Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
John Green from Mental Floss corrects 50 common misquotations. I must say, I’ve misquoted at least a dozen of these. Let’s not have any of these on this site, or at least any of these distorted or misattributed!
Now I suppose this will interest only a subset of our photography enthusiasts here, but I wanted to call attention to an upcoming week-long course on insect photography in Belize, whose instructors include two superb nature photographers that I’ve often featured on this site: Piotr Naskrecki and Alex Wild.
The flyer is below, and the website for the course is here. I’m told that there are only a few slots left.
Besides the photography instruction, of course, there’s plenty of chances to learn natural history from experienced field biologists. Here, for example, is a photo Wild took during the last class (the caption from PopSci):
In the jungles of Belize last January, entomologist Alex Wild noticed something odd about the trap-jaw ants passing through his outdoor insect photography class: They all had shrunken heads and swollen abdomens. A day after making the observation, Wild and his students came upon an ant with a worm bursting out of its side. Parasites were at work. Nematode worms enter the ants as larvae and grow inside the ants’ body cavity, siphoning off nutrients and distorting their hosts’ natural anatomy. When the eight-inch-long nematodes are ready to mate a few weeks later, they push their way out of their half-inch-long hosts, killing them.
Lee Strobel is a Christian apologist and author whose book, The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Toward God, is on Dr. Eric Hedin’s reading list for his creationism-infested “science” course at Ball State University. Strobel claims that he was once an atheist, but that the evidence turned him religious.
Wikipedia characterizes the book thusly, which is perfectly in line with the other books on Hedin’s one-sided creationist reading list:
The Case for a Creator consists of interviews with intelligent design advocates and Christian apologists who argue for the existence of a creator. Critics of the book accuse it of bias, which they assert is contrary to the book’s own claims of being neutral and scientifically rigorous.
The advocates interviewed in the chapters and their topic(s) of discussion are as follows:
It’s no surprise, then, that over at the wonderfully-named site For God’s Glory Alone Ministry (article expanded from one in The Christian Post) Strobel is quoted as saying that Hedin’s course is great, for it provides the opportunity fo the kids to see all sides:
“I believe we should give teachers, scientists, and students the right to pursue the evidence wherever it takes them – even if it takes them to the politically incorrect conclusion that there’s an Intelligent Designer,” Strobel told The Christian Post via email. “In other words, let’s test the evidence in the marketplace of ideas.
The two problems are these: intelligent design (and also old-earth creationism, also on Hedin’s reading list in the form of books by Hugh Ross), has already been tested in the marketplace, and scientists aren’t buying it. And, of course, Hedin’s course doesn’t present the alternative view that has been tested in the marketplace, and won: modern evolutionary biology. The man is intellectually dishonest, but of course that’s what creationists must do to get their ideas into the classroom (we’ll see how long Hedin is able to get away with this).
Strobel, who apparently hasn’t really looked at Hedin’s class, nevertheless teaches something similar. His defense of this strategy is, really, indistinguishable from the views of P. Z. Myers and Larry Moran, both of whom have—while criticizing content of Hedin’s course—argued that it should nevertheless continue to be taught because eliminating it would violate “academic freedom.” The words in bold below perfectly express P.Z.’s and Larry’s views. I wonder if they realize that their views are perfectly consonant with the creationist call to “teach the controversy” on the college level.
Strobel, whose book, The Case for a Creator, is on the course reading list, says that he doesn’t have any specific knowledge about Hedin’s class, but said, “In my view, a fair teaching of cosmology, physics, biochemistry, biological information and human consciousness tends to point quite naturally toward an Intelligent Designer. Students should be allowed to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence. I certainly don’t see any First Amendment prohibition against free academic inquiry, especially in an elective course like this. I hope students will be able to consider all aspects of scientific evidence and not be unfairly prohibited from considering certain evidence just because some critics don’t like its implications.”
He added, “For me, it was a surface-level understanding of science that paved my path into atheism, but it was a more thorough and open-minded investigation of the broad spectrum of evidence that ultimately led me to conclude there’s a a Creator, as I describe in my book The Case for a Creator.”
LOL! If Ball State keeps this up, their graduation photo will look like this:
If you’re a nonbeliever, I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard about this. On the Cable News Network (CNN), correspondent Wolf Blitzer asked an Oklahoma tornado survivor if she thanked the Lord for helping her from her house just before the twister struck. The video is below, and PuffHo recounts the interview:
“We’re happy you’re here. You guys did a great job,” Blitzer said to Rebecca Vitsmun, who escaped from her house with her 19-month-old son right before the twister tore through it. “You’ve gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?”
Vitsmun hesitates for a moment and smiles. “I — I’m actually an atheist,” she said, laughing off the awkward moment.
“You are. All right. But you made the right call,” Blitzer said.
“We are here, and I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord,” Vitsmun said.
In Oklahoma! What better sign of the increasing nonbelief in the U.S., and of people’s willingness to go public with it? Kudos to Vitsmun, and a warning to newspeople: don’t assume everyone believes in God.
What would really have been nice is if Vitsmun had replied, “What? You mean the Lord who killed those twenty-odd people?”
There are many great soul duets, but to my mind this is the best. It’s Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell with their classic rendition of “You’re all I need to get by,” (1968), a song written by Nickolas Ashford and Valeree Simpson, themselves a singing duo. It’s simply the most soulful of the Motown duets, and by that I mean there’s a lot of emotion in the voices.
Both Gaye and Terrell died young. Gaye was killed by his own father a day before he turned 45. Terrell (see below) was, when she recorded this song, already ill from the brain tumor that would kill her at age 24.
Wikipedia notes about this song:
. . . it became one of the few Motown recordings of the 1960s that was not recorded with the familiar “Motown sound“. Instead, “You’re All I Need to Get By” had a more soulful and gospel-oriented theme surrounding it, that was influenced by the writers, who also sing background vocals on the recording, sharing vocals in a church choir in New York. The lead vocals were recorded separately by the two singers and combined during the mixing process, reportedly to cut studio time, and give time for Terrell, who was using a wheelchair, to recover from surgery to repair the malignant brain tumor that would ultimately cause her death in 1970.
Gaye and Terrell did several nice songs together; my second favorite is “Ain’t nothing like the real thing” (1968), which you can hear here. It was also written by Ashford and Simpson.
Yesterday was the first 80º (F) day in New York (that’s 26.7º C for you pedantic purists), and reader Tom sent a picture of his cat’s reaction to the unseasonable weather.
The moggie’s name is Catman.
Poser #1: Yesterday a colleague from another school asked me how to test whether hummingbirds would visit two related species of flowers nonrandomly, that is, whether the flowers were reproductively isolated because the hummingbird (which pollinates as it sips nectar) prefers one over the other. He proposed an experiment in which he would put two individual plants of each species in a four-plant array, and then watch which ones the hummingbirds visited. His initial supposition was that if there were no reproductive isolation (that is, the species are equivalently attractive to the bird), any two bird visits would result in the flowers being of different species 50% of the time. As he said,
“All else being equal, you’d expect a bird that’s falling from the sky (telling itself, ‘I am GOING to pick two random flowers’) the thing should visit two A’s 25% of the time, two B’s 25% of the time, and 50% of the time it should visit one of each species.
Again, it SHOULD pick two DIFFERENT species 50% of the time if it somehow chose them simultaneously.”
But then he realized that that wasn’t right. He asked me what the answer was, and, after about 5 minutes of thought, it came to me, and it’s obvious if you think about it.
This is equivalent to putting two black balls and two white balls in an urn, and then picking two balls. What are the chances that you’d pick two balls of different color?
It’s not 50%. And the true answer doesn’t matter whether you draw the balls successively, or grab two balls at once.
What’s the answer? (It’s the same as if the department has four new graduate students: two males and two females, and asks you to put two of them in a vacant, two-person office. What are the chances they’d be of opposite sex if you choose randomly?
Explain your answers below.
And this real-world biological problem brought to mind a very famous hypothetical problem:
Poser #2. This is the most counterintuitive probability poser I know: the famous “Monty Hall” problem, about which my pal Jason Rosenhouse wrote a whole book. It’s based on the old television game show, “Let’s Make a Deal,”hosted by Monty Hall, which gave contestants a choice like the one described below.
Here’s the deal: You are shown three doors. Behind one of them is a fabulous prize, like a car or a vacation. Behind the other two are trivial prizes, say pillows. You choose a door. The host, who knows what’s behind every door, then opens one of the doors you didn’t choose, revealing a pillow. He then asks you, “Do you want to switch doors now?” That is, he’s saying you can stick with the door you originally chose, or switch to the other, unopened one. Whatever you decide to do, you get what’s behind the door you stick with at the end.
The question: should you switch doors? The intuitive answer is “no, it doesn’t matter: the chance I’ll choose the one with the prize is 50% whether I switch or not.”
That’s the wrong answer. It does matter.
I’m sure some of you know the answer, but wait a while before you explain it in the comments. For those who can’t wait, the explanation is here.