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.
In 1598 Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, allowing freedom of religion to the Huguenots. In 1927 actors Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford become the first to leave their footprints in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. In 1945 Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide after being married for just more than a day.
Don’t they look uncomfortable?
Finally, here’s a song that sounds like it is 50 years out of time, but it was only released yesterday. It’s a perfect for relaxing to while sipping your morning coffee or tea.
Over in Poland Madame Hili is having a relaxing Sunday herself.
Hili: I probably nodded off over this book.
A: This happens only to those who still like books.
In Polish:
Hili: Chyba przysnęłam nad tą książką.
Ja: To się zdarza tylko tym, którzy jeszcze lubią książki.
Meanwhile, Leon is up to similarly important things.
Leon: I consider this an opening of our picnic.
And finally, reader Stephanie sent this gorgeous photo of a lynx to Jerry, taken by Arielle DeMerchant near Scotch Lake in eastern Canada. There’s a story here about how she set about capturing this shot.
Reader Michael, who has contributed to two posts today (see previous one), called my attention to a new series of short videos by Diana Morgan, who has abandoned the persona but not the demeanor of Philomena Cunk. The new series of three clips (one more to come) is called “British Famous“, and attempts to sell Britain as a tourist destination using the conceit that Morgan visits various places in Britain to prepare to be TRULY famous, which means famous not just in Britain, but in America. Here are the first three videos with this introduction:
Who was Benedict Cumberbatch a few years ago? Nobody Cumberbatch, that’s who. Because he was only British Famous. And he’s not alone.
For decades, British celebrities have been adored at home but anonymous abroad, until America discovers them and makes them the real kind of famous.
And that is precisely Diane Morgan’s plan. So she’s doing things she believes Americans love in the hopes of becoming the next big American thing, all while showcasing the greatest parts of Great Britain.
The first video, “The Self-Help Guru”, shows, as Michael noted, Morgan
…taking the piss out of ‘mindfulness’, crystals, chakras etc. . . Good fun! Not from the T.V. show – Diane seems to have branched out into other stuff such as this YouTube channel, Love GREAT Britain, which is promoting holidays in GB
There are a few other Morgan skits on the channel if you’re interested, but this is the only one that’s reasonably well written IMO.
I didn’t know she has a talent for physical comedy [pratfalls, slapstick] until this series.
Judge for yourself. I prefer Philomena but this is still worth watching:
“The Rock Star”, filmed in Manchester, home of our Matthew Cobb:
And “The action hero,” filmed in Scotland:
The next installment to come is called “The Foodie.”
Reader Michael looked over the latest issue of The New Atlantis, and was horrified. He sent me the message given below, which prompted me to look at the magazine, too. And I shared his horror, for the issue, while pretending to be about science, really does down science, criticizing it in several articles for its problems and incompleteness (it supposedly uses the flawed assumptions of naturalism and materialism, and of course, as they say, many experiments can’t be replicated). It’s no surprise that this issue was financed by—you guessed it—the John Templeton Foundation. Here’s part of Michael’s email (indented):
And some of the ‘essays’ in this special issue are absolutely incredible [in a bad way]! Take the one by Stephen L. Talbott [you’ve run into him before], “Evolution & the Purposes of Life” – I really suffered reading it & I’m not going to even attempt to give an overview:
PLEASE NOTE
The New Atlantis is published by two bodies…
[1] “The Center for the Study of Technology & Society”, who also publish “Big Questions Online” – the latter is entirely financed by the John Templeton Foundation (https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/about/)
[2] A Washington think tank called the “Ethics & Public Policy Center” which has this on the “About” page: “About EPPC. Founded in 1976 by Dr. Ernest W. Lefever, the Ethics and Public Policy Center is Washington, D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy. From the Cold War to the war on terrorism, from disputes over the role of religion in public life to battles over the nature of the family, EPPC and its scholars have consistently sought to defend and promote our nation’s founding principles—respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, individual freedom and responsibility, justice, the rule of law, and limited government.”
There seems to be associations with the Templeton organisation [especially their juicy seminars] ‘hidden’ all over the place with respect to The New Atlantis & its directors, board, etc etc. Here’s one:
Take Adam Keiper, editor at The New Atlantis. I put “Keiper” into the Templeton Grant Database, and then picking a year gives me these two [no results appear for other years]:
[1] Start year: 2015. Big Questions Online Pilot and Planning Grant
Project Leader: Adam Keiper
Grantee: Center for the Study of Technology and Society
$211,634[2] Start year: 2015 Special Issue and Sections in ‘The New Atlantis’ Dedicated to Big Questions
Project Leader: Adam Keiper
Grantee: The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
$151,100
I [JAC] looked over a couple of articles, which give me cause for concern. But of course we’ve always known that Templeton tries to fuse religion and science, often by doing down science and suggesting it needs to be supplemented with the other metaphysical “ways of knowing”. That’s the subject of the first article I mention. There are other articles that push a hyperconservative agenda, including one on sex and gender that claim that gender and sexual orientation is far less “hard-wired” than we think.
Here are three specimens:
“The Limits of Information” by Daniel Robinson, an Oxford philosopher. Here we see an implicit claim that science is inadequate as a “way of knowing”:
Let’s pause to summarize these main points. First, the search for universally valid physical explanations must be futile, for some physical phenomena themselves lack the requisite certainty, as we know from quantum mechanics. Second, that aspiration cannot include a systematic understanding of what counts as an explanation in the first place. Imagine a Martian, sent to Earth to discover what human beings are. Returning to Mars, the “earthopologist” submits a report accurate in every detail regarding the composition of bodies identified as “human”: potassium, water, calcium, and so forth. All the empirical data are accurate and reproducible, but nothing in the account explains anything of interest about human beings. While this might count as an explanation of the chemical composition of human bodies, it cannot be considered an explanation of what it means to be human.
. . . It is not my intention to defend anti-realism. My own stance, if it’s even worth considering, is the Kantian position that, like it or not, we are all destined to be metaphysicians, so it’s a good idea to prepare for the mission. Van Fraassen, however, draws attention to the non-scientific dispositions and orientations endemic to the pursuit of knowledge: the choice of facts we attend to in our reasoning, and the stance one adopts in that process. There are also emotional and motivational factors that contribute to our choice of explanations. Once a revolutionary challenge to a previously uncontested scientific theory is vindicated by the facts, the scientist committed to that theory undergoes something akin to an emotional breakdown. There are real personal and psychological forces at work in a realm that textbooks treat as antiseptic and “objective.”
In these moments the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions of lived life may be informed by physics and physiology, but only from the third-person perspective. From our own first-person perspective, words alone fail, and making the experience known to another requires appealing to what is common in our humanity — yet another gap.
Well, yes, you can feel in your heart that there’s a God, which you might say is part of “being human,” but that feeling gives no confidence that there really is a God. It’s just a feeling, and establishing its truth value beyond the fact of your feeling it requires science.
And some day science may indeed explain the emotions. Further, the question of “what it means to be human” is of course totally nebulous. When made more explicit, the answers are empirical—scientific. That doesn’t mean that there is no value in the humanities—in literature, art, and music. What it means is that any question about the real nature of the Universe can be answered only by what I call “science construed broadly”: the use of reason and replicated observation of nature as a way of ascertaining such truths.
Another bad piece: “Saving Science” by Daniel Sarewitz, professor of science and society at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation and Society (we’ve encountered Sarewitz’s misguided ideas before: here and here).
Sarewitz claims in the subtitle that “Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing.” To save the enterprise, he says, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world.” His thesis is that all the problems of science— confirmation bias, lack of replication, etc.—can be cured if it’s driven by technology: the need for practical solutions. Sadly, that’s not even wrong, for technology driven science would miss some fundamental discoveries about the universe (like evolution), and science driven by pure curiosity, like quantum mechanics, has had great practical payoffs not predicted if the field were driven by human “needs” alone. Some excerpts:
Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble. Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena. But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion. Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths. Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.
. . . Advancing according to its own logic, much of science has lost sight of the better world it is supposed to help create. Shielded from accountability to anything outside of itself, the “free play of free intellects” begins to seem like little more than a cover for indifference and irresponsibility. The tragic irony here is that the stunted imagination of mainstream science is a consequence of the very autonomy that scientists insist is the key to their success. Only through direct engagement with the real world can science free itself to rediscover the path toward truth.
Sarewitz is the Chicken Little of Science, and our field is proceeding just fine without his tut-tutting, thank you. After all, some “facts” have remained unchanged for several hundred years. DNA is a double helix regardless of what people find in the future. Smallpox vaccination prevents smallpox (the disease is in fact gone now), benzene has six carbon and six hydrogen atoms, and the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. Sarawitz falsely implies that the whole edifice of scientific truth is rotten,.
Finally there’s “Evolution and the Purposes of Life”, by Stephen L. Talbott, described as “a New Atlantis contributing editor, [and] a senior researcher at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York”. This piece emphasizes the teleological aspects of organisms that seem to evince purpose (“purpose” of course, involves intention and thus a mind). I quote in extenso because this supposedly evolutionary article is really a Teilhard-ian argument that evolution, materialism, and natural selection are inadequate to explain the seemingly “purposive” nature of animal life. (This is not true, of course, as Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins have shown repeatedly.)
Even the “growth behaviors” of plants and the “chemical behaviors” of the individual cells in our bodies are in some sense intelligent and purposive, wisely directed toward need-fulfilling ends. Purposive — or teleological (end-directed) — activity is no merely adventitious feature of living creatures. Being “endowed with a purpose or project,” wrote biochemist Jacques Monod, is “essential to the very definition of living beings.” And according to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a geneticist and leading architect of the past century’s dominant evolutionary theory, “It would make no sense to talk of the purpose of adaptation of stars, mountains, or the laws of physics,” but “adaptedness of living beings is too obvious to be overlooked…. Living beings have an internal, or natural, teleology.”
The curious thing, however, is that despite this emphatic recognition of the purposive organism, we find in textbooks of biology virtually no mention of purpose — or of the meaning and value presupposed by purpose. To refer to such “unbiological” realities is, it seems, to stumble into the unsavory company of mystics. Yet we might want to ask: if purposiveness in the life of organisms is as obvious as many in addition to Monod and Dobzhansky have admitted, why should it be impermissible for working biologists to reckon seriously with what everyone seems to know?
. . . The idea of teleological behavior within a world of meaning is rather uncomfortable for scientists committed — as contemporary biologists overwhelmingly are — to what they call “materialism” or “naturalism.” The discomfort has to do with the apparent inward aspect of the goal-directed behavior described above — behavior that depends upon the apprehension of a meaningful world and that is easily associated with our own conscious and apparently immaterial perceptions, reasonings, and motivations to act.
The problem of teleology, with its apparent inwardness, has been thought to present itself on two fronts. It occurs wherever a conscious, purposive designer, traditionally taken to be God, is assumed to have created organisms, and again wherever the organism itself, once created, becomes a locus of end-directed functioning. Resolving the issue of teleology has meant, for the biologist, eliminating inwardness on both fronts, and the argument often makes little distinction between them.
. . . Everyone agrees that natural selection cannot work unless the organisms available to it are capable of carrying out all the activities necessary to their life and survival, while also reproducing and preparing an inheritance for their offspring. But these are the very activities that presented us with the problem of teleology in the first place. If natural selection must assume them in order to do its work, then to say it solves the problem of teleological origins looks very much like question-begging.
No, the “assumptions” are heredity and naturalism, both of which are not really assumptions, but methodologies that give answers. There is no question-begging!
But wait, there’s more!:
All of which takes us back to an earlier point: the organism is not so much something with a causal, physical origin as it is a power of origination — or a power of storytelling. It manifests itself in becoming — in the coordinated and directive aspect of organic processes moving toward fullness of expression — and is not something explained by the physical lawfulness of those processes. When we have understood this inward, originating power, might we not find ourselves better equipped to think about primordial origins?
Nope. What we have here is an indigestible word salad.
In the end, the article flirts with Intelligent Design: a divine force behind evolution. Or so I think from words like these (my emphasis):
Evolution-based pronouncements have somehow become far too easy. When theorists can lightly pretend to have risen above the most enduring mysteries of life, making claims supposedly too obvious to require defense, then even questions central to evolution itself tend to disappear in favor of reigning prejudices. What is life? How can we understand the striving of organisms to sustain their own lives — a striving that seems altogether hidden to conventional modes of understanding? What makes for the integral unity and compelling “personality” of the living creature, and how can this personified unity be understood if we’re thinking in purely material and machine-like terms? Does it make sense to dismiss as illusory the compelling appearance of intelligent and intentional agency in organisms?
It is evident enough that the answers to such questions could crucially alter even our most basic assumptions about evolution. But we have no answers. In the current theoretical milieu, we don’t even have the questions. What we do have is the seemingly miraculous agency of natural selection, substituting for the only agency we ever actually witness in nature, which is the agency of living beings.
But we do have answers: natural selection produces the appearance of “intelligent agency”. It’s not rocket science! Organisms live their lives as if their “purpose” was to survive and reproduce: to maximize their genetic output. Dennett thinks this is real design, just not conscious design, while others call it “designoid.” I don’t care what you call it so long as you understand how it came about. And we do!
So once again we see Templeton, while paying lip service to science, is really doing it down, claiming that it’s incomplete, that naturalism and materialism are insufficient, that there’s some kind of nebulous “purpose” behind evolution, and that we have to look at Other Ways of Knowing (read: God) to supplement science.
Shame on Templeton, and shame on those researchers who so gladly take its money!
Kevin Richardson has forged wonderful relationships with the lions who grew up in his presence (I’ve often featured him on Caturdays), but I still worry that some day he’ll be nommed. But he’s quoted in Wikipedia as saying this:
Richardson has been scratched, punctured and bitten but never in a malicious way. Richardson is not dissuaded by these dangers. In an interview, he mentions, “Obviously one realizes the danger when working with animals of this calibre, I’ve weighed the pros and I’ve weighed the cons, and the pros far outweigh the cons.” He warns about following in his footsteps, however. All the pictures of his adventures do not portray his years of experience and bonding. “People like to take things out of context. They don’t know the relationship I have with this lion.” As a rule, Richardson only interacts with lions he has been with since their birth. Richardson also differentiates his work from that of professional zoologists interacting with completely wild animals they have not raised, or that of trainers whose animals are required to perform on stage day after day.
Here he is playing a game of footy with lions. They’re no Messi, but still. . . Note the caged videographers at the end!
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This video is called “Cat tries to save his human from DROWNING IN THE BATHTUB!”, but I’m not sure that’s the cat’s real concern.
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Finally, readers gravelinspector and Michael sent a video of white tiger quadruplets born at the “White Zoo” in Austria on March 22. The color is due to a mutation in a single gene, but not the gene that causes albinism (that would give them pink eyes).
They’re adorable, but I have reservations about breeding these color variants, as the inbreeding necessary to preserve the color has caused a number of deformities (crossed eyes, cleft palate. club feet. etc.), and of course they’re bred for pure entertainment–they cannot be released in the wild and so serve only as entertainment.
Reader Karen Bartelt sent some photos of birds and mammals from California. Her notes:
We were compelled to try and forget Trump, so we (my husband Bob and I) took a spur of the moment trip to a Blue State, California. One of our target animals was the elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris). We saw these at Drakes Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. The last picture was actually near the Patrick Visitor Center. This mellow male was chilling on the sand, and I shot the photo from a respectful distance. Not so the idiot who posed his wife next to the seal, and later touched his tail (luckily, the seal wasn’t looking for trouble). We also saw Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna); interesting bicolored redwinged blackbirds (Ageiaius phoeniceus), a race that’s only found in central California; and sweet dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis). I think this photo is of what’s considered to be the “Oregon race” of the junco.
Our other target animal was the California condor, which we saw at Pinnacles National Park, and will send later.
After today, posting will be light for a couple of days while I entertain visitors, and Grania will be in charge. Today is Saturday, April 29, 2017: National Shrimp Scampi Day—a dish I’ve never had. And, appropriately given the situation in Syria, it’s The Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare, an issue that, while the UN can issue remembrances for, apparently can’t do anything to stop. Finally, I’ve just learned, thanks to reader jsp, that we missed a big holiday yesterday: National Hairball Awareness Day, celebrated the last Friday in April. I am not making this up. But Opus seems to have gotten the date wrong in the latest Bloom County:
On this day in 1770, James Cook arrived at and named Australia’s Botany Bay, now located in Sydney. On April 29, 1916, the Easter Rising in Dublin ended as rebel leaders surrendered to the British. Many were tried and several leaders were executed. Here’s a video clip of the executions from the movie “Michael Collins”: don’t watch it if you don’t want to see firing squads, but I find this very moving:
On this day in 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun in the Führerbunker and named Admiral Dönitz as his successor. Both Braun and Hitler committed suicide the next day. On the same day, the concentration camp Dachau was liberated by Allied troops. On April 29, 1992, following the beating of Rodney King, the Los Angeles riots began; the media is reporting on their 25th anniversay. On April 29, 2004, the last Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line, ending 107 years of that car’s production. Finally, on this day six years ago, Prince William married Catherine Middleton.
Notables born on this day include Henri Poincaré (1854), Harold Urey (1893), Duke Ellington (1899), Willie Nelson (1933), my friend and ex-chair, geneticist Brian Charlesworth (1945), Dale Earnhardt (1951), Kate Mulgrew (1955), Daniel Day-Lewis (1957), Michelle Pfeiffer (1958), and Uma Thurman (1970). It was a good day for actors.
By the way, Duke Ellington was both a great musician and a great foodie. Here’s an excerpt from a nice New Yorker profile of him from 1944, mentioning his favorite desserts: a gemisch of different things:
Duke, who is always worrying about keeping his weight down, may announce that he intends to have nothing but Shredded Wheat and black tea. When his order arrives, he looks at it glumly, then bows his head and says grace. After he has finished his snack, his expression of virtuous determination slowly dissolves into wistfulness as he watches [Billy] Strayhorn eat a steak. Duke’s resolution about not overeating frequently collapses at this point. When it does, he orders a steak, and after finishing it he engages in another moral struggle for about five minutes. Then he really begins to eat. He has another steak, smothered in onions, a double portion of fried potatoes, a salad, a bowl of sliced tomatoes, a giant lobster and melted butter, coffee, and an Ellington dessert—perhaps a combination of pie, cake, ice cream, custard, pastry, jello, fruit, and cheese. His appetite really whetted, he may order ham and eggs, a half-dozen pancakes, waffles and syrup, and some hot biscuits. Then, determined to get back on his diet, he will finish, as he began, with Shredded Wheat and black tea. Long before this, he is usually surrounded by an admiring crowd, which watches him with friendly awe. He chats with the chicks in the group and may turn from his steak or lobster to say pleasantly to one of them, “You make that dress look so beautiful.” He is not a bit embarrassed by the fact that he said the same thing the night before to another chick in another town. Sometimes he will pause before eating a dessert awash in rich yellow cream and say to a girl, “I never knew an angel could be so luscious.” At the end of his supper, he may lean back, satisfied at last, and sing out to Strayhorn, “Dah dah dee dee dee, tah tahdle tah boom, deedle dee, deedle dee, boom!”
Those who died on this day include Ludwig Wittgenstein (1951), Alfred Hitchcock (1980), Albert Hoffmann (2008; discoverer of the effects of LSD, on which I heard him lecture at Harvard [he lectured in a lab coat and was very staid]), and Bob Hoskins (2014). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is killing time until lunch:
Hili: I’m thinking about post-breakfast philosophy.
A: And…?
Hili: I have time to do it until next meal.
In Polish:
Hili: Zastanawiam się nad filozofią postśniadanną.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Mam na to czas do kolejnego posiłku.
The nymphs (juvenile stages) of katydids—orthopterans from the family Tettigoniidae—nymphs look pretty much like miniature katydids; here’s a screenshot of what you see when you do a Google image search for “katydid nymph” (click to enlarge):
But one species, at least, has modified its nymph stage to look like a hymenopteran. Here’s a photo by Piotr Naskrecki taken in Mozambique:
A pretty ant on a flower. Or is it? Unbelievably, this is a nymph of the katydid Eurycorypha from #Gorongosa mimicking a Polyrhachis ant. pic.twitter.com/2UDOPATFUu
Now clearly selection is responsible for this, but what kind? Does it hide from predators by running with real ants (crypsis), or does it resemble a stinging or toxic ant that predators have learned to avoid (Batesian mimicry)? I don’t know, but it’s a lovely mimic.
This video from the excellent Numberphile YouTube channel shows a very simple game that has the most unexpected outcome. My only criticism of this video is that I’d like to be shown the explanation, even if it’s complicated! Maybe readers can help me.
