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.
Don’t forget to keep those photos coming in; the tank is only half full.
Today we have unusual subjects: architecture, Darwin and gravesites. First, some photos by reader Tom Hennessy:
This time of year it can be difficult to find good subjects for photograph, but I am fortunate to be a member of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden here in Richmond, VA. Starting at Thanksgiving and continuing until mid January they have the gardens beautifully decorated with lights. I spent a couple evenings there this past week photographing as the sky darkened. I am attaching a few of my favorite shots. The main attraction is the conservatory which houses wonderful orchids and succulents, and in the summer houses a butterfly exhibit.
And a set by reader and wildlife biologist Mark Otten:
While in the UK this past May, I had the opportunity to visit Down House and Downe Village. While I took plenty of photos of the house and the famous sandwalk, I thought your readers might enjoy something a little different.
Downe Bank Nature Preserve encompasses the area that Darwin called “Orchis Bank”. Orchis Bank is thought to be the inspiration for the “entangled bank” in the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species. “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank . . .” Downe Bank Nature Preserve is about 700 meters east of Down House.
While Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Cathedral, his wife Emma and several of their children are buried in the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin Church in Downe Village. Emma’s grave is under the horizontal pink granite capstone at the back of the churchyard next to the fence and just in front of the blue car. Darwin’s brother Erasmus is buried in the same grave.
Close up of Emma Darwin’s grave. Anyone who has read a Darwin biography knows what an amazing woman she was. [JAC: Charles, of course, is buried in Westminster Abbey, though you have to look hard to find his stone, which is on th floor near the entrance. Also, I can’t find Emma’s name on the stone below!]
Darwin constructed a greenhouse behind the residence to house tropical and subtropical plants. One of the plants he kept was the insectivorous common sundew (Drosera rotundifolia). Sundew leaves exude sugar-laden mucilage to attract insects, which are then trapped. Sundews often grow in nutrient-poor habitats and use consumed insects to supplement their nitrogen requirement.
Professor Ceiling Cat recommends a visit to Down House (accessible from London by car) if you’re in that part of England. It’s a wonderful village, not at all touristy, and the house itself is simply splendid. It’s been restored, at least on the first floor, to the appearance it had in Darwin’s day, with much of the original furniture. In Darwin’s study you can still see his chair and the board he placed across the arms to write. That’s where he wrote The Origin. There’s also a folding screen behind which is a chamber pot where Darwin vomited during one of his many bouts of illness. Upstairs you can see his hat, his walking stick, and other possessions. As lagniappe, there’s a good real-ale pub in the village, where you can hoist a few in honor of The Great Man and his Big Idea.
Some big news today: Ammon Bundy and a couple of his thugs have been taken into custody while driving; there was an exchange of gunfire and one thug was killed. Twenty-odd thugs remain at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Also, in Canada, they have filmed a fox on Prince Edward Island who steals newspapers regularly (five of them at a time!) from a school. Whether the fox reads them is unknown; it may be using them to line its nest. Click on the screeenshot below to see a video of the thieving Reynard.
Also, at the Vatican, they have spared the tender feelings of visitng Iranian President Rouhani by covering up the nude statues during his visit. Click on the screenshot below to see the story:
Nude statues at the Vatican covered with plywood boxes.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have another enigmatic statement from Hili this morning:
Hili: Do spiritual descendants evolve?
A: Why do you ask?
Hili: More and more idiots are quoting wise people.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy duchowe potomstwo podlega ewolucji?
Ja: Dlaczego pytasz?
Hili: Coraz więcej idiotów powołuje się na mądrych ludzi.
And Leon, off in the Polish mountains, appears to be getting at least a bit of outside time:
Leon: Yesterday there was a chubby titmouse here.
Finally, on this day in 1880, Thomas Edison got a patent on the light bulb, and, in 1596, Sir Francis Drake died of dysentery off the coast of Panama at age 55. Divers continue to search for his lead coffin, dumped into the sea and containing his body, clad in a full suit of armor. It’s also Holocaust Memorial Day; hashtag feed here with some interesting items.
The pictures speak for themselves, but you can read more about it here. I’ll just add that these photos were taken in the wild, not in a zoo, and required 117 hours of observation by photographer Daisy Gilardini to get the shots.
From a Tw**t by “A Scanner Snarkly” via Grania, we get the entire set of penguin evolution strips from Berk Breathed’s “Bloom County”. Click to enlarge:
Oh dear: Dr. Cobb promised a nice, interesting science post this afternoon, but he’s very busy being famous and all, so I’ll just make a few announcements. The first is that Dan Barker, whose proclivity at writing books makes him the Steve Pinker of Godlessness, has yet another book, one that will go on sale February 1. Click on the cover below to go to the Amazon listing:
According to the Amazon description, it appears to have been designed as a straight collaboration between Dawkins and Barker, but Richard was eventually limited to writing the foreword (probably by the press of work). It’s strange for a description to say stuff like that. But, as with all of Dan’s books, it’s sure to be good. Amazon blurb:
What words come to mind when we think of God? Merciful? Just? Compassionate? In fact, the Bible lays out God’s primary qualities clearly: jealous, petty, unforgiving, bloodthirsty, vindictive—and worse! Originally conceived as a joint presentation between influential thinker and bestselling author Richard Dawkins and former evangelical preacher Dan Barker, this unique book provides an investigation into what may be the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Barker combs through both the Old and New Testament (as well as thirteen different editions of the “Good Book”), presenting powerful evidence for why the Scripture shouldn’t govern our everyday lives. This witty, well-researched book suggests that we should move past the Bible and clear a path to a kinder and more thoughtful world.
The chapter headings below reflect, in order, the qualities of the Old-Testament God limned in Richard’s famous quote from The God Delusion:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
I don’t think anything Richard ever wrote brought him as much hatred and opprobrium as that quote, yet what he said is largely true (Sauron may be worse. . . ).
But wait! There’s Part II, with extra added vices!:
When I was a kid, I loved the Indianapolis 500 race, and before it was televised I’d listen to it on the radio and write down what happened in every lap. I was particularly fascinated by pit stops: when cars pull in for new tires, a gas refill, and so on. The crews who do this are amazingly fast and well orchestrated, but this one, a pit stop at the Formula 1 Melbourne Grand Prix in 2013, is only FOUR SECONDS LONG (I timed it). I watched it twice, and, sure enough, they did everything in just a few seconds. And it’s a Ferrari.
If you’ve followed the career of Simon Conway Morris, the famous Cambridge paleontologist, you’ll know about his work on the Burgess Shale as well as his refutation of Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis that the animals in that formation represented fundamentally novel phyla that died out due solely to “historical contingency.”
You might also know that Conway Morris is a devout Christian, and has bent some of his science toward natural theology: the use of natural history to give evidence for God and understand His ways. So, for example, Conway Morris’s 2003 book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, a discussion and list of “convergent evolution” (lineages of animals or plants that, though unrelated, come to resemble each other), was part of a Templeton-funded project whose underlying theme was that the uniqueness of human intelligence was the result of God’s intervention.
Conway Morris, then, seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid of religion, co-opting his science in service of praising and giving evidence for God and Jesus (who are, of course, One Being). That is certainly the lesson from Conway Morris’s new scholarly paper in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (free download, reference and link below), which makes no bones about adducing “evidence” for God from mathematics.
Try reading it yourself. It’s a long and tedious read, made harder by Conway Morris’s penchant for what he thinks is breezy and readable prose, which in fact he has no idea how to produce. The article is loaded to the gunwales with phrases that Conway Morris thinks are clever, but in fact weigh down his prose and distract from his thesis. Here are just two examples:
For example, if the minimum additional weight that needs to be added to eighty ounces (or if you prefer 2268 g) for me to perceive a tangible difference is one ounce (for those of you wedded to Gallic certainty that is of course is 28.35 g). . .
and
Be that as it may, and with no reason to doubt that our mathematics would not emerge without some sort of cultural foundation, is our competence in this regard any better explained? In this context, I am rather wickedly reminded of the plot situation familiar to the less able writer whereby the narrative has ensured that the hero is trapped in some impossible predicament (chained in steadily flooding cellar, that sort of thing) until the author picks up the pen and continues “ and with a mighty bound he was free”. So in an analogous way lurking at the back of the numerosity debated that is to ask how on earth the numerical approximations employed by animals like a rhesus monkey or guppy can be squared with the capacity to employ square roots (let alone complex numbers), there nestles an all-purpose and perhaps too convenient explanation.
Oy! That is just bad writing, and the paper would have been immensely improved had Conway Morris not been so infatuated with his own cleverness.
But I digress. Here, as best I can make it out, is Conway Morris’s argument:
Some species of animals show “numerosity”, that is, they can distinguish between greater or lesser numbers, as in crows distinguishing between three pieces of food and five.
But ONLY HUMANS can “count” and do abstract mathematics (find square roots, solve equations, etc.) To Conway Morris, these unique abilities depend critically on human consciousness and language.
The mathematics we engage in is not just a human invention, but is in fact the discovery of mathematical truths that are independent of human devising. When we do math, we are discovering already-existing truths that are “out there.” (I believe this view is called “mathematical realism”.) As Conway Morris says, “mathematics inhabits a transcendental world.” And here we begin engaging with the numinous.
We have no idea how humans actually do math: it doesn’t seem like something that would arise naturally from our evolution. As Conway Morris says,
. . . claims for an evolutionary basis for a capacity for abstraction seem to rest on weak ground. This emphatically is not to contest that we at least require neuronal equipment and such a nervous system could only arise by the processes of evolution. It is, however, to protest that we are not a whit closer to explaining how even relatively simple mathematical operations are actually conducted. Related to this is the sense that effective mathematics is impossible without language and in this sense is a test-case for consciousness itself.
Here he gets even closer to the idea that doing math is something that reflects a gift from God. If you think I’m exaggerating, Conway Morris quotes Robert Kanigel on the remarkable mathematical gifts of Srinivasa Ramanujan, well known to many. The bit below is longish, but I think is necessary to quote in full, as it suggests that Ramanujan’s abilities had a divine source (Kanigel’s quote, my emphasis):
“It is uncanny how often otherwise dogged rationalists have, over the years, turned to the language of the shaman and the priest to convey something of Ramanujan’s gifts.. [R]epeatedly [mathematicians] have been reduced to inchoate expressions of wonder and awe in the face of his powers, have stumbled about, groping for words, in trying to convey the mystery of Ramanujan.. [I]n the language of the Polish émigré mathematician Mark Kac, [Ramanujan] was a “magician,” rather than an “ordinary genius.” Mystery, magic, and dark, hidden workings inaccessible to ordinary thought; it is these that Ramanujan’s work invariably conjures up, a sense of reason butting hard up against its limits.
But at reason’s limits does something else take over? Do we here flirt with spiritual or supernatural forces outside our understanding?T. K. Rajogopolan, a former accountant general of Madras, would tell of Ramanujan’s insistence that after seeing in dreams the drops of blood that, according to tradition, heralded the presence of the god Narasimha, the male consort of the goddess Namagiri, “scrolls containing the most complicated mathematics used to unfold before his eyes.”
Of this Conway Morris says two telling things:
Such a view is, of course, congruent with the view that mathematics inhabits a transcendental world. As Morris Kline (1980, 323) notes there are individuals and schools that “affirm that the mathematical concepts and properties exist in some objective sense and that they can be apprehended by human minds.”
and
Ramanujan’s encounters with his god ring very true, but I may be engaged in wishful thinking.
Now the first bit is just adumbration of mathematical realism, but the second claims that our ability to apprehend those “out-there” truths may come not from naturally selected brains, but from God. And that this is in fact Conway Morris’s view is clear from his last paragraph (my emphasis).
There is another observation, linked to this thought. Oddly the idea of animal numerosity being extrapolated to human mathematics almost always presupposes that our neural architecture actually has any capacity to know the world. This, however, may not be true unless we have an independent warrant that tells us that what we believe to be true is in reality truly true. Darwin saw the abyss and dithered, unable to take the plunge. It is, of course another story, but such a warrant exists. Not on the basis of unreflective faith, the recurrent gibe offered from Huxley to Dawkins, but because in a world of radical uncertainty we have only two options. One is to erect a thanatocratic culture, of existentialist despair, where suicide rates grow and euthanasia is “legal”. The other is to become creatures of trust. Curiously enough, and from a very different direction, in his essay “Sorry, but your soul just died” Tom Wolfe (2000, 109) comes to what I think is a similar conclusion. Speaking of our existentialist morass that Nietzsche so presciently identified, Wolfe writes of “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He’s floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can’t see it, but he’s much impressed. He names it God”. Back to square one.
The first bit is straight out of Alvin Plantinga’s playbook: natural selection could not possibly have given us the ability to apprehend truths about the cosmos because natural selection favors not apprehension of truth, but ability to survive and reproduce.
I’ve criticized this view in Faith versus Fact, and of course the answer is simple: in many (but not all) cases, natural selection could give us the ability to apprehend truth and the tools (rationality and logic) to do it, because apprehending truth helps us to survive and reproduce. (If we can’t tell a lion from an antelope, we are in big trouble). Sometimes, of course, we don’t apprehend truth: optical illusions and other false beliefs (i.e., we’re smarter than most other people) could also be the results of natural selection, but a form that promotes false beliefs because they can be adaptive, too.
At any rate, at the end of the paragraph Conway Morris goes off the rails, claiming that “in a world of uncertainty” we must choose between nonbelief in God, leading to nihilism and despair, or to become “creatures of trust”, i.e., believers in God. Can there be any doubt from the above that this is what Conway Morris means?
Finally, his notion that disbelief in God leads to nihilism is refuted by simple observation: most atheists haven’t taken to their beds in despair, nor wallow in sorrow and gloom. And euthanasia and suicide—really?
Here’s the last bit of his argument:
Our ability to do math, one aspect of our ability to perceive what is real, is a gift from God.
The purpose of the whole piece, if you can slog through the prose, is to show that the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” is evidence for God, so that science buttresses Conway Morris’s Christianity. Now THAT sounds like a Templeton project, for Sir John Templeton’s belief—and the goal of his bequest to his Foundation—was that science, studied properly, would support the existence of God.
It’s no surprise, then, that you find this at the end of Conway Morris’s paper:
TEMPLETON again! But that’s not surprising: the organization has supported Conway Morris for years. In fact, I’ll venture a guess here: Conway Morris, who’s rapidly becoming the Francis Collins of paleontology, will win the million-pound Templeton Prize within five years.
Below is a video of Conway Morris attacking materialism as an explanation of consciousness; it’s more or less a plumping for dualism. He’s presenting a God-of-the-gaps argument based on the puzzle of consciousness. This is the kind of stuff that Templeton loves: in our ignorance resides the divine. Note that he at 4:29 he regards the Resurrection of Jesus as true, because it’s simply impossible to make up that kind of story!
I’m still amazed that a scientist as good as Conway Morris can accept the reality of the Resurrection on evidence so thin that he’d never use such a line of reasoning in his scientific work on fossils!
Ah, the philosphy fracas continues! First Russell Blackford wrote a laudatory review of Faith versus Fact for Talking Philosophy. Then Massimo Pigliucci, who never fails to remind us that he has three—count them, three—doctorates, and is therefore more qualified than anyone to assess both philosophy and biology, took out after Russell’s review—without having read my book. That would be okay (I do it myself sometimes) if Pigliucci had not also characterized—actually, mischaracterized—what I said in my book, something that could have been avoided had he read it. Pigliucci’s piece, “In defense of accommodationism: on the proper relationship between science and religion”, was a bit on the nasty side, and in a post on this site I took issue with several of its claims (in bold):
Religion isn’t about believing in facts about the cosmos, but about meaning, morals, and values. Here Pigliucci is just wrong. Even Sophisticated Theologians™ admit that religion is based on assumptions about “how things really are” in the universe, and they note as well that the moral and value claims rest at bottom on empirical claims. (1 Corinthians 15:14: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”) I won’t belabor these points, as I discussed them in detail in my earlier post.
Religion and science are logically compatible. Therefore they’re compatible. End of story. Had Pigliucci read my book, he would know what I meant by “compatibility,” which has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with practice and outcomes.
Accommodationists are almost invariably atheists. I have no idea why Massimo made that statement, but it shows that he doesn’t get out enough. Yes, many atheists are accommodationists, but the bulk of the accommodationist literature comes from religionists and theologians. I ought to know: hell, I spent two years reading the likes of John Haught, Alvin Plantinga, Alister McGrath, Ian Barbour, John Polkinghorne, Karl Giberson, Francis Collins. . . ad nauseam.
Well, Russell, who is a genuine credentialed philosopher, has finally responded to Massimo on his own, in a piece at the online TPM (The Philosophers’ Magazine), “On Accommodationism: A reply to Pigliucci.” As usual, Russell is more civil than I am. (I try to be, but sometimes fail.) His words:
Massimo Pigliucci is someone I normally have time for. I’ve enjoyed amicable and efficient dealings with him in the past, and I don’t doubt that his long-running critique of pseudoscience has achieved a degree of good. But on any topic related to the “New Atheism” – including the relationship between science and religion, or that between science and morality – he appears to lose all objectivity.
I don’t really care what history, or what quirks of psychology, might lie behind this – I don’t even want to speculate. The result, however, is that he does himself a disservice, since I’m surely not the only person to have noticed how these topics bring out the worst in him.
That’s about as nice as you can be before ripping apart your opponent’s arguments. At any rate, while Russell goes over some of the same ground I plowed, he also discusses other issues. Defining “accommodationism” as “the idea that there’s room for religion in a scientifically informed understanding of the world” (not a bad definition!), Blackford makes the following points—and more. Go read his piece to see for yourself:
There are tactical and political reasons why people favor accommodationism. He doesn’t accuse Pigliucci of hewing to these tactics, but it’s useful to remember why people like Eugenie Scott and Michael Ruse (not to mention Stephen Jay Gould), atheists themselves, nevertheless vociferously defended the principle that there’s no conflict between science and religion. By claiming that science and religion are incompatible in a land of believers, you render yourself a skunk among Americans.
Pigliucci engaged in unwarranted smears toward Blackford when Russell characterized Gould as a “celebrity scientist.”
Pigluicci, despite implying otherwise, actually agrees with both Russell and me that Gould’s NOMA principle is untenable.
Russell is on the fence about whether endeavors like archaeology or history can be seen as “science broadly construed,” which is how I characterize disciplines that use the toolkit of science to find truth. And, truth be told, I don’t care that much about this “demarcation problem”. The issue for me is whether a discipline claims to be finding truth, and, if so, if it uses the time-honed tools of science to ascertain those truths. The main conflict is whether religion can ascertain truth (the answer is no), and whether areas like literature have “ways of knowing” that can ascertain truth (I doubt it). Frankly, I don’t care if one sees archaeology as “science broadly construed” when it finds out about ancient civilizations; all I care is if they archaeologists draw their conclusions using methods similar to those of scientists who study historical phenomena.
I’ll finish with two quotes from Russell’s piece, the first about whether religion is in the truth business, and the second about Pigliucci’s style of argument.
Although Pigliucci does not accept the principle of NOMA, he claims, without much argument, that religion is primarily about ethical teachings and questions of meaning (whatever these really amount to; it’s not straightforward!). Thus, Pigliucci thinks, most of religion, or perhaps the most important part, cannot be contradicted by empirical findings from the sciences (or perhaps it’s just the natural sciences, exclusive of psychology). To see things otherwise is “a gross misreading of history,” so Pigliucci claims – but again, claiming this does not make it so.
As Pigliucci himself appears to acknowledge, many theologians got out of the cosmogony business precisely because they felt pushed out by the success of scientific inquiry. As a result, yes, many Catholics, such as Pigliucci’s mother, are not biblical literalists – but that is precisely an example of what I discussed in my post: religion has been forced to come to terms with challenges from science and modernity. The historical record that Pigliucci refers to supports my case, not his. (That said, plenty of mothers and others are biblical literalists – at least in the US. See the statistics provided by Coyne in his response to Pigliucci.)
Unfortunately for Pigliucci, religions are not in any measurable way “primarily” about moral claims or “ethical teachings.” Such teachings are often, though not always, important elements of religions. But they are important as elements in systems that integrate many other elements, such as (yes!) cosmogonies, eschatologies, sacred histories, epistemologies (contrary to one of Pigliucci’s ex cathedra pronouncements, religions do indeed offer methods of finding truth, such as faith, prayer, revelation, and study of holy books), and prescribed forms of ritual and worship.
Religions typically make claims that are, at least to some extent, open to empirical scrutiny by the sciences and humanities. If those claims don’t check out – or even if they are rendered explanatorily superfluous – then of course there is a tendency for the religions concerned to lose their prestige and their aura of authority. If a religion retreats to offering only allegories and moral guidance, it may then lose much of what made it psychologically attractive to adherents in the first place. Besides, we can often rationally ask why the retreat was necessary – if a religion was divinely established, as many purport to be, why were its claims not correct from the start?
Furthermore, without their pretensions to possess a wider explanatory authority, religions lose their appearance even of moral authority. Given the oppressive and miserable nature of many moral norms associated with one or another religion, that’s probably just as well.
Well said. And one of Russell’s biggest beefs with Pigliucci appears to be the latter’s style of argument:
Finally, I confess to being blindsided and annoyed by this turn of events. I don’t mind being disagreed with, but it creates an awkward situation when such a hostile and rhetorical post is lobbed my way from someone with whom I have various ongoing professional dealings. I won’t labor the point: to be sure, I’ve put up with much worse, in my time, and from far nastier people than Pigliucci, but it’s still unexpected and objectionable.
More worryingly, anyone reading Pigliucci’s post from outside the discipline of philosophy will form a poor view of the discipline. If this is the way one of its better known tenured professors chooses to engage with others, and to discuss ideas, the rest of us will struggle uphill when we try to present philosophy as a counterweight to propaganda and tribalism. I hope outsiders won’t interpret Pigliucci’s approach to “New Atheist” topics as typical of how philosophers go about their business. We usually display – I hope – a bit less belligerence and a bit more intellectual substance.
I’m really not much for back-and-forth intellectual catfights, though of course I won’t shy away from criticizing pieces that I see as misguided. I just don’t want to engage in repeated back-and-forths But in this case, it’s Massimo who was initially misguided, and so both Russell and I felt justified in writing responses. Let us now mercifully draw the curtains closed and proclaim “FIN” to this argument.
