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.
Remember, she’s on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe tomorrow at 9 pm, and I expect at least three readers from the UK to watch it and report back. Meanwhile, here’s a taste from one of Brooker’s tw**ts, courtesy of the ever-watchful Matthew Cobb:
UPDATE: The University Club has now sent me a formal announcement with details, to wit:
Faith vs. Fact
New York Times bestselling author Jerry Coyne will talk about his book, Faith vs. Fact, at a lunch at the Club on Thursday, May 21, at 12 p.m. In it, he explains why any attempt to make religion compatible with science is doomed to fail. Evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne details why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable or conflicting conclusions. Coyne warns that religious prejudices and strictures in politics, education, medicine and social policy are on the rise. He believes there is harm in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in.
Plated lunch at 12 p.m., remarks at 12:15 p.m. $25. Non members who reserve in advance and pay by credit card and adhere to business casual dress code can sign up with the Book Stall.
Note that the phone number to reserve is given in the post below.
*******
As I wrote before, the University Club of Chicago (downtown at 76 E. Monroe Street) is hosting a launch event for Faith Versus Fact on Thursday, May 21 at noon. Details have now become available thanks to reader Michael, who called the place up to get tickets (the info is still not posted).
I will give a 45-minute talk on the book, there will be a Q&A, and I’ll be signing books afterwards. There are tickets, and they cost $25, but that includes lunch, and the place is swanky.
Here’s how to get tickets, from Michael’s email:
I bought them over the phone (there is still no info up on the site) and they are $25.00 each. I’d recommend your readers calling the University Club rather than waiting for it to appear on the website just in case! Lunch is included.
Also, it seems some of the staff does not have all the info and some of them seem to think it is NOT open to the public. It is, and so I hope everyone interested gets the correct information. I spoke to Cathlene at (847) 446-8880.
If you’re in town and have the bucks to spare, I’ll be glad to shake your hand, sign your book, and, if you say the magic word “Maru,” draw a cat in it.
I was absolutely shocked to read in today’s New York Times that renowned food critic Josh Ozersky had died, and at the terribly young age of 47. Lately he was the food critic for Esquire, and the encomiums for Josh are pouring in from his fellow critics and foodies. Many disagreed with him, but all recognized that here was a delightful guy with a lust not just for food, but for life.
And it was in the latter capacity that I met him, for one of the things that excited Josh was evolution. Somehow he found this website and my email address, and he’d sporadically pepper me with questions about evolution. It was clear that he’d read a great deal about it, and his questions were endless, though they’d fall on me sporadically—about once a year, and about six questions a day for two days. One of his recurrent problems was how natural selection could possibly promote the evolution of two genes at the same time, for he was under the impression that before you could “fix” one gene, you’d have to fix the other. I explained to him how several advantageous alleles could sweep through a population at once, and even sent him a simulation demonstrating that, but I was never able to overcome his intuitive feeling that this couldn’t happen.
When I was visiting New York last October for the New Yorker Cat vs. Dog debate, I emailed Josh and asked him where I should eat. He offered to take me on a tour of Chinatown’s barbecue restaurants—an opportunity I simply couldn’t pass up. We had a great time stuffing ourselves at a variety of places, and on this site I wrote a post about our tour: “A ‘light’ lunch with Josh Ozersky.” That was, of course, a facetious title: I don’t think the man knew the meaning of “light.” We had a great time and bonded as fellow foodies and atheistic Jews. At the end he indulged his scientific interests by taking me to “The Evolution Store” on Spring Street, which carried a variety of fossils, skeletons, and other natural-history stuff.
Yesterday I learned that Josh was in town for the James Beard awards, for he’d left the following message on his Facebook page (and, according to the Daily News, also on Twi**er), asking about places to eat:
I was about to email him saying, “Hey! Why didn’t you call me?”, when I realized the message was a day old and his eating schedule was probably already full. (I had to scroll WAY back on his Facebook page to find this post, for his page is now brimming with messages of love and admiration from his friends and colleagues.) So I missed him, and now I’ll miss him for good.
The Daily News also has a video of Josh singing karaoke just hours before he died. Nobody knows yet what killed him, but I suspect it was food, and that’s okay, except that he should have lived four more decades. At least he went quickly, and after a late and bibulous night on the town.
He and I didn’t believe in an afterlife, so I can’t say he’s in a better place, but I can say that he left this planet a better place.
Here’s his obituary from Eater:
Ozersky was a trailblazer in the early digital food-media scene. In 2003, Ozersky introduced the world to his alter ego “Mr. Cutlets” in his book Meat Me in Manhattan and his 2008 book The Hamburger: A History was well-received by outlets like the Economist, and catapulted Ozersky to the top of the food writing scene. Ozersky was well known in the food internet world, too. In 2006, Ozersky launched New York Magazine’s food blog Grub Street as founding editor, operating the site until 2008 and picking up a James Beard Award for his work along the way. He had several high profile posts following his GS tenure, including as a Time columnist and as an editor-at-large forEsquire. Ozersky celebrated chefs and restaurateurs in his web series Ozersky.TV, which launched in 2010. He also founded the growing event series Meatopia and was on board to co-author a cookbook with chef John Tesar.
While he wasn’t always universally agreed with — he had a pretty famous feud with Robert Sietsema over comps at his wedding and also a well-known beef with David Chang — Ozersky’s impact on the food writing world is hard to overstate. Here are some of Ozersky’s most beloved essays.
· The Hidden Virtues of Tweezer Food [ESQ]
· Jonathan Benno: Tattooless Chef in a Food Network World [Observer]
· Found: The Incredible Restaurant in the Middle of Nowhere that Nobody Knows About [ESQ]
· Solitary Man [Saveur]
And here’s Josh sharing some gelato with me at Grom last October:
Farewell, brother.
I know Pamela Geller is a controversial figure, and that her group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), has been labeled an anti-Muslim “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I also have objections to her political conservatism, her misguided attacks on building an Islamic center near the 9/11 attack site, and I don’t sympathize with her religiosity (she’s Jewish).
But until now I’ve done what many of us do, which is to go with the tide of liberal opinion and simply accept what we hear about her (and others who are demonized) from vocal Leftists. They may well be correct in calling Geller an “Islamophobe”—that is, somebody who hates Muslims rather than just Islam—but I’d rather find out if that’s true from reading her statements rather than from listening to liberals who dislike her. After all, we’re supposed to be skeptics. The failure to exercise proper skepticism, for example, is what led liberals like Garry Trudeau into misguided denunciations of Charlie Hebdo. They simply didn’t do their homework. And when it comes to religion, especially Islam, it’s unwise to follow the tide of liberal opinion without due diligence. So I’m going to start at the beginning and say that although I don’t agree with Geller on some things, I’m not yet convinced that she hates individual Muslims rather than Islam and what its religious dictates portend for Western democracies.
Below is an interview Geller did with Alisyn Camerota of CNN after the attack on the Texas “Muhammad art exhibit”. Camerota displays the typical liberal attitudes, deploring the violence but somehow managing to suggest that the AFDI was just asking for it (being “provocative”) by exhibiting drawings of Muhammad.
Geller schools her, arguing that she, Geller, doesn’t hate Muslims as people (go to 4:50), but does deplore extremist Muslim ideology. You can doubt that if you want, but make your decision based on evidence. Although the interview is 14 minutes long, I urge you to listen to the whole thing. It shows how someone commonly seen as a reactionary is, on this issue at least, on the right (meaning correct!) side, while the liberals are flailing about in cognitive dissonance.
(By the way, we now know that the two attackers, who were killed by a security guard carrying only a pistol, were both Islamic jihadists armed with assault weapons. There are reports that ISIS is taking credit for the attack, but I’m not yet convinced.)
Here’s a microcosm of the dilemma faced by liberals, which shouldn’t really be a dilemma:
Note that at about 2:02 Camerota says the fateful words that damn all liberals: “But what people are saying [i.e., what Camerota thinks] is that there is this fine line, you know, between, freedom of speech and being intentionally incendiary and provocative.”
There you have it: the fine line—the same line that, according to many, was crossed by Charlie Hebdo and everyone said to engage in “hate speech.” Sorry, but the center doesn’t hold, for all controversial speech is “intentionally incendiary and provocative”, including the words of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. (I take “incendiary” as meaning “designed to ignite a movement or opinion”.) Geller schools Camerota about this, and Camerota, from her horrified expression, seems to realize that she hasn’t thought this issue through! As Geller says at 8:14, “You should be directing your barbs at the enforcers of the sharia and those who seek to destroy and crush freedom of speech as they did in Paris and Copenhagen.”
Note too, that at 9:45 Camerota seizes on Geller’s characterization of murderous terrorists as “savages,” claiming that Geller was painting all Muslims as savages. That’s simply not true, as you can hear from Geller’s own words, and is just a diversionary tactic on the interviewer’s part. (Camerota finally abandons that line of inquiry as a mere “semantic game,” but she’s the one who raised it as a serious criticism of Geller—as the very issue of Islamophobia!)
Finally, Camerota tries to defend herself by claiming that “This [interview] is not an attack; this is a conversation,” but that’s not true, either. Camerota was on the attack. She just didn’t pwn Geller in the way she wanted.
Geller finally says the money quote: “Who gives voice to the voiceless?” By that she means the women, the gays, the apostates, and the Christians murdered and oppressed by Islam, who are always neglected by the liberal media and their running dogs like Ben Affleck and Glenn Greenwald. By concentrating on rebuking people like Geller for “provoking” militant Islam, while pointedly ignoring the excesses of militant Islam, liberal venues like CNN simply exacerbate the problem.
The problem isn’t those who exercise free speech: the problem is those who murder people who do, and who want a society in which not only is speech muzzled, but women are second-class citizens, gays and non-Muslims are under a death sentence, and yes, all “fun” is sublimated into religious duties.
h/t: Jeffrey Tayler
Bad news: I have apparently re-injured my back by sleeping on it wrong, and so I have a new regiment of 9 Advils per day and strict sleeping on my back, which I hate, as well as applications of “wet heat” and avoidance of all strenuous movement . Those who told me to “stretch” the back were wrong: that just injures it more. Further, the doctor says that, on average, it will be six weeks until I’m completely back to normal, which of course stretches into my book-related activities. Well, you can’t fight the laws of physics, though I’m in serious pain. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is taking it easy:
A: What are you doing there?Hili: I’m still resting after the weekend.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam robisz?
Hili: Jeszcze odpoczywam po weekendzie.
And lagniappe:
The orchard is blooming (still) – day nine.
Look at the Princess among the blossoms!
So shoot me: I like cats and am perked up by feliniana at the end of the day. Reader “redlivingblue” sent a note with pictures of his two new kittens:
Good morning! I just wanted to share a couple of quick pics of my new kittens. My wife and I named the female Kahleesi (My wife Dana is quite a Game of Thrones fan), the male Dillinger (he is adapt at escaping virtually any enclosure ).
My beloved siamese SCSI died just a few months ago. I still miss him terribly! My wife brought home these new kittens without telling me. They were found in a wall at a construction site by contractors who work for my wife. They are quite wild and it took a couple of days for them to get used to me. Now we are taking cat naps together and I seem to be a member of the gang. I am including a pic of Dillinger playing around my boots to give a sense of scale….
Five days ago I wrote about the new Nature paper revealing the “dino-bat” fossil Yi qi, a bizarre species of theropod that had feathers but also membranous wings like a bat—and a special new bone, evolved from the wrist, that supported its wing. It isn’t clear whether this creature could fly, but it surely could at least glide. At any rate, Nature has put out a two-minute video about the beast, and here it is. (If you didn’t read the post, this can serve as a precis.)
I don’t like the slur on pigeons at the end, for, in parts of the world, pigeons are the most common dinosaurs.
h/t: Heather Hastie
Even though 2015 is not even half over, I’m already going to present two yearly awards. Professor Ceiling Cat’s “George Orwell Award for Defense of Free Expression” is going to Nick Cohen, whose work, pretty new to me, must be well known to many UK readers. The other award, the “H. L. Mencken Award for Mockery of Religion,” goes to Atlantic writer and Russia correspondent Jeffrey Tayler, whose weekly articles in Salon (of all places) take religion apart with the opprobrium it deserves.
I call your attention to Tayler’s latest Sunday sermon: “Ted Cruz, our ayatollah: Fight back now, or welcome to the 2016 religious right hellstorm.” This latest piece, nominally a response to a critique of an earlier Tayler piece by goddycoddler Matthew Barber, is really Tayler’s long expression of amazement and disdain for how thoroughly marinated American politicians are in toxic faith. And I’ll give three excerpts showing the Mencken-like straighforwardness that has earned Tayler his award:
Accusations of “bigotry,” trotted out with the intent to silence, should still the tongue of no outspoken atheist. We attack not religious folks as people, but the irrationality inherent in their religion, which is nothing more than hallowed ideology, and therefore is, or should be, as much fair game as, say, socialism. Would Evangelicals heed calls to “respect” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (who has just announced his candidacy for 2016) and avoid engaging in “anti-socialist” bigotry with regard to his political views? Of course not. Nor should they, necessarily, if they disagree with him. Being a socialist, just like being a Christian, is a matter of choice, save one important fact: at least socialism constitutes a coherent ideology to which nothing resembling the benighted principle of“Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd) has ever applied.
The Latin quote, I believe, is from Tertullian, channeled through Kierkegaard. Another:
I chose the term “faith-deranged” with care. I meant it literally, lest there be any doubt that I intended to be merely incendiary. Derangement is clearly rampant across large swathes of America. Citizens of one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth who opt, of their own volition, to believe in a magic book negated by science and peppered with all manner of bilious behests and misanthropic myths cannot be esteemed to be thinking sanely. Given the extreme nature of the delusions of these citizens and the resulting behavior – for example, petitions whispered to an invisible celestial tyrant with the goal of securing favorable outcomes, otherwise known as prayer, and hallucinated responses from said invisible tyrant – only one conclusion presents itself: faith has disrupted their mental faculties and is producing symptoms that, were they not sheltered under the adjective “religious,” would qualify as pathological.
But there’s some optimism at the end:
Rationalists must resist all calls to show respect for religion, be it Christianity or Islam or any other faith with universalist pretensions. Recall the damage these stultifying ideologies of control and repression have done the cause of progress throughout history. And remember the stakes now, with so many of our presidential candidates flaunting their belief, and seats on the Supreme Court likely to free up, especially post-2016. We either fight back by speaking out now, or we may end up living in a Christian-theme-park version of Iran, with Ted Cruz as our ayatollah.
Yet do not despair! In the United States the winds of reason are blowing more strongly than ever: since 2012 alone, 7.5 million have abandoned religion. We atheists have the momentum. Finally, finally, we can make out religion’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
Those sleeping the slumber of faith hang DO NOT DISTURB signs about their minds.
No rationalist should feel obliged to comply.
Congrats to Tayler on his prize. He can stop by my office anytime to pick up his award: a specially autographed copy of FvF with a Russian-speaking cat drawn in it, and a fine Cuban cigar.
p.s. Tayler, on his Facebook page, posted this statement from Dan Barker:
