February 2018 Newsletter
In this Clergy Letter Project update, you’ll find the following six items:
- The Clergy Letter Project and Vote for Science;
- Astrobiology News for February 2018: The Evolution of Life and Language;
- Evolution Under Attack in India;
- The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth;
- Good News about Evolution Education in Ohio and Pennsylvania; and
- Last Call for Scientists in Synagogues.
1. The Clergy Letter Project and Vote for Science
Last year members of The Clergy Letter Project voted overwhelmingly to endorse having The Clergy Letter Project become a formal supporter of the March for Science. As I explained in our November newsletter, “In an attempt to capitalize on the energy generated by the March, the organization has taken a new step to advocate for high quality science. They’ve created a program called Vote for Science with the goal of ensuring that elected officials both promote science and use it to inform their decisions. The program is not politically partisan but it certainly does favor science over pseudoscience and facts over opinions.”
As part of The Clergy Letter Project’s support for their efforts, I wrote an essay for their blog. The piece is entitled “Thousands of Clergy Recognize the Value of Science.” While I hope you take a look at the essay, I thought it would be useful to share the final two sentences with you: “[Clergy Letter Project] Members recognize that voting for individuals who understand and promote science is not a partisan political act. Rather it is an act of common sense, an act that stands to benefit humanity, and an act that demonstrates that Enlightenment values are alive and well in the 21st century.”
This year’s march is scheduled for 14 April with more than 70 locations planning to take part. You can learn more on the March for Science website.
2. Astrobiology News for February 2018: The Evolution of Life and Language
In this month’s Astrobiology News, Clergy Letter Project consultant and Adler Planetarium astronomer Grace Wolf-Chase discusses new work demonstrating the similarities between studying the evolution of life and the evolution of language.
I generally like to stick to subject areas with which I’m more familiar, but I found this news feature on NASA’s Astrobiology site(1) to be so fascinating that I wanted to draw your attention to it! So, with the disclaimer that as an astrophysicist I can hardly claim expertise in either evolutionary biology or linguistics, what follows is a great example of how advances in one field may find applications in others – in this case, how lessons learned through research in the evolution of languages may help advance research in evolutionary biology.
The article highlights the work of Eric Smith, a complex systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute who studies both language and biology, and MIT biologists Rogier Braakman and Greg Fournier. Both linguistics and biology reason about the past to explain diversity. Both collect information into evolutionary trees, albeit using very different tools. While modern biology uses sophisticated computer methods to relate DNA sequences in the genomes of different organisms, linguists look broadly at the many facets of language, such as lexical roots, sounds, syntax, and grammar.
Funded by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, Smith has been looking at several linguistic elements to construct evolutionary trees that may provide insights to biologists for how they can broaden their perspectives to include more than DNA sequences in constructing narratives of life’s past. The shapes of linguistic trees can inform linguists about migrations, exchanges, and cultural divides. Just as mutations in gene sequences can lead to the emergence of new species in biology, changes in the usage of sound units, known as phonemes, can result in the formation of new languages.
One important difference between biological evolution and language evolution is that genetic changes can occur sporadically, in isolation, while this rarely occurs in language. When a sound changes, it usually changes in many words at the same time. A counterpart to this collective behavior in biology is when relationships within a genome prevent individual genes from mutating without parallel changes in other genes. Since it’s not always clear when this so-called “concerted evolution” applies, Smith and colleagues have been studying the relative importance of sporadic versus concerted evolution in the context of language. Their results indicate these models produce very different predictions of when language changes occur, so they devised a statistical method for identifying concerted changes in linguistic or genetic data.
Smith, Braakman, and Fournier think that analogies with language evolution may help inspire innovations in reasoning that can help “Evolution 1.0” evolve to “Evolution 2.0.” Fournier says that a common over-simplification in genetic reconstruction is choosing an evolutionary path with the least number of changes, which can produce intermediate steps that would be non-functional in the real world. Linguists tend to avoid this mistake because they are aware that each evolutionary step must produce a working language. Smith and Braakman demonstrated how applying constraints in chemical pathways used by organisms to convert carbon dioxide into organic molecules could explain many of the early branches in the tree of life.(2)
I encourage you to read the full feature story on NASA’s Astrobiology site! You might also want to check out a more technical article that applies Smith’s analysis to a wide range of languages based on word meanings.(3) There are many examples of how innovations in one field have led to similar advances in other fields. This has certainly happened frequently in the space sciences, and I find it exciting that these successes are inspiring increasing numbers of cross-disciplinary collaborations!
Until next month,
Grace Wolf-Chase, Ph.D. (gwolfchase@adlerplanetarium.org)
1. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/language-and-the-evolution-of-life-share-some-similarities/
2. Braakman R, Smith E (2012) The Emergence and Early Evolution of Biological Carbon-Fixation. PLoS Comput Biol 8(4): e1002455.
3. Youn, H., Sutton, L., Smith, E., et al. (2016) On the universal structure of human lexical semantics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(7) 1766-1771.
3. Evolution Under Attack in India
The opening paragraph of a recent article appearing in The Guardian says it all: “India’s minister for higher education has been condemned by scientists for demanding that the theory of evolution be removed from school curricula because no one ‘ever saw an ape turning into a human being’.” Unfortunately, anti-evolution sentiments are alive and well in many parts of the world.
4. The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth
Wayne Ranney, a member of The Clergy Letter Project’s list of scientific consultants, is a co-author of a book entitled The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth. With the subtitle of “Can Noah’s Flood Explain The Grand Canyon?” the book is likely to be of interest to Clergy Letter Project members. (Just to be clear about this point, the authors answer this question in the negative!)
The book is in the running to be named the Public Lands Alliance book of the year. You can learn more about the book and vote for it in the contest by going to the Public Lands Alliance website. Do hurry though since voting closes at 3 pm (PT) on 28 February.
5. Good News about Evolution Education in Ohio and Pennsylvania
Our good friends at the National Center for Science Education reported good news on the evolution education front in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. A move in Ohio to declare evolution a philosophical rather than a scientific concept was defeated by the State Board of Education. In Pennsylvania “a state appeals court has told a taxpayer that he can't sue his school district because it teaches the theory of evolution in science class."
6. Last Call for Scientists in Synagogues
Sinai and Synapses, directed by Clergy Letter Project member Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, has received funding to run a second round of its very successful “Scientists in Synagogues” program. The program is designed to provide participants opportunities to explore the most interesting and pressing questions surrounding Judaism and science. The program provides funding to implement a local project and covers all expenses associated with an opening workshop scheduled for 27 June 2018 in New York (a workshop, I hasten to add, at which I will be participating!). You can read more about the program and learn how to apply by visiting the Scientists in Synagogues web site. The deadline for applications is 15 March 2018 so hurry!
Finally, as always, I want to thank you for your continued support and as I do every month, I urge you to take one simple action. Please share this month’s Newsletter with a colleague or two and ask them to add their voices to those promoting a deep and meaningful understanding between religion and science. They can add their signatures to a Clergy Letter simply by dropping me a note at mz@theclergyletterproject.org. Together we are making a difference.
.
Michael
Michael Zimmerman
Founder and Executive Director
The Clergy Letter Project
www.theclergyletterproject.org
mz@theclergyletterproject.org