Readers’ wildlife photographs

January 12, 2016 • 7:15 am

We have some photos from a new contributor, Jessica Drew, who got to participate in a nice wildlife census:

I thought you would like to see some pictures from my trip to Midway Atoll to participate in the annual albatross nest count. Every year during a three-week counting period, Fish and Wildlife Service volunteers systematically count every nesting pair of black-footed and Laysan albatross  [Phoebastria nigripes and P. immutabilis, respectively] on the atoll. It was extraordinarily fun work. Every sunset, we had the totally magical experience of seeing thousands of Bonin petrels leaving their burrows and flying above us! Aside from the albatross, we had the pleasure of seeing Laysan ducks, White terns, Frigatebirds, masked, brown and red-footed boobies, Golden plovers, and Bristle-thighed curlews! Here are a few of my favorite pictures. Enjoy!

Remember that the 64-year-old bird, “Wisdom,” who produced a chick this year, was also a Laysan albatross.

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Red-footed booby (Sula sula):

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White tern (Gygis alba) flying over my head:

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​White terns being adorable with each other!:

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As lagniappe, a bird from Diana MacPherson:

It’s a blizzard here as the rain turned to snow & the wind kicked up so the birds are eating a lot of seeds & taking shelter nearby in the Weigela bush, like this male house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus).
Male House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) Taking Shelter from the Blizzard

Bomb in Istanbul kills ten; ISIS possibly involved

January 12, 2016 • 7:05 am

I’ve been to Istanbul four times and love the place—and Turkey. Istanbul is one of the most wonderful, eclectic cities in the world, full of nice people, wonderful architecture, and great food. It was thus especially saddening to learn from the New York Times that an explosion took place today in the central Sultanahmet area (site of the famous Blue and Hagia Sofia Mosques), killing at least ten people and wounding 15. Moreover, it appears to have been caused by an ISIS-inspired suicide bomber from Syria, or so says President Erdogan—not exactly an unimpeachable source. Still, I think he’s probably right given the tensions between Turkey and ISIS.

The Telegraph has a live-blogging site to report developments in this case, and it includes what is described as a photo of the blast:

The below image has been widely circulated on social media by the Turkish press but has not been officially verified.

It purports to show the moment that the bomb exploded at Sultanahmet square.

According to investigative journalist Eliot Higgins, the original photograph was published within minutes of the blast happening, and he suggested it could not have been produced that quickly by a hoaxer.

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And a photo of the dead, courtesy of the New York Times:

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Rescue teams gathered at the scene of an explosion in Istanbul on Tuesday. Credit Kemal Aslan/Reuters

I have no idea what role the U.S. is to play in countering this kind of terrorism, which is basically guerrilla warfare by those who don’t care whether they live, but it won’t be defeated until its ideology is as well.  Right now, both a military and an ideological war seem futile.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon lagniappe)

January 12, 2016 • 6:00 am

It’s Tuesday, it’s very cold, and it snowed again last night. Also, I got nothing: it’s one of those days when I go to work having nothing concrete that I want to write about on this site. (There are some mysterious explosions in Istanbul, though, and I learn that Rupert Murdoch just became engaged to Jerry Hall.) That’s the bad news. The good news is this video posted on George Takei’s website. I’m told it resembles Baby Hili’s behavior with Darwin, Cyrus’s d*g predecessor. One month from today, on Feb. 12, I’ll be giving the Darwin Day Lecture for the British Humanists in London with one R. Dawkins as moderator; info and tickets here. I’m looking forward to visiting Old Blighty, and hope to quaff some good pints of Landlord (not easy to find) in London and Oxford. On this day in 1967, psychology professor James Bedford died and his body was immediatly cryogenically frozen—the first person in history so preserved. Now, nearly five decades on, he’s still a human popsicle. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is arguing with Andrzej, just like her predecessor Pia did:

Hili: This stick is thinking that I’m not going to catch it.
A: This stick doesn’t think.
Hili: This stick is only pretending that it doesn’t think.

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In Polish:
Hili: Ten patyk myśli, że go nie złapię.
Ja: Ten patyk nie myśli.
Hili: Ten patyk udaje, że nie myśli.

And, in Wroclawek, poor, sad Leon is already missing the holidays and his favorite cat toy:

Leon: The Christmas Tree moved out…

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A fun and educational wildlife quiz

January 11, 2016 • 2:00 pm

I got an email from one Lin Taylor, who pointed me to a swell new quiz that she and a biology friend constructed. I’m not much for games, but this is a good one, because it not only challenges your knowledge of biology but it’s educational in several ways. Here’s her email and the link:

I’m a biologist turned programmer (I took one of Matthew Cobb’s zoology classes at university!) and long-time reader of your blog. A few weeks ago you published a post ‘how many of these weird animals do you know?’:

My friend and I were disappointed that this wasn’t an *actual* quiz, with multiple choice options… so being industrious people, we made one of our own:

It’s populated with 500 species from the Encyclopedia of Life database, so there is a pretty healthy variety of animals and plants in there (I haven’t seen any fungi or slime moulds yet, unfortunately…). We thought you might enjoy playing it.

I did enjoy playing it, and hope you will too. Again, it’s here, and here’s how it works. For any round you can choose between 3 and 5 questions, all at either “easy”, “medium,” or “hard.” With the first two you can have hints (unlimited for “easy”); but no hints for hard.

Your job is to guess the Latin binomial of a pictured species given three choices. For example, below is a “hard” one (not hard for me, as you see, because I recognize the Latin names of all felids!).  And this one is easier than most hard ones.

After each game you can play again, and will get new animals. Try it!

(Lin warns me that if too many people play the game, it could overwhelm the server.)

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Nick Cohen on reforming Islam: don’t look to faith to fix itself

January 11, 2016 • 1:00 pm
 We don’t have Orwell around any longer, but we do have Nick Cohen, who instantiates many of Orwell’s values: a hatred of totalitarianism, an overweening need and respect for the truth, and plain writing about the truth. He’s one of the few journalists whom I agree with down the line, though of course I haven’t sworn fealty to the man.

Cohen’s new piece in the Guardian, “Don’t look to the Pope for enlightenment values“, is his usual good stuff, criticizing the Vatican for calling Charlie Hebdo anniversary cover “blasphemous,” and especially for the hypocrisy of a Church whose history showed and whose scripture still shows approbation for awful crimes. But there’s one bit of the piece that struck me strongly.

First, though, we have Cohen’s definition of the Enlightenment, taken from Kant. It’s as good as any I’ve seen:

Kant provided a guide for the uninitiated. What is Enlightenment? he asked in 1784. It was nothing less than the freedom to argue for your own ideas without being forced to comply by authoritarians: the general who says: “Do not argue – drill!”; the taxman who says: “Do not argue – pay!”; the priest who says: “Do not argue – believe!” To overcome them, you must first understand that “the public use of one’s reason must be free at all times and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind”.
This is why I call the “regressive Left” the “authoritarian Left.” It’s less pejorative and more accurate. But putting that aside, Cohen names the Pope and his church as prime anti-Enlightenment authoritarians:
Kant’s generals, governments and priests bawl orders to this day. To update him, however, we would need to add an authoritarian the 18th century could not have imagined: the pseudo-liberal who says: “Do not argue – respect!” [JAC: here he’s referring to the so-called Regressive Left], They were bawling at the Parisian dead before their graves were dug and the loudest bawls came from Pope Francis.
. . . I’m damned if I can see any moral superiority, liberal, conservative or otherwise. The pope responded to the murders of satirists by lecturing their corpses. You cannot insult or make fun of the faith of others, he said, as he came as close as he dared to blaming the victims. A man’s religion was like his mother, he added. And anyone who insulted his mother could “expect a punch”.
Finally, I want you to look at the middle paragraph of the end of the piece (my emphasis):

Assad, Iran and Hezbollah engage in the mass murder of Sunnis. Isis returns the compliment and takes Yazidi, Shia and Christian women as their sex slaves. But then Moses commanded the Israelites to fall upon their enemies and kill everyone except “women that have not known a man by lying with him”. Those they could keep for themselves.

It may be objected that the New Testament is less gory that the Old. But Christ no more forbad slavery, rape, torture and genocide than did the Ten Commandments. Christians in power engaged in orgies of persecution of one another, of non-believers, of witches and of Jews. Indeed, the true Judaeo-Christian tradition was the 1,600-year tradition of Christians murdering Jews. What civilisation Judaism and Christianity possess came from the outside. They did not reform themselves, which is why calls for a Muslim reformation so spectacularly miss the point. Civilisation came from the battering that religion took from the Enlightenment, from sceptics, scientists, mockers and philosophers, who destroyed their myths and exposed the immorality of their taboos.

Charlie Hebdo told us a truth that too many do not like to admit: anyone who tries to do the same to Islam today can end up dead.

The more I think about the bit in bold, the more I agree with Cohen. I’ve always said, along with other liberals, that our own lucubrations about the perfidies of Islamic doctrine are pretty much bawling up a drainpipe. The real change that Islam needs, if such change is to come, will depend on moderate Muslims or even ex-Muslims: people like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  But, truth be told, while these people are immensely brave, passionate, dedicated, and arduous in their attempts to de-fang Islam, I haven’t seen much change. Now perhaps it’s because that change, in the hearts and minds of men and women, is invisible to us. But the tail of the distribution of extremist Islam hasn’t appeared to be drawing in.

People like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Maryam Namazie can be ignored because they’re apostates, and thus deserve to be killed rather than heard. Muslims secretly suspect that “liberal Muslims” like Maajid Nawaz are unbelievers, too, and pay them little heed.

Perhaps, then, the route to reforming a dangerous faith is not to ask those within the faith to fix it. After all, Cohen is right: the Church didn’t reform—as far as it has, which isn’t far*—because moderate Catholics decided to change it. It liberalized itself (or at least pretended to) because secular society moved ahead of its regressive values, forcing the Vatican to play moral catch-up if it wanted to keep its Catholics. As far as I can see, with few exceptions religious morality is always behind secular morality.  Do you think that Pope Francis is asking us to be tolerant of gays because the Church had a revelation from God? No, it’s because intolerance of gays, and opposition to gay marriage, gradually became seen as contrary to Enlightenment values. That put pressure on regular Catholics, which in turn puts pressure on the Vatican.

Maybe we should stop saying that the only reform of Islam will come from moderate Muslims. Maybe we ourselves should keep the pressure on—promoting those precious Enlightenment values and showing that many Muslims oppose them. The failure of nerve on the Left, which refuses to take this action for fear of its being seen as bigotry, may ultimately produce a failure to de-radicalize Islam.

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The Cohenator.
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*See Kristina Keneally’s corrective to her recent Prime Minister (both Catholics) “Tony Abbott, you do know you belong to a church that has not reformed, don’t you?“
 h/t: Phil

Plain talk about free will from a physicist: Stop saying you have it!

January 11, 2016 • 10:30 am

We’ve taken a break from the many discussions on this site about free will, but, cognizant of the risks, I want to bring it up again. I think nearly all of us agree that there’s no dualism involved in our decisions: they’re determined completely by the laws of physics. Even the pure indeterminism of quantum mechanics can’t give us free will, because that’s simple randomness, and not a result of our own “will.”

So although most of us are pure determinists about our behaviors, and reject the libertarian we-could-have-done-otherwise brand of free will embraced by most people and nearly all religionists, many of us are still compatibilists. By and large, compatibilists reject dualism and embrace determinism (and the randomness of quantum phenomena), but still say that humans have “free will”. (What is deemed “compatible” is determinism and some notion of free will.) To do that, they simply redefine the classical notion of dualistic free will so that it means something else: the lack of constraint by others, the evolved complexity of our brain that processes a variety of inputs before spitting out a “decision,” and so on.

Given that most people’s notion of free will is a dualistic ghost-in-the machine one, and that we know that’s false, it’s not clear why the classical definition of free will has been replaced by compatibilism rather than determinism. To those compatibilists who gladly embrace a new definition of “free will”, I ask these questions:

What is the point of redefining free will so that it’s compatible with determinism? And given that compatibilistic definitions are diverse and often conflicting, which one is right? Or does it even matter?

All too often, the point of compatibilism is not to create some philosophical advance, but merely an attempt to stave off the damage that rejecting dualistic free will is said to pose to society. Although compatibilists often cover that up, I think that many of their efforts are directed at keeping the Little People from seeing that determinism reigns. The motive is that people’s false belief that they really can make different decisions in exactly the same circumstances is essential to keep society running smoothly. In precisely the same way, religion-friendly atheists say that the Little People need their gods, because without them the fabric of society would unravel. (There are a lot of similarities between belief in free will and belief in God.)

Explicit statements that we need to retain some concept of free will for the good of society have been made by several people, including Dan Dennett, the most sophisticated purveyor of compatibilism (he has two books on it), philosopher Eddy Nahmias, and, in 2014, Azim Shariff and Kathleen Vohs, who warned of the dangers of rejecting free will in a Scientific American article (reference below, sadly not free). Vohs was co-author of a famous 2008 paper (reference below, pdf free) showing that reading a passage about determinism caused a short-term increase in students’ tendency to cheat in psychological tests. Their results, however, have not been replicated in two subsequent tests.

Nevertheless, in the Scientific American article Shariff and Vohs make an extended argument about the dangers of science telling us that we don’t have free will. Two snippets:

The less we believe in free will, it seems, the less strength we have to restrain ourselves from the urge to lie, cheat, steal and feed hot sauce to rude people.

Yes, in one of their studies people who read passages denying the existence of free will tended to put twice as much hot salsa on tortilla chips intended for someone else who’d acted like an ass. Can you imagine a society in which everyone tries to burn the palate of others? That would truly be a disaster!

After considering the potential effects that rejecting free will could have on society, Shariff and Vohs conclude this way:

In the 18th century Voltaire famously asserted that if God did not exist, we would need to invent him because the idea of God is so vital to keeping law and order in society. Given that a belief in free will restrains people from engaging in the kind of wrongdoing that could unravel an ordered society, the parallel is obvious. What will our society do if it finds itself without the concept of free will? It may well reinvent it.

And that’s precisely what they’ve done by inventing compatibilistic notions of free will!

Given the dubious claim that rejecting free will damages society, and the undoubted benefits to our judicial system of embracing determinism, I’m still baffled by why compatibilists continue to argue that we NEED some notion of free will. If you’re going to argue that in the comments, I’d appreciate your telling me why we have to have such a notion rather than just rejecting the idea and embracing determinism. And why is the notion you embrace better than the alternative forms of compatibilism? (As I said, compatibilism is a lot like religion.)

And if rejecting free will has bad effects on society, so what? Doesn’t the truth matter—the truth that neuroscience is telling us about the determinism of our actions? Those who are compatibilists for the good of society are no better than atheists who argue that while there’s probably no god, it’s crucial that the Little People still believe in one. My view is that we should simply find out what’s true, and then deal with it.

Finally, free will is important because it’s one of those issues where philosophy and science can really make a difference in peoples’ lives. Science tells us that our behavior is not under our conscious control, and philosophy can tell us how to apply that to issues like reward and punishment. There are not that many areas of academic philosophy that can actually affect the lives of the average person, but this is one. Why on Earth do we waste our time arguing about compatibilist definitions of free will, definitions that are too arcane to affect society or the average person?

I’ve gone on too long, but I wanted to call your attention to a good new critique of free will—both the dualistic and compatibilist verisons—by Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. It’s on the BackReAction website, and is called “Free will is dead, let’s bury it“. Hossenfelder doesn’t pull any punches, and she writes very well. I’ll give a couple of excerpts:

There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it cannot be influenced by you, whatever you think “you” are. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no “will” – there is just some randomness sprinkled over the determinism.

In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way.

These are the only two options, and all other elaborations on the matter are just verbose distractions. It doesn’t matter if you start talking about chaos (which is deterministic), top-down causation (which doesn’t exist), or insist that we don’t know how consciousness really works (true but irrelevant). It doesn’t change a thing about this very basic observation: there isn’t any known law of nature that lets you meaningfully speak of “free will”.

I consider compatibilism one of those “verbose distractions.” She then goes after the Chicken Little Compatibilists and cites the Shariff and Vohs article (that’s how I found it):

This conclusion that free will doesn’t exist is so obvious that I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t widely accepted. The reason, I am afraid, is not scientific but political. Denying free will is considered politically incorrect because of a wide-spread myth that free will skepticism erodes the foundation of human civilization.

For example, a 2014 article in Scientific American addressed the question “What Happens To A Society That Does not Believe in Free Will?” The piece is written by Azim F. Shariff, a Professor for Psychology, and Kathleen D. Vohs, a Professor of Excellence in Marketing (whatever that might mean).

In their essay, the authors argue that free will skepticism is dangerous: “[W]e see signs that a lack of belief in free will may end up tearing social organization apart,” they write. “[S]kepticism about free will erodes ethical behavior,” and “diminished belief in free will also seems to release urges to harm others.” And if that wasn’t scary enough already, they conclude that only the “belief in free will restrains people from engaging in the kind of wrongdoing that could unravel an ordered society.”

To begin with I find it highly problematic to suggest that the answers to some scientific questions should be taboo because they might be upsetting. They don’t explicitly say this, but the message the article send is pretty clear: If you do as much as suggest that free will doesn’t exist you are encouraging people to harm others. So please read on before you grab the axe.

Hossenfelder then goes on to criticize the Vohs and Schooler study for not showing what it claims to, and then dispels the canard that rejecting free will also denies people responsibility for what they do.

At the end she draws a connection between quantum mechanics and free will—a connection that eludes me. I know of the so-called “observer effect,” but didn’t realize that it, or Bell’s Theorem rejecting the existence of local hidden variables, had any connection to dualistic free will. So I invite readers to read what’s below and then enlighten me. And of course you are still welcome to defend compatibilism if you want, but do tell me why you think we have to retain a notion of free will. (All of us, of course, feel that we have free will, but that’s irrelevant.) At any rate, tell me what this means, especially the part I’ve bolded.

The reason I am hitting on the free will issue is not that I want to collapse civilization, but that I am afraid the politically correct belief in free will hinders progress on the foundations of physics. Free will of the experimentalist is a relevant ingredient in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Without free will, Bell’s theorem doesn’t hold, and all we have learned from it goes out the window.

This option of giving up free will in quantum mechanics goes under the name “superdeterminism” and is exceedingly unpopular. There seem to be but three people on the planet who work on this, ‘t Hooft, me, and a third person of whom I only learned from George Musser’s recent book (and whose name I’ve since forgotten).

h/t: Hector

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Vohs, K. D. and J. W. Schooler. 2008. The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychol. Sci. 19:49-54.

Shariff, A. F. and K. D. Vohs. 2014. The world without free will. Scientific American. Scientific American 310:76-79.