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.
Good morning! PCC(E) is still feeling the effects of timezone-hopping so I am with you again today.
Today in 1928 Disney released Steamboat Willie which was the first the studio had released with fully synchronized sound. The Jazz Singer had appeared in cinemas the previous year which had pretty much sealed the fate of sound in movies, prompting Disney to produce this short.
In 1978 in rather more grim news, Jim Jones convinced members of his cult to commit suicide – and murder in some cases – in Jonestown, Guyana. Whatever grandiose legacy the madman wished to leave behind him, his legacy appears to be the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” which is fitting if nothing else.
It’s Kirk Hammett‘s birthday (1962) today as well. He’s the lead guitarist with Metallica. Here he is on a guitar solo strutting his stuff.
Over in Poland, Hili is still scheming, although I suspect the plans now included maximum comfort as a prerequisite. And he’s still chatting with the lovely actress Gaia Weiss, the daughter of Andrzej’s niece:
Hili: We have to reach as far as possible.
Gaia: And beyond.
(Photo: Gaia)
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy sięgać tak daleko jak to możliwe.
Gaia: Albo jeszcze dalej.
(Zdjęcie: Gaia)
Here’s a new Leon:
Leon: And they are not trimming its claws!
And in keeping with the solemn tone, here is a lagniappe from Twitter. I did not know this was a thing. Apparently it is.
It’s Friday. We’re all tired. So here’s some photos of cats wearing hats made from their own hair. Enjoy. pic.twitter.com/iKUIzto9k0
Here we have a prime example of Crybaby Liberals who will do anything to impugn the man who is now president-elect. The sad thing is that Trump has impugned himself so many times with his own behavior that we really don’t need to examine his tastes in steak. But behold the effluence of PuffHo (click on screenshot to go to the piece), from a piece published in March:
And we’re told that we’re supposed to hate Trump for this:
You may hate him for his lies or for his racism, but now you can hate him for how he takes his filet mignon. It’s almost as if he’s threatened by any possible life remaining in the meat. Trump wants everything he eats to be really, really, really dead.
Trump’s steak preference is considered offensive by most people who have an ounce of appreciation for food.
It’s one of the biggest crimes a person can commit while dining out. Steaks ordered “well-done” have been known to crinkle the noses of talented chefs.
. . . .When you cast your vote for president this year, think about how the candidates interact with the world on a more intimate level. What would they do if they saw a stray dog on the side of the road? Would they be willing to let someone else take the last spot in the elevator, and wait for the next? How would they navigate a menu at a nice meal out?
This is the kind of over-the-top demonization that should embarrass all of us. The stray dog/elevator/steak analogy at the end is simply asinine. I happen to believe that a rare steak tastes better, but tastes differ, and I’d never try to say that anybody who wanted a well done steak (like my Dad used to, for instance) was a bad person.
At the end of this article, which appeared in the “Taste” section of PuffHo (the food section), we find the usual editor’s note appended to every PuffHo piece on Trump (it was clearly added after he was nominated). I’ve added the final bit.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S. And, he eats his steak in the worst possible way: well done!!!! That makes him even more of a bad person.
For some reason, respectable intellectual venues are constantly and loudly proclaiming the comity between science and religion. I don’t quite know why this is so—we’ll have another example tomorrow from Smithsonian Magazine, of all places—but here we see the well known science popularizer and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku touting God in a June piece in Intellectual Takeout: “World-famous scientist: God created the Universe.” Kaku, who specializes in string theory, holds a professorship in physics at the City University of New York. And the title clearly plays into the hands of those with an Abrahamic bent.
But seriously? God created the Universe? Well, let’s ask Dr. Kaku for his evidence—”evidence” that he initially gave in CNS News. And here, as far as I can see, is the entirety of his evidence: there are laws of physics.
Here’s the CNS piece in its entirety:
Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York (CUNY) and co-founder of String Field Theory, says theoretical particles known as “primitive semi-radius tachyons” are physical evidence that the universe was created by a higher intelligence.
After analyzing the behavior of these sub-atomic particles – which can move faster than the speed of light and have the ability to “unstick” space and matter – using technology created in 2005, Kaku concluded that the universe is a “Matrix” governed by laws and principles that could only have been designed by an intelligent being.
“I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore,” Kaku said, according to an article published in the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies.
“To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.”
“The final solution resolution could be that God is a mathematician,” Kaku, author of The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, said in a 2013 Big Think video posted on YouTube. [JAC: see video below.]
“The mind of God, we believe, is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.”
But which physical laws are simply the brute facts of physics, like the inverse-square law, or the constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum, and which rules are evidence for “an intelligence”? Can Dr. Kaku tell us the difference? Or does he think that all physical laws are evidence for a higher intelligence? And why? What could there possibly be there about any law of physics that instantiates a higher intelligence? (I’m ignoring the mushbrained “Matrix” allusion here.)
Now, you can say that the combination of all physical laws and parameters as part of a Universe that harbors intelligent life is itself evidence for a god (that’s the Strong Anthropic Principle), but you can’t make that argument for individual laws. As Sean Carroll and others have observed, at bottom the answer of why laws are what they are, or that they’re often simple and often remarkable, could be just “That’s the way it is”
Since Kaku is a scientist and a popularizer, it should be his responsibility, when addressing the nature of unexplained physical laws, to say, “We don’t know” or “We don’t understand.” Instead, he says that “God is a mathematician.” Well, you might as well say “The Universe is a mathematician.” And that simply means that the laws of physics can be expressed mathematically. But of course any regularity can be expressed mathematically, so that’s just saying that physical laws show regularities. One might as well say that the laws of fluid mechanics evince the mind of God.
If you want to make those regularities into a God, as did Einstein did, then you’re a pantheist. (I don’t think Kaku is one, since he mentions “an intelligence”, which surely isn’t pantheism!) But it’s intellectually dishonest to use the word “God”—which is freighted with all sorts of religious meanings for most folks—to do that. I think that Kaku is in fact pandering to the religious in an effort to make himself more popular. He’s certainly not behaving as a scientist—one who is satisfied saying, “I don’t know.” Nor could I find any record of Kaku believing in a personal God.
Below is the 2013 video in which Kaku, at the end, expresses a belief in God, or at least uses the word “God” three times (start at 4:22). The rest of the video has nothing to do with God, but is a simple explication of the history of physics. Here’s the delusional bit:
All of a sudden we had super symmetric theories coming out of physics that then revolutionized mathematics, and so the goal of physics we believe is to find an equation perhaps no more than one inch long which will allow us to unify all the forces of nature and allow us to read the mind of God. And what is the key to that one inch equation? Super symmetry, a symmetry that comes out of physics, not mathematics, and has shocked the world of mathematics. But you see, all this is pure mathematics and so the final resolution could be that God is a mathematician. And when you read the mind of God, we actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.
What the hell does Kaku think he’s doing when he’s talking about “the mind of God”? The “cosmic music” that is controversial string theory?
It’s time for us scientists, and for those who think the road to understanding reality is the road of naturalism, to start calling out the kind of nonsense espoused by Kaku. There is no comity between science and religion, and there is no place for accommodationism in any venue that purports to advance science and reason. It’s arrantly irresponsible to describe the wonders of reality—or, in the case of disputed string theory, the tenets of an unevidenced hypothesis—as evincing “the mind of God.”
Kaku knows what kind of country the U.S. is, and he knows full well that people will see his little lecture and his interview as science giving evidence for the Bearded Man in the Sky. I’m surprised that Kaku hasn’t been snapped up by the Templeton Foundation!
This is science popularization at its worst: an “aren’t I a nice guy” pandering to religion, and an abandoment of our overriding tenet of doubt. This kind of bunk is happening all over, and it’s time we fought back.
We’ve seen recent examples of God-osculation in the journal Nature (shame on them!), in National Geographic, and tomorrow we’ll see one in Smithsonian Magazine.
I’m back from SE Asia, but am horribly jet-lagged. It will take me a few days to recover and resume posting as usual. In the meantime, enjoy this comic.
The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “furry”, shows Mo raising a few dumb creationists questions about evolution, although the “Why aren’t there furry Eskimos?” issue is new to me. (The word is “Inuit,” now, and they didn’t need fur because they had clothes.)
The good news is that, after a five-year effort, Why Evolution is True will, I’m told, soon appear in Arabic. I’ve long wished for this, for the Arab-speaking world is largely creationist, and I’m pretty sure there are no books in Arabic laying out the evidence for evolution. At any rate, the Egyptian National Center for Translation has done the job (it was interrupted during Arab Spring), and we’ll have an edition in that language within a month or two.
We have two contributions today, the first being two landscapes from Stephen Barnard taken on November 15 from his home in Idaho. His caption:
Here’s the sunrise this morning (looking southeast), and its counterpart, a minute or two later, in the northwest.
And from reader Tim Anderson in Oz, we have what I believe is our first astronomy video. His notes:
The attached file is a timelapse movie of the southern night sky taken from my home in Cowra, NSW. The glow at the bottom of the frame comes from the lights of the town. Light pollution is an increasing problem for amateur and professional astronomers alike.
Maybe some of you can recognize the stars or constellations.
Jerry is back home in Chicago, but he is jetlagged and, I quote, “a wreck”, so I am doing the Hili dialogue this morning out of compassion.
Today is the day in 1973 when Nixon informed the world “I am not a crook” at the height of the Watergate scandal, back in the day when reporters actually did their job rather than aspired to be the incestuous sycophants that so many of them are today.
In 1978 the Star Wars Holiday Special aired and was described thusly by Nathan Rabin : “I’m not convinced the special wasn’t ultimately written and directed by a sentient bag of cocaine.” Of course Rabin was only 2 when the special aired and so had many years to think about it when he finally wrote his review 35 years later.
Mark Hamill commented on the strange robes that appeared on the Wookies yesterday on Twitter.
You can actually watch the whole thing here, if you wish. Or you can just watch the Life Day song sung by Carrie Fisher. It’s … not good, but that’s not her fault.
In 1989 the Velvet Revolution began in Czechoslovakia. It started as a student protest against the one party communist regime; but the students were joined by the general public and within 10 days the government had resigned.
Anyway, back to the present:
In Dobrzyn Hili has a visitor or possibly a partner in crime; this is Gaia Weiss, the daughter of Andrzej’s niece, who’s an actress living in Paris.
Hili: We are both young and beautiful. What shall we get up to?
Gaia: We will surely think of something.
In Polish:
Hili: Obie jesteśmy piękne i młode, ciekawe, co my jeszcze wymyślimy?
Gaia: Z pewnością coś wymyślimy.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been held guilty for Hillary Clinton’s loss for several reasons, including criticizing her too much as well as for not criticizing her enough before the primaries, which led to a flawed candidate being put up against Trump. You can’t win in this game!
David, whose email is below (name redacted to protect privacy ) took the time to chew me out for not doing enough for Hillary, and for criticizing both her and Islam. This is only one of several specimens I’ve gotten from butthurt liberals. (His first paragraph is a quote from my post referenced above.) I love the gracious salutation!
Hey,
‘………What bothers me almost as much as Trump’s victory is the vitriol I’m getting in both comments (the really nasty ones don’t go up) and personal emails, excoriating me for being responsible for Trump’s victory. I am told that by calling attention to Hillary’s flaws, I helped pave the path to a Trump win, as if somehow we should not point out the weaknesses of our candidates […..] But me? Seriously? I am one individual among millions, and one who voted for Clinton……’
Some points:
1 You claim to be 1 in a million, but your blog reaches thousands of potential voters, and I think you have boasted on your blog of the # of your followers – you ARE an opinion-maker.
2 If you truly supported HRC, you could have donated $ to her campaign, or volunteered to knock on doors in the nearby swing state of Wisconsin – did you do any of this? Moi? I reluctantly donated $ to HRC to try to stop Trump.
3 Even while traveling in Asia, you could have called potential voters on your phone with a pro-HRC message. [JAC: LOL; I don’t travel with a phone outside the US!
4 I [and other Democrats] see the recent election as a fight between reality and an insane, racialized, right-wing fantasy – a zero-sum fight in which there is no neutral ground. Trump represents a return to the USA of a theory of white genetic superiority.
5 If points 1-4 above are true, then the following 3 points are also true:
5A Every time you criticized HRC, you depressed turnout among Democratic voters – which was an in-kind donation to Trump. Overconfidence in HRC and confirmation bias with opinion polls were a HUUUGE gift to the Trump campaign. You contributed to this.
5B Every time you criticized ‘political correctness’, you made an in-kind contribution to the alt-right.
5C Every time you mentioned the hijab and ‘muslims behaving badly’, you made an in-kind contribution to the alt-right.
These problems with the alt-right haven’t ended with the election – see, e.g., Steve Bannon.
Quick, where’s my hair shirt and metal cilice?
I’m sorry, but reader David is like a wounded bull in a corrida who wants to gore the nearest available human. People like this need to stop trying to find someone to blame for Hillary’s loss. The reasons are complex: you can’t point at one thing as the culprit, but least of all at the person who was a Democrat but simply had opinions different from yours. As for criticizing Islam and hijabs, are we supposed to stifle ourselves lest we enable the “alt-right”? Yes, David is not thinking clearly, and that’s the most charitable thing I can say about him.
For more on the immature tendency to find anything to blame for a bad election outcome, here are Seth Andrews and Darrel Ray discussing some of the more angst-ridden responses and overstatements with respect to Trump’s election:
“Many people are expressing deep and strong, even debilitating emotions as a result of the election. In this special episode I wish to give listeners some techniques they can use to reduce their distress, while preparing to move forward in the future.”
Reader Bruce Lyon has graced these pages with wonderful photos of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) nesting in California (see here, here and here), and now he adds a third batch to the set. His notes are indented:.
More photos of the nesting peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) I have been following on the California coast between Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Today’s offerings focus on the birds in flight, where they really shine (sometimes gobsmackingly so).
Peregrines are famously the world’s fastest birds. A National Geographic video claims an astonishing 240 mph dive, determined with a falconry bird equipped with a transmitter and skydivers enticing it to chase a plunging lure. As the video shows, the birds reach their exceptional speeds by going into a stoop, i.e. diving with wings tucked close against the body to produce an aerodynamic teardrop shape. I often see my falcons stooping, mostly during hunts but also on windy days. The birds become feisty on windy days and they sometimes seem to stoop and fly loops just for the sheer fun of it—an avian airshow.
Below: the female stooping on a windy day.
The birds are also remarkably maneuverable, even at high speeds. I have seen full tight loops during hunts. Below: The female suddenly flips upside down in flight.
Below: the male partially tucks his wings to give me a speedy flyby.
On windy days the falcons also become more feisty about chasing gulls, pelicans and other large birds. It seems like play to me because they never appear serious about trying to kill their victims. Below: A couple of photos of the peregrines chasing Western gulls.
A pair of black oystercatchers tried to nest around the corner from the falcon nest, just out of sight of the nest. The falcons soon began chasing the oystercatchers, first by trying to sneak around the corner and ambush them. The oystercatchers got wise to this strategy and one oystercatcher then stood sentry at the corner where it could watch the falcons. This did not stop the falcons who then began chasing the oystercatchers out over the water. It looked like the falcon might be trying to herd the oystercatchers, perhaps to get them off balance and then grab them.
Below. Male falcon herding the oystercatchers.
Below. The oystercatchers were not amused. After a couple of days of this harassment they deserted their nest and moved to a different part of their territory.
The open coastal landscape around falcon nest lets me observe the birds going off to hunt, and I have been lucky to see several successful hunts. The birds often watch for birds from the nest cliffs and then suddenly take off when they see a hunting opportunity. I can tell when the leave to chase something because they are clearly flying with a purpose—fast and direct. They must have remarkable eyesight because some of the birds they have gone out after have been more than a mile away, according to my Google Earth estimates. I have seen two hunting methods: climbing up very high, nearly out of sight, and then diving in a stoop, or simply chasing a bird down and grabbing it out of the air.
Below: The male launches from the cliff, perhaps to go after some prey.
I suspected that the birds might hunt cooperatively as a team because they often leave the cliffs at the same time and then fly off together rapidly. Below: the team heading off to chase something together. The size difference is apparent, with the smaller male above.
I eventually watching a successful cooperative hunt. The pair flew off north but then quickly circled around to the south, behind a bluff. Their U turn made suspicious so I scanned southward with my binoculars and saw a lone dove flying inland, half a mile away. The peregrines suddenly appeared, streaking like meteorites. The male, in the lead, swooped at the dove but missed because the dove swerved. A split second later, an explosion of feathers—the female had done her job. She followed the tumbling dove to the ground and then brought it to her favorite plucking site near the nest. Since then I have seen several tag team chases and kills. The photo below is pretty crappy but it shows a different cooperative chase—that time the dove (bird in center) got away:
Below. The male returns from a successful hunt with a freshly killed collared-dove:
The falcons also have aerial prey transfers. The male sometimes transfers prey to the female, who then takes it to the nest. After the chicks fledge, both parents transfer prey to the chicks. In transfers, the prey is dropped into the air and the recipient has to snatch it while it is falling.
Below: The female has just grabbed a dove the male dropped.
Below: Sometimes the fledgling falcons are kind of klutzy. Twice, the parent had to fetch a gull chick that the fledgling failed to grab after the drop. The parent gave up and brought the gull chick to the cliff, where the fledgling picked it up. It then dropped it in the sea. Doh!
