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.
Taken by reader Ben Batt on Magnetic Island, just off the coast of Townsville, Australia, this picture hides—not very well—a Bush Stone-curlew (Burhinus grallarius). These birds crouch down and freeze when approached. This is an easy one compared to some other “spot-the-X” posts we’ve had, but remember that this degree of crypsis can still fool a predator, and that’s all that matters. A hungry predator doesn’t have time to minutely inspect the environment.
This video is over three years old, but I hadn’t seen it until just now. The British comedy team of Mitchell and Webb do a good job of spoofing Richard Dawkins, with Robert Webb playing Dawkin’s agent, looking for new attack-bait after The God Delusion. David Mitchell does a great imitation of Dawkins’s voice—at least I assume it’s an imitation, since I’ve never heard Mitchell speaking as himself.
And if you haven’t seen Mitchell and Webb’s brilliant “Homeopathic Emergency Room” sketch, click on this link.
h/t: GBJames
You can pretty much be sure that when the New York Times carries an op-ed discussing either the genesis of ISIS or potential solutions to its brutality, religion will be downplayed. Well, yesterday’s op-ed by writer Aatish Taseer, called “ISIS and the return of history,” is a welcome exception, though as usual I have a few beefs with it. (I clearly have a gene for petulance).
The good part is that Taseer’s piece is pretty sensible, pointing at the rise of modernity and the hatred thereof as a cause of Muslim disaffection, and pointedly ignoring the regressive Left’s self-blaming based on Western imperialism. As he notes:
Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.
Taseer’s on to something here, of course, there are a couple of problems. One is a problem of omission: why do the youths of these modern states act so disaffected? He says only that “a certain dispiriting experience of modernity, felt often as the loss of a sense of self and of old ways, exacerbates these demands. This is what lies behind this violent need to reclaim history.” But that’s not very convincing, for there are plenty of societies (China and Taiwan come to mind) that have made the transition to modernity without needing to reach back at an imagined past. To me, a better explanation is that the disaffection comes from dysfunctional societies: the kind of societies where ISIS, the Taliban, and Boko Haram arose. Modernity isn’t so dispiriting if you’ve benefited from it!
Also, Taseer’s vision of an ancient and more benign Islam may be relatively accurate, but for nonbelievers the areas it conquered were hardly the paradisiacal and multicultural society Taseer paints:
The jihadists in Syria and Iraq, Mr. McCants [William McCants, author of The ISIS Apocalypse] told me, are “infatuated” with Harun al-Rashid, the great Abbasid caliph whose court reportedly inspired “One Thousand and One Nights.” “They see him as the pinnacle of success, and the caliphate that he ruled over as the golden age,” Mr. McCants said, “but they elide all those parts of his rule that don’t mesh with their own.” The eighth-century caliph being idolized by the Islamic State practiced a far more lenient rule than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does. Harun was tolerant of Shiites and religious minorities. His court would engage in freewheeling debates over matters of faith. “You could play musical instruments,” Mr. McCants said. “He loved to drink wine, he loved men.”
Jews and Christians in these communities (people called dhimmis) were allowed to live, and even practice their faiths (inconspiculously), but had restrictive freedom and were taxed. But let’s grant Taseer the fact that modern extremist Islamists are indeed practicing behaviors not seen in earlier parts of the Caliphate. The question is why.
And here’s where Taseer gives religion a pass, blaming “history” rather than faith. As he says, this return to the past is not unique to extremist Islam, but is present elsewhere, including Buddhist and Hindu societies:
When I was in Sri Lanka in 2013, the Bodu Bala Sena, a radical Buddhist nationalist group, had conjured up a prudish Buddha who scolded young girls about their clothes and told them what time they should be home at night. In reality, the Buddha, like many Eastern thinkers, was generally reticent on the subject of sexual morality
. . . Similarly, in India, a breach has appeared between a sensuous and liberal past and an ugly, puritanical present. In my daily reading of Sanskrit poetry, there are women with disheveled hair, half-open eyes and cheeks covered in sweat from the exertion of coitus. But turn on the television and the minister of culture, who says that the Hindu holy books are ideal texts for teaching moral values, informs modern Indians that “girls wanting a night out” may be all right elsewhere, but it is “not part of Indian culture.”
Note that in India, imperialism can’t be blamed for the rise of extremist Hinduism. That’s a fairly recent development, and the British quit India in 1947. (Note as well that Indian protests against British occupation were by and large nonviolent, and, despite pervasive poverty, India never developed a movement like ISIS. What happened during Partition was not the killing of the British, but the wholesale slaughter of Hindus and Muslims by each other, and almost entirely on the basis of religion.Trains full of Muslims were slaughtered by Hindus, for example, after the penises of males were inspected—Muslims practice circumcision and Hindus don’t.)
But, after a brief allusion to the fact that the Qur’an might be a bit nastier than other scripture in inspiring violence, Taseer still claims that the “return to history” is the main problem:
Islam, with its rich textual history and detailed recordings of the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad, offers the faithful an especially aggressive blueprint for turning the past into a weapon against the present. But the return of history is not specific to Islam. All over the old world, the spread of modernity and the wearing down of tradition have led to a frantic need to repossess the past. But this act of reclamation, through an ever-closer adherence to text without context, does not give back what was lost. It creates something radical and new — and dangerous.
But the history that Islamist and Hindu nationalists aspire to return is one soaked in religion. After all, it’s the dictates of scripture that shaped those societies, inspiring, for instance, ISIS to adhere to a literal Qur’an and behaviors derived from the hadith. The West, too, has had to cope with modernity, but hasn’t been so shaken up by “the shock of the new” that Americans long for the days of the frontier and its violence. The aspects of the past that are so odious to opponents of ISIS or Hindutva come from scripture.
I’m not saying that the secular past was all beer and skittles: as Steve Pinker argues, morality has increased most everywhere in the last five or six centuries, and bad treatment of the poor, women, and animals was simply part and parcel of society. But imagine if there was no religion—not just now, but in the past. What would regressive Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists be grasping for?
In that way Taseer manages to exculpate religion, and I don’t think he’s 100% correct. But at least he’s free from the tiresome self-blaming of the Western Left.
It’s nearing the end of the year, but I’m confident that we won’t see an article more wooly-headed than this one before New Year’s Day. So I’m awarding the Most Odious Osculation of Faith (MOOF) Award to the big Atlantic article, “Why God will not die“, by Jack Miles. True, it was published in the December, 2014 issue, but eluded my attention till now, and deserves a quick look, as well as the award, for being worst piece in its genre over the last 12 months.
The subtitle (also the piece’s last sentence), “Science keeps revealing how much we don’t, perhaps can’t, know. Yet humans seek closure, which should make religious pluralists of us all,” tells the tale, and reveals its shaky thesis: we should make room for religion because a.) science doesn’t know everything; in fact, it makes us more ignorant, and b.) we want to know everything (i.e., find “closure”). Ergo: Make Room for God. Although Miles is an atheist, he seems to evince atheism’s worst facet: making bad arguments for osculating the rump of faith.
I’ll be brief, for wading through the piece—and in a venue as respected as The Atlantic—was truly a trial, equivalent to reading the part of the Bible where God tells the Jews, in minute and tedious detail, how to build the Ark of the Covenant. Just two points.
Miles does down science. Here’s his beef: science raises more questions than it answers, so our ignorance increases:
Well, the scientists did demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs won his belated Nobel Prize. And the success of CERN has indeed pointed the way to further research. At the same time, that success has increased our ignorance even more than I had imagined. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, concluded a 2013 article titled “Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know” with the following rather chastened sentences: “Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.” If science is the pinnacle of human knowing and physics the pinnacle of science, and if physics is deemed crucially limited even by the gifted few—Weinberg’s “we”—who know it best, where does that leave the rest of us?
I have begun to imagine human knowledge and ignorance as tracing a graph of asymptotic divergence, such that with every increase in knowledge, there occurs a greater increase in ignorance. The result is that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.
While admitting in passing that science does tell us stuff, here Miles makes a specious argument: that science actually increases our ignorance. That’s bogus, as it’s based on a specious definition of increased ignorance as “realizing that something is out there that we don’t fully understand.” But ignorance, according to every definition I’ve seen (one follows), means something like this: “a lack of knowledge, understanding, or education : the state of being ignorant.” So, for example, discovering that there is dark matter and dark energy doesn’t increase our ignorance, as Miles implies, but decreases it, because we’ve discovered a phenomenon that we don’t fully understand. Ignorance simply means that that we lack knowledge, and, as science gives us more knowledge, and, indeed, raises more questions, our ignorance actually decreases.
The fact is that there is in principle a finite quantity of human ignorance, comprising every fact about the universe and about other universes, and that ignorance remains ignorance whether or not we realize there are new questions we can’t answer. Ergo, everything we find out actually decreases our ignorance. Miles last paragraph above is meant to denigrate science for actually increasing our ignorance, therefore providing an increasing gap that can be filled with—guess what?—faith and religion.
Miles makes room for religion. If you can fully understand the following, you’re a better person than I (I’m counting on our resident Faith Interpreter Sastra to help out here):
Yet if a faith of some sort is inevitable, why should the NSRN not devise something that suits it? Its language may teeter at times between assumptions of superiority and professions of humility, but so does conventionally religious language. Professionally, I judge that its work complements rather than undermines the work that my colleagues and I have done on our anthology. [The Norton Anthology of World Religions.]
Am I kidding myself? No doubt, but let’s be clear: there is a component of self-kidding—a suspension of disbelief—in even the most serious human enterprises. (Does anyone really believe that all men—and women—are created equal? But recognizing the delusional premise of American democracy needn’t undermine our faith in it.) The element of play is particularly, though by no means uniquely, prominent in religion.
I think Miles doesn’t quite understand that “equal” here means “equal in rights, opportunities and respect,” not “equal in behavior, strength, and other traits”. But putting that aside, this is a weak-minded justification of faith, further undermined by adding the postmodern notion of “play” (jouer), which in fact is NOT prominent in religion. If Catholicism is playful, it sure has fooled me!
And do you get this?:
Science is immortal, but you are not. History is immortal: Earth could be vaporized, and on some unimaginably distant planet on some unimaginably remote future date, another civilization’s historians could still choose to use the terrestrial year as a unit of time measurement. But where does that leave you? You have a life to live here and now. “Tell me,” the poet Mary Oliver asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” We never truly know how to reply to that challenge, do we, since more knowledge—the knowledge we do not have—could always justify holding current plans in abeyance just a little longer. But when life refuses to wait any longer and the great game begins whether you have suited up or not, then a demand arises that religion—or some expedient no more fully rational than religion—must meet. You’re going to go with something. Whatever it is, however rigorous it may claim to be as either science or religion, you’re going to know that you have no perfect warrant for it. Yet, whatever you call it, you’re going to go with it anyway, aren’t you? Pluralism at its deepest calls on you to allow others the closure that you yourself cannot avoid.
The tenets of faith might not be true, but you need something to get through life. It may be irrational (and he implies in the next sentence that science is no more rational than religion), but it gives us closure. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I don’t turn to science out of fear of mortality. I turn to science because it makes my present life much richer.
And yes, I allow people the pluralism of being religious, but I don’t allow them freedom from criticism for embracing ridiculous and unsustainable propositions. “Just believe something” is pretty crappy advice, especially coming from a nonbeliever. 
The “Slo Mo Guys” have filmed Lloyd the Tubby Tabby making an acrobatic leap to get a slice of ham. As the notes indicate, “Gav bribes Lloyd the cat with some ham so she performs the famous cat double-jump in super slow motion. Shot at 2,500 frames per second. (100 times slower).” I am amazed that the cat can get enough leverage to move upward on a perfectly vertical fence–twice! Such is the allure of ham. . .
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According to CatChannel.com, and TheState.com, Morticia, a therapeutic tabby in Lexington County, South Carolina, may be given the boot by the county and asked to leave the Coroner’s Office where she works. Although, as the video below attests, Morticia provides effective counseling to grief-stricken people at that office, her furry presence calming folks down, the county considers the cat a danger, liable to bite, scratch, and aggravate cat allergies.
That’s dumb, because she’s a sweet animal. Rescued at six months and desperately ill, Morticia is now a fixture in the office, but her presence is threatened by AILUROPHOBES:
“I’ve asked her to find a nice home for the cat,” County Council Chairman Johnny Jeffcoat of Irmo said. “Our liability for that is huge.”
Fisher, however, isn’t backing down, divulging that Morticia is up-to-date on all of her immunizations and spayed. Additionally, she has a friendly disposition, and is kept in a back room where the public can only see and handle her upon request.
With these facts on her side, Fisher intends to appeal the feline’s eviction to the nine council members, hoping that they will make an exception to the rule that pets can’t be kept in county buildings, and allow her to keep the kitty on board. Though Fisher hopes things will go her way, she has numerous offers of a new home for Morticia should the council members hold firm to their former ruling.
What a bunch of grinches! Note, though, that the comments on the piece are uniformly in favor of Morticia being allowed to keep her job.
One of many positive comments:
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Finally, remember Skidmark, the orange kitten found wandering on the highway and rescued by a motorcyclist? Well, here’s an update on Skids, and she’s doing fine! She has a new toy, too, though I worry about cat toys in which the moggie chases something but is never able to catch it.
Remember to send me your GOOD wildlife photos. Today is Spider Saturday, and we have photographs by Jacques Hausser from Switzerland, along with his notes:
Agelena labyrinthica, Agelenidae. A male on a part of his web extending across a leaf. Male spiders collect and store their sperm in the end part of their palps, used like syringes to transfer it into females. Note the long spinnerets.
Argiope bruennichi, Araneidae. The wasp spider. The whitish ribbon of silk crossing the center of the web is called the stabilamentum. Its function is unknown – but it allows you to identify the web easily!
Tetragnatha extensa, Tetragnathidae, trying to go unnoticed, but still controlling her web with two legs.
I’m adding a note from Wikipedia here, along with their photo, just to show the camouflage behavior:
When alarmed, it will sit along a plant stem, a blade of grass or the central vein of a leaf, with its four front legs pointing forwards, and its four back legs pointing backwards for camouflage.T. extensa is able to walk on the surface of water, where it can move faster than on land.
Enoplognatha ovata, Theridiidae. This one belongs to the pale “lineata” morph; I never spotted the colored form “redimita”, AKA “Candy Stripe Spider” in my surroundings.
Salticus scenicus, Slaticidae [JAC: often called the “zebra spider” for obvious reasons]; a jumping spider running on a plastic bag (sorry for this poor “landscape”, but here it was).
Phalangium opilio. A harvestman or “Daddy-long-legs” (order Opiliones). It is not a spider (they don’t build webs or produce silk), but still belongs to the class of Arachnids. This one is a male, recognisable by his very long palps.
It’s Saturday, the sparsest day for readership at this site: is it even worth me posting? It’s going to rain today, even with a high of 59°F (15°C)—a spectacularly warm day for mid-December. But the rain will continue on and off till Wednesday. On this day in 1901, Marconi received the first radio signal transmitted across the Atlantic, Delhi (my favorite Indian city) replaced Calcutta as the nation’s capital in 1911, and, in 1963, Kenya became independent from the United Kingdom. On this day in 1915, Frank Sinatra was born (he died at 83) and Dionne Warwick was born in 1940, making her 75 today. Wikipedia also declares that an orca, Keiko, who played Willy in the movie “Free Willy” died on this day of pneumonia in 2003 at the young age of 27. That’s the first time I’ve seen an animal celebrated on a Wikipedia days-of-the-year site. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is only three years old, with many years left to converse with Andrzej—and amuse his staff:
Hili: Do you want me on the pillow or under the pillow?
A: Maybe it’s better on the pillow.
Hili: Czy chcesz, żebym była na poduszce, czy pod poduszką?
Ja: Może jednak na poduszce.
Let’s finish the week with some Honorary Cats™. The CBC has a series of fox pictures by Ian Murray from Nova Scotia, one of which took first place in the “baby animals” category of the National Wildlife Federation’s annual photo contest. Here it is:
Murray’s comments from the CBC site:
Ian Murray of Wallace River spent May through July watching the fox family this summer to capture the tender moment.
“The foxes were great: their shyness at first, then their acceptance of me once they knew I was no threat. And best of all was their interactions between themselves and especially with their mother,” he told CBC News.
“She was, is such a good, attentive mom. She almost wasted away to nothing over the summer as she put all her energy into hunting and bringing home food for the babies.”
And I might as well put up a few of the other winners:
Dragana Connaughton, Palm Beach Florida. “Birds”, second place. I love this photo! And note the even spacing: those birds like their personal space.
Crisscrossing a vivid sky, utility lines offer a sunset perch for a massive flock of starlings. “It looked like a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds,” says Dragana Connaughton, who spotted the scene while driving home. She stopped to capture this study of pattern and light.
Cindy Goeddel, Bozeman, Montana. “Mammals”, first place.
Deep snow, long shadows and a willful line of bison yield a powerful portrait of a charismatic animal in one of America’s most iconic landscapes: Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. A professional guide and photographer, Cindy Goeddel made this image on a frigid February afternoon while leading tourists through the park, home to more than 4,000 genetically pure wild American bison.
Chris Schenker, Hopkinton, Massachusetts. “Connecting people with nature”, first place:
A whirling tornado of bohar snappers dwarfs a diver photographing the fish off Ras Mohammed National Park at the southern tip of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
And two photos of thirsty animals. The first, from Kathy Noteboom of Bayfield, Wisconsin, won second place in the same category as the photo above.
European honeybees find cool relief on a summer day, using their strawlike tongues, or proboscises, to sip water from a backyard birdbath.
Finally, Linda Krueger of Hastings, Minnesota took second prize in the “backyard wildlife” category with this photo.
When this black-capped chickadee swooped in to grab a drink from a garden hose, Linda Krueger grabbed her camera to catch the whimsical moment.
I’m going to add one reader’s photo here, which just arrived in my inbox. It’s by Anne-Marie Cournoyer of Montreal, and I’ll call it “Winter Squirrel,” even though it’s not quite winter. Look how chubby and furry it is. Truly, Canadian squirrels are extra fat this winter!
h/t: Caroline J.