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.
Yes, even though I’m an apostate Jew, I still like a few Christmas songs, and I’ve put them below to celebrate the beginning of my personal holiday. All three songs were written fairly recently—since 1962.
Drawing courtesy of reader Laurie
This is a lovely one by Sarah McLachlan and a children’s chorus; it even includes an antiwar message, included in the original song written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. That was recorded in 1971 by the John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir. I like this version because it shows the song being recorded.
Who could forget Karen Carpenter, to my mind the possessor of the world’s best female pop voice? And this is her most famous holiday song, written by her brother Richard and Frank Pooler and recorded in 1970. She’s already anorexic in this video, but the voice (prerecorded) is strong—and gorgeous. Richard called her low notes “the money notes”: the word “Christmas” is one.
And the owner of the world’s best male singing voice, with one of my favorite Christmas songs (yes, it refers to baby Jesus). The song was written only in 1962—as peace song during the tensions of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (The Carpenters’ version is here, with Karen coming in at 0:55).
We’ll have just one photo today. Since stars play a role in the mythology of Christmas, here’s a star picture from reader Tim Anderson in Australia. His notes:
One of the most beautiful sights of the summer skies is the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters.
Imaged 24/12/18 in Cowra, NSW
The image comprises ten 240-second frames stacked and aligned in Nebulosity 4 and post-processed in Photoshop. 127mm refractor telescope; ASI071MCPro camera cooled to -20° C and fitted with an Astronomik L2 UV/IR cut filter; Skywatcher EQ8 mount
The cluster is known in Japan as “Subaru”, hence the grill badge on cars of the eponymous manufacturer.
So this is Christmas, and what have you done? Yes, it’s Tuesday, December 25, 2018, the very first day of the six-day holiday of Coynezaa. It’s also National Pumpkin Pie Day, which is meet and proper since everyone in the U.S. will eat it today, while in England they’re having mince pies, also meat and proper. Throughout the world, Christians are commemorating what they take to be the birth of Jesus, but we discussed that claim yesterday.
Google’s U.S. Christmas Doodle is animated, showing that the old rocking chair has got Mr. and Mrs. Santa:
And this is my Christmas Doodle (I didn’t draw it):
To put you in the mood, here’s a slightly dark Christmas ad contributed by Grania (Translation from Swedish: “This year we do everything to make Christmas less stressful. With us, you can solve all the Christmas adventures in one place. Visit http://www.clasohlson.se or welcome to our stores.”)
On this day in 336, according to Wikipedia, there was the “first documentary sign of Christmas celebration in Rome.” It was a big day for coronations of kings: to mention just two, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on December 25, 800 (in Rome), while William the Conqueror was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey in 1066.
On this day in 1758, Halley’s Comet was seen by Johann Georg Palitzsch, confirming Edmund Halley‘s prediction of its reapparance. That was the first time the appearance of a comet was predicted and then observed. On Christmas Day, 1950, the Stone of Scone, on which British monarchs were crowned, was stolen from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalist students. It reappeared in Scotland in April of 1951.
On December 25, 1968, the Apollo 8 spacecraft—the first to orbit the moon with humans inside—left that orbit and headed back to Earth. Finally, on this day in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union, and that Union was dissolved the very next day. Also on Christmas, Ukraine officially left the Soviet Union.
It was a big day for births; perhaps moms were holding back until Christmas. Notables born on this day include Jesus Christ (year 0, unattested), Isaac Newton (1642; Julian calendar; today is sometimes called “Newtonmas”), Clara Barton (1821), Helena Rubenstein (1870), Kid Ory (1886), Conrad Hilton (1887), Robert Ripley (1890), Humphrey Bogart (1899; today should be called “Bogartmas”), Cab Calloway (1907), Rod Serling (1924), Jimmy Buffett (1946), Sissy Spacek (1949, born on the first day of Coynezaa in the year I was born, so she’s five days older than I), Annie Lennox (1954), and Justin “Cultural Appropriation” Trudeau (1971).
Those who expired on Christmas Day include W. C. Fields (1946), Charlie Chaplin (1977), Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu (1989; executed), Dean Martin (1995), Birgit Nilsson (2005), Eartha Kitt (2008), and George Michael (2016).
In honor of Deano’s passing, here he is singing my favorite Dean Martin song. The woman in yellow, who also sings, is Shirley MacLaine, the recipient of the song/massage is Dorothy Malone, the movie is “Artists and Models” (1955), and the song was misspelled as “Innamorata” by its writers Harry Warren and Jack Brooks (the recorded version is here). (“Inamorata” is the Italian word for a female lover; the male equivalent is “inamorato”.) They don’t make movies like this any more: for one thing, it lacks affirmative consent.
You’ll recognize Martin’s partner, Jerry Lewis, towards the end.
What a voice Deano had!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili uses body language and, according to Andrzej, her tail says, “I’m happy.”
A: What is your tail saying?
Hili: The same thing I say but in a different language.
In Polish:
Ja: Co mówi twój ogon?
Hili: To samo co ja, tylko innym językiem.
And in Wloclawek, Leon’s being a scrooge. After all, he has a Christmas mouse!
Leon: I don’t understand why there’s so much ado about Christmas.
In Polish: Nie rozumiem o co tyle hałasu z tymi świętami.
Doesn’t this seem unnecessarily complicated? It looks like one of those “dipping birds.” But I guess it’s a near-optimal design because it hasn’t changed in centuries.
Tweets from Matthew. He’s being a grumpy Scrooge at Christmas!
So in the annual watching of It’s A Wonderful Life we have come to the crucial point where (spoiler) UNCLE BILLY PROVES HIMSELF TO BE THE MOST IRRITATING CHARACTER IN THE WHOLE OF FICTION. Oh and everything is Mary’s fault with that damn wish.
We had Earthrise because of an orbiting spacecraft, not because the moon rotates.
How many times do I have to say this. If you are on the Moon, looking at Earth, it stays in the same place in the sky, never moving, going through phases. It neither rises not sets. I remember vividly ½ way thru lecture realising. They thought heart attack or Miss E back row.
Every year our aunt in Maine sends us little handmade chocolate lobsters. This year they are soap. Guess how I found out? 🦞 🧼 👄 pic.twitter.com/GOri5LmTEM
CLARIFICATION; By “dreaming” here, I was asking whether blind people have visual dreams.
The NBC News tonight broadcast a segment about a little girl who was born blind but has a really positive attitude: she has her own upbeat show on local radio, reading from a Braille script, and says that the only thing she can’t do is “see.”
That instantly got me wondering: Do blind people dream? And here’s a prediction—actually three predictions—before I’ve checked on the Internet. (I don’t think I’ll check until tomorrow, or I’ll wait until a reader tells me.)
The first prediction, which is mine, is based on the supposition that if someone is born blind, they’ve never been able to process visual input and therefore couldn’t experience it in their brain. Therefore, I predict that they would not be able to dream.
But people who go blind after they’re born would have developed the brain ability and experience of seeing and would have the neural ability to dream. BUT—the third prediction—the longer they’ve been blind, the less reinforcement of their brain-eye connection they’d have, and I predict that they’d gradually lose the ability to dream, or at least the frequency of dreaming would wane.
It’s strange that I’ve never thought about this before.
Something is amiss here; look at this series of tweets from the “President”, all issued within two hours.
And no, he’s not going to get his Wall for Christmas. He’s been a bad boy this year, and will get a big lump of coal to fuel his dirty energy initiative.
I don’t want to be a Scrooge, but then again it wasn’t I who decided to put up the post below at The Big Think—not an appropriate name any longer—just before Christmas. Read and weep, and then decide if you want me to send you a reader’s essay about why this article is bogus. The Big Think author, Paul Ratner, is a writer and filmmaker:
I’m not going to dissect Ratner’s “evidence” for a historical Jesus in detail (Ratner says he’s not dealing with the divine Jesus, though, as you’ll see, he is to some extent). There are three lines of what Ratner considers “evidence for Jesus”, and the last is so gnarly that even Ratner doesn’t believe it.
1.) There were writings about Jesus not that long after his supposed death. Ratner quotes the Apostle Paul, who never met Jesus and didn’t even tell stories about the historical Jesus in his letters. As Peter Nothnagle shows below, Paul conceived of a non-earthly, celestial Jesus. The other writings about Jesus are derivative, as with Pliny and Tacitus, as well as Josephus, whose quotes about Jesus may have been later interpolations. It remains the case that the entirety of evidence for a historical Jesus comes from the Bible and assertions about its timeframe, and that gave rise to people writing about Jesus from decades to centuries after he supposedly died. There is no convincing contemporary evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus—or at least evidence that would convince me.
Yet I am willing to be convinced, because I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Even if there was a person on whom Jesus was based, that doesn’t show that the person was a divine, miracle-working Son of God. I think I’m just being skeptical, and feel that those scholars who are nearly certain that there was a historical Jesus are guilty of confirming what they want to believe. But of course others will feel differently: this is about how much evidence it takes to convince someone, and that will differ among people.
2.)There were eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life by people who would have been alive during his time. Paul is the main one, but he never met Jesus, and the notion that he met Jesus’s apostles is doubtful at best (see the essay I tout below). And that’s pretty much it. Ratner then adds superfluous and unconvincing evidence that doesn’t even fall into this category. It’s unbelievable, so I’ll show it to you:
The accounts of the witnesses also correspond quite well to what other sources of information tell us about the life in the Palestine of the first century. For example, having large crowds coming to a healer like Jesus is confirmed through archaeology, which tells us that residents of the area had to contend with diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis. A study of burials in Roman Palestine by archaeologist Byron McCane revealed that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the graves they looked at had remains of children and adolescents. McCane underscored the prevalence of childhood mortality at the time, explaining that “during Jesus’ time, getting past 15 was apparently the trick.”
Of course, just having the details of the environment right doesn’t prove that Jesus Christ existed. Dr. Gathercole, thinks it just wouldn’t make sense for the writers of the time to create such an elaborate character, stating: “It is also difficult to imagine why Christian writers would invent such a thoroughly Jewish saviour figure in a time and place – under the aegis of the Roman empire – where there was strong suspicion of Judaism.”
This sentiment is supported by Byron McCane, an archaeologist and history professor at Florida Atlantic University who said in an interview with National Geographic that he “can think of no other example who fits into their time and place so well but people say doesn’t exist.” In other words, it would be rather unprecedented for such a person to be made up.
This is how deep Jesus “scholars” have to dig to buttress his existence: the Bible says Jesus was a healer, and lots of people were sick during his time. Got it? That’s really strong evidence! And then there’s the old trope that the story is so unbelievable that it must be believed: in this case, “why would Christian writers invent a thoroughly Jewish saviour figure” and so on. That’s the argument for Jesus from ignorance, but of course there were no Christians before Jesus. It’s along the lines of “the women found Jesus’s body, and nobody would believe women back then, so it must have been true.”
3.) The argument from relics. This is so stupid that Ratner doesn’t buy it, and Ratner winds up saying, “Well, Jesus must have been a real person because scholars of that era said so.” Have a gander:
There have been a number of relics associated with Jesus, but none have been proven to be undoubtedly authentic. These include the infamous Shroud of Turin, supposedly the negative image of a man who was allegedly Jesus Christ. Some claim it to be Jesus’s shroud after the crucifixion. The science on the dating and origins the Shroud is very much being debatedand doesn’t generally support the claims.
Another famous relic of dubious authenticity is The True Cross. There are hundreds of fragments of wood claimed by various people throughout history as being from the cross used in the Crucifixion of Jesus. Many of these fragments are dispersed in various European Churches despite little confirmation they are real.
Other Crucifixion-related purported relics include the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus, the nails used in the cross, or the Veil of Veronica – supposedly used to wipe the sweat from Jesus’s brow when he was carrying the cross.
Why is this even given as a “piece of historical evidence”? Even Ratner says that “none have been proven to be undoubtedly authentic”. Let’s fix that: “There is no reason to believe that ANY of these are authentic.” Note, too, that this is not evidence for a historical Jesus, but for a divine Jesus, which Ratner says he’s not presenting.
Finally, Ratner’s Big Punt.
Based on the evidence we have, can anyone with certainly say Jesus really existed about 2,000 years ago? While incontrovertible proof may be impossible to come by, those who study the period believe there was someone named Jesus Christ living in the area and time period that we generally agree on, said archaeologist Eric Meyers, emeritus professor in Judaic studies at Duke University.
THE PALLIATIVE TO THIS NONSENSE: As a special Christmas gift to my readers, I’m offering an article by reader Peter Nothnagle, who has made a hobby out of studying “historical Jesus scholarship.” Peter has produced a 21-page document, “Jesus: Fact or Fiction?”, derived from a talk he gave in 2016 to the Unitarian-Universalist Society of Iowa City City Secular Humanists and Secular Students of Iowa. It’s a learned but very clearly (and humorously) written document that concludes that there’s no convincing evidence for even a historical Jesus. I’ll just excerpt a bit from the end, and then offer you his piece:
So what have I learned in my efforts to uncover the historical Jesus? I’ll be blunt. The whole, vast edifice that is Christianity looks like it was built on a foundation of myth and fiction. That doesn’t mean that it’s all false, but here’s the important bit: it does mean that there is no good reason to believe that any of it is true. Believe it, if you like, on faith, but know that all the evidence that supports it is weak, contradictory, or fraudulent.
Before I wrap up I’d like to say one thing to the critics of the Christ-myth theory. I am not taking an extreme position. It’s not like there are people on one end of a spectrum who claim that “Jesus is the son of God”, and I’m at the opposite extreme when I say that there was no such person. Christ-mythicism is a position of neutrality. I am equally unconvinced of the Jesus of Paul, the Jesus of Mark, of Matthew, of John; I’m not prepared to say that Jesus was a rebel leader, nor would I say Jesus was invented by the Romans to pacify the Jews, nor that he was a wandering faith healer whose followers exaggerated his accomplishments. Maybe some of those Jesuses are more plausible than others, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclude that any of them was real, or even likely. Like most mythicists, I am simply trying to find an answer to an important question, and I would be absolutely delighted if any good new evidence for Jesus should come to light – and who knows, maybe that will happen some day. But today a Christ-mythicist like me is not some crank, a Christ-mythicist is just someone who has looked at everything put forth by believers, historians, archaeologists, and folklorists, and concluded that the Jesus venerated by Christians is far more likely to be a literary creation than a historical person.
This discovery hasn’t destroyed my faith, because I didn’t have any to begin with, but even as an atheist it still leads me to a sobering conclusion: that there is really no limit to humans’ capacity to deceive ourselves.
If you want me to send you Peter’s piece,email me and ask at my well known address. But please don’t ask unless you intend to read it (remember, it’s 21 1.5-spaced pages long), as it takes time to send it out. But it is very good.
And have a happy Xmas—with “X” representing a mythological character.
