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.
Read and weep: science says we live on! Click the screenshot:
What science tells us:
Here is a brief list of the advantages we can expect if we as a global society begin to pay more attention to these sources.
• Our lives would be seen as “going somewhere” or “adding up to something.” We would grow in confidence that a Source of immense proportions is at the helm of a meaningful soul-building process.
• We would see that life doesn’t end at death, that those cut off early in life would not be denied their share, and that ancestors and their descendants would be reunited.
• We would picture the afterlife in a new way. Most religious people live with notions of a heaven that is static, even boring, with nothing more left to achieve; or vague, with nothing concrete and colorful and beautiful to recommend it. The heavens would be reconceived as a challenging, stimulating, dynamic environment.
Heaven is like college! Read the piece for more new findings about Heaven.
One proof that there’s no God (or at least a just and merciful one) is the triumph of the unjust and ill-deserving. And one of the best pieces of evidence of that sort is Reza Aslan’s ascendancy as a religious and cultural pundit. Here’s the latest argument against God’s existence: Aslan has just won the prestigious James Joyce Award. The University of California at Riverside Office of Puffery announced it;
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Reza Aslan, professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside and best-selling author, has been named the recipient of the James Joyce Award and an Honorary Fellowship of the Literary & Historical Society, Europe’s largest university society.
The James Joyce Award is given to those who have excelled in a field of human endeavor and have made a profound impact on the world around them. Recipients in recent years have included Salman Rushdie, Alan Rickman, Desmond Tutu and Noam Chomsky. The award will be presented in the 2016-17 academic year.
The Literary & Historical Society is located in University College Dublin, Ireland, which is Ireland’s largest university, with more than 25,000 students.
“Given your immense success in the field of theology, we maintain your accomplishments certainly merit the award,” Sinead McCarthy, fellowships officer of the 162nd Session of the Literary and Historical Society, wrote in a letter announcing the award. “… We feel that your principled and unique analysis of Islam and other religions will be very educational for the students (at UCD), many of which are of either Christian or no faith – not to forget the university’s growing Islamic community. In an age where Islamophobia and ignorance of Islam dominate media discourse, we would be honoured to hear you speak in front of the Society to challenge the students and present to them another way of thinking about the way religion and specifically Islam are discussed and presented in the modern world.”
Aslan’s “principled and unique analysis of Islam” is, of course, to whitewash it, distorting its history and the beliefs of its adherents. What’s clear from the above is that he’s getting the award for defending pernicious religious beliefs by lying about them. It is an Authoritarian Leftist Award.
You can see more information about the prize, and the list of winners, here. Meanwhile, I’ve decided I’m in the wrong business. With a little greed and mendacity, I could be rolling in this stuff, and flush with Templeton cash.
On May 13 I reported that, after a report by Dean Rakesh Khurana, Harvard’s President Drew Faust instituted a new University policy: students who belonged to non-University single-sex organizations, like fraternities, sororities, and “final clubs,” would be subject to sanctions by Harvard. Those sanctions included Harvard’s denial of any leadership positions in student organizations to members of such groups (these positions include being captain of single-sex sports teams), as well as the University’s refusal to write letters of recommendation to applicants for prestigious fellowships like the Rhodes and Marshall. (That would effectively sink those students’ chances.)
That policy, made without consulting faculty or students, had an admirable goal: to reduce sexism and sexual harassment and assault. But the means were invidious: penalizing students’ freedom of association off campus. As a Harvard alum, I wrote a letter to President Faust (copy here) objecting to the policy, and got back this noncomittal reply:
Dear Mr. Coyne,
Thank you very much for taking the time to write. I appreciate having your perspective on this important set of issues, and I have taken the liberty of sharing your concerns with Dean Khurana.
Sincerely,
Drew Faust
Now, according to the Harvard Crimson (the student newspaper), a group of 16 faculty have prepared a resolution against Faust’s new policy and plan to introduce it to the faculty senate. The pdf is here, and here’s the letter. You’ll recognize at least one of the signatories:
Resolved: Harvard College shall not discriminate against students on the basis of organizations they join, nor political parties with which they affiliate, nor social, political or other affinity groups they join, as long as those organizations, parties, or groups have not been judged to be illegal.
Argument. This resolution codifies longstanding University practice. Harvard has established nondiscrimination policies for its educational and administrative purposes, but throughout the history of the College a student has been able to be at once a full member of the Harvard community and also a member of other communities with different policies. The Faculty sets standards for student behavior when it votes the Handbook for Students, but students may exercise their civil right to free assembly without fear that Harvard will disadvantage them because they have joined an organization that does not comply with Harvard policies.
This understanding was articulated in the 1992 report on ROTC (“the Verba report”). “Harvard is not and should not be responsible for the policies and practices of the wide variety of external organizations in which its students may choose to participate …. Some of our students belong to organizations, such as religious or single-sex social clubs, that have membership requirements which would be impermissible under the University’s non-discrimination policy…. [I]ntrusion by the University into the private choices of students, acting as individuals, to … participate in such external activities would, we believe, be unacceptably paternalistic.”
The Verba committee considered and explicitly rejected the option of sanctioning individual students who chose to join ROTC in spite of its discriminatory policies. “Even if the University itself abandoned all direct support of ROTC, it could proceed further and seek to prohibit Harvard students from enrolling in an ROTC unit or accepting an ROTC scholarship because of the discriminatory policy of the military. This would be a paternalistic policy inconsistent with Harvard’s general approach. It would single out ROTC for disadvantageous treatment compared to other outside organizations or funding sources, and would seek to extend the reach of Harvard’s non-discrimination policy beyond its proper boundaries.”
These “proper boundaries” were not specified in the 1992 legislation, probably because they went without saying. Recent administrative proposals suggest that there is uncertainty about the limits of Harvard’s control over students’ lives. We therefore believe that this legislation, based on University precedent, history, and practice, is needed to protect the rights of current and future students—and, indeed, by extension, the rights of current and future faculty and staff.
Shaye Cohen, Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy
Daniel Gilbert, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology
Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Richard Losick, Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology
Jason Mitchell, Professor of Psychology
Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government
Hanspeter Pfister, An Wang Professor of Computer Science
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology
Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science
Richard Thomas, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics
Helen Vendler, A Kingsley Porter University Professor
James Waldo, Gordon McKay Professor of Practice of Computer Science
Notice that most of the signatories are in the sciences; this is common when faculty object to restrictions on freedom of speech, For reasons I don’t understand, faculty in the humanities are loath to stand up for such issues. The Crimson reports further:
Biology professor Richard M. Losick, one of the motion’s signatories, said that although he had discussed the sanctions informally with colleagues since the announcement, he was not aware that administrators consulted faculty on the policy. Losick added that he was “no fan” of final clubs, but worried that administrators’s actions represented a threat to the “fundamental right of freedom of association.”
“The action from the Dean and approved by the President was taken without consultation with the Faculty,” Losick said, adding that he found it “disappointing that there was not an opportunity for it to be discussed among the faculty before such new procedures were put into place.”
Can the Dean and President actually implement such a policy without the faculty’s and students’ assent? Can the faculty overturn this policy by a vote? Neither answer is clear. But President Faust has made a misstep with this one, and I predict that the policy won’t actually go into effect (it’s scheduled to begin next year).
Finally, Harry Lewis, the professor of computer science who signed the letter above, and a former Dean of the College, wrote a separate letter of objection to Dean Khurana and President Faust; you can see that here.
As reported in the March 31 BBC News, a five-year-old girl in Durham, England, Eliza Adamson-Hopper, wrote to the local constabulary suggesting that the police might usefully employ cats:
Eliza Adamson-Hopper contacted Durham Police chief Mike Barton suggesting cats would be good at listening out for danger and rescuing people from trees.
She received a reply saying he would pass the idea on to an inspector.
The force has now confirmed it will consider using felines in an as-yet unspecified role.
Insp Richie Allen, of the dog support unit, said: “I can confirm the force is looking into recruiting what we believe to be the first UK police cat.
“Their duties and responsibilities have not yet been agreed but if nothing else they will become the force mascot.
“Of course, if it smells a rat we’ll expect it to catch it.”
Eliza and her cat, Mittens
Eliza, who has a cat called Mittens and a dog called Susie, wanted to know why the police use dogs but not cats.
. . . Eliza’s letter read: “A police cat would be good as they have good ears and can listen out for danger.
“Cats are good at finding their way home and could show policemen the way.
“Cats are good at climbing trees and hunting and could rescue people that are stuck.”
Mr Barton’s reply, which included a drawing of his cat, thanked her for the suggestion.
Here is the letter from the constabulary to Eliza, which includes a drawing of the policeman’s cat, Joey! (Click to enlarge.)
The movie is a French/Canadian/Belgian venture, and is in French (it has English subtitles); the voice of April (Avril) is Oscar winner Marion Cotillard.
You must go see it if you have cats, kids, or both, or even if you just like cats—or good movies. If you’ve already seen it, weigh in below.
Here’s the trailer in which Darwin makes several appearances:
JAC: Instead of “Readers’ Wildlife” today, we’ll have a report on frogs by Greg Mayer, who’s just visited Costa Rica.
by Greg Mayer
Although quite cryptic on the forest floors it calls home, the smoky jungle frog (Leptodactylus pentadactylus) in the photo below is too obvious to be a candidate for “spot the frog”. This large species of frog (reaching over a 150 mm in snout-vent length) sports what in the military would be called “defense in depth”– a series of defensive behaviors and adaptations that help the frog avoid becoming someone else’s meal. The one in the photo below I encountered at the Lapa Rios Ecolodge, near the tip of the Osa peninsula, on my recent trip to Costa Rica.
Smoky Jungle Frog (Leptodactlyus pentadactylus), Lapa Rios Ecolodge, Osa, Costa Rica
It was a large individual (well over 100 mm), and we found it at night in the rainforest. Its first line of defense is that it’s quite hard to see against the variegated mixture of brownish leaves, twigs, and mud of the forest floor. (The red shine of the eye is more noticeable, but fortunately for the frog, natural predators don’t carry flashlights!) When first seen, the frog was sitting up at attention, but when we approached, it pushed itself down flat against the substrate, and as I moved around in front of it for a picture, it really pushed its face into the ground, making itself less noticeable.
Smoky Jungle Frog (Leptodactlyus pentadactylus), Lapa Rios Ecolodge, Osa, Costa Rica
Since all we wanted was pictures, the frog did not move to its further lines of defense. Had we provoked it, it would have assumed an elevated defense posture, with the back raised, also inflating its body and expelling air to make a hissing sound, similar to what is seen in some toads (Leptodactylus is not a true toad). I haven’t seen (or at least can’t recall seeing) this in Leptodactylus— the behavior was described in this species by Jaime Villa (1969)– but I have seen it in giant toads.
Elevated defensive posture of Leptodactylus pentadactylus (Villa, 1969: Fig. 6).
This of course draws a potential predator’s attention to the frog– having hidden, why would it now face up to its foe? This is where the next lines of defense come in. First, the frog is big, and this behavior makes it look even bigger. For some predators, the frog is a mouthful too far. Next, if the frog is touched, it exudes a copious and toxic mucus. This mucus induces a strong allergic response in humans, and presumably others, at least mammals if not all other vertebrates- intense sneezing, watery and itching eyes– the unpleasantness of which I can attest to from personal experience. It is said that people merely in the vicinity, who have not touched the frog, can, through aerial transmission of toxin droplets, get the same symptoms. The mucus can irritate the skin, and cause pain to any scratches or open wounds (which I fortunately did not have when catching the frogs). And the frog will also emit a loud, piercing shriek, which might well startle a predator into releasing its grip. Norm Scott reported that caimans were attracted to this cry, and even speculated that that was its function– to attract caimans to dispatch the frog’s predator– sort of like a bugle call to the cavalry!
More straight forward than the multi-layered defenses of the smoky jungle frog is the defense of poison dart frogs– aposematic, or bright, warning coloration, accompanied by very toxic skin secretions. We encountered two species at Lapa Rios. Phyllobates vittatus, with bright orange stripes, is a member of the genus which contains the three species of the poison dart frog family, Dendrobatidae, that are actually used by Indians to make poison darts.
Poison Dart Frog (Phyllobates vittatus), Lapa Rios Ecolodge, Osa, Costa Rica
We found three of them, during the day, along the Rio Carbonero. We also found three Dendrobates auratus along the paths at the Lodge itself, wandering about during the day, bold as brass, as is their wont. I’ve seen them quite abundant in other parts of Costa Rica, but we saw only three during 4.5 days at Lapa Rios. For neither species of dart frog was I able to get a very good picture; there’s a better picture of auratus in an earlier post, and, in another earlier post, more details and references on poison dart frogs. BBC Earth has a nice explainer on poison dart frogs, with links to interesting papers
Poison Dart Frog (Dendrobates auratus), Lapa Rios Ecolodge, Osa, Costa Rica
Savage, J.M. 2002. The Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica: A Herpetofauna between Two Continents, between Two Seas. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Scott, N.J. 1983. in D.H. Janzen, ed. Costa Rican Natural History. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Villa, J. 1969. Comportamiento defensivo de la “Rana Ternero”, Leptodactylus pentadactylus. Revista de Biología Tropical 15:323-329. pdf
It’s Saturday, June 4, and still overcast in Boston. The big news is that Muhammad Ali died yesterday in a Phoenix hospital at age 74. For many years he’d had Parkinson’s disease, perhaps instigated or exacerbated by blows to the head. He was controversial, but I’ll always admire him for one act: he sacrificed over 3 years of his boxing career, while he was in his prime, by refusing to be drafted and requesting status as a conscientious objector. Convicted of draft evasion, he appealed and was ultimately vindicated, but he’d been stripped of his boxing title in the meantime and did not engage in prize fighting for several years.
Others who died on this day include W. H. R. Rivers (1922) and Dorothy Gis (1968). Notables born on this day include Bruce Dern (1936). On this day in 1913, the suffragette activist Emily Davison was killed by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby; she was trying to draw attention to her cause but was trampled to death. You can see a depiction of this in the recent movie “Suffragette.” Exactly 6 years later, the U.S. Congress approved the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. And, on June 4, 1940, Churchill gave his “We ahall fight on the beaches” speech to the House of Commons.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a very enigmatic dialogue. I don’t understand it and Andrzej, taking a nap, can’t explain at the moment what he wrote. Readers will have to struggle with it as best they can!
Hili: I have to go out from this shadow.
A: Why.
Hili: To show my modesty.
In Polish:
Hili: Muszę wyjść z cienia.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Żeby zademonstrować swoją skromność.
I’m not quite sure who this fellow is, but he’s apparently a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. It’s thus a bit disturbing that a writer doesn’t proofread his own personal self-promotion page. I count at least five errors on this section of his introduction page:
There’s a certain kind of person who, when they say something extraordinarily stupid online, see the inevitable pushback as evidence that they were right: that they had “hit a nerve” or uncovered some deep and unpleasant aspect of the human psyche. Chris Mooney was like this when writing about accommodationism, and John Horgan is like that about everything. None of these people ever consider the more parsimonious view: that they’ve just written something really dumb and are being called out for it.
Now we have Eric Metaxas, writing at the Wall Street Journal, who claims that the atheist rancor toward Larry Alex Taunton’s book, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens (see earlier post today), reflects atheists’ own fears that God might in fact exist. Metaxas:
Avenging anti-God hordes have crashed the book’s Amazon page, fulminating with one-star reviews that the book is “tripe!” and “dishonest” and “morally reprehensible,” and accusing Mr. Taunton of riding the beloved Hitch’s coattails “to make a fast buck.” It is pretty obvious that none of these Amazon “reviewers” has actually read the book. But why haven’t they, and why are they so outraged? [JAC: I’ve now read the book, and it’s just as bad as you’d think.]
Do they fear that Mr. Taunton is some Bible-believing Svengali whose nefarious power over their ailing colleague was sheerest opportunism? And are they afraid that actually engaging with Mr. Taunton and his ideas would put them in the same danger as the man they so admired?
How can people so vocal about the importance of “evidence” and “reason” behave like this? Yet there they are, posting their angry one-star reviews, “liking” all other one-star reviews on the page to try to discourage book buyers, and then indignantly clicking away.
But one must wonder: Could it be that, in the friendship between the two men, they detect the possible existence of something they deny but secretly fear might be real? Is God a subject too scary to seriously consider with facts and reason?
The idea that Hitchens was curious about faith and engaged with it intellectually apparently would amount to an intolerable betrayal in the minds of some atheists, so they simply pretend that it never happened, despite the clear evidence to the contrary.
Well, we already know that Hitchens was intellectually engaged with faith: he was curious about it and, like all subjects, he wanted to learn about something before he passed judgement and, like religion or Mother Teresa, brought it to its knees. And speaking of “clear evidence,” what about Hitchens’s own statements that if he ever seemed to be embracing God, he would have been either in his last throes of dying dementia or addled by drugs? And what about the testimony of those who knew him best: his friends, his colleagues and his wife, all of whom assert that Hitchens was certainly not flirting with Christianity? All of these people knew Hitchens better than Metaxas did. None of these data are mentioned by Metaxas. Instead, he ends like this;
If atheist activists want to be taken seriously, they must be willing to engage the facts. The fact is that Mr. Taunton has simply said that Hitchens late in life was “not certain” of his atheism. Unable to tolerate this crack in the atheist facade, Mr. Taunton’s critics reacted hysterically. The response lent credence to what many of us suspect—that atheists really do fear some facts, and, more than that, fear where those facts might lead.
We surely can’t take Metaxas seriously because he won’t absorb the facts stated above. There is not the slightest evidence that Hitchens was uncertain of his disbelief, save the unsupported speculations of Taunton.
If we are angry, it’s not because we are scared that God might exist. I’m surely not; I don’t worry about God at all! We’re angry because a man who many of us thought of as a sort-of-friend, so sympatico was he with our views, is being maligned. We are angry that man who was an intellectual and rhetorical hero of many, who showed not the slightest sign of leaning toward a deity, is being coopted by the faithful to make a quick buck—confirming how badly religion can make you behave. And, above all, we are angry because atheists, at least in principle, respect the truth; and both Metaxas and Taunton have bent the truth to shore up their own weakness for superstition.
