kuska describes how science had come to realize the many treasures in ‘junk DNA”.
(Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 90, Number 14 Pp. 1032-1033)
and Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Junk–the Semantics of Junk DNA
Well, not exactly… But the following press release allows us to explore a common confusion amongst ID proponents, in addition to providing more compelling evidence supporting common descent.
The origin of the brain lies in a worm: Researchers discover that the centralised nervous system of vertebrates is much older than expected
First of all, an “ancient” evolutionary prediction
The findings provide strong evidence for a theory that was first put forward by zoologist Anton Dohrn in 1875. It states that vertebrate and annelid CNS are of common descent and vertebrates have turned themselves upside down throughout the course of evolution.
So how come UcD ‘contributor’ DaveScot considers the findings an argument from incredulity? And what are ID’s explanations and or predictions?
Those who have been following the comments section of the first post on the PNAS flagellum paper, entitled “Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system,” will see that there have been several developments: ScienceNOW at Science magazine has uncritically reported the PNAS paper’s all-flagellar-genes-came-from-one conclusion; Behe and other IDers are getting into the act, although they are so clueless they don’t really even understand why the PNAS paper is problematic; and PZ Myers and I have dropped hints that several of us PT bloggers are reaching the conclusion that this paper is looking worse, not better, after close examination. We will have more on the technical methodology issues in the next few days. For the moment I would just like to offer a simple response to some comments, and a simple but powerful reason that the “all core flagellum genes are descended from one ancestral gene” does not work.
First, the comments. Some commentators have reacted along the following lines: (1) maybe the paper isn’t so bad, just speculative; and/or (2) maybe I’ve misread the paper or its conclusion was poorly worded, and maybe the authors just meant to argue that some of the 24 core flagellar proteins were related, not all 24 proteins.
Unfortunately – and I mean unfortunately because I wish one of these options was true – neither idea is a supportable interpretation of the authors’ views. Have another look at Figure 3 from the Liu & Ochman paper:
A detailed eyewitness report on the Discovery Institute’s conference revival at Southern Methodist University last weekend has been published. This bit (p. 3) is particularly good:
At this point, we were fed up with the sheer lack of science being discussed. (Remember, ID theorists claim to support a science, not a religion.) So we held up our signs. They bore questions such as, “Why do we have wisdom teeth if they do not fit our jaws?” and “Why did it take 20 species of elephant to go extinct to get two species that survived?” and “Why do the ribosomes (protein synthesizing machinery) in our mitochondria match those of bacteria?” to name a few.
Some recent science journalism from The Onion: Unemployed Scientists Prove Dog Likes Beer
Over at After the Bar Closes, Steve Story has set up a poll asking for educational background from PT/AtBC participants. With 90 responses in, the results so far are:
Check it out.
by Douglas L. Theobald
As many of you undoubtedly know, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor is the Discovery Institute’s latest garrulous creationist mouthpiece. In a recent blog entry responding to Michael Lemonick of Time Magazine, Egnor claims that the 19th century scientists Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell used “the inference to design” to study electricity:
“Let’s ask: what role did the inference to design play for scientists who gave us electricity? … The two scientific pioneers of classical electromagnetism, Faraday and Maxwell, were particularly devout Christians who inferred design everywhere in nature. They believed that God designed everything — including electricity. Their approach to science was pure design inference, undiluted by atheism or materialism. … They worked entirely from the design inference.”
Faraday and Maxwell were Christians who did indeed see design in nature. However, Egnor has it backwards.
Today the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) put out an Advanced Online Publication paper on flagellum evolution entitled, “Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system.” The paper is freely available via Open Access. I was initially excited that PNAS had published a paper on this topic, and furthermore that it cited the Pallen/Matzke essay on flagellum evolution, and Ian Musgrave’s excellent book chapter in Why Intelligent Design Fails.
Unfortunately, as I read the paper, my delight turned to concern, and then dismay. The paper makes some potentially useful points and explores new territory in a few areas. But much of it ranges from dubious to just irremediably wrong.
Salvador Cordova (Young Earth Creationist)
Darwinian TE (Theistic Evolution) just doesn’t cut it scientifically.
What a riot, as opposed to the scientifically defensible Young Earth variant or the scientifically vacuous Intelligent Design variant?
I missed this one a week or two ago. Simon Conway Morris and his colleague Jean-Bernard Caron published a paper in Science on a new Cambrian fossil called Orthrozanclus. The cool thing about the fossil is that it combines features from two other fossils that Conway Morris previously implicated as transitional stem groups between the modern crown groups (“phyla”) of mollusks, annelids, and brachiopods: Wiwaxia and Halkeria. Of course, according to Discovery Institute propaganda, transitional fossils like this don’t exist.
Here is a news summary. See also the Orthrozanclus post from PZ Myers, his post last year on another stem group mollusk-ish critter, Odontogriphus.
The SMU Campus newspaper carried an opinion piece written by Ben Wells who is a junior anthropology major.
The article starts out by describing the political and religious foundation behind the Discovery Institute’s actions
This weekend Dedman Law School’s Christian Legal Society will be hosting a controversial and well-known institute that preaches a religious message masked in a capsule of pseudoscience.
Indeed, the Wedge document outlines clearly how Intelligent Design is meant to be a religious and not necessarily a scientific issue.
A controversial document (reported as the Wedge Document, a 1998 internal memo) stated the Institute’s goal was to “drive a wedge” into “scientific materialism” in order to divorce it from its purely observational and naturalistic methodology and stop the deleterious effects of evolution on Western culture.
Dr. Michael Egnor, creationist neurosurgeon and Discovery Institute blogger, has a problem. Either he hasn’t figured out that we’re way past April Fools Day, or he has just managed to produce what might just be the single dumbest anti-evolution argument that I have ever seen. We’re talking about a demonstration of absolute, rock-bottom, Kent-Hovind-eat-your-heart-out, triple-distilled essence of pure stupid.
The argument today - and I warn anyone who knows anything at all about evolution to put down all food and drinks right now - is that if evolution was right, we should see some brain tumors acting to make better brains.
No, I’m not joking. That’s his latest argument, in response to a thorough fisking delivered last month by Yale neuroscientist Steve Novella. Brain tumors mutate and are subject to natural selection, so if evolution is correct they should produce better brains:
This just in:
Science has an article today on extracting and sequencing proteins from T. rex bones, and I'm already getting email from people wondering whether this is believable, whether it challenges the stated age of dinosaurs, whether this means we can soon reconstruct dinosaurs from preserved genetic information, and even a few creationists claiming this is proof of a young earth. Short answers: it looks like meticulous and entirely credible work to me, these fossil bones are really 68 million years old, and it represents a special case with limits to how far it can be expanded, so scratch "reassemble dinosaur from fragments" off your to-do list.
Continue reading "Stone soup; or, extracting protein fragments from T. rex bones" (on Pharyngula)
Here’s an update to “Is There A Systems Biologist In The House?”, in which I described how the head of the New Mexico chapter of the Intelligent Design Network (IDnet), Joe Renick, put a whole new spin on “Systems Biology” in an editorial commentary published in the Albuquerque Tribune (March 28th):
Joe Renick Wrote:The greatest threat to the Darwinian dogma today is science itself.
There is a revolution underway in the biological sciences. A whole new field of biology called “Systems Biology” has emerged during the past 10 or 15 years. This revolution is just as profound for the biological sciences today as the transition in physics was from classical physics to quantum physics and relativity in the early part of the 20th century.
In this exciting new field, research is guided not by Darwinian principles but by design principles because design principles are needed to explain design-like features.
The teaching of evolution today in public schools is frozen in the past where it is based largely on a mid-20th century understanding of biology. Research in the biological sciences has moved far beyond that understanding because of the hopeless inability of Darwinian principles to explain the complexity observed in living things.
In my initial responses to Renick, found here and here (comments), I argued that
Sure, “Systems Biologists” use words like “design” occasionally, but that doesn’t automatically mean they think “designs” in nature must be “poofed” into existence by an un-named magical being.
and
Just bear in mind that Systems Biologists use evolution science, and do NOT utilize so-called “Intelligent Design” in any way, shape or form.
Recently, Joe Renick sent me a letter to clarify his position on Systems Biology and Intelligent Design, and allowed it to be published in the April NMSR Reports.
Renick said all this talk about him wanting to get ID into schools is baseless:
Joe Renick Wrote:You and your colleagues are the ones making the conclusion to a designer, not me.
I kid you not. Read on below the fold.
Cool news, strengthening the Dinosaurs-Bird link
Tiny bits of protein extracted from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone have given scientists the first genetic proof that the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant cousin to the modern chicken.
Source: CNN
Thanks to Bob O’H (hat tip) I have discovered that my book review of E.O. Wilson’s The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth has been published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE). Wilson attempts to set aside the evolution/creation issue to encourage evangelicals to join him in saving biodiversity. The review is currently the online-before-print version, I assume it will be in the May issue. The journal requires a subscription but I will post a bit below.
I have to add that I take a little extra pleasure in getting to correct Wilson, in my opinion the world’s leading living biologist, for mistakenly talking about the “spinning bacterial cilium” when he meant “bacterial flagellum.” OK, I am still a tiny ant compared to Wilson (and Wilson literally is a god among ants, so that is saying something), but hey, I am on a crusade about the flagellum thing.
This news article reports on a topic that tugs at antievolutionist heartstrings: would the Pope, leader of the Catholic church, throw in with them, joining them in the “intelligent design” big tent? The answer, at least according to this news report, is “No”. Pope Benedict is reported to adopt theistic evolution, the idea that God’s method of creation is what science has discovered concerning evolutionary biology. And we know from William Dembski that “intelligent design theorists” are no friends of theistic evolution.
A lot of the coverage has concentrated on Benedict’s stance against atheism, which seems to me to be about as newsworthy as taking up the question, “Is the Pope Catholic?” Well, yes, it seems that he is.
Today, we have part 3 of John Mark Reynold’s four six-part exercise in rationalizing institutionalized ignorance of geology, aka young-earth creationism. See previous discussion of part 1 and part 2. The really fascinating thing about Reynolds is how he can contradict his own professed high principles within seconds of stating them. For example:
The question is: “What is true?”, not what fits my preconceived philosophy of science or theology.
Way to go, great sentiment. Clearly, then, we should look at the physical evidence and conclude that the earth is not young and the global flood of Noah did not happen – oh, wait:
It's time for Tangled Bank #77 at Aetiology, and it's another mega-collection of links to science articles.
You’ve gotta hand it to Bill Dembski. No one is as damaging to the ID cause as he is. I mean, we’ve tried to trip them up, and I think we’ve succeeded here and there, but ultimately, Dembski is our best warrior.
Case in point: he’s just gone on a tirade in which the very paper which he previously said was in favor of intelligent design has got it all wrong:
So let me spell it out: DIRECTED EVOLUTION IS NON-DARWINIAN. DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS NON-DIRECTED. … Just because the word “evolution” is used doesn’t mean that homage is being paid to Darwin. “Directed evolution” properly falls under ID.
The sad thing is, this little outburst should really be directed at Matti Leisola and Ossi Turunen, the guys who wrote the paper under consideration, and not at me.
Here is what the authors wrote:
At one end is an approach commonly referred to as a rational design, which aims to understand the principles of protein structure and function well enough to apply them in designing new properties or even novel proteins using de novo design. The value of this approach in purely scientific terms is indisputable. However, because the difficulty is likewise indisputable, any approach that might succeed sooner is worth exploring. That realization has motivated work at the other end of the spectrum, where the emphasis is on finding what works rather than predicting what works. Darwinian evolution is the inspiration behind this. In the extreme form, this means avoiding protein design principles altogether and relying instead on huge sequence libraries and carefully designed selection methods.
Why didn’t Dembski, with all his brilliance, bother telling his ID author heroes that they were really talking about “intelligent design” the whole time? Instead they’re under the horrible misapprehension that directed evolution techniques were inspired by Darwinian evolution. And later they go on to say that there’s an “Overreliance on the Darwinian methodology”, meaning the directed evolutionary methods they spent the previous paragraphs describing.
Here’s more:
It is often said that random genetic methods to improve enzyme properties “rely on simple but powerful Darwinian principles of mutation and selection” (Johannes and Zhao 2006). We agree.
Whoa, what’s that? Leisola and Turunen agree that mutation and selection are “Darwinian principles”, and that these principles are responsible for the success of directed evolution? Say it ain’t so!
Tell me something Bill: Did you even read the paper?
An olden goldie from Sarkar, Director and Professor at the Biodiversity and Biocultural Conservation Laboratory, of the University of Texas-Austin, who had the good fortune (sic) to debate Paul Nelson.
“It wasn’t much of a debate, with Nelson conceding that intelligent design was far from being a scientific theory, that it had no legitimacy as part of a high school curriculum, and that it had to develop a laboratory research record before it can be taken seriously.”
Wow, was that all?
I've just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin's pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel's genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn't yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it's a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks right up there with bumblebees can't fly, rockets won't work in a vacuum, and no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM…he specifically predicts that 'Darwinism' will be dead and abandoned within ten years, by 1910.
Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past. A few decades hence when people will look back upon the history of the doctrine of Descent, they will confess that the years between 1860 a