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.
With only 114 more subscribers, I can hit 40,000. Since I get no $$ from writing here, I must make do with subscriber stats—and 40K is a lovely number—though I promise to resist the urge to write things that attract views. (Clickbait is parody and doesn’t count.)
As for the 39,886 people all being “amazing” (a truly overused word these days), well, I’ll let you be the judge.
UPDATE: This took only 5 minutes, and I’m not sure whether it’s a regular update or people are really heeding the call. Anyway, much appreciated. I’d offer a prize to the 40,000th subscriber but I’m not sure I can identify him or her. If I can, they get a free hardback of FvF (autographed, avec chat), or an audiobook.
Yes, they’re revising the British banknotes again, so hang onto your tenners. You might even get a crisp one at the bank and frame it. For the £10 note, which has carried the portrait of the World’s Best Biologist since 2000, is being given the boot. I always smiled when I pulled out a tenner in England. No longer.
The old note:
Instead, as of next year, we’re going to have. . . Jane Austen. Now don’t get me wrong: I like her work (though I much prefer “George Eliot’s Middlemarch), but couldn’t they put her on the fiver and leave Darwin alone?
The twenty, which now carries Adam Smith, will be replaced in 2020 by one of my favorite painters, J. M. W. Turner. That’s okay by me.
Finally, the fiver, which now carries Elizabeth Fry, is going to be replaced by The Bulldog this September:
They do tend to change the pictures every ten years or so (except for the Queen, who remains on the other side), but with the no-platforming of Darwin no biologists will remain on the currency. What about putting on the trio of Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, along with a spiffy representation of the double helix?
On March 10 I told the story of David and Collet Stephan, a couple from Alberta who killed their son Ezekiel, afflicted with meningitis, by withholding medical treatment in favor of bogus “alternative” medicine. Here’s what the CBC said when reporting on their prosecution for criminal neglect. (Ezekiel died in 2012):
In a bid to boost his immune system, the couple gave the boy — who was lethargic and becoming stiff — various home remedies, such as water with maple syrup, juice with frozen berries and finally a mixture of apple cider vinegar, horse radish root, hot peppers, mashed onion, garlic and ginger root as his condition deteriorated.
Court heard the couple on tape explaining to the police officer that they prefer naturopathic remedies because of their family’s negative experiences with the medical system.
Ezekiel had bacterial meningitis, which is highly responsive to antibiotics and can be easily cured if caught early. If left untreated, death is the almost invariable outcome, as it was in his case.
But good news for rationalists: the CBC just reported that David and Collet have been convicted by a jury, which deliberated only 9 hours, for “failing to provide the necessaries of life.” I hope the sentence, levied in June, will be a stiff one, for if ever there’s a case for punishment levied to deter others, this is it. Other children regularly die for faith-based healing, whether it’s religious or based on the Stephan’s “faith” in alternative medicine. To me, it’s the same as murder through neglect. In this case the maximum sentence is only five years, but it will likely be lighter. As the CBC reports:
Shannon Prithipaul, the past president of the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, thinks it would be unlikely for the couple to receive “something close to the maximum.”
“It’s not like they were not feeding their child or they were purposely withholding medication that they knew would assist the child but didn’t,” she said.
That’s bogus. They were purposely withholding medication that any rational person would know is the right thing to give such a child. They didn’t even take him to a doctor until he stopped breathing, but he was already dead! If these parents get off lightly, it will be a signal to others in their position—First Nations parents who treat leukemia with herbs or other religious parents who substitute prayer for medicine—that they might suffer no legal consequences at all.
In fact, this case is exactly like religiously-based withholding of medicine, for in both situations the damage is based on faith. That the conclusion of experts who have watched this case, and a major contention of my book Faith Versus Fact. “Faith” is belief without sufficient evidence to convince most rational people, and whether that be based on religion, ideology, or belief in “alternative medicine,” it’s all the same, and all equally culpable in a case like this.
Here’s another CBC story on the Stephans; click on the screenshot to go to it:
Why is this such a revelation? Do people not see the parallel between faith in God and faith in maple syrup? How surprising is this?:
“It’s like a religion to them,” says Tim Caulfield, research director of the University of Alberta’s Health Law and Science Policy Group. He has written the books The Cure for Everything! Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?
“Studies have shown that some people are more likely to believe these kinds of things. They’re more likely to believe in the supernatural. They’re more likely to be religious and they’re more likely to buy the entire package of complementary and alternative practices.”
But Caulfield is right, and makes a good point:
Caulfield says individuals can not only find information that backs their own personal beliefs online, but entire cyber communities that agree with them.
“When you start insulting and say there’s no evidence to support homeopathy, there’s no evidence to support these kind of whole remedies — you’re not just insulting the practice — you’re insulting the individual. It becomes part of their belief system.”
Caulfield says it isn’t easy to get people to change.
“When people are faith-based, which so many of these practitioners really are and so many people that use this, they can’t change their mind, because then they’re losing part of their identity package.
“They’re losing part of who they are.”
Caulfield wants a national dialogue about what he calls pseudo-science.
“It’s almost like there’s this strange, pseudo-science correctiveness … that stops us from talking honestly about what these guys provide.”
And that “pseudo-science correctness” is even harder to dislodge (and more easily excused by the public) when it’s based on religion. Even if we can’t change people’s minds, though, we can make sure the law gives a stiff corrective to faithheads like the Stephans. And we can also recognize that homeopathy, acupuncture, crystal healing, and other such nonsense are just as faith-based as religion.
Yes, the David and Collet Stephan were people of faith, but that’s a term that should always be taken not as the usual compliment, but as a profound criticism.
These four journalists were not only reformers, but supported Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Nevertheless, they were sentenced to long prison terms on trumped-up charges. The New York Times reports:
An Iranian revolutionary court handed down long prison terms on Tuesday to four journalists supportive of the government of President Hassan Rouhani, Iranian news media reported. All were convicted on charges of having acted against national security.
Noting that Mr. Rouhani has called for more press freedom in several speeches, analysts said the prison sentences were a warning by Iran’s conservative-dominated judiciary that it would not accept any relaxation of the rules for journalists.
A prominent reporter and actress, Afarin Chitsaz, was sentenced to 10 years, the Iranian Students’ News Agency reported. Last year, she wrote an impassioned defense of the nuclear agreement between Iran and major world powers in the daily Iran, an official government newspaper.
Ten years.
All of the journalists worked for reformist newspapers. They included the editor in chief of Farhikhtegan, Eshan Manzandarani, who received a seven-year sentence.
Seven years.
The other two were Davood Asadi, who received five years, and Eshan Safarzaiee, who received seven years.
Asadi; five years. No photo available for Safarsaiee
The four were arrested in November by the intelligence unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on suspicion of assisting the United States in ‘‘infiltrating” the country. Ms. Chitsaz was also convicted of “having connections with foreign governments,” her lawyer, Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei, said in an interview. “I will appeal this decision,” he said.
. . . Over the last decade, dozens of reformist newspapers have been closed by the Iranian judiciary and hundreds of reporters have been imprisoned, a campaign of intimidation that has forced many to tone down criticism or to seek other jobs.
They will be jailed for one “crime”: urging reform. Five or more years in an Iranian jail is a damn severe punishment.
Given that the lecture’s being used in Texas, I look forward to creationist Don McLeroy’s response explaining how these data really comport better with the creation story of Genesis.
Well, McLeroy, once head of the Texas Board of Education, and a man who’s done more to damage science education in this country than anyone I can think of, has responded on his site To My Listening Ear. (What a misnomer! The man listens only to refute; he’s completely close-minded.) Here’s the entirety of McLeroy’s post, called “The Evolutionist’ Conceptual Lock” (there’s apparently a missing “s”):
Considering Carl Sagan’s “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Jon Peter’s video fails Sagan’s test for whale evolution; he doesn’t realize he has not presented very much evidence. If he would only look at all of the whale as he looks at a hind limb atavism, he would realize his mistake. For example, when discussing hind limb atavisms, Peter’s observes: “Think about that. Remember, if it is a leg, think of the DNA it takes to produce a leg—bones, muscles, nerves, skin cartilage. That’s a lot of DNA.” I agree. But now consider the amount of genetic instructions and rewired DNA it takes for the transformation of an ancient land mammal into a whale. Now this is a lot of DNA! I do not know if he really has thought about the amount needed.
Yes, a creationist has a hard time explaining the atavism [JAC: what’s your explanation, Mr. McLeroy?], but the evolutionist has a multiple orders of magnitude problem explaining a whale. Especially, when all this supposedly happened “remarkably fast: most of the action took place within only 10 million years.” (Coyne, Why Evolution is True, 51)
This short critique highlights what I believe is the evolutionist’ greatest blind spot: thinking he has massive overwhelming evidence when he doesn’t. Stephen Gould warned “The greatest impediment to scientific innovation is usually a conceptual lock.” (Wonderful Life,276) I see the evolutionist’ “conceptual lock” as claiming “What’s not a problem is the lack of evidence.” (Coyne, 222)
I guess the missing “s” in “evolutionist'” isn’t a typo after all.
Here McLeroy simply raises the old canard about “evolution can’t create that much change in the DNA!” But nobody has ever shown that it can’t, and we have the fossil evidence that it can. If McLeroy is serious here, he’d show that that amount of morphological and anatomical evolution that occurred simply couldn’t have happened via natural selection. That’s presently impossible, of course, since we don’t know how many genes have changed, and how many substitutions have occurred. The only attempt I know to see if the evolution of a complex character was evolutionarily feasible in a reasonable amount of time was Nilsson and Pelger’s 1994 paper (free download) on the evolution of a camera eye from a light-sensitive eye spot. Contrary to creationist assertions, they showed it could happen pretty quickly: a few hundred thousand years. Whales had ten million years to evolve, and of course many traits were changing at once.
And, as I said, we have the evolutionary evidence for morphological evolution—in the fossil record! McLeroy simply ignores that. What is his explanation for all the evidence: God put the vestigial pelvises and atavistic legs in whales to fool us? Did God create a succession of fossils to mimic the evolution of whales, apparently to trick biologists into thinking that whales evolved from terrestrial artiodactyls? Is McLeroy’s God a Cosmic Prankster?
As with all creationists, McLeroy doesn’t explicitly describe his alternative theory to explain the data: he just kvetches about evolution. I presume that he thinks that the false evidence for evolution is God’s handiwork; if he believes otherwise, he should give his theory for the remarkable succession of fossils, the vestigial pelvis and rudimentary legs, and the silenced olfactory-receptor genes (they’re all “dead” in cetaceans). For the nonce, I will assume that McLeroy sees God as allied with Satan in this cartoon from reader Pliny the in Between:
I’m an admirer of the work of Asra Nomani, a journalist, cofounder of The Muslim Reform Movement, and author of Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. I’ve posted about her before; she’s a genuine believing Muslim and so, unlike Ayaan Hirsi Ali—who’s dismissed partly, and unfairly, because she left Islam—Nomani’s efforts to expunge the extremism and misogyny from Islam can’t be rejected on the grounds that she’s not a believer. (See her nice interview with Bill Maher here.)
Nevertheless, she’s had pushback. Her article in last December’s Washington Post with former Voice of America journalist Hala Arafa, “As Muslim women, we actually ask you not to wear the hijab as a sign of interfaith solidarity,” apparently led to a fair amount of online debate (see here)—and to the expected online abuse of Nomani. Here’s a bit of Nomani and Arafa’s Post response to the call on “Hijab day” for women to don the headscarf as a sign of solidarity with Muslim women:
Born in the 1960s into conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shiite sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have been bullied in an attempt to get us to cover our hair from men and boys. Women and girls, who are sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” take it a step further by even making fun of women whom they perceive as wearing the hijab inappropriately, referring to “hijabis” in skinny jeans as “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for “whores.”
As I’ve recounted several times, when I visited the Middle East Technical University in Ankara a few years ago, I had a conversation with women students who were Muslims. At that University the headscarf is banned, and I asked the students what they thought of it. They unanimously agreed with the ban, saying that although they were Muslims, they didn’t like the headscarf; but if it were permitted, and they didn’t wear it, the “enforce-hers” would tell them that they weren’t “good Muslims”. Hijab-shaming is apparently not rare in Turkey. Also, the absence of the hijab in pre-Revolution Iran and Afghanistan, and the presence of websites like “My Stealthy Freedom,” show that most women don’t wear it voluntarily, unless by “voluntarily” you mean “choosing to wear it to avoid bullying or a beating—or worse.”
More from Nomani and Arafa:
To us, the “hijab”is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and thus must not be tempted by the sight of our hair. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.
The new Muslim Reform Movement, a global network of leaders, advocating for human rights, peace and secular governance, supports the right of Muslim women to wear — or not wear — the headscarf.
Unfortunately, the idea of “hijab” as a mandatory headscarf is promulgated by naïve efforts such as “World Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, and Ahlul Bayt, a Shiite-proselytizing TV station, that the University of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its participation in “World Hijab Day”. . .
. . . Today, in the 21st century, most mosques around the world, including in the United States, deny us, as Muslim women, our Islamic right to pray without a headscarf, discriminating against us by refusing us entry if we don’t cover our hair. Like the Catholic Church after the Vatican II reforms of 1965 removed a requirement that women enter churches with heads covers, mosques should become headscarf-optional, if they truly want to make their places of worship “women-friendly.”
They go on to argue that the religious dictate to wear a hijab depends on misinterpretation of the Qur’an, where the word doesn’t mean “headscarf”. Their discussion is interesting, and finishes with a some words about the recency of mandatory veiling:
In 1919, Egyptian women marched on the streets demanding the right to vote; they took off their veils, imported as a cultural tradition from the Ottoman Empire, not a religious edict. The veil then became a relic of the past.
Later, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser said in a speech in the early 1960s that, when he sought reconciliation with members of the Muslim Brotherhood group for attempting to assassinate him in 1954, the Supreme Leader of the Brotherhood gave him a list of demands, including, “imposing hijab on Egyptian women.” The audience members didn’t understand what the word hijab meant. When Nasser explained that the Brotherhood wanted Egyptian women to wear a headscarf, the audience members burst out laughing.
As women who grew up in modern Muslim families with theologians, we are trying to reclaim our religion from the prongs of a strict interpretation. Like in our youth, we are witnessing attempts to make this strict ideology the one and only accepted face of Islam. We have seen what the resurgence of political Islam has done to our regions of origin and to our adoptive country.
As Americans, we believe in freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs, or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.
My own view is that the hijab shouldn’t be banned (but what about Middle East Technical University??), but covering of the face in the West should be banned in certain public places that require identification. In the end, though, I agree with Nomani and Arafa that wearing an oppressive garment to demonstrate “solidarity” is deeply misguided. There are better ways to show solidarity with Muslims than wearing a garment designed to oppress women. (One of the best demonstrations of solidarity, I think, was the recent demonstration of Europeans, who held hands and surrounded mosques after recent terrorist attacks to prevent their countrymen from damaging them.)
At any rate, this Saturday, Asra Nomani and two presumably pro-hijab women, Hoda Katebi and Duaa Eldeib (they’re both pictured wearing the headscarf), are speaking at the Chicago Humanities Festival on the topic, “Politics and Clothing: The Hijab,”. The full announcement is below, and here:
Sat, Apr 30 | 3 – 4 PM
Art Institute of Chicago
Fullerton Hall
111 S. Michigan Ave. | Chicago, IL | 60603
Members: $12
Public: $15
Students and Teachers: $10
When Italian designers Dolce & Gabbana announced its first hijab collection, it wasn’t just the fashion world that took notice. In many ways, hijab is becoming part of mainstream Western culture, worn by characters on television series, Olympic athletes, even a new Barbie doll. Still the wearing of hijab continues to spark other responses, from attacks on women in Paris, to calls from some Muslim women to end what they view as an oppressive form of dress. CHF convenes a conversation to discuss the complex and sometimes contradictory responses to hijab, including Asra Nomani, journalist and author of Standing Alone in Mecca and Hoda Katebi, activist and author of Tehran Street Style, moderated by Duaa Eldeib of theChicago Tribune.
As I mentioned when in Portland, I encountered reader Bruce Thiel at my free will talk; Bruce’s avocation is preparing fantastic fossils that he finds locally. I’ve featured some of his preparations before; have a look, as I’ve never seen anything like them. Using a dental drill and working slowly and meticulously, he produces fossils like the ones below, whose photos just arrived in my email. (Go here to see how a preparation proceeds.) He doesn’t sell them, though preparations like this fetch high prices; instead, Bruce gives them to museums and scientists to study. So let’s have a paleontological “readers’ wildlife” today. Bruce’s notes are indented:
Here are some other interesting crabs I’ve prepared. Background information about the fossils and the discovery and preparation procedure can be found here [JAC: the second link above].
All the crabs shown are about 30 million years old and are Pulalius vulgaris, except for the last picture. This crab in the next two pictures was mashed and not particularly well-preserved—until I got to the eyestalks and claws, so I went as close as I could between the claws. The eyestalks are 1.5cm apart–slightly over 1/2 inch—so there was not a lot of working area.
The next crab was one of three given to the Smithsonian. What looks like googly-eyes are two attached barnacles.
The next two crabs host tube worms, and are at Kent State being studied for epibionts. The chip in the middle of the carapace is what fossils preparers call “the mark of discovery.” Most of the round or oval-shaped concretions are blank or contain bits of wood, shell or decomposed organic material. In working down into the middle of the rock with the pneumatic jackhammer to see what they contain, if one is too aggressive or not paying close attention, one can “nick” the shell with the pneumatic tool as I did in this case. Both crabs have interesting snake-shaped worms lurking on their shell. One of the questions experts would like to answr is if the worms attach while the crab was alive or after death and during decomposition.
This is one of the smaller crabs I’ve worked on. I held my breath when uncovering the tiny claw. My thumbnail is shown for comparison.
These are two Macroacaena schencki crabs from the Keasey Formation, Oregon (33 – 35 MYO). We think the larger and wider of the two is female but determination awaits further research.
