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.
The famous “Doc Bill”, retired chemist and programmer, commenter on this site, lover of noms, and the staff of Kink the Cat, invited me over to dinner at his place in Houston last night, along with Kevin McCarthy, writer of the Skeptic Ink site Smilodon’s Retreat. The co-host was his wife Helen, a retired geologist.
It was a lovely evening with lots of conversation about Intelligent Design (Doc and Kevin have spent a lot of time following and criticizing the Discovery Institute), and, of course, good food. Below is Doc grilling one of the noms: bacon-wrapped tenderloin. He’d also smoked some ribs in his new smoker, which smokes and cooks them at a very low temperature.
A lovely plate: rare tenderloin, asparagus, roasted potato slices, corn/black/bean/pepper salad, and smoked ribs, accompanied by a California Pinot Noir. Dessert was a homemade raspberry/apple cobbler with ice cream.
I got to have Kink sit next to me on the table during dinner. He’s a lovely cat but with lots of chutzpah:
“Kink” was given his name by the shelter where Doc and Helen got him, for his tail had a pronounced kink in it. You can see that below. This makes him unable to wrap his tail around his body (as many cats do), when lying down.
Well, well. Here we have an article in the Guardian by Rowan Williams, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, arguing that atheists are constantly “arguing against propositions that no serious Christian writer would endorse.” I would have thought that the propositions we were arguing against were those of God’s existence, the divinity of Jesus, salvation, and so on—things that seem pretty much in the Christian mainstream—but Williams, a Sopisticated Theologian™, says “nope.”
In fact, Williams is exaggerating here: the argument he says atheists make, but that no Christian believes, is our refutation of the First Cause argument, also known as the Cosmological Argument. The argument goes, of course, like this: everything must have a cause, including the Universe, but the chain of causation cannot run on forever: there must be a First Cause. And that cause must have been God. God therefore exists, QED.
One response to this argument is this: “But who caused God?” That’s a perfectly sensible question: what brought God into existence? What was he doing before he created anything? In response, theists finesse the argument with a definitional ploy: God is the ONE AND ONLY THING that doesn’t need a “cause.” So their argument is basically tautological and semantic.
I’ll add here that the so-called “law of causality” implied in this argument doesn’t really hold in modern physics. As Sean Carroll pointed out to me, it’s more sensible just to use the “laws of physics” instead of “causality.” That is, there is no “cause” why the Earth orbits the Sun: it’s just obeying the laws of physics. In the same way, there is no “cause” for an atom to decay, even though an ensemble of atoms decays in a predictable way. (I suppose theists would respond, “Well, tell us where the laws of physics came from, then? Must have been God!”)
Williams’ essay is inspired by Rupert Shortt’s new book, God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, coming out July 1. I haven’t read it since it’s not available, so I’m just discussing Shortt’s argument that Williams finds so persuasive. And it turns out to be the same old cosmological argument, gussied up in fancy language:
Whatever can be said of God, God cannot by definition be another item in any series, another “thing” (hence the book’s title). The claim made by religious philosophers of a certain kind is not that God can be invoked to plug a gap, but that there must be some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of a universe of interactive patterns of energy being exchanged. Without such a fundamental concept, we are left with energy somehow bootstrapping itself into being.
As for Krauss’s Universe from Nothing, Williams is scornful (and of course he has a point: what is “nothing”, anyway?):
And Shortt is rightly merciless towards those who wriggle out of difficulties by slipping disguised constants into the “nothingness” out of which the universe comes – primitive electrical charges, quantum fields, timeless laws or whatever. He quotes the British scholar Denys Turner to good effect on the fact that “nothing” ought to mean what it says – “no process … no random fluctuations … no explanatory law of emergence”. The problem of origins cannot be defined out of existence, and the highly complex notion of creation by an act that (unlike finite agency) is not triggered or conditioned needs to be argued with in its own terms, not reduced to the mythical picture of a Very Large Person doing something a bit like what we normally do, only bigger.
But in the end Shortt’s (and Williams’s) “solution” is again a semantic and tautological one, with the dubious premise that nothing can go on forever and that there is a “Law of Causation.” Yes, maybe there is some conception of “nothing” beyond a quantum vacuum, but it doesn’t follow that such a theological form of “nothing” ever existed, that “causation” is always meaningful at the physical level, or that the cosmos in some form (e.g., a multiverse) could not have existed indefinitely. The argument remains what it always has been: “because something exists, there must have been a god.” Atheists do understand that, and we do see its problems. It’s the theologians, in their willingness to take anything as evidence for god, who don’t look too hard at the philosophical and empirical difficulties of the Cosmological Argument.
Williams gives Shortt’s book a big endorsement, calling it “a powerful indirect commendation of Christian faith, insofar as it lays out some of what it looks like to think in a Christian mode, how the system works – in such a way that it is possible to see that Christian thinking is not automatically stupid or incapable of being used as a resource in handling complex current issues.”
Well, let’s avoid using the word “stupid.” Can we say “blinkered”, for Christian thinking is automatically tendentious and laden with confirmation bias. Before you can start invoking God, you have to give evidence for God: evidence that goes beyond the puerile Cosmological argument.
____
If you want to hear Sean Carroll go after the cosmological argument in a debate against William Lane Craig, go here. The debate is nearly 3 hours long, but Caroll’s post has some discussion of the argument at issue. For a shorter take by Carroll go here.
I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time.
And so it is with the March 26 column by William Irwin, which you know from the title alone will be a stinker: “God is a question, not an answer.” What does that mean? I bet you can guess.
First, who is William Irwin? Well, he’s got credentials: he’s the Herve A. Leblanc Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He also wrote “The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism Without Consumerism” and is the general editor of theBlackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. He seems to have a sense of humor, as witnessed by his “Jeopardy Dream Board” on his university website. But oy, is he convoluted about God!
Irwin begins with Camus, who is his novel L’Etranger show the protagonist rejecting God when a priest visits him right before his execution. He then fast-forwards to a 2013 novel by Kamel Daoud, whose protagonist declares that “God is a question, not an answer.” And so it is for Irwin:
[This] declaration resonates with me as a teacher and student of philosophy. The question is permanent; answers are temporary. I live in the question.
Any honest atheist must admit that he has his doubts, that occasionally he thinks he might be wrong, that there could be a God after all — if not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, then a God of some kind. Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Herman Melville, “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Dwelling in a state of doubt, uncertainty and openness about the existence of God marks an honest approach to the question.
This is bogus. Any honest person must also admit that there might be fairies, or Santa Claus, or any number of fanciful illusions for which there is no existing evidence. But saying that there is no evidence for something is not the same as saying that there’s a decent probability that that something might exist. I see no evidence for UFO abductions, but of course one can’t rule them out with absolute certainty. But I would bet my life savings that none have taken place. Likewise with wonder-working leprechauns. So why don’t we have Irwin writing a column that “Leprechauns are a question, not an answer”?
Right there Irwin makes one of the most common mistakes of Sophisticated Theologians™: confusing logical possibilities with probabilities. He goes on:
Likewise, anyone who does not occasionally worry that she is wrong about the existence or nonexistence of God most likely has a fraudulent belief. Worry can make the belief or unbelief genuine, but it cannot make it correct.
People who claim certainty about God worry me, both those who believe and those who don’t believe. They do not really listen to the other side of conversations, and they are too ready to impose their views on others. It is impossible to be certain about God.
Yes, and it’s also impossible to be dead certain about the nonexistence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Xenu and his thetans, and the Golden Plates of Joseph Smith. Does that mean that we should give them a shred of credibility; that there’s something wrong with people who refuse to even consider them? I don’t think so. The onus on those insisting on the God’s existence is to provide at least a shred of credible evidence for a god. There is none: no more than for Nessie or leprechauns. Yes somehow Irwin wants us to think that we should take the existence of God—excuse me, the question of God—more seriously than for these other fictions. Why? Only because far more people share delusions of God than do delusions of leprechauns.
The problem is, of course, that most atheists don’t claim they know with absolute certainty that God doesn’t exist. Many theists, though, claim the opposite—with much greater certainty. But putting that aside, how, exactly, could atheists “impose their nonbelief” on others? Does Irwin mean that we shouldn’t favor the First Amendment? That we should allow prayers in all public schools? It is not atheists who impose their views on others, but religionists who think it’s their duty to make their moral code into civil law. All we do is try to convince others that we’re more reasonable than they, and to prevent them from foisting religious beliefs on the rest of us.
Irwin goes on, but he really says nothing more than this: that both atheists and believers should have some doubt. And then his whole exercise degenerates into a why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along lovefest:
What is important is the common ground of the question, not an answer. Surely, we can respect anyone who approaches the question honestly and with an open mind. Ecumenical and interfaith religious dialogue has increased substantially in our age. We can and should expand that dialogue to include atheists and agnostics, to recognize our common humanity and to stop seeing one another as enemy combatants in a spiritual or intellectual war. Rather than seeking the security of an answer, perhaps we should collectively celebrate the uncertainty of the question.
Does Irwin not see that we are indeed combatants—fighters in a war of rationality against superstition? And it’s no mere intellectual combat, either: lives and well being are at stake. But Irwin, of course, refuses to go the last step and see that there are real consequences of religionists working out their certainty in the public sphere. His is a chickenshit compromise that ignores the realities of faith.
Finally, if God is a question, not an answer, that pretty much guts conventional religions—or at least religious practice. How do you pray to a question? What about the certainties evinced in practices like Communion, or wearing Magic Underwear? Do we still keep these practices? I suspect Irwin would say, “Yes, but we should just have more doubt.” Well, fine. But I don’t see much doubt coming from those who should be the biggest doubters: those who assert the existence of God, and put on their magic underwear before going to Temple.
In the end, Irwin says nothing new; his column is a total waste of space. But of course how much new stuff can you say about a practice for which there’s never been any evidence? Irwin is certainly not the first religious philosopher who says that “we should be less certain.”
Reader Enrico, who sent me the link to Irwin’s column, sent me another link as well, as well as a comment:
I stick to Sarah Silverman (extract about religion from her award-winning show We Are Miracles):
A lot of work in behavioral and evolutionary biology concerns the evolution of mating systems—polyandry, polygyny, monogamy, promiscuity, and the like—and elucidating the factors that lead to the evolution of one or another. Mating systems can be variable within a species, and human societies exhibit a range of mating systems, with monogamy and polygyny being perhaps the most common. But these culturally defined mating systems may exist more as aspirational norms than as universal practices. From a biological point of view, it is actual paternity and maternity that count, not what the culture deems most appropriate.
In a piece in the New York Times, Carl Zimmer takes a look at this in human societies, asking how often is it the case that the father of a family’s children is not the mother’s spouse, but rather some other male who has fathered the children through adultery. This is a popular theme of “reality” TV, but Carl concludes it’s an old wives’ tale, citing a review by Maarten Larmuseau and colleagues in press in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Using a variety of approaches that have become possible only since the development of DNA sequencing, including ordinary paternity testing and the clever use of Y chromosomes in concert with family genealogies and historical migration events, they show that “extra pair paternity” (EPP, i.e. cuckoldry) is actually rather rare—only 1-2%.
Carl notes that this is not as unexpected as the myth would have you believe. In species with females who frequently have multiple mates, males evolve a number of adaptations to insure the precedence of their sperm over other males—and men have none of these sorts of adaptations.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is, forgive me, literally a bastard. (The Sun).
My doctoral mentor, E.E. Williams, always said that observations refuting your favorite hypothesis don’t come early in your hypothesizing; a Malevolent Nature ensures that they come only after you’re really convinced you’re right. And in the journalism version of this, the contrary example doesn’t come till you get your piece on the front page of the New York Times. In fairness to Carl, though, one example does not refute his general conclusion, and it isn’t even quite cuckoldry: the Archbishop’s mother had sex with the private secretary justbefore her marriage, so the birth of the Archbishop-to-be nine months after the wedding had been wrongly assumed to be the fruits of the wedding night.
Larmuseau, M.H.D., K. Matthijs, and T. Wenseleers. 2015. Cuckolded fathers rare in human populations. Trends in Ecology and Evolution in press. pdf
First up we have a rare astronomy photograph from reader Don McCrady:
I submit for your consideration the following astrophoto. It is called M13 (M for Messier), and is one of the finest globular clusters visible in the northern hemisphere, located in the constellation Hercules. There are some 300,000 stars packed into sphere some 160 light years across. The image can be downloaded from Flickr in any resolution you wish.
The total exposure time was approximately 3 hours, 1 hour each through red, blue, and green filters. Each subexposure was 4 minutes long, and was all combined using astrophotography stacking software. I used my new-ish 130mm aperture f/5 telescope and a Santa Barbara Instruments Group STL-4020M to take the picture. All this was taken from my heavily light-polluted backyard in Redmond, WA (under the glare of 3 obnoxious street lights).
And some butterflies from reader Mark Sturtevant:
Here is an assortment of butterflies from last summer. These are probably the last pictures that I will take with my ancient manual Canon Fd mount lens that I had adapted to a modern camera body, as I bought myself a Christmas present in the form of a bigger and better long lens.
First up is the great spangled fritillary (Speyeria cybele). The large pale spots under the hind wings are metallic silver, and I have so far found it difficult to capture that feature in a photo. This is among my best efforts for this species.
Next is an Eastern black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes). This perfect specimen, which is a male, was so keen on collecting salt along a sandy beach that I nearly stepped on it. Females have smaller yellow markings, and a larger blue area on the hind wings. The dorsal surface of the female allows it to be a better mimic of the distasteful pipevine swallowtail. Why does the male not take on that mimicry? Actually, they do on their ventral side where both males and females mimic the pipevine model. But the large yellow markings seen in most males improves the chances that they will hold a good spot in a ‘lek’, which is where males gather in an area that is visited by females.
Next is a lovely sight that is restful to my eyes: a couple of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) on one of my favorite plants, Joe-Pye weed (Eupatorium). I have developed some idiosyncrasies for what I want from my butterfly pictures, and you can see one of them here which is to have light casting shadows on the wings to show the topography.
The next picture of a monarch shows another thing that I seek in butterfly pictures when possible. That is, to show light glowing through the wings to reveal the colors of both the dorsal and ventral wing surfaces. In this case, the patterns are nearly identical.
Another thing that I like to capture in pictures of Lepidoptera is when they have damaged wings. It adds a bit of character to that particular insect, as if it is saying ‘sure, I am delicate and all, but I have flown for miles and I escaped dangers. I have been places and life did not cut me any slack’.
The final photo is of the largest of our native butterflies, the awesome giant swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes). You can see at once that this individual has it all as far as I am concerned. Light is glowing through the wings to reveal the strikingly different color patterns of the dorsal and ventral wing surfaces of this species, and this brave butterfly clearly had some adventures and it bears the battle damage to prove it. The only problem here is that he (she?) would not sit still. It did not stop beating its wings for a moment, but rather kept its engines running for a full 20 minutes as it fed from our butterfly bush in our back yard, with me frantically taking picture after picture. Ah well, summer is coming, my equipment is better, and I will look for a 2nd chance.
It’s Sunday, I overslept, and I’m in Houston, which is infinitely larger than I remembered. It takes an hour to get anywhere here, and that’s by car: there’s little public transportation. I’ll be going back to Chicago tomorrow. My conversation with Dan Barker about FvF went well, I think, with surpisingly little pushback during the Q&A given that it was in Houston. It was almost a full house, and the conversation was great: Dan is a great interviewer and asked some good “devil’s advocate” style questions. Thanks to organizer John Barr for setting up this inaugural Lone Star College book fair, and for inviting me.
Today is April 10, which you may not know is normally the 100th day of the year. But because 2016 is a leap year, it’s the 101st. On this day in 1912, the Titanic left Southampton on its maiden—and only—voyage. In 1919, Emiliano Zapato was assassinated in Mexico. On April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (one of my favorite novels) was published in New York by Scribner’s, and on this day in 1970, Paul McCartney announced he was leaving the Beatles, ending the tenure of the greatest band in rock history. Those born on April 10 include Joseph Pulitzer (1847) and Paul Theroux (1941). Those who died on this day include Kahil Gibran (1931), much beloved of my hippie friends in college, Evelyn Waugh (1966), and Dixie Carter (2010).
Meanwhile in Dobrazyn, Hili has been very bad to Cyrus, but is unrepentant:
Hili: I’ve eaten your pâté.
Cyrus: Did she really do that?
In Polish:
Hili: Zjadłam twój pasztet.
Cyrus: Czy ona naprawdę to zrobiła?
And here’s a photo I took on my flight to Texas, showing a beefy guy wearing a baseball cap backwards. I took slight issue with Stephen Fry’s claim that NO adult should wear baseball caps (though I don’t much like the look), but I totally agree with those who added, in the comments, that baseball caps shouldn’t be worn backwards. They just look DORKY that way, viz.:
Calvin Trillin writes for The New Yorker, and is one of my favorite food writers (I recommend American Fried). But, like many, he’s run afoul of the Easily Offended. In the April 4 issue of the magazine, he published a poem called “Have they run out of provinces yet?”
Have they run out of provinces yet? If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret. Long ago, there was just Cantonese. (Long ago, we were easy to please.) But then food from Szechuan came our way, Making Cantonese strictly passé. Szechuanese was the song that we sung, Though the ma po could burn through your tongue. Then when Shanghainese got in the loop We slurped dumplings whose insides were soup. Then Hunan, the birth province of Mao, Came along with its own style of chow. So we thought we were finished, and then A new province arrived: Fukien. Then respect was a fraction of meagre For those eaters who’d not eaten Uighur. And then Xi’an from Shaanxi gained fame, Plus some others—too many to name.
Now, as each brand-new province appears, It brings tension, increasing our fears: Could a place we extolled as a find Be revealed as one province behind? So we sometimes do miss, I confess, Simple days of chow mein but no stress, When we never were faced with the threat Of more provinces we hadn’t met. Is there one tucked away near Tibet? Have they run out of provinces yet?
Now if you’ve read Trillin, you’ll know that he loves all sorts of Chinese food, and writes about it constantly. He HATES chow mein, as he noted in American Fried. In light of that, the poem above is clearly satirical: there’s no way that Trillin would be dismayed about the arrival of new provinces with new dishes!
But of course people took it as some kind of denigration of the diversity of China. As The New York Times reports, these included a writer in Jezebel, who mocked Trillin by writing a critique from the perspective of “a sixth grader” (12 year old in the U.S.):
The imagery of the poem is scary and the mood of the poem is confused and troubled. As Calvin Trillin says in the poem, “Now, as each brand-new province appears/ It brings tensions, increasing our fears./ Could a place we extolled as a find/ Be revealed as one province behind?” He misses “simple days of chow mein but no stress/ When we never were faced with the threat/ Of more provinces we hadn’t met.” This line rhymes with the title of the poem, which is “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” which is a question that is connected to the world because everyone understands that China is too big and they are taking American jobs and there are too many kinds of them.
In conclusion, Calvin Trillin hopes the answer is yes, China has run out of provinces.
And here’s the title of a critique of the poem that appeared in The Stranger, a weekly Seattle alt-mag. Click on the screenshot to go to it:
And the writer, Rich Smith, accuses Trillin of racism (the magazine’s emphasis; note that although this sounds like a parody, it is not):
The poem announces its regressive ideologies in several ways, starting with the title’s employment of the othering “we/they” binary, where “they” are “foreigners” who have a seemingly endless number of those whatsits—Provinces?—and “we” white Americans are the stately realists who have a comprehensible number of states and cuisines.
This longing for a time of chow mein—which is, as I’m sure the food writer knows—a westernized dish—is a longing for the days of a white planet. Those days when we white people comfortably held power, when they made food for us, when the only fear was the fear of another cuisine to conquer, the days before we had to ask ourselves stuff like—does this poem rest on an unexamined racist sentiment?
Trillin’s concluding thought in this poem recalls Tony Hoagland’s concluding thought in “The Change,” which Claudia Rankine famously (relatively speaking) and powerfully and gracefully discussed at the 2011 AWP conference. Like Trillin’s speaker, Hoagland’s speaker yearns for a time when the divide between white people and black people was even more institutionalized than it is now.
Aside from adding insult to the centuries of injury done to people of color in the U.S., Trillins’s and Hoagland’s poems commit the poetic sin of resting on stereotypes. Trillin’s talk of potentially endless provinces plays on the stereotype of the Chinese horde and stokes xenophobic fears, and his exoticization of food (“as each brand-new province appears”—brand new to who?) plays into Orientalism. All of these are stereotypes, all stereotypes are cliches, andall cliches are boring. In fact—and here’s some etymology for you, Trillin—the word “cliche” comes from the act of boring into a stereotype. So cliche is born from the stereotype—in that it’s supposedly onomatopoetic of the “sound of a mold striking molten metal” to make a printing plate.
None of this is to say that white writers shouldn’t write about race. After all, as I remember Ta Nehisi Coates quoting Baldwin at a recent talk in Seattle—we invented it. But the idea is to try to write about race without perpetuating racism.
Now here’s a person who’s all heated up over nothing, but his button has been pressed, and the prose comes out automatically, like one of those old dolls that would speak when you pulled a ring on its back.
At the end of his article, Smith adds an update in which he says that, in light of new information he got, this might possibly be an ironic poem. POSSIBLY? Did the author look up anything about Trillin’s history of writing about Chinese food? Apparently not; he just splattered his kneejerk reaction on paper that Trillin’s poem was “racist.” This is the way things work today: shoot first; ask questions later, all the while signaling your moral purity.
In the end, though, Smith dismisses the possibility of Trillin being ironic:
I think that’s a bold bit of irony! It requires you to trust the New Yorker wouldn’t publish a poem like that (and, to their credit, they have been publishing such good ones lately!) and it rests on Trillin’s reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of.
This is sheer idiocy. If you’re unaware of Trillin’s history, look it up before you start calling him a racist.
Writer Karissa Chen appears to be obsessed by this poem, as you can see on her Twi**er feed. Here are but two of her reactions, one written after she belatedly realized that the poem might be humorous:
In the face of this food-related social media onslaught (I’ve omitted some other attacks), Trillin was forced to explain himself to The Guardian, saying “his poem was being misinterpreted and that it ‘was simply a way of making fun of food-obsessed bourgeoisie’ – and further defended the piece by saying that it was a device that he’d used before. The Guardian explains:
It was used in a previous poem:
Trillin pointed out another poem he published in the New Yorker, entitled What Happened to Brie and Chablis?
That poem, published in 2003, also pokes fun at the foibles of foodies, although the satirical tone is clearer:
What happened to Brie and Chablis? Both Brie and Chablis used to be The sort of thing everyone ate When goat cheese and Napa Merlot Weren’t purchased by those in the know, And monkfish was thought of as bait.
“It was not a put-down of the French,” Trillin wrote.
I’m sorry, but this kind of social media pile-on, completely unjustified in this case, is ludicrous. It is as if people are looking everywhere to find offense, and to see themselves as victims. Yes, sometimes they are, and pushback is acceptable. But in this case it isn’t. Before you attack someone for your perception that their ideology is impure, try understanding what they meant. That, after all, was the downfall of many who criticized Charlie Hebdo.
