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.
Two quotes from this evening’s NBC News in their report on the fire in Notre Dame:
From Richard Engel, describing how the interior of the cathedral was not damaged as severely as the outside:
“But in the interior, fire met faith, and faith won.”
Seriously?
From another correspondent describing how firemen ran into the church to save the various dubious relics:
“The rescuers did God’s work.”
Not “one might say that the rescuers did God work,” but the simple declarative sentence above.
We’ve met Yves Gingras before, when a Templeton-funded reviewer, having a severe pecuniary conflict of interest with Gingras’s views, heavily criticized Gingras’s book Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue. At that time, at the end of 2017, I defended Gingras on the grounds that the reviewer, Peter Harrison, had an out-and-out bias, having been funded by the Templeton Foundation that Gingras criticizes and having made the usual wooly arguments for accommodationism between science and religion. Here’s a bit of what I said about Harrison’s dubious ethics:
Here’s what Harrison says:
(Full disclosure: I have been the recipient of Templeton funding, although none of my books on the historical relations between science and religion have been supported by them.)
This is a gross conflict of interest, and had I been Harrison trying to review Gingras’s book for, say, The Washington Post, the first question my editor would have asked me was whether I had any personal conflict of interest involving the author’s thesis. If I said I had taken Templeton money and Gingras criticizes the Templeton Foundation, I would absolutely have been prohibited from reviewing Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue. Shame on the L.A. Review of Books for even allowing Harrison to review the Gingras volume!
For, of course, if you’re in the Templeton stable, you better defend them if you want more Templeton money, and that is the prime conflict of interest at play here. Harrison, had he acted ethically, should have recused himself from reviewing this book.
If you want to see Harrison’s involvement with Templeton, check this Google search. He has given Templeton-sponsored lectures, attended Templeton-sponsored conferences, and accepted grants from the Templeton Foundation. In fact, in Templeton’s Stable of Prize Thoroughbreds, there’s a special stall labeled “Peter Harrison”. He knows which side his oats are buttered on.
But let’s get onto Gingras’s book, which I just read thanks to a strong recommendation by philosopher Maarten Boudry, whom I met for beers and dinner in Ghent. Gingras holds a professorship in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Quebec at Montreal.
Here’s his book, published in French in 2016 and translated into English the next year; you can get to its Amazon site by clicking on the screenshot:
This book is similar to my Faith Versus Fact in its thesis that science and religion are incompatible, but although there is some overlap in topics (e.g., we both have a discussion of the Templeton Foundation, a criticism of U.S. governments’ going easy on people who hurt their kids by withholding medical care on religious grounds, and a defense of the older “conflict thesis” books of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White), they are largely complementary. Gingras’s book is well worth reading.
The main thing that Gingras’s book has that mine lacks is a proficiency in historical scholarship, so that he can go into the conflicts between science and religion much more thoroughly and knowledgeably than I could. So, for example, he devotes many pages to the archetypal conflict between science and religion: the case of Galileo versus the Catholic Church. Having read all the Church documents and reports right up to when the Church apologized for its behavior 350 years after putting Galileo under house arrest, Gingras makes a compelling case that this was indeed a conflict between Galileo’s scientific views and the Church’s notion that his science contravened scripture. This is important because apologists like science historian Ronald Numbers (who has also been extensively funded by Templeton) have spent many pages saying that l’affaire Galileo wasn’t about a conflict between science and religion, but was about politics, personal animus, or anything other than religion. When you read Gingras’s analysis, complete with extensive documentation and quotes from Catholic officials, you’ll see how flimsy arguments like Numbers’s really are.
Gingras continues through history, describing the medieval banning of scientific “philosophy” (as it was called) when it contradicted the Church, the numerous science books placed on the Catholic Church’s index of prohibited works because the books contradicted Church teaching, the controversy ignited by Darwin’s Origin (which continues to this day), and, to my delight, a discussion of the John Templeton Foundation’s nefarious attempts to foist an “impossible dialogue” on the public by pumping millions of dollars into softheaded projects supporting Sir John’s thesis that science and religion can illuminate one another. A quote (pp. 153-154):
The preferred strategy of those promoting public discourse on the relationship between science and religion has always been to foster associations with already-recognized institutions, thus allowing a transfer of credibility. The technique is simple: if great scholars were associated with the [Templeton] Foundation (by receiving a prize, for example), then it certainly must be serious. Thus, in 1996, the Foundation accomplished a masterstroke by convincing the powerful American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to agree to allow Templeton to sponsor a project entitled “Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion” to the tune of $5 million, a sum that has enabled the program to be active since 1996.
You can see the DoSER project’s AAAS website here, and its activities are still funded in part by Templeton (see here, here, and here, for instance). That the U.S.’s premier scientific organization has a theological arm with eight employees is beyond belief.
Gingras’s book closes by describing how both scientists and believers either implicitly or explicitly recognize the existence of a conflict. He also dispels lame attempts to “reconcile” the areas, like the frequent claim that they’re compatible because some scientists are religious. And there’s a final bit, which I greatly liked because it comports with my own thinking: the argument that a “constructive dialogue” between science and religion is impossible because religion has nothing to contribute to the practice of science. In contrast, science can affect religious thinking and discourse, usually in a “destructive” way by contradicting religious claims.
The book is aimed more at scholars than mine is, and the writing is a bit drier (perhaps because of the translation), but this is essential reading for those interested in the fraught relationship between science and religion. I second Maarten Boudry’s recommendation.
The fire at Notre Dame is out, and much of the main building was spared, though it will take years, if ever, to bring it back to where it was before. I’m not sure about the status of its famous stained-glass windows, though one photo seems to show that a big one is gone, for, after all, the glass was held together with easily-melted lead. The cause of the disaster has not been determined, and may never be.
All in all, it’s not the disaster I feared; here’s what it looks like today:
President Macron has pledged that it will be rebuilt, and private donors have already given millions to that purpose, with the LVMH Group having donated 200 million Euros.
While I was watching the news last night, they had a special report from a correspondent who was talking about whether the artwork and relics had been saved. She was especially concerned that Jesus’s crown of thorns had been recovered, and I’d forgotten that that relic was even in the Cathedral. In fact, the Cathedral also contains not only a nail supposedly used to secure Jesus to the cross, but a piece of the True Cross itself. The chances that these are real are miniscule; I suspect that if there was a “True Cross”, the pieces of it preserved in various places would be much larger than any execution cross.
On this morning’s local news, an anchor was especially excited that the cross on the altar had been preserved, clearly implying that this was the work of God. She didn’t discuss why God allowed the Cathedral to burn but saved the cross.
At any rate, here’s how CNN reported on these relics:
The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris is home to scores of priceless artifacts, artwork and relics collected over the centuries, each with their own story.
As a devastating fire tore through the revered Gothic cathedral on Monday, toppling its spire, many feared these treasures might be lost forever.
The Crown of Thorns, which some believe was placed on the head of Jesus and which the cathedral calls its “most precious and most venerated relic,” was rescued from the fire, according to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
“We managed to protect the most precious treasures in a safe place,” a Paris City Hall spokesperson told CNN.
However it has not been confirmed whether individual items such as a fragment of the True Cross and one of the Holy Nails were saved.
Even the New York Times didn’t hedge that much:
While one treasure, a relic of the crown of thorns said to have been worn by Jesus during his crucifixion, was saved, the status of other historic items is unclear.
Yes, the crown was “said to have been worn by Jesus”, but the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion (much less the identity of the Jesus person) is not established historically. The “other historic items”, like the nail that went through Jesus, aren’t “historic” in the sense that their provenance is established, but only in that they were historically seen by the credulous as being real.
Perhaps I’m being overly captious, but the chances are very high that these relics are dubious; it’s as if the press reported “It has not been confirmed whether the runner from Santa’s sleigh was saved.” Wikipedia lists over a dozen related relics, either individual thorns from the Crown of Thorns or fragments of the entire crown, preserved at various places. Like the Shroud of Turin and many other relics of Jesus, these are fakes, products of a Jesus-relic industry in the Middle Ages.
Here’s the supposed Crown preserved in a gold reliquary at Notre Dame:
Another view (could there be Jesus’s DNA on it from bloodstains?):
As for the crucifixion nails, it’s true that nails have been found in tombs in Israel that were driven through bone, and were likely used in crucifixions, but none of these has been identified as a Jesus Nail (and how could it be given that his bones would have gone missing?), and there are at least three separate crucifixions involved. Here’s a nail that was driven through the hand:
Here’s the “Holy Nail” from Notre Dame:
Re the piece of the True Cross, well, let’s start with some carbon dating on that.
Here’s a tweet from a global news agency failing to qualify the “Crown of Thorns” although it does hedge on St. Louis’s tunic. And of course the artefacts are replaceable; you just cobble together another crown out of dried twigs.
Some Notre-Dame treasures saved by French firefightershttps://t.co/4h1e3ETBwl
Two irreplaceable artifacts have been rescued — the Crown of Thorns, a relic of the passion of Christ and the tunic allegedly worn by Saint Louis pic.twitter.com/3fPA3SySAR
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 16, 2019
I’m not trying to be churlish here, but just reporting how religious myths subtly become reinforced by the press. (Caveat: some places, including the Guardian, hedges all these relics with an indication that they’re “believed to be real”.) At any rate, the value and beauty of Notre Dame, which are undeniable, are to me completely independent of the truth of Christian mythology, which I see as false. The Rose Windows are infinitely more valuable to our culture than a nail of dubious origin. But such is faith.
Stephen Barnard has been sending me photos from Idaho every few days, and let’s see them all together. His captions are indented.
The first set of photos came with a “trigger warning: mink/mallards”. I was relieved that the mallards didn’t get eaten.
This American Mink (Neovison vison) was working its way down the creek, sometimes on the bank and sometimes in the water. It was (unmistakably) stalking a pair of mallards that were hugging the bank to keep out of a strong wind. I expected it to attack them, but I think my presence spooked it.
A couple of new species showed up today, in wet, overcast weather that ducks seem to enjoy. Cinnamon Teal (Anas cyanoptera). Common. Breeding male. They seem to me to be gregarious and quarrelsome, often hanging close to mallards and squabbling among themselves.
Gadwall (Mareca strepera). Less common. More solitary in pairs. This is a breeding male. The feather patterns on the wing are psychedelic.
Not a good photo, but just to show another duck species in Loving Creek. Green-winged Teal (Anas carolinensis)
Marsh Wren (Cistothorus palustris). Tiny, active, secretive birds. Hard to photograph.
The silhouette of a moose (Alces alces) at sunset.
Mating Red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis).
Deets (Canis lupus familiaris).
It’s Tuesday, the Cruelest Day: April 16, 2019, and National Eggs Benedict Day, a dish that Anthony Bourdain advised you never to order at brunch, since it’s likely to be cobbled together from leftovers from the week. It’s also World Voice Day, a rather bizarre commemoration of the phenomenon of the human voice. Finally, it’s Foursquare Day, since April is the fourth month and 16 is four squared.
On April 16, 1818, the U.S. Senate established a demilitarized border with Canada by ratifying the Rush–Bagot Treaty. In 1881, in Dodge City, Kansas, sheriff Bat Masterson fought his last gun battle (he wasn’t hurt and lived to a ripe old age). Here’s a picture of Masterson and another famous sheriff; it’s from Wikipedia but definitely looks pasted together:
(From Wikipedia): Deputies Bat Masterson (standing) and Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, 1876. The scroll on Earp’s chest is a cloth pin-on badge.
On this day in 1912, Harriet Quimby, the first woman to get a pilot’s license in the U.S., also became the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel. She died in 1912 after being thrown from a two-seater plane. Here’s Quimby’s photo, this time not altered:
On April 16, 1917, Lenin returned to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) Russia from exile in Switzerland. He arrived at the Finland Station and gave a fiery speech calling for revolution. (You may have read Edmund Wilson’s famous history of socialism, To the Finland Station.) When I was in St. Petersburg a few years back, I made a special trip to the station to see the engine that pulled one of Lenin’s trains. Nobody spoke English, and the platform. where the car resides, was restricted, so I had to draw pictures of Lenin in a locomotive before they understood what I wanted to see. Then they became very nice and let me see the engine. Here it is along with a plaque in both Finnish and Russian (translation please).
Wikipedia’s caption for its own picture (these one are mine) is “The engine that pulled the train on which Lenin arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917 was not preserved. So Engine #293, by which Lenin escaped to Finland and then returned to Russia later in the year, serves as the permanent exhibit, installed at a platform on the station.”
Exactly a year later, Gandhi organized an India-wide day of prayer and fasting in response to the April 13 killing of unarmed Sikh celebrants by General Dyer’s troops in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
On April 16, 1943, Albert Hoffman accidentally discovered that LSD was hallucinogenic while doing pharmaceutical research on the fungus ergot. Three days later he took the drug on purpose to verify its effects, and the rest is history. (I heard him lecture on this discovery when I was sitting in on Richard Schultes’s economic botany class at Harvard. He was a stiff, Swissy man who talked in a starched lab coat, not at all an acid head!) Exactly two years later, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail while locked up for protesting segregation. You can see the whole letter here.
On April 16, 1990, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, aka “Doctor Death”, helped in his first assisted suicide. After several more of these, he was jailed from 1999-2007. Finally, on this day in 2007, 32 people were killed and 17 injured at Virginia Tech when Seung-Hui Cho, a mentally ill former student, went on a shooting rampage. He then shot himself in the head.
Notables born on this day include David Hume (1711), Ma Rainey (1886), Rudolf Hess (1894), Bernard Malamud (1914), I. M. Pei (1917), Fanny Blankers-Koen (1918), Carol Burnett (1933), Bobby Rydell (1942), and Melania Trump (1970). Remember this Rydell hit, “Swingin’ School”? OY!
Those who bought the farm on April 26 include John Wilkes Booth (1865), Arnold Sommerfeld (1951), Gypsy Rose Lee (1970), Count Basie (1984), Lucille Ball (1989), and Jayne Meadows (2015).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains Hili’s disgust: “Andrzej’s shoes really need cleaning – not of mud but of everyday dirt. They are simply dirty shoes which haven’t seen shoe polish for ages.”
Hili: I’m afraid you have to clean your shoes.A: It’s none of your business.
Hili: Obawiam się, że musisz buty wyczyścić.
Ja: Nie twój interes.
And in his future home nearby, Leon asks about the exams that all Polish secondary-school students are taking:
Leon: Tell me about it. Was it difficult?
A tweet from reader Barry, showing a cat getting a massage while hearing music. (Video; sound on.)
https://twitter.com/m_yosry2012/status/1117421211443695617
A tweet from reader Nilou, who thinks these baby ravens are adorable:
Successful & enjoyable day ringing Ravens today. Fifteen young ringed (two teams out). Huge thanks to all the team today – especially our awesome climbing team! @_BTO #GlosBirds pic.twitter.com/3ZwiJG9mlR
— Gloucestershire Raptor Monitoring Group (@glosraptors) April 14, 2019
Two tweets from Heather Hastie. She said this about the first one: “How’s this for cute?” Be sure to watch the video:
https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1117281503283515392
I didn’t know, either. . .
https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1117444746463440896
Matthew shows the variation in the vernacular words for a fish across the UK. Things get a little hairy in northwest England. (You may have to download and enlarge the picture.)
This may well be the best map I have ever produced! pic.twitter.com/5i6RQDaurz
— Richard Jones (@rlcjones) April 14, 2019
A science “hoax” perpetrated by a good science Twitter site, @justsaysinmice:
I talked to @jamesheathers, the scientist behind @justsaysinmice. My favorite tidbit: the avatar of the account that's highlighting mice is actually a rat! Science jokes! https://t.co/87dr7V4DsQ
— Shraddha Chakradhar (@scchak) April 15, 2019
The conflagration at Notre Dame was horrible, but it appears that a large part of the main cathedral has been saved. I got an email today from a childhood playmate I had about 60 years ago and had lost track of until very recently. He told me this:
I just happened to see your recent comment about the Notre Dame fire:“I’m just unspeakably sad. Yes, it was a religious structure, but that doesn’t detract from its historical significance, its beauty, and the emotional effect it has on many (including me).”That comment sparked my memory of a conversation I had with your father many years ago. He told me that when you were very young they took you on your first tour of Paris. He said nothing much impressed you and you seemed pretty bored by the whole excursion. Then you went into Notre Dame and he said you stopped in your tracks and appeared absolutely mesmerized and in awe of the place. He said he had never seen you react quite so intensely at any other place you ever visited when at that age. I have no idea how that emerged from a deep burial in my memory bank but there it is.
#Feu à #NotreDame !!! pic.twitter.com/Q7stzf3cwc
— 👁🗨Thiiteyes (@XavierBrowney) April 15, 2019
Tweets from Grania. This one is inexcusable as the study reports results in MICE. And it was tweeted by Discover Magazine!
Scientists Uncover a Protein That Seems to Fight Aging in Our Skin https://t.co/4oaigJWHdx pic.twitter.com/y7WnpUHkGW
— Discover Magazine (@DiscoverMag) April 15, 2019
A man and his best friend, a muscovy duck.
When a duck understands everything you say. pic.twitter.com/UWRiEPth6a
— Sam Neill (@TwoPaddocks) April 15, 2019
A snow leopard pounces, but no living creatures were hurt in the making of this video.
https://twitter.com/meowlibrary/status/1116910777728815104
Well, the roof of Notre Dame collapsed in the fire and the damage is horribly severe. There’s a timely report at The New York Times (click on screenshot below):
They still don’t know how the fire started, but here’s what the NYT says:
André Finot, a spokesman for the cathedral, said in a telephone interview that the cause of the fire remained unknown, and there was no immediate indication that anyone had been hurt.
“It’s not about the faith — Notre-Dame is a symbol of France,” said Emmanuel Guary, a 31-year-old actor who was among a huge crowd amassed on the Rue Rivoli, on the Right Bank. Many had tears in their eyes.
After part of the spire collapsed, the fire appeared to spread across the rooftop, where the growing flames licked the sky and projected a yellow smoke over the horizon.
. . . The French police rushed in and started blowing whistles, telling everyone to move back, witnesses said. By then, the flames were towering, spilling out of multiple parts of the cathedral. Tourists and residents alike came to a standstill, pulling out their phones to call their loved ones. Older Parisians began to cry, lamenting how their national treasure was quickly being lost.
. . .Vincent Dunn, a fire consultant and former New York City fire chief, said that fire hose streams could not reach the top of such a cathedral, and that reaching the top on foot was often an arduous climb over winding steps.
“These cathedrals and houses of worship are built to burn,” he said. “If they weren’t houses of worship, they’d be condemned.”
Apparently they couldn’t do a forest-fire-like drop of water from the air, as that, they say, might have caused the entire edifice to collapse. There will be plenty of recriminations in the next week. I’m just unspeakably sad. Yes, it was a religious structure, but that doesn’t detract from its historical significance, its beauty, and the emotional effect it has on many (including me).
The pictures and videos below show the fire in the interior, and that probably means that the stained-glass windows, the choir, and other works of art are destroyed. It will never be the same again.
WATCH: Notre Dame's spire collapses into the flames, video from witness Nicolas Marang shows. https://t.co/MaEI5HttSM pic.twitter.com/gHhwMrRYmS
— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 15, 2019
#NotreDame: 'The roof has entirely collapsed, there are flames coming out the back of the cathedral as if it was a torch'@charli, Journalist at France 24, at the scene of the fire. pic.twitter.com/2B0IrMiDcL
— FRANCE 24 English (@France24_en) April 15, 2019
Some photos:
This is such a sad picture:
As usual, there’s never a dull moment at Botany Pond. As I mentioned in my last report, there were SIX drakes at the pond yesterday. Later in the afternoon, I noticed that some violent fights had broken out among them, with up to three drakes biting each other’s necks in a furious tangle of beaks and wings.
When I went downstairs to see what was going on, I found that a new hen had invaded the pond. She wasn’t Honey, but she was quacking, and I’m sure her presence instigated the fighting. Here she is, I believe with Gregory, the dominant mallard (he had his wings full trying to drive all the other drakes out of the pond.
She’s a quacker! Here she is with her chosen mate (who is clearly two-timing Honey):
That hen wasn’t Honey, as you can tell from this photo. She’s quite plump, too.
After a while, she got in the water with Gregory, and they swam off, but were pursued by another amorous drake. As you can see below, a vicious duckfight ensued, and right on the spot where James and Billzebub battled it out for Honey’s affection last year. You can see this hen jump out of the water before the fight starts, but she eggs on the males (as did Honey last year) by quacking loudly.
The fight begins 54 seconds in:
Gregory won, and the two went off to the bank, where I fed them:
But you never know what will happen next. This morning I watched as two giant Canada geese (Branta canadensis) plopped into the pond. Sure enough, it was old 92P and 88K, the same pair who invaded the pond last year. (These geese mate for life.) They had come back again! Last year they had goslings, and then left early on while the young were still small. I didn’t want that to happen again, so I went down and had a standoff with the geese—not hurting them but confronting them. There was much honking, but they eventually flew away. I’m afraid I haven’t seen the last of them.
88K is the female, 92P her mate (I know this because I reported their band numbers last year and acquired a Goose Spotting Certificate that gave their sexes and approximate birth dates). I still don’t know about those stiff neck tags (their legs are banded as well). They seem to do fine, but it looks constricting.
Here’s a video of the pair: