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 got in my car this morning (I almost always walk to work, but have to drive somewhere this afternoon), turned on the headlights, and had a vision that freaked me out for a moment. It was this car, looking for all the world like a grimacing monster:
Oy, another week! At least Chicago will have little or no snow, while Americans on the east coast are completely screwed. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili still pretends to care for her feathered food, but Andrzej sees through her. And in Wroclawek, Leon shows that Hili is not the only solipsistic tabby in Poland.
Hili: Bird feeding is very entertaining for cats.
A: I know, but I’m afraid you are no St. Francis.
In Polish:
Hili: Dokarmianie ptaków daje rozrywkę kotom.
Ja: Wiem, ale obawiam się, że świętym Franciszkiem to ty nie jesteś.
Czyż nie jestem wyjątkowym rodzynkiem w cieście?
by Matthew Cobb
Yesterday we saw evidence that black bears are pretty agile. Today we can see that you really need to pay attention when they are around, as this man found in California back in 2012, as reported on local TV.
TRIGGER WARNING: Meat! If you don’t like it, don’t read further. Moreover, all comments about how bad it is for your health, or remarks on my diet, will be deleted.
*****
Yesterday a kindly reader took me to a fancy steakhouse in Chicago: David Burke’s Primehouse. I’ve been there only once before—in 2011, when a few of us took Sam Harris out for dinner after his talk on The Moral Landscape (story here).
Since I don’t eat at the famous Chicago steakhouses very often (check the menu!), I brought my camera along to document the luxurious viands, for I knew the meal would be excellent, and I hoped to talk my way into seeing the meat-ageing room downstairs (I heard that they’ll sometimes give a short tour).
Burke’s is famous because all the steak served in his restaurant has half a genome from a single Black Angus bull, one affectionately named Prime 207L, bought for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here’s the banner, depicting the bull, that greets you as you walk downstairs to the ageing room:
And here’s Prime with chef David Burke. The restaurant proudly advertises Burke as “the first chef to own his own bull.” And that’s no bull!
The manager who gave us our tour (more below) said that Prime, who lives on a farm in Kentucky, is permitted to service three cows per day, six days a week. (Yes, every male will comment to himself about that!). He added that even when Prime goes to the Big Pasture in the Sky, they’ve frozen enough of his sperm to make steaks for years to come.
And here’s our meal: two aged ribeyes, together containing a complete Prime207L genome. I got the 40-day ribeye, and my host the 55-day. There’s also a 75-day-aged steak that costs $79, a substantial increase over the lesser-aged ribeyes. You’ll see the reason for the price differential below.
Along with the ribeyes I had a glass of stout (right), and we shared broccoli (not my choice!), and two tasty side dishes of tempura vegetables and onion rings. Portions were ample, and my steak, ordered rare (of course), was cooked perfectly. It was one of the best steaks I’d ever had. (I couldn’t finish it and will have the leftovers tonight.) Just for scale, the steak is resting on a huge plate:
Afterwards we politely asked the waiter if it were possible to tour the ageing room, and, after asking permission, he said yes. The room is kept cool but not cold, and the humidity is maintained at 57%. Here are the racks of ribeyes resting, each with a label showing when it was laid down. At the end of the room is the highly touted “wall of pink Himalayan salt,” which circulates salt throughout the room, keeping the beef free from mold and bacteria, and eliminating the need for putting any salt on it.
We were told that the room contained about $250,000 worth of meat.
Here are the youngest ribeyes:
And here are the oldest, patiently approaching 75 days. The dry-ageing makes them tough and desiccated on the outside, but imparts a delicious gamy flavor to the meat, a prized quality. These older ones must have half of their weight trimmed away before cooking, which explains why they’re so pricey:
Finally, just for show, the restaurant keeps a few ribeyes from 2007 on hand, just to show what happens when the process continues. They become like beef jerky, but the guide said that these would still be edible:
Thanks to Richard, the generous reader who bought me a stupendous steak.
On Christmas Day of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a short piece by Eric Metaxas called “Science increasingly makes the case for God” (The subtitle is “The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?”). If the WSJ link takes you to the subscription page, just Google the author’s name and the article’s title, and you’ll find a link that’s free.
Metaxas’s piece was wildly popular. It got about 400,000 Facebook shares and likes, and as of this morning there were 7,008 comments! Metaxas, described by Wikipedia as “An American author, speaker, and TV host” appears to be a believer, for there’s also this: “On February 2, 2012, Metaxas was the keynote speaker for the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast.”
Given its message, it’s not surprising that Metaxas’s article went viral, for it purported to give scientific evidence for God’s existence. Or rather, it claimed that science could not explain the existence of life on Earth in any convincing way, and so the only option must have been God’s creation. A few quotes will give the tenor of his piece; it’s all based on the supposed improbability of life coming into being:
Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.
. . . Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?
Metaxas then raises the “fine-tuning” argument—the supposed improbability of the universe having the right physical constants in place to allow life, and finishes off like this:
The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone—beyond itself.
Notice that “Someone” is capitalized, and of course what Metaxas means, and what accounts for the article going viral, is that “something or Someone” simply has to be God—preferably the Abrahamic God.
The article’s popularity also shows that although many believers claim that they don’t need evidence for God, when something that seems to be evidence crops up, they seize on it avidly. Religious claims are claims about reality, and thus could conceivably be supported or refuted by evidence. If anybody says otherwise, just show them how many people liked Metaxas’s piece.
Well, I can imagine what I’d feel if I were Lawrence Krauss reading it. Along with Sean Carroll, Krauss has spent a lot of time showing that we can explain the universe without invoking God, something that is a major theme of Krauss’s most recent book, A Universe from Nothing. So Krauss, who isn’t timid, sat down and wrote a rebuttal to Metaxas’s piece. It appeared in yesterday’s online New Yorker under the title, “No, astrobiology has not made the case for God“; I’m surprised, given the magazine’s penchant for coddling faith, that it appeared at all.
But good for Krauss. He takes apart every probabilistic argument given by Metaxas, and cites new work showing that the origin of life may have been nearly certain given the chemical conditions on early Earth. I still haven’t been able to get through the arcane paper describing that work, but Krauss summarizes it nicely:
Furthermore, a recent interesting, if speculative, proposal suggests that, when driven by an external source of energy,matter will rearrange itself to dissipate this energy most efficiently. Living systems allow greater dissipation, which means that the laws of physics might suggest that life is, in some sense, inevitable.
Maybe Krauss will write a sequel to his book called A Biosphere from Nothing. He adds this:
Beyond this, two exciting scientific advances in recent decades have identified new ways in which life can evolve, and new locales where it can do so. First, we have discovered a surprisingly diverse group of new solar systems. And we now understand that, even in our solar system, there are a host of possible sites where life might have evolved that were long considered unlikely. Moons of Jupiter and Saturn may have vast oceans of liquid water, underneath ice covers, which are heated by gravitational tidal friction associated with their giant hosts. On Earth, scientists have had to revise old rules about where and how life can survive. The discovery of so-called extremophiles—life forms that can live in extreme acids, or under extreme heat or pressure—has vastly increased the set of conditions under which we can imagine life existing on this planet.
And, finally, Krauss takes apart the fine-tuning argument for God, something that Sean Carroll has also been attacking. Here’s Krauss:
The constants of the universe indeed allow the existence of life as we know it. However, it is much more likely that life is tuned to the universe rather than the other way around. We survive on Earth in part because Earth’s gravity keeps us from floating off. But the strength of gravity selects a planet like Earth, among the variety of planets, to be habitable for life forms like us. Reversing the sense of cause and effect in this statement, as Metaxas does in cosmology, is like saying that it’s a miracle that everyone’s legs are exactly long enough to reach the ground.
Krauss doesn’t discuss two other explanations for fine-tuning (the one above seems to presume that the constants were simply a given that we don’t understand, perhaps just a matter of “luck”). Those two are 1.) there could be a deeper physical principle showing that the constants more or less had to be pretty close to what they are, but we don’t yet understand that principle (this may be implied in Krauss’s emphasis on the progress of cosmology), and 2.) there might be multiple universes that (according to physical theory) have different physical constants, and life happened to have arisen in one universe that had the right constants. The “multiverse” idea isn’t just something cooked up by physicists determined to kick God out of the picture, as it arises naturally from some theories of physics; and there is evidence for some of the conditions conducive to a multiverse.
But the real flaw in Metaxas’s piece is that it’s a big fat God-of-the-gaps argument, claiming that if science doesn’t understand something by now, God must have done it. That is, of course, a dreadful way to argue in view of all the “gaps” in our understanding (most notably the origin of species) that over the centuries have been caulked not with God, but with science. And so Krauss pwns Metaxas in his final paragraph:
In the meantime, both believers and non-believers are done a huge disservice when people promulgate biased and disingenuous claims that distort what current science implies and can imply about the universe. In a society in which the understanding of science is already marginal—and where, at the same time, the continued health of modern society as it meets the challenges of the twenty-first century depends, in some sense, on our ability to utilize our scientific knowledge, both to create new technologies and to help guide rational public policies—this is the last thing we need.
Another thing we don’t need is people claiming that when science encounters a hard problem that it hasn’t yet solved, God is peeking out of that lacuna.
Now that Makaya Sault has died from her untreated leukemia, there’s another 11-year-old first Nations Child from Ontario (“J. J.”) getting “alternative (i.e., useless) treatment, and she’ll also die from the same disease unless someone intervenes. But in this case, a Canadian judge did look at the case, and refused to intervene. Judge Getin Edward, who will have blood on his hands if J. J. dies, ruled against McMaster Children’s Hospital, who wanted to force the child to continue chemotherapy. Doctors there say that J. J. would have had a greater than 90% chance of survival with chemo. But her parents wanted “alternative” and “aboriginal” treatment, though they took J. J. to the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, where they use quack nostrums like raw-food diets, lots of vitamins, and cold-laser treatment—hardly “native” healing.
Edward’s ruling was unconscionable; here’s how the National Post described it (my emphasis):
Justice Gethin Edward of the Ontario Court of Justice suggested physicians essentially want to “impose our world view on First Nation culture.” The idea of a cancer treatment being judged on the basis of statistics that quantify patients’ five-year survival rate is “completely foreign” to aboriginal ways, he said.
“Even if we say there is not one child who has been cured of acute lymphoblastic leukemia by traditional methods, is that a reason to invoke child protection?” asked Justice Edward, noting that the girl’s mother believes she is doing what is best for her daughter.
“Are we to second guess her and say ‘You know what, we don’t care?’ … Maybe First Nations culture doesn’t require every child to be treated with chemotherapy and to survive for that culture to have value.”
Yes, Judge Edward, if the child will die without scientific medicine, and if “traditional methods” won’t help, then that is certainly a reason to invoke child protection. The purpose of courts deciding such cases Judge Edward, is because the parents may believe they’re doing best for their children, but sometimes don’t.
In fact, I don’t see how any rational and caring person can rule as the judge did. To conflate J. J.’s chemotherapy with the question of whether J. J.’s First Nations culture “had value” is ludicrous. The fact is that not everything in her culture has to have value, and one thing that doesn’t is its support for those who refuse to treat their sick children properly. Judge Edward apparently cares more for the reputation of an aboriginal culture than for the life of this poor child. He’s an idiot.
A new piece on CBC News highlights J. J.’s plight. Reporter Connie Walker, a First Nations person herself (a Cree), was allowed to visit J. J., talk to her mother, and witness her treatment. The picture is bleak.
First, here are J. J.’s “medicines”, which don’t look helpful:
And the reporter has a few tart words about this treatment:
As a First Nations person myself, I’m confident I can say that none of my ancestors abided by a strict raw vegan diet, or took high doses of vitamins intravenously or underwent cold laser technology. Regardless, her mother said Hippocrates was in line with her belief in natural medicine.
Walker adds this:
When we arrived, J.J. was preparing her “green drink” of wheatgrass and juiced raw vegetables. Raw vegetables have been pretty much the only thing she’s been allowed to eat since she left chemotherapy in August.
But if she minded, she didn’t say. She didn’t say much of anything actually. She was quiet and shy but very sweet, and like most children in a frightening situation, she looked often to her mother to guide her.
And of course her mom professes deep love for the child she’s in the process of killing:
Her mom is a strong, confident woman. Direct and honest. Not afraid to share her views.
We had a long interview at their kitchen table where she described in detail her experience since her daughter’s diagnosis.
Last summer, she says, she had a healthy, happy daughter, and within a matter of weeks she was living every parent’s worst nightmare. It was obviously traumatizing for both.
There is no doubt she is a mother who loves her daughter fiercely. She won’t let anyone stand in her way in doing what she believes is best for her little girl.
What kind of “love” is that, though? I’m prepared to believe that the mother believes she loves her daughter, but its akin to the kind of love that men profess for their wives before they beat them. What mother would learn that her daughter has a greater-than-90% chance of cure with chemotherapy, and none with alternative medicine, and yet still choose the latter? It’s a mindset that baffles me completely.
Another disturbing revelation is that Dr. Bruce Clement, the head of the Hippocrates Health Institute, apparently persuaded the mother to take J. J. off chemotherapy. He, too, will have blood on his hands. How can these people live with themselves?
[J. J.’s mother] described Hippocrates as an amazing place. “It’s like a resort,” she said. She spoke about the director, Brian Clement, with glowing adoration. “What struck me most,” she said, “was he was not afraid of cancer. Cancer didn’t shake him like it shook me.”
I’ve seen many videos of Clement. There is no doubt he has a way with words. He travels around the world giving lectures, extolling the virtues of wheatgrass, and talking down vaccines, cancer and Western medicine.
It was his words that convinced her to leave chemo. She said she called him from the waiting room at McMaster and he assured her that leukemia was “not difficult for them to deal with.”
Clement now denies he said that, and when the reporter asked him for examples of people he had cured, he ordered her off the property. Here he is lecturing the reporter (photo from CBC)
J. J.’s last hope is the Brant Children’s Aid Society, which has refused to intervene twice when J. J. and her predecessor Makayla Sault were removed from chemotherapy. In fact, they praised the judge’s decision. Have a look at how the Children’s Aid Society director Andrew Koster behaved in this affair.
Both times, after just a few days investigating, they determined that despite the life-threatening illness that would almost surely result in death without treatment, these girls were not in need of his protection.
I interviewed Koster in May. In his office, he showed me the hutch filled with First Nations artifacts he’s collected over the years of working in child welfare.
He said it was the Child and Family Services Act that required them to “respect First Nations culture” and he “couldn’t even begin to think” about removing her from a caring family environment and forcing her into chemo.
Koster also called Judge Edward’s ruling to let the child undergo alternative treatment a “landmark decision.” That’s really screwed up. This man is odious and dangerous. He’s protecting a culture, not children, and he should be fired. And strongly doubt that his organization requires “respect” of a form that prohibits intervention when a child’s life is at stake. Here’s the miscreant and his minion with the CBC’s caption:
Why do First Nations people get preferred treatment here, when in other cases in Canada parents who refuse medical treatment, even on religious grounds, not only get their children taken away, but are prosecuted for neglect. Last December, for example, 14-month old John Clark died of a staph infection after his Seventh Day Adventist parents refused to take him to a doctor, giving him vegetables instead (he was malnourished when he died).
As Global News notes, “Under the Criminal Code, the parents or guardians of a child are legally required to provide the basic necessities of life including food, shelter, care and medical attention.” And in that case religious beliefs didn’t matter: the parents’ other two children were taken away and mom and dad were both charged with “criminal negligence causing death and failure to provide the necessities of life.”
So why do First Nations parents get a break and Seventh Day Adventist parents not? There seems to be some inconsistency here. In the case of J. J. and Makayla Sault, after all, both children were refused “the necessities of life”—chemotherapy. And in both cases the refusal to get proper treatment was based on faith.
Unless the Brant Children’s Aid Society changes its mind and intervenes, which is unlikely, J. J. too will die. And as her mother lays her in her grave, she’ll insist that she deeply loved her child. The problem is that she, the judge, and the Children’s Aid Society love First Nations “culture” more.
For a while I’ve been saying that “Islamophobia” refers to the dislike or fear of the tenets of Islam, not the fear, dislike, or hatred of Muslims themselves. But with all the violence going on, I’ve been thinking about that. And I have a question to pose to readers. It’s this: “What if some Muslims you know embrace some of the odious beliefs of Islam”? Can you separate how you feel about them as people from their beliefs?
I don’t think so. After all, would you be friends with someone who seemed really nice, but then found out that they adhered to white-supremacist beliefs? I doubt it. Would you be friends with a Catholic who seemed nice, but then found out that they felt strongly that gay behavior was a grave sin, that those who practiced it would wind up in hell, and campaigned actively against gay rights? I doubt that, too. Would you be friends with a Muslim who seemed really nice, but then found out that they favored stoning adulterers, obeying sharia law, and killing people who left Islam? I couldn’t. When I think of the friends I have who are religious, none of them have odious religious views—all of them are of the liberal “ground-of-being” stripe.
Now of course I’m not characterizing all Muslims or religionists here—many don’t hold those views. But for those who do—and surveys show that there are many among Muslims—can you really say you dislike the “sin” but love the “sinner”? I’m not made of such stern stuff. I simply cannot bring myself to befriend—or respect—people who hold such beliefs. I wouldn’t denigrate such people personally, or treat them as if they were a homogeneous group (which is what those people do who try to stem Muslim immigration into Europe), or deny them any rights or liberties, but I certainly wouldn’t hold them up as role models, either. I won’t say that I hate or fear all Muslims, but I can’t bring myself to admire, like, or respect the many of them who hold beliefs I consider retrograde or dangerous.
So my question is this: to what extent can you separate the believer and the beliefs?
Reader John Chardine is a felicitious combination of a biologist and a professional photographer. He’s posted here before, but I recently saw some of his photos on Facebook and begged him for more. (His photography website is here.) I received a nice collection of themed pictures that imparted a biology lesson, and I’ll share both today. John is off to Antarctica (he goes every year to lecture about Antarctic birds on cruise ships), so I’ve importuned him to send penguin pictures on his return—and also to give me advice about visiting Antarctica, since that’s one of my dreams.
Here are his notes:
One of my little bird photography projects is to collect images of birds showing their nictitating membrane (another is to photograph pooping birds, but that’s for another time). Most bird photographers throw away images if they show the membrane. I keep them.
The membrane is also referred to as the third eyelid and is flicked across the eyeball in a blink or for more prolonged periods. As you are photographing a bird, the blinks are so quick that you rarely see them by eye. The camera, however, often catches the blinks. This is one of many aspects of wildlife photography I really love—revealing biology through still photography.
The membrane is stored in the inner corner of the eye and folds up in there. You often see the pleats when the membrane is extended. It functions to clean the cornea and also protect it when needed. Birds often cover the cornea with the membrane for more than an instant when they are doing anything that potentially may harm the delicate corneal tissues, such as landing, fighting, or even preening. The general wisdom is that nictitating membranes are clear when they need to be—e.g., in diving birds that feed underwater—and show various degrees if opacity otherwise. The apparent opacity of the membrane seems to be dependent in some species on the angle of view, as the image of the Sandhill Crane clearly shows. Maybe the membrane changes with age? Some species like the White Ibis seem to have a particularly thick membrane. In evolutionary terms, perhaps there is a trade-off between the robustness of the membrane and its transparency, and a robust membrane is generally better option if you do not need to see through it. Very little work has been done on this subject.Anyway, here are a few images of this interesting part of birds’ eyes (many other vertebrates have vestigial to full membranes).The clear, diaphanous membrane of a Common Goldeneye—a diving species of duck:
A landbird, the Ostrich, with a full opaque membrane. I assume the squiggly lines on the membrane are blood vessels:
A Virginia Rail, also showing the possible blood vessels. This membrane is quite clear but the rail is not a diving bird. Rather, it moves quickly through thick marsh vegetation (as thin as a rail) and as it does so it probably needs to protect its eye while at the same time seeing where it’s going:
A Sandhill Crane showing variation in the apparent opacity of the membrane due to view angle and maybe light direction. This is the same bird:
White Ibis, showing a particularly thick membrane. The pleats are easy to see here:
