It’s fire season, with multiple recent studies out on how man acquired fire and the impact that had on human history. The other day here biologist Michael Denton commented on an article in Philosophical Transactions B, “The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.” Now the New York Times points out another couple of papers, in Molecular Biology and Evolution and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Writes Steph Yin in the NY Times (“Smoke, Fire and Human Evolution“):

When early humans discovered how to build fires, life became much easier in many regards. They huddled around fire for warmth, light and protection. They used it to cook, which afforded them more calories than eating raw foods that were hard to chew and digest. They could socialize into the night, which possibly gave rise to storytelling and other cultural traditions.

That gift for storytelling is alive and well, as evolutionary speculations about man and fire demonstrate. Notice the contrast in rigor between Dr. Denton’s argument for design in the film Fire-Maker, which is all science, and the more imaginative exercises recounted by Ms. Yin.

She and some of the scientists she cites are actually quite upfront about this. On fire and its dangers in relationship to human evolution:

“I would say it’s mostly barroom talk at the moment,” said Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and the author of “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.” His work suggested that cooking led to advantageous changes in human biology, such as larger brains.

Penn State University toxicologist Gary Perdew describes a mutation allowing humans to better process toxins from fire.

It’s possible that having this mutation gave modern humans an evolutionary edge over Neanderthals, though it’s speculation at this point, said Gary Perdew…. But if the speculation is correct, the mutation may have been one way that modern humans were inured against some adverse effects from fire…

The study in PNAS suggests a hypothetical downside of fire-making.

It offers conjecture that the early use of fire might have helped spread tuberculosis by bringing people into close contact, damaging their lungs and causing them to cough.

More problems with fire:

Anthropologists have speculated that inhaling smoke led to the discovery of smoking.

That’s a lot of “speculation” and “conjecture.” This has got to be the most speculative notion of the bunch:

Fire is even tied to the rise of patriarchy — by allowing men to go out hunting while women stayed behind to cook by the fire, it spawned gender norms that still exist today.

So then we have suggestions that fire spawned smoking, tuberculosis, and the patriarchy, that it helped humans get bigger brains and beat out the Neanderthals. Perhaps these are all true. But look at the comfort level with storytelling, or as Dr. Wrangham puts it, “barroom talk.” He is also, by the way, given by Ms. Yin as the source of the fire-makes-patriarchy thesis, having published on it with several colleagues in a 1999 article in Current Anthropology.

Now compare that with Dr. Denton’s case that human fire-making points to fine-tuning at multiple levels, strong evidence for design from the planetary down to the anatomical level. The ultimate implications of the evidence he offers are necessarily left to the reader to weigh, but the evidence itself is not speculative in the least:

The conquest of fire and the subsequent development of technology were only possible because of an extraordinary fitness in nature to that end, involving multiple environmental conditions and very specific properties of particular types of matter. Without a set of truly remarkable facilitating coincidences in the nature of things, man would never have mastered fire or started on his long journey of technological discovery…

There’s an effective summary of his argument here. I see no comparison between the factual nature of what Denton says, on one hand, and the imaginative quality to much of what evolutionists assert, on the other.

You can see the trailer for Fire-Maker here:

A reader this morning reminds me of Michael Behe’s observation, “All sciences begin with speculation; only Darwinism routinely ends with it.” Yes, you can get away with a lot, it often seems, so long as you’re not making an argument for intelligent design.

In the Times, Steph Yin quotes a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Caitlin Pepperell, who comments, “I hope these studies will spur us to think more about fire, and take it in all the different directions it can go.”

“All the different directions”? Right, all but one.

Image: Cro-Magnon artists paint by fire-light, by Charles Robert Knight [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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