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.
Reader Phil sent me a nice cartoon from a local newspaper, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, with this note: “Perhaps you might enjoy the attached political cartoon. Clay Bennett is one of the lone bright spots in Tennessee journalism. I’m sure he gets a lot of hate mail. You can find more of his work here.”
Non-Americans might not recognize that the elephant picture you see outside the door is the emblem of the Republican Party.
It is Thursday, right? Sadly, the cold weather has returned to Chicago, and I’ve planned a trip to Boston, hoping that the gazillion feet of snow there will have melted by the beginning of April. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is just . . . enigmatic. Does she have a schedule for hunting mice versus birds?
Hili: Thursday.A: That’s right.Hili: But I was planning another day of the week for today.
Hili: Czwartek.
Ja: Zgadza się.
Hili: Planowałam na dziś inny dzień tygodnia.
I have asked for an explanation from Malgorzata, who wrote me this:
Hili planned that it will be Friday, Saturday or Sunday. She is not pleased that this is Thursday when she wanted it to be another day of the week. She just discovered the sad reality (by checking the calendar) that it really is Thursday and she is complaining about reality. It is not that she had any plans for Friday, Saturday or Sunday. She just planned another day for this day.
Here’s a bit of squee to take us over the week’s hump. Who would have guessed that platypuses had this catlike behavior? Here are the YouTube notes for the video below:
This beautiful platypus loved playing in the water and loved a tickle! She was so friendly and ate food right out of my hand! There is only one place you can do this in the world and that’s at Healesville Sanctuary [near Melbourne].
Look at this friendly little girl; I assume it’s a female because males have poisoned spurs on their hind legs. With a cat, the penalty for an unwanted belly rub is a swat or a bite, but with a male platypus it’s a poisoned dart!
Here’s the “Wade with the Platypus” experience, which ain’t cheap: $195 Australian (about $150 US). But I’d still do it: for life is short.
Most of you have probably heard of Stephen Law, a philosopher at the University of London and provost of the Center for Inquiry UK (he’s also an atheist). At the Five Books site, which I keep recommending as a great way to find what to read in an area you’re curious about, Nigel Warburton has just done an interview with Law , who recommends five books for learning about (and debunking) pseudoscience. I’ll leave you to read what he says, but I’ll list the books here (and their US Amazon links) for your convenience. And I’ll append or or two statements from the interview.
Les livres:
God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser (about the failure of Christian Science healing). I’ve read this book and it’s terrific.
UFOs: The Public Deceived by Philip J. Klass.
Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst. I want to read this book.
Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. I’ve read this book, and also recommend it. It’s a great takedown of postmodern nonsense.
How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a Critical Age by Theodore Schick. I haven’t read this book.
Weigh in below with your thoughts on any of these you’ve read. I’ll finish with a definition and an opinion by Law.
We’re going to be looking at your choice of books about pseudoscience, but before we go into the books themselves, could you explain what pseudoscience is?
Pseudoscience is a practice in which people convince themselves that what they’re doing is science – that it meets scientific standards – but, on closer examination, it turns out that they’re merely aping the methods of science. It’s a kind of fake science. I’m particularly interested in pseudoscience and other dodgy systems of belief. Our cultural landscape contains many belief systems which are intellectual black holes: as you approach them you find yourself getting drawn in. Eventually you pass the event horizon, and there is no escape, or at least it can be extremely difficult to think your way out again. The people that are trapped inside these belief systems are often intelligent, well-educated people. They really believe that what they believe is rational and reasonable and perhaps even scientifically credible. But the truth is that they are duping themselves. I’ve selected some books which illustrate this tendency of human beings to get sucked into these intellectual prisons, often never to escape.
And Law apparently lumps religion in which pseudoscience, which is fine so long as we’re talking about truth claims of religion that could, in principle, be tested empirically:
What I object to is the way in which some appeal to mystery in order to try and get themselves out of trouble, in order to deflect attention away from the fact that there’s no real evidence to suggest that what they’re saying is true (and perhaps even evidence contradicts what they claim). It’s important to me that if somebody claims that they have some kind of medicine that works for a particular illness, for example, that they can show that the medicine really works. I don’t think that anyone should be making those kind of claims, and in particular making money from those kind of claims, unless they can demonstrate that what they claim is, or is very probably, true. It’s particularly important that we all have some immunity to the kind of bullshit that surrounds us in our everyday lives. When I walk down the high street where I live, I find people promoting all sorts of strange and peculiar beliefs, religious beliefs, alternative medicines, and so on. Many of these people are fairly harmless, but not all of them. Some of them want to lure me and my children into belief systems that are potentially exploitative, and perhaps even dangerous. We all need some immunity to bullshit. We need to make sure that our critical faculties are engaged. We need to be sure that a little red light will come on in our heads as we begin to approach one of these intellectual black holes, so that we don’t fall victim.
Oh Lord, Elaine Ecklund is at it again. And by “it,” I mean “taking money from the Templeton Foundation, making a survey, and then interpreting the data to show what Templeton wants: a finding that science and religion are in harmony.”
Ecklund’s latest efforts, which haven’t yet been published but were the subject of a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meetings, are summarized by Science Daily. (The Rice University blurb, from where Ecklund works as a professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life program, notes that Templeton funded this research.) And the upshot of Ecklund’s research (i.e., data masaging) is that evangelical Christians don’t reject science as much as we think they do. Here’s her rationale:
Ecklund noted that evangelicals are of interest in this study because they constitute approximately 26 percent of the population in the U.S. and are often considered the most hostile toward science.
“We really wanted to determine if this claim was based in any truth,” Ecklund said. “Although many politicians and the media at large portray evangelicals as distrustful of science, we found that this is more myth than reality.”
Surprise!!! Here is a summary of her “Religious understandings of science” survey:
It includes a nationally representative survey of more than 10,000 Americans and more than 300 in-depth interviews with Christians, Jews and Muslims; more than 140 of the latter three groups are evangelical Christians.
The data, then, though presented as “the largest study of American views on religion and science,” is limited to about 140 “evangelical Christians.” Is that a good sample? Who knows?
And of course you know what Ecklund found: many of them do trust science. Here are the “key findings” as given in the Science Daily post (indented), with my comments:
Of course, the “complementary” view is totally wrong, for it presumes that science and religion somehow help each other in understanding the universe. As I maintain in The Albatross, this is bogus because religion has no reliable ways to find out what is true. (By “complementary,” I presume they mean “complementary in finding truth,” not “separate magisteria,” which is what the “independence” criterion is for.)
But Ecklund is all about proving that people’s perceptions of evangelicals are wrong, not that evangelicals have an accurate perception of reality.
The same goes for the “independent” characterization, which is Gould’s argument about nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA): that religion should make no claims about the nature of reality, and science should make no claims about meaning, morals and values, which are the bailiwick of faith.
NOMA, of course, is wrong because religion is not the sole magisterium for meaning, morals and values—secular philosophy has done a better job in the last few millennia. And of course religion, including evangelical Christianity, does make statements about reality: about whether God exists, about whether Jesus came to earth and did miracles and was resurrected, about prayer working, about there being a soul and an afterlife, and so on. Those issues are certainly not “independent” of science, and both scientists and theologians admit that Gould is wrong in arguing that religion does not or should not make truth claims.
So if evangelicals do have those beliefs about science and religion, fine, but they’re misguided. What’s more important—correcting our ideas of how we see these people, or correcting their harmful and misguided beliefs? Ecklund concentrates all her energies on the former. I prefer to deal with the latter.
Note that Ecklund uses the general term “science.” I suspect she’d get rather different results if she asked about specific areas of science, say evolution, global warming, or a 13.7-billion-year old Big Bang.
Finally, there are Pew data contradicting Ecklund’s statistical claims (see below):
See above.
This is deceptive, for of course “identifying with a religious tradition” doesn’t mean “accepts a religion”! I identify with Judaism, for instance, as that’s my background, but I don’t believe a word of its doctrine. Ecklund is counting on people to not to look too hard at her wording. The facts about the religious belief of American scientists, which are in the following passage from Faith vs. Fact, are that more scientists are atheists than believers, and that good scientists are the most atheistic of all:
The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent were atheists (the rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling. When one moves to scientists working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62 percent being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23 percent who believed in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than among the general public.
Finally, sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that elects only the most accomplished researchers in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93 percent of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only 7 percent believing in a personal God. This is almost the exact opposite of the data for “average” Americans.
It will be a cold day in Hell (that’s a metaphorical Hell) when Ecklund will admit this. She’s spent her career avoiding it by concentrating on stuff like scientists’ “spirituality” or “following a religious tradition.”
Who ever claimed that any believers think that science does more harm than good? Presumably even evangelical Christians use cellphones, take antibiotics, and fly in airplanes.
This is in fact an indictment of evangelicals: they’re just not as interested in science as are other believers or nonbelievers.
But here are some contradictory data from a Pew survey taken in 2009:
52% of evangelical Protestants think that science conflicts often with religion, and 49% of them see science as sometimes conflicting with their own religious beliefs (I suspect evolution is the culprit here). What happened? Did evangelicals undergo a big change in the last five years? I doubt it. There is either a difference between Ecklund and Pew in the sample, in the wording of the questions, or something else. One thing’s for sure: either Ecklund won’t mention this survey, or she’ll find a way to dismiss it. She is, after all, on a mission from God.
And the worst news:
Ecklund plans to write a book about the survey findings with Chris Scheitle, a sociology professor at the West Virginia University.
h/t: Tom
Last night the state of Missouri executed by lethal injection the convicted murderer Cecil Clayton. Clayton, however, was brain-damaged, and in a way that probably contributed to his crime. The situation is described by The Guardian:
The state of Missouri executed its oldest death row inmate on Tuesday – a man who was mentally impaired from a work accident that removed a large portion of his brain – after his final appeals failed at the US supreme court.
The execution of Cecil Clayton, 74, was delayed for several hours, while the supreme court weighed appeals from Clayton’s defense attorneys.
Lawyers acting for Clayton, 74, had called on the nation’s highest court to intervene and stay the execution. In a petition to the nine justices, they argued that it would be unconstitutional to execute the prisoner because under a series of rulings in recent years the supreme court has banned judicial killings of insane and intellectually disabled people.
Clayton lost about a fifth of his frontal lobe in 1972 when a splinter from a log he was working on in a sawmill in Purdy, Missouri, dislodged and slammed into his skull. The damage has had a long-term impact on his character and behavior, with a succession of medical experts chronicling problems ranging from uncontrolled rage to hallucinations and depression.
The frontal lobe has an important function in controlling impulse and emotion.
Here’s his crime, from MSNBC:
Then, in 1996, Clayton’s life changed forever – again – when he shot and killed a police officer. Before Barry County Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Castetter even got out of his vehicle at Clayton’s home – where the officer had gone to investigate a domestic dispute – Clayton fatally shot Castetter in the head, according to police.
Here’s Clayton (photo from the Guardian):
And here’s a scan of Clatyon’s brain from MSNBC. The damage is obvious and severe:
Both the governor of Missouri and the Supreme Court rejected Clayton’s appeal, though admitting he had what they euphemistically called “adaptive deficits.” What they saw as more relevant was Clayton’s ability to understand why he was being killed. More from the Guardian:
“Mr. Clayton’s IQ, since his accident and subsequent deterioration, now falls within the range required for intellectual disability,” the defense wrote in its appeal to the high court. “And there is substantial evidence of adaptive deficits; Mr. Clayton, even in prison, cannot without assistance order canteen items or navigate the telephone system.”
Missouri said that medical exams had found Clayton understood why he was being executed and that meant he was competent to face the needle. They argued that Clayton’s intellectual deficits had to be present before he turned 18 to let him escape execution and that he waited too long to raise his claim.
“As one who has carried a badge most of my adult life, I share the outrage of every Missourian at the murder of law enforcement officer, Deputy Christopher Castetter,” Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said in a statement following the execution. “Cecil Clayton tonight has paid the ultimate price for his terrible crime.”
This execution is a prime example tragic results that come from people’s failure to understand determinism and its consequences for justice, reward, and punishment. What happened to Clayton is a direct and unavoidable consequence of his background and genes, but also of the public’s erroneous notion that people have “free will”—that in many situations we (and Clayton) can freely choose to act other than the way they did. In fact, science tells us that Clayton had no such choice, whatever the prosecutors say. Our brains are computers made of meat, and run programs based on their wiring, which comes from the genes we inherited and the environments we experienced. There is no ghostly “we” that can override the output of those programs.
The MSNBC link was sent to me by Dr. Russell Jacobe, an anesthesiologist in Texas who should know something about the brain (name and email used with permission). Jacobe sent me his own analysis of the issue, and rather than reiterate what he said, which I fully agree with, I’ll just reproduce what he told me:
The above [MSNBC] link references an execution that has implications regarding freewill. The prisoner, Cecil Clayton, suffered a traumatic brain injury and years later murdered a policeman. After the injury Mr. Clayton had gross abnormalities in the frontal cortex on MRI (missing a significant part of it) personality changes, problems with impulse control, and a decrease in cognitive ability. I do not believe he had the ability to choose his actions at the time he committed the crime. This seems an obvious case where continued medical treatment, not execution, would have been more humane. This patient/prisoner had macro changes to the brain that our current MRI technology can easily identify. What if in the future we can define abnormalities or brain damage at a finer level? There are probably many cases of brain damage in the ranks of murderers that we can’t pinpoint yet via scans or testing. I believe, as neuroscience and genetic testing improve, we will learn that most violent criminals have physical reasons for why they broke the law. We may learn that it is not their fault that their brain structures and pathways predispose them to violence just like it is not a diabetic patient’s fault that her blood sugar is high. Such advances would have profound repercussions for how we punish crime in this country.
I’ve enjoyed your work and website for years and look forward to the new book. Obviously, I had no choice but to send you this email.
But I would go further than Dr. Jacobe, adding something I’ve always believed: every criminal has “brain damage” in the sense that the constitution of their brain, as determined by their environmental history and genetics—in conjunction with the situation in which they found themselves when they transgressed—had no choice but to commit a crime that damages society. Nearly all philosophers agree with that kind of determinism. A criminal could not have done otherwise at the moment of his crime, just as we have no choice about whether to have a sandwich or a salad at lunch.
This determinism makes hash of the notion that we should judge or punish criminals based on whether they “knew right from wrong” or whether they “can understand why they are being executed”. Yes, some miscreants do know and understand those things, but, given that they couldn’t have acted otherwise, why is that relevant? It’s entirely possible to know that what you’re doing is wrong by society’s lights, and yet still be unable to resist doing wrong. Sociopaths are the most extreme example of this: some clearly understand that society judges their actions as wrong, but they themselves don’t feel that they’re wrong. But even criminals who sense that their own actions are “wrong” still have no choice in what they do. And their IQ is irrelevant, too. No matter how “smart” you are, your choices are just as constrained as anyone else’s. We’re all responsible for our missteps, in the sense that we made them and punishment of the miscreant may be warranted. But we’re not morally responsible, for that means that we could have freely chosen a better way.
What Clayton needed was not a lethal injection, but treatment. Yes, perhaps treatment couldn’t help someone with such a severe brain problem. In that case rehabilitation might be futile, but Clayton would still need to be jailed—for both the protection of society from his poor impulse control, and to deter others less obviously debilitated from committing similar crimes. Biological determinism is still compatible with confinement for these things. Deterrence, rehabilitation, and sequestration are the reasons we determinists favor incarceration, whether it be in a jail or a hospital. (Deterrence is simply the action of an environment circumstance—the observation of someone suffering for what you might contemplate doing—on your neurons.) But in all cases our goal should be the good of society and the possibility of changing the prisoner so he can re-enter society without endangering us all.
But Missouri’s goal in this case goes far beyond that: its goal was largely to punish Clayton for what he did. In other words, the motivation was retribution. This is clear from both the stated “outrage” of the attorney general and the notion that Clayton had to “pay a price” for his crimes—the loss of his life. Clearly, both of these statements assume that Clayton could have behaved otherwise—could have refrained from the murder. Outrage is not a useful emotion toward someone whose crime probably stemmed from brain damage.
But it’s not a useful emotion to feel towards any crime, although such emotions, and the desire for retribution, may have evolved as a way to protect society from offenders. But rationality has taken us beyond these primitive feelings: we understand determinism, we understand that people’s actions are completely determined by factors over which they have no control, and we can put aside our childish emotions and adopt a truly humane approach to justice. When we realize that criminals never had a choice, we can then let science rather than knee-jerk reactions guide our actions. What punishment is the best deterrent for others? What are the chances that an offender, if released after a certain period, is likely to re-offend? What is the best way to treat prisoners, “brain damaged” or otherwise, to cure them?
All this is, in principle, accessible through research, but little is being done. We’re still letting primitive emotions rather than reason guide our actions. When they slipped the needle into Clatyton’s veins yesterday, it was an act not of reason, but of irrational and state-sponsored retribution. How can it possibly make sense to kill someone for something they could not help doing?
Today’s strip is apparently based on a true story, which you can hear on the BBC’s “Beyond Belief” podcast (go to 10:25). Wikipedia has a concise article on the Mahdi.
Norah Jones‘s (b. 1979) real name is Geetali Norah Jones Shankar, and it’s well known that she’s the daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shanker (her mother was Sue Jones). When I first heard this song in 2002, on her Come Away with Me album, I was blown away. It’s a beautiful jazz-infused song, with only five instruments (including her own piano) and a languid delivery that reminds me a bit of Billie Holiday.
“Don’t Know Why” was in fact written and first performed by Jesse Harris, but it was Jones who made it a huge hit. It nabbed her three Grammys in 2003: record of the year, song of the year, and best female pop vocal performance. Sadly, although maintaining a respectable performing and recording career, Jones never again rose to the standard of this song. She remains somewhat of a “one hit wonder.”
I’ve listened to this many times, as it’s on my iPod when I exercise, and I went back and forth on whether it’s about the death of love that’s coincident with bad sex. But this morning I heard it again on my way to work, and concluded that it’s indeed salacious. But it’s still beautiful. This is a live version performed in Amsterdam.
The original recorded version is here, and there’s a wonderful solo version—just Jones and her piano—here (I almost put that one up).