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.
I’m on the verge of declaring bears to be Honorary Cats™, joining the pantheon with foxes and owls. Bears are furry, smart, and canny, as shown by this black bear who, looking for all the world like a man in a furry suit, opens the back door of a car:
Readers’ bear experiences should be put in the comments below.
h/t: Michael ~
Well, if Chopra ever had any scientific credibility, it’s now in shreds. Listen to the part of this video (laughably labeled “Two great minds question HIV/AIDS—Scam/Hoax?”) that starts at 22:15. Chopra is interviewed by Tony Robbins, wealthy lifestyle guru and “self help” author. Here’s a bit of the interchange:
Chopra: HIV may be a precipitating agent in a susceptible host. The material agent is never the cause of the disease. It may be the final factor in inducing the full-blown syndrome in somebody who’s already susceptible.
Robbins: But what made them susceptible?
Chopra: Their own interpretations of the whole reality they’re participating in.
Robbins: Could that be translated into their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs, their lifestyle?
Chopra: Absolutely. . .
It goes on and gets worse as Chopra discusses what he calls “so-called AIDS”
Let’s look at the facts. If you don’t have the virus, regardless of your interpretation of reality, you won’t get AIDS. If you do have the virus, you’re certain to get a disease that is highly likely turn into full-blown AIDS without medical treatment. I don’t know of any studies showing that an “interpretation of reality” is 100% correlated with the presence of the disease (although the presence of the virus is). So which one of these is the more likely “cause”?
I suppose that, according to Chopra, no disease is “caused” by a microbe.
Chopra is reprehensible, suggesting that you can avoid AIDS by not using condoms, but by having the right interpretation of reality. So far his quackery has been either amusing or mildly harmful. Here it becomes dangerous, as Chopra denigrates drug treatments like AZT. (As we’ve long known, the drug slows the replication of the virus, and prolongs life, but is not a “cure”.)
When both Chopra and Robbins laugh at AZT, Chopra suggests that it was promulgated by drug companies because they were interested in money. Now if that’s not a pot/kettle moment, I don’t know what is!
h/t: Ben Goren
Andrew Sullivan and I crossed swords several times, most notably when he became enraged after I argued that the story of Adam and Eve was taken literally for millennia by many theologians and believers—and still is today. In a statement that still makes me laugh, he argued this:
There’s no evidence that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn’t had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it’s meant literally. It’s obviously meant metaphorically. It screams parable.
Yes, I had read the fucking thing, and much other theology as well. My original response to Sullivan’s nonsense was here, and I have a longer disquisition about metaphor and scripture in The Albatross.
That exchange continued in two more posts, one by Sullivan and one by me.
But I still had a grudging respect for the man. He was a gay member of the Catholic Church, and was bold enough to stand up to it, as well as to be open about his homosexuality and his HIV-positive status. On the other hand, he was a member of the Catholic Church, and stayed a member. Still, I admired his willingness to call the excesses of his church, as well as his arguments for gay-marriage laws and the legalization of marijuana. He criticized political correctness and the excesses of the so-called social justice warriors, even though he was pretty much on the left. I didn’t read him that often, but I know that Greg Mayer, who posts here, was a fan—even though Greg disagreed with some of Sullivan’s views. Finally, it was dead obvious that Sullivan worked very hard, not just to make money, but because he loved what he did. I admire that kind of dedication.
Now, however, Sullivan’s hanging it up. In a post yesterday at his site The Dish, he announced his retirement from blogging, and gave his reasons:
Why? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.
The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.
I want to spend some real time with my parents, while I still have them, with my husband, who is too often a ‘blog-widow’, my sister and brother, my niece and nephews, and rekindle the friendships that I have simply had to let wither because I’m always tied to the blog. And I want to stay healthy. I’ve had increasing health challenges these past few years. They’re not HIV-related; my doctor tells me they’re simply a result of fifteen years of daily, hourly, always-on-deadline stress. These past few weeks were particularly rough – and finally forced me to get real.
The rest of his piece is, well, pretty touching, especially when he talks about the community of readers he had, something that hits home for me. He promises to reappear in print in some other venue, and I’m sure that’s true. He has writing in his blood, and you don’t just give that up. And I completely understand his desire to respond to things thoughtfully rather than having to bang out pieces on a daily basis.
So, Andrew, I wish you Godspeed—and that’s a metaphor.
h/t: Ginger K.
The new measles outbreak in the U.S. has made many parents rethink their opposition to vaccination. To help them, The Nib provides a convenient flowchart (well, the bottom part doesn’t seem to go anywhere):
h/t: jsp
If you are too young to have lived through the civil rights era in the U.S., you probably haven’t heard of the “Friendship Nine.” They were a group of black men who, in 1961, decided to commit an illegal but nonviolent act of resistance to the odious segregation laws in South Carolina. (The name of the group came from the fact that most of them went to Friendship Junior College.)
On January 31 of that year, the group walked into a store in Rock Hill, South Carolina, sat down at a lunch counter, and ordered lunch. That was illegal: blacks were forbidden from eating in white establishments. They were arrested and convicted. The group decided, as a statement, to go to jail rather than put up bail. They served 30 days at hard labor. The signifiance of this event, which I still remember, was (according to Wikipedia), this:
“What made the Rock Hill action so timely … was that it responded to a tactical dilemma that was arising in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] discussions across the South: how to avoid the crippling limitations of scarce bail money,” wrote Taylor Branch in “Parting the Waters,” his Pulitzer Prize winning account of the Civil Rights Movement. [JAC: Branch’s book is terrific.] “The obvious advantage of ‘jail, no bail’ was that it reversed the financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the white authorities to pay for jail space and food. The obvious disadvantage was that staying in jail represented a quantum leap in commitment above the old barrier of arrest, lock-up, and bail-out.”
During their sentence, the men refused to work several times and were put on a bread-and-water diet. All of this drew national attention to the inequities faced by blacks in the South, which ultimately led to the Civil Rights act of 1964, pushed through Congress and signed by Lyndon Johnson.
I bring this up for two reasons. First, the men’s convictions were finally overturned—two days ago, after 54 years. Over much of the interim, the men suffered from having a conviction on their record, hampering their efforts to get jobs. On Tuesday, the men’s original lawyer moved for dismissal, the current prosecutor agreed, and the judge apologized, saying,”We cannot rewrite history, but we can right history.” (See the dramatic courtroom video here.)
That brings up not only the idea of human rights, but also question of “What is the right thing to do?” Reporting on the story last night, Brian Williams of NBC News (the channel I watch) said something like this: “South Carolina did the right thing after more than 50 years.”
Who among the readers here doesn’t agree, instantly and instinctively, that clearing those men, as well as the old battles for civil rights, were indeed the right things to do? Most Americans would nod in agreement as well.
Yet when I was young, the instincts were largely the opposite, particularly in the southern United States. Segregation was seen as natural and right (indeed, it was often justified on Biblical grounds), and what the Friendship Nine did was seen as wrong and immoral: a group of people claiming a right that they didn’t have.
The instinctive feelings that we have convey a couple of lessons. First of all, they have changed dramatically over those fifty years, and almost completely among white Americans over the last century. Yet our feelings about what’s right have always seemed to come from the gut, even when those feelings change.
Francis Collins and other religionists argue that our instinctive views of right and wrong can’t be explained by science, but must have been vouchsafed by God. (Collins calls this set of feelings “the Moral Law”). But if those instincts change so drastically, and so rapidly, what does that say? It says, of course, one of two things. Either God has changed the Moral Law (which can’t be true if you’re a true believer), or that our moral instincts come not from God but from rationality, secularism, and changing circumstances.
The answer, of course, is the latter. As Peter Singer argues in his book The Expanding Circle, and Steve Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the increasing interactions between different groups of humans, and the changing tide of thought, has made us realize that nobody is privileged with a set of “rights” not shared by other humans. That is why, as Pinker documents eloquently, what humans see as “moral” has changed so much over the last several centuries.
Second, the rapid change shows that our particular feelings about right and wrong, at least in this case, cannot come from our genes. Morality about civil rights, and other things like animal rights, child labor, slavery, women’s rights, and so on, has changed too fast to be accounted for by evolution. Yes, some feelings of what is “right” probably reside in our genes (our preference for our own children and our own relatives over others, for instance), and perhaps the very notion of “right” vs. “wrong” also resides in our genes, but the particular actions and feelings that constitute right and wrong are often quite malleable.
Morality does not come from God, and most of it isn’t in our genes. It comes, I suggest, from an evolved background of having a code of behavior that enables humans to live harmoniously, on top of which is overlain the particulars of that code, which change not only as our society changes, but as our species learns what it takes to make a good society.
*****
Here’s a short documentary on the Friendship Nine:
Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully. For I look upon it, that he who doesn’t mind his belly will hardly mind anything else. —Samuel Johnson
I have a few more posts of holiday snaps, and while I was perusing my photos of a visit to a rural village (next to come), I saw photos of noms, which of course I had to put up immediately. Here is some food connected with our four-day stay in Santineketan.
We stayed in my hosts’ house right outside the town (they also have an apartment in Calcutta and one in Delhi aside from their major residence on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi). There was a cook—a nice woman named Rupali (which, I believe, means “silver” in either Hindi or Bangla); but my hostess, who has stringent criteria for food, also worked in the kitchen. The result is that we had breakfasts like this, consisting of fresh fruit and (from left to right on bottom), rasgulla (sweet cheese balls in a syrup), a spicy soup (like sambar, but thicker), and luchi, small disks of freshly fried bread filled with mashed peas. This was all washed down with coffee and Darjeeling tea. The combination of sweet and savory foods makes for a great breakfast.
Breakfast on another day. Rice, pakora (vegetable fritters), a kind of Bengali kedgeree made with a mixture of stuff (perhaps an Indian reader can give me the name), mashed eggs with spices, and, at the left, pati sapta: Bengali crepes filled with a cooked mixture of coconut, condensed milk, and jaggery (sugar made from palm sap):
We arranged a special lunch at Mitali Homestays, which is a B&B but also a kind of restaurant where one must reserve well in advance (you’re competing with the residents). There was ample food, including these dishes of mixed vegetables, red cabbage, fish in mustard sauce (katla), rice, curd (raita), and several other dishes on another table. You could eat as much as you wanted.
My plate before the main dish was served (see below). This has mixed veg, red spinach, tamarind chutney, dal (lentils; upper right) and eggplant in a sweetish sauce with sesame seeds, as well as rice:
I believe I’ve posted this photo before, but here I am in the rooftop garden, about to add to my plate some large prawns cooked in a sauce with butter and spices. I am a happy man: this dish was so large that even four of us couldn’t finish it, and believe me, we would have if we’d had more tummy room (there was dessert of rice pudding and fruit to come). I treated everyone to lunch, and the tab for four, at this fairly fancy place, was about $20.
The next day the other guest on the trip treated us to lunch at an unprepossessing but famous place that had terrific food. It’s called Bonolakshmi and is in the country—in the small town of Bolpur. It’s the Indian equivalent of a roadhouse, and also has a sweet shop and a souvenir shop. People come long distances to sit in the dark dining hall and chow down on traditional Bengali dishes. Some of the patrons tucking in (with their hands, of course):
Lunch is served on thalis (metal trays); here is what they put on your plate immediately after you sit down: dal, fried potato sticks, rice, and an unknown vegetable dish. These are replenished as often as you want:
The pièce de résistance: Bengali style seafood. The two dishes on offer were bhapa ilish (the steamed fish hilsa [Tenualosa ilisha] with turmeric and mustard sauce)—one of the most famous Bengali dishes—and lobster in coconut sauce. We had the fish, and it was stupendously good, even though I’m picky about my fish.
Back in Santineketan, my hostess, Shubhra, was kind enough to give me several cooking lessons. Here I am taught to make a dish of stir-fried cabbage with other vegetables (left) and a Bengali rice pudding (right). It’s not hard—if you know what to do, have years of experience, and have the Indian ingredients on hand! Most Indians who are reasonably well off cook on these small gas burners fueled by propane canisters, for gas lines are not practical, and you can’t cook Indian food on an electric stove.
Indian street food at the Poush Mela fair in Santineketan. This man was selling cubes of unripe guavas with a mustard sauce, which doesn’t sound like a terrific snack (and indeed, I tried it and didn’t like it much), but one that was bought up avidly by the locals:
My host had a cone of the guava and nommed it eagerly:
But I love most Indian snacks dearly, and here’s one of my favorites: jhal muri, a Bengali snack made with puffed rice (muri), peanuts, raw onion, coconut, and a sweet and spicy dressing (to see more, click on the “jhal muri” link on this page). It is always served in a paper cone, and the ingredients vary widely. This one, served on the train between Kolkata (Calcutta) and Santineketan, is renowned; I was told to buy the stuff from a particular guy who roams the aisle, mixing the jhla muri freshly in a big metal can, with the ingredients and sauces stored separately in a box around his waist. It was 10 rupees per cone (16 cents) and is a substantial snack.
It was great: a real melange of flavors. This photo is out of focus because I took it with one hand on a moving train:
I say “photo” above because there’s only one, but it’s a doozy—and also a bit sad. I was going to post some India photos this morning, but an email arrived from biologist Jacques Hausser in Switzerland with a photo and a short tale.
This occurred half an hour ago in my garden: a female sparrow hawk (Accipiter nisus) caught a female great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopus major)… although they were thirty house sparrows available around the feeder!
It seems like just yesterday when I was posting a Thursday Hili dialogue. Who knows where the time goes? The good news is that although it’s quite cold here, we’ve had none of the heavy snow or strong winds that have plagued New England. In fact, even Dobrzyn has more snow than Chicago. Out in the weather, Hili asserts her felinitude:
Hili: This snow is as cold today as it was yesterday.Cyrus: Try to think about something else. That works for dogs.Hili: I’m not a dog.
In Polish:
Hili: Ten śnieg jest dziś tak samo zimny jak był wczoraj.
Cyrus: Staraj się myśleć o czymś innym, wtedy pies tego nie czuje.
Hili: Nie jestem psem.