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.
There’s no doubt which “religion” this video is mocking, and it wouldn’t have been possible fifteen years ago, before it was dangerous to criticize Scientology because you’d either be sued, harassed, or stalked. Such is the power of the Internet!
How many references can you get? Do you know the billion-year-contract? Did you see the picture of the alien? The video is replete with references to features of the faith and the peccadillos or L. Ron. Hubbard and his minions.
h/t: Krishan
All the good that Salon has done by publishing the eloquent antitheist essays by Jeffrey Tayler has been wiped away for good by a new essay on the site, “You’re praying to the wrong God: What organized religion gets wrong about prayer.” It’s by Nancy Abrams, and is an excerpt from her new book A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet.
Judging from this excerpt and the Amazon description, Abrams does for religion what compatibilists do for free will: she tells us that there is no anthropomorphic God who cares for each of us, but that’s okay, for she redefines God to give us The Only Kind of God Worth Wanting!
That God is the Universe, or so you might discern from painfully clawing your way through her tortured prose. But it’s more than just Einstein’s recasting of God as the wonders and regularities of the Universe. Read a few excerpts and then tell me what you think she’s trying to say. (I’m not sure myself.)
This is her first paragraph, and I’ll be damned if I know what she’s talking about:
The power of praying comes from daring to enter that mysterious place between the emerging God and us. But it’s not an empty space—it’s our own selves on progressively larger size scales, where we are participating in multiple emerging phenomena and creating emergent identities. As the ancient Egyptian world blended outward into the spiritual world, so does ours. And the higher our consciousness goes along the Uroboros of Human Identity, the more it blends into the emerging phenomenon of God. In tuning our ordinary consciousness in to those higher levels that we may have scarcely ever visited before, we approach God.
Thus we simply change our idea of God from a supernatural being to whatever fulfills our “God Capacity”:
It’s time to crack open the whole idea of talking to God. If we are in a universe now known to span more than sixty orders of magnitude, and God is emerging from the infinite interactions of human aspirations, we have to look at everything anew. We’ve already begun to do this intellectually, but can we do it emotionally? How can we step outside images of God that are many centuries deep and realize that those are only images and not reality?
It turns out all humans have a tool that will let us do this. The perfect name for it was suggested by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In an interview filmed in the early 1950s Jung was asked bluntly, “Do you believe God exists?” Earlier Jung had written that all people need ideas and convictions that can give meaning to their lives and help them find their “place in the universe” (his phrase). He had written that we have the capacity to satisfy this need symbolically with a god image. He answered the interviewer by saying, “What I know is that all humans have a ‘god-capacity.’” That’s the tool. Our god-capacity.
And, apparently, we can force ourselves to believe that the Universe itself fills that “god-capacity”, which of course isn’t traditional religion at all, but to Abrams might be a good replacement (my emphasis):
There is a God that’s closer to every one of us than the air we breathe and more powerful than the zeitgeist in which our lives are planted. If we could learn from the evangelicals how to feel as though we’re really in touch with the emerging God in the ways we actually are, we could experience the joy and awe of participation in the universe and see the possibility of prayer as a cosmic blessing.
We have learned from the evangelicals in [Tanya] Luhrmann’s study that if we are motivated enough, it’s possible to train our minds to experience whatever we believe is real. What if we directed toward the real universe and the emerging God even a fraction of the effort that millions of religious people make every day to experience the presence of their image of God?
After redefining the Universe as God, she then redefines “prayer” as “contemplating the Universe” (this woman would have made a wonderful free-will compatibilist!):
It’s often said that prayer is talking to God and meditation is listening for the answer. That can be true, of course, but it’s not the only way. If we meditate on how the universe works as if we actually believed it, that would be a prayer to reality, and reality is the parent of God and everything else. This kind of prayer is a way of harmonizing oneself with the reality that can host an emerging God. We no longer live in an intuitive universe, but most of our words still refer to earthly experiences and, unless we unchain them as metaphors, these metaphors mislead us to think that they accurately reflect reality.
If we want to know how to talk to God, or how God might talk to us, we need to train our minds to live in the same universe as God. Doing so can be prayer.
. . . We’re truly participating in our universe when we come to feel in our bones that we are part of the story, thoroughly integrated into the big picture. God is emerging from us and bound into us, we know where we stand in the cosmos, and we know what we are.
. . . The galaxy is merely our local geography. There is a whole universe to re-envision, large and small, outside and inside ourselves. Expanding our consciousness to the spiritual realms of the universe is praying.
Seriously, can any thinking person take this stuff seriously? Her solution to the delusions of religion is to substitute the idea that God is really just science and naturalism, but is also more-than-just-naturalism in a way that isn’t quite clear. Will believers buy it? I doubt it? Will atheists buy it? Only if they’ve lost too many neurons.
Sure, you can harmonize religion with science if you redefine religion as science, and prayer as simply awe before the Universe. But then why use the word “God” at all, which, as Abrams knows, is loaded with emotional and historical resonance? You can also decide that “cat” is just another word for “d*g,” and then argue that Hili is a d*g, but who, given the historical use of those terms, would accept that usage? Only someone who desperatelyy wants a d*g but has only a cat.
h/t: Barry
I’m doing a bit of writing work at Harvard, and always make sure on these visits to reconnect with Dick Lewontin, my Ph.D. advisor, and perhaps the most famous evolutionary geneticist of the last generation. Although he’s retired, he still has space at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and, at age 86, he’s in very good nick. In January he (along with Tomoko Ohta) nabbed the famous Crafoord Prize, the evolution/ecology equivalent to the Nobel Prize, likewise awarded by the king of Sweden.
Today Dick, my Harvard host Andrew Berry, and I repaired to the Cambridge Commons for a bibulous lunch (well, Andrew and I had a beer) whose comestibles were okay but not worth displaying. But here’s the Great Man (also known as “Dr. L.” or, when we were his students, “The Boss”) about to dig into vegetarian spring rolls.
Dick’s office still harbors “The Moose,” an enormous mounted moose head that, when I was a graduate student in 1977, we stole from the MCZ attic and, at great labor, carried over to our lab, where one of the handier students mounted it on the wall. When Dick moved downstairs after retirement, he insisted that the moose go with him. And so it has, where it now sports a jaunty pith helmet.
Dick is pointing to a photograph of me, naked except for a cowboy hat and sneakers, climbing a small hill near Death Valley that we christened “Mount Lewontin” when I was doing field work. Since the mountain was too low to consider it an achievement to climb without oxygen, I climbed without clothing instead. I believe the inscription I wrote on it is, “To my friend and advisor Dick Lewontin, who has always climbed upwards toward the naked truth.”
I am proud to be among the mementos on Dick’s wall. The top photo is of Dick’s own advisor, Theodosius Dobzhansky (sitting at his microscope where he looked at the salivary-gland chromosomes of fruit flies), below that is the Naked Picture, and at bottom right is an X-ray photo of one of my first DNA gels, done back in the days when extraction of DNA and sequencing were done completely manually, with the sequence read from bands spread across four lanes—corresponding to the four nucleotides of DNA. I went to Princeton in 1990 on sabbatical just to learn how to do this (I produced only one paper from that work), and sent him that to show off my work to The Boss, just as a successful cat brings a mouse to its owner. The gel is also autographed, but I can’t remember what I wrote.
Andrew Berry photographed me by one of the two famous BioLab rhinos that flank the entrance to the nation’s most beautiful biology building.
Over at his website This View of Life, David Sloan Wilson has a transcript of a recent phone interview he did with Dick. It includes some choice (and not amiable) words about Steve Gould, as well as comments on their famous joint paper, “The Spandrels of San Marco,” on evolutionary psychology (not favorable!) and on niche construction.
Last December 12, the journal Science included a paper by Erich Jarvis et al. (reference and free download below) that undertook an ambitious revision of the family tree of birds. Although I read it when it came out, I didn’t post about it as I simply didn’t have the time (it takes about 4 hours to read and prepare one of these scientific posts). But I was reminded that I was remiss by a short piece by Sarah Lewin appearing online in March the Scientific American site, “The bird family tree gets a makeover“. The advantage of Lewin’s piece is that it compares both the old and new family trees (“phylogenies”) of birds to show how drastically our view of their evolution has changed from the Jarvis et al. paper. And there’s also a nightjar in both—can you spot it?
I’m only going to show the results, which are based on DNA sequencing of 48 birds spread across all avian orders. Three types of DNA were used: protein coding genes, introns (which are spacer segments separating protein-coding regions of DNA), and UCEs, as described below:
. . . we identified a high-quality orthologous gene set across avian species, consisting of exons from 8251 syntenic protein-coding genes (~40% of the proteome), introns from 2516 of these genes, and a nonoverlapping set of 3769 ultraconserved elements (UCEs) with ~1000 bp of flanking sequences. This total evidence nucleotide data set comprised ~41.8 million bp (table S3 and SM4), representing ~3.5% of an average avian genome.
The tree that resulted rested largely on noncoding intronic sequences, as one expects, since noncoding DNA is expected to be largely free of selection, and thus its evolution simply reflects the passage of time (evolution by “genetic drift”). This noncoding DNA is precisely the kind of DNA you want when you’re constructing a phylogeny. After all, a family tree simply describes which species’ ancestors branched off at different times, which and that time-branching is the relatedness of moden species. Anything affected by natural selection, whose action is usually not as clocklike, is likely to make the phylogeny noisier. At any rate, here is the new tree presented by Lewin, followed by her conclusions:
Lewin’s take:
The new tree confirms many past observations, such as the common ancestor of the core landbirds. It also resolves some controversial links. Who might have guessed, for instance, that pigeons and flamingos are close cousins?
In addition to 48 bird genomes, the researchers sequenced three crocodilian genomes to pinpoint early descendent relationships.
The separation of penguins, pelicans and ibis from flamingos and grebes (and pigeons) implies that the waterbird trait evolved independently multiple times.
Because of how quickly both land birds and waterbirds evolved, the data suggests that the original ancestors might have been birds that lived along the coastline.
Chickens share the most DNA with the first bird ancestor, closely followed by hoatzin and emu.
You can see how drastically things were revised. What strikes me is first of all, that vocal learning, the ability to imitate and learn new sounds, evolved three times independently: in songbirds like starlings, in parrots (of course), but also in hummingbirds! I was completely unaware that hummingbirds had any imitative capacities.
Other things I find intriguing are that parrots are much more closely related to songbirds than previously thought; that pigeons and doves are now more closely related to flamingos than to other songbirds; that hummingbirds are a sister group to the swifts; that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to either eagles or vultures; and that owls are more closely related to trogons, woodpeckers and trogons than to falcons.
We have many bird experts as readers, so if I’ve made any errors in my elementary explanation, or if there are any other important or suprising findings I’ve failed to highlight, please add them to the comments.
h/t: Amy
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E. D. Jarvis et al. 2014. Whole-genome analyses resolve early branches in the tree of life of modern birds. Science 346: 1320-1331.
I’ve mentioned that most of the photos that have been sent to me reside on my Big Computer back in Chicago (the mowse is the size of a CAW!), so I’m largely confined to showing photos sent me while I’m here in Boston (I’ll be home on Thursday). Fortunately, some readers have continued to send snaps. Here are a few:
Reader Mal Morrison sent an interspecies kerfuffle from Plymouth, Devon:
I wandered out onto my balcony with a cup of tea this morning and noticed a group of 4 Eurasian Magpies (Pica pica) examining an old nest in a nearby tree. One of them alighted on a Georgian house 10 metres from the tree. The disused chimney in the house is being used by by Jackdaws (Corvus momendula) for nesting (they are using the slot that can be seen in the photo). The picture is of the outcome of the encounter.
Reader Pyers snapped some herons on a bibulous trip:
Just got back from the week on the canals and, apart from the ubiquitous mallards and moorhens, these are the best of the photos ( the weather was a bit grey):
We had just paused for water ( you must top up with drinking water on a regular basis – imagine running out ….. 😉 and I saw this gray heron (Ardea cinerea) opposite. Grabbed the camera and got these. They are in order – the bird landed just by a mooring ring ( which is visible by its feet in the last photo)
Location: just above Tardebigge Top Lock ( the start of the longest flight of canal locks in the UK – 30 locks in about 2 ½ miles !) , Worcestershire, UK. By the way, I would really recommend a trip like that as a getaway for a party of friends. Perfect way to see very rural England and various pubs!
And of course Stephen Barnard of Idaho always comes through in the lean times:
Yet another Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) and yet another Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). I’m pretty sure, from the way the eagles were behaving, that the eggs have hatched.
A new week has begun. Have you accepted Christ (who rose yesterday) as your personal Lord and Savior? For even if you were a jerk or even a criminal your whole life, that acceptance will win you a spot in heaven!
Meanwhile, Easter in Dobrzyn was uneventful, except that Malgorzata, Andrzej, and Hili were visited by a number of Andrzej’s former students, paying homage to the Great Man and bringing their boyfriends/girlfriends for approval. Hili, of course, got a lot of fusses (see below).
And today’s dialogue, says Malgorzata, needs an explanation:
Well, explanation is needed. There is a strange custom in Poland (and some other parts of Eastern Europe) on Easter Monday to drench people with water. It is even described in Wikipedia (in English). Hili urges Cyrus to join in:
Hili: Jump into the water and then go next to them and shake yourself.
Cyrus: This is not a good idea.
In Polish:Hili: Wskocz do wody, a potem się przy nich otrząśnij.
Cyrus: To nie jest dobry pomysł.
What a good sign: Philomena Cunk (aka Diane Morgan), the Official Website Sweetheart™, has retweeted a photo of some Easter biscuits, which apparently came from Tornado Alley Atheists (motto: “We give atheism a bad name”):
h/t: pghwelshgirl
Stephen Barnard sent a holiday-themed picture from Idaho:
Deets and I accidentally spooked a Canada Goose [Branta canadensis] off this nest. I took a quick photo and moved on. I’m surprised they can nest successfully on the ground with all the predators around. Seemed appropriate for Easter.
