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.
I really don’t like Whole Foods. It’s snobby, overpriced, and, worst of all, sells homeopathic remedies and alt-medicine magazines. If they’re serious about health, they wouldn’t sell ineffectual—and therefore harmful to the afflicted—”remedies.”
But I digress. I became aware from this tw**t of a hilarious Facebook page, “Overheard at Whole Foods“. That page is as packed with woo as Sedona, Arizona!
But, as the Ginsu Knife people say, “WAIT! There’s more!”:
And my favorite:
We must at all costs maintain the organic integrity of our purchases!
Here’s today’s Dilbert strip by Scott Adams. It’s a rare comic that has such a good take on “free will”—at least the contracausal or “ghost in the machine” version:
The short New Yorker piece, by Patrick House, “What is elegance in science?“, bothers me, and for reasons I don’t quite understand. I’d appreciate it if readers could have a look (you can read it in 5 minutes) and weigh in below. What bothers me consciously about the piece is that is basically says nothing, but, in true New Yorker style, uses a lot of pretty words to do so. The last paragraph in particular suffers from that problem, especially the part I’ve bolded.
Last year, neuroscientists in the United Kingdom put expert mathematicians in an fMRI and tested whether their brains responded to equations the way that other people’s brains respond to, say, a beautiful painting or piece of music. They found that some equations—often simple, powerful ones like Euler’s identity, eiπ +1 = 0, which joins together five mathematical constants—caused “activity in the same part of the emotional brain, namely field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC), as the experience of beauty derived from other sources.” Things are not always clear in the brain, though; it is impossible to say for certain whether activity in the mOFC is a response or a precursor to an emotion, or whether it’s the emotion itself. Likely, any full description will be messy, turbulent. But within that turbulence will be, finally, an explanation for what it means to know something when one sees it, or for what the “great liquid whip” of Roger Federer’s forehand and the “whip-like thrashing” of the roundworm tell us about string theory, or for how it came to be that three pounds of inelegance thought up such a concept as elegance in the first place.
Umm. . . .I don’t think so.
I suppose what bothers me unconsciously is the New Yorker’s seeming lack of understanding of, and respect for, science as it’s actually done. Yes, their medical articles are often good, but there’s far too much science-bashing. This often takes the form of using anecdotes to make generalities (often “counterintuitive generalities”), as does Malcolm Gladwell, or Jonah Lehrer’s specious “decline effect,” in which, he implied, scientific findings are inevitably doomed to being proven wrong. (Ironically, Lehrer resigned from the New Yorker after he was caught fabricating quotes and plagiarizing.) The idea that science undergoes a complete turnover is not true, of course: the formula for water, the fact of evolution, and the observation that DNA is a double helix are “truths” that, while provisional in a technical sense, are likely to remain true for the forseeable future!
My worry is that the magazine, which wields enormous influence among intellectuals, is wedded to a covert form of postmodernism—one that sees scientific truths as always dubious and liable to revision, and sees the humanities as just as much a source of objective truth as is science, if no more so. After all, Lehrer became famous for a book called Proust Was a Neuroscientist. (No he wasn’t!) I’m still open to debating whether the humanities and arts give us “other ways of knowing,” but that is surely questionable, and I haven’t yet seen an objective truth about the cosmos conveyed initially and solely by the humanities. What’s not debatable is that the humanities have given us as much objective truth as does science. They haven’t, though they’ve immensely enriched human existence in other ways. (Again, see my discussion in FvF.) Yes, rarely The New Yorker does have some good, hard science, but it’s hard to find amidst the anecdotes.
A knowledge of science is of immense value in modern life, and one would think that The New Yorker, which caters to the intellectuals, would give it some pride of place in their pages.
At any rate, the plaque below, affixed to a building at 28 W. 44th Street in New York, suggests that these attitudes have persisted for some time:
Reader Chris sent me this item with the note, “I am loath to call this one interesting, but it’s right up your alley; Christians pushing for apologetics in college to stop the hemorrhaging. Then again, consider the source.”
This has given rise to the execrable movie “God’s Not Dead,” in which a religious student outwits a professor who spews nonstop atheism at his students, and, at the end, the professor finds Jesus after being hit by a car (see the trailer here). It’s also spawned the Jack Chick tracts in which professors are portrayed as God-hating, Darwin-loving nitwits. A classic example is the famous “Big Daddy” strip. Here are the last few panels of that strip, in which the pwned professor gives up, and his lies about evolution are characterized as destroying belief:
In truth, most professors are believers, though many aren’t. But few of us impose our atheism on students as does Kevin Sorbo in “God’s Not Dead”, or even bring it up. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my nonbelief in three decades of teaching. Yes, I teach evolution and tell students that there’s no evidence for creationism, and let them see how the evidence militates against one view and for the other. But I’ve heard of no professors that act like the pompous Christian-bashing professor of “God’s not dead.”
And it’s not just evolution-hating fundamentalists who fear the Atheist Professoriat. The real reason Christians fear college is because they know that it encourages doubt and thinking, and they know that those attitudes are inimical to accepting blind faith. Young people are leaving the Church in droves, and, as the Barna Institute found, three of the reasons that kids vote with their feet is that churches seem unfriendly to science, that churches are overprotective, and that churches are not friendly to young folks who doubt. To Christians, doubt is the enemy, and to professors, especially those of us in science, doubt is a great virtue.
At any rate, the Examiner reports that Fearless Faith is running a series of seminars designed to gird the students’ loins against heathen professors and their nefarious influence.
An apologetics training in response to an increasing number of grieving parents who have heard these words from their college students looks at ways students can speak respectfully, but firmly to their professors, many of whom are atheists.
The instructors at Fearless Faith are convinced a contributing factor to why 70 percent of young evangelicals admit to abandoning church is a lack of worldview and apologetics training for students in how to resist the influence of their atheist professors.
Frank Turek, founder of CrossExamined.org and author of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, offers the Fearless Faith seminar to address the fact that college professors are five times more likely to be atheists than the general public and may be hostile toward Christianity.
Unprepared students who find the college environment frightening and toxic can easily fall into a crisis of faith.
. . . Fearless Faith is a day-long seminar given at churches to teach students fearlessness about defending their faith. Students will learn how to respond calmly and respectfully when their faith is challenged, how to find flaws in common arguments for atheism, and how to defend the basic tenets of Christianity.
God forbid that they should begin doubting! This program is evidence that many Christians don’t want students to doubt (in contrast to some liberal religionists who claim that doubt is essential to belief), but need them to accept faith blindly (that’s why it’s called “faith”).
Here’s one more bit:
Analytical thinking and certainty about one’s own beliefs are necessary for this [Fearless Faith] approach.
“When your Marxist professor lectures on topics like socialism and cultural relativism, just take good notes and try to think of questions that expose flaws in his worldview,” Adams recommended. [Mike Adams is a Fearless Faith instructor.]
“For example, ‘Professor, isn’t putting Jews in ovens wrong regardless of the geographical location and time period of the people doing it? In other words, isn’t there such thing as a universal moral code?'”
This shows again the strong connection between Christianity and the claim that a universal moral code can come only from God. (This “moral law is one bit of “evidence” touted by National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as evidence for a deity.) But, of course, the “moral code” is not universal, nor does it defy explanation by both evolution and secular reason. Faith Verus Fact takes us this issue in detail.
It’s a curious but telling that Christians feel the need to have such programs and seminars to combat what they see as the onslaught of atheism, while atheists don’t have similar programs to combat the onslaught of religion, which, in the US, is far stronger than the occasional lucubrations by nonbelievers. Atheists don’t need such programs because, in general, we are much more willing to examine our worldviews, and because we prize doubt far more strongly than do Christians. Doubt and lack of evidence for religious claims are, after all, what led many of us to give up God in the first place.
And here’s a video touting the Fearless Faith program:
The tank is filling up, but keep sending in your photos.
We have three contributors today; the first is Matthew Rave, who sends us another pareidolia image of Jesus. These are becoming distressingly frequent:
This is a beautiful insect I cannot identify (I am a theoretical physicist, not a biologist). For context, I live in the mountains of North Carolina. [Readers: help out with this moth]
This is the shadow of a plant, which continues a theme of a recent pic you posted…this time, it’s not an angel but the Lord himself wielding a mighty sword:
Steven Barnard sent a photo of a Honeybee and ant feeding on a Rocky Mountain bee plant (Cleome serrulata)
And some photos from a new contributor, Gregory Zolnerowich:
Attached are a few wildlife photos for your blog. They were all taken by me at the Konza Prairie Biological Station near Manhattan, Kansas.
Bison calf:
Damselfly [species unidentified]:
The antlion, Glenurus gratus. [JAC: this is in the order Neuroptera, and the larvae are fierce predators that dig conical pits in the dirt. Into those pits fall hapless insects, mainly ants, and they’re unable to climb out of the holes, both because the sides are slippery and because the larva also hurls sand at its prey, knocking them to the bottom where the antlion grabs them with its jaws. I used to keep them as pets when I was a child, feeding them ants. A video is below.]
Here’s a clip of how the antlion builds its nefarious pit:
Professor Ceiling Cat has a busy day today, several appointments and a radio interview (recorded now, broadcast Sunday), so posting may be light. Like Maru, I do my best. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the hot weather has abated, as it has in Chicago, and Hili is making enigmatic statements:
A: Why are you in such a rush?
Hili: I’m chasing after yesterday.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu tak pędzisz?
Hili: Gonię wczorajszy dzień.
*******
Leon’s mountain adventures are coming to a close; I believe he returns home today. And he’s clearly exhausted from hiking:
Leon: Why didn’t mountain want to come to Muhammad?
Today.com reports that Corduroy, who’s just turned 26, has been declared by the Guinness Book of World Records (now a website) as the world’s oldest cat.
Guinness announced the news Thursday, when Corduroy was 26 years and 13 days old. Born August 1, 1989, in Oregon, he’s lived with Ashley Reed Okura since she picked him from a litter when she was 6 years old.
“We are thrilled!” she told Guinness, according to Thursday’s press release. “I bought Corduroy a mouse [JAC: WTF?] to celebrate. He is such a mellow, cool old cat and it is wonderful to share him with the world. … Corduroy has been through all of my life’s major events and I feel blessed he is still healthy and enjoying life. We hope to continue to give him a good life for years to come.”
Here’s the Guinness video:
Courtesy of Guinness World Records Oldest living cat at age 26 years 13 days. Born August 1, 1989, the feisty feline has lived with owner Ashley Reed Okura of Sisters, Oregon since she was just seven years old and he was a tiny kitten!
Okura said the secret to his longevity is “allowing him to be a cat: hunting and getting plenty of love!” She added, “Growing up on 160 acres in Oregon, I allowed Corduroy to roam the ranch freely, so he always gets lots of exercise.”
. . . Corduroy’s interests include “sharp cheddar and mice,” the latter of which he only gets “on special occasions or if he catches them,” Guinness reported. The cat also spends the bulk of his days “roaming the outdoors, getting pet [sic], eating and taking catnaps.”
Do remember, though, that Corduroy is a long way from attaining the record held by the oldest cat ever recorded, Creme Puff, who lived to the astounding age of 38 years and 3 days! Creme Puff’s owner was the crusty but soft-hearted Texan Jake Perry, who raised many record holders, attributing their longevity to his giving them bacon, eggs, and asparagus for breakfast. I’ve posted about Perry here, and if you go to the great video at the bottom of that post, you’ll see Creme Puff, at age 35, appear around 7:17 in the video.
We’ve received a bountiful supply of new entries for the Fact vs Faith in Strange Places contest. Jerry has extended the deadline from Aug. 20 to August 31, so you have eleven more days to get your entries in. The winner gets a first-printing, hardbound edition of FvF, autographed and, if you like, with a cat drawn in it. Here are the latest entries, and they’re great! This is going to be a tough one to judge.
Reader Mike Bendzela sent this in.
A Baldwin apple tree in Standish, Maine is pretty incongruous, no?
(Baldwin: triploid, self-infertile, biennial bearer.)
Then there’s the biblical reference…
P. S. I’m actually biting a Gravenstein, not a Baldwin, as Baldwin’s aren’t ready until October. I don’t know what Eve ate.
[Nobody knows, Genesis just refers to it as fruit פֶּ֫רִי and various translations and mis-translations appear to have been responsible for apple becoming synonymous with this story ~ Grania]
Charlie Jones send us this one saying:
My daughter was inspired to set up this photo. This is the expression I make when thinking.
Andrea Kurita sent us some gorgeous photos of a Buddhist temple along with this entry.
I do not intend to submit this photo to the contest because it’s not a selfie (really!). It’s a product of this afternoon’s jaunt to the Saifuku-ji (西福寺) Buddhist temple in Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, which I thought would amuse you. I composed and shot it with my iPhone, so due to the angle the exposure is poor, alas — my hubby held up my iPad Mini, which came out sharp enough. [Fear not, Jerry has deemed this Entry-worthy].
CJ went on a pilgrimage to the source of the book (Jerry’s lab complex).
One can look on my entry in 2 ways …
1) Waiting for a professor at the door of his office/lab to autograph his latest book, looking at a nonexistent watch, knowing school is not in session, and he’s on a book tour (actually on the day you returned from said tour) is incongruous. Also, none of your campus squirrels would come near me or your book, but then I had no noms to entice them.
or
2) I’m a contrarian and this is a complete disregard of the contest rules and I have no chance of winning anything.
PS
Great door mat [JAC: This Mickey Mouse doormat was cut for me by the departmental administrator from leftover carpet that was installed in her office]
Tim Petersime undertook a foray into enemy territory.
I live about 3 miles from this ‘Exhibit’ (I refuse to call it a Museum). The saddest thing about this place is that when my son & I were there this morning to take the picture, we saw about half a dozen 6-10 years old pile out of a mini-van in the parking lot.
Finally, Peter N submitted his entry with a title WMSSH.
The title is an acronym for “Wise men still seek Him” — transubstantiation and all that! My copy of FvF is
in fact open to page 83 where you mention that potty idea.
