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.
If you saw the wonderful movie “Spotlight,” you’ll remember the performance of Stanley Tucci as Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston lawyer representing the victims of child abuse by Catholic priests. Well, here’s the real Garabedian in a six-minute interview with CBS News. The interviewer seems incredulous at Garabedian’s uncompromising claim that the Vatican isn’t doing squat about curbing child abuse, but I think the attorney is credible.
(Click on the screenshot to go to the video, and you’ll have to disable Adblock to see it.)
Most of you have probably heard of Freeman Dyson (born 1923), a mathematician and physicist of considerable accomplishment, who worked for decades at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. He’s also a bit of a polymath, having published on biology and, unfortunately, on metaphysics. For, as he’s admitted, Dyson is a “nondenominational Christian”, something I didn’t know until I read his new interview in Business Insider (BI) and saw some pretty weird statements.
The interview, conducted by Elena Holodny, is actually quite interesting if you leave out the metaphysics. Surprisingly, Dyson says that he thinks people shouldn’t bother learning mathematics unless they have to use it (I don’t really agree, for even in everyday life it can come in handy), and he insists that people shouldn’t waste their time getting Ph.D.s (he doesn’t have one). You’ll hear about Dyson’s work for Britain’s Bomber Command during World War II, about his encounter with the young (and then unknown) Richard Feynman, and hear his one choice comment about The Donald.
It always upsets me a bit when someone with that degree of intelligence succumbs to the blandishments of Jesus. Dyson won the million-dollar Templeton prize in 2000, probably for his accommodationist views as a scientist. These views are expressed in the BI review, with Dyson coming off almost like Steve Gould:
Holodny: You won the Templeton Prize for your contributions to science and its relation to other disciplines such as religion and ethics. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the interplay of science and religion?
Dyson: Yes, because I don’t believe in it. I think they should be separate. Of course, it’s a personal question. Some of my friends like to keep them together, but I certainly like to keep them separate. For me, science is just a bunch of tools — it’s like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it’s an instrument I know how to play. It’s almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that’s how I feel when proving a theorem.
Anyway, religion is totally different. In religion, you’re supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries. Anyhow, to me, that’s something quite separate.
So there we have it: the non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) form of accommodationism popularized by Gould. So far so good, though I don’t accept this distinction because most believers rely on real truths about the universe imparted by their faith. But after saying this, Dyson steps in quicksand:
Holodny: Do you think that there’s a way they could complement each other? Or are they just in two completely different lanes?
Dyson: Well, they are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it’s the same universe with two different windows. I like to use the metaphor “windows.”
The science window gives you a view of the world, and the religion window gives you a totally different view. You can’t look at both of them at the same time, but they’re both true. So that’s sort of my personal arrangement, but, of course, other people are quite different.
(My emphasis in the penultimate sentence.) I’m curious what Dyson means by “both religion and science are ‘true'”. What is “true” about religion? I suppose if asked, he’d mutter something about “spiritual truth”, and he certainly equivocates by saying (twice) that “other people are quite different”—a form of bet-hedging that Templeton loves. But I wish Holodny had asked that follow-up question.
I found it especially odd, then, especially for someone who asserts that science and religion are distinct spheres of inquiry, that Dyson violates that dictum at the end of his interview (my emphasis):
Dyson: Almost everything about the universe is astounding. I don’t know how you would measure astounding-ness… I think the most amazing thing is how giftedwe are — as you were saying at the beginning, that we are only monkeys who came down from the trees just recently.
We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running. I mean, we’re the animal that is best of all the animals at long-distance running. Why? It is quite amazing. Superfluous gifts you don’t really need to survive.
. . . I think that’s what it would say: It’s us that’s really amazing. As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species — there’s nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could’ve done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort. . .
Here we see the implicit claim that Darwinian evolution couldn’t have given rise to such a multitalented species, ergo God. That’s not only overstepping the boundaries of science into metaphysics, so that the realms are no longer separate, but it’s also flat wrong.
First of all, we are highly cerebralized, giving us the possibility of using that complicated hardware to do things that could never have been the direct object of natural selection. Also, we have culture, so that the accumulated wisdom of aeons of humans is passed down via language, giving us the ability to do math and music and so on.
With this statement, Dyson makes himself the heir of A. R. Wallace, who, though adhering to Darwinian evolution, found the human brain an exception—something that required the invocation of a Higher Power (Wallace didn’t mean God, though). Never, said Wallace, could selection have installed in the brain of “savages” abilities that could be useful only in the future. You should be able to refute Dyson’s claim yourself (I did it in my recent review of Tom Wolfe’s new book.)
The attempt to infer something about God’s existence or character from observing nature is, of course, the endeavor called “natural theology,” its premier instantiation being the pre-Darwinian claim that the complexity and “perfection” of nature could be explained only by invoking a creative deity.
The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God.
I won’t waste my time going after claims like those.
According to the Toronto Sun, on Monday Canadian PM Justin Trudeau visited the mosque of the Ottawa Muslim Association, where men are segregated from women—who listen from the back of the bus. The Sun also reports that the imam of the mosque has connections to a group identified by the UAE as a terrorist organization.
I don’t know much about the imam, Samy Metwally, but I do object to Trudeau giving his imprimatur to this type of gender segregation, nor would I approve of his visiting an orthodox Jewish temple that had the same type of segregation. Remember, Trudeau appointed Canada’s first cabinet that consisted of at least 50% women, and yet here he endorsed, even implicitly, the subjugation of women.
Listen to ex-Muslim Eiynah “Nice Mangos” take apart Trudeau (and gender segregation in mosques) in this 12½-minute podcast. Click on the screenshot below to listen.
Here’s Trudeau at the mosque. Note that, as reader Taz mentions in the comments below,
Three female MPs accompanied Trudeau during his brief remarks, though they had to arrive by a side door and stand with their heads covered.
I won’t repeat why I’m so enamored with mimicry, except to say that it shows how powerful natural selection can be. Here’s a mimetic insect that was just brought to my attention by Matthew Cobb, courtesy of Canadian science communicator Ziya Tong.
Meet the lichen katydid,Markia hystrix, from Central and South America. It’s a herbivore and apparently lives in the forest canopy. First I’ll show two photos, and then two videos showing its remarkable crypsis (camouflage), said to make it look like a lichen (try typing those last four words without making an error):
As I noted last night, I’m reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which, I hope, will be the last theology book I ever read. And I’m doing it not because it has knockdown arguments for God—those don’t exist—but because it’s surely the most popular and influential work of Christian apologetics in the 20th century. I’m 40 pages in, and don’t really want to finish it and then write a full review, as that would be a lot of time spent for no good purpose. But I will comment from time to time.
I can see how this book influenced Francis Collins in his conversion from atheist to evangelical Christian. (The tripartite frozen waterfalls helped, too.) As Wikipedia notes in Collins’s bio:
Collins has described his parents as “only nominally Christian”and by graduate school he considered himself an atheist. However, dealing with dying patients led him to question his religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He familiarized himself with the evidence for and against God in cosmology, and used Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewisas a foundation to re-examine his religious view. He eventually came to a conclusion, and became a Christian during a hike on a fall afternoon. [JAC: Frozen waterfall!] He has described himself as a “serious Christian”.
If you’ve read Collin’s account of his religion in The Language of God, or heard his talks on faith, you’ll see that he leans heavily on what he calls “The Moral Law”: the instinctive feeling of right and wrong that, he says, is ingrained in all humans. Collins sees that as a knockdown argument for God, since he can’t envision how such a feeling could be installed in our neurons by natural selection. And if it couldn’t have evolved, well, God did it.
Of course he’s wrong: one can envision how rudiments of morality could have been selected for in our small-group-living ancestors, and we see such rudiments in our primate relatives, where it could have evolved independently. On top of an evolved morality, however, lies a veneer of culturally inculcated morality that might feel inborn but is actually indoctrinated. And that could come from aeons of experience on how to behave so our society functions well (which, after all, gives us personal well being).
It’s clear that Collins gets this argument for God from Lewis, for it’s a major argument in the first part of Mere Christianity. Not only is the Moral Law seen as evidence for God, but, in a masterpiece of sloppy thinking, Lewis argues that it was one of the few ways that God could actually give evidence to humans of His existence (my emphasis):
“The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts [in the Universe] but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more. namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to around our suspicions? In the only case where you can expect to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes; and in the other cases, where you do not get an answer, you see why you do not.” (p. 19)
Here you see two things about Lewis’s book: the extraordinarily clear prose, with no equivocation or evasion, and the easily shredded arguments for God. Lewis’s arguments here are the same as Collins’s: the “Moral Law” we feel inside ourselves must have come from God. And, more than that, Lewis makes a virtue of necessity: the only way God could reveal Himself to us is through our feelings—our realization that some behaviors are “right” and others “wrong. Ergo the dubious “architect” simile, which falls apart with a moment’s thought.
Two obvious problems immediately appear. First, why couldn’t God show himself to us by performing miracles, or by giving us other external signs of His existence? After all, He Who Is Outside the Universe managed not only to produce a virgin birth (something that Lewis accepted), but also a resurrection (ditto). It is as if, to Lewis, God, being “outside the universe”—whatever that means—entails his inability to do anything inside the universe. But of course Lewis doesn’t think that’s the case, although he pretends so here to make his argument. In fact, if God can perform miracles, he could, as the Universe’s architect, rearrange the stars to say “I am that I am” in Hebrew, bring Jesus back to Earth again, or give any number of signs right now that would evince his Being.
Second, both Lewis and his spiritual descendant Collins simply can’t see how morality could have any origin other than God. Why, then, are lifelong nonbelievers imbued with the same feelings of right and wrong? I suppose Lewis would reply that even atheists are creatures of God and have the same Moral Module installed, but he fails to consider alternative secular hypotheses like reason and evolution. Unless I miss my guess, evolution was already widely accepted at Oxford by the 1950s!
Finally, Lewis does finesse the Euthyphro argument: the argument of Plato (sort of) that morality must be antecedent to God because if God commanded us to do bad things, we’d have to do them simply because that’s what God wants. But since we wouldn’t obey those commands (unless you’re William Lane Craig), we must have an idea of right and wrong that doesn’t involve God’s will. One way of getting around that is saying that God is simply good by nature, but that presupposes some standard of goodness that is independent of God, and to which God decided to adhere. His innate goodness, so the rebuttal goes, was manifested in Scripture, from whence we derive our morals. Or, as in Lewis’s case, God actually imbues humans with our notion of good and bad, so that we don’t need scripture to learn how to be good. Both arguments, however, still suffer from the problem that there must be external standards of good to which god adheres.
Enough for now. This book will drive me mad.
For a glimpse of Lewis, here is the only existing recording of Lewis’s BBC broadcasts that he turned into Mere Christianity. I can’t find a recording of his voice anywhere else. Pure “received pronounciation”!
And, courtesy of Pliny the in Between, Meerkat Christianity:
Today’s Jesus and Mo, “wind2,” is an 8-year-old strip with new artwork. Despite the fervent attempts of Sophisticated Theologians™ to define faith otherwise, it always comes down to the definition given by philosopher Walter Kaufmann: “intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.” This is why, if you have evidence, you don’t speak of faith, and why scientists don’t say they “have faith in evolution”. Faith is not a virtue, but a character flaw.
We’ve been treated over the last year with some splendid photos of peregrine falcons taken by reader Bruce Lyon by the California coast (see here and here for previous installments). This is the latest batch, the result of what Bruce called “one of his top natural history encounters, ever.” His notes are indented:
Here is another installment of photos of the nesting pair of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) I have been following for the past couple of years on the California coast between Santa Cruz and San Francisco. This batch of photos is from a single evening in May 2015 when the peregrine family had some squabbles over food. It was one of the most enjoyable and memorable natural history encounters I have ever had. The lighting was nice too!
When I arrived at the nest cliffs, both parents were out hunting and the three chicks were perched at various spots along the cliff top. Eventually the adult female came cruising up the coast from the south with a freshly killed band-tailed pigeon in her talons. She flew around a corner out of sight towards one of her favorite plucking stations. By the time I got into position to be able see what was going on at the plucking site, there was already a fledgling getting to work on the pigeon and the adult had flown to the nearby cliffs to perch. Although the parents were shy about letting me approach when they had prey, the fledgling was completely unconcerned. I was able to sit on the top of the cliff not too far way and watch it eat. It spent the next hour eating the pigeon.
Below: The fledgling with its pigeon carcass. The peregrines eat four species of dove/pigeons but the yellow feet of the band-tailed pigeon are diagnostic—the other species all have pink feet.
The adult female was perched nearby and several times she approached the plucking station and seemed interested in landing—if I had to guess, she did not want the prey item to be entirely consumed by this one piggy little chick. However, the fledgling had other ideas—each time the adult approach to land the fledgling mantled the prey aggressively and the adult circled away. (Mantling is where a bird of prey hunches over and drops its wings around the prey, apparently to hide the prey from another predator that might steal it. It also seems like an aggressive signal of ownership.)
Below: mom does a flyby but does not land.
Eventually a second chick landed at the plucking station, grabbed the prey from its sibling and then turned and mantled the prey. After about a minute the original chick left—its crop was bulging and I expect it was pretty satiated.
Below: The newcomer mantles the prey. Note the bulging throat area (crop) on the chick in behind; it is stuffed with pigeon.
The second chick was left in peace for only a few minutes because the mom finally could not stand it any longer and came in and landed on the plucking station. She really wanted that pigeon and this lead to an amusing parent-offspring tug-of-war. For over ten minutes she tried every trick in the book to snatch the pigeon away from the chick; the chick countered by mantling the prey, keeping its body between the prey item and its mom, and whining nonstop. The adult tried to get around the chick’s blockade by walking around the other side, but the chick invariably pirouetted to block her. The adult even poked her head several times under the chick and tried to pry the carcass free with a powerful yank, but all without success.
Below: This time mom means business.
Below: the next four images show the parent-offspring tug-of-war.
The battle lasted for a dozen minutes but the chick was triumphant in the end and flew off with the carcass to another favored dining spot. Another chick soon joined it—since it did not have a full crop I assume that this was the third chick. As the photos below show, these two chicks seemed to share the food—there was no prey mantling and no signs of aggression.
It’s Wednesday, September 14 in the U.S., we’ve made it halfway though the week. Assuming you haven’t died this week, you’re still alive! The other good news is that it’s National Eat A Hoagie day (see post from two days ago) as well as National Cream Filled Donut Day. I wonder why they don’t have National Kale Day or National Quinoa Day. . .
It’s also the birthday of Amy Winehouse (♥♥born 1983, died 2011), which I’ll celebrate by embedding one of her videos below. Also on this day in history, Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901 after William McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet.
Other notables besides Amy born on this day include Clayton Moore, who played the Lone Ranger (1914), and Kate Millett (1934). Those who died on this day include John Harvard (1638), Dom Pérignon (1715; I have one bottle!), Aaron Burr (1836), and Isadora Duncan (1927; strangled by a scarf caught in the wheel of her open-top car). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili continues with her enigmatic monologues. I would say she’s on ‘nip, but she doesn’t use the stuff:
Hili: When you look at reality you see that it is reality.
A: And what are you looking at?
Hili: Reality.
In Polish:
Hili: Kiedy przyglądasz się rzeczywistości, widzisz że to jest rzeczywistość.
Ja: A czemu się przyglądasz?
Hili: Rzeczywistości.
Meanwhile in frigid Winnipeg, where seals have invaded people’s ice-covered swimming pools, Gus has extracted the last crunchie from his food-filled ball, purchased to give the moggie some exercise. Disgusted, he slaps the empty ball away:
In memory of Amy, a good Jewish girl gone bad due to Evil Men and Drugs, here’s her rendition (I’ve posted this before) of Al Kooper’s song “I love you more than you’ll ever know”. She’s all glammed up:
