Jeffrey Tayler continues making Salon friendlier to anti-theism

April 13, 2015 • 12:54 pm

I guess Salon, which most New Atheists dislike because of its history of accommodationist and atheist-bashing articles, doesn’t really care whether it has a unified viewpoint or not, for it’s begun to publish a string of long and hard-hitting anti-theist articles by Jeffrey Tayler, a contributing editor to The Atlantic who lives in Moscow.  Tayler’s latest (there must be at least a half dozen by now) is “Bill Maher terrifies Bill O’ Relly: An atheist has the Fox News host running scared.” And although nobody can replace Christopher Hitchens, if you have a Hitch-shaped hole in your God Module, it’s pretty well filled by Tayler’s prose, which pulls no punches.

The piece is nominally about Bill O’Reilly and his odious colleague Ann Coulter’s affront at Bill Maher’s repeated attacks on religion, and on the duo’s judgment that Maher is promoting the well-known “War On Christians”, a war that’s completely imaginary except in the minds of jihadist Muslims.  O’Reilly argues that Maher is a “well known religion hater” with “a free pass to bash people of faith.” Well, most of that is true, but it’s ironic given that O’Reilly and Coulter’s long engagement in a real war: the war on atheists, and the fact that both have long had a free pass to bash people of no faith. In fact, both O’Reilly and Coulter are far more strident in their rhetoric than Maher ever was (read Coulter’s book Godless—or, better yet, my 2006 review of it—to see how hateful these people are).

But the real excuse for the article is Tayler’s desire to unload on the incursion of unsubstantiated and harmful religious belief into American politics. I’m not sure why he’s started doing this lately, but I fully approve. Here are just a few excerpts—do read the whole thing, even though for most readers Tayler will be preaching to the choir:

It hardly takes a journalistic sleuth to ferret out the simultaneously ludicrous and lamentable false equivalency that O’Reilly has drawn here between the horrific, all-too-real massacres of Christians underway in countries afflicted with terrorism abroad, and the barbs, criticisms, and, yes, insults about religion coming from some vocal atheists, including Maher, in the United States.  The death toll from the former stands in the hundreds; from the latter: zero.  I’m unaware of a single atheist who, motivated by his or her nonbelief, has called for or committed acts of violence against Christians anywhere, at any time.  Obviously, nonbelievers possess no “sacred text” with which they could justify harming anyone, let alone people of faith.  (NB to those who will take to the comments section and rant about Stalin and Mao.  Murderous dictators both, they ordered their atrocities not on account of their atheism, but to “defend the revolution” and secure their power.)

One of the reasons I’m such a fan of Tayler’s latest pieces is, I suppose, because they echo so closely the premise of The Albatross: that religion claims to help us understand things about the universe, but, unlike science has no way to test or verify its claims.  Both science and religion compete to understand reality, but only science has the method to verify its findings, while religion merely buttresses emotional and epistemic commitments made in advance, commitments impervious to evidence.

All in all, rationalists should applaud O’Reilly and Coulter for having the courage to so boldly air their mendacity, mischaracterizations, and lopsided analogies, which are in fact illuminating.  Namely, they both argue from a premise so widely accepted that they leave it unstated: that those who believe, without proof, fantastical, far-reaching propositions about the nature of our cosmos and how we should live our lives have nothing to explain, nothing to account for, while those of us who value convictions based on evidence, reasoned solutions, and rules for living deriving from consensus must ceaselessly justify ourselves and genuflect apologetically for voicing disagreement.

Beneath this unstated premise lies another more insidious notion: that there are two kinds of truth – religious and otherwise.  That, say, the assertion that God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh might not be literally true, but it merits respect as “religious truth” (or, as Reza Aslan puts it, “sacred history”), as a metaphor for some ethereal verity, one so transcendental that boneheaded rationalists obsessed with superfluities like evidence cannot grasp it.

This is sophistry of the most contemptible variety.  By such unscrupulous subterfuge the faithful (and their apologists) commit treason against reason, betray honest discourse, and hope to render their (preposterous) dogmas immune to disproof and open to limitless interpretation, depending on their needs of the moment.  Either an objective proposition (say, that Jesus was the son of God, or that the Prophet Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse) is true or it is untrue.  It cannot be whatever the one advancing it says it is; much less, true for some, but not for others.

O’Reilly himself clings to this New-Age idea that we all have a right to our personal, customized truths.  In his 2006 interview with Richard Dawkins, O’Reilly admits that he’s “not positive that Jesus was God,” but he’s “throwin’ in with Jesus, rather than throwin’ in with you guys [atheists], because you guys can’t tell me how it all got here.”  A minute or so later, he announces that he’s “stickin’ with Judeo-Christian philosophy and my religion, Roman Catholicism, because it helps me as a person.”

That doesn’t mean it’s true, replies Dawkins.

“Well, it’s true for me,” says O’Reilly.  “See, I believe it.”

“You mean true for you is different from true for anybody else? . . .  Something’s either got to be true or not.”

O’Reilly’s “reasoning” would fail to pass muster in a nursery-school yard, yet he presents it shamelessly to an adult audience on national television.  He knows most people tend to avoid outright expression of disbelief (and certainly suppress belly laughs) when others begin disclosing their religious beliefs.

Such timidity must stop.

. . . The one thing both O’Reilly and Coulter do get right is that there is a war going on, but it’s not between hapless Christians and “vicious” atheists.  It is between rationalists who seek to live in ways they reason to be best, and the faithful cleaving to fatuous fables and Paleolithic preachments inscribed in ancient books that should be pulped, or at best preserved as exhibits for future students majoring in anthropology, with minors in mental derangement.

Indeed.  Tayler aligns himself firmly with New Atheism by adhering to what I see as its defining trait: the view that science itself , aligned with secular philosophy, is our main intellectual weapon against religion.  There are not two different ways of knowing about the universe. There is only one, and that’s the scientific way, for science is the only reliable way to learn about reality. And so long as religion makes claims about reality—the few who deny that are so far out of the mainstream that they’re hardly worth bothering with—then its main opponent must be science, construed broadly as a combination of empirical investigation and rationality.

One of the most eloquent dismissals of religion’s pretensions appears in a little-known essay by Mike Aus on Richard Dawkins’s site, an essay called “Conversion on Mount Improbable.” Aus was a Protestant minister who, after learning about evolution, gradually abandoned his faith. And in that essay he makes a statement that I find almost unbearably eloquent:

When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.

There’s not much to add to that.

The Borowitz report satirizes Hillary Clinton’s campaign announcement

April 13, 2015 • 11:05 am

By now you must have learned that The New Yorker’s Borowitz Report is satire, but it’s often sufficiently believable (given the dire state of everything in the U.S.) to convince the gullible that it’s real news. And, given Hillary Clinton’s campaign-announcement video—which shows her for only a brief span amidst a lot of “average Americans,” implying that she’s simply one of many people who want to make a change for the better—the Borowitz Report’s latest headline doesn’t ring far from true (click on screenshot below to go to article).

Screen Shot 2015-04-13 at 11.00.05 AM

Most of it:

BROOKLYN (The Borowitz Report)—Hillary Clinton has followed up the official announcement of her candidacy with a new campaign ad featuring nothing but kittens.

The sixty-second spot stars an assortment of kittens—tabbies, calicoes, Siamese, and a dozen other breeds—in a variety of adorable vignettes.

At various points in the advertisement, the kittens are shown playing in a sock drawer, tangled up in yarn, and chasing a duckling.

Clinton herself appears only in the final seconds of the ad, saying merely, “Hi. I’m Hillary.”

The commercial immediately drew the wrath of the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, who called it “woefully short on substance.”

“There’s no mention of what Hillary Clinton would do to grow our struggling economy, fix the disaster of Obamacare, or repair our damaged reputation abroad,” a visibly furious Priebus told Fox News. “It’s just cats.”

There’s also a picture of cute kittens at the top, but I’ll omit that since we’ve already had one today.

h/t: John

Talk in South Carolina: Saturday

April 13, 2015 • 10:18 am

I’m heading for South Carolina on Friday (the Greenville/Spartanburg area) to give two talks, schmooze with the local humanists, eat good southern nomz, and meet Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo. One of my two talks, on evolution, is open to the public at Furman University, and the information is below. There will be a book sale and signing of WEIT afterwards, and if you say the secret word, “manul,” you’ll get a cat drawn in your book.

The other talk, on The Albatross (soon to be in fine bookstores everwhere) is for the Piedmont Humanists, and is closed to the public.

But all are welcome at this one; the poster was designed by reader Su Gould. (Also note who’s sponsoring me):

COYNE fb ad Furman 1.2

Is natural selection making the Dutch taller?

April 13, 2015 • 9:08 am

A piece by Carl Zimmer in Thursday’s New York Times called my attention to a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B (reference and link to download below) by Gert Stulp et al. on the remarkable height of Dutch people and some evidence that natural selection (probably via sexual selection) is acting to promote their vertical ascent. (Stulp himself is 6′ 7″.)

When I visited Amsterdam and Groningen a few years ago, I was immediately struck at how tall the Dutch were; I was altitudinally challenged when talking to them. The new paper by Stulp et al. not only shows that they’re the tallest people in the world, but that they’re getting taller. And some of that increase may be due to genetic evolution. For a multi-generation study shows that, at least among men, the tallest Dutch people have the most children.

Here’s the present situation as described the paper (I’ve translated the cm into inches):

When it comes to height, the Dutch have a remarkable history. In the mid- eighteenth century, the average height of Dutch (military) men was approximately 165 cm [5 feet 5 inches]. This was well below the average for other European populations, and very much shorter than the average height of men in the United States, who towered over the Dutch by 5–8 cm [2-3 inches]. Dutch men are now the tallest in the world, having grown by approximately 20 cm [8 inches!] over the last 150 years. By contrast, male height in the United States has increased by only 6cm [2.3 inches] across the same time span. Equivalent differences in height are also observed between The Netherlands and other European countries. Indeed, it is notable that, while the secular trend in height has slowed or stopped in most North-European countries, it has continued for much longer among the Dutch, with the available evidence suggesting it has begun to slow only very recently.

Or, as Carl Zimmer notes:

Since 1860, average heights have increased in many parts of the world, but no people have shot up like the Dutch. The average Dutchman now stands over six feet tall. And while the growth spurt in the United States has stopped in recent years, the Dutch continue to get taller.

That increase of 8 inches in only three or four generations is remarkable, and is simply too rapid to be explained by natural selection alone. As the authors note, it’s plausible that most of this increase in height is due to improvements in health and diet, including the advent of universal healthcare and a greater equality of income than seen in most other countries, including the height-challenged U.S. The authors mention consumption of dairy products; I’d add to that herring and french fries with mayonnaise! Of course, one could in principle test how much of that height increase was due to genes by simply rearing Dutch people in a controlled, equalized environment along with people of other nations over the past 150 years, but of course that’s not practical. But one could at least compare the present height of Dutch reared at home versus those brought up in other cultures where they don’t have the supposed height-increasing factors of healthcare and cheese.  We have no data on that, either.

The authors, though, tried to parse out the action of genetic evolution by looking at the offspring of Dutch people of different heights in a three-generation health study lasting from 1935 to 1967, and involving over 90,000 subjects.  Lots of demographic data were collected, including fertility, age of puberty and menopause, whether or not individuals were in a long-term relationship, health, education, and income.

It’s a complicated study, so I’ll just give the most notable result: the corrected correlation between male and female height (expressed as standard deviations above and below the mean height) and number of children, a good measure of evolutionary fitness.  Here are the graphs from Figure 1.  I had to cut and paste in the scale for the X axis, and can’t line therm up well, but the five ticks on the X-axis (not including the origin) go from -2 to 2 standard deviations (0 is the average, and is the middle tick on the scale). About 16% of Dutch people exceed one standard deviation above the mean; about 2.5% exceed two standard deviations.

Screen Shot 2015-04-13 at 7.25.02 AM Screen Shot 2015-04-13 at 7.25.16 AM

As you see, for males, on the left graph, the number of children produced is generally higher for males above the mean ( mean  = 0, middle tick); males about 1 standard deviation above the average have the most children, and the number falls off beyond that. That implies that there is natural selection for taller males: the population should, if there is genetic variation for height, be increasing in height. (Ignore the “no. of children with current partner” line for the time being; you can see a discussion of that in the paper.)

Now the authors claim that they can’t say this is natural selection, for their definition of “natural selection” is “”differential reproduction of individuals with different genetic constitutions“, and we don’t know if those taller males who leave more kids have at least part of their height advantage based on genes. (It’s likely to be true, though, for there is substantial genetically based variation in height among other populations that have been examined). But if you construe natural selection, as some do, as “differential reproduction of individuals with different traits,” then this is indeed natural selection for taller males. But whether that selection causes evolution depends on the genetic basis of height variation. In either case we lack the genetic evidence to say that the Dutch male population is evolving to be taller. But if the data are suggestive.

For females, however, women of average height have the most children, and so there would be no direct selection on women to be taller. The graph on the right, which shows “fitness” related to deviation from the mean, is a classic example of stabilizing selection, in which individuals with the average trait value have the most offspring, and those on either extreme have fewer. That is a form of “pruning-away” selection that keeps the trait at a constant value.

I suspect, and this is suggested by the authors, that if there is selection, it’s sexual selection: taller males are more attractive as mates. That would  itself lead women to become taller over time as well, for the genes that make males tall would also tend to make female offspring taller as a byproduct. (The authors give no data on whether female height has also increased in recent years.)

There is much more in the paper, but I’ll just add two points. First, this relationship is independent of other variables like education and income, so the correlation is unlikely to be spurious, say if taller males had more kids simply because they were better nourished, or provided more resources for their kids.

Second, why is this happening in the Dutch but not in other populations? (Well, it could, since there aren’t many similar studies, but work in the U.S. shows that men of average height and women of below-average height have more children.) The authors speculate on the reasons for the difference between the Netherlands and U.S., but it’s still not clear.

What is clear is that there is phenotypic selection for bigger males in the Dutch population, and that may well be responsible for part of the the striking change in height of Dutch males over the past 150 years. But surely most of that increase is due to cultural rather than genetic evolution: something in the Dutch culture that makes people taller. My theory: raw herring!

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________

Stulp, G., L. Barrett, F. C. Tropf, and M. Mills. 2015. Does natural selection favour taller stature among the tallest people on earth? Proc Roy Soc B. 282, http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.0211

Readers’ wildlife photographs

April 13, 2015 • 7:15 am

Photographer Pete Moulton, who’s supplied us with some great pictures, always forgets about us, and I have to go onto his Facebook page and beg him for some of the photos he posts there. Here’s a batch of herp photos I wheedled out of him:

Per your request, here are a few lizards. A lot of people think of Arizona as a pretty snake-y place–and it is!–but we’ve got lizards too. In fact, I think Arizona’s state lizard list is the largest in the US at 49 native species, plus three introduced species.
First up is probably the most commonly photographed of our species: a Desert Spiny Lizard, Sceloporus magister. These are large and easily seen, which makes them photographic favorites. This one is a half-grown female at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.
Desert Spiny Lizard_4-11-15_DBG_3094 copy
Common Side-blotched Lizard Uta stansburiana from the Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area in south Phoenix. Sky-blue dorsal spotting indicates a male. These are very common lizards hereabouts.
Side-blotched Lizard_Rio Salado 5-30-10_0028
Long-nosed Leopard Lizard Gambelia wislizenii from the confluence of the Rio Salado and the Rio Verde north of Mesa. This female was a side benefit during a dragonflying trip.
Gambelia wislizenii
Tiger Whiptail Aspidoscelis tigris, also from the Salado-Verde confluence. The most numerous whiptail in my area. Aspidoscelis is an interesting genus, in that six of our eleven species aren’t really species at all, but parthenogenetic clones. This one, however, does reproduce sexually.
Tiger WT_Granite Reef 6-7-09_5500
A cryptic lizard (in fact, this is the “chameleon” once sold in pet stores) from reader Barn Owl, who still has not adopted the barn cat La Reina:
I was out in the backyard with my d*gs this afternoon, checking my vegetable garden after the rain showers rolled through, and I spotted a Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) on the snow pea vines.  It was almost exactly the color of the undersides of the leaves – I’ve attached a photo, which unfortunately isn’t of the high quality typical of most Readers’ Wildlife Photos (but it’s about the best I can do with my little FinePix).
Anole
Finally, we have two photos from perhaps the youngest reader to grace the photography page. Brianna, daughter of reader “darrelle”, is only eleven, but has already entered a wildlife photography contest. The captions are her father’s, but the photos are hers.
The first is of a Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) in breeding plumage. He was looking fairly comfortable, all snuggled up, but he was keeping an eye on the photographer!
Brown Pelican in Breeding Season Plumage -Pelecanus Occidentalis
The second is of a Great Egret (Ardea alba), sometimes also called a Great White Heron. He is just smoothly gliding into the sunset. I really like the lighting on this one.
Great Egret-Ardea Alba

Monday: Hili dialogue

April 13, 2015 • 4:38 am

It’s Monday! Yay! (Not really. .  .).  Today Professor Ceiling Cat addresses evolution students via Skype at SUNY Syracuse, where they’re reading WEIT and want to query the author. Then I work on my talks and read Breaking the Spell again (if you read it, weigh in below), and then haz chicken breast, biscuits, green beans, and a 2008 Bordeaux for dinner. Yay for biscuits, too, and a pity to those outside the U.S. who haven’t tasted this indigenous but wonderful breadstuff. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili aspires to be a bigger cat:

Hili: Do I look like a lynx?
A: A very friendly lynx.

P1020530
Well, does she? What a noble thing is a cat!
In Polish:
Hili: Czy wyglądam jak ryś?
Ja: Jak bardzo przyjazny ryś.

Hillary announces

April 12, 2015 • 2:28 pm

Let the games begin. Here’s Hillary Clinton’s official announcement that she’s running for President. (She doesn’t show up until about 1:30 of this 2:18 video; the rest shows average Americans making their plans.)

From the New York Times:

This campaign will begin on a small scale and build up to an effort likely to cost more than any presidential bid waged before, with Mrs. Clinton’s supporters and and outside “super PACs” looking to raise as much as $2.5 billion in a blitz of donations from Democrats who overwhelmingly support her candidacy. Much of that enthusiasm is tied to the chance to make history by electing a woman president. But some, too, owes to the lack of compelling alternatives in a party trying desperately to hold on to the White House when Republicans control the House and the Senate.

Mrs. Clinton’s declaration on Sunday is to be followed by a series of intimate but critical campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire. She will use them to reintroduce herself to voters and begin to lay out the central theme of her candidacy: improving the economic fortunes of the middle class, with an emphasis on increasing wages and reducing income inequality.

What do you think? I’m holding my nose and wishing for Warren.

Garry Trudeau’s full (and clueless) remarks on “hate speech” published in The Atlantic

April 12, 2015 • 12:21 pm

At least one person questioned, when I reported yesterday that Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau criticized Charlie Hebdo for engaging in “hate speech,” whether Trudeau’s remarks might be inaccurate, perhaps distorted through other peoples’ Twi**er reports.

Sadly, that’s not the case. The Atlantic has published Trudeau’s full remarks that he made on receiving a Polk Award for journalism, and it substantiates what I said yesterday. Here are just a couple of excerpts from the Atlantic piece, “The abuse of satire.”

I, and most of my colleagues, have spent a lot of time discussing red lines since the tragedy in Paris. As you know, the Muhammad cartoon controversy began eight years ago in Denmark, as a protest against “self-censorship,” one editor’s call to arms against what she felt was a suffocating political correctness. The idea behind the original drawings was not to entertain or to enlighten or to challenge authority—her charge to the cartoonists was specifically to provoke, and in that they were exceedingly successful. Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free speech absolutists were unchastened. Using judgment and common sense in expressing oneself were denounced as antithetical to freedom of speech.

And now we are adrift in an even wider sea of pain. Ironically, Charlie Hebdo,which always maintained it was attacking Islamic fanatics, not the general population, has succeeded in provoking many Muslims throughout France to make common cause with its most violent outliers. This is a bitter harvest.

Really, Mr. Trudeau? That’s Charlie Hebdo’s fault? Why isn’t it the fault of those “non-extremist’ Muslims who decided to align with the murderous thugs.

Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.

By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charliewandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died. Meanwhile, the French government kept busy rounding up and arresting over 100 Muslims who had foolishly used their freedom of speech to express their support of the attacks.

. . . What free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.

I really believed that Trudeau was more thoughtful than this. First of all, in what sense are Muslims “non-privileged”? Yes, there are anti-immigrant strains in France (not just against Muslims, but against blacks as well), but in many cases Charlie Hebdo was going after Islam in general, which has hegemony over several powerful and important countries in the world. Yet Trudeau still intimates that Charlie Hebdo violated French law and, by extension, should be prosecuted.

Second, why are bad ideas limited to the “privileged”? Why is it off limits to go after those ideologies held by minorities? After all, another reviled minority in France is skinheads and Nazi sympathizers. Should we declare satirizing those groups off limits because they’re “non-privileged”? What about black charlatan preachers like Creflo Dollar? Is it mean to make fun of his desire for a multi-million-dollar jet, and of those who fund it, because they’re members of an oppressed minority?

Further, why is “punching up” okay if doing that is also liable to create violence? After all, if you “punch up” against Islam in Pakistan, you’re a dead cartoonist.  Should one always refrain from mocking bad ideas if the target is liable to react violently? Do tell us what you think, Mr. Trudeau.

In the next-to-last paragraph above, Trudeau comes close to blaming Charlie Hebdo for the violence it incited. Sorry, Mr. Trudeau, but that fault lies at the door of the offended Muslims. And seriously, do you think the magazine’s staff was “directly inciting violence”? How did it do that, exactly? Did it tell Muslims to engage in a killing spree?

I am immensely saddened to realize that I’ll never again have quite the admiration for Trudeau that I once felt. He is apparently converging with the Offended Snowflakes who populate American campuses. Sure they’re allowed to feel pain, to be outraged, and to use their own right of free speech to protest. But they have no right to embark on violence or engage in censorship. To equate satirizing bad ideas, religious or otherwise, as “its own kind of fanaticism” is ridiculous. Trudeau neither understood the purpose of Charlie Hebdo’s satire, nor, apparently, the reason why we must protect that kind of speech and continue to encourage criticism of bad ideas. For if we shut up for fear of outraging proponents of bad ideas, we’re simply lost.