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.
This commenter won’t be posting here again, as I don’t want creationists infesting the site (that’s the road to perdition!), and they have nothing new to say to me. And almost never are they open minded enough to come around to evolution. It happens, and I’ve heard the stories as well as met converts (e.g., two once-Orthodox Jews I met at TAM, who, learning that evolution was indeed true, left the faith and lost their friends and family). But this is a site for rational discourse and evolution happens to be true. So is a spherical Earth, but I’m curious how people can accept a flat one, so I’m going to let them comment and, if they wish, argue to the point where it’s pointless to continue.
Anyway, this came in an hour ago; it’s also a comment on yesterday’s Flat Earth post, but this person, named “Mking” wants to harangue about evolution:
Only children believes that (Cartoons) Animation Films do talk. But the adult knew that the voices from this Films are real human voices.
Any adult or educated humans that believes in Evolution is just like a child who believes that Cartoons actually talk.
Evolution till today had no real proof. From non living matters to living matters. Only the biggest of all fools agreed to that.
Anyone who believes in Evolution is telling us that, humans can in years to come develop goat or cow Hoof and in the Same way, that a goat will in millions years to come stand upright and starts walking in humans foot. Fools
After my post on the persistence of flat-Earthism in the U.S. (“Flat Earthers are still with us!“)—a form of delusion apparently connected with religion, anti-Semitism, and other conspiracy theories—I got several comments from what seem to be genuine flat-Earthers. Now there’s no telling if these people’s beliefs are genuine or they’re just trolling (I suspect that at least the last two are genuine), but I’m letting these comments through (and moderating the commenters) so you can reply if you want. Genuine discourse will be permitted. I for one am curious to see how these believers rationalize their faith in flat-Earthism in the face of solid evidence for a spherical Earth. I know the creationist arguments, but not the ones for a flat Earth.
I’ll reproduce the comments below and link the names to where the comments appear on the original thread. The names are given as they appear in the comments, and I haven’t changed the wording or anything else.
Biblical Cosmology is true. Calling on all Jesus people to make a stand and discover water will not curve in non-fisheye camera lense. GOD PULLED THE FIRMAMENT OVER THE EARTH LIKE A TENT.
For those who care to inquire while enduring the mockery they will find overwhelming evidence in favor of a geocentric universe with an immovable Earth as a flat plane and the stars, moon and sun all contained within the firmament. The sun and the moon and the stars are thousands of miles away and aren’t nearly as big as what science tells us. The Ancients all understood the engineering of the universe and it is only in modern times that we have rejected what is plainly visible, logical and reasonable. Most news agencies today prop up Flat Earth organizations that embrace bizarre ides mixed with truth to discourage the masses from even considering an alternative to the heliocentric system that is taught throughout the world today.
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And, finally, this from reader Kris Sherwood (I couldn’t help bolding two sentences). “Gravol,” by the way, is a drug used to treat nausea and motion sickness.
It makes me very upset that I have to read all of these people criticize others that have actually questioned the bullshit spinning ball nonsense that the media NASA and the government shoves down our throats . Especially when. They take everything the media and the government and NASA tells them at face value and then tries to criticize others without even doing any in I mean any of their own research. One of the definitions of ignorance is blindly believing something when there is evidence to the contrary and you still don’t even take a look. I didn’t believe a lot of different so-called conspiracy theories either. But thought I should at least research it for myself like an intellectual does. You shouldn’t criticize something without first looking into it yourself. You can easily look up all this information for yourself but most people suffer from cognitive dissonance and will believe whatever is handed to them through the media or government. Make sure all of you Flat Earth critics take your Gravol today and everyday because the Earth is spinning and moving so freaking fast that you are going to become nauseous. The Horizon is always at flat eye level. If it was curved at all the Horizon would be going away from us curving away and it simply does not anywhere you are on this plane. Please just do your own research before criticizing these people and me who have actually done real science which includes experiments not basing everything on mathematical equations. Please listen to what I have said today thank you
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I have no responses, but I hope readers might query at least some of these commenters.
Reader Kurt Helf sent some photos and captions (the latter indented):
This past spring the family and I went to Destin, FL for my daughter’s last cheerleading competition. I visited Gulf Islands National Seashore and took the first two snaps. These smooth goose barnacles (Lepas anatifera) had colonized a long piece of wood drifting in the Gulf of Mexico and met their doom when they washed up on shore and dried out.
The weather was mostly stormy with high surf and so the beach had the usual crop of hydrozoans washing up on shore: Portuguese Man O’ War (Physalia physalis) and By-the-Wind Sailors (Vellela vellela). The former can be quite beautiful but I wouldn’t want to encounter one in the water!
I found Mr Eastern Box Turtle (I assume Terrapene carolina carolina) just around the corner from where the cheer competition was taking place.
Spider on Web: I was having my morning cuppa on the patio yesterday and I noticed this web reflecting the early morning light. I have no idea what species this is.
The hermit crabs were numerous and all seemed to favor using the shells of this unknown (to me) marine snail. This is the thinstripe hermit crab (Clibanarius vittatus). Note the barnacles on the shell.
Reader Peter in Iowa found a weird squirrel, which he calls “a squirrel with lemur leanings”. His notes:
I distribute sunflower seed every morning for any passing rodent or bird , and consequently we have quite a lot of gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in our yard (in east-central Iowa). Most of them are indistinguishable gray ones, but we’ve had a number of melanistic individuals, ranging from charcoal-gray to black. We even had a couple of black ones with vivid orange tails. However, this week we have a new visitor, with markings I had not seen before – rings on its tail! Photos attached.
Jerry: Is this striping or some kind of fur loss?
And from Stephen Barnard, sunset from his property in Idaho, taken last night:
Gooday, mate, it’s Sunday, July 9, 2017 (but in three hours it’ll be Monday down under). It’s National Sugar Cookie Day in the U.S., which I suppose would be National Sugar Biscuit day in Britain—if they have such a thing. And in Canada it’s Nunavut Day, commemorating the Nunavit Land Claims Agreement signed on this day in 1993, an agreement that started Nunavut on the path to becoming a distinct territory. Now its drivers get to have polar-bear-shaped license plates, as do all residents of the Northwest Territories. This is the coolest license plate ever:
On this day in 1540, Henry VIII (he comes up a lot here) annulled his marriage to Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife. She wasn’t executed, but died anyway at age 41. On July 9, 1816, Argentina (the world’s only nation to be named after a chemical element) declared its independence from Spain. Argentina is on my bucket list. On this day in 1850, Wikipedia reports, “U.S. President Zachary Taylor dies after eating raw fruit and iced milk, [and was] succeeded by Vice President Millard Fillmore.” Let that be a lesson to avoid iced milk, whatever that be. On this day in 1868, the The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., most importantly (at that time) slaves. It also contains the “due process” clause and other stuff. And on this day in 1986, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Homosexual Law Reform Act, finally making homosexuality legal in my adopted country.
Notables born on July 9 include Elias Howe (1819), Franz Boas (1858), Edward Heath (1916), Guru Dutt (1925), Ed Ames (1927, he’s 90 today), Oliver Sacks (1933), David Hockney (1937), O. J. Simpson (1947), Lindsey Graham (1955), Tom Hanks (1956), and Courtney Love (1964).
Here’s a classic moment with Ed Ames on the Tonight Show, with Ames teaching Johnny Carson to throw a tomahawk. Where the tomahawk lands on the silhouette of a man is the kicker. Note Carson’s uber-witty comment that it was a “frontier bris” (circumcision), adding, “I didn’t even know you were Jewish.”
Those who died on July 9 include Edmund Burke (1797), Paul Broca (1880), Earl Warrn (1974), and my Chicago colleague, paleontologist David Raup (2015). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is seeing ghosts. Look at that face!
A: What are you seeing there?
Hili: The ghost of Hamlet’s father flew in to Dobrzyn.
A: For how long?
Hili: I don’t know, he’s not saying anything
In Polish:.
Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Duch ojca Hamleta przyleciał do Dobrzynia.
Ja: Na długo?
Hili: Nie wiem, nic nie mówi.
A squee to end the day. Like many animals, newborn elephants must walk almost immediately after birth, as the herds move around. They don’t have nests like birds. Here’s a newborn African elephant (Loxodonta africana) learning to stand and walk. It’s a bit wobbly, but mom tries to help.
Matthew Cobb found this thread on Twi**er in which someone in charge of social media at the Church of England screwed up. Here’s the first post:
Thomas More and John Fisher were Roman Catholics who, you may recall, were executed for refusing to give up their allegiance to Roman Catholicism and recognize the Church of England with Henry VIII as its head.
Hilarity ensued (there are others in the thread):
Shout out to the the social media intern at Church of England who just accidentally restarted a 500 year old sectarian conflict. pic.twitter.com/UlRRkpIS1r
— Charles Lawley تشارلز لأولي (@CharlesLawley) July 7, 2017
Catholic twitter is going apeshit. Might take the afternoon off work and just see how this plays out. 🍿 pic.twitter.com/VxZz6Bctoj
— Charles Lawley تشارلز لأولي (@CharlesLawley) July 7, 2017
As I always say, it’s easier to convince a diehard creationist of the truth of evolution than to convince a diehard atheist of the fact that our behaviors are determined, and that we can’t make alternative choices at a given moment.
Yet there are some enlightened folk who not only accept determinism but deny that a version of “free will” can be confected that preserves our notion of that term while accepting determinism. There are some enlightened folk who realize that accepting behavioral determinism mandates a severe reform of the criminal justice system, including adopting the view that criminals, like malfunctioning machines, need to be treated rather than punished.
One of those enlightened people is neurobiologist and author Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford. I know from the comments on this site that many readers admire Sapolsky. I haven’t chimed in simply because I don’t know much about the man or his work, but I do know that he’s just come out with a new book that’s received terrific reviews. It’s now #88 on Amazon’s top 100 books (click on screenshot to go to the site):
I’m definitely going to read this one, especially because I just heard a great interview with Sapolsky which was part of an absorbing 48-minute program on free will on Radiolab. Click on the screenshot below to go there, and I do recommend you listen if you have a spare 3/4 hour. I think that the first part of the show is older, and Sapolsky’s part was added on; but I’m not certain:
The title is clever, because “Fault line” refers not to geology but to where and how we affix blame for people’s actions. The program is about free will.
I believe the program is narrated by Jad Abumrad, who, along with Robert Krulwich, have some of the best jobs in the world, for their Radiolab show is thoughtful, clever, penetrating, and accompanied by great sound and music thanks to Abumrad’s background. (I was on the show once and they transformed my interview into a wonderful piece.)
This show begins with an earlier segment about an epileptic (named “Kevin” to protect his identity) describing how he underwent two brain operations to cure his epilepsy. After the first operation, he met a woman whom he married after a difficult courtship, and then underwent a second operation when his epilepsy returned. The second operation, which removed part of Kevin’s frontal cortex, changed his personality. He started eating a lot more, playing his piano obsessively—often the same song for 8 or 9 hours—and demanding sex at all hours and in all places. Not only that, but he started haunting pornography websites, winding up downloading child pornography.
Eventually Kevin was caught by the feds, and although he pleaded that he couldn’t help himself because his brain was damaged (indeed, he had Klüver–Bucy Syndrome), the judge rejected that defense and sent Kevin to federal prison for two years, with two additional years of house arrest. At this point (27:20), Sapolsky comes on to comment. He’s articulate and engaging, a really great talker and thinker. His first reaction to the judge’s decision was that he was “appalled by that judicial decision and the underlying worldview.” The appalling worldview is one of libertarian free will: the mistaken notion that Kevin had the power to control his behavior.
One reason Kevin went to prison is that the judge didn’t buy the defense’s claim that Kevin had lost impulse control; the reason was that he had child porn on his home computer but not on his work computer, which suggested to the judge that Kevin could override his impulse to look at illegal pornography. Sapolsky, though, says that there are many neurological conditions that vary in their intensity and expression with physiological state. Alzheimers patients, for instance, have a well-known tendency to be able to remember their names and other things in the morning, but lose it in the evening. It’s not that they simply choose not to tell you their name in the evening—they simply can’t! And that bears on Kevin’s defense that he wasn’t choosing freely when and where to download child porn.
Indeed, Sapoksky notes that our own “normal” behaviors are unconsciously affected by how tired, stressed, or fearful we are. He cites a well known study about judges giving parole: when they’re hungry, right before lunch, judges are harsh, giving parole hardly any of the time. Right after lunch, however, they’re generous, giving parole 60% of the time! But when asked, the judges claim that they’re making their decisions freely. Sapolsky notes that hunger makes the cerebral cortex largely abandon considered judgment in favor of more emotional decisions, even though the judges claim that they’re acting out of pure free will and volition. But that’s a confabulation: their brain, starved, is helping “make these decisions.” (I hope good lawyers schedule their clients accordingly!) It’s scary to think that the working of our justice system is affected in this way, but that’s determinism.
Abumrad, like many rational people, is shocked by Sapolsky’s view that Kevin wasn’t deciding his criminal acts “freely”, i.e. in a libertarian manner. (Both Sapolsky and Abumrad take “free will” to mean, “I could have done otherwise at the moment”; neither even mention compatibilist free will.) But Sapolsky is relentless, feeling that, as science progresses, “one by one, all of the things that we think are under our control. . .will be chalked up to screwups in our biology”.
And it’s not just criminals whose behavior is determined; Sapolsky asserts that “Everyone is a Kevin; all of us are Kevins all of the time.” Abumrad is clearly flummoxed; he can’t bring himself to quite accept Sapolsky’s determinism.
Sapolsky ends by saying that what we need to do in the justice system is “prescribe treatments and constraints,” just like you’d treat a car with broken brakes or put it in a shop for complete overhaul if it were dangerous. People, he says, aren’t “bad”, but simply conditioned to behave in one way or another, and that we should abandon our notion of retributive punishment and our tendency to affix moral judgments to other people’s behavior. Yes, that tendency is evolved, but it can be overcome. Retributive punishment lingers, he says, because “punishment is pleasurable,” and though Sapolsky doesn’t mention that such pleasure is probably evolved, I’m sure he’d agree that it is; it’s a form of emotionality that was adaptive in our ancestors.
When Abumrad asks Sapolsky whether his determinism is maladaptive for society (a common but misconceived view), Sapolsky responds that the price of a free-will view of punishment is high: the affixing of shame to people as well as imprisoning them “for what is simply a biological problem.”
In the end, Sapolsky confesses, as do all of us determinists, that we still act as though we have free will. When he’s complimented on wearing a nice tee-shirt (I gather that Dr. Sapolsky is no paragon of sartorial splendor!), he says, “Thank you”, and then realizes that he had no choice about what shirt to wear and thus shouldn’t be grateful for having made a good “choice.” Yes, the feeling of volition is deeply ingrained in all of us; that’s why I have a hard time convincing people that their behaviors are absolutely determined—with the possible exception of quantum effects.
Sapolsky says, at the very end, that he has a hard time imagining a world in which everyone is a behavioral determinist. I don’t. We surely cannot abandon our feeling that our actions are free, but we can still accept the science, and modify our behavior, and society’s behavior, in light of the deterministic truth. Maybe Sapolsky can’t see a world without determinism now, but just a few centuries ago, people couldn’t imagine a world in which everybody refused to believe in gods. Now that world is coming.
Determinism will eventually be accepted in this world, but that, too, will come slowly—much more slowly than atheism will come.
And now I too am a fan of Sapolsky: not just because we agree 100% about free will, but because the man is thoughtful, articulate, and yet has a light popular touch that makes us want to listen to him. Listen to the show; it’s great!
