For everyone who eschews supernatural mythology       This site is for all people who believe in nature, science, and reason, and who value ethics, aesthetics, compassion, and truth    Heathenalia BELOW ARE A FEW ITEMS MANY HEATHENS FIND RELEVANT * The Heathen-Haven Icon * Grandeur of Evolution in Darwin Exhibition * Debate over origin of universe has life of its own * Islands Make Surprising Contribution to Evolution -------------------- THE HEATHEN-HAVEN ICON The Heathen Haven icon reflects the six biochemical senses that give rise to experience which, in turn, gives rise to awareness that is the origin of animal, including human, persona (not to be confused with dualistic "soul" which is a mythical fantasy). Red is for sight which engenders 85% of our experience. Yellow is for Sound. Orange is for Taste. Green is for Smell including pheromones. Blue is for Touch. Violet is for Intuition or "insight" based on virtual experience resulting from interactions driven by biochemical processes among memories, including inherited genetic memories. The white center on which the six senses converge represents a synthesis which constitutes "experience." ------------------ GRANDEUR OF EVOLUTION IN DARWIN EXHIBITION By Verlyn Klinkenborg in The New York Times, November 19, 2005 In the summer of 1868, Charles Darwin and his family visited the poet Alfred Tennyson and his family on the Isle of Wight. The visit - and the visitor's ideas - troubled Tennyson. "What I want," he later told a friend, "is an assurance of immortality." This was an astute remark. Many of Darwin's readers, then and now, have tried to find ways to reconcile a divine creator with the clearly secular implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. As often as not, the effort is less a search for a first cause than a plea for assurances of immortality. Tennyson recognized that Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," which was published in 1859, offered no such promises. What bothered Tennyson wasn't merely the possible loss of eternity. It was also the central observation that underlies Darwin's theory: the fact, first noticed by Malthus, that every species on the planet, including humans, produces far more offspring in each generation than nature can support. Coming as late as we do - nearly a century and a half after Darwin's "Origin" - we have the luxury of seeing at a glance what Darwin saw: that the pressure of so much excess population is a harsh but efficient test of the value of accidental variations in any species. We can say, with Thomas Huxley, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" But, of course, Darwin did not simply think of it. He prepared for years to be ready to think of it when he did. It is one thing to see the logic in evolution, as stated on the page. It is something entirely different to have pieced together such an astonishingly powerful theory - a word that, as scientists use it, means an explanation of the facts as we know them - from the details of nature itself. The new exhibition called "Darwin" at the American Museum of Natural History portrays the making of the man and the scientist, and it reminds us how well and how fully evolution explains the life around us. It also captures the way Darwin's theory opened an entirely new window in the human imagination. It is possible to say, in fact, that humans did not begin to understand their place in nature until 1859. I found myself wondering, oddly, what it must have been like to be alive at such a revolutionary moment. But we live in a moment that is no less revolutionary. "Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound," Darwin wrote. In our time - the DNA era - the mechanisms of those laws have been revealed in ways that Darwin could only dream of, and in ways that confirm the essentials of his theory beyond a shadow of a doubt. This exhibition is useful, too, in reminding us that the controversy over evolution - over a true understanding of the human place in nature - has been more or less constant since 1859, though it has reached a peak of political absurdity only in our own time. The basic objections to evolution - the ones trumpeted by the proponents of so-called intelligent design - are essentially the ones Darwin described in the sixth chapter of "Origin." They have been given a new language, and new examples have been adduced. But Darwin did a surprisingly good job of forestalling his critics. He showed that most of the objections to his theory, then as now, were based on a misunderstanding of the evidence or the nature of his argument, or were owing simply to the fact that so much remains to be discovered about the workings of life on Earth. One comes away from this exhibition with a reawakened sense of Darwin's characteristic honesty and his extraordinary powers as an observer, qualities that are as much an attribute of the scientist as of the man. Darwin presented the strongest, most detailed argument and evidence for evolution that he could. He also carefully presented the strongest objections to his theory that he could. Under a century and a half of close examination, his theory has grown more and more solid - with refinements, of course. Under the kind of scrutiny that Darwin bestowed on himself, the notion of intelligent design vanishes in a puff of smoke like the bunkum it is. "I do not attack Moses," Darwin once wrote, "and I think Moses can take care of himself." But the problem is not Moses, or Jesus or God. It is humanity itself. To the extent that the furor over evolution represents a cultural crisis in America - and only in America - it is a crisis of credulity, not faith, a crisis rooted in neglect and ignorance. To lose the assurance of immortality is a serious thing, if it were ever ours to have. At the end of the "Origin" Darwin famously wrote, "There is a grandeur in this view of life." There is also an apologia in that phrase. He knew how hard it would be for us to see ourselves truly. ------------------------------------ DEBATE OVER ORIGIN OF UNIVERSE HAS LIFE OF ITS OWN By Laura Pedersen and Jody Goldberg in The Mercury-News, Nov. 22, 2005 Science classes in Kansas may teach that Darwin was wrong, but not so in the South Bay. Most schools here do not teach intelligent design because they do not consider it science. ``Intelligent design,'' according to the ID Network Web site, is ``the science of design detection -- how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose.'' It says that an intelligent being, not natural selection, developed the complexities of life and matter. Intelligent design supporters cite as evidence the observation that every organ of living things appears to have been developed for a specific purpose; that there is no scientific explanation for the specific order of DNA bases; and that Darwin's ideas are a theory that has not been absolutely proven. ``We have been teaching intelligent design since before that became a name,'' said Jonathan Burton, vice principal of academics at Valley Christian High School in San Jose. ``When given a fair evaluation, it leads a rationally thinking person to conclude that there is a designing force behind the process,'' he said. ``Intelligent design, done properly, is science in its purest form. It takes a step back and is not starting from philosophical assumptions.'' But most religious schools in the South Bay don't teach intelligent design. ``A basic tenet of science is that everything has a natural cause. Intelligent design is not science because it includes supernatural forces,'' said Victoria Evashenk, chair of the Science Department at Notre Dame High School in San Jose. The school is among several private Catholic schools that teach evolution, not intelligent design. Mike Pistacchi, science department chairman at Presentation High School in San Jose, said about intelligent design, ``Until it is real science, we will not teach it.'' Public educators agree. ``This is a religious ideal, and it doesn't belong in a classroom,'' said Nicky Austin, biology teacher and science department chair at Gilroy High. ``Part of the problem that people have with natural selection is the word `theory.' It gives the idea that we're not sure. A theory is as sure as sure can be,'' said Kevin Scully, science department chair at Pioneer High School in San Jose. Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction, does not support teaching intelligent design in public schools because it has a religious connotation. ``Because religious beliefs are based on faith, and are not subject to scientific test and refutation, these beliefs should not be taught in the realm of natural science,'' he wrote in a press release in September. Laura Pedersen is a sophomore at Notre Dame High School in San Jose. Jody Goldberg is a junior at Los Gatos High School. ----------------------------- ISLANDS MAKE SURPRISING CONTRIBUTION TO EVOLUTION By Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, November 22, 2005 Islands hold a special place in the hearts of evolutionary biologists. When Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos Islands in 1835, he was stunned by the diversity of birds, which helped guide him to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Beginning in the middle of the last century, the ornithologist Ernst Mayr laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the way new species evolve, arguing that they mainly emerged when populations became geographically isolated. Mayr based his theory on his studies of birds from Pacific islands. Yet islands have generally been considered evolutionary dead ends. After animals and plants emigrated from the mainland, it was believed that they became so specialized for island life that they could not leave. They eventually became extinct, only to be replaced by new arrivals from the mainland. "They were like baubles of the evolutionary past," said Christopher E. Filardi, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. But Dr. Filardi and Robert Moyle, a colleague at the museum, have found evidence that islands can act as engines of evolution instead of dead ends. Animals can spread from island to island, giving rise to an explosion of new species, and even colonizing the mainland again. The results suggest that conserving biodiversity on islands is vital for the evolution of new species in the future. Dr. Filardi made this discovery by studying a group of Pacific island birds, known as monarch flycatchers, that were among the birds Mayr studied 80 years ago. Dr. Mayr could compare only the anatomy and colors of monarch flycatchers. Dr. Filardi, on the other hand, was able to analyze their DNA. He collected it from some species by going to remote islands, while Dr. Moyle extracted other samples from preserved flycatchers stored at the museum, going back to the 1800's. The scientists identified 13 species that shared a common ancestor in Australia or New Guinea between 2 million and 5.6 million years ago. The descendants of that ancient bird spread thousands of miles to islands as far-flung as Fiji and Hawaii. New species arose along the way, undergoing drastic changes at a rapid rate. In one lineage, the monarch flycatchers tripled their body size in less than a million years. "This stuff can happen really fast," Dr. Filardi said. This evolutionary wave returned to its origins when flycatchers from the Solomon Islands colonized Australia and New Guinea. Dr. Filardi and Dr. Moyle published their results in the Nov. 10 issue of Nature. "Many aspects of island bird evolution are going to have to be rewritten," said Jon Fjeldsa, an ornithologist at the University of Copenhagen. Other recent studies suggest that islands may also be engines of evolution for many other animals and perhaps even plants. In the June issue of The Journal of Biogeography, for example, Kirsten Nicholson of Washington University and her colleagues published a study of lizards that live in Central and South America. The team demonstrated that 123 mainland species are the descendants of an ancestor that lived in the West Indies. "I have a feeling that in the next 10 years we're going to see a lot more of this," Dr. Filardi said. Today monarch flycatchers and other island species are under serious threat from habitat loss and from rats and other animals introduced by humans. Rising seas from global warming could destroy some islands altogether. Dr. Filardi argues that the new findings make preserving island biodiversity even more urgent, because islands may be an important source of new biodiversity. "It's the potential that the earth has to reinvent itself in the future," he said. "Islands may have more to do with that than we ever thought." ---------------------------------------