In which I defend evolution but claim that denying it is not the same thing as denying gravity or relativity

February 18, 2015 • 11:25 am

The Washington Examiner is a conservative website, so when one of its reporters, Eddie Scarry, called me yesterday to talk about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s refusal to give his viewpoint on evolution, I asked if Scarry was himself against evolution. After receiving his assurances that he wasn’t, we then had a long conversation about Walker, and, in particular, a piece by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, rightfully calling out Walker for his cowardice, pandering, or both. But Cohen, in an otherwise admirable piece said one thing that I found dubious. Here’s a bit of Cohen’s piece, and I’ve bolded the part to which the reporter asked me to respond:

But it was in London that a Brit, somehow overlooking the significance of cheese, asked the governor whether he believes in evolution. This is precisely no different than asking whether one believes in the theory of gravity or general relativity, but Walker would not answer. He said he had come to London to deal not with philosophical matters but, as cannot be emphasized enough, cheese. Good day, gentlemen!

It is in fact different from asking whether one believes (“accepts” is a better word because “believe” implies a religious-like faith) in theory of gravity or generality relativity, and the reason is obvious. The theories of gravity and relativity don’t impinge on anyone’s religious beliefs. Evolution carries implications that no other science does—save, perhaps some branches of cosmology. It implies that humans evolved by the same blind, materialistic, and naturalistic process involved in the evolution of every other species, and so we aren’t special in any numious sense. It implies that we’re not the special objects of God’s creation. It sinks the “design” argument for God—the most powerful argument in the canon of Natural Theology. It implies that we were not endowed by God with either a soul or moral instincts, so that our morality is a product of both evolution and rational consideration. It implies that much of our behavior reflects evolved, genetically-influenced propensities rather than dualistic “free will.” It implies that even if God did work through the process of evolution , He did so using a horrible and painful process of natural selection, a form of “natural evil” that doesn’t comport well with God’s supposed omnibenevolence.

That is why asking about whether people accept evolution differs from asking them about stuff like gravity or relativity: the latter two areas don’t have any implications for or conflict with traditional religious belief. That’s why it’s entirely possible to be pro-science except for evolution, and why a lot of people are. That’s what I told the reporter, though of course I added that the evidence supporting evolution is at least as that supporting gravity and relativity or the “germ theory” of disease. And I noted that while it’s possible to reject evolution and be pro-science, there is a correlation between anti-evolution and anti-science, which is mediated through not just religion (which sometimes promotes anti-environmentalist and anti-global warming views), but also through politics. It’s no coincidence that Republicans are not only the anti-evolution party in the U.S., but also the anti-science party.

As far as I could tell, I gave Scarry a full account of what I thought. But of course reporters have their own agendas, and here’s how it came out in his piece. I am the “Democrat biologist”! (click on screenshot to go to the article):

“Democrat biologist”? Really? What does my politics have to do with the issue? I also told him I was a liberal and an atheist, but those labels were ignored. This headline seems to be an effort to politicize my statements about science. Anyway, here’s what Scarry wrote:

Dr. Jerry A. Coyne, an evolutionary biology professor at University of Chicago and author of Why Evolution is True, told the Washington Examiner media desk Tuesday that the question itself lacks substance.

“You can’t tell anything about Walker’s views on science from that question,” he said.

Coyne, who identifies himself as a Democrat, said that it is not inherently “anti-science” to eschew a definitive stance on evolution theory.

As the media storm brewed last week over Walker’s evolution punt, he issued a statement via his Twitter account, saying “both science and my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God. I believe faith and science are compatible, and go hand in hand.”

Coyne said that science is divided into many fields and evolutionary biology is unique in that it stands at odds with many religions.

“Evolution is a particular view point,” he said. [JAC: I said “viewpoint” as one word!] “It’s the one form of scientific research that goes against people’s religious beliefs. You can’t say that about chemistry or physics. … So, you can be pro-science but deny evolution.”

Coyne added, though, that the evidence supporting evolution theory is as strong as germ theory (the assertion that microscopic organisms cause disease in the human body). “It’s irrefutable,” he said.

I suppose that’s generally correct, but the reporter neglected to mention that those who are against evolution are, through group identity with either a faith or political party, on average more against science than are those who accept evolution. That is, I qualified my statement “You can’t tell anything about Walker’s views on science from that question.”

Indeed, although I and others have called out Walker for either his cowardice or his ignorance (or both) for ducking the question about evolution, his views on evolution would tell us with reasonable confidence only if he favored teaching evolution in the public schools. And indeed, he should have answered that question. But if you want to know what Walker thinks about global warming, genetically modified organisms, vaccination, or other issues that are far more pressing for our species than is the teaching of evolution, then ask him about those other issues. You can’t simply use one’s views on evolution to represent one’s views on science as a whole.

Sam Harris on the Chapel Hill murders

February 18, 2015 • 8:45 am

The bodies of the three young Muslims who were murdered in Chapel Hill were barely cold before the finger-pointing began. Predictably, the religious, including some Muslims, expressed absolute assurance that this was a “hate crime” motivated by Craig Stephen Hicks’s animus towards Muslims.

What was almost as predictable but, perhaps, more reprehensible, was the eagerness of some atheists to blame this crime on the “militancy” of New Atheists. Indeed, some atheists accused people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Lawrence Krauss of creating a climate of hatred and “dehumanization” of Muslims that gave rise to the murders, and even of being complicit in the murders themselves. Those same accusatory atheists sneered at explanations, like mental illness, a parking dispute, and so on, that didn’t involve New Atheism and “Islamophobia” (see here, here, here and here for examples). In the rush to judgement, the facts were either unknown or ignored.

Well, the grand jury that just indicted Hicks didn’t indict him for committing a “hate crime,” which they could have done. As PuffHo says of hate crimes in the state:

To win a hate-crime conviction, however, legal experts say prosecutors would have to prove Hicks deliberately targeted those killed because of their religion, race or national origin.

North Carolina does not have a specific “hate crime” statute, though its laws cover such acts of “ethnic intimidation” as hanging a noose, burning a cross or setting fire to a church.

In the absence of strong evidence that there was religious animus behind the crime, a grand jury indicted Hicks on three counts of murder and one count of discharging a firearm in an occupied building. That, of course, won’t stop those with an ideological agenda to continue calling it a hate crime—one motivated by atheism, “Islamophobia,” or both. But the evidence of an anti-Muslim animus is virtually nonexistent in this case. In the only analysis I know that minutely dissected Hicks’s motives, at least from his writings, Michael Nugent, after thoroughly analyzing Hicks’s Facebook page (see his posts here and here), concluded this:

It may be that [Hicks] murdered them because he was an atheist and they were Muslims, and that he simply did not reflect that part of his personality online. But the available evidence does not support that idea, and those who are engaging in speculation should take into account the available evidence.

I agree. Speculation not only outran the facts in this case, but is now obdurately against the facts. Unless and until Hicks or someone else provides evidence that he killed the Muslims in the name of atheism, I won’t accept that as a motive, and until I see evidence that he killed them because they were Muslims, I can’t bring myself to call this a hate crime. That, of course, is in distinction to the actions of those like the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, who told us their reasons for killing.

One of those accused of creating a climate that led to this murder, Sam Harris, produced an eloquent 24-minute audio response on his website, a response called “The Chapel Hill murders and ‘militant’ atheism.” It is a calm, reasoned, and eloquent piece in which Harris not only abjures responsibility for the crime and the climate that supposedly created it, but indicts those like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald, who, by being quick to accuse New Atheists of complicity in the murders, actually endanger the safety of those New Atheists. I know, for example, that Sam gets hate mail in Arabic after these accusations get into the Twi**ersphere. That would scare the bejeesus out of me.

Click on the screenshot below (or the link above) to go to Sam’s podcast:

Sam begins his piece with an expression of horror at the murder of these three young people, and ends with a plea addressed to those of us who want to maintain our rights to speak freely and publicly about what we need to express, including the dangers of faith, and yet not fear for our lives by doing so. Harris asks us to push back on social media against the distortions of people like Greenwald and Aslan who, using the Chapel Hill murders as an excuse, demand that we give up criticizing religion.

As Harris says:

“If you care about our ability to notice, and criticize, and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn this behavior. You have to condemn the deliberate manufacture of lies designed to make it unsafe to have honest conversations.”

Lest we forget that what’s getting lost in these ideological battles is the inexpressible tragedy of people whose lives were snuffed out before they had much of a chance to live them. Here are the victims:

The dead have been identified as:

Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, of Chapel Hill

Yusor Mohammad Barakat, 21, of Chapel Hill

Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh

Barakat was Mohammad’s husband; Abu-Salha was her sister.

Barakat was a second-year student at the UNC School of Dentistry, who was raising money on a fundraising site to provide dental care to Syrian refugees in Turkey.

He had been married for just over a month to Yusor Mohammad, who was planning to begin her dental studies at UNC in the fall, according to the school.

The remarkable spider-tailed viper

February 18, 2015 • 6:57 am

I’ve previously written a post on the spider-tailed viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides), a wonderful snake that has a bizarre and deceptively spider-like appendage on its tail. It was discovered in 1968 in Iran, but described as a new species only in 2006, with the authors speculating that the appendage could be used to lure prey. Below is a picture of the snake’s “caudal appendage” taken from the well-named website Life is short, but snakes are long (LISBSAL), which also describes the developmental basis of this structure:

. . . the structure of the [appendage], which is formed of the last pair of subcaudal scales, much enlarged, and a single enlarged dorsal scale. The elongated components are modified lateral scales. X-rays taken by the team showed that the caudal vertebrae extend well into this structure and are not deformed or modified.

So what we have here, as we nearly always do with new structures in evolution, is simply the modification of an old structure in a novel way. One could imagine that mutations that affected the rear scales, making them bigger and more spidery-looking, could give a reproductive advantage (more food!) to the mutant snake. Further mutations would make the lure even more spider-like and more attractive to prey. And perhaps the tail-waving was already in place, though it was surely elaborated after this structure began to evolve.

As I noted in my earlier post, this appendage could function to scare off predators, but the way the snake waves the appendage suggests that it’s a deceptive lure to attract prey who thinks they’re going to eat a juicy spider. Here’s a video of lure-waving:

Further, the informative post on LISBAL on “Spider-tailed adders” gives other information suggesting that this is indeed an evolved trait helping the snake capture prey, particularly birds:

Behavioral observations made in 2008 of a live P. urarachnoides captured in western Iran and maintained in captivity confirm these ideas. Closed-circuit video was used to record behavior, and the results published in the Russian Journal of Herpetology by Behzad Fathinia of Razi University and his colleagues. They observed the snake, a juvenile male that regurgitated a Crested Lark, using its caudal lure to attract sparrows and baby chickens that they introduced into its enclosure. When the birds approached and pecked the tail, the snake struck and envenomated the birds, a process taking less than one half second. A bird was also found in the stomach of the paratype specimen, further evidence that this species might feed heavily on birds in the wild with the aid of its spectacular caudal lure. The tail of P. urarachnoides probably represents the most elaborate morphological caudal ornamentation known in any snake, with the possible exception of the sound-producing rattles of rattlesnakes.

And, indeed, the video below, which came out a year after my first post, shows how the spider “lure” can attract a bird, which is then killed. This video is a bit heavy on rhetoric and light on science, but it still shows the effectiveness of the deceptive tail.

h/t: Mathieu

Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and lagniappe)

February 18, 2015 • 4:40 am

Oy vey! Checking the temperture outside on my weather app, I find that it’s 3ºF (- 16ºC), and it will get colder today, with a predicted low of -8ºF (- 22ºC). Tomorrow will be at least as cold. The door into summer is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, soaking up sun through the window, Hili essays a bit of philosophy:

A: What are you thinking about?

Hili: I know that the issue of free will in humans is controversial, but I suppose nobody questions free will in cats?

(Photo: Sarah Lawson)

In Polish:

Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Ja wiem, że kwestia wolnej woli u ludzi jest kontrowersyjna, ale chyba nikt nie kwestionuje wolnej woli kotów?(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)

*******

As lagnaippe, here is a short, weather-related cat video. The English is a bit wonky but ignore that, for here’s Sparta the cat desperately seeking the Door to Inside. The YouTube description:

After a hudge snowstorm my cat was lost in the snow then he return in the house like a bulldozer. No animal abuse here and no one throwing the cat, sad to hear that from troll people ;( . Another video will be made but on the other side.

A slow-motion version with scary sound effects is here.

Finally, this photograph, which I know nothing about, has been making the rounds on the Internet:

h/t: Blue, jsp

Leon the Cat hikes in the mountains

February 17, 2015 • 4:15 pm

Leon the Cat, a lovely male tabby owned by Elzbieta (see here at the bottom), a friend of Malgorzata and Andrzej, has been trained to not only walk on a leash, but also be carried in a daypack. Therefore he gets to take hikes with his staff.

When I heard that Leon and his staff were going to the mountains, and in Poland in winter, I wondered how he’d take to the snow. Well, I’ve received two Leon monologues (he doesn’t do dialogues) indicating that all is well:

Leon: Are there any chamois out there?

*******

Leon: I discovered that I have a gene for mountain wandering.

And I have received a report that “Leon was sleeping sweetly in his backpack on the way back.”

David Carr, 1956-2015

February 17, 2015 • 3:45 pm

by Greg Mayer

David Carr’s funeral was held earlier today in New York. He died last week of complications from lung cancer, collapsing and dying in the newsroom of the New York Times, where he had been a media reporter and columnist since 2002. A media columnist for the New York Times might seem a bit far afield for WEIT, but our interests here are varied, and, in many ways, much of Carr’s journalism addressed questions at the heart of WEIT as an online enterprise: in a digital age moving away from physical print media, how are the means of gathering and disseminating information to change, and how can authority and reliability be earned and represented in digital media? The questions might sound a bit grand, but since starting his website 5 years ago, Jerry has been very much actively involved in defining what a website for discussion and presentation of science to the general public can be.

Carr, while embracing virtually all forms of digital media, clearly saw the virtues of “legacy” media, and insisted on the importance of news-gathering versus news-aggregating. In a memorable moment captured in the film Page One, he was once on stage with a vacuous dot com executive who hailed a brave new future where newspapers would be gone and people would produce their own news, to which Carr replied:

The New York Times has dozens of bureaus all over the world, and we’re gonna toss that out and kick back, see what Facebook turns up? I don’t think so.

I first found Carr through his Carpetbagger column at the Times, and began to regularly read all of his Times contributions. His back story, which I learned only after reading him for awhile, was amazing. A Minnesotan by birth and upbringing who had worked at a number of “alternative” weeklies, he had been a crack addict who, as he liked to put it, was a single parent on welfare. But in a remarkable second (or third or fourth) act to his life, he became one of the nation’s leading journalists– a paean to the second chance. He told this story in his memoir Night of the Gun and in a NY Times Magazine article (which is where I first read the story).

I saw him give a live TV interview last week, just a day or so before he died, on the Brian Williams affair. I was shocked to see how ill-fitting his suit was—he had lost a tremendous amount of weight, probably one of the complications of the cancer that was to soon end his life. I thought his remarks about Brian Williams a tad ungenerous: he referred to Williams’ “bad decisions”, but having taught for 20 years about the unreliability of sincere eyewitness testimony and the constructive nature of memory, I could not see Williams’ errors as “decisions”, but as an all too frequent result of how human memory works (an aspect of the Williams story well covered by the Times).

Despite my different take on Brian Williams, I always appreciated and frequently agreed with Carr’s analyses. Margaret Sullivan has gathered together links to much of the coverage of Carr in the Times and throughout the media in her Public Editor column, so I won’t place any here; go take a look at her column and follow the links to sample some of Carr’s work and the tributes that have poured in.

Another Catholic defends the historicity of Adam and Eve

February 17, 2015 • 2:32 pm

When I was in Mississippi last week, I was once again given Catholicism as an example of a faith that has no problem with evolution. I politely disagreed, noting that the Church’s official doctrine accepts Adam and Eve as humanty’s literal ancestors, that Catholicism sees humans as evolutionarily special since God vouchsafed us a soul, and that the Church accepts the existence of demons afflicting us and has an Official Vatican Exorcist (and many other exorcists elsewhere) to expel them. Further, even though the Church sort-of-accepts evolution, 27% of American Catholics are still young-Earth creationists. At the very least, one must describe the Church’s stand on evolution as “mixed.”

And even reputable Catholic theologians take an anti-evolution stand. One of them is Dennis Bonnette, whose ludicrous essay “Did Adam and Eve really exist?” (answer: “YES!”) appeared in November’s Crisis magazine. I don’t really know Bonnette, but reader Neal, who sent me the link (where do you people find this stuff?), describes him as “generally regarded as one of the Catholic apologetic heavy hitters, along the lines of [Edward] Feser.”

I didn’t know anything about Crisis magazine either, though its banner says it’s “A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity.” Crisis magazine describes its mission like this:

Crisis has conceived its mission around the Holy Father’s insights. Each day, Crisis will remind countless Catholics of their heritage, give them the confidence to defend the common good, a just society, the teachings the Church, the family, the dignity of work and the sanctity of life. Our authors hope to help the new laity (and clerical readers) form both their intellect and their spirituality in a scholarly, but accessible, way.

Well, Bonnette’s article is hardly “scholarly”, for instead of following the data where they lead, he tries to buttress his churchy preconception that Adam and Eve were historical people. He has very little choice, actually, if he wants to defend the doctrine of Original Sin, which, of course, leads directly to the importance of Jesus. But he’s going against all of science.

The data showing that Adam and Eve didn’t exist, especially 6,000 years ago, include the tracing back of human DNA lineages to hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago (some gene lineages antedate our split from the ancestors of chimps!); the fossil data showing our gradual origin over the six or seven million years since we diverged from that ancestor, and genetic data showing that even under very conservative assumptions, the human population did not fall below 10.000 individuals in the last million years.

Bonnette attacks the science in four ways:

1. The infallible Church has declared that Adam and Eve were real. And indeed it has. Here’s what Bonnette says, which is pretty accurate:

First, Church teaching about Adam and Eve has not, and cannot, change. The fact remains that a literal Adam and Eve are unchanging Catholic doctrine. Central to St. Paul’s teaching is the fact that one man, Adam, committed original sin and that through the God-man, Jesus Christ, redemption was accomplished (Romans 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15: 21-22). In paragraphs 396-406, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, speaks of Adam and Eve as a single mating pair who “committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state” (CCC, 404). “Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back toward God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle” (CCC, 405). The doctrines surrounding original sin cannot be altered “without undermining the mystery of Christ” (CCC, 389).

Today, many think that Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis did not definitively exclude theological polygenism. What they fail to notice, though, is that the Holy Father clearly insists that Scripture and the Magisterium affirm that original sin “proceeds from a sin truly committed by one Adam [ab uno Adamo]” and that this sin is transmitted to all true human beings through generation (para. 37). This proves that denial of a literal Adam (and his spouse, Eve) as the sole first genuinely human parents of all true human beings is not theologically tenable.

Oooookay, well, we don’t have to deal with that, because it’s not really a scholarly argument. It’s an argument from authority.

2. Scripture tells us that humans appeared instantly on the planet. Here Bonnette comes close to denying evolution in general. Indeed, earlier he characterizes evolution as if it’s something the media have cooked up:

The prevailing assumption underlying media reports about human origins is that humanity evolved very gradually over vast periods of time as a population (a collection of interbreeding organisms), which itself originally evolved from a Homo/Pan(human/chimpanzee) common ancestor millions of years ago. Therefore, we are not seen as descendants of the biblical Adam and Eve.

That’s about as weaselly as you can get about evolution. Does Bonnette see it as true, or just as a “prevailing media assumption”?

At any rate, says Bonnette, his hero Aquinas tells us that humans are unique because “true man is distinguished essentially from lower animals by possession of an intellectual and immortal soul, which possesses spiritual powers of understanding, judgment, and reasoning (Summa theologiae I, 75).” Ergo humans must have originated suddenly. Now you could say that the soul was instantly infused into humans, but “understanding, judgement, and reasoning”? If those aren’t just about God, but about matters in general, then we have to accept that the hominin brain underwent a huge and instantantaneous jump. And that’s just what Bonnette thinks. As he says:

Thus at some point in time, true man suddenly appears—whether visible to modern science or not. Before that time, all subhuman behavior manifests merely material sensory abilities. The fact that positivistic scientists cannot discern the first presence of true man is hardly remarkable.

3. Science can’t disprove the existence of Adam and Eve because, well, it’s science. I’m not kidding. Bonnette says that the population-genetic data showing that humans didn’t bottleneck at two people is merely an “inductive” conclusion from computer models. And it could be wrong!:

Such methodology produces, at best, solely probable conclusions, based on available evidence and the assumptions used to evaluate the data. There is the inherent possibility that an unknown factor will alter the conclusion, similarly as was the unexpected discovery of black swans in Australia, when the whole world “knew” all swans were white.

Yes, and that’s the way science works. There’s also the inherent possibility that all the oxygen molecules in Bonnette’s bedroom will move to one side of the room, suffocating him while he sleeps. It’s logically possible! Does he sleep with an oxygen tank?

Some things are more probable than others, though, and Adam and Eve come off, scientifically speaking, as highly improbable. When he says stuff like the above, Bonnette shows his misunderstanding, willful or not, of how science works. We go by what’s most likely, by what explanations best account for the data we have. What’s a better explanation: the fossil record, genetics, and conservative population-genetic calculations, or a Bronze Age book that has been shown to be wrong in many places? Further, Bonnette’s “scholarly” methodology is worthless, for it involves trying to fit all observed facts into the Procrustean bed of scripture. If you don’t believe me, see the last paragraph below.

4. The population-genetic data are wrong. Sadly, Bonnette attacks earlier and somewhat flawed calculations on the number of immune-gene lineages, ignoring the vast bulk of more recent data showing very ancient multiple gene lineages and a bottleneck in Homo sapiens of more than 10,000 people (note: 10,000 > 2!). Ignoring this recent data (and it was of course available last November), he just waves his hands and says “science might be wrong.” Yes, it might, but I’d put my money on science much more readily than on Scripture, which hasn’t exactly had a great track record in helping us understand the origin of humans.

To show the lunacy of this whole enterprise, Bonnette spends some time considering the theory that perhaps humans did go through a bottleneck of two people (Adam and Eve), but it looks genetically like there were more people because the post-Adam-and-Eve humans interbred with Neanderthals. (We did, of course, breed with them, but that says nothing about Adam and Eve.) But Bonnette rejects this theory on the following grounds, which will make you chuckle (my emphasis):

The difficulty with any interbreeding solution (save, perhaps, in rare instances) is that it would place at the human race’s very beginning a severe impediment to its healthy growth and development. Natural law requires that marriage and procreation take place solely between a man and a woman, so that children are given proper role models for adult life. So too, even if the union between a true human and a subhuman primate were not merely transitory, but lasting, the defective parenting and role model of a parent who is not a true human being would introduce serious disorder in the proper functioning of the family and education of children. Hence, widespread interbreeding is not an acceptable solution to the problem of genetic diversity.

Here we are plunged into an Alice-in-Wonderland world completely alien from reason. It’s theology, folks! We’d all be really disordered if our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals!—although they did.

Finally, Bonnette gives us the real reason why Adam and Eve were historical:

Since the same God is author both of human reason and of authentic revelation, legitimate natural science, properly conducted, will never contradict Catholic doctrine, properly understood. Catholic doctrine still maintains that a literal Adam and Eve must have existed, a primal couple who committed that personal original sin, which occasioned the need for, and the divine promise of, the coming of the Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

Amen, brother!

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