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.
Over the years I’ve repeatedly documented the wooly thinking, religious apologetics, and general mushbrain-y analysis at “The Stone”, a philosophy blog at the New York Times. But very rarely the editors will deign to let a rationalist or—horrors!—an atheist have a column. And today it’s Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg, who is about the most “militant” atheist—and “hardest” determinist—I know. You may have read his 2011 book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, a defense of scientism that had the honor of being named “the worst book of the year” by Leon Wieseltier. I thought it was a pretty good book, though a bit tendentious, but certainly much better than all the tripe that passes as criticism of “scientism” (Wieseltier has purveyed some of that stomach lining).
Rosenberg’s theme is the fallibility of our thinking that consciousness produces absolutely accurate information about our actions, thoughts, and motivations. He maintains that this is wrong: just as when we exercise our “theory of mind,” imputing beliefs, intentions, or motivations to others, so that faculty is equally fallible when turned upon ourselves. Certainly our feeling of being a free agent consciously willing an action, and thereby bringing it about, is wrong, as many experiments have no shown, and as I’ve discussed endlessly. Rosenberg goes a bit further:
How do we know this? Well, Hume would have answered that introspection tells us so. But that won’t wash for experimental scientists. They demand evidence. Some of it comes from the fMRI work that established the existence of a distinct mind-reading module, more from autistic children, whose deficits in explaining and predicting the behavior of others come together with limitations on self-awareness and self-reporting of their own motivations. Patients suffering from schizophrenia manifest deficiencies in both other-mind reading and self-mind reading. If these two capacities were distinct one would expect at least some autistic children and schizophrenics to manifest one of these capacities without the other.
That we read our own minds the same way we read other minds is evident in what cognitive science tells us about consciousness and working memory — the dual imagistic and silent-speech process that we employ to calculate, decide, choose among options “immediately before the mind.”
. . . The upshot of all these discoveries is deeply significant, not just for philosophy, but for us as human beings: There is no first-person point of view.
Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds. If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we think or why we think it.
Philosophers’ claims that by reflecting on itself thought reliably reveals our nature, grounds knowledge, gives us free will, endows our behavior with moral value, are all challenged. And the threat doesn’t stem from some tendentious scientistic worldview. It emerges from the detailed understanding of the mind that cognitive science and neuroscience are providing.
There’s considerable merit in this argument, though I’ll be thinking more about it. But to the extent that Rosenberg is right, it puts the lie to the claim that introspection itself can give us truths as reliable as those obtained by “scientific” methods: empirical observation, prediction, and corroboration by others. Introspection is by definition an uncorroborated process, and if you make a claim about the nature of reality based on introspection alone, there’s no reason to trust it. Even when you say, “I’m hungry”, you may be wrong; the only truth there is that your consciousness tells you that you feel hungry. But of course your eyes could be bigger than your stomach. One of my favorite quotes, by former pastor Mike Aus, expresses this nicely:
When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.
Uncle Karl Giberson earned his avuncular title by being civil and reasonable, especially for an evangelical Christian. But then sometimes he turned mean and lost his “Uncle” monicker. I’m restoring it today, at least temporarily, on the basis of a nice piece he wrote for Beacon Broadside, a website run by Beacon Press. The title tells it all: “Noah’s Ark Park Keeping Christians in the Eighteenth Century.”
What’s good about his approach—Giberson is a trained physicist, and, along with Francis Collins, one of the two founders of the failed organization BioLogos—is that he uses evidence to dismiss the Ark story. Although Uncle Karl’s objections aren’t new, remember that his readership consists largely of fellow Evangelicals, many of whom buy the Ark story whole hog (or rather, two whole hogs).
Giberson:
The story of Noah’s Flood, more so than any other major story in the Bible, has been known for centuries to be impossible. Many lines of evidence make this clear. As far back as the seventeenth century’s great age of exploration, questions arose about how all the newly discovered animals could possibly have gotten to their existing locations if they were once on a boat that that docked in the Middle East. In Ham’s retelling, four thousand years ago there were just two kangaroos and both were located in Turkey, on Mt. Ararat where the ark came to rest. How did they hop across the ocean to Australia? And as explorers expanded the catalog of animals, it became clear they could not have fit in the ark, even if they could have gotten there.
Explorers soon discovered that the north and south poles could not have been under water just four thousand years ago. Once the height of the Earth’s great mountains was determined, calculations showed that there wasn’t enough water to cover them. Plants were discovered that could not have survived being submerged in salt water. The list goes on. The story of Noah’s Flood is simply not possible, and educated thinkers in the West began abandoning it more than three centuries ago.
Almost every new science that emerged in the wake of the Scientific Revolution created additional problems for the story. Evolution ruled out the possibility that all the races could have evolved from Noah’s family in just a few thousand years. Geneticists determined that the human race could never have consisted of just eight people. The discovery of continental drift showed that, by the time of Noah’s flood, the continents were in their present locations, making it impossible for the animals to have accomplished the necessary migration both onto the ark, and then back to their present locations.
These challenges to a literal reading of the story of Noah were the collateral damage of scientific progress, so much so that to insist today on the historicity of Noah’s flood requires the rejection of many mainstream scientific ideas.
. . . Ham seeks to convince his audience that Noah, with a crew consisting entirely of seven family members, cared for two of every species—he uses the uncertain biblical term “kind” in place of species—for over a year. Noah’s tiny crew fed the animals, watered them, cleaned up their waste, healed their illnesses. This strains credulity. Just the two elephants alone would have needed at least 15,000 gallons of fresh water—water that would have to be stored, since the water outside the ark would have been salty. And, not being refrigerated, the water would have to be prevented somehow from becoming contaminated.
And don’t forget those penguins, which would have to hop or swim all the way from Turkey to the South Pole (or the Galápagos, swimming around South America). For a much more complete description of the Ark’s scientific problems, I again urge you to read the informative and humorous piece by Robert A. Moore, “The impossible voyage of Noah’s Ark.”
Finally, Karl raises one of the most serious problems with the Ark story: a theological one. Why, if God could have reformed humanity (as he did Pharaoh, by “softening his heart”), did he have to drown the entire population of H. sapiens, save eight people, and kill every other living thing on Earth? After all, you can’t make the case that all those animals sinned! The only viable conclusion is that god was a genocidal and animal-hating maniac:
Noah’s story, as a tale for children, has a certain adventurous charm, and I was fascinated by it as a kid in Sunday School. Much of that adventure came back to me when I visited Ham’s other project, the Creation Museum, a story I recount in Saving the Original Sinner. But I have to confess that I am horrified by the story as an adult and wonder why it took me so long to see just how horrifying the story is. Taken literally—the entire point of Ham’s new park—the story suggests that God drowned all the children on the planet for their parents’ sins. Even if we assume that all adults outside of Noah’s family were terrible sinners deserving to be drowned, the collateral damage in the deaths of innocent children and animals dwarfs every major genocide in history combined. If Noah’s story is literally true, God is a monster.
Giberson makes only two trivial errors in his piece. One is the claim that Noah carried “two of every species” on the Ark. As Karl surely knows, Genesis 7:2 says that for “clean” animals, seven pair were to be brought aboard. (Generally, “clean animals” are those that could be eaten; you can see a list here.) Giberson also says that admission to the Ark Park is $60. That figure is actually for joint admission to The Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum; admission to the Ark alone is only (!) $40. Still, you can imagine how much dosh the park, which is, I think, going to be very popular, will bring in.
At the end, Giberson says that Ham and his Ark Encounter are doing “a great disservice to Christianity and thinking people in general.” He’s right. But that brings up two issues.
The first is Giberson’s reliance on science and empirical evidence to dismiss the Ark Story. That’s all well and good, but if you rely on that kind of evidence, then you must also dismiss the story of Jesus’s divinity, his crucifixion, and his Resurrection. But Giberson buys that part of scripture. He more or less has to, for if you reject the Jesus myth, you’re rejecting Christianity as a whole.
Further, in his 2009 book Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, Giberson touts confirmation bias rather than examining religious beliefs with evidence:
As a believer in God, I am convinced in advance that the world is not an accident and that, in some mysterious way, our existence is an “expected” result. No data would dispel it. Thus, I do not look at natural history as a source of data to determine whether or not the world has purpose. Rather, my approach is to anticipate that the facts of natural history will be compatible with the purpose and meaning I have encountered elsewhere. And my understanding of science does nothing to dissuade me from this conviction.
What he doesn’t seem to realize is that Ham is doing exactly this, for Ham finds “purpose and meaning” in the Creation and Flood stories; and if the nasty facts tell against that story, well, you just have to reject them.
As I’ve followed Giberson’s career over the years (he’s now teaching at Stonehill College in Massachusetts and writing more books), I’ve seen him come precariously close to the borderline of nonbelief. He left BioLogos, probably over their policy of coddling Evangelicals who couldn’t deal with the scientific facts, and I’ve seen him go after science denialism more and more strongly. He’s even said that one of the main reasons he retains his faith is a purely pragmatic one (quote below from Saving Darwin):
As a purely practical matter, I have compelling reasons to believe in God. My parents are deeply committed Christians and would be devastated, were I to reject my faith. My wife and children believe in God, and we attend church together regularly. Most of my friends are believers. I have a job I love at a Christian college that would be forced to dismiss me if I were to reject the faith that underpins the mission of the college. Abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails.
What I’d say to Uncle Karl is that life off the rails isn’t that bad. After all, you can now go in whatever direction you want rather than schlep your baggage on an unswerving path to a mythical Heaven. And I’d say this to him as well, “Karl, you’ve rejected the Ark story because there’s no good evidence for it. Why don’t you just go one myth further?”
Finally, I’d like once again to chew Bill Nye’s tuchas about debating Ken Ham in 2014. Ham claims, and he might be right, that that debate, held at the Creation Museum, was instrumental in helping call attention to and raise money for the Ark Park, once so financially troubled that it looked as if it would die. But it was built, requiring millions of dollars of donations and tax breaks. And I predicted, way back in January of 2014, that by debating Ham, Nye was going to help finance the park. In fact, that was probably the only value of that debate, which has sunk like a stone. It certainly didn’t change any minds.
Nye just visited the Ark Park, ostensibly to see what effect it would have on children—but we already know the answer!. I hope he enjoyed seeing this Park of Lies that, in all probability, he helped finance.
Say what you will about Bill Nye, and about how he helped educate you or your kids on his television show. My own view is that now that he’s not on the telly, he still desperately craves the attention he once had, and is trying to run back to the spotlight in a Ham-handed fashion (pun intended). Not that long ago, Nye questioned the safety of genetically modified foods, though he backtracked on that. I’d like to see him do more backtracking and admit that he screwed up by debating Ken Ham. By participating in that debate, Nye was helping subsidize the peddling of lies to children.
Illustration of the Ark Encounter park from Giberson’s article.
Robert Lang, who’s documented his trip to Costa Rica, sends some photos of reptiles today. His notes are indented:
There were two types of turtle common on the Carrbbean canals: the Black River Turtle (Rhinoclemmys funerea), which is pretty generically turtle-looking:
. . . and what our guide called the “Sliding Turtle”, which has a striped neck and head like the North American Red-Eared Slider. Judging from guide’s name, appearance, and range, I’m guessing it’s the Meso-American Slider(Trachemys venusta).
One of the Black River Turtles made a nice perch for a juvenile Emerald Basilisk (Basiliscus plumifrons).
The juvenile basilisks look generically lizard-like, but the adult has dramatic sails along its back. [JAC: These are sometimes called “Jesus Christ lizards” because they can literally run across the surface of the water.]
We saw a few other interesting lizards: a Black Spiny Iguana (Ctenosaura similis) along a riverbank near the Pacific:
And Green Iguanas (Iguana iguana) near the Carribean. The greens are sexually dimorphic; the females are smaller and darker:
While the males are larger, lighter, and have larger spikes along their back.
We saw only two snakes, both venomous: first, the Green Tree Viper (Bothriechis lateralis), in Monteverde cloud forest. Wait, why is it not green? It’s a juvenile. The juveniles are brown and marked, and have a distinctive greenish-yellow tail tip, which you can see here.
And a juvenile Eyelash Pit Viper (Bothriechis schlegelii) in the rain forest. Costa Rica has a lot of venomous animals, but they’re generally not aggressive; these just sat there while we shot. This one was teeny-tiny, just a few inches long, but I’m sure he would have been happy to sink his teeny-tiny fangs into a probing finger, so we still kept our distance.
There are also two types of crocodilians. We saw Spectacled Caimans (Caiman crocodilus) on the Caribbean side:
And the most intimidating, the American Crocodile (Crocodylus acutus), which we saw in tidal rivers on the Pacific side.
Definitely a strong discouragement of unauthorized swimming!
It’s July 18, 2016, a steamy Monday here in Chicago, but it’s Nelson Mandela International Day, so let’s remember his legacy. Also on this day, in 1870, the First Vatican Council declared the Pope infallible (I prefer “inflammable”, as Archie Bunker called it) when speaking ex cathedra. This was, of course, just a committee decision, not some fiat from God. On July 18, 1925, Hitler published Mein Kampf, and, in 1969, Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts, killing campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne. And on this day in 1976, Nadia Comăneci received the first perfect 10 in gymnastics at the Olympics (in Montreal); it was on the uneven parallel bars. Hard to believe that she’s 54 now!
Notables born on this day include Vidkun Quisling (1887), Astronaut and politician John Glenn (1921, celebrating his 95th birthday!), and Hunter Thompson (1937). Those who died on this day include Jane Austen (1817), Mimi Fariña (2001), and, of course, Mary Jo Kopechne. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cherry harvest will begin this week, so I’ll miss the bulk of it; but I am assured of constant pies made from frozen cherries. One reason the harvest is unexpectedly early is that there has been a lot of rain, which has kept our Hili impatiently indoors:
A: Hili, what are you doing?
Hili: I’m trying to hear whether it stopped raining.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, co ty robisz?
Hili: Słucham, czy przestało padać.
Leon and his staff are now in southern Poland, searching for an entire antique wood house, which will be disassembled and moved up to their new land near Wroclawek. Naturally Leon, riding in the car, is impatient, for he wants a snack.
Leon: Are we there soon?
In Montréal, the French sign has gone up at Le Cafe Sauvage:
And Matthew sent this Soviet poster that reads “There is no God!”
Oh, and if you want to know the vitals on Mike Pence, The Donald’s pick for GOP Vice Presidential Candidate, go see Heather Hastie’s summary at her website. Good post.
On the news tonight they showed crowds of Turkish people jubilantly celebrating the putdown of the coup. Even if they didn’t favor a coup (which, truth be told, wasn’t a great idea), should they be so jubilant?
It is almost as if the chickens in the henhouse were celebrating the retention of the local fox. Maybe the more rational citizens stayed at home, but, given Erdogan’s rule and the history of Turkey in the 20th century, it seems to me that the proper response is resignation and sadness. Surely they know what’s coming now.
This occurred May 10, 2016 at Cooden Beach, East Sussex, England. Here’s the rather long YouTube description:
Rescuers from East Sussex Wildlife Rescue & Ambulance Service (WRAS) were called out early afternoon to a fox cub after it was seen at the bottom of a drain in a cul-de-sac in Cooden Beach Bexhill.
The cub had originally been seen the night before but disappeared, but was again spotted at lunch time on Tuesday 10th May. Trevor Weeks MBE founder of WRAS from Uckfield, Rescuer Manager Chris Riddington from Eastbourne and Senior Rescue Tony Neads from Polegate, attended on site to try and save the cub.
“At first we were unsure where the cub was as there were multiple pipes leading in different directions. We used a mobile phone to film inside the pipes, as well as drainage rods, hose pipe and insulation for pipes to try checking the pipes and potentially push the cub to the drain entrance 2.5ft underground. We were amazed that the vixen turned up whilst we were trying to find the cub and it was almost as if she knew we were trying to rescue her cub” said Chris.
Rescuers could hear the cub and eventually came to the conclusion, that the cub must be in the only section of pipe they couldn’t get rods or pipes into. “We didn’t want to give up, and we knew that if the cub was left it was die. After spending 90 minutes trying to get to the cub we came to realize we had no choice but to play the waiting game. It is common for cubs to make their way back towards the entrance they came in from, so we decided to back off take a break and then try again. We returned to WRAS’s Casualty Centre for a break for a couple of hours to sort out other rescues and check on casualties. On our return to Cooden Beach a couple of hours later, I laid on the ground with my arm down the hole. Suddenly I could feel the cub touching my hand, twice he reversed into my hand by not far enough for me to grab hold, on the third occasion I was able to grab his tail, and gently lift him out of the drain” said Trevor.
The cub was soaking wet and dirty, so rescuers decided to wrap the cub up in a towel and take him back to WRAS’s Casualty Centre for a bath and clean. Within the hour rescuers had returned to Cooden Beech to try and reunite the cub with his mum.
“As if the rescue hadn’t been amazing already, within minutes of us returning mum appeared and walked straight over to a pet carrier which we had placed the cub in. As soon as the cub realized mum was there he was so excited and desperately wanted to get out the carrier. With some help from mum he managed to climb out and mum escorted him back home again. It was unbelievably emotional for all of us” said Chris.
“This is the third technical rescue of a fox cub in three days. Sunday saw rescuers rescue a fox cub stuck in a trench and return it to the wild, Monday saw rescuers rescue a cub stuck between two walls and Tuesday was this rescue of a cub stuck in a drain! The last two rescuers we were really not sure whether we would be successful, so for both cubs to have been returned to their families is amazing. It really makes the long hours and stress so well worth it” added Trevor.
I was reading a nice article by Andrew Shtulman* on the most common misconception people have about natural selection (that it involves not differential reproduction among genetically different individuals but the gradual and simultaneous transformation of all individuals in a population), when I came across his presentation of Darwin’s “variational” theory of natural selection. That’s the first view given in parentheses, and the correct one.
This characterization of evolution via natural selection (it’s not really a definition) involves a three- or four-step logical chain. Here’s the way it’s presented in many classes, and the way I used to present it:
Animals and plants produce many more offspring than can survive, ergo there is tremendous mortality in nature.
Animals and plants differ in their traits.
Bearers of some traits leave more offspring, or survive better, than do bearers of others. (For example, those individual moths who match their backgrounds better are less likely to be eaten by birds than are their more conspicuous relatives.)
Some portion of the differences among individuals in these traits will be passed on to the next generation. That is, some of the variation is heritable (“capable of being inherited”).
If these conditions hold, then the population will undergo gradual genetic change, being enriched in the genetic variants that give their bearers greater reproduction and/or survival (“fitness” is the word we use here). This is a variational view of evolution rather than the incorrect transformational view outlined above. The chain can also be described as “Excess production of individuals + variation in fitness + some heritability of that fitness = evolution via natural selection.”
I hope you’ve followed me so far. If you’ve taken any evolutionary biology, you’re likely to have heard the chain of logic above. It is exactly the chain outlined by Darwin in On the Origin of Species. Darwin, in fact, said that he finally grasped the importance of natural selection when he read Malthus’s “On Population”, which described the overproduction of offspring. For when Darwin realized that the huge excess of young animals and plants must somehow be culled if populations remained at relatively stable sizes, he saw immediately that the culling would probably be based on the traits that individuals had, and if variation in those traits had at least some genetic basis (remember that Darwin was unclear about how genetics worked), it would, over time, produce a predominance of the variants producing those traits. Curiously, A. R. Wallace also hit on the idea of natural selection after reading Malthus as well.
But there’s one problem with this: one of the points is not necessary for evolution by natural selection. Can you guess which one?
It’s #1—the very point that brought Darwin and Wallace to the brilliant idea of natural selection.
Why isn’t this necessary? While clearly not all offspring survive in any species—otherwise we’d be up to our collective tuchas in rabbits, beetles, or oak trees—natural selection can still cause evolutionary change in a population that is expanding (or decreasing), and in which all offspring survive. Imagine, for instance, that a lizard makes it to a luxuriant island in the ocean, one loaded with food and without predators. Imagine too that every lizard dies only of old age—after it’s already had its offspring. And further imagine that some lizards are better able to digest the local vegetation, and thus are better nourished and leave more offspring than others. Every offspring survives, but more of the next generation will carry those genetic variants that make them better at digestion. Over time, the population will evolve by natural selection, as the carriers of the “good digestion” genes overtake their dyspeptic confrères. So we have (variational) evolution by natural selection, but every individual that is born survives to reproductive age. And this will work even if individuals are immortal and never die.
Of course the situation I just described is unsustainable: eventually the population of lizards will get big enough that they’ll be competing for food, and might even kill each other. My point, though, was that natural selection can operate independently of a huge mortality—or any mortality—in a population.
Ergo, we can omit #1 above from the characterization of natural selection. When I realized this, I dropped it from teaching.
In fact, the great evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher made just this point in his famous book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930). In chapter 2, he objects to the Malthusian point, saying that it not only ignores differential reproduction in favor of differential survival (my example above), but ignores the fact that organisms often overproduce offspring as the very result of natural selection. The vast overproduction of offspring in some ocean fish, for example, isn’t just a given: it’s likely resulted from the high mortality experienced by tiny fish, due largely to predation. If that’s the case, you have to produce more offspring just so some will survive.
Here’s the quote from Fisher explaining that. Fisher was famous for his dense and often opaque prose, but maybe you can grasp his point:
“. . . it should be remembered that the production of offspring is only excessive in relation to an imaginary world, and the ‘high geometrical rate of increase’ is only attained by abolishing a real death rate, while retaining a real rate of reproduction. There is something like a relic of creationist philosophy in arguing from the observation, let us say, that a cod spawns a million eggs, that therefore its offspring are subject to Natural Selection; and it has the disadvantage of excluding fecundity [offspring production] from the class of characteristics of which we may attempt to appreciate the aptitude. . . [T]he historical fact that both Darwin and Wallace were lead through reading Malthus’s essay on population to appreciate the efficacy of selection, though extremely instructive as to the philosophy of their age, should no longer constrain us to confuse the consequences of that principle with its foundations.”
Fisher was a very smart man. So, if you teach how natural selection causes evolution, you might want to omit point #1 above—or at least qualify it.
Ronald Fisher (1890-1962)
______________
*Shtulman, A. 2006. Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution. Cognitive Psychology 52:170-194.
