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.
The readers’ wildlife tank is emptying (send in your good photos, please), so today I’ll repost some of the superb work of National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore (yes, the magazine’s content is going downhill, but the photos are and have always been the best part). Sartore took a year off to help his wife during a bout of breast cancer, and, as the BBC reports, he decided to call attention to the plight of the world’s endangered species:
“I thought maybe if we do eye-contact, if we photograph animals where there are no distractions, all equal in size on black and white backgrounds, where a mouse is every bit as big and amazing as an elephant, then maybe we could get the public hooked into the plight of endangered species and extinction,” he says.
Traveling the world for Nat. Geo., he got photos like this (captions from the BBC site, whose words are indented; and I’ve added my own link and words (flush left):
The Florida panther is an endangered species of cougar. Once down to only 20 individuals, there seem to be about 160 now:
As the project grew, it caught the attention of editors at National Geographic, who commissioned Sartore to produce a few series of photographs, on amphibians for example, and America’s endangered species.
The photographer began travelling the world armed with different-sized tents in which to photograph smaller animals like birds and lizards. For the larger ones, he remained reliant on the safer environment of zoos.
This species is a frugivorous denizen of the Amazon basin, and is not considered endangered:
With her death, and the death of another northern white rhino in San Diego not long afterwards, there are only three of the species left, all living under armed-guard in Kenya. They are too old to breed, though a conservation project is attempting to create an embryo through IVF which would be implanted in the womb of a similar rhino species.
“It’s not just the little things we’re allowing to slip into extinction,” says Sartore.
“It’s the big stuff too, unfortunately.”
This species occurs in Indonesia and New Guinea, and was described only in 1990. It’s known for the “smiley face” it often seems to have:
Like its cousin the naked mole rat, the Damaraland mole rat, from southern Africa, is eusocial (one breeding female and worker castes)—they’re the only two mammals known to be eusocial.
The fennec, from the Sahara desert, is the world’s smallest canid, weighing about half as much as a house cat. It’s not endangered. Notice the large ears to facilitate heat loss.
It’s January 2, 2017, which means that we’ll have to read “President Trump” in the papers—and hear it on the news—in only 18 days. My heart sinks. As for holidays, today’s both National Buffet Day (a good idea, especially if it’s an Indian buffet) and National Cream Puff Day. It’s also National Science Fiction Day, commemorating the birth of Isaac Asimov on January 2, 1920.
On this day in 1967, Ronald Reagan became governor of California and, in 1971, the Ibrox Disaster took place, in which a spectator crush at a soccer match in Glasgow between Rangers and Celtic killed 66 people and injured more than 200 (you can see a one-hour documentary here). On this day in 1999, the Great Midwestern Snowstorm dumped huge quantities of the stuff over this part of the country, including 19 inches (!) in Chicago, with attendant temperatures of -25°C. I remember that well, but don’t want to experience it again. I slogged to work with snowdrifts up to my hips, and was exhausted at the end of what is normally an 11-minute stroll.
Notables born on this day include Barry Goldwater (1909), Isaac Asimov (see above), Roger Miller (1936), Lynda Barry (1956), and Christy Turlington (1969). I’m a Lynda Barry fan, and here’s a typical cartoon:
Those who died on this day include Dick Powell (1963) and Erroll Garner (1967). It was not a notable day for either news or celebrities. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, who has at least a rudimentary political consciousness, is bewailing the dire state of Polish politics:
A: Holidays ended. It’s time to go back to work.
Hili: Don’t tell this to the politicians. They might do it.
In Polish:
Ja: Święta się skończyły, pora zabrać się do roboty.
Hili: Nie mów tego politykom, bo posłuchają.
And in nearby Wloclawek, the Dark Tabby seeks his food:
Leon: Wasn’t my bowl here?
Reader Vera sent a video of her cat Grisélidis watching the television show “Game of Thrones”:
I know that new people are always coming on board here, but they may be unaware of the rules for posting (see “Da Roolz” on the left sidebar or here), which emphasize civility toward one’s host (i.e., ME) and toward your fellow commenters.
If you’re new here, and aren’t aware of the commenting policy, do read those rules. If you violate them, you may be mildly warned (either on this site or in a private email), asked to apologize (and if you don’t, you’re gone), or just flat-out banned. Incivility is the prime banning offense, followed by obtuseness. And please do not dominate a thread; the guidelines for that are also laid out in the rules.
I’ve mentioned the site Quillette before, describing it “as a site you should be bookmarking. Think of it as Slate, but more serious, more intellectual, and without any Regressive Leftism.” (The editor in fact quotes that in her appeal for funds that I’m highlighting here.) It’s a true progressivist site, but it’s growing and needs money.
Unlike HuffPo, editor Claire Lehmann strives to at least pay a nominal fee for contributions, which is only fair. But that takes dosh, and so Quillette has established a Patreon page where you can sign up for monthly donations. The rationale is here, and the Patreon page here. They’re not asking for much: just a total of $1000 per month, and of that they’ve got $332. And check out some of the article highlighted on the Patreon page.
With minimal resources, Claire has done a terrific job so far. But with more money they could become the progressivist and anti-regressive-Leftist site. Check out their content, and, if you feel so inclined, offer a monthly contribution. They’re fighting the good fight. And here’s their “road map for 2017”:
Because there are so many more religious believers than atheists, even if the rates of conversion to and fro were equal you’d still get more believers becoming atheists than the other way round. (Eventually, though, the numbers would be equal.) But the rates aren’t really equal: it seems that the rate of loss of belief exceeds that of acquiring belief—at least if you accept the statistics about the secularization of the West.
That’s one reason it’s surprising to see an atheist regain belief in God. The other is that it makes more intellectual sense to give up belief than to acquire it, and that’s because there’s no evidence for Gods. Since most people live their lives in an evidence-based way, you might expect that despite the religious indoctrination of children, those who come to think for themselves would eventually give up faith. On the other hand, acquiring faith seems weirder, since it means you’re believing in spite of the evidence. (I consider the absence of God as evidence for his nonexistence, since any decent God would have given us that evidence, and would not have given different groups of people wildly different faiths.)
So I was disappointed when, according to several sources (including the Washington Post), Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he is no longer an atheist (he’s previously mentioned his nonbelief on his site). It started with this post on his Facebook page:
And then a reader followup:
“Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from Priscilla, Max, Beast and me,” he wrote, naming his wife, daughter and dog. Then a commenter asked him: Aren’t you an atheist?
Zuckerberg identified himself as an atheist for years, but on Facebook on Christmas he wrote back: “No. I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.”
Well, that’s a bit ambiguous because you can say that being religious is important without yourself being religious, but given the positive connotations of “important,” that’s unlikely. What’s unclear is whether Zuckerberg has reclaimed his Judaism, or adheres to another faith.
In fact,HuffPosuggests that Zuckerberg has been toying with the idea for a while:
He didn’t provide details about his faith. The title of his holiday greeting on Facebook was “celebrating Christmas.”
He and wife Priscilla Chan met with Pope Francis at the Vatican last summer and discussed how to bring communication technology to the world’s poor. Zuckerberg said at the time that he was impressed with the pope’s compassion.
“We told him how much we admire his message of mercy and tenderness, and how he’s found new ways to communicate with people of every faith around the world,” Zuckerberg posted. “It was a meeting we’ll never forget. You can feel his warmth and kindness, and how deeply he cares about helping people.”
So long as the helping doesn’t involve giving them contraception!
If Zuckerberg were an ordinary person, a return to faith would be an unimportant curiosity. It’s a bit more distressing since the guy is smart and creative. But, as head of Facebook, he does have some power, and part of that power is to defend faith and do down atheism. Facebook already has a tendency to censor criticism of Islam, though that might not be on Zuckerberg’s orders. Perhaps nothing will happen, and I hope so, but I sense that criticism of any faith will become more a part of Facebooks modus operandi.
UPDATE: I should have asked readers to answer the question for themselves, so I’m adding that here. Several people already have done that, and I encourage it.
__________
Every year, science-book agent John Brockman, who handles the “trade books” of every well known science writers, as well as running the online intellectual “salon” Edge, asks his stable of writers to give brief answers to a question that someone thought up. The answers are posted online and later compiled into a book. This year’s question is given in the title of the post, and the link to John’s introduction is in the previous sentence. Here it is, and note that John’s definition of science coincides with my notion of “science broadly construed”: a toolkit of ways of establishing provisional truth rather than a formal discipline or a body of knowledge (my emphasis below):
Of all the scientific terms or concepts that ought to be more widely known to help to clarify and inspire science-minded thinking in the general culture, none are more important than “science” itself.
Many people, even many scientists, have traditionally had a narrow view of science as controlled, replicated experiments performed in the laboratory—and as consisting quintessentially of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. The essence of science is conveyed by its Latin etymology: scientia, meaning knowledge. The scientific method is simply that body of practices best suited for obtaining reliable knowledge. The practices vary among fields: the controlled laboratory experiment is possible in molecular biology, physics, and chemistry, but it is either impossible, immoral, or illegal in many other fields customarily considered sciences, including all of the historical sciences: astronomy, epidemiology, evolutionary biology, most of the earth sciences, and paleontology. If the scientific method can be defined as those practices best suited for obtaining knowledge in a particular field, then science itself is simply the body of knowledge obtained by those practices.
Science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge—is an essential part of psychology and the social sciences, especially economics, geography, history, and political science. Not just the broad observation-based and statistical methods of the historical sciences but also detailed techniques of the conventional sciences (such as genetics and molecular biology and animal behavior) are proving essential for tackling problems in the social sciences. Science is nothing more nor less than the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great figures in history, or the structure of DNA.
It is in this spirit of Scientia that Edge, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, is pleased to present the Edge Annual Question 2017. Happy New Year!
Now there are dozens of answers, but I’d suggest you go to the full compilation of responses and pick out the ones that interest you. Here are but a few that intrigued me—and that I thought people should know about:
Frank Tipler, “Parallel universes of quantum mechanics“. Tipler asserts that most physicists accept Everett’s notion of an infinite number of parallel universes, and that this notion is indeed true (as he says, “So obvious is Everett’s proof for the existence of these parallel universes, that Steve Hawking once told me that he considered the existence of these parallel universes “trivially true”). Tipler then argues that the many-universe theory (or “truth”) gives us a form of free will:
The free will question arises because the equations of physics are deterministic. Everything that you do today was determined by the initial state of all the universes at the beginning of time. But the equations of quantum mechanics say that although the future behavior of all the universes are determined exactly, it is also determined that in the various universes, the identical yous will make different choices at each instant, and thus the universes will differentiate over time. Say you are in an ice cream shop, trying to choose between vanilla and strawberry. What is determined is that in one world you will choose vanilla and in another you will choose strawberry. But before the two yous make the choice, you two are exactly identical. The laws of physics assert it makes no sense to say which one of you will choose vanilla and which strawberry. So before the choice is made, which universe you will be in after the choice is unknowable in the sense that it is meaningless to ask.
To me, this analysis shows that we indeed have free will, even though the evolution of the universe is totally deterministic. Even if you think my analysis has been too facile—entire books can and have been written on the free will problem—nevertheless, my simple analysis shows that these books are themselves too facile, because they never consider the implications of the existence of the parallel universes for the free will question.
I’m not sure that the idea of parallel universes is as widely accepted as Tipler claims (after all, we need evidence to demonstrate its truth), but even if it is true, I’m not sure if it gives us free will in our own universe, which is the one we inhabit and care about.
Leo M. Chalupa, “Epigenetics“. This one is deeply misleading, implying that environmentally-induced epigenetic changes can affect our evolution, and dispose of the “nature vs. nurture controversy”. To wit:
What makes epigenetics important, and why is it so much in vogue these days? Its importance stems from the fact that it provides a means by which biological entities, from plants to humans, can be modified by altering gene activity without changes in the genetic sequence. This means that the age-old “nature versus nurture” controversy has been effectively obviated because experience (as well as a host of other agents) can alter gene activity, so the “either/or” thinking mode no longer applies. Moreover, there is now some tantalizing, but still preliminary evidence that changes in gene activity (induced in this case by an insecticide) can endure for a number of subsequent generations [JAC: not true!]. What happens to you today can affect your great, great, great grandchildren!
Barnaby Marsh, “Humility”Although listed as a “philanthropy executive” and visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, remember that Marsh used to be an executive vice-president at the John Templeton Foundation. That explains stuff like this:
As we advance in our scientific careers, it is all too easy to feel overconfident in what we know, and how much we know. The same pressures that face us in our everyday life wait to ensnare us in professional scientific life. The human mind looks for certainly, and finds comfort in parsimony. We see what we want to see, and we believe what makes intuitive sense. We avoid the complex and difficult, and the unknown. Just look across the sciences, from biochemistry to ecology, where multiple degrees of freedom make many problems seemingly intractable. But are they? Could new tools of computation and visualization enable better models of the behavior of individuals and systems? The future belongs to those brave enough to be humble about how little we know, and how much there is that is remaining to be discovered.
Scientific humility is the key that opens a whole new possibility space- a space where being unsure is the norm; where facts and logic are intertwined with imagination, intuition, and play. It is a dangerous and bewildering place where all sorts of untested and unjustified ideas lurk. What is life? What is consciousness? How can we understand the complex dynamics of cities? Or even my goldfish bowl? Go there are one can see quickly why when faced be uncertainty, most of us would rather quickly retreat. Don’t. This is the space where amazing things happen.
Yes, we scientists really need that lecture! I’m surprised he didn’t mention God—but then he wouldn’t be able to do that on this site.
My own contribution about what people should understand is the idea of “Determinism,” but this won’t be new to readers here.
There are many more contributions at the site, so pick out the ones that most interest you. It’s a good way to start 2017—by stretching your brain. And remember that these essays are intended for nonspecialists interested in science, the “educated layperson.”
John Brockman
I should add about John that his success is due largely to his “nose” for what kind of science the public wants, and a sense of timing that makes him urge authors to write about certain topics at the “proper” time. It was he, for example, who told Richard Dawkins that he needed to write a book about religion for 2006, ergo The God Delusion.
I found an old readers’ wildlife post from October, and can’t see that I actually posted it; I believe I was traveling when I prepared it. The photos are from Stephen Barnard, one of our most faithful contributors (and one of the best photographers), so it’s appropriate to start the new year with his work. His captions are indented. (If I’ve posted this before, forgive me.)
Some landscapes and a white-tailed doe (Odocoileus hemionus):
One of these three landscapes has a flock of Canada geese (Branta canadensis). Can you spot them?
Here’s a photo of a juvenile rabbit (a cottontail?) that I took two summers ago, and I may have already posted it. But something this cute is always worth seeing:
And a photo from Christopher Moss, who contributed a pheasant for the Christmas Cat parade:
Standing exactly where the pheasant was on Christmas Day, this young doe was photographed through a different window. She’s about 15 feet from me and kept a wary eye on me as I took pictures.
