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.
Today’s Jesus and Mo, a strip called “son,” is pretty clever, as the barmaid doesn’t mean what Jesus and Mo think she does!
I have to say that one of the most compelling arguments against a religionists’ belief is that, to defend it, they must explicitly argue, and give reasons why, everybody else’s belief is wrong. This is no simple matter since, as Jesus and Mo state above, the claims of different religions are often flatly contradictory. The example of Jesus is perhaps the best one.
Just ask a Christian this: “How do you know that your religion is right—that Jesus is the route to salvation—and Islam is wrong in saying that accepting Jesus as God’s son sends you to hell?”
One theologian who’s attempted an answer is Alvin Plantinga, whose apologetics are always good for a few laughs. His answer is that the reasonableness of one’s faith comes from a sensus divinitatis—a “divine sense”—vouchsafed us by God. And his sensus divinitatis tells him that Christianity is right.
But, you’ll be asking yourself, everyone has that sensus, so how come it’s gone awry in some people? As I note on pp. 180-181 of Faith Versus Fact (available in fine bookstores everywhere), Plantinga’s answer is laughable:
Of course Plantinga has an answer for why there are so many atheists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and pre-Christian believers, like the Aztecs and ancient Egyptians, who were somehow unable to form true belief in the Christian God. The answer is that in those individuals the sensus divinitatis is or was “broken,” dismantled by the effects of sin. Curiously, Plantinga argues that your broken sensus need not stem from your own sin:
[Plantinga, from Warranted Christian Belief]“Were it not for sin and its effects, God’s presence and glory would be as obvious and uncontroversial to us all as the presence of other minds, physical objects and the past. Like any cognitive process, however, the sensus divinitatis can malfunction; as a result of sin, it has been damaged. . . . It is no part of the model to say that damage to the sensus divinitatis on the part of a person is due to sin on the part of the same person. Such damage is like other disease and handicaps: due ultimately to the ravages of sin, but not necessarily sin on the part of the person with the disease.”
Here we have an untestable explanation for an insupportable thesis.
Isn’t Plantinga’s answer funny? Yet this was the guy chosen to be head of the Western division of the American Philosophical Association. According to Wikipedia (the original reference is behind a paywall), Time magazine described him as being “widely regarded as the world’s most important living Christian philosopher.“
I’d be delighted if readers could report other answers they’ve received to the question, “What makes you so sure that your religion is right and all the others are wrong?”
So, if you have a few minutes, the BBC has a 16-question quiz designed to see if you can tell house cats from wildcats by their appearance. Greg Mayer, who found this, called it to my attention and then boasted:
I got 15 of 17 correct, after correcting one of their IDs (tame hybrids don’t count as house cats in my book).
I’m a bit baffled, as there are only 16 cats shown!
So, keeping in mind Greg’s caveat, take the quiz by clicking on the screenshot below. There are no answers to click on, so get a pen and paper, make a column of numbers from 1 to 16, and then write either “w” (wild) or “h” (house) next to each. The answers and IDs are at the end of the quiz.
GO!
Be sure to read the identification notes in the answers; you’ll learn something.
My own score was 14/16; I missed two, undoubtedly including the one that Greg missed. As the Angry Cat Man, I should have scored 100%.
In lieu of readers’ wildlife today, we’ll have a beautiful landscape by Stephen Barnard, and in it somewhere is a passel of American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos). Can you spot them? Stephen issues a challenge: “I doubt that anyone could spot the American White Pelicans this photo.”
Yes, I know that “passel” isn’t the proper term for a group of pelicans! The photo will be large, and will overlap the writing to the right when first posted, but I’ll quickly post something else to get the words out of the way. Wait ten minutes after posting before you try to find them.
Alternatively, you can click on the photo twice (with a break between the clicks) to get a standalone photo.
Now, gaze on the splendor of Idaho and find those pelicans! I’ll post the answer at 11 a.m. Chicago time. Don’t reveal the answer in the comments, though you can say if you’ve successfully found the birds.
This will be posted slightly late as I’m not yet feeling 100%, though better than yesterday. Sadly, August is on its way out, as today’s the last day of the month. And it’s the Day of Solidarity and Freedom in Poland, though freedom is on the wane there thanks to the right-wing government, closely allied to the Catholic Church. On this day in 1939, the Nazis staged the “Gleiwitz incident”, a phony attack on a radio station near the Polish-German staged to look like an incident of Polish aggression against Germany. Hitler then used it as an excuse to invade Poland the next day, September 1, which marked the beginning of World War II. Here’s how far the Germans went to stage that attack (from Wikipedia):
To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human props to pass them off as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.
In addition to Honiok, several prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were drugged, shot dead on the site, and had their faces smashed up to make identification impossible. The Germans referred to them by the code phrase “Konserve” (“canned goods“). For this reason, some sources incorrectly refer to the incident as “Operation Canned Goods”. In an oral testimony at the trials, Erwin von Lahousen stated that his division of the Abwehr was one of two that were given the task of providing Polish uniforms, equipment, and identification cards, and that he was later told by Wilhelm Canaris that people from concentration camps had been disguised in these uniforms and ordered to attack the radio stations.
This is also the day in which Princess Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, and the driver were killed in the infamous car crash in Paris. That was in 1997: 19 years ago. Notables born on this day include two musicians, both born in 1945: Van Morrison and Itzhak Perlman. Those who died on this day include Sally Rand (1979) and Henry Moore (1986). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there’s a title to today’s dialogue, reflecting the vacillation of the animals:
Pendulum
Cyrus: I’m going in, it’s too hot here.
Hili: It’s nice in the shade.
In Polish:
Ruch wahadłowy
Cyrus: Wracam do domu, tu jest za gorąco.
Hili: W cieniu jest sympatycznie.
Out in Winnipeg, Gus demonstrates the typical way he lies down, what his owner Taskin calls “The Shoulder Roll”:
Reader Kieran sent this video, and by the time you see it I’ll have gone home, for Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) has a tummy ache. Enjoy the Juggling Otter (Amblonyx cinerea), whose YouTube video says this:
The Otter at Dudley Zoo enjoys his pebble juggling while waiting for his feeding time. Oriental small clawed otter [sic] are the smallest of the world’s 13 species. They are members of the weasel family. They are now back to their previous numbers in many areas in the UK.
Well, it was only a matter of time, for Mother Teresa was always on the fast track to sainthood. She died in 1997, was put on the Fast Track immediately by John Paul II (now SAINT John Paul II), and was beatified in 2003 (one of the steps to sainthood, requiring verification of a single miracle). Now, 13 years later, she’s gotten her second miracle and will be declared a full saint on Sunday. The Catholic News is probably the best source for this:
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis will declare Blessed Teresa of Kolkata a saint at the Vatican Sept. 4.
The date was announced March 15 during an “ordinary public consistory,” a meeting of the pope, cardinals and promoters of sainthood causes that formally ends the sainthood process.
. . . Shortly after she died in 1997, St. John Paul II waived the usual five-year waiting period and allowed the opening of the process to declare her sainthood. She was beatified in 2003.
After her beatification, Missionary of Charity Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator of her sainthood cause, published a book of her letters, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.” The letters illustrated how, for decades, she experienced what is described as a “dark night of the soul” in Christian spirituality; she felt that God had abandoned her. While the letters shocked some people, others saw them as proof of her steadfast faith in God, which was not based on feelings or signs that he was with her.
The date chosen for her canonization is the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death and the date previously established at the Vatican for the conclusion of the Year of Mercy pilgrimage of people like her who are engaged in works of mercy.
We all know by now what a fraud Agnes Bojaxhiu was. She courted dictators and took money from them, she used her homes to convert the sick and dying rather than help them, she was slippery in managing her funds. If you have doubts, read Christopher Hitchens’s The Missionary Position, an attack on Mother Teresa that has never been refuted, or (if you read French) the critical paper “Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa” (“The dark side of Mother Teresa”), which is free online. It’s in the journal Studies in Religion, which means it was almost certainty peer reviewed; and it has a summary in English:
The impact of Mother Teresa’s work has no religious or geographical boundaries. In the four parts of this text, we try to understand this phenomenon. We first present the method used to collect the available information and then discuss a few biographical considerations to clarify her mission and the media’s contribution to her popularity. The third part identifies four stumbling blocks on her way to canonization: her rather dogmatic religious views, her way of caring for the sick, her political choices, and her suspicious management of funds that she received. Fourth, we discuss some elements of her life related to beatification, including her “night of faith,” the exorcism to which she was subjected as well as the validity of the miracle attributed to her. In conclusion, we question why the criticism of which she has been the target has been ignored by the Vatican.
And, of course, the whole procedure for determining sainthood is just as bogus, with a “devil’s advocate” (Hitchens was one in this case!) who argues against the case for sainthood but is ignored, and specious “proof” that the saint in statu nascendi brought about two miracles. In Faith Versus Fact and on this site, I wrote about those miracles. I don’t know much about the second, but the first one wasn’t a miracle at all:
The Vatican itself, which requires a miracle to beatify someone, and two miracles to make them a saint, is none too scrupulous about the medical evidence needed to elevate someone to the pantheon. The beatification of Mother Teresa, for instance, was the supposed disappearance of ovarian cancer in Monica Besra, an Indian woman who reported she was cured after looking at a picture of the nun. It turns out, though, that her tumor wasn’t cancerous but tubercular, and, more important, she’d received conventional medical treatment in a hospital, with her doctor (who wasn’t interviewed by the Vatican) taking credit for the cure.
But her sainthood was always a fait accompli, for the legend of Agnes Bojaxhiu is impervious to fact, just as Catholicism itself is impervious to fact. And so, on Sunday, another person joins the pantheon of the two-thousand-odd existing saints who, by being canonized by the Vatican, now have special access to God, and special powers if you pray for them.
We may pride ourselves on being “the rational animal,” but that’s the final thing that’s bogus. How rational is Catholicism, and how rational is this phony, cooked-up way of declaring that some person gets a special telephone line to God?
“Lucy” is the skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis female, dated at 3.18 million years old and discovered by Donald Johanson’s team in 1971 in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia. Lucy has become famous because, with 40% of the skeleton recovered, all in one place, she gave a remarkably complete picture of what one of our ancestors may have looked like soon after splitting off from our common ancestor with modern chimps. (Note: we’re not sure that modern humans are really descendants of Lucy’s species).
In short, Lucy was short (3 feet 7 inches, or 1.1 meters), an adult, and had a brain the size of a modern chimp (450 cc; modern chimps are about 400 cc and humans are about 1150 cc). She could clearly walk bipedally, as her pelvis and legs were clearly adapted for upright walking. We also have the Laetoli footprints of two hominins walking upright—probably also A. afarensis but dated even older than Lucy (3.7 mya). Nevertheless, Lucy had fingerbones that were curved, like those of apes, suggesting that her species had either not lost all traces of their arboreal past, or that A. afarensis still clambered about in the trees.
In fact, a new paper in Nature by John Kappelman et al. (reference below, free access at link) suggests that Lucy met her death by falling from a tree. Although that conclusion is a bit controversial, the evidence shouldn’t be sniffed at. What is that evidence?
The main evidence is the way Lucy’s bones were broken, especially the proximal end of the right humerus, or upper arm bone (“proximal” means the end of the bone closest to the body, where the bone articulates with the shoulder). What Kappelman et al. found, by looking at casts of the bone and making 3-D prints of them, is that the end of the humerus was shattered in such a way suggesting a violent concussion with the ground. This is, in fact, what we see in modern humans who have tried to break a fall by putting out their arms. Here’s a photo of the cracked humerus from the paper, with Lucy’s full skeleton to the right:
The fact that these fractures remained together suggests to the authors that the cracking occurred while Lucy was still alive rather than long after death, for they’ve stayed within the joint capsule, and would likely have been scattered on the ground had they been a postmortem cracking of the bones during natural burial. It also suggests that if Lucy’s death—due to both bone breakage and organ damage (the latter possibly caused by splintering bone)—was due to a fall, she stretched out her arms after she had struck the ground (see below), and thus was conscious immediately after she struck the ground.
The head of the other humerus, the left one, also shows some fracturing too, though the damage isn’t as extensive.
There is other fracturing of the arms as well: the shaft of the right humerus shows spiral fracturing (“d” above), and there are suggestions of fractures in the forearms, with no evidence of healing. The clavicle (shoulder bone) also shows vertical fractures.
There are apparent fractures in the legs and pelvis as well: breakage in the tibia, fibula left femur (severely fractured), and in the pelvis. Here are photos of those:
Fractures of the tibia, the larger of the lower leg bonesFractures in the neck of the femur (upper leg bone)
The pelvis is really screwed up! Look at these putative fractures:
Finally, there are other apparent fractures to the cranium, lumbar vertebrae, and mandible (jawbone).
So what happened to Lucy? Because both the arms and legs are fractured, the authors conjecture that Lucy fell considerable distance out of a tree, with the legs striking first and then the arms outstretched to break the fall. The authors give a diagram, and I’ve added the figure legend from the paper:
(From text): Figure 2 | Reconstruction of Lucy’s vertical deceleration event. We hypothesize that Lucy fell from a tall tree, landing feet-first and twisting to the right, with arrows indicating the sequence and types of fractures. a, Pilon fracture, tibial plateau fracture, and spiral shaft fracture of right tibia. b, The impact of hyperextended left knee drove the distal femoral epiphysis into the distal shaft, and fractured the femoral neck and possibly the acetabulum, sacrum, and lumbar vertebra. c, The impact of the knee drove the patella into the centre anterodistal surface of the femoral shaft. d, Impact on the right hip drove the right innominate into the sacrum, and the sacrum into the left innominate, dislocating and fracturing the sacrum and left innominate, and elevating the retroauricular surface. e, Lucy was still conscious when she stretched out her arms in an attempt to break her fall and fractured both proximal humeri, the right more severely than the left with spiral fracture near the midshaft, a Colles’ (or Smith’s) fracture of the right radius, and perhaps other fractures of the radii and ulnae. The impact depressed and retracted the right scapula, which depressed the clavicle into the first rib, fracturing both. f, Frontal impact fractured the left pubis and drove a portion of the anterior inferior pubic ramus posterolaterally, and a branch or rock possibly created the puncture mark on the pubis. g, The impact of the thorax fractured many ribs and possibly some thoracic vertebrae. h, The impact of the skull, slightly left of centre, created a tripartite guardsman fracture of the mandible and cranial fractures. See Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Video 4.
What was Lucy doing up there? The authors suggest that she was nesting, just like modern chimps make nests high off the ground. The height of chimp nests (8-21 meters) is sufficient to kill an animal that falls from them.
Could anything else have caused the fractures? The authors note that you could get similar fractures if the body collided with objects in a flood; if a big animal hit Lucy at high speed, or if she suffered seizures, perhaps caused by a lightning strike. But they claim these occurrences are not only uncommon, but the pattern of Lucy’s fractures is absolutely consistent with those of modern people who fall from considerable heights. And we know that modern chimps have been killed by falling from trees.
But were there trees in that area when Lucy lived? Good question! The authors say that in the area near the village of Hadar, where Lucy’s skeleton was found, was indeed probably a “grassy woodland with sizable trees.” That evidence comes from fossil pollen, the location of the skeleton (near a water channel that probably harbored nearby trees), and isotopic evidence.
Do other experts agree? Well, not completely. Carl Zimmer interviewed several people for an article on this in the New York Times (which I just read after I wrote the above), and they disagree on whether these are even fractures, and, if so, if they resulted from a fall. And even if they resulted from a fall, maybe Lucy fell not while nesting, but for other reasons. One of the doubters is Don Johanson, who discovered Lucy. Here are some quotes from Zimmer’s piece:
But other experts said Dr. Kappelman and his colleagues had not done enough to rule out other explanations for the fractures.
Ericka N. L’Abbé, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said that when living bones break, some parts bend. A close inspection of Lucy’s bones might have revealed traces of that bending.
“The major drawback is that they didn’t look under a microscope,” Dr. L’Abbé said.
Dr. Johanson [who discovered Lucy] said it was far more likely that the fractures Dr. Koppelman attributes to a fall had occurred long after her death, as her skeleton was buried under sand.
“Elephant bones and hippo ribs appear to have the same kind of breakage,” Dr. Johanson said. “It’s unlikely they fell out of a tree.”
. . .Some researchers have argued that by Lucy’s time, our forerunners were no longer good tree-climbers, having evolved to find food on the ground. “Australopithecus afarensis was essentially a terrestrial animal,” Dr. Johanson said.
. . . .Dr. Kappelman and his colleagues considered the possibility that Lucy fell out of a nest in which she was sleeping. Chimpanzees build their nests an average of 40 feet above the ground. A fall from that height could have killed Lucy, the scientists calculated.
But Nathaniel Dominy, an evolutionary biologist at Dartmouth College, considers it unlikely. “For me, the much more likely scenario is that she was climbing for food,” he said.
Chimpanzees sometimes gather honey from hives that are far above their nests. They have to use one hand to hold on to a branch while jabbing a stick into a hive with the other.
“Lucy was just enduring the stings as a chimpanzee would. It would be intense,” Dr. Dominy said.
The upshot. I’m not completely convinced that this represents a fall, especially in light of Don Johanson’s worries that the “fractures” represent postmortem events due to burial. But this is still intriguing, and shows that things remain to be learned from what is probably the most well studied hominin fossil of all time. If these do represent fractures sustained during a fall, it would be cool, for it would give us strong evidence that A. afarensis was still living part-time in the trees even after it had evolved the ability to walk upright on the ground.
This is what happens when a book reviewer is assigned a book in which he has no expertise whatsoever. Over at USA Today, Don Oldenburg reviews Tom Wolfe’s new book, The Kingdom of Speech. I’ve read the book, and its thesis is that human language is not in any way a product of biological evolution. Indeed, Wolfe has said that not only are humans not a product of biological evolution, but that only animals evolve and humans aren’t animals! (In an NPR interview with Wolfe, Scott Simon didn’t challenge him on that fatuous assertion.) Over the last decade, Wolfe has flirted with Intelligent Design creationism, and that’s clearly evident in the book. Insofar as Americans who read this book come to it with ignorance about evolution or its history, they will be not only let down, but deceived.
Further, Wolfe distorts the data and history of linguistics—at least the part of linguistics concerned with what aspects of humans’ ability to speak, and their ability to use semantic language, may have a biological origin—and whether that origin involves natural selection. I’ll have more to say on that later this week; let’s just say that we have data addressing that.
Sadly, Mr. Oldenburg seems to have missed every flaw in Wolfe’s argument, and produces instead a puff piece, giving the book three stars out of four. Oldenburg has only minor quibbles, which explains the missing fourth star, but simply doesn’t address Wolfe’s solution to Big Problem: Where did language come from?
Here’s a bit of USA Today‘s puff piece:
And so begins Wolfe’s provocative and winding tale that attempts to demystify the mystery that has baffled the world of linguistics and, arguably, makes what we think we know about the origins of speech and human evolution wrong.
Arguably? That implies there’s a counterargument. Sadly, Oldenburg doesn’t give one.
[Wolfe] presents that intriguing case in his inimitable, casual-chatty, captivating storytelling style. His trademark rich reporting is unmistakable throughout his first non-fiction endeavor in 16 years, since Hooking Up, his 2000 essay collection. But The Kingdom of Speech is much more a legacy of his brilliant 1981 lambasting of modernist architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, and his fascinating 1975 assault on modern art, The Painted Word.
I’ve read Bauhaus and The Painted Word. I found both books gratuitously nasty and show-offy, and the critics found them ignorant as well. They show neither the absorbing narrative of Radical Chic and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test nor the research that went into what I consider Wolfe’s best book, The Right Stuff (highly recommended). As for this book, Oldenburg simply hasn’t done his homework in either evolution or linguistics, enabling him to emit stuff like this:
Wolfe starts with retelling the what-the-hell story of the Theory of Evolution [sic] from its starting gate, when “Charlie” Darwin and his British landed-gentry lads filched the theory of natural selection from far-afield naturalist Alfred Wallace. Going forward, he identifies many rogue evolutionaries gone wild, from anti-Darwinian Robert Chambers to the Darwin-cheerleader Thomas Huxley, to the first-geneticist Gregor Johann Mendel.
Wolfe’s diversions include everything from Apache cosmology to “gestural theory” (the standing man’s freed-hand gestures evolving into speech). The second half of the book focuses on pompous, nasty, but conversation-changing Noam Chomsky versus mosquito-bitten, neck-deep-in-Amazon-primitiveness, anthropologist Daniel Everett, whose life story is a splendidly cinematic read.
Seriously? Huxley and Mendel are “rogue evolutionaries gone wild”? Huxley defended Darwin, but he was in no sense a “rogue,” nor did he “go wild.” As for Mendel, does Mr. Oldenburg realize that Mendel was not an “evolutionary” but a geneticist who didn’t have an inkling about evolution? The main lacuna here is that Oldenburg doesn’t address the book’s claims seriously. Even in the restricted space of USA Today one can call attention to the fact that there are serious problems with both the evolutionary and linguistic parts of the book. Nor does he apparently have the expertise to review the book properly (I don’t know Mr Oldenburg’s background, but if he had that expertise, he should have used it.)
Instead, Oldenburg’s quibbles are stylistic ones:
Sure, Wolfe-ish annoyances persist. Too-many repeated words (“talk talk talk it was, and endless theory theory theory”) and slam-bang semantics (“Bango!” and “OOOF!”). One of his detours — where he lists historic oddball charismatic leaders just to prove that, like Chomsky, many were in their 20s — makes you want to say, “Stop it, Tom.”
Still, he brings to this academic debate the same irreverence and entertaining quality that lit up Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — without the trippy, ‘60s, Merry Prankster craziness. You’ll find here the same manic prose, the hip rhythms and cleverly crafted arguments of the genius Tom Wolfe. Which you must read.
I wouldn’t follow the advice of that last sentence. If you want to read more incisive reviews of The Kingdom of Speech, see Charles Mann’s at the Wall Street Journal, Harry Ritchie’s at The Spectator (he calls Wolfe’s thesis “bollocks”), or Tom Bartlett’s analysis in The Chronicle of Higher Education. While Bartlett is far too credulous and uncritical about the evolutionary parts of Wolfe’s book, his fact-checking of Wolfe’s claims about Noam Chomsky (claims that, in effect, Bartlett calls “bollocks” as well) is instructive.
