Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
It’s International Women’s Day (Mother’s Day in eastern Europe and Russia), and Google has celebrated with a video describing the aspirations of women and girls throughout the world. Click on the screenshot below to see it.
The video notes:
Over the years, Doodles have marked the achievements of women in science, civil rights, journalism, sports, arts, technology and beyond. But for our 2016 International Women’s Day Doodle, we wanted to celebrate the next generation of Doodle-worthy women—the engineers, educators, leaders, movers and shakers of tomorrow.
So we visited 13 cities around the world and asked 337 girls and women to complete the sentence “One Day I Will…” Then, we made this video.
From San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Lagos, Moscow, Cairo, Berlin, London, Paris, Jakarta, Bangkok, New Delhi and Tokyo, the women we met make up a diverse mosaic of personalities, ages and backgrounds. And their aspirations are just as varied—ranging from the global to the very personal, from discovering more digits of pi to becoming a mother to giving a voice to those who can’t speak.
We also asked some more familiar figures to participate, including anthropologist Jane Goodall—who wants to discuss the environment with the Pope—and Nobel Prize Winner Malala Yousafzai and activist Muzoon Almellehan, who are working fearlessly toward a future where every girl can go to school. Despite already impressive accomplishments under their belts, these women continue to dream big.
Creators: Lydia Nichols, Helene Leroux & Liat Ben-Rafael. Original music: Merrill Garbus (tUnE-yArDs).
The Doodle Page has a bunch of “behind the scenes” videos (one below), and shows that, unlike most Doodles, this one reaches every country in the world (except, presumably, North Korea). This video was filmed in New Delhi, where I’ll be in exactly ten days. The tower is the Qutb Minar, a minaret that dates back to 1220 AD.
It’s March 8: International Women’s Day (see next post), so women should be demanding cakes and goodies and stuff along with their rights. On this day in history, Johannes Kepler discovered his third law of planetary motion: “The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of thes emi-major axis of its orbit.” In 1910, French flyer Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman to receive a pilot’s license. In 1971, this was the day of the famous Joe Frazier/Muhammad Ali fight, won after 15 rounds by Frazier. In 1974, the execrable Charles de Gaulle airport opened outside Paris, and, five years later, the first CD was publicly demonstrated. Two years ago on this day (was it that long?), Malaysia Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared, presumably crashing into the Indian Ocean, where debris has since been found. Births on this day include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841), Otto Hahn (1879), John McPhee (1931), Lynn Redgrave (1943), Carole Bayer Sager (1947), and Rabbi Sacks, Templeton Prize Winner and gay marriage opponent (1948). Those who died on this day include William Howard Taft (1930), Billy Eckstine (1993), and Joe DiMaggio (1999).
Hili: Did humans had to appear in the process of evolution?
A: Probably not.
Hili: See? And cats had to.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
In Polish:
Hili: Czy w procesie ewolucji człowiek musiał się pojawić?
Ja: Prawdopodobnie nie.
Hili: No widzisz, a kot musiał.
(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)
As lagniappe, here, courtesy of reader Sue Rosenthal, is a sea otter giving birth—a wild sea otter (Enhydra lutris) that clambered onto the rocks outside the Monterey Bay Aquarium, dropping a baby otter just last Saturday:
Their notes:
A wild otter mom, seeking shelter from stormy seas, gave birth to her pup in our Great Tide Pool with guests and staff looking on. It was an amazing moment. Not that long ago, southern sea otters were hunted to near extinction but now, thanks to legislative protection and a change of heart toward these furriest of sea creatures, the otter population in Monterey Bay has rebounded.
Our sea otter researchers have been watching wild otters for years and have never seen a birth close up like this. We’re amazed and awed to have had a chance to witness this Monterey Bay conservation success story first hand in our own backyard. Welcome to the world, little otter!
In a new piece at the Daily Beast, moderate Muslim Maajid Nawaz has sorrows. Why? Because members of his very own branch of Islam, the Barelwi sect of Pakistani Sufi Islam, are not behaving moderately.
The backstory is this: a Christian woman in Pakistan, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death for blasphemy, apparently a charge cooked up by local Muslims who could not forgive her for drinking from the cup they used. (She’s still in jail.)
Then, a “flamboyant secular Muslim,” Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab province, defended Asia Bibi in public and lobbied for a lightening of Pakistan’s odious laws against blasphemy. That itself was considered blasphemy, and so, in January, 2011 Taseer was gunned down iwith an AK47 by his bodyguard, Mumtaz Quadri. Predictably, thousands of Pakistanis considered Quadri to have done a heroic thing, and protested in his favor. Nevertheless, he was arrested and hanged for murder on February 29 of this year.
What bothers Maajid most, though, is the reaction of his fellow British Muslims, including those of his own sect, to Quadri’s “martrydom”. And here I’ll quote Nawaz himself:
Previously, a quarter of my fellow British Muslims have expressed sympathy with the terrorists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris. And now, certain Muslim religious and community “leaders,” who position themselves as anti-ISIS and “mainstream,” have come out publicly praising Qadri as a hero.
One of Europe’s largest mosques, the Barelwi Sufi-managed Ghamkol Sharif in Birmingham, U.K., held a wake “in honor of the lover of the Prophet, Warrior Mumtaz Qadri, the martyr.”
Another Barelwi Imam, Muhammed Asim Hussain, whose verified Facebook page has been liked nearly 137,000 times, posted his position openly:
“A dark day in the history of Pakistan; the day Ghazi [warrior] Mumtaz was wrongfully executed and martyred in the way of Allah, when he did what he did in honor of the Prophet.”
A mainstream conservative Barelwi leader, Muhammad Masood Qadiri, who presents a weekly show on Ummah TV, available on the Sky TV platform, doubled-down after hailing “warrior” Qadri as a “martyr”:
“This does not make me a terrorist sympathizer as I, along with millions of fellow Muslims, do not accept that Gazi Mumtaz Qadri was a terrorist in the least. I have always been the first to condemn terrorism wherever in the world it takes place. I am also an Islamic religious minister. I therefore have a duty to express an opinion on fundamental matters concerning Islam and on this occasion, the crime of blasphemy.… As for having travelled to the funeral of Gazi Mumtaz Qadri, along with hundreds of thousands of others who also attended, I am not at all ashamed of this.”
Mohammed Shafiq, who runs the Ramadan Foundation website, a regular pundit on the “community leader” circuit, posted a prayer eulogizing Qadri and criticized Pakistani media for not condemning Qadri’s execution.
What makes the positions of all of these “community leaders” so hurtful is that they hail from the relatively moderate, Barelwi strand of Sufi Pakistani Islam.
Nawaz goes on to beg his coreligionists to rethink their stand on blasphemy, to show love instead of hate—even to “come and talk to our senior theologians at my organisation Qulliam,” a think tank dedicated to opposing religious extremism.
It’s sad to hear Nawaz’s pleas, but I’m surprised that he was surprised. Surveys of British Muslims have long shown them to be more extremist than most people think, and Nawaz’s importuning will, I fear, fall on deaf ears. The article seems more like a cry of torment than a call for empathy. Such is the situation of the moderate British Muslim.
I guess it was too much for me to hope that my 2013 Slate essay, “No faith in science,” would once and for all dispel the claim that science is just like religion in depending on faith. My point was simple: what “faith” means in science is “confidence based on experience,” while the same term in religion means “belief without enough evidence to convince most rational people.” It’s the same word, but with two different meanings. Yet religious people mix up those meanings regularly—and, I expect, deliberately. I wish they’d read my goddam essay.
So someone’s done it again: Matt Emerson, a Catholic whose blog says, “I teach theology and direct the advancement office at Xavier College Preparatory in Palm Desert, CA.” He’s also written the book Why Faith? A Journey of Discovery, to be published by Paulist Press this May; it apparently aims to help people maintain and understand faith.
Emerson
At any rate, Emerson published a short essay in the March 3 Wall Street Journal—”At its heart, science is faith-based too“—that, as usual, conflates the meaning of “faith” as applied to science (but we scientists avoid that word!) versus as applied to religion. Rather than go into detail, I’d recommend you read my Slate piece, and Emerson should have, too! Here’s a bit of his conflation:
The scientists who made the gravitational-wave discovery, [Italian physicist Carl Rovelli] wrote, were pursuing a “dream based on faith in reason: that the logical deductions of Einstein and his mathematics would be reliable.”
Mr. Rovelli was not referring to religious faith. And scientists generally deem even faith scrubbed of theological meaning to be something unrelated to their endeavors. Yet the relationship between faith and science is far closer than many assume….
Wrong. Scientists don’t have “faith in reason.” As I noted in Slate:
What about faith in reason? Wrong again. Reason—the habit of being critical, logical, and of learning from experience—is not an a priori assumption but a tool that’s been shown to work. It’s what produced antibiotics, computers, and our ability to sequence DNA. We don’t have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding. Even discussing why we should use reason employs reason!
Here’s an old canard from Emerson and physicist/accommodationist Paul Davies:
Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies has noted that the work of science depends upon beliefs—that the hidden architecture of the universe, all the constants and laws of nature that sustain the scientific enterprise, will hold. As he wrote in his book “The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World”: “Just because the sun has risen every day of your life, there is no guarantee that it will therefore rise tomorrow. The belief that it will—that there are indeed dependable regularities of nature—is an act of faith, but one which is indispensable to the progress of science.”
Well, we can’t be 100% certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I dealt with this in Slate as well:
You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out.
I’d bet $100,000 that the sun will rise tomorrow (i.e., day will break, for it might be cloudy!), but I wouldn’t bet $5 that Jesus was resurrected bodily. The dependable regularities of nature are, unlike the tenets of theology, not acts of faith, but observations that we accept as holding widely, because they always have. This is simply confidence based on experience!
Why do people like Emerson mix up these uses of faith? It’s obvious: accommodationism—and also a mushbrained attempt to do down science by saying, “See, you’re just like us!” (Implication: “See, you’re just as bad as we are!”):
Recognizing the existence of this kind of faith is an important step in bridging the artificial divide between science and religion, a divide that is taken for granted in schools, the media and in the culture. People often assume that science is the realm of certainty and verifiability, while religion is the place of reasonless belief. But the work of Messrs. Davies and Rovelli and others, including Pope John Paul II in his 1998 encyclical “Fides et Ratio,” demonstrates that religion and science sit within a similar intellectual framework.
ORLY? How, exactly, do the “findings” of religion resemble those of science? After all, Emerson may believe that Jesus was not only part of God, but also God’s son, was crucified and resurrected, and that we’ll find salvation through accepting that. But if you’re a Muslim, you could be killed for professing such blasphemy, and Jews, of course, don’t believe in Jesus as the Messiah. There are millions of conflicting “truths” in religion, but although there are some disputes in science, there’s general agreement that, say, DNA is a double helix, the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and that a benzene molecule has six carbon atoms. Theology can offer us NO truths so well established.
But Emerson claims it can, and his claim is laughable:
But just as faith is indispensable to science, so is reason essential to religion. Many find themselves relating to God in a way analogous to the scientists searching for gravitational waves. These seekers of religious truth are persuaded by preliminary evidence and compelled by the testimony of those who have previously studied the matter; they are striving for a personal encounter with the realities so often talked about, yet so mysterious.
In such a context, it isn’t blind belief that fuels the search, any more than scientists blindly pursued the implications of Einstein’s theory. Rather, it’s a belief informed by credible reasons, nurtured by patient trust, open to revision. When I profess my belief in God, for example, I rely upon not only the help of the Holy Spirit. I also rely upon the Einsteins of theology, thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas, whose use of reason to express and synthesize theological truths remains one of the great achievements in Western civilization. Aquinas’s “Summa Theologica” is a LIGO for the Christian faith.
Open to revision? Only if science disproves religion’s claims, and even in that case 40% of Americans still reject evolution in favor of the fairy tales of Genesis. And what, exactly, are the “theological truths” of Aquinas and his coreligionists? Can we please just have a list of five or six? Please?
And here’s the kicker—and Emerson’s conclusion:
To be sure, religion and science are different. But many religious believers, like scientists, continue to search for confirmation, continue to fine-tune their lives and expand their knowledge to experience a reality that is elusive, but which, when met, changes life forever. And if the combination of faith and reason can deliver the sound of two black holes colliding over a billion light years away, confirming a theory first expressed in 1915—what is so unthinkable about the possibility that this same combination could yield the insight that God became man?
There’s a difference between searching for confirmation and searching for truth; religion does the former, science the latter. If Emerson can give us evidence—and not just from the Bible—that “God became man”, then I might take his truth claims seriously. Absent that, we need accept his verities no more than we accept those of Scientology, Mormonism, or, for that matter, Beowulf.
It’s a travesty that the Wall Street Journal publishes tripe like this. Are they that desperate for copy? I doubt that they’d even entertain a piece like the one you just read here.
Click on the image above to refresh it and see the disappearing “e”. Today’s Google Doodle – in France anyway – marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of Georges Perec (1936-1982). Here he is with a lovely cat.
Perec was a well-known French author who wrote in a very playful style – he loved word-games (he also wrote crosswords). His first published book was La Disparition in which the letter ‘e’ does not appear (this is a major feat in French!). According to legend, the reviewer in Le Monde did not notice… The significance of the missing ‘e’ goes back to Perec’s family, who were killed in the camps. ‘E’ in French sounds the same as ‘eux’ – ‘them’. The book has been superbly translated into English as A Void by Gilbert Adair. The blurb on Amazon begins thus:
Anton Vowl is missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any hint as to his location and, insidiously, a ghost, from Vowl’s past starts to cast its malignant shadow.
My favourite book of Perec’s is Life: A User’s Manual, though I also love his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris – a series of descriptions of the ‘infraordinary’ in the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris (based in turn on Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style), and his Je Me Souviens, a series of things he remembered, so beautifully written that you think you remember them, too. If you’ve never heard of Perec, try his writing – in French if possible, but the translations are all excellent.
All these works were part of what Perec called Oulipo – the workshop for potential literature, a group in which writers would set themselves an artificial framework and then write within it.
I sent the Doodle to Jean-François Ferveur, a friend who is also a good friend of Jerry’s, and a fellow Drosophilist. J-F (as he is known) wrote:
ah oui, Georges Perec… Je me souviens… au coin de la rue Vilin… l…La disparition.. la Vie mode.. que du très très bon. Merci de rapeller le souvenir de cet érudit chercheur du CNRS.
Perec was a librarian in the French research organisation the CNRS, where I used to work, where J-F still does. It was there that I first met PCC(E).
In 2012 Christophe Verdon made this enamel plaque, in the style of the Parisian street names:
I can only stand by helplessly as major magazines like National Geographic, and now Newsweek, tout spiritual woo, misleading people and, in the case of the latest Newsweek issue, even causing harm. Here’s their Special Issue on Spiritual Living, which Newsweek describes this way:
To live a spiritual life is to be better connected with the universe around you. This 100-page, special edition of Newsweek is your guide for all things metaphysical, from focusing the mind for meditation through yoga and more, to healing the body with crystals and essential oils. Featuring insight from notable names in the spiritual sphere including Gail Thackray, William Lee Rand and Brad Johnson, this is the issue for anyone looking to awaken their soul.
Miracle crystals? Essential oils? Holistic foods? Angel numbers? Oy! But perhaps the worst is the article “John of God, the Miracle Healer,” about a fake and quack of the first water.
John of God, or “João de Deus” is a psychic healer of great renown: Wikipedia reports that every week thousands of people stand in line to receive his numinous ministrations. That, of course, means he’s a very effective charlatan. Here are his methods, which have been debunked by numerous people including James Randi:
When called for a spiritual surgery by De Faria, patients are offered the choice of ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ operations. If they select an ‘invisible’ operation (or are younger than 18 or older than 52) they are directed to sit in a room and meditate. De Faria also claims that spiritual physicians can perform surgery on the actual patient via a surrogate when the actual patient is unable to make the trip.
A very small percentage of people choose a ‘visible’ operation where De Faria operates without traditional anesthetic. Instead he says he uses “energized” mineral water and the spiritual energies present, the latter which are provided by groups of volunteers who meditate in a separate room called the ‘current room’. These practices such as inserting scissors or forceps deep into a nose and scraping an eye without an anesthetic or antiseptics have been scrutinized by medical authorities and skeptical investigators James Randi, who has called for De Faria to come clean and stop lying to the public about the existence of spirit and Joe Nickell have described these procedures at length as old carnival tricks.
See especially Randi’s takedown, which describes John’s “surgeries” as “carny stunts.” Naturally, John of God has been touted by Oprah (see Orac’s excoriating remarks on her endorsement). Randi especially decries the forceps in the nosestunt, used to “cure” a variety of ailments. See for yourself:
Here’s a bogus eye-scraping operation, with Newsweek’s caption:
Using a knife, John of God performs a visible spiritual surgery on a woman’s eyes. Some healings require only his hands, while others call for the use of tools. ERALDO PERES/AP IMAGES
Anyway, Newsweek‘s piece simply echoes the puffery of Gail Thackray, who describes herself on her website as as “spiritual educator, medium”. She also made a film about John of God, and experienced a life changing “conversation with God” while sitting in John’s prayer room. How objective is she in the piece? Well, judge for yourself from her words and this accompanying picture:
Newsweek caption: “John of God poses for a photo with author Gail Thackray COURTESY GAIL THACKRAY”
And the Newsweek piece describes, completely uncritically, John’s miraculous “healings”. There’s not a word of dissent, not a peep from his many critics. There’s just stuff like this (these are apparently excerpts from a longer piece in the magazine, selected by Newsweek editor Trevor Courneen):
For all the unanswered mysteries the universe presents, few are incredible enough to earn the label of miracle. Hyperbole is often tied to bewildering occurrences and practices, but a closer look can often lessen their profundity. Though tirelessly explored and frequently experienced, the divine-spirit-induced healing work of John of God remains an exception.
“It is hard to believe, but when you experience this, it is profound,” says Gail Thackray, co-creator of the film John of God: Just a Man and author of the accompanying memoir. An insisting astrologer would initially push Thackray to Brazil where she would first pursue and meet the enigmatic man who heals others by becoming inhabited by spirits. Eventually, Thackray discovered her own purpose was sharing the healings of John of God with the rest of world.
and this:
Whether the guidance of God, divine spirits or varying otherworldly beings are truly enacting the healings, the results of John of God’s work have a way of speaking for him. The energies may not be seen, but in many cases, the healings are. “Many times he takes someone out of a wheelchair, and the ailments literally disappear in front of your eyes,” says Thackray.
and this ending:
With his staggeringly vast reach, the degree of John of God’s exceptional nature becomes a resurfacing question. Even those who acknowledge that energy flows within all of us acknowledge that there hasn’t been anyone on Earth quite like John of God in quite some time. “We all have the ability to heal on some level and can develop this,” says Thackray. “But some are born with or receive a very special healing gift. John of God is rare indeed.”
This is absolutely reprehensible: a complete abnegation of journalistic duty. Yes, journalists can write about this faker if they want, but they’re ethically obligated to point out the many debunkings. What we have, instead, is a completely uncritical puff piece, and one that’s dangerous. By encouraging the afflicted to seek out John of God, Newsweek is hurting people. This isn’t Bigfoot, Nessie, or alien abductions: this is the touting of ineffective spiritual healing, something that kills and injures people.
To add insult to injury, the article appear’s in Newsweek’s online “Tech & Science” section. That was pointed out by the reader who sent me the article, a reader who’s created an entire website devoted to taking down the Brazilian Faker: John of God: the CON, and who has written a short piece on the Newsweek travesty.
This kerfuffle is a sign of the times—or rather of Time Magazine. In a post on February 25, Timegave a list of 100 female authors—their phrase; don’t go after me for not saying “women authors”—read most often in U.S. colleges. (Time‘s list was apparently culled from the list of the Open Syllabus Project.) Kate Turabian and Diana Hacker, who wrote style manuals much used for writing papers, were the most popular, but the real writers then followed: Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and so on. (I can’t believe they left off Carson McCullers!)
But the item of interest to internet pedants, and curmudgeons like myself, was that #97 on the list was Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). You don’t have to be very literate to know that in fact Evelyn Waugh had a Y chromosome:
PHOTO BY HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, was, despite his Catholicism, admired by Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and by Richard Dawkins, who called him “one of my favorite novelists.” And although I haven’t read Waugh (I suspect I wouldn’t be a fan, for writers like P. G. Wodehouse and Anthony Powell, who describe or satirize the lives of British toffs, leave me cold), I do know that he was a man. Shame on Time for not knowing that, too! Who’s editing their articles, and do they know anything about literature?
For a scathing critique of Time‘s faux pas, coupled with a lament about the ignorance of today’s youth—and, better still, an appreciation of Waugh’s literary merits—read Stefan Kanfer’s short piece “An ignorant Time” in City Journal. (As a former editor of Time, Kanfer has credibility about this.) I’m not so wild about Kanfer’s accusation that the younger generation is going to Ignorance Hell: such complaints have been issued by every older generations since ancient Egypt. But there is one difference between this younger generation and all those that went before: the Internet:
When once-formidable newspapers like the New York Times print regular, lengthy columns of misattributions and misinformation, and when a newsmagazine cannot identify the sex of an author, much less his/her significance, Americans can no longer depend on periodicals to set things straight. That job, ironically, has been ceded to the freewheeling and often irresponsible Internet.
I can’t hold the Internet responsible for Time’s gaffe, but it is good that corrections can come so quickly, thanks to bloggers and to Twi**er. On balance the Internet is a very good thing, even if it does reduce the attention span of people, making them less able to read real books.
I note that in the update of its piece, Time has issued a correction:
