Online here: a debate on “atheism as fundamentalism”. It’s just starting (2:15 EST), so watch now. It will go on until 4:30 EST.  Harries and Moore vs. Dawkins and Grayling:

For the first time, Intelligence Squared will be live-streaming a debate on this page:

“Atheism is the new fundamentalism”

In partnership with livestation.com, from 6.45pm (GMT) this evening, you will be able to watch online as Richard Dawkins, author of ‘The God Delusion’ and Professor A C Grayling, take on Richard Harries, the former bishop of Oxford, and Charles Moore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, at this sold-out Wellington Squared event held at Wellington College, Berkshire. It will be chaired by the Headmaster of Wellington (and political historian) Anthony Seldon.

Postmortem:  In the debate proper, I thought that Dawkins and Grayling far outshone the others (of course, I’m hardly objective here!), but Harries and Moore were quite eloquent and put on a good show.  On our side, Grayling had great things to say, especially about Stalin and Hitler as “apostles of atheism,” while Richard was more fiery.  They were a great counterpoise of the restrained but eloquent philosopher and the outspoken evolutionist.

Initial vote (online):

Atheism is the new fundamentalism.

Agree   5%

Disagree 87%

Don’t know 8%

Final vote (after the debate, online):

Agree  4%

Disagree  95%

Don’t know 1%

Initial vote (audience):

Atheism is the new fundamentalism.

Agree   24%

Disagree 48%

Don’t know 28%

Final vote (audience):

Agree  24%

Disagree  70%

Don’t know 6%

Looks like most of the minds changed came moved the “don’t know” to the “disagree” category.  A win in both audiences!

If you have 2.25 hours to spare (I don’t today, but I’ll look soon), they’ve posted the Ciudad de las Ideas religion debate, which I missed when I was in Mexico, on YouTube.

Against faith:  Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens

The faithful for faith: Shmuley Boteach, Dinesh D’Souza, Nasim Taleb

The atheist for faith:  Robert Wright.

The sound seems to be a bit muted, but it may be my computer.

Well, in your collective wisdom you’ve guessed it, as I knew you would.  These are in fact The Spandrels of San Marco (as one astute reader pointed out, they’re not really spandrels but pendentives) from the Basilica di San Marco in Venice.  I visited the building not a week ago, and was marvelling at the architecture and its fantastic mosaics.  As I was doing so, I recognized the spandrels (pendentives), each of which, as in my photograph of yesterday, contains a decoration.  And I suddenly realized, “Holy shit, these are the spandrels of San Marco!”  And so I photographed them.

They are famous for more than their mosaics: they are the ostensible topic of a famous paper by Steve Gould and Richard Lewontin (my Ph.D advisor), to wit:  Gould, S. J., and R. C. Lewontin. 1979. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm:  a critique of the adaptationist program. Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 205:581-598.  The point of the article, made in its introduction given below, was that although spandrels harbor decorations, they were not put there by the architect as a surface to be decorated. Rather, spandrels (or pendentives, excuse me), are the necessary byproduct of placing a dome on top of arches and columns.  And, like many features of organisms, spandrels are byproducts.

Gould and Lewontin pointed out that many traits of animals and plants were not the direct objects of natural selection, but reflect other processes.  For example, blood is red not because it’s adaptive for blood to be red (I suppose an ardent sociobiologist could say that the red color makes blushes evident, which conveys emotions, etc. etc., but of course moles have red blood too!), but that the color is a byproduct of selection for an oxygen-carrying molecule, hemoglobin, that just happens to be red. In other words, it’s pleiotropy: a non-adaptive byproduct of an adaptation. In section 5 of their paper, G&L list many other ways that the traits of plants and animals can be nonadaptive.

This paper is famous because the authors were famous, because it’s very well written, but most of all because it posed a direct attack on the “Panglossian paradigm”: the view that sociobiology wants to explain all traits, particularly human behaviors, as the direct products of selection.  This paper has been the subject of furious discussion and at least one book.  In my view, the paper made some valid points but went overboard in its criticism of the adaptationist program, which, after all, has produced lots of insights about evolution.  I knew Gould, who was on my thesis committee, and it always seemed like pulling teeth to get him to admit that natural selection was even a relatively important force in evolution.  If pressed, he would, but Gould always preferred (perhaps for political reasons) to emphasize the limitations of selection.  Lewontin was not nearly so extreme.

You can find the original article here or (original journal pdf) here.  It’s worth reading it if you haven’t before, even if you disagree with much of the message.

The opening is pure Gould:

The great central dome of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice presents in its mosaic design a detailed iconography expressing the mainstays of Christian faith. Three circles of figures radiate out from a central image of Christ: angels, disciples, and virtues. Each circle is divided into quadrants, even though the dome itself is radially symmetrical in structure. Each quadrant meets one of the four spandrels in the arches below the dome. Spandrels-the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angles are necessary architectural byproducts of mounting a dome on rounded arches. Each spandrel contains a design admirably fitted into its tapering space. An evangelist sits in the upper part flanked by the heavenly cities. Below, a man representing one of the four biblical rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Nile) pours water from a pitcher in the narrowing space below his feet.

(this image at http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ ~suchii/spandrel.html)

The design is so elaborate, harmonious, and purposeful that we are tempted to view it as the starting point of any analysis, as the cause in some sense of the surrounding architecture. But this would invert the proper path of analysis. The system begins with an architectural constraint: the necessary four spandrels and their tapering triangular form. They provide a space in which the mosaicists worked; they set the quadripartite symmetry of the dome above.

Such architectural constraints abound, and we find them easy to understand because we do not impose our biological biases upon them. Every fan-vaulted ceiling must have a series of open spaces along the midline of the vault, where the sides of the fans intersect between the pillars. Since the spaces must exist, they are often used for ingenious ornamental effect. In King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, for example, the spaces contain bosses alternately embellished with the Tudor rose and portcullis. In a sense, this design represents an “adaptation,” but the architectural constraint is clearly primary. The spaces arise as a necessary by-product of fan vaulting; their appropriate use is a secondary effect. Anyone who tried to argue that the structure exists be-cause the alternation of rose and portcullis makes so much sense in a Tudor chapel would be inviting the same ridicule that Voltaire heaped on Dr. Pangloss: “Things cannot be other than they are… Everything is made for the best purpose. Our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Legs were clearly intended for breeches, and we wear them.” Yet evolutionary biologists, in their tendency to focus exclusively on immediate adaptation to local conditions, do tend to ignore architectural constraints and perform just such an inversion of explanation.

Read the rest; it’s certainly one of the most important papers in modern evolutionary biology.

I’d have another contest about this, but a) it’s too easy and b) I have to ration my book supply.  Still, you’ll look really smart if you explain why I’m just now putting this photo on this website, giving the relevant referents.  No prize except a warm handshake.

Over at his website, James Randi attacks the notion that the Belgian man who supposedly emerged from a 23-year coma, claiming that he was conscious all the while, is now engaging outsiders using facilitated communication.   A “helper” holds the guy’s hand while he supposedly chooses letters on a keyboard.

Anybody who has looked at these videos with an objective eye, rather than sympathetically, sees immediately that something is fishy. The typing seems to be done by the facilitator, not by the patient.  The problem is highlighted in Randi’s post when he links to a video showing that the “facilitated communication” occurs when the patient seems to be asleep:

I’m enraged. Several perceptive persons have sent me to msnbc.com – where we can see Dr. Nancy Snyderman relating a story.  It’s a heartrender, described thus by Dr. Snyderman:

“A mother [in Belgium] says her son has emerged from what doctors thought was a vegetative state to say he was fully conscious for 23 years but could not respond because he was paralyzed.”

No, that is not what the man said, Dr. Snyderman. That’s what an incompetent layperson typed for him! I ask you to first go to http://tinyurl.com/y8lku48, and note the section of the video from 12 to 35 seconds, then come back here.

This is the same problem that plagued similar studies of “facilitated communication” in autistic children.  As far as I know, they turned out to be bogus.  It’s sad, but the will to believe is strong.

UPDATE:  Orac doesn’t believe it either.

h/t: Butterflies and wheels

Although the video is only seven seconds long, it’s important: this is the first film ever taken of the elusive Borneo bay cat, Catopuma badia, the world’s rarest cat. (The film, courtesy of the Global Canopy Programme, is on the link. Click on the lower left, not the upper left.)

The species is endemic to Borneo, and was first collected by Alfred Russel Wallace. The ears are curiously short, and there is nice striping on the head. It’s small (6-8 lb., the size of a house cat), is a denizen of tropic forests, and is rumored to eat monkeys. Tigerhomes.com says this about its status as a species:

It has been always been questioned whether the Bay Cat was a separate sub-species or an island version of the Asian Golden Cat. In 1992 a female Bornean Bay Cat was caught on the Sarawak border near Kalimantan and taken to the Sarawak Museum. The cat later died in captivity but was preserved and detail blood analysis and genetic testing proved this cat was indeed a unique species and therefore a highly endangered one.

I’m not sure how this proves species status. If the Bay Cat were sympatric (i.e., had an overlapping range) with the Asian Golden Cat, and they were fixed for different genetic variants, this would indeed prove a lack of interbreeding, confirming the species’ status as distinct. (I’m using the “biological species concept” here, according to which two species are distinct if they live in the same area in nature but don’t exchange genes.) But it’s not clear whether this is the case with these cats.

From the website:

Rare, elusive, and endangered by habitat loss, the bay cat is one of the world’s least studied wild cats. Several specimens of the cat were collected in the 19th and 20th Century, but a living cat wasn’t even photographed until 1998. Now, researchers in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, have managed to capture the first film of the bay cat (Catopuma badia). Lasting seven seconds, the video (see below) shows the distinctly reddish-brown cat in its habitat.

For three years Andrew Hearn and Jo Ross of the Global Canopy Programme have been surveying Borneo’s wild cats with camera trapping; these include the Sunda clouded leopard, the marbled cat, the flat-headed cat, the leopard cat, and the bay cat, which is the only species of the five that is wholly endemic to Borneo. As well as recording the first video of the bay cat, they also took the first photos of the animal in Sabah.

Fig. 1.  Captive bay cat. Photo by Jim Sanderson.

Fig 2.  In the wild. From the website: “Researchers suspect there are less than 2,500 mature bay cats left in the wild.  The species is endemic to Borneo and rampant deforestation is the main threat. Copyright: Global Canopy Programme. Photo by Jo Ross and Andrew Hearn.”

h/t: Don Strong

I am delighted to see a pungent exchange between Robert Wright in the New York Times and Christopher Hitchens in Slate.  (It’s about a week old, but I’m just back).  Wright explicitly blames American belligerence against Islam as the force producing the Fort Hood shooting spree by Major Nidal Hasan.

The title of Wright’s piece is “Who created Major Hasan?”, and of course the answer is “America!”

The Fort Hood shooting, then, is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism — or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Fort Hood is the biggest data point we have — the most lethal Islamist terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. It’s only one piece of evidence, but it’s a salient piece, and it supports the liberal, not the conservative, war-on-terrorism paradigm. . .

That’s a reminder that, contrary to right-wing stereotype, Islam isn’t an intrinsically belligerent religion. Still, this sort of stereotyping won’t go away, and it’s among the factors that could make homegrown terrorism a slowly growing epidemic. The more Americans denigrate Islam and view Muslims in the workplace with suspicion, the more likely the virus is to spread — and each appearance of the virus in turn tempts more people to denigrate Islam and view Muslims with suspicion. Whenever you have a positive feedback system like this, an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope.

This is all part and parcel of Wright’s apparent bid for the Templeton Prize, most recently displayed in The Evolution of God.

Well, I’m not in favor of stereotyping individual Muslims, but as for Islam, well, it does seem to be an intrinsically belligerent religion. Read the Qur’an — you’ll find plenty of belligerence there.  And if you object that the Old Testament is belligerent, too, look then all the imams calling for jihad.  And how many Muslims stood up to protest the widespread jubilation in the Middle East that ensued after 9/11, or stood up to defend the right of Danish newspapers to publish cartoons mocking Mohamed?

Nor was I in favor of invading Iraq — here I differ from Hitchens — and now it looks as if we’ve been stalemated in a Vietnam-like situation in Afghanistan.  We should simply get out, because we won’t — and can’t — win.  But regardless, Hitchens is on the mark when he goes after Wright:

Very well, then; the case for Maj. Hasan the overburdened caseworker seems to have evaporated. Robert Wright, among others, is big enough to admit as much. Wright, now emerging as the leading liberal apologist for the faith-based (see his intriguing new book The Evolution of God), now proposes an alternative theory of Maj. Hasan’s eagerness to commit mass murder. “The Fort Hood shooting,” says Wright, “is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism—or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan.” I know that contributors to the New York Times op-ed page are not necessarily responsible for the headlines that appear over their work, but the title of this one—”Who Created Major Hasan?”—really does demand an answer, and the only one to be located anywhere in the ensuing text is “We did.”

Everything in me revolts at this conclusion, which is echoed and underlined in another paragraph of the article. Why, six months ago, did “a 24-year-old-American named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad—Carlos Bledsoe before his teenage conversion to Islam—fatally shoot a soldier outside a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark.? ABC News reported, “It was not known what path Muhammad … had followed to radicalization.” Well, here’s a clue: After being arrested he started babbling to the police about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Wright describes this clue-based deduction of his as an illustration of the way that “an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope.” Though I can’t find much beauty in his prose there, I want to agree with him.

For a start, did Hasan or Muhammad ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

It is he, who I am taking as representative of a larger mentality here, who uses equally inert lingo to suggest that Maj. Hasan was “pushed over the edge by his perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” That’s a nice and shady use of the word “perception.” Might it not be equally true to say that Hasan was all-too-easily pulled over the edge, having already signaled his devout eagerness for the dive, by a cleric who makes a living by justifying murder of Muslims and non-Muslims alike?

etc.  Do read both pieces.

What’s with The New York Times lately?  Accommodationism there is rampant, particularly in the op-ed section, where Nicholas Kristof published a mushbrained piece praising (God help me) Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright’s books, and criticizing atheism as “irreligious intolerance.”  It’s almost as if the paper made a calculated decision to coddle religion, for that’s what their readers want.

UPDATE:  Thomas Friedman has a piece in today’s New York Times placing the blame more properly where it lies.