But Kevin was in fine form, claiming, among other things, that T-Rex could have pulled plows for humans! Who knew! Want to learn what other wonderful insights into the history of the work Kevin bestowed upon the ignorant masses? Read the full post to find out.

The ICR is claiming because the abstract includes the sentence, “[i]n 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other…” this somehow disproved the long-accepted position of humans and chimps being more closely related than humans and gorillas. Instead of a layperson’s restating of the experts refutation of the ICR’s butt-speak, I’ll just link to PZ’s excellent explanation of how Incomplete Lineage Sorting actually supports common ancestry (just like pretty much everything we know about genetics), and specifically refutes creationism.

I predict that when Larry and Kevin, the Laurel and Hardy of creationism at Madison’s Farmers Market, return in the spring with the famous Box-O-Bullshit they’ll have the ICR’s little tract in their folder of creo-crap. And I’ll predict further that when asked what ILS is neither will have the faintest idea.

Update: For a really good explanation of ILS (from a Christian) see this post at BioLogos.

Larry the Creationist claimed that humans and chimp genomes are only 70 percent similar after reading a real piece of crap from the ICR that intentionally distorted a paper published in the letters section of Nature.

The really interesting part about this incident, ICR publishing an intentional distortion of real research, and Larry then picking it up and now believing something completely untrue, is how perfectly it demonstrates the way the ICR willfully misleads its gullible followers and actually spreads ignorance and misinformation among the public.

I feel very confident saying that the distortion on ICR’s part is intentional because they are simply far too familiar with the literature and too capable of basic reading comprehension to read the original paper and honestly believe the conclusion of the paper is what they claim: that the paper stakes a position that human and chimp genomes are only 70 percent similar.

No, what’s at work here is far more insidious. They intentionally distort the research, and then circulate the distortion to bolster their follower’s confidence in creationism, knowing full well the 70 percent claim is bogus. Is their own confidence in creationism so shaky they are compelled to distort legitimate, published research to keep their flock in line?

I urge you to read my post Creationists and Y Chromosomes, follow the links to the ICR post and the original paper and then decide for yourself if the ICR is being honest.

The show was full of great stuff, but I had an authentic “oh wow!” moment about halfway through the program. The scene switched to a lake in British Columbia populated by fish called sticklebacks. Species of sticklebacks in the ocean have “a pair of fins on its belly that are like spikes. They are for defense. The spikes make the stickleback hard to eat,” but the lake sticklebacks have lost them.

Researchers David Kingsley and Dolph Schluter wanted to find out how the lake sticklebacks lost their spikes, and went digging through the fish’s DNA. “We know these genetic switches exist. But they’re still very hard to find,” Kingsley said. “We don’t have a genetic code that lets us read along the DNA sequence and say, ‘There’s a switch,’ to turn a gene on in a particular place.”

(In the show transcript Kingsley is identified with the HHMI. Hey, Kingsley, next time you see Carroll getting something out of the vending machine in the hall, remind him about Science Pub.)

Eventually Kingsley and colleagues found the switch, and sure enough it was mutated and no longer turns on the gene that makes spikes. They believe that this has implications for other more distantly related species and might even explain why manatees lost their legs when they left land for water.

Additionally, the sticklebacks teased the researchers with a tantalizing clue. (I should be a mystery writer.) From the show, “the lake stickleback may have lost its spikes, but evolution has left behind some tiny remnants: the traces of bones. And they are lopsided, bigger on the left than on the right.”

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if, in fact,” Kingsley said, “this classic unevenness is the signature of using the same gene to control hind-limb-loss in incredibly different animals?” Well, the evidence continued to mount, because Kingsley and team then examined “boxes” of manatee bones and found the same left-right lopsided pattern. Manatees have left pelvic bones bigger than their right.

After the show I plugged “sticklebacks manatees limb loss” into Google and started clicking links. The most laydude friendly post I found, unsurprisingly, was on one of my favorite sites, sciencedaily.com, published on June 4, 2009. It’s an interesting piece and I highly recommend you read it, but I’ll touch on a few points here.

Mike Shapiro, first author on the paper cited in the Science Daily post, said, “We knew that in many cases of evolution, the same gene has been used over and over again – even in different species – to give the same anatomy.” But here the story gets more complicated, because, at least according to this post, different genes may be responsible for the spike loss in different species of stickleback. “This is very surprising because these species are fairly closely related,” said Shapiro.

What’s noted in this piece that was absent from the PBS show is the actual gene responsible for the sticklebacks spikes: Pitx1. Interestingly, in the last paragraph of the post we read, “While the new study shows different genes can control the same trait in two closely related species of sticklebacks, researchers already knew that in some cases, the same gene can control similar traits in distantly related species. Pitx1 controls loss of the pelvis in threespine sticklebacks and is tied to club foot in humans.”

In fact, it looks like Pitx1 was suspected even further back then the NOVA show, or the 2009 Science Daily post, because I also found this paper from the April 2004 issue of Nature. Shapiro and his co-authors closed the paper saying, “Many other populations show the same left–right asymmetry that is a characteristic feature of Pitx1-linked pelvic reduction in mice … Mutations in or closely linked to the Pitx1 locus may contribute to many other examples of evolutionary reduction of pelvic structures in natural populations, a possibility that can now be tested by further genetic studies and direct analysis of Pitx1 structure and regulation in multiple populations, species and genera.”

So it looks like a pretty compelling case for Pitx1, and regulatory switches related to its expression, being responsible for limb loss in many different species, including manatees. What’s interesting after reading up a bit on a topic like this is to search for it on the Answers in Genesis site. The sheer breadth of topics AiG manages to cover is pretty impressive, until you realize that the depth with which they cover them is, well, very unimpressive.

Plugging Pitx1 into AiG’s search engine finds an article called “How Manatees Lost Their Legs?” by Dr. Georgia Purdom. After recapping the basics of the research, she states that “[t]he changes in the regulatory region of the gene are thought to be quite ‘young’ (10,000–20,000 years ago).” Wait, what? I thought that the world was only about 6000 years old! But it’s okay; she’s just reporting what scientists think. She then adds, “[f]rom a creationist standpoint, this change may have happened as a post-Flood event [after about 2304 BC, that is] when rapid speciation occurred as a result of the drastic changes in environment and predator-prey interactions.”

Now prepare yourself for some weapons-grade irony, folks. In the very next section, under the heading “Where’s the Evidence,” Purdom faults the research for extrapolating the possibility that manatees lost their hind limbs through the same mutation and mechanisms that sticklebacks have in the wild, that have caused club feet in humans, that have caused reduced limbs in lab mice (more in the 2004 Nature paper), because the actual genes in manatees have not yet been sequenced to show the mutations.

There is more research to do, no doubt, but it’s more than reasonable after the work the researchers have done so far to think about Pitx1 in other species, including manatees. But for Purdom to make this the central point of her objection to the research after proposing spikeless sticklebacks the result of “a post-Flood event when rapid speciation occurred” is hilarious. If only AiG were held to the same standard for evidence as actual scientists!

If Purdom’s main problem with the research is that Shapiro “has not examined the Pitx1 gene in manatees yet,” wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity for Dr. Purdom, who has a PhD in molecular genetics, to ask Ken Ham for a budget to do the research and show that there is no correlation between Pitx1 and limb loss or reduce pelvis size in manatees? (This is yet another project for the list of unfunded creationist research that I started assembling in my previous post, of course.) I’m sure that Shapiro, Kingsley and a lot of other scientists, would welcome the opportunity to review her published results as she has done theirs.

House Bill 1457, introduced by Gary Hopper (R-District 7) and John Burt (R-District 7), would charge the state board of education to “[r]equire science teachers to instruct pupils that proper scientific inquire [sic] results from not committing to any one theory or hypothesis, no matter how firmly it appears to be established, and that scientific and technological innovations based on new evidence can challenge accepted scientific theories or modes.”

Don’t you just love it when nimrod politicians dabble in the philosophy of science?

The more we learn about the great apes the more reasonable it sounds to include them in the human family (don’t some people already?). Here are a couple of interesting articles making them feel closer than ever. Science Daily reports on research that finds “weigh their chances of success, based on what they know and the likelihood to succeed when guessing”. Additionally, scientists studying chimpanzees have known for a long time that they’ll hoot to warn of danger, like many animals, but “they don’t bother warning other chimpanzees already alert to the dangers.”

Both of these discoveries show more behavior in the apes we thought more likely to be possessed only by humans. Cool stuff! Read up!

The articles begins, “A small fish crawling on stumpy limbs from a shrinking desert pond is an icon of can-do spirit, emblematic of a leading theory for the evolutionary transition between fish and amphibians.” However, the wikipedia page about tetrapods says, “The first tetrapods are thought to have evolved in coastal and brackish marine environments, and in shallow and swampy freshwater habitats.”

I’m a little confused here. The article goes on to present the second idea if it were brand new, but I’ve been reading about this for a while now, like the wikipedia article. I’m guessing wikipedia has been updated fairly recently. And we also may have a case of the filter scientific research goes through on its way to public consumption that sometimes results in less than one hundred percent accuracy.

Whatever the lesser details, the bigger picture is clear: four limbers like us evolved from fish. Read the article and then wikipedia page to get a good, basic view of the current state of our knowledge, and I’d also recommend Zimmer’s book as well.