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.
As part of its Darwin 1809-1859-2009 commemoration of the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of the Origin, the University of Wisconsin–Parkside‘s Science Night series presents Prof. Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago speaking on “Why Evolution Is True” at 7 PM on Wednesday, Sept. 9, in Greenquist Hall 103. The event is free and open to the public, and sponsored by the University’s Committee on Lectures and Fine Arts, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Biological Sciences. Parking is free after 6:30 PM. If you’re in southeastern Wisconsin or northern Illinois, we’re in Kenosha, and not hard to find or get to. (For one of our previous Darwin 1809-1859-2009 events, see here.)A fossil fish, Diplomystus dentatus, with no particular relation to Jerry’s talk, but a nice picture.
Richard Dawkins’s latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, was released Thursday in the UK (it shows up in the US September 22). The title, of course, refers to evolution, and the book, like mine, is a summary and discussion of the massive evidence that has turned evolution from a hypothesis into a fact.
I’ll be reviewing the book elsewhere, so it would be inappropriate for me to comment here, but you can read extracts from Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 at the Times Online. Richard also gives a video introduction to TGSOE in a short YouTube video.
So far I’ve seen three reviews of the book: by paleontologist Richard Fortey in the Guardian, by Anjana Ahuja in the Times, and by an anonymous reviewer in The Economist (for some bizarre reason, Economist reviews are never signed). And of course the sourpuss creationists at the Discovery Institute have already dismissed the book as a compendium of the “same tired old evidences.” Well, some of them may be tired, but — unlike intelligent design — they have the merit of being true.
Bloggingheads.tv was founded (and still largely run) by Robert Wright, and was once funded by the Templeton Foundation. What does that tell you? For one thing, to expect a lot of faitheism and sympathy for religion — even on Science Saturday, where it doesn’t belong. But what I didn’t expect was sympathy for creationism. Although Bloggingheads, which features online discussions between pairs of writers, scientists, or scholars, has featured some really good stuff, it now seems to be tilting dangerously toward woo.
Listening to the Behe/McWhorter love-fest, physicist Sean Carroll, who runs the superb blog Cosmic Variance, had enough:
I couldn’t listen to too much after that. McWhorter goes on to explain that he doesn’t see how skunks could have evolved, and what more evidence do you need than that? (Another proof that belongs in the list, as Jeff Harvey points out: “A linguist doesn’t understand skunks. Therefore, God exists.”) Those of us who have participated in Bloggingheads dialogues before have come to expect a slightly more elevated brand of discourse than this.
Various bizarre things ensued: the LoveFest disappeared and then reappeared on the site, unconvincing reasons were given, and finally Carroll and others had a teleconference call with Robert Wright. As Carroll tells it, things did not go well:
But, while none of the scientists involved with BH.tv was calling for the dialogue to be removed, we were a little perturbed at the appearance of an ID proponent so quickly after we thought we understood that the previous example had been judged a failed experiment. So more emails went back and forth, and this morning we had a conference call with Bob Wright, founder of BH.tv. To be honest, I went in expecting to exchange a few formalities and clear the air and we could all get on with our lives; but by the time it was over we agreed that we were disagreeing, and personally I didn’t want to be associated with the site any more. I don’t want to speak for anyone else; I know that Carl Zimmer was also very bothered by the whole thing, hopefully he will chime in. .
. . .What I objected to about the creationists was that they were not worthy opponents with whom I disagree; they’re just crackpots. Go to a biology conference, read a biology journal, spend time in a biology department; nobody is arguing about the possibility that an ill-specified supernatural “designer” is interfering at whim with the course of evolution. It’s not a serious idea. It may be out there in the public sphere as an idea that garners attention — but, as we all know, that holds true for all sorts of non-serious ideas. If I’m going to spend an hour of my life listening to two people have a discussion with each other, I want some confidence that they’re both serious people. Likewise, if I’m going to spend my own time and lend my own credibility to such an enterprise, I want to believe that serious discussions between respectable interlocutors are what the site is all about.
. . . I understand that there are considerations that go beyond high-falutin’ concerns of intellectual respectability. There is a business model to consider, and one wants to maintain the viability of the enterprise while also having some sort of standards, and that can be a very difficult compromise to negotiate. Bob suggested the analogy of a TV network — would you refuse to be interviewed by a certain network until they would guarantee to never interview a creationist? (No.) But to me, the case of BH.tv is much more analogous to a particular TV show than to an entire network — it’s NOVA, not PBS, and the different dialogues are like different episodes.
I have no doubt that BH.tv will continue to put up a lot of good stuff, and that they’ll find plenty of good scientists to take my place; meanwhile, I’ll continue to argue for increasing the emphasis on good-faith discourse between respectable opponents, and mourn the prevalence of crackpots and food fights. Keep hope alive!
Business model indeed! It sounds as if Bloggingheads plans more injections of woo, creationism, and goddycoddling, for if Wright had promised an end to that stuff, I doubt that Carroll would have resigned. At any rate, Carroll’s stance is personal and nuanced, so do read his piece. He hasn’t called for anybody else to follow him in defection.
But I do. Respectable journalists like Carl Zimmer, John Horgan, and George Johnson have participated in bloggingheads.tv. I ask them to have the courage of their convictions and resign if they don’t get assurances that Bloggingheads will stop presenting woo.
As you can see from Carroll’s post, he was not happy with things either. So he and I talked to Robert Wright and other Bloggingheads people today. I had expected that I’d get a clear sense of what had happened over the past month at Bloggingheads, and what sort of plan would be put in place to avoid it happening again. I imagined some kind of editorial oversight of the sort that exists at the places where I regularly write about science. I didn’t get it. . .
. . .My standard for taking part in any forum about science is pretty simple. All the participants must rely on peer-reviewed science that has direct bearing on the subject at hand, not specious arguments that may sound fancy but are scientifically empty. I believe standards like this one are crucial if we are to have productive discussions about the state of science and its effects on our lives.
This is not Blogginghead’s standard, at least as I understand it now. And so here we must part ways.
The loss of Carroll and Zimmer is a real blow to Bloggingheads.tv — and to science popularization in general. But you can’t pin this one on Dawkins and his atheist pals; blame it instead on the accommodationist Robert Wright.
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Note:
In a comment on Carroll’s post, Robert Wright responds:
It’s true that I didn’t give you the pledge that apparently would have kept you appearing on BhTV: No more creationists or Intelligent Design folks ever on Bloggingheads. I said that, for example, I could imagine myself interrogating ID people about their theological motivation. And I said I’d welcome a Behe-Richard Dawkins debate, since Dawkins is a rare combination of expertise and accessibility. But I also said that offhand I couldn’t imagine any other Behe pairing that would work for me (though there may be possibilities I’m overlooking).
The key thing that I tried to underscore repeatedly in our phone conversation yesterday is this: The two diavlogs in question were not reflective of BhTV editorial policy, and steps have been taken to tighten the implementation of that policy so that future content will be more reflective of it. Sean, I wish that in your post you’d conveyed this to your readers, though I realize that you had a lot of other things you wanted to say.
(Read the whole comment; it’s number 37 after Carroll’s post.) And Wright also takes a lick at yours truly for my critique of his book. I’m working on a response to him now, which should be up after my trip to Alabama this week.
Two classical kittehs today; the first is a photo of Dante in a bookshop window, sent by a friend in Poland.
The sign reads, “I’m alive, I’m asleep! Do not knock on the window. Dante, cat.”
Fig. 1. Dante at rest.
And here is a video of cats playing Schoenberg, Opus 11, part 1, compiled, note by painful note, by Cory Archangel. As Tom Service says in a description of this video in the Guardian:
This comes close to genius. Or borderline obsessive compulsion: Cory Arcangel‘s re-creation of Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, edited from YouTube’s sub-culture of piano-playing cats. All 170 of them.
Cory spent “a few months of free time” making these videos, with the help of a software program called Comparisonics, that allows you to search for similar sounds in audio files, using Glenn Gould’s recording of the Schoenberg as his litmus test to compare with YouTube’s cats. And the result is one of the great victories of transcendent, purposeful purposelessness on the internet.
For those masochists who love Schoenberg (or kittehs) enough to want more, here are the other two parts.
In today’s New York Times you’ll find Sam Harris’s op-ed piece on Francis Collins’s appointment as director of the National Institutes of Health, explaining why he thinks Collins is a bad choice. When I read a preliminary draft of the piece, I was struck by the list of five slides taken from Collins’s lecture, and so I went to YouTube to watch it. (The link is below.) The slides are taken from a Berkeley lecture in which Collins aims to break down the walls between science and spirituality, areas that he says should not be “walled off” from one another.
After watching this talk (it’s about an hour long, starting at 6:00 and ending at 1:13:00, with the beginning and end occupied by introductions and questions, respectively), I am more certain than ever that Collins really does pollute his science with his faith. By speaking with the authority of a scientist, by discussing science at length, and above all by describing in the same talk the evidence for evolution and the “evidence” for God, acting as if they are of similar epistemic significance, he is confusing his audiences about the nature of evidence and the nature of science. (See his comment at 51:30 that “My role here is to tell you what I as a scientist and a believer have learned about science and what I have learned about my belief in the context of that and vice versa.”) It’s a disquieting performance, even more distressing because Collins is an affable and genial speaker, conveying his snake oil is with a dose of sugar. And it’s scary (but not incomprehensible) to see how a smart man has managed to convince himself of a set of superstitions that are completely unsupported by evidence.
Before I dissect his arguments, let me give Collins credit for one thing: he isn’t a straight-up wackaloon creationist. He recognizes that intelligent design is not science, and gives some arguments against it. He doesn’t do nearly as good a job as Kenneth Miller, but at least he tries, and that’s good. But then he undercuts the whole business by proclaiming that the evidence points to the hand of God on the tiller.
If you want to avoid having to watch the whole megillah, scroll forward until about 27 minutes in, when Collins starts laying out the “questions” that science cannot answer, e.g., What happens after I die? Is there a god?. Of course the implication is that faith can answer them, but he’s wrong. How can faith tell us what happens after we die? Do our bodies get taken to heaven? If so, do we show up with our bodies at the age at which we died, or as an infant, or as something in between? If we’re cremated, do we appear before St. Peter as a cinder? How can we tell for sure that we’re not going to be boiled in molten sulfur for eternity?
The whole tenor of Collins’s argument is that his acceptance of God is based on empirical evidence. In this sense he puts it on the same plane as his science, and this is the pollution that has always troubled me. (Look at Collins’s five slides, highlighted by Sam Harris, and see if they don’t look like flat assertions about reality.) Collins begins laying out the “evidence” for God at 28:39. It is, briefly, this:
1. There is something instead of nothing.
How does that prove there is a God? Physics tell us that something can indeed come from “nothing” (that is, the absence of matter). The origin of the universe is of course a problem that physicists are still working on.
2. Mathematics is “unreasonably effective”.
Well, how ineffective would it have to be before it didn’t point to God? Didn’t Gödel show that it wasn’t perfect anyway?
3. The Universe was put together by a mathematical mind.
How does he know this? Why do regularities in the Universe testify to the existence of a celestial being? After all, isn’t the suspension of regularities — that is, miracles — also taken as evidence for God? You can’t have it both ways.
4. The physical constants seem to have “precisely chosen values” that enable the existence and evolution of complexity.
Note the word “chosen”, which assumes what the argument is trying to prove. There are, of course, numerous scientific theories for why the values are as they are (and they don’t appear so “precise,” anyway). This work is in its early stages, and so Colllins is advancing a God-of-the-gaps argument — a form of argument that he pretends to abjure (see below). Since we don’t understand why the “constants” of physics are as they are, says Collins, their “precision” must constitute evidence for God. Note Collins’s assertion that scientific hypotheses like multiverses require more faith than do religious explanations
Too, there are already good scientific explanations for “fine tuning,” including Lee Smolin’s hypothesis that new universes are constantly coming into being (the “multiverse” theory), and those whose physical constants allow them to last a long time will eventually, though a process analogous to natural selection, enrich the population of universes with those having “tuned” constants. This is not a “desperation” or a “faith” move, as Collins implies; rather, as Sean Carroll has pointed out, multiverses are a natural prediction of some classes of physics theories.
5. The Big Bang shows that the Universe had a beginning. Therefore it must have had a creator; that creator would have to have been supernatural, and “that sounds like God.”
So much for all the physicists who are trying to figure out how the universe could have arisen through natural causes. Give up, folks — Collins says that he knows the answer!
6. The existence of a “moral law” (which Collins defines as the universal observance by humans of codes of right and wrong) can be understood only by the existence of a creator.
This is the most bizarre of all his arguments, and the one which most strenuously evades both science and reason. The existence of human morals can be understood as a result of either evolution, evolved rationality, or both. One common explanation involves the evolution of reciprocal altruism in small communities of hunter-gatherers. Another, advanced by Peter Singer and others, invokes rationality itself — recognizing that nobody has a moral claim to be special — and the extension of that in interdigitating societies. There are perfectly good non-God reasons for individuals and societies to adopt and adhere to moral codes. Collins pretends that these reasons don’t exist. Indeed, he cites the existence of “extreme altruism,” as demonstrated by Oskar Schindler’s saving Jews at risk to his own life, as evidence that altruism isn’t evolved. This shows no such thing. Some people choose to adopt children, a manifestly nonadaptive act, but that doesn’t show that the drive to be parents didn’t evolve.
The most inane and disingenuous part of Collins’s argument is his claim that without religion, the concepts of good and evil are meaningless. (Collins’s slide 5 in Harris’s piece: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”) That’s palpable nonsense. Good and evil are defined with respect to their effects and the intents of their perpetrators, not by adherence to some religious code. It is beyond my ken how a smart guy like Collins can make a claim like this, even going so far as to argue that “strong atheists” like Richard Dawkins have to accept and live their lives within a world in which good and evil are meaningless ideas.
There are, of course, also statements made without evidence, including this one: “God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul” And this (slide 4): “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God.” How does he know? What’s the evidence? Isn’t the distinction between the science slides and the faith slides being blurred here?
Look at it this way: suppose Collins gave a talk sketching the evidence for evolution, and then went on to say how “evidence” points to the past existence of a space alien ruler named Xenu, who kidnapped some of his people, preserved them in antifreeze, and transported them to Earth, where they were stored in volcanoes. The souls later escaped and are now wandering around, clinging to humans, and this is what causes all the trouble of the world. Only by detecting this soul-infestation with a fancy instrument, and subsequent deprogramming, Collins might say, can we root out these disembodied vestigial souls and find happiness.
If Collins said this, you might well think he’s a wack-job, too ridden with crazy ideas to hold down an important government job. But of course the beliefs I described constitute the theology of Scientology, and are no different in kind from the beliefs of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or of any other faith. The reason why it’s ok for Collins to profess evangelical Christianity is because Christianity is a superstition that is common and socially sanctioned.
The great irony of this talk is the contrast between Collins’s entirely reasonable dismissal of intelligent design as being based on God-of-the-gaps arguments, and his credulous acceptance of those same arguments when it comes to matters like morality, multiverses, and the so-called fine-tuning of physical constants. At one point he avers that scientists should not invoke supernatural causes if natural causes will do, but then abandons this stand when it comes to physics. Shouldn’t we give physicists a few decades to figure out why the “constants” are as they are, just as we gave biochemists some time to figure out how the flagellum evolved? Apparently not. Collins has decided that science will always be impotent before certain problems, whose continued existence must therefore prove God.
This kind of evasion and use of double standards is of course de rigueur for religious scientists who insist on publicly harmonizing their faith with science.
If Collins continues to go around giving talks like this as head of the NIH, I will no longer give him the benefit of the doubt. He is polluting science with faith — and hurting public understanding of science — by pretending that empirical evidence points to the existence of God.
We have some Tuesday felids because this video, taken at the Tulsa zoo, demonstrates an evolutionary lesson. Look closely at the cubs’ coats, and you’ll see leopard-like rosettes. Many species of cats show this pattern in the cubs, even if the pattern disappears with growth. It almost certainly reflects (as discussed in WEIT), an atavistic trait: the persistence in a descendant of traits that were adaptive only in an ancestor. I suspect that the ancestor of lions had spots as adults, and that’s why they show up, briefly, in lion cubs.
ublication of the Origin, the University of Wisconsin–Parkside‘s Science Night series presents Prof. Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago speaking on “Why Evolution Is True” at 7 PM on Wednesday, Sept. 9, in Greenquist Hall 103. The event is free and open to the public, and sponsored by the University’s Committee on Lectures and Fine Arts, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Biological Sciences. Parking is free after 6:30 PM. If you’re in southeastern Wisconsin or northern Illinois, we’re in Kenosha, and not hard to find or get to. (For one of our previous Darwin 1809-1859-2009 events, see here.)
A fossil fish, Diplomystus dentatus, with no particular relation to Jerry’s talk, but a nice picture.
