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.
John Cleese has made a career out of offending people, for that’s the thrust of much of his comedy, especially with Monty Python. In this short Big Think video, he sounds off on the hyper-offensiveness plaguing today’s society (he singles out college students), showing that it’s a warped extension of a laudable concern for the dispossessed. (By the way, I don’t agree that all humor is critical, and I’ve put a joke at the bottom* that is completely inoffensive.)
The money quote: “If people can’t control their own emotions then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior.” We’ve seen this going around the internet quite a bit in the last year, when it’s been deemed okay to mock some viewpoints while others are totally off limits, branding those transgressing those boundaries as ideologically polluted.
h/t: Cindy
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*Here’s a joke that doesn’t offend anyone (except perhaps invertebrates):
One day a guy is sitting on his couch when he hears a knock on the door. He gets up and looks around and doesn’t see anyone. All of a sudden he hears a voice from on the ground. He looks down and sees a snail standing there without a shell. The snail says “Hey, Buddy, can I come inside and spend the night?….I don’t have a shell and it’s cold outside!” The guy looks at the snail and says “Get lost!” and kicks the snail across the street. Two years later the same guy hears another knock on the door. He opens the door and sees the very same snail. The snail looks up and says “What the heck did you do that for?!”
Dougall Fraser describes himself as an “author, host, psychic, and cosmic coach.” He also reads auras and has called himself “the queer guy with the third eye.” In other words, he’s a fraud.
His website gives a bit of his history:
Dougall knew at a very early age that he saw the world and others differently. He could easily perceive the issues, secrets and desires in people’s lives. This trait was not always welcomed by others (especially at a party). He gave his first reading at the age of 8 and was regularly counseling adults while still in grade school. By the time he was 14, Dougall began to better understand his abilities and how to best use them for the greater good. He has studied meditation, psychology and healing extensively to enhance his natural talent.
Dougall has maintained a professional practice for more than fifteen years and is recognized as one of the country’s best psychics. His international clientele ranges from CEOs and celebrities, to people just like you who may need extra insight. With his own spiritual belief system, Dougall feels that we all have a blueprint for our lives. His main purpose is to help people assess and attain the life that they dream of.
Okay, we’re used to these bogus psychics. But they really know all this stuff, why are they reduced to inhabiting storefronts, giving readings over the phone the bereft, or even flogging themselves on websites? Why don’t they use their abilities to predict the stock markets or enrich themselves immensely by reading other people’s minds?
Of course they’re frauds: none of them have ever been able to pass the James Randi’s “Paranormal Million Dollar Challenge“, which they should easily pass if they have genuine psychic abilities, earning a cool million in the process.
At any rate, over at the Oprah Winfrey Network, a division of PuffHo, we have an article by Lisa Capretto touting a video in which “Famous psychic answers woman’s question before she even asks it.” The famous psychic, of course, is Dougall Fraser, and click on the screenshot below to see the short video of his “amazing” abilities.
OMG! He totally answers her question! What are the chances of that happening? (Of course, this is one “reading” selected out of many, but let’s not quibble about that.) Moreover, the article is totally credulous; here’s its substance:
Dougall Fraser reportedly gave his first psychic reading when he was 8 years old. Now in his late 30s, he’s done countless.
One such reading happened during a session at Nicole Richie’s Pearl xChange event, which featured talks aimed at empowering women in all areas of their lives. Fraser was one of the guest speakers that day, and he hosted a Q&A session with the audience during his time on stage.
A woman stood up to ask Fraser a question, but as soon as he laid eyes on her, he immediately began reading her aura, speaking about the colors he saw around her and explaining the issues that come along with having this type of energy. As it turns out, Fraser blew her away by addressing her exact question before she could say anything more than her name. The whole two-minute reading unfolds in the video above.
I would love to see people like this subjected to real scientific tests: ones in which the psychics are presented with people they’ve never met before, who are either trained to show no expression or, better yet, have their faces covered. Let’s see how well they do then! (I’d of course ask Randi or people like Penn and Teller to design these tests.)
This psychic nonsense falls halfway between Bigfoot and Catholicism on the scale of Harm to Society. The people who fall for Fraser’s ploy give up a bit of dosh and get a bit of entertainment. The downside, of course, is that they’re being bilked. I suppose in some cases, people like Fraser can serve as impromptu therapists, reading from people’s expressions what’s troubling them and giving them a happy solution, but it’s no substitute for real therapy. Others do damage by lying to people about the fate of their loved ones in the afterlife. And, of course, phone and storefront psychics take lots of money from people and give them very little.
Catholicism, on the other hand, not only bilks people, but warps many believers for life and feeds them delusions. The church has also enabled sexual abuse and consistently intrudes into politics, trying to control people’s sex lives and the reproductive status of women. On the less-harmful side of woo stands belief in things like Bigfoot, in which very little harm is done—at least as far as I know.
Overall, I don’t understand why the actions of people like Fraser aren’t illegal. They promise things they can’t deliver, they tout skills they don’t have, and pretend to put people in touch with loved ones who are dead. It resembles quack remedies like homeopathy (which should also be illegal), and there are no warning labels. When people like Fraser do their acts, they should be forced to wear a sign around their necks reading: “This act is for entertainment purposes only. I do not possess special abilities to read your mind or your aura.”
Finally, shame on PuffHo and Oprah for presenting this guy as if he had paranormal abilities.
Since I publicly criticize religion and tout science, I’m subject to all manner of rebukes from believers. I don’t often post these, but they’re often of the “science is just like faith” ilk. Here’s one that just arrived (I’ve left the person’s name out, but feel free to respond as if you were addressing him/her):
Dear Dr. Coyne,
I happened to incidentally come across reference to your book “Faith vs Fact: why science and religion are incompatible”. I have seen this kind of argument go around for a number of decades. While many may feel this way, I for one do not. I have my religious faith and I do not have any incompatibility with my science (I have made fairly substantial contributions to the science of evolution over the years for example). I was interested to see the assertion on the website (http://jerrycoyne.uchicago.edu/Faith-vs-Fact.html) that “religion — including faith, dogma, and revelation — leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.” Hmm, interesting. I could have said exactly the same about some endeavors on the behalf of current evolutionary theory too. I have found over the decades that the practice of science often has the same shortcomings that are attributed to religion, including bigotry and suppression. In the science of evolution I have seen how the practice of science can often fall short of “reason and empirical study”. None of this will make any difference to you I am sure, as we are both well on the way in our respective paths of exploration and it is good that there is diversity of opinion on these matters.
Sincerely,
[Name redacted]
As happens so often, when someone says that science is pretty much like religious faith, they inadvertently criticize faith, as when this person notes that “over the decades that the practice of science often has the same shortcomings that are attributed to religion, including bigotry and suppression.” That’s hardly to religion’s credit.
Now in Faith versus Fact, I debunk the notion that science itself produces bigotry and suppression. Insofar as those practices occur among scientists, I argue, it comes from the people themselves—not the discipline—acting badly. So why can’t we likewise claim that when religion produces bigotry and suppression, it’s also the result of bad people practicing a value-neutral faith?
The response is that inherent in some religions—but not in science—are three features that can enhance bad behavior: the connection of faith with a moral code, the notion that you (but not adherents to other faiths) have absolute truths—and not the provisional truths of science—and the ideas of eternal reward and punishment. Those three features can promote divisiveness, bigotry, and missionizing: the desire to impose your beliefs on others for their own good (viz., Republican theocracy in America). Missionizing may be done with good intentions, but of course it’s annoying and ultimately dysfunctional, not to mention the fact that it warps, lies to, and brainwashes children, inhibiting them from asking questions.
But that aside, what bothers me was the claim by this person—and he/she is a scientist—that science falls down at least as much as religion in ascertaining what is true, or so I inferred from this bit:
“religion — including faith, dogma, and revelation — leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.” Hmm, interesting. I could have said exactly the same about some endeavors on the behalf of current evolutionary theory too. I have found over the decades that the practice of science often has the same shortcomings that are attributed to religion.
The fact is, however, that the practice of science often leads to correct, testable, and uncontested conclusions, while religion does not. Here are some facts uncovered by evolutionary biology that religion can’t match:
Life on earth began somewhere between 3.8 and 3.5 billion years ago.
Mammals evolved gradually from reptiles
The closest living species to humans are the two species of chimpanzees
The legs of tetrapods evolved from bony fins of fishes
Whales evolved from land mammals (artiodactyls) beginning about 50 million years ago, and the rear limbs gradually disappeared.
All living species have a single common ancestor, so that there was only one origin of “life” that produced the species living now
I could go on and on—my book WEIT is full of such things. And if you expand the realm into “truths” uncovered by science, the realm of such things is unlimited. A benzene molecule has six carbon atoms, the Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum, and so on.
Yes, of course scientists have been wrong: think of things like static continents, cold fusion, and the notion that the hereditary molecule was a protein (or, as Linus Pauling thought, a DNA triple helix). But, unlike religion, science gets a lot of things right. If it didn’t, we’d still be living in the Middle Ages, disease-ridden creatures without technology. So I challenged the person who wrote me a letter to send me a list of ten things about the cosmos that religious intuition got right. How many gods are there? Was Jesus the divine son of God? How does God want us to treat unbelievers and apostates? Is it immoral to get blood transfusions? Does god want women to be priests? Religions disagree on fundamental questions like this, and they’ll never resolve them. Religion makes no progress in understanding the universe, despite the fact that an important function of religion is to discern truth. What good would Christian belief be if Jesus wasn’t the son of God who was crucified and resurrected.
Although liberal religionists claim that “my religion isn’t about truth,” that’s generally a lie. For if you don’t accept the epistemic claims of your faith: that there is a god, Jesus was divine, Muhammad was a prophet to whom the Qur’an was dictated, and so on, what reason have you to practice the rituals and ethics of your faith?
I could go on, but this misguided person doesn’t deserve more of my time. Respond below if you wish. I just have one more statement, regarding this person’s claim:
it is good that there is diversity of opinion on these matters.
My answer is “no there isn’t.” There’s no more value in diversity of opinion about this than there is in claims about the shape of the earth or the presence of alien abductions. Show me evidence for a god and then we’ll talk.
Africa harbors three living species of zebras: the plains zebra (Equus quagga), with several subspecies, the mountain zebra (Equus zebra), and Grévy’s zebra (Equus grevyi). The taxonomy of the group is in fact disputed, as distinct species sometimes produce fertile hybrids when they live in the same place, but let’s not worry about that now. The most distinctive feature these species have in common is, of course, their stripes: they are the only fully-striped members of the genus Equus (zebras, horses, and asses), a group containing eleven species. Here’s what the three zebras look like (notice the difference in pattern):
Plains zebraMountain zebraGrévy’s zebra
Now why do they have stripes? If you’re asking the question as an evolutionary one, then one way to pose it is to ask, “What were the selective advantages to the ancestor of modern zebras of having the striped pattern?” (Stripes evolved only once, in the ancestor of zebras, so we don’t require a separate adaptive explanation for each species.)
But that presumes that the stripes were or are an adaptation. Perhaps the pattern wasn’t selected for itself, but is a byproduct of some other adaptive aspect of the zebra’s biology. Perhaps, for instance they’re simply a physiochemical result of a developmental constraint in the production of any body color in zebras. That’s possible, I suppose; but I suspect, given the distinct pattern, that it really did confer some reproductive advantage to zebras, or does so now. Let us assume that it did and does enhance the survival and reproduction of zebras, and see if we can find an explanation of how it does so.
I’ve previously discussed one theory for the evolution of stripes: resistance to biting flies. I’ll highlight a recent paper on that soon, but today we’ll examine another widespread hypothesis: stripes provide camouflage that hide zebras from predators, chiefly hyenas (which take young zebras) and lions.
First, though, let’s list all the hypotheses for striping: camouflage; resistance to biting flies, which won’t land on striped objects (more on that this week); “species recognition,” so that the stripes help zebras find other individuals or the herd; “aposematism”: conspicuous coloration that tells predators, “Stay away! I can bite and kick!”; and a way to cool off by reducing thermal load.
The “camouflage” hypothesis is actually several hypotheses: the stripes hide the zebras in grassland or woodland, making them harder to see; or the stripes break up the body outline so predators can’t discern them as “prey”; or that the stripes confuse predators when they’re attacking a herd, making it hard to single out one individual to nom.
A recent paper in PLoS ONE by Amanda Delin et al. (reference and link below) tests the first two parts of the camouflage hypothesis. They did this by determining the distance at which four species (lions, hyenas, other zebras, and humans) could discern the striped pattern under three light conditions: daylight, twilight, and darkness (moonless nights). (Most predators hunt zebras at twilight). They used measurements of these species’ eyes, photographs of mounted skins as well as of live zebras in the wild, and estimates of visual acuity taken from what we know about vision in domestic cats and passing photographs of zebras through filters mimicking cat’s vision.
The researchers wanted to know the distance at which the four target species (especially the hyena and lion predators) could discern the stripes. They used the “discern stripes” criterion for a good reason: predators attack from a distance, and if they can’t see the stripes at that distance, then those stripes can’t really function to hide the animal. (They could, however, still act to confuse a predator in the midst of an attack.)
The upshot: predators are lousy at discerning stripes from even moderate distances, well short of distances at which predators commit themselves to attack. Zebras and humans (especially the latter) are much better at seeing stripes at a distance than are hyenas and lions, and the ability to discern stripes gets exponentially worse as night falls.
Conclusion: at present, stripes don’t seem to camouflage zebras from predators.
I won’t go into all the details, but below are the data tables showing distances at which the four species can resolve stripes in open habitats—under three light conditions. The table below gives the maximum distance in meters at which stripes can be recognized in different body regions (three species of zebras, two body regions for each). The graph went across the page, so the six rows can be identified from the first shot below:
Humans are pretty good at discerning stripes in daylight, but at dusk (and especially at night), you can’t see the stripes more than 170 meters away on any zebra.
ZebraVision:
Zebras aren’t as good as humans at discerning stripes, but can still see them pretty well at daylight (at least as far enough away to see conspecifics within 75-200 meters), so maybe the stripes can help animals find their herdmates.
What the charts below show is that predators are lousy at seeing the stripes, particularly under low-light (hunting) conditions. At dusk, lions can’t see the stripes when zebras are more than 50 m away, and on moonless nights they have to be right on the zebras before they can see the stripes. Since lions commit to attack at distances much greater than 50 meters, it seems as if the stripes don’t protect zebras from being seen by lions. At distances of 50 m or more, zebras look much like unstriped prey: waterbuck and topi.
Hyenas are even more myopic for stripes: beyond about 30 meters, a zebra looks to a hyena just like any uniformly-colored prey.
Here are some photos showing what zebras would look like to humans and lions at only 16.4 meters away. The caption is this:
Fig 3. A small group of plains zebra taken at a real-world equivalent of 16.4 m as they may appear to a human (a,c,e) and lion (b,d,f) under photopic (bright; daylight), mesopic (dim; dusk) and scotopic (dark; moonless night) conditions. Stripe visibility falls off from human vision to lion vision and as ambient light decreases.
This is from the close distance of 16.4 meters. But even at that distance the stripes are not very visible at twilight (“mesopic”) conditions, while under moonless (“scotopic”) conditions the zebras are just gray blobs, looking much like antelope. As I said, lions attack from distances much greater than this, so zebras at twilight would look like any other prey item. In other words, the stripes don’t appear to camouflage the zebras at distances relevant to protecting them from predators.
It’s still possible, though, that the stripes could confuse a predator once it’s in the midst of a fleeing zebra herd. But I don’t find that particularly plausible, as an attacking lion tends to single out only one individual for attack, while hyenas act as a group when taking down an individual.
The authors did find that stripes did render zebras less conspicuous in woodland, as the vertical stripes tend to hide them amidst the vertical saplings. But this still obtains only at close distances, and, as the authors note, “Thus, stripes cannot help zebras blend in with the background except when a zebra is close to a predator, distances at which predators could likely smell or hear zebras moving or breathing as they are particularly noisy herbivores.” (There’s a hint of special pleading here!)
What about the other hypotheses? Aposematism may still be viable, as once a lion is close to a zebra it might shy away it because of the stripes signalling “don’t mess with me.” That could be tested by dyeing zebras in the wild, but I don’t find that theory very plausible.
The “social recognition” hypothesis for stripes is still viable. The authors try to dismiss it, though, by saying this:
We therefore cannot reject the hypothesis that stripes may assist recognition of conspecifics or individuals, although stripes promoting species recognition seem improbable given the limited extent of allopatry in the three species of zebra. Field observations do not support the idea of stripes enhancing allogrooming, social bonding, individual recognition or being an indicator of phenotypic quality or health. Nor is striping related to crude categories of social organization, namely harem defense polygyny or to resource defense across equids where social requirements might differ. Finally, domestic horses are capable of sophisticated individual recognition using visual cues in the absence of stripes and so it seems somewhat implausible that their close relative, the zebra, needs stripes to do this.
Well, “species recognition” is not a particularly viable hypothesis anyway, and I’ll accept the authors’ notes (there’s a reference given) that stripes don’t enhance individual recognition or other forms of bonding. But stripes still could help zebras find their herds more easily, and there are of course many advantages to finding your herd and rejoining it if you wander off. And the fact that horses can find their herds even though they’re not striped is irrelevant: the question is whether zebras’ stripes give them an enhanced ability to stay with their herd. We simply don’t know the answer to that.
In the next post, later this week (assuming people read this post), I’ll highlight a two-year-old paper by Tim Caro’s group that claims to give the correct adaptive explanation for stripes. Yes, folks, it’s protection from biting flies. I’m not 100% convinced by that paper, but it’s a more plausible explanation than camouflage, and there are relevant data. But more on that later.
Reader Ed Kroc sent a sequence of gull-rearing photos. His notes:
Heeding your call for more wildlife photos, here is a batch of baby Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens) photos, strong challengers for cutest baby animal in my opinion. These are all from one of the nests I was routinely observing this past summer from a bridge in downtown Vancouver, BC.
The first photo shows the father-to-be atop the nest, “panting” due to the unusually extreme heat we were having then in early July (about 32 degrees Celsius – very hot for Vancouver). Notice the tour boat on the harbour in the background. Most gulls simply clear out a little scrape in the dirt to use as a nest, but that clearly wasn’t an option here. You can see that this particular pair actually constructed quite a robust structure from scratch.
The next three photos show the 2 days between the first and the third chicks hatching. First, Dad is incubating the other two as the eldest chick plays with some nesting material. Then, the second chick has just emerged from his/her shell, right next to the third chick still inside an egg. The next day the last egg hatched. You can see the youngest chick chomping on Dad’s leg, wanting him to sit back down as he checks on what the other hatchlings are getting up to.
I suspect that the striking spotted pattern of the chicks helps hide them in the wild (though not on rooftops), but of course I’m not sure. Readers who know anything about this are invited to comment below.
A short time later, the mother gull returned with some food for the hatchlings. You can see the two older chicks scuttling out of the nest to pick at the blob of seafood, while the youngest chick (still less than a day old and not completely dried off from hatching yet) is not quite ready to venture out of the nest cup.
About a week old now, the next two pictures show the middle chick basking in the innocence of youth. After running around for a bit, he/she let out a large yawn in the shade and then summarily plopped right down in place for a nap.
Fast forward a few more days and one of the three chicks had leapt down to the main rooftop below. In the picture, Dad is calling to the chick below. The other two chicks joined their more adventurous sibling a couple days later, and for the next 6 weeks, they grew and learned to fly on the open rooftop together.
Here’s the range of the species, taken from the Cornell website. They omitted the key, but purple is year-round sites, red is summer (breeding) sites, and blue is winter (non-breeding) sites.
It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day, and in one week exactly I’ll be arriving, bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, at the Hell on Earth known as Heathrow Airport. Here in Chicago, we’ve had a great spell of warm weather, with temperatures yesterday and today reaching nearly 50°F (10°C). It’s the last day in January, a day on which Guy Fawkes was executed in 1606, the U.S. Congress passed the 13th Amendment (prohibiting slavery) in 1865, and the first McDonald’s opened in Russia (in Moscow) in 1990. In Soviet Russia, the hamburgers eat YOU. Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the major leagues (baseball) was born on this day in 1919, as was “Mr. Cub”, Ernie Banks, in 1931 and pitcher Nolan Ryan in 1947. Those who died on this day include John Galsworthy (1933), A. A. Milne (1956; I still have all my childhood Pooh books), Molly Ivins (2007), and guru Meher Baba (1969; “Don’t worry; be happy. I will help you.”) Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dissing her staff’s dinner:
Hili: What do you have for dinner today?
A: Pasta.
Hili: Words fail me.
Look at that expression of disgust!
In Polish:
Hili: Co macie dziś na obiad?
Ja: Makaron.
Hili: Nie mam słów.
Leon, the Dark Tabby, is back in Wroclawek, having hiked very little in the mountains. We’ll have to wait till next year for his next hiking vacation:
Leon: I’m going to stop the vacation time.
And remember Jerry Coyne the Cat, raised as a foundling by reader Gayle Ferguson from New Zealand? You can see pictures of him as a kitten here (among other places); here’s one of them:
Now Jerry is two years old, and has grown into a fine, handsome furry fellow. Here are two pictures Gayle just sent, along with a note from Jerry’s staff:
Jerry doesn’t stay still long except when asleep so nabbed these shots before he took off. Still loves your woollen bootie and throws it around, sucks on it and growls at it sometimes too. He is such a character! Gives Loki [the other cat] hell but it is very entertaining when he does.
Heeere’s Jerry:
Since the days of Jerry and his siblings, Gayle’s raised at least four batches of homeless kittens, and every one has been adopted. She’s a true Hero of Felids.
Here’s a robot solving a Rubik’s cube in a tad over one second. It’s not an official record for a machine yet (that’s 2.39 seconds), but they’ll get the Guinness record before too long.
Gizmag gives more information about how the robot works, and I’ll let the geekier readers read the details there. There’s an interesting discussion in the YouTube comments about whether there’s a trick here, but I don’t think so.
You’re probably asking, “What’s the record for a human?” Well, here it is: Lucas Etter solving the cube in 4.90 seconds.
I’ve become aware of someone else besides Jeff Tayler who’s criticizing religion on Salon—a stand decidedly against the editorial current of that site. And the other anti-theist is Phil Torres, an author and ethicist described at Salon as:
(His Wikipedia biography is here, and notes that he’s a musician as well.) Note that Torres’s book comes out February 16, and has an introduction by Uncle Russell Blackford (Eric MacDonald has long since lost his avuncular status, and is reduced to osculating the rump of Edward Feser on the latter’s website).
The reason why Trump’s American exceptionalism is wrong is because, says Torres, America is not exceptional—at least not in the way we think. We’re not by a long shot the most socially healthy country in the word. In fact, as I point out incessantly, we’re the most socially dysfunctional First World country. One of the good things about Torres’s article is that it serves as a compendium, with references, of all the ways the U.S. falls short compared to our “peer countries”—mostly in Europe. We’re horrible, for example, when it comes to these issues:
life expectancy
government-supported health care
gender parity
quality of education
happiness
income equality
ethics and lack of corruption
lack of waste in government spending.
The list goes on, with documentation, so it’s a good reference. Summarizing the U.S.’s ranking, Torres says this:
The point is that, as should be clear by now, there’s an unequivocal pattern of American inferiority when our country’s performance is juxtaposed with the rest of the developed world’s. Indeed, in many categories — such as childhood poverty, income inequality and family paid leave — we’re just barely a developed country, if even that. The result of these failures is that our collective quality of life is not nearly as high as it ought to be. Here it’s worth turning to the Mercer Quality of Life Survey, since it attempts to quantify the livability of some 221 cities around the world. And guess what it finds? The U.S. has only a single city in the top 30 — and it happens to be the ultra-progressive den of liberal debauchery called San Francisco. At the pinnacle of Mercer’s list are cities like Vienna, Zurich, Auckland, Munich and Vancouver. In fact, of all the cities in the North American continent, the top four are all in Canada. Now that’s just embarrassing, eh?
Indeed. I’m going to Auckland! Now what’s the reason why we think we’re so good but we actually are pretty miserable compared to our “peer nations”? Torres singles out two reasons: religion and conservative politics:
Why exactly are we ranked low in terms of opportunity and flourishing? What’s behind our middling performance compared to the world? Is it because our country is too progressive? Too socialist? Too secular? Too crowded with atheists?
The unambiguous answer to these questions is a resounding No! For example, the U.S. turns out to be among the most religious countries in the developed world. According to a 2014 Gallup poll, “nearly four in 10 Americans report that they attended religious services in the past seven days.” In contrast, only about 2 percent of Norwegians attend church on a weekly basis, as of 2009. Along these very lines, a 2011 study reported that religion is tumbling toward “extinction” in nine developed countries, namely Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland — all of which are doing just fine. And whereas a U.S. politician could hardly dream of running for president as an out-of-the-closet atheist, many other countries have had atheist leaders in the past. As the former Prime Minister of Australia — a progressive woman who doesn’t believe in God — said to the Washington Post, “I think it would be inconceivable for me if I were an American to have turned up at the highest echelon of American politics being an atheist, single and childless.” Yet the empirical fact is that secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious folks. So it’s not that our country is too Godless.
Most of this I knew, but Torres take on American “progressivism” is pretty new to me:
The U.S. also turns out to be quite conservative by comparative standards. I find it hard to even map right-left American politics onto the political spectrum of European countries. On many issues, for example, the right-wing Tories in the UK are left of the Democrats. And Sweden, whose “thriving economy and society [are] based on a government of socialist principles, higher taxes, and healthy regulations,” has a tax rate that’s nearly double America’s. As an article in Forbes notes, the common thread that weaves together the tapestry of happiest countries is that “they are all borderline socialist states, with generous welfare benefits and lots of redistribution of wealth.” In these countries, civil liberties are taken seriously (some even permit prostitution and drug use), and everyone has a robust safety net to fall back on in tough times. So it’s also not that our country is too progressive.
And indeed, I’ve seen David Cameron take positions that American Democrats would consider too left wing. Not that I favor the Tories, but I’m not a big fan of Democrats (except for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) as genuine progressives. They’re too beholden to the banks, the industries, and the gun and health lobbies.
Torres’s conclusion?
I would argue that our country lags behind the developed world precisely because of how religious and conservative we are. As Bertrand Russell correctly observed way back in 1927, “I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.” As a matter of fact, religious conservatives in America have consistently opposed attempts to implement equal pay for women legislation, universal health care and stricter environmental regulations. For reasons that continue to baffle me, many middle-class people still vote for Republicans, even though the effect of Republican policies has been to knock us out of the top bracket with respect to nearly every metric of life-quality.
In the past I’ve argued that America is religious precisely because it’s socially dysfunctional, but Torres reverses the causal arrow: America’s hyper-religiosity makes us bad off. Yes, many religious people oppose social progress, and there’s no reason why there can’t be an insalubrious synergy between religion and social well-being. That is, perhaps religion makes society poorer off according to Torres’s indicators. (I’ll need to ponder that one, but it’s almost certainly true in many Muslim countries.) And when society gets poorer off, it becomes more religious (there’s ample sociological documentation for that). If Torres is right and an important causal direction is from religiosity to social dysfunction, then we need to figure out why America is so much more religious than other First World countries.
As for conservative politics holding back social progress, I’m prepared to believe it. Conservatives consistently oppose measures to equalize income, as well as to equalize rights: the rights of gays, blacks, immigrant, the impoverished, and women. They consistently oppose government intervention to level a playing field tilted by the vagaries of genes and environments.
Torres’s article does the best thing a piece like this can: it gives us food for thought. If you think that American religiosity itself has promoted a dysfunctional society (or if you take the other side), weigh in below. And if you agree, then let us know your hypothesis for why the U.S. is so much more religious than other First World nations.
