The Evolution of Evolutionary Thinking in Chile

The scientific study of evolution in Chile has experienced periods of diversification and stasis, depending upon the social and political context at different times. In the eighteenth century, most of the natural history research consisted of systematics and taxonomy and, as in most of South America, this task was performed mainly by natural historian theologists. Later, the immigration of European scientists to Chile after independence from Spain in 1810 improved substantially its knowledge of the local biota and stimulated the diversification of naturalists in the country. Research in modern biology and the teaching of genetics in Chile can be traced back to Giovanni Noe, an Italian zoologist who had a profound impact in the first third of the twentieth century. In the 1960s–70s, Danko Brncic, a population geneticist educated in the tradition of Dobzhansky and the modern synthesis, led the most important diversification process in the study of evolutionary biology in the country. However, the military coup in 1973 brought this radiation to a sudden stop and produced a stasis period associated with the subsequent 17-year dictatorship. Evolutionary biology recovered its status after the re-establishment of democracy, and it is currently experiencing an exciting and renewed diversification period that has led to the foundation of the Chilean Society of Evolutionary Biology, the only scientific society for the study of evolution in Latin America. One of the missions of the Society is to bridge the gap between scientists and science educators in order to improve the teaching of evolution at different levels both in secular and religious schools. Even though the Roman Catholic Church has been a pivotal institution in the development of Chilean society, debate on evolutionism—creationism issues has been largely absent both in public and academic discussions. The influence of religion on science education has been sporadic, and mostly related to omission rather than tergiversation of scientific information in biology textbooks. Currently, schools are obliged by law to teach the basics of evolution in K-12 and K-16 levels (or their local equivalents). Because of this, there is little at present that suggests an organized creationist or intelligent design movement surge in the near future. Nevertheless, the high percentage of religiosity in Chile, together with the observation that the moral values of Chilean society are among the most conservative in the world, provide good reasons to remain vigilant.     

It's Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Intelligent Design Movement's Recycling of Creationist Strategies

The intelligent design (ID) creationist movement is now a quarter of a century old. ID proponents at the Discovery Institute, headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA, insist that ID is not creationism. However, it is the direct descendant of the creation science movement that began in the 1960s and continued until the definitive ruling against creationism by the US Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard 1987, which struck down laws that required balancing the teaching of evolution with creationism in public schools. Already anticipating in the early 1980s that Arkansas and Louisiana “balanced treatment” laws would be declared unconstitutional, a group of creationists led by Charles Thaxton began laying the groundwork for what is now the ID movement. After Edwards, Thaxton and his associates promoted ID aggressively until it, too, was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District 2005. Subsequently, in 2008, the Discovery Institute began its multistate promotion of model “academic freedom” legislation that bears striking parallels to the 1980s balanced treatment laws. Because of Kitzmiller, ID proponents have written their model legislation in code language in an effort to avoid another court challenge. Yet despite attempting to evade the legal constraints imposed by Edwards, they are merely recycling earlier creationist tactics that date back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. The tactics that ID creationists now use—promoting legislation, publishing “educational” materials, establishing a “research” institute, and sanitizing their terminology—are the recycled tactics of their creation science predecessors.     

The Evolution of Creationist Movements

Every discipline has its hazards, and for evolution scientists and educators, a major hazard consists of encounters with creationists, their rhetoric, and their attempts to insert antievolutionism into public education. Preparation for this hazard should be a standard part of the background of professional evolutionists. One important piece of this preparation involves understanding the historical origins of creationism within the wider history of western Christianity, especially evangelical Protestantism and its development in the United States. Here, I place the standard histories of “creation science” by Numbers and Larson (covering primarily the early 1900s to the 1980s) into this larger context (going back to the evangelical split over slavery before the Civil War and during), and then show how the “intelligent design” movement (from the 1980s until the present) fits squarely within the long history of primarily evangelical, biblicist opposition to evolution. The major creationist movements and slogans are identified and also placed into this historical picture. In summary, while creationism has evolved diverse labels and strategies for legal and rhetorical purposes, its fundamental essence remains unchanged. That essence is advocacy of miraculous divine intervention, i.e., special creation, in the history of life, and the claim that science must acknowledge special creation or dire consequences for society will follow.     

Why “Sudden Appearance” Is Not as It Appears

Recent action taken by the Texas State Board of Education has opened the door to the inclusion of creationist arguments into public school science curriculum in that state and—because of the critical role of Texas in textbook adoptions—perhaps in many other states as well. One of the arguments that have been targeted by creationists is the “sudden appearance” of animal phyla at the base of the Cambrian period (i.e., the Cambrian explosion). While the creationist argument is both misleading and deeply flawed, high school biology teachers are often lacking the relevant paleontological knowledge to refute the argument. This paper attempts to provide teachers with a set of core counterpoints to the creationists’ claims along with a list of online resources that are highly visual in nature and should provide the means to help stimulate genuine student critical thinking about this issue, an alleged goal of the creationist agenda.     

Black Catholicism and Black Lives Matter: the process towards joining a movement

This ethnographic study examines how Black Catholics identify with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. The study follows several national Black Catholic gatherings since the death of Mike Brown. Using an adaptation of Scott Hunt, Robert D. Benford, and David Snow's social movement frame analysis, I explore how Black Catholics define and construct the ongoing political issues within the Black Lives Matter movement. I discuss the conditions which contribute to Black Catholic’s participation, or lack thereof, in this social movement through the processes of diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, and motivational framing. I position the larger Black Catholic belief system within frame analysis, examine the relevance of the frames with the Black Catholic community, and analyse the frames’ timing with the Black Lives Matter cycle of protest. This research has implications for intragroup meaning making as Black Catholics start the process towards identifying with the Black Lives Matter social movement.     

The threat from creationism to the rational teaching of biology

Most biologists outside the USA and a few other countries, like Australia and Canada, are under the impression that the threat to the teaching of biology represented by creationism does not concern them directly. This is unfortunately no longer true: the recent growth of creationism, especially in its pseudo-scientific manifestation known as "intelligent design", has been obvious in several countries of Western Europe, especially the UK, Germany and Poland, and it is beginning to be noticeable in Brazil, and maybe elsewhere in Latin America. The problem is complicated by the fact that there are not just two possibilities, evolution and creationism, because creationism comes in various incompatible varieties. Turkey is now a major source of creationist propaganda outside the USA, and is especially significant in relation to its influence on Muslim populations in Europe. The time for biologists to address the creationist threat is now.     

Hypertension among Polish males during the economic transition

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Polish society experienced deep political, economic and social changes. The aim of the study is to investigate whether changes that occurred in Poland during the transformation significantly influenced the risk of hypertension among adult men. We find that irrespective of age, marital status, education, degree of urbanization, lifestyle variables (smoking, drinking alcohol, and physical activity), and BMI the risk of hypertension after 1989 was higher than before transformation (odds ratio=1.45, p<0.001). Psychosocial factors are proposed as factors which might at least partly explain the higher risk of hypertension during the first years of economic transition in Poland.     

Habitat selection of the Ortolan bunting Emberiza hortulana in Poland: predictions from large-scale habitat elements

The Ortolan bunting Emberiza hortulana was censused in Poland during the Common Breeding Birds Monitoring Project in 2003–2009. Data from 683 monitoring polygons, covering in total more than 0.23% of the country, were used in the analysis. Based on the data and environmental information gathered in GIS databases (Corine land cover “CLC2000 and 2006” database, digital elevation model “GTOPO30” dataset, “Wordclim” dataset, and NDVI dataset), we modeled a habitat- and spatial-related variation of the Ortolan bunting’s presence. Birds were recorded in 13.2% grid cells. The mean density was 0.5 individual/km². We modeled the spatial presence of birds using multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS). Then models were cross-validated to check their consistency. The environment-use model shows that the Ortolan bunting prefers extensively cultivated farmland dominated by non-irrigated arable fields, small coniferous and mixed forests, complex cultivation patterns, and meadows. The preferred areas are located on lowlands in western and central parts of the country where the climate is the driest and warmest. Such a repeatable spatial pattern model of the population helped to create a predictive map of the Ortolan bunting’s presence in Poland. The general rule is that the probability gradient of its presence increases from the northeastern part of the country to the central and southwestern parts of Poland. Additionally, the Ortolan bunting avoids severe continental climate and regions with dense ground-level vegetation.     

Global Health Care Justice,Delivery Doctors and Assisted Reproduction: Taking a Note From Catholic Social Teachings

This article will examine the Catholic concept of global justice within a health care framework as it relates to women's needs for delivery doctors in the developing world and women's demands for assisted reproduction in the developed world. I will first discuss justice as a theory, situating it within Catholic social teachings. The Catholic perspective on global justice in health care demands that everyone have access to basic needs before elective treatments are offered to the wealthy. After exploring specific discrepancies in global health care justice, I will point to the need for delivery doctors in the developing world to provide basic assistance to women who hazard many pregnancies as a priority before offering assisted reproduction to women in the developed world. The wide disparities between maternal health in the developing world and elective fertility treatments in the developed world are clearly unjust within Catholic social teachings. I conclude this article by offering policy suggestions for moving closer to health care justice via doctor distribution.     

Civic Biology and the Origin of the School Antievolution Movement

In discussing the origins of the antievolution movement in American high schools within the framework of science and religion, much is overlooked about the influence of educational trends in shaping this phenomenon. This was especially true in the years before the 1925 Scopes trial, the beginnings of the school antievolution movement. There was no sudden realization in the 1920’s – sixty years after the Origin of Species was published – that Darwinism conflicted with the Bible, but until evolution was being taught in the high schools, there was no impetus to outlaw it. The creation of “civic biology” curricula in the late 1910’s and early 20’s, spearheaded by a close-knit community of textbook authors, brought evolution into the high school classroom as part of a complete reshaping of “biology” as a school subject. It also incorporated progressive ideologies about the purposes of compulsory public education in shaping society, and civic biology was fundamentally focused on the applications of the life sciences to human life. Antievolution legislation was part of a broader response to the ideologies of the new biology field, and was a reaction not only to the content of the new subject, but to the increasingly centralized control and regulation of education. Viewing the early school antievolution movement through the science-religion conflict is an artifact of the Scopes trial’s re-creation of its origins. What largely caused support for␣the school antievolution movement in the South and particularly Tennessee were concerns over public education, which biology came to epitomize.     

Charismatic Catholic Renewal in Bougainville: Revisiting the power of Marian devotion as a cultural and socio‐political force

This article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the conference stressed this renewal not to be made independent or outside of the Church. In this article I discuss how in Bougainville the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) has been predominantly operating ‘outside’ the institutional Catholic Church, drawing upon both Catholic and cultural logics to mobilise devotees across Bougainville towards renewal and political change. In particular, I will focus on various local Marian movements, elucidating the power and force of the CCR in contexts of Bougainville's civil war (1988–1998). In doing so, this paper will explore what Catholicism and CCR may contribute to discussions about the positioning of culture within Christianity, at the same time showing how charismatic Marian devotion invites reassessment of recent prevailing discussions on cultural ‘continuity’ versus ‘rupture’, as well as doctrinal boundaries held so dearly by the CCR and the Roman Catholic Church in general.     

Examining <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ambrosia</Emphasis> pollen episodes at Poznań (Poland) using back-trajectory analysis

The pollen grains of Ambrosia spp. are considered to be important aeroallergens in parts of southern and central Europe. Back-trajectories have been analysed with the aim of finding the likely sources of Ambrosia pollen grains that arrived at Poznań (Poland). Temporal variations in Ambrosia pollen at Poznań from 1995–2005 were examined in order to identify Ambrosia pollen episodes suitable for further investigation using back-trajectory analysis. The trajectories were calculated using the transport model within the Lagrangian air pollution model, ACDEP (Atmospheric Chemistry and Deposition). Analysis identified two separate populations in Ambrosia pollen episodes, those that peaked in the early morning between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., and those that peaked in the afternoon between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.. Six Ambrosia pollen episodes between 2001 and 2005 were examined using back-trajectory analysis. The results showed that Ambrosia pollen episodes that peaked in the early morning usually arrived at Poznań from a southerly direction after passing over southern Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, whereas air masses that brought Ambrosia pollen to Poznań during the afternoon arrived from a more easterly direction and predominantly stayed within the borders of Poland. Back-trajectory analysis has shown that there is a possibility that long-range transport brings Ambrosia pollen to Poznań from southern Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. There is also a likelihood that Ambrosia is present in Poland, as shown by the arrival of pollen during the afternoon that originated primarily from within the country.     

Is the Pope a Catholic?

The whole-part relationship is generally considered transitive, but there are some apparent exceptions. Componential sortals create some apparent problems. Homo sapiens, the Pope, and his heart are all individuals. A human being, such as the Pope, is an organism-level component of Homo sapiens. The Pope’s heart is an organ-level component of both Homo sapiens and the Pope. Although the Pope is a part, and not an instance, of the Roman Catholic Church, it seems odd to say that his heart is a part of that church. This is largely because the Pope’s heart does not have a place in the ecclesiastical government. However, it does contribute to the functioning of the organization. One popular alternative to the view that Homo sapiens is an individual is the notion that it is a natural kind. This has been done by redefining ‘natural kind’ in such a manner that not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Pope and every other human being is a natural kind as well.     

Discovery of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Dermacentor reticulatus</Emphasis> (Acari: Amblyommidae) populations in the Lubuskie Province (Western Poland)

The distribution of the meadow tick, Dermacentor reticulatus (Fabricius) is divided into two separate areas—Western Europe and Eastern (Russian). The break in distribution of this species falls in Poland, as well as other sites. The populations of D. reticulatus in Poland, which have been confirmed by collecting ticks from vegetation, are located in the north-eastern and western parts of the country, although there are also reports of D. reticulatus occurring on hosts in several parts of Poland which have not been confirmed by collecting ticks from vegetation. Until this research was carried out, the view was that this species does not occur in the western part of Poland in the area between the Vistula and Oder rivers. In the site surveys conducted in the Lubuskie Province (western part of Poland around the city of Zielona Góra, about 55 km from the Polish-German border), during the springtime activity peak for adult stages looking for hosts, seven natural implantations of D. reticulatus were discovered where 208 tick specimens were collected by flagging. These were exclusively adult stages, including 127 females and 81 males. Because of the distance (around 350 km) from the nearest focus in Mazuria in North-eastern Poland, the populations discovered have been named the D. reticulatus “Lubuskie Focus”. The research proves for the first time that D. reticulatus occurs in Western Poland. The research indicates that D. reticulatus is the second most important tick in Poland, after Ixodes ricinus (L.), which is epidemiologically very important, especially as a parasite on dogs and cattle. The proliferation of the meadow tick in Central Europe is inseparably linked with the expansion of canine babesiosis.     

God’S Laboratory: Religious Rationalities And Modernity In Ecuadorian In Vitro Fertilization

Catholicism is the only major world religion that unequivocally bans the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Nevertheless, in Ecuador, Catholic IVF practitioners declare God’s dominion over their IVF laboratories and clinics in explaining pregnancy outcomes. My analysis of this routine combination of spiritual and material causal models in Ecuadorian IVF contributes to two ongoing discussions about (1) the tensions between “institutional” and popular forms of Catholic religiosity and (2) the proper boundaries of science in modernity. The Catholic Church’s historical and contemporary struggle to determine control of the miraculous has usually been characterized as a conflict between educated clergy and humble peasants. In the case of Ecuadorian IVF, we find, instead, educated elites and middle classes participating in this same contestation with the Church, proclaiming their direct ability to harness the power of God to effect material change on earth. This spiritual power to affect clinical outcomes does not take place just anywhere, but in clinic and lab, disrupting another set of presumptions about modern scientific practice and subjectivity. Like other Ecuadorian elites and middle classes, IVF practitioners are heirs to Enlightenment thought, and experience themselves as modern in their participation in these high-tech endeavors. But their spiritual approach to laboratory rationality does not trouble these IVF practitioners’ experience of themselves as moderns, prompting a reevaluation of the narratives of scientific modernity that limit their scope to Europe and North America.     

At the north-eastern extremity: variation in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Cepaea nemoralis</Emphasis> around Gdańsk,northern Poland

Variation in the shell colour and banding polymorphism in the land snail Cepaea nemoralis was studied in 260 populations in the region of Gdańsk, northern Poland. Unlike in other regions of Poland, many populations contain brown shells. Populations from shaded habitats have higher frequencies of brown than those from open and intermediate habitats, largely at the expense of yellow shells. Nearly all brown shells are also unbanded. Apart from this disequilibrium, banding morphs among yellow and pink shells show no relationship to habitat. There are no broad geographical trends in morph-frequencies, but there are very strong correlations among populations very close together, revealed both by pairwise analysis and Moran’s I. Principal Component Analyses show that these correlations relate to overall genetic similarity at the loci involved. The populations are at the north-eastern limits of the species’ range; habitats are mostly anthropogenic, and comparisons with studies in two urban areas (Wrocław, SW Poland, and Sheffield, central England) suggest that the patterns of variation seen are a product of human transport of propagules followed by local dispersal. The effect of habitat here is much less marked than in regions much further west, but it indicates that natural selection has occurred.     

Using creation science to demonstrate evolution 2: morphological continuity within Dinosauria

Creationist literature claims that sufficient gaps in morphological continuity exist to classify dinosaurs into several distinct baramins (‘created kinds’). Here, I apply the baraminological method called taxon correlation to test for morphological continuity within and between dinosaurian taxa. The results show enough morphological continuity within Dinosauria to consider most dinosaurs genetically related, even by this creationist standard. A continuous morphological spectrum unites the basal members of Saurischia, Theropoda, Sauropodomorpha, Ornithischia, Thyreophora, Marginocephalia, and Ornithopoda with Nodosauridae and Pachycephalosauria and with the basal ornithodirans Silesaurus and Marasuchus. Morphological gaps in the known fossil record separate only seven groups from the rest of Dinosauria. Those groups are Therizinosauroidea + Oviraptorosauria + Paraves, Tazoudasaurus + Eusauropoda, Ankylosauridae, Stegosauria, Neoceratopsia, basal Hadrosauriformes and Hadrosauridae. Each of these seven groups exhibits within‐group morphological continuity, indicating common descent for all the group’s members, even according to this creationist standard.     

Nitrogen budgets of the Polish agriculture 1960–2000: implications for riverine nitrogen loads to the Baltic Sea from transitional countries

The Oder and the Vistula rivers are responsible for about 25% of the total riverine nitrogen input to the Baltic Sea and of this 60% have been estimated to originate from diffuse sources. In this study we have tested the hypothesis that changes in agricultural practices in Poland have changed the riverine nitrogen export from the rivers Oder and Vistula to the Baltic Sea. We calculated agricultural long-term nitrogen budgets (1960–2000) for the catchments of the Oder and the Vistula rivers. Poland went through severe economical changes in the early 1990s, which led to a drastic decrease in fertilizer consumption. The role of the calculated nitrogen surplus as an eutrophication capacitor and the potential to reduce this important capacitor to improve the environmental state of the Baltic Sea is discussed. N surplus for the entire country showed a maximum in 1980 (58 kg ha⁻¹ sown area⁻¹) and it dropped to 39 kg ha⁻¹ sown area⁻¹ in 2000. The surplus was, however, up to two times lower than that in other transitional countries, and much lower than in Western Europe with intensive agriculture. An observed decrease in nitrogen concentrations in both Polish rivers is not ascribed to drop in fertilizer use, but it results from nutrient removal in municipal wastewater treatment plants with tertiary treatment facilities. Comparison of trends in nitrogen concentrations in different transition countries indicates that factors other than reduced fertilizer application influenced the inertia of the water quality response. Hence, the potential to reduce diffuse nitrogen emissions from agriculture by reducing fertilization is constricted in areas with low-nitrogen surplus. In transitional countries like Poland the largest potential for nutrient reductions seem to be in improving the connectivity to waste water treatment plants with tertiary treatment.     

波兰西南卢布林中部地区纵纹腹小鸮的繁殖期食性

2000、2001年4 -7月,我们对波兰东南部纵纹腹小( Athene noctua)繁殖期的食性进行了研究。通过对498个食丸的分析,检出了1 953类动物,其中昆虫占猎物总数量的60·5 % (生物量仅占2·7 %) ,且以鞘翅目(Coleoptera)昆虫居多。该地区纵纹腹小的主要食物是小哺乳动物(占总生物量的93·4 %和总数量的38·3 %) ,在4月出现了一个取食小哺乳动物的高峰。在所捕食的猎物中,个体最大的是欧鼹鼠(Talpa eu-ropaea) ( n=2)。研究还发现,纵纹腹小的猎物种类有季节性变化,以满足繁殖各阶段(如孵卵、育雏和饲喂离巢幼鸟)不同的能量需求。