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.
She’s gone. I was at the Field Museum on Wednesday for the first time since the previous month, and the removal of Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex has been completed.
Stanley Field Hall, where Sue used to be.
Viewed from the balcony above, visitors walk through Stanley Field Hall, seemingly unaware of the ghostly white outline of Sue’s now departed plinth.
Where Sue used to be, from above.
A sign explained where Sue will eventually show up.
Sue’s actually not gone away entirely, for the second floor balcony display, featuring Sue’s real skull, remains in place. [JAC: the skull was always up there as it was too heavy to mount on the skeleton downstairs.]
The second floor display also includes touchable, life-size, bronze models of various parts of Sue, including the (relatively) tiny forearm. Devotees of the concept of unity of type, and Neil Shubin‘s Your Inner Fish in particular, will recognize the “one bone, two bones, many bones” pattern found throughout the tetrapod vertebrates and their piscine forebears.
A bronze model of Sue’s forearm.
A closeup of the digits; the two distalmost phalanges of the outer (lower, in this photo) digit were among the few bones missing from Sue’s skeleton, and the ones in the model are based on Albertosaurus, a related theropod dinosaur.
Sue’s fingers.
From up on the balcony, I could also get a better look at the model of Pteranodon longiceps hanging from the ceiling.
Pteranodon longiceps in the Field Museum.
And zooming in a bit.
Does the position of this model mean that Pteranodon is Ceiling Reptile?
On February 8 I reported that the Duluth (Minnesota) public schools had removed two classic books from their syllabus: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. The reason, as you can guess, is that they contained the “n-word”: as the Minnesota Star-Tribune reported:
“The feedback that we’ve received is that it makes many students feel uncomfortable,” said Michael Cary, director of curriculum and instruction for the district. “Conversations about race are an important topic, and we want to make sure we address those conversations in a way that works well for all of our students.”
Cary said the decision, made as a group by district leaders and leaders in Duluth’s secondary schools, came after years of concerns shared by parents, students and community groups. The change was announced to district staff members late last week.
Stephan Witherspoon, president of the Duluth chapter of the NAACP, called the move “long overdue.”
The literature has “oppressive language for our kids” Witherspoon said, and school should be an environment where children of color are learning equally. There are other novels with similar messages that can be taught, he said.
“Our kids don’t need to read the ‘N’ word in school,” Witherspoon said. “They deal with that every day out in the community and in their life. Racism still exists in a very big way.”
To be sure, the schools were still leaving the books in the school library, just in case kids want to trigger themselves. And, as I wrote at the time, there are ways to teach this sensitively, and of course African-American kids are going to hear that word many times growing up, and will know what it means. The two books, in fact, are not oppressive but anti-racist, but use the language common among racist Southerners at the time.
Note that one of the objections to the books being used was from the NAACP, an abbreviation for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Those last two words, of course, are also taboo, as they are considered more offensive than “blacks” or “African Americans,” though not as offensive as “nigger” (I’m not using the “n-word” euphemism here, as everybody reads the offensive word into it.) Nobody calls African Americans “colored people” these days. If the NAACP is serious, it should change its name. The reason they don’t, of course, is that “colored people” was respectable at the time among blacks, and they keep it as a sign of history. But the historical context is also the same justification for teaching the “triggering” word in the two banned books.
This kind of school censorship repels me, and so I wrote to Dr. Michael Cary, Director of Curriculum and Instruction of the Duluth Public Schools. I also emailed the same letter, individually, to all seven members of the Duluth School Board. Here it is:
Dear Mr./Ms. X,
I’d like to register a protest against your school board’s removal of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the curriculum on the grounds that they contain a single word that is considered offensive. This is censorship, pure and simple, and censorship based on the principle that a book that contains any material that people find offensive should be removed from the curriculum. But nearly any important book will offend someone, and, as you know, both of these books are not only important, but anti-racist.
To say that there are other books that convey the same message implies that ideology is what’s important for the students, and that books with the same ideology are interchangeable. But that’s not true. Both of these books have substantial literary merit: Hemingway deemed “Huck Finn” as the fountainhead of American literature, and “Mockingbird” won a Pulitzer Prize. There are no other books like them.
I’m sure your students are mature enough, and your teachers capable enough, to teach these important books with care and sensitivity. To deprive students of reading them as part of the curriculum is to diminish their cultural education.
Yours sincerely,
Jerry Coyne
Professor Emeritus
Department of Ecology and Evolution
The University of Chicago
Now usually I get some kind of response or non-response defending the censorship, but up to now I’ve heard exactly nothing. Apparently the books are still out of the curriculum. This morning, however, I got a snotty email from one member of the school board, who had the temerity to address me by my first name and then to ask me three questions. I’ll leave out the name as it’s not important:
Hi Jerry,
A few questions:
1) Where did you get your information from?
2) Why do you think the decision was made? Who made it? What’s the story behind it?
3) What do you know about our community, our teachers, and our students?
That’s the complete content of the email.
My information, of course, came from the newspapers, and was widely available. As the paper reported, the decision was made by “a group by district leaders and leaders in Duluth’s secondary schools”. I presume that includes members of the Duluth School Board, but even if it doesn’t, they didn’t have to bow to the pressure. Finally, the last question really is dumb: the writer assumes that I have to know all about the community, teachers, and students to justify my criticism of the censorship. But every word I wrote goes for every school that would teach but then censor the books. The implication, of course, is that the community was riled up, contained people who saw the word “nigger” as triggering, offensive, oppressive, and upsetting, even when contained in classic works of literature, and that Duluth teachers are unable to teach those two books in a way that could defuse any offense—or even use it as a teaching moment. Are they really that incompetent?
Regardless, this is not only a non-response (just a lot of snarky questions), but speaks poorly of the Duluth School Board. So, let them censor what the kids will see, for, after all, the School Boards knows hate speech when they see it. I hope that the Streisand Effect operates here, and the children seek out and read those two books.
Meanwhile, the Duluth School Board can take a hike.
UPDATE: There’s a comment by reader “Worm” below that suggests he/she is the school board member who wrote me the snarky response. I can’t verify that, because it’s anonymous, but if it’s true, this person should not be on a school board!
We have a treat today! From the rain forests of tropical Ecuador, reader/biologist/photographer/evolutionist/naturalist Lou Jost sent us some Big Cat videos. Lou’s notes:
Jerry, I have some Youtube cat videos for you…very BIG cats. These are taken by a camera trap (set up by our crew, Javier Robayo, Juan Pablo Reyes, Jorge Brito, and Hector Yela) in a property we are trying to buy for our Dracula Reserve in northwest Ecuador. The camera site was baited with bananas because we were interested in small rodents. But we got these two puma (Felis concolor) as well [JAC: they’re called “cougars” or “mountain lions” in the U.S.]
The first one is a male, the same animal we have filmed more than 10km to the south during a different investigation. He marks the spot with urine, which later attracts the attention and approval of a beautiful female puma. Meanwhile a prey animal, an agouti (Dasyprocta sp), also takes an interest in the urine, and is probably less happy about it….
JAC: note the female’s “flehmen response“, opening her mouth and curling her lips, as she smells the male’s scent:
And here’s a screen capture of the female doing a flehmen:
Okay, we’re firmly into March now, and it’s March 2, 2018, National Banana Cream Pie Day. It’s also Texas Independence Day, celebrating the day in 1836 when settlers declared independence from Mexico and declared the Republic of Texas.
In India, the festival of Holi began yesterday evening and lasts until tonight; it’s a celebration of spring and general good feeling. In India—and in places on campus here—Indians throw permanent dyes and water on each other. If you’re wearing good clothes in India, don’t go outside!
On this day in 1657, the Great Fire of Meireki began in Edo (now Tokyo), lasting three days and killing over 100,000 people. On March 2, 1797, the Bank of England issued the first one- and two-pound banknotes, which would have been a lot of dosh in that time. (Reminder: the Darwin 10-pound note went out of circulation yesterday, so if you have any (and I have one), you’ll have to go to a bank and change them for the new tenners. The new ones bear the portrait of Jane Austen. Much as I love Austen, I’m sad to see Darwin go. On March 2, 1859, the Great Slave Auction was held near Savannah, Georgia, lasting two days and selling 436 men, women, and children in a two-day period. It was the largest slave auction in U.S. history, and I can only imagine the grief and misery it caused. The only saving grace: according to Wikipedia, no families were broken up. It’s hard to imagine a time when humans could sell other human beings like so much merchandise. On this day in 1876, after the U.S. Presidential election, and only two days before inauguration, the Congress declared Rutherford B. Hayes the winner even though his opponent, Samuel Tilden, won the popular vote the preceding November. Sound familiar?
On this day in 1933, the movie King Kong opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Thirteen years later, Ho Chi Minh was elected the president of North Vietnam. On March 2, 1949, 2 months before I was conceived, the first nonstop around-the-world flight was completed as a B-50 Superfortress, Lucky Lady II, landed at Forth Worth, Texas. It took 94 hours and of course involved inflight refueling. On this day in 1956, Morocco gained independence from France. Four years later, Wilt Chamberlain set the still-extant record for scoring in a single NBA basketball game: 100 points even. On May 2, 1983, compact discs, previously available only in Japan, were released for the first time in other countries, including the U.S. I remember this well—and now they’re almost obsolete! Finally, on this day in 1995, scientists at Fermilab announced the discovery of the top quark.
Here’s the trailer for the original King Kong:
Notables born on March 2 include Sam Houston (1793), Sholem Aleichem (1859), Moe Berg (1902), Dr. Seuss (1904), Desi Arnaz (1917), photographer Ernst Haas (1921), Michael Gorbachev and Tom Wolfe (both 1931), Lou Reed (1942), Karen Carpenter (1950, ♥), Laraine Newman (1952), and Daniel Craig (1968; he’s 50 today). Those who fell asleep on this day include Horace Walpole (1797), D. H. Lawrence (1930), Howard Carter (1939), Philip K. Dick (1982), Serge Gainsbourg (1991), and Anita Morris (1994).
When I began taking tons of slides (Kodachrome 64) in graduate school, Ernst Haas was one of my photographic heroes; he was a pioneer of color street and nature photography. Here’s one of his photos from one of his books I own, The Creation:
The Brits and Irish are such wusses when it comes to snow. This would be a light dusting in Chicago—no cause for concern or difficulty in driving—but in Cork it’s caused a huge slowdown:
From Matthew: A baby chimp is rescued from poachers and flown to safety. Make sure you turn the sound on:
Sound On: This made my night. A baby chimp being rescued from poachers in the Congo and being flown to safety. I watched it three times and felt less stressed. The pilot is so kind and gentle. pic.twitter.com/nX1TOUCbyb
This video was just posted yesterday, and it’s amazing—like the alien coming out of the guy’s stomach. It’s a caddisfly. These aren’t what entomologists call “flies,” which are in the order Diptera; rather, they’re in the order Trichoptera. As for what is happening here, I’ll let Matthew (who sent me the video) explain:
Its a hemimetabolous insect, so they just go through a series of moults, the final being the most dramatic. They are nymphs, this is the imago. Same as in dragonflies. And who worked it out and described it first? Swammerdam.
Yep! Little Black Caddisflies hatch on nice days even in winter. This one is about 4mm long, so hatches in minutes compared to larger aquatic insects which can take up to an hour to eclose.
Now think of the evolution required to built such a complex developmental program (which of course includes behavior):
Here’s a African gray parrot named Einstein (Psittacus erithacus), celebrating her 30th birthday at the Knoxville Zoo:
If you follow or participate in the Women’s March, whose goals are admirable, be aware that you’re getting in bed with some very unsavory characters—the March’s leaders.
Last Sunday, as reported by CNN, Louis Farrakhan, the bigoted and unhinged leader of the National of Islam (the “Black Muslims”) gave a blatantly anti-Semitic speech. Click on the screenshot to see the details:
Minister Louis Farrakhan engaged in a series of anti-Semitic remarks on Sunday.
Farrakhan has led the black nationalist group Nation of Islam since 1977 and is known for hyperbolic hate speech aimed at the Jewish community.
During the speech in Chicago, Farrakhan made several anti-Semitic comments, including, “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”
“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” he later said.
The CNN article contains a lot of tweets from CNN anchor (and liberal) Jake Tapper recounting Farrakhan’s remarks with embedded videos, like this one:
At 2:57:00 he begins approvingly quoting some of the anti-Semitic comments made by Rev. Billy Graham and President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office.https://t.co/WE5ys7It8R
Farrakhan made multiple inflammatory comments during his three-hour speech. He claimed that “the powerful Jews are my enemy,” that “the Jews have control over agencies of those agencies of government” like the FBI, that Jews are “the mother and father of apartheid,” and that Jews are responsible for “degenerate behavior in Hollywood turning men into women and women into men.”
Farrakhan has been known to make anti-Semitic comments for decades, including calling Adolf Hitler “a very great man” and claiming that Jews were behind the 9/11 terror attacks.
Even the dubious Southern Poverty Law Center, itself too eager to demonize Muslim reformers or apostates like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has denounced Farrkhan and the Nation of Islam as producing “deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric”, stating that such behavior “earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate.”
Now, who was at Farrakhan’s speech but Tamika Mallory, one of the four co-chairs of the Women’s March? (They include, as Wikipedia notes: “Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York; Tamika Mallory, a political organizer and former executive director of the National Action Network; Carmen Perez, an executive director of the political action group The Gathering for Justice; and Bob Bland [a woman], a fashion designer who focuses on ethical manufacturing.”) And it turns out that three of these four women—all save Bland—have sucked up to Louis Farrakhan.
CNN reports on Mallory, who has a history of osculating Farrkahan (see also my post here):
Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory was in attendance, CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out on Twitter after she shared an image from the event on Instagram.
Mallory has posted on social media about Farrakhan in the past — on February 21, 2016, she posted an image of him from a stage at the Joe Louis Arena with the caption: “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan just stepped to the mic for #SD16DET… I’m super ready for this message! #JUSTICEORELSE #ForTheLoveOfFlint.”
Mallory did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on Sunday’s speech.
Mallory, and Perez as well, both have firm connections to Farrakhan, expressing approval for the man and his ideas, as documented in an article in The Algemeiner. This picture, from Perz’s Instagram account, shows their approbation (Perez on left, Mallory on right):
I should add that, as I posted last year, Perez is a big fan of other dubious characters. As NYT writer Bari Weiss noted in a column called “When progressives embrace hate” (and I’ve checked on these statements):
Ms. Mallory, in addition to applauding Assata Shakur [JAC: characterized by Tapper, truthfully, as “a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba”] as a feminist emblem, also admires Fidel Castro, who sheltered Ms. Shakur in Cuba. She put up a flurry of posts when Mr. Castro died last year. “R.I.P. Comandante! Your legacy lives on!” she wrote in one. She does not have similar respect for American police officers. “When you throw a brick in a pile of hogs, the one that hollers is the one you hit,” she posted on Nov. 20.
Ms. Perez also expressed her admiration for a Black Panther convicted of trying to kill six police officers: “Love learning from and sharing space with Baba Sekou Odinga.”
And here’s Linda Sarsour weighing in on a Perez Instagram post, noting that “the brother does not age” and “God bless him”. Indeed!
You might construe this as just a factual assertion, but I think it’s darker than that:
So Perez and Mallory are big supporters of Farrakhan (and terrorist killers) and I suspect Sarsour is, too, given her “God bless him” weigh-in above. As reader BJ—who called the speech, Mallory’s attendance, and some links to my attention—noted: “This would be all over the media if it was about the leaders of a huge right-wing march following Richard Spencer, and since Farrakhan is just as hateful as Spencer, the only difference between the two is that Farrakhan has far more followers and, apparently, influence over respected organizers.”
You’d expect progressives to call out Perez, Mallory, and Sarsour for their association with an unrepentent Jew-hater like Farrakhan, who is the black equivalent of Richard Spencer. But no, some liberals make excuses for it, so eager are they to overlook anti-Semitism in the cause of being woke. Just have a look at this defense of the Women’s March leaders on the feminist site Jezebel (my emphasis):
Of course, neither Sarsour, nor any of the other Women’s March co-founders, is immune to criticism (and Weiss raises a few valid points in her op-ed [JAC: here], particularly around Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory’s association with Louis Farrakhan, a black activist who has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Semitic and homophobic extremist; neither Perez nor Mallory have responded to our request for comment on the affiliation or Weiss’s piece). But progressives should understand who these criticisms serve, especially when they originate from Islamophobic arguments—and understand that, as a Palestinian-American Muslim woman, Sarsour’s very identity and existence is considered controversial in a country that continues to support policies that discriminate against one of the most oppressed people in the world.
Transation: “It’s okay for Sarsour, Perez, and Mallory to hang around with a rabid anti-Semite, because the critics of that can be fobbed off as simple Islamophobes. Besides, Sarsour is supporting the oppressed feminists, so it’s okay for her and her cronies to express anti-Semitism.”
Like others who endorse the Woman’s March, Jezebel is so enamored at the March’s well-meant aims that they’ll either overlook or defend the viper at the breast of the Women’s March organizers. I am mystified at this. Perez and Mallory associate with a bigoted loon, Sarsour says “god bless him”; and all three are dubious characters, characters who hang around with and praise bigots and killers. Is this the best the Women’s March can do? Can’t they find leaders who aren’t in bed with bigots? And why does the liberal press ignore this? (We already know the answer.)
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
—Karl Marx A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
As “mainstream” publications like the New York Times and New Yorker become increasingly regressive, we can expect to see more osculation of religion, even though the tenets of religion are false and the U.S. is becoming more secular. (One characteristic of Authoritarian Leftists is their refusal to criticize faith.) In an op-ed yesterday, David Leonhardt, a columnist and the associate editorial page editor for the New York Times, not only praises a pro-religion column by conservative Ross Douthat, but cites a study purporting to show that religion is a net good in the world (click on the screenshot to read the piece):
An excerpt:
The benefits of faith. In his Sunday column this week, Ross Douthat issued something of a challenge to secular liberals. They think of themselves as empiricists, Ross wrote, but they’re actually close-minded about several powerful forces for good, starting with religion.
“When people and societies are genuinely curious,” he continued, “they are very reasonably curious about everything, including things happening in their bodies and their consciousness and more speculative realms.”
If you read Douthat’s column, you’ll see it’s a critique of Steve Pinker’s thesis, described in his new book Enlightenment Now, that the world is getting better, and that a big reason for that improvement is the rejection of dogma and superstition pushed by religion and faith. In fact, Douthat claims that, contrary to all reason, being irrational—whether that’s manifested in astrology, spiritualism, or religion—actually promotes the curiosity that pushes science forward. As Douthat argues:
. . . in many instances the interests that Pinker dismisses as irrational hugger-mugger, everything from astrology to spiritualism, have tended to strengthen during periods of real scientific ferment. It’s why Isaac Newton loved alchemy and the Victorians loved séances; it’s why charismatic Christianity has spread very naturally with economic development in Africa and Latin America and why the Space Age coincided with the spread of all those health food stores.
Which is why if Pinker and others are genuinely worried about a waning appreciation of the inquiring scientific spirit, they should consider the possibility that some of their own smug secular certainties might be part of the problem — that they might, indeed, be stifling the more comprehensive kind of curiosity upon which the scientific enterprise ultimately depends.
Smug secular certainties, indeed? Has he read Pinker’s book, which is based on data? As usual, what issues from Douthat’s pie-hole is nonsense: religion in the West is waning strongly, regardless of the spread of “charistmatic Christianity” in Africa and Latin America. Douthat fails to realize that the economic development in places like Africa and Latin America depends largely on science produced in more secular countries, and that correlation between scientific ferment and superstition (even if it’s real, and I Douthat) is not causation. Read Douthat’s column if you want to see an Orwellian conviction that superstition actually increases our respect for empirical data.
Back to Leonhardt’s, who then cites data that I find a bit dubious (see below):
The column reminded me of a pattern that, as a secular liberal myself, I’ve long found inconvenient: Religion is correlated with a lot of healthy behaviors and positive outcomes. All else equal, religious people have higher educational attainment, earn more money, use drugs and alcohol less and commit fewer crimes, according to a long line of social-science studies (that have frequently been done by secular liberals).
The question about these findings is the old correlation-causation question: Does religious faith lead to these healthy behaviors? Or is something else, independent of faith, causing them?
He then cites a 78-page study—and I haven’t yet read it—but the link is in the column’s excerpt below (my emphasis):
A clever new study tries to offer some answers. It’s not anywhere near the last word on the matter, obviously, but it is intriguing.
. . . The group taught 15 weeks of classes to more than 6,000 very poor Filipinos. Some of the students received a version that combined religious teachings with advice on health and employment. Others received only the nonreligious parts. By comparing the different batches of students, the economists hoped to isolate the effect of religion.
The results: Six months later, those who received the religious education indeed reported feeling more guided by religion. They were also earning more money, largely by shifting from agricultural work to higher-paying jobs, such as fishing or self-employment. And even small pay increases can be a big deal for people living in extreme poverty.
. . . No study is definitive. But I do find the overall evidence of religion’s ancillary benefits to be strong. That evidence hasn’t made me personally religious. I’m still quite comfortable with my secularism. But the evidence has made me more humble and open-minded about how the world can go about solving some of its problems.
Does this convince you that religiosity has “strong ancillary benefits”? Of course I’m biased against that, but let’s look at the description. The subjects were “very poor Filipinos”, not reasonably well-off Westerners, which, after all, is whom Leonhardt is addressing. Even taking these results at face value, remember that the most religious people in both the U.S. and across nations are those with the lowest well being, and thus tend to look to a heavenly being for succor rather than their governments. This might explain the “feeling more guided by religion” part. After all, if you get a religious education, why wouldn’t you feel more guided by religion?
As for earning more money, I’d want to see the effects of four treatments: “religion alone”, “religion combined with advice on health and employment”, “advice on health and employment alone” and “no treatment.” Perhaps a reader can have a look at the survey, and see if “religion alone” has a bigger effect than “advice on health and employment”, or if the combined treatment had a bigger effect than “religion alone.”
At any rate, this one study in the Philippines, showing that religion combined with secular advice is better than secular advice alone (I’m presuming here), flies in the face of other data that Leonhardt doesn’t mention. As I’ve discussed before, in both Faith Versus Fact and a 2012 paper in Evolution (free access with Unpaywall), the most religious countries in the world are those with the lowest well being. Conversely, countries with the highest well-being (and, according to a UN survey, the happiest inhabitants) are the most secular countries: countries like Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, and so on. (That includes the U.S., which using sociological measures doesn’t have such a “successful society”.)
This holds true among states of the U.S. as well, though I don’t have the correlation at hand. The “red states”, which are highly religious, tend to have lower well being than “blue states”, with more secularist and liberals. Here are two figures from a post I did in 2012, showing data from a Gallup poll”. First, the degree of religiosity in American states:
And overall well being:
There’s a striking correlation, at least visually: those states with the lowest well being have the highest religiosity. (I’m willing to be that this is statistically significant.) That, and the data among countries, does not suggest that religion motivates people to better their lot. Of course these are just correlations, but sociologists such as Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have theorized that religiosity is a response to low well being: if your society is not taking care of you, you look for solace and help to gods. An alternative hypothesis is that believing in God makes you create worse societies. The first explanation (first adumbrated by Marx in his famous quote) makes more sense to me, but the second may carry a lick of sense as well. If you’re hopeless and think that either god will help you or that your lot will be better in the next life, you have less impetus to improve your society.
Either way, the data from everyplace outside the small group of poor Filipinos discussed by Leonhardt refutes his thesis on the effect of religion on material well being. Of course, he doesn’t mention that.
What bothers me about Leonhardt’s article is the fact that, as he admits, he himself is a nonbeliever—or at least a “secularist” who isn’t religious. Presumably, then, he thinks religion is good for the “little people”, as it inspires them to work harder and make more money, even if the tenets of religion aren’t true. Good for thee but not for me! How incredibly condescending and patronizing can one be? Does he seriously think that teaching religion to people is one way “the world can go about solving some of its problems”?
And remember, this patronizing git, who pretends to be “humble,” is largely in charge of the entire op-ed section of the country’s best newspaper.
