It is rather easy to find examples of misconceptions about evolution and misinterpretations of scientific results. All you need to do is look at the latest articles at the Discovery Institute's site "Evolution News & Science Today". Case in point: their take on a recent paper by Stilianos Louca and Matt Pennell in Nature last spring. The paper is this one:

Louca, S. and Pennell, MW. (2020). Extant timetrees are consistent with a myriad of diversification histories. Nature doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2176-1

It is behind a paywall, but the preprint version of the paper is freely available at the Biorxiv preprint server here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/719435v2.full

The Discovery Institute's site is quite excited about this paper. Their report on 12 January (here) announced that the paper announced something very dramatic:

Two theorists have caused a stir in evolutionary circles, claiming to have proven that Darwinian phylogeny efforts (tree-building) cannot be constrained to one “best” answer. In fact, any proposed tree is no better than an infinity of other trees. They can’t see the tree for the forest.

Now if true, this would call phylogenies (evolutionary trees) seriously into question. Can it be that Louca and Pennell have undermined the foundation of reconstruction of evolutionary trees? Or is it possible instead that the folks at EN&ST have misread Louca and Pennell's paper?

Guess which is more likely? ...

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I just finished reading the latest book by Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. I thought it was a splendid book and, besides this recommendation, will offer a few comments. If you want a detailed synopsis of the book, I suggest the review by my colleague Paul Braterman on the blog 3 Quarks Daily. Some Assembly Required is a history of evolutionary biology from Darwin to the present, from fossils to DNA. Shubin takes a biographical or historical approach (or a biographical/historical approach) in much of the book, but his topic is largely an answer to the question famously posed by Darwin’s contemporary St. George Jackson Mivart: what would be the use, for example, of an incipient wing? How, for that matter, could a fish evolve fins for walking and lungs for breathing at the same time? As Shubin puts it,

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Today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States. This day, we remember the courage that was required to engage with racism in our society. The history here is both hopeful and discouraging. For all the progress made, much is left undone.

Some question why we should even address race on The Panda’s Thumb, a blog devoted to defending evolutionary science. Perhaps this will just end into a contentious debate about the scientific particulars about the biological meaning of race.

It is difficult to talk about race. Still, we should find the courage to engage. The questions matter here. There are important things that can and should be said by us.

I want to follow Todd Wood’s example. This summer, this young earth creationist asked, “Is Evolution Racist?” Knowing this genre well, we should expect a diatribe of race-baiting, but that is not what Wood did. Instead, he took an honest look at his camp’s own history of racism, explaining how creationism has been used to justify racism.

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Photograph by C. Joseph Long.

Photography Contest, Honorable Mention.

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. Mr. Long writes, “Dunes up to 200 m are formed where wind sweeping across the cold semi-desert of southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley is funneled toward Mosca Pass in the Sangre de Cristo range on the eastern edge of the southern Rocky Mountains. The valley itself is a deep graben toward the upper end of the Rio Grande Rift with no surface drainage in its northern reaches.”

The Times the other day posted an “op-doc,” or an op-ed in documentary-film format, concerning the “Ark” Park in Kentucky. I have received a handful of communications about this op-doc, and I have decided to plagiarize all of them. I will not identify the authors, but if they feel like identifying themselves, they can do so in the comments. The op-doc is available here. It is behind a pay wall, but you may be entitled to access a few pages each month without a subscription. At any rate, I found a range of opinions.

The first person to contact me noted that the piece had been posted in the Times and called it

[a]n uncritical free ad for the Ark Park disguised as an op-ed “documentary.” The NYT let this in as an “opinion” piece. It is directed by Jeremy Seifert. Seifert’s other work doesn’t appear to be aligned with fundamentalism; he does seem to have directed or produced a film attacking GMO foods.

The remainder of the comments come from a listserv I subscribe to. A second person wrote,

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