Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time before the age-old debate of religion vs science, evolution vs creationism made its way to the pages of Nature Network. It began in the summer with the posting of a seemingly simple, but definitely loaded, question: do you believe in evolution and if you do, do you believe in God?

Discussion was slow to get going, but things heated up when, over the weekend, a creationist said that life is too complex and beautiful to not have had some higher thought behind it. Oh my. I certainly couldn’t leave that point hanging. So I asked our resident evolutionary biologist, Henry Gee, an editor of Nature, to post a response, and the floodgates opened (Thanks Henry!). Take a look. Many of the commenters say that a belief in God and a subscription (not ‘belief in’) to evolution can co-exist and that science and religion shouldn’t be pitted against each other, as they are two different things.

It’s a timely discussion. The National Academies recently put out a report, “Science, Evolution and Creationism”. One of our newest bloggers, Pete Jordan, a postdoc with the NIH, has read the report and written a few comments on its strengths and weaknesses. It seems the report didn’t satisfy Pete in its discussion of how and why science and religion are separate human endeavors.

In other evolutionary bio news, Scientific American this month ran a “story”:https://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains about Harvard biological anthropologist “Richard Wrangham”:https://www.fas.harvard.edu/~primates/ and his controversial ideas about how the cooking of food—by making food more quickly and easily digestable with less energy, enabling that energy to be used for the development of bigger bodies and brains—could have played an important role in human evolution. The problem is, other scientists say that there’s little evidence of the use of controlled fire during the time that Wrangham says cooking became important.

Wrangham is scheduled to give a “talk”:https://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/lectures_and_special_events/index.php on this subject at the Harvard Museum of Natural History next month.