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.
It’s Monday, June 6, and if you’re of a certain age you’ll remember that this day in 1944 was D-Day: the invasion of Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy. If ever there was a just war in our age, it would be World War II. Reader Ken Phelps took this picture in Normandy two weeks ago, and it’s appropriate to post today:
Notables born on this day include Robert Falcon Scott (1868), Nobel Laureata Edwin G. Krebs (1918), and Levi Stubbs (1936; the great soul singer is 80 today). Those who died on this day include Patrick Henry (1799), Carl Jung (1961), Stan Getz (1991) and Esther Williams (2013). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s suffering from her usual affliction:
Hili: I’m going back home.
A: That’s nice.
Hili: Not so much nice as hungry.
In Polish:
Hili: Wracam do domu.
Ja: To miło.
Hili: Nie tyle miło, ile jestem głodna.
We also have a special dialogue from Wroclawek, where Leon has a black visitor:
Leon: What are you looking at? Haven’t you ever seen an European cat?
[Malgorzata’s explanation: “Tabby cats are called ‘European cats’ in Poland. Don’t ask me why. There are Persian cats, Russian cats, and all possible cats. I’m not an expert.”]
Finally, reader Anthony V. submitted a photo of his cats as part of the “Cats Sleeping in Uncomfortable Positions” series (check out the moggie at left):
From Volkach, Bavaria, sisters Kosmos (the kitler) and Tifa (the tabby). Midnight to 5 a.m. is party time for these two 1 year olds, so they need to rest up during the day.
This morning I was going to put up a satirical “clickbait” post along the lines of PuffHo’s self-important “Six things you need to know this morning.” (By the way, why do they always give lists with numbers, like “25 cats who sleep in weird positions” or “eight ways for seniors to improve their sex lives”? Are lists automatic clickbait?)
My post was going to be this: “Six things you need to know about Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) this morning”, giving quirks about me that readers might not know. But I decided that would be solipsistic—if not salacious—so I thought instead I’ve just give one of them, and then ask readers to contribute one of their own.
When I debated John Haught at the University of Kentucky, the speakers and students in the Honors Program all had dinner with faculty and the University provost before the talks. As an icebreaker, we went around the table, with each person revealing one interesting or odd thing about themself. I will reveal here the one I gave then, but readers should then reveal one of their own. What odd thing is there about you: can you do weird things with your eyes or joints, did you have any bizarre encounters, or do you have any unusual talents or skills? Have you consorted with anybody famous? Here’s mine:
I can play recognizable tunes on my skull by pounding on the top of my head with my right fist and opening my mouth various widths to produce different notes. I call this my “cranial drum.”
The Method
Your turn: what odd thing about you would intrigue our readers?
I’m doing what I planned to do here: hang out with friends, chill, catch up on non-science reading, and see one of my favorites cities (by that I mean greater Boston). Yesterday I took a long walk with my oldest friends Tim and Betsy (10,800 steps; Betsy had a pedometer on her iPhone)—from Lechmere to the North End. On the way I took this photo of the light playing on the waters of Boston Harbor.
Purple irises (my favorite flower) were blooming along the roadside:
If you live in Boston, you’ll know that there’s a Saturday produce market at the Haymarket downtown. When I was a poor grad student, I used to come here at the end of the day, when the produce mongers would try to unload their remaining fruit and veg at rock-bottom prices:
Peppers that remind me, like they did Edward Weston, of nude bodies.
It’s cherry season already:
On Friday I took my pals to an upscale Oaxacan place, the Olé Mexican Grill. I’d never been there, and it was terrific. For the first course we had margaritas, cider, and a huge stone crock of freshly made guacamole with warm tortilla chips (the latter continually replenished). I ate so much guac that I couldn’t finish my main course. And I was so busy nomming it that I didn’t think of taking the obligatory picture till the stuff was almost gone:
My friend Betsy’s course: four fish tacos with different salsas:
Tim’s course: duck en mole:
My course: chile rellenos filled with sauteed spinach, cheese, raisins, and pine nuts, served with a generous portion of fried plantains and a pyramid of rice. It was terrific (I took one pepper home with me). I recommend this restaurant highly if you’re in Cambridge/Somerville. It isn’t really cheap, but it’s well worth it. And don’t forget to get the guacamole.
The Olé has the advantage of being only one block from Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream, where we repaired for dessert. Betsy had Chocolate Mocha Explosion, Tim the chocolate/banana (it tasted like a banana split), and I had my perennial favorite, burnt sugar (foreground). I won’t rest until every reader who goes to Boston visits Christina’s and tries this flavor—the world’s best.
Today is Betsy’s birthday, so last night a group of us, including her and Tim’s two daughters and their boyfriends, went to a Spanish tapas place in Brookline, Taberna de Hiro. Great food, good wine at reasonable prices, and a good Spanish cider (I’m currently on a cider kick). Here’s one of the dishes I eshewed: anchovies and olives. I cannot abide the malodorous anchovy (and yes, I know that Spanish anchovies are different).
Postprandial table talk; left to right: Betsy, Tim, Vinicius, Rebecca, and Jeanie.
This video, a recent debate in London between philosopher Anthony Grayling and Rabbi Daniel Rowe, was sent to me by reader Mark, who made this comment:
I have to admit to finding the prospect of an orthodox rabbi holding his own in a debate with Dr. Grayling on God’s existence rather disheartening, but I’m afraid that’s exactly what went down the other night in London.
Knowing Anthony, I was dubious, but I have to say that having watched the debate, I see that Mark is right.
First, a bit about the debate from the YouTube description:
J-TV: The Global Jewish Channel hosted its very first live event with a debate on the existence of God between Professor AC Grayling and Rabbi Daniel Rowe. AC Grayling is known as the “fifth horseman of atheism”, having written many books and articles on the atheism. Rabbi Daniel Rowe completed a postgraduate in the philosophy of mathematics. The two went head-to-head amidst a packed hall.
And here it is. The Q&A from the audience begins about 55 minutes in, so you can skip the last 20 minutes if you’re pressed for time.
The reason that Grayling didn’t crush Rowe was based on one thing: Anthony wasn’t up on the responses of physicists to the “fine tuning” and “first cause” arguments for God. The rabbi made three arguments:
You can’t get a universe from nothing; there is a “law” that everything that begins has a cause. Ergo, God. In response to Krauss’s book about how you can get a universe from a quantum vacuum, Rowe responded, as do many theologians, that “nothing” is not a quantum vacuum—it’s just “nothing.”
I’ve heard this many times, and what strikes me is that theologians never define what they mean by “nothing”. Empty space, the quantum vacuum, isn’t nothing, they say so what is? In the end, I’ve realized that by “nothing,” theologians mean “that from which only God could have produced something.” At any rate, the “law of causation” doesn’t appear to hold in modern physics, and is not even part of modern physics, which has no such law. Some events really do seem uncaused.
Also, Rowe didn’t explain how one can get a god from nothing. Theologians like him always punt at this point, saying that God is the Cause that Didn’t Require a Cause, because He Made Everything. But that is bogus. What was God doing before he made something? Hanging around eternally, bored out of his mind?
The next two contentions of Rowe are basically appeals to ignorance: God of the gaps arguments. Grayling did note this, but should have given a fuller response. Rowe:
We don’t understand why the Universe is orderly and why the laws of physics are the same everywhere. Clearly the only answer is that those laws were made by God to create a designed universe in which life could exist.
The “fine-tuning” argument shows that the parameters of the Universe are such that only slight deviations from some of the constants of physics would have made the existence of life impossible. Therefore the Creator was the Fine Tuner.
In response to the third argument, Grayling’s response is weak: the chances that his grandparents would have met, calculated a priori, were also very low. But it happened, and he is here.
That’s not a great response because it’s not addressing the fine-tuning argument but asserting the Weak Anthropic Principle. The former argument asks the harder question: why are the parameters of physics such that only a slight alteration of some of them would make life impossible? And why are the physical constants as they are?
We don’t know the answer to this, though religionists, taking advantage of scientific ignorance, say, “See, there must have been a God!” But physicists have grappled with this problem, and I discuss their responses in Faith versus Fact. One response is that the physical constants may not, if varied, be as rigid as we think in permitting life: we just don’t know. Another may be that there is a deeper reason for these physical constants to take their values, and we don’t know that deeper reason. Finally, the constants may vary in different universes if there is a multiverse system, and we live in one of those lucky universes.
It’s useful for everyone who encounters these arguments—and they are now the default argument of the Sophisticated Theologians™ because they sound so daunting—to know how physicists respond to them. If you don’t have FvF on hand, I suggest Sean Carrolls’ fine essay, “Does the Universe need God?“, also published in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity.
Near the end of the debate, Grayling asks the important question: “If there was a creator, how do you know that it was the creator described by the Abrahamic religions?” I’d add, “How do you know that your creator was beneficent rather than malicious?” “And how do you know that God, after making the laws of physics, didn’t abscond and become a deistic god rather than a theistic one who still interacts with his creation?” The rabbi has no answer.
The Q&A session had one interesting question: when Rabbi Rowe is asked, at 1:05:00, how he knows that his religion, Judaism, is the “correct” religion. His answer is lame, in fact, he ducks answering completely (to be fair, he had only 90 seconds to answer). But his response is basically this: “Well, I’ve proved that there was a creator, and it would be stupid to think it was a rabbit, wouldn’t it?” But how one goes from Not a Rabbit to Yahweh and Moses defies me!
At any rate, it’s time to bone up on the fine tuning argument, and the argument for God from the constancy of the “laws” of physics.
Poor Larry Alex Taunton has been beaten to death for his dumb book on Christopher Hitchens’s supposed late-life interest in becoming a Christian; and I won’t belabor the man after this post. But several readers called my attention to a new drubbing of Taunton by Nick Cohen in the Guardian: “Deathbed conversion? Never. Christopher Hitchens was defiant to the last.” (Taunton, of course, is a Christian, trying to claim an atheist for his own.) It’s worth reading Cohen because, well, it’s always worth reading Cohen, and, as usual, his piece is unusually perceptive. Plus he wrote to Hitchens’s son for comment.
First, Cohen recounts some of the slurs the tawdry Taunton levels against Hitchens and his friends:
The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist is the work of a true fanatic, who has never learned when to seize a golden opportunity to hold his tongue. Recounting a memorial for Hitchens in New York, for instance, Larry Alex Taunton has to say how much he hates the event and the mourners. “The funeral, like the man himself, was largely a celebration of misanthropy, vanity and excess of every kind,” he intones.
Taunton says that Hitchens was his “friend”, but he marks his true friends and allies against a godly checklist and finds them wanting. The defender of the Christian faith spies Lawrence Krauss and cannot restrain himself from calling him “the smarmy little physicist Lawrence Krauss” (the professor is not only a renowned theoretical physicist but has also made the scientific case against the existence of a god or gods, ergo Taunton must jeer). Stephen Fry is not just an actor and writer but a “homosexual activist”. And Salman Rushdie becomes “the serial blasphemer Salman Rushdie”.
That last jibe gives you Taunton’s measure. Somewhat notoriously, Rushdie and his translators were targeted by the Ayatollah Khomeini for satirising the founding myths of Islam. In a choice between the atheist Rushdie and clerical murderers, Taunton, the Christian, instinctively decides to excuse the taboos of a deadly strain of Islam. Better to have a murderous faith, it appears, than no faith at all.
Cohen in fact wrote to Hitchens’s son Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, asking him about this issue (and adding that he needn’t reply if the matter was too painful). The son replied; Cohen says this:
I put the book aside last week. There seemed no need to write about Taunton, as Matthew d’Ancona and Padraig Reidy had already taken him to pieces with admirable vigour. But then Alexander Hitchens wrote back about that “bloody book”.
On the deathbed conversion – I spent my father’s final weeks and days at his bedside and watched him draw his final breath and die, and can assure you that there was no hint of any sort of conversion (as I’m sure you have already guessed). In fact, we barely spoke about religion at all except for joint expressions of frustration at the god botherers who made the rounds in the ICU and other units where dying people could be preyed upon by vulturous Christians.
I want to print what he said because lies on the web can last for ever and need to be countered. Indeed, they have always needed to be countered. In the 19th century, American believers claimed Tom Paine had died “howling and terrified”, recanting his assaults on organised religion and the reliability of the Bible.
After the New York Observer repeated the canard one too many times, the atheist Robert Ingersoll made a large bet that it could not justify the claim. He forced the editor to run a retraction headed “Thomas Paine died a blaspheming Infidel” when he won.
— Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens (@amhitchens) June 5, 2016
Taunton, of course, now claims that Hitchens was only “flirting” with the notion of Christianity, but if you read the book, you see that the claim goes beyond this. What you actually read is Hitchens expressing interest in the Gospels, as someone would who wanted to learn about religion. Taunton then turns this intellectual interest into a spiritual search, and, as we know, all the evidence is against that.
Cohen, who is a treasure for rationalists—or should be—has written the ultimate takedown of Taunton, for he goes beyond simply his execrable book. The peroration:
One of the charges against Christopher Hitchens that has stuck is that he was a member a new breed of “militant” atheists that besmirched the genteel world of modern western culture. Hardly anyone who threw around the term worried about the moral equivalence they were drawing between men and women, who used only the power of language, and a wave of genuinely militant religion that crushed lives, sexually enslaved women and made medieval prejudices modern. Nor did they reflect that “faith-based” political action, from the Rushdie affair via 9/11 to Islamic State, placed a moral duty on atheists to adopt a more robust mode of argument.
I am delighted to say that Taunton’s sole achievement is to show us that, in death, Hitchens provided a further reason for militant rejection of religion: its creepiness.
One can’t show this cartoon too often; be sure to put it on your Facebook page!
These photos from reader Mark Sturtevant, which just arrived, jumped the queue as it’s much easier for me to use new photos on the road than retrieve old ones. But to those who have photos in line: don’t worry—they’ll be posted, and I’ll let you know when they are up.
We have a couple of apple trees in our yard, and in the Fall there are numerous wind fallen apples. These bring in squirrels that gnaw open the apples, and the resulting scent and sugars attracts a wide range of insect congregants. The whole effect is a bit like how elephants dig water holes on the Serengeti, and then the water holes bring in diverse gatherings of thirsty and hungry wildlife.
My kids were rather embarrassed by my attention to this drama under our apple trees. Walking home from school with their friends, they would at times see dad sprawled on the grass in motionless attention. Is he.. dead? No, just watching his bugs.
So here are some pictures that I had taken of insects that are drawn to the exposed flesh of wind fallen apples. Lets’ start small, and work our way up.
First we have the most numerous visitors, which were ants. Among the species are the ubiquitous winter ants (Prenolepis imparis). Note how several of them have crops swollen with apple juice.
Next are the fruit flies. I found at least three different species, but these (I think Chymomyza amoena) were the most peculiar. Rather than feeding, they seemed more interested in each other as they strutted around, waving their patterned wings. I am not sure what is going on here except that possibly these are males trying to signal to any passing female. [JAC: yes, fruit flies often court females on the food, for that’s the best place to find them!]
Numerous other species of flies were also found, but I will move on with just one more example which is a green bottle fly (probably Lucilia sericata) and a companion multicolored Asian ladybug (Harmonia axyridis). This turned out to be one of my favorite pictures from last year, as I rather like this odd couple. It must be admitted that green bottle flies are gorgeous, even though they frequently visit poo and rotting meat.
In the next picture is a downy yellow jacket (Vespula flavopilosa), by far the most common wasps on the apples. Although wasps were sometimes tolerant of other insects, many would show agonistic behavior toward each other or toward large flies. In that case if another wasp or large fly landed near them the ‘owner’ of the apple would shoo it away. In a later posting I will return to this subject and show an Epic Wasp Battle between two yellow jackets who could not sort out which one owned the apple.
Here’s a close-up of one of the yellow jackets. At the time I was experimenting with combining extension tubes and a reversed lens for extra magnification.
Finally, we have the King of the apples, which were the rather large paper wasps (I think Polistes bellicosus). These were not common, but no one questioned their authority. If a yellow jacket landed on an apple claimed by one of these beasts, they would quickly skedaddle after the merest glance by the much larger wasp.
It’s Sunday, June 5, I’m still in Boston, and on this day in history (1915) Denmark amended its constitution, giving women the right to vote. And on June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan, and died the next day.
Notables born on this day include the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith(1723). Those who died on this day include the writer Stephen Crane (1900) the writer O. Henry (1910), Ronald Reagan (2004) and sci-fi author Ray Bradbury (2012), one of the few fantasy writers I read when I went through a sci-fi phase as a young teenager. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is finding it hard to brain:
Hili: I was thinking for a long time.
Cyrus: And?
Hili: I got tired.
In Polish:
Hili: Długo myślałam.
Cyrus: I co?
Hili: Zmęczyłam się.
Here’s a photo of Cyrus getting washed this morning by Malgorzata and Hania, the daughter of the lodgers upstairs. He seems pretty complacent. But let me note that one of the many advantages of cats over d*gs is that cats wash themselves.
We have a Gus Monologue:
Gus: This grass is delicious!
Finally, in our series of Cats Sleeping in Uncomfortable positions, we have “Leo the Contortionist,” whose staff is reader Ed Suominen:
