Religion, Evolution, and Biased Research?

These articles are a profile of a researcher named Bruce Lahn who is a geneticist. Some of Lahn’s research is considered a major landmark in the scientific community dealing with deciphering the evolutionary history of the human Y chromosome. His most recent work however deals with seeking to identify the genes behind human’s superior cognitive abilities as compared to animals. Lahn published two Science papers that concluded beneficial brain mutations are common in Eurasia but rare in Africa which attempts to provide evidence for racial differences in cognition. In the section titled “tackling the evolving brain” [2] Lahn claims two genes which are thought to regulate brain growth called microcephalin and ASPM appear to have undergone strong natural selection since the human and chimpanzee lineages split between 5-7 million years ago. Lahn and coworkers claim these genes are implicated in regulating cell division in developing neural cells and mutations can cause microcephaly. The very next sentence goes on to say the function of these genes in normal humans is not clear because they find these genes expressed in non-neural tissues as well. How can it be concluded natural selection has occurred when the very function of these genes in humans is unknown? Furthermore, Lahn and coworkers publish two papers [4, 5] in science in 2005 saying natural selection on variants of these two genes and report these variants have conferred survival, reproductive benefits and “perhaps” a cognitive benefit as well. Media interviews with Lahn reveal an interesting truth however. Lahn admits there was no real evidence natural selection had acted on cognition or intelligence. However, he then says the two papers point out mutations occur when key events in human cultural development occurred 37,000 years ago. These proposed cultural developments 37,000 years ago are nothing more than evolutionary rhetoric taught as fact amongst the vast books written on the subject of human evolution. When people arrogantly presume evolution as truth and fact, not only is that conferred throughout the published literature but one can clearly see how one’s research is skewed to fall within their priori on origins. Reading further some of the co-authors of the papers such as Sarah Tishkoff [2, 3] are distancing themselves from the attempts to link ASPM variant to human evolution. What I find interesting is during interviews with Lahn, he