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.
Hili: Carry me in, please.A: Could we meet halfway?Hili: Your expectations are too high.
Hili: Przynieś mnie do domu.
Ja: A możemy się spotkać wpół drogi?
Hili: Masz zbyt duże wymagania.
It’s not very hard. . .
h/t: jsp
I swear, I’m not looking at the readers’ comments on my New Republic piece on the unnecessary death of Canadian child Makayla Sault. But reader Diane G. just had to let me know that one of the doctors who wrote an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) asking for sensitivity to aboriginal methods of healing, has made some comments on my piece. That doctor, Matthew Stanbroke (an editor of CMAJ), was clearly upset that I criticized his article, and tried repeatedly to defend himself. (He has a chronic case of Maru’s syndrome.) Go see how he justifies his and his co-author’s claim that we need to understand and show sensitivity to those faith-ridden parents who advocate other ways of healing—ways that ultimately kill their kids.
Violating my own rules, I had to go over and pwn him, but I hardly needed to: the readers themselves did a good job. You should have a look at that article in CMAJ, though: it’s a sickening defense of “respect” for “alternative” (i.e. ineffectual) medicine. Among other things, it says this:
Medical science poses no inherent conflict with Aboriginal ways of thinking. Medical science is not specific to a single culture, but is shared by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike. Most Aboriginal people seek care from health professionals — but nearly half also use traditional medicines. Aboriginal healing traditions are deeply valued ancestral practices that emphasize plant-based medicines, culture and ceremony, multiple dimensions of health (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual), and relationships between healer, patient, community and environment. These beliefs create expectations that Aboriginal patients bring to their health care encounters; these must be respected.
Why? It goes on:
. . .Had the court forced J.J. to undergo such treatment, the mistrust, anger and resistance that might have ensued within her community could have greatly compromised any future ability to provide optimal care not only to her, but to all Aboriginal people. For the state to remove a child from her parents and enforce medical treatment would pose serious, possibly lifelong, repercussions for any family, but such action holds a unique horror for Aboriginal people given the legacy of residential schools
In otherwords, Stanbroke and his coauthor Lisa Richardson see no conflict between science and “aboriginal ways of thinking” about medicine (what have they been smoking?), and they argue, in effect, to let children die while we try to persuade aboriginals to also have respect for science-based medicine. Don’t you dare take mortally ill aboriginal kids from their home: let them go to crank clinics like the Hippocrates Health Institute and have their cold-laser treatments, getting sicker and sicker while Stranbroke and Richardson promote “mutual understanding.” Hogwash, I say. Remove the kids from their homes, make them undergo proper treatment, and save their lives.
Fortunately, the Globe and Mail, which has reported extensively on the case of the late Makayla Sault, as well as of another aboriginal child, “J. J.”, who is still alive but undergoing the same crank treatment for leukemia, published an editorial by Leah Maclaren that comes out strongly in favor of government intervention. Maclaren’s piece, “Mackayla Sault: Whose interests are served when a little girl dies?” restores my faith in the sanity of Canadians. Stanbroke and Richardson should read it carefully.
Just a couple of excerpts:
But little about this story seems reasonable or fair. It is the strange tale of how the rights of the state can come into conflict with – and ultimately be trumped by – the hard-won rights of a specific minority. It is also the story of how superstition and magical thinking can dangerously masquerade as “cultural tradition” to dupe the sick, the young and the desperate. And finally it’s the story of how powerful people are sometimes willing to sacrifice the lives of innocents to protect the rights of a historically wronged community.
. . .Makayla’s rarer cancer had a 75-per-cent cure rate if conventionally treated; for J.J., that rate was 90 to 95 per cent. But without chemo, J.J. faces the same fate as Makayla – no one, according to doctors, has ever survived this form of cancer without chemotherapy.
. . . If Makayla had continued her chemo, she would likely have gone on to live a full and healthy life. Despite this, Brant Children and Family Services did not contest Makayla’s request to stop treatment. Why did it do this when the state has a long history of intervening in similar cases involving, for example, the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions?
The difference is that Makayla is aboriginal, and for her the option to refuse “western medicine” in favour of “traditional” treatment is seen as an essential right as opposed to the flat-out death sentence it ended up being. In other words, Makayla’s indigenous rights trumped the right of the state to intervene and save her life. So they let her die as a matter of cultural sensitivity, so that other aboriginal rights would not be eroded in the future.
. . . “Makayla was a wonderful loving child who eloquently exercised her indigenous rights as a First Nations person,” Brant Children and Family Services director Andrew Koster said this week when he heard the news of her death. (Translation: A child died, but it wasn’t my fault). He added, unnecessarily, that “The parents are a loving couple who loved their daughter deeply.”
I have no doubt that is true, but I fail to see how Makayla’s death is either rational or fair. What is the point of granting a child a right if will only ensure she ends up with no rights at all?
I can’t believe that the Children and Family Services director said this and didn’t decry the use of quack treatments or the government’s failure to intervene to save Makayla’s life. What is going on with these people?
Shame on you, Mr. Koster, and shame on you too, Drs. Richardson and Stanbroke. Either implicitly or explicitly, you’re asking us to let children die lest we offend the sensibility of Canadian aboriginals. How did your priorities get so screwed up?
It breaks my heart to know that before too long, I’ll be publishing an obituary of J. J. in these pages.
h/t: Diane G., Taskin, Quaxo
by Matthew Cobb
In November 2010, Leanne Zackowski posted a brief YouTube video consisting of photos of a black bear getting into a bird feeder. Earlier today Andrew Hendry (@EcoEvoEvoEco) tw**ted those images today, and Professor Ceiling Cat insisted they were posted. The final photo is of a park sign in British Columbia. Read it to the end.
Although I’m an admirer of the anticreationism work of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), I’m not a fan of their pervasive accommodationism. They not only have a “faith project” designed to show that science and religion are compatible, but their writers and employees regularly defend the view that science and the supernatural are compatible because science cannot deal with the supernatural. That, of course, is bogus: what else are tests of the efficacy of prayer, or tests of ESP and telekinesis, but science dealing with the supernatural? The thing is, I think the NCSE people know this, but are espousing an untenable position that nevertheless allows them to avoid offending the religious supporters of evolution. I’d prefer that they say nothing about religion, and I find it unseemly for a scientific organization to coddle superstition and delusion.
But I digress. What I wanted to bring to your attention is a review that the NCSE commissioned for “NCSE reports” from philosopher Maarten Boudry, a review called “The Relentless Retreat: God in the Age of Science.” The book at issue is Religion and the Science of Origins by Kelly James Clark, described by Boudry as a “philosopher and Christian apologist.” Both Boudry’s review and the Amazon review (just below) show the book to be a long exercise in accommodationism, the claim that science and religion are totally compatible:
Religion and the Sciences of Origins critically discusses issues in religion and the sciences of origins in both historical and contemporary contexts. After developing options on the relationship of science to belief—conflict, separation, and integration—the book treats three historical events: the scientific revolution, the Galileo affair, and the reception of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Special attention is paid to the influential yet misleading myth of the warfare between science and religion. The book examines theoretical issues—chance and purpose, the evolutionary psychology of religion, the relation between mind and body (and neuroscience and free will), and the relation of God to the good. After discussing God and the big bang, the book concludes with an analysis of evolution in the Muslim and Jewish traditions. The book, which assumes no prior background on the part of the reader, offers insights into the crucial past and into the most heated current debates surrounding science and religion.
I’m not sure that the NCSE knew what it was about when it asked Boudry to review the book, for if you know his writings (and I’ve highlighted several of them on this site), you’ll know that he has little patience for accommodationism. And that shows in his review, which he’s published in advance on his website.
Here are but a few of Boudry’s arguments in his longish but highly readable review:
“Clark’s claim that “God is not a scientific hypothesis,” however, plays on an equivocation. To be sure, the God ‘hypothesis’ does not look much like, say, the nebular hypothesis of the formation of the solar system. It did not arise from careful empirical investigation of nature, and religious believers who endorse such beliefs do not do so tentatively and after carefully examining the available evidence. A less polite way of saying this is that believers tend to be intransigent and dogmatic. In that sense, indeed, God is not a scientific hypothesis. But all that is irrelevant for the conflict view: belief in a supernatural Creator amounts to a scientific hypothesis in the sense that it has testable empirical consequences, is amenable to scientific investigation, and would make a genuine difference for science if true (Fishman 2009). That is precisely the heart of the conflict thesis: because it makes factual claims about reality, religion encroaches on the domain of science and is vying for the same explanatory domain, even if does not remotely look like science. To think that God is ‘not on the scientific radar’ (p. 6), as Clark does, just because theism did not emerge as a result of the hypothetico-deductive method, is a category mistake.”
“Clark is fair in at least one regard: in reconciling science and religion, he provides equal disservice to both. The most important distortion of science in this book, which is unfortunately also promulgated by high-profile scientific organizations such as the NCSE and the AAAS, is that science is by its very nature [is] restricted to natural causes and explanations, and must remain studiously neutral on questions about the supernatural. God can never fail as a scientific hypothesis, or so the doctrine of methodological naturalism claims, because he never entered the scientific arena in the first place. He may or may not exist, but science has no say on the matter. I think this is a politically convenient fiction, which does not survive philosophical scrutiny and historical analysis (Edis 1998; Boudry, Blancke et al. 2010; Fishman and Boudry 2013). It has also backfired, because it creates the impression that science has unfairly excluded God (see the ID propaganda movieExpelled) from serious consideration. The Intelligent Design (ID) folks had a field day with that one.
The doctrine of “methodological naturalism” is just one among several straitjackets that Clarke wants to force science in . . . “
Indeed, and read the review to see more about why supernatural claims often fall within the ambit of science.
“’Intelligent design,’ a modern-day heir of natural theology, may be discredited in the eyes of most theologians, but cosmology may still leave a number of gaps in the fabric of the cosmos for God to fill up. According to the ‘fine tuning’ arguments that are currently in vogue, the fundamental physical constants in our universe seem to lie within a very narrow range, outside of which the cosmos would not be conducive to the formation of matter and solar systems, let alone be hospitable to intelligent life. Surely this is a sign of God’s providence. However, even if we grant that life is viable only within a certain range of physical values, which is a premature conclusion at this point, there are plenty of natural explanations on offer for this appearance of fine-tuning (Carroll 2012). In the multiverse model arising from string theory, for example, the constants of nature vary from one place to the other, and the existence of certain life-conducive regions is a matter of sheer happenstance. Clark is aware of this possibility, and although he spends a whole chapter on fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God, at the same time he is already hedging his bets and anticipating the next retreat: if one of the multiverse models of the cosmos should be borne out, and fine-tuning arguments would go out of the window, this, too, would count in favor of theism: ‘God in his goodness may indeed have created everything – every possible kind of thing in the universe. … The multiverse might be the ultimate expression of divine goodness and creativity.’ (p. 205). So either God, in his loving providence, has created one universe carefully tailored for life, or in his infinite profligacy, has created a whole plethora of worlds, the finely-tuned and the messed-up ones alike. Either way, praise be unto Him! This ‘Heads I win, Tails you lose’ approach to theology betrays a desperation to maintain a cherished belief at any cost, regardless of the evidence. Note also that by invoking the fine-tuning argument, Clark is tacitly conceding that evidence is in fact relevant to the God question – thereby undermining his claim that God is not a scientific hypothesis.
In science, this kind of reasoning would be met with ridicule, but for theology, being ”another way of knowing”, different rules seem to apply.”
This is all music to my ears, for I have made similar arguments. Boudry and I are in fact in almost total agreement on the relationship between religion and science, and we’ve just co-authored a paper that touches on this issue. It’s been submitted to a philosophy journal, so I can’t discuss or describe it, but if it’s accepted I hope that Massimo Pigliucci will at last grant me a modicum of street cred in philosophy.
Boudry, a Belgian, writes in the tradition of Herman Philipse—a philosopher who uses his training and knowledge of science to argue against the compatibility of these disciplines. This is a refreshing change from those philosophers and historians of science (many of them atheists) who for reasons beyond my ken abandon their criticality when it comes to religion. But go read Boudry’s book review. I like it, but don’t know if the NCSE will.
Thanks to Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia, Boudry now has his own personal Wikipedia page, which you can see here. His age is given as 30 but he looks 16. He thus has many years left to dismantle the pretensions of accommodationism.
Well, the readers are heeding my call and sending in photos, but if you have some good ones, do send them, too. I’m not happy without a substantial bank of photos in the folder.
Today we’ve heard from reader Stephen Barnard from Idaho, who’s on a fishing trip to New Zealand and sent a few photos:
No kakapos, unfortunately, but here’s a typical New Zealand rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). I caught MANY rainbows this size or bigger, 5-7 pounds. Trout fishing in New Zealand is very different than in the US or anywhere else I’ve been. There are fewer fish but they average much larger. Once you’ve fished a beat it has to be rested for weeks before it fishes well again. The guides jealously guard the identity of their rivers and I’m sworn to secrecy.
The highlight in North Island was fishing on a enormous ranch (they call them “stations”) of 30,000 acres and 18,000 sheep, with a beautiful freestone river that hadn’t been fished for many years, and even then hardly at all. Nearly everything in the landscape photo is part of the station. It was easily my best day of trout fishing ever.
Another photo is of a stick insect of unknown species. They would somehow land on my face and my fly rod.
The fleabag hotel where I’m staying in Auckland blocks your website for some reason, as well as many others. I don’t think it has anything to do with religion.
Also from the Antipodes, a photo by reader Tim Anderson:
The wedgie (wedge-tailed eagle; Aquila audax) is Australia’s largest raptor. This one was beside the Adjungbilly Road in southern NSW, waiting patiently for the chance to carry off a VW Beetle. The pale russet colour on its back indicates that it is probably a young male, as their plumage darkens considerably as they grow older.
Reader Sharon, who claims that she’s a “crummy photographer,” nevertheless sent some nice photos:
This is a picture of my first flower of 2015, a Snowdrop (Galanthus), blooming near a Mother of Thyme plant. This was taken January 19th. Instead of blooming at the end of January I am now seeing them in the middle of January.
Are snowdrops a harbinger of global warming?
Sadly, most of the cats of India have no owners: they are bedraggled, flea-ridden beasts whose lives are short and brutal. They wander the streets, ribs visible, looking for rats or any kind of nom. They broke my heart, but I love them all. And the fortunate few have found forever homes. Here are some snaps I took of cats or cat-related items in India.
Cats down by the Ganges, Kolkata (Calcutta). They were in relatively good shape as people were giving them fish. But one kitten. . . .well, I won’t talk about it:
Mother and kitten:
These lucky moggies didn’t have to scrounge, as some kind soul was giving them fish.
My hosts have a flat in Kolkata in an apartment surrounded by a high wall. Within it are several cats and kittens who are fed by some of the residents and by the watchman. They are relatively well off compared to most feral cats in India, but they still scrounge for noms. This kitten made a heroic climb to the trashbin:
Not a real cat! (I have to say this because some cats in India resemble this.) This is an sculpture of some sort outside the art department at the university in Santiniketan.
This is Puchku, a lively little girl (“puchku” means “little one”) owned by Mr. Krishno Dey, who runs a wonderful homestay (rated #1 by Tripadvisor) in Santineketan. We arranged to have lunch there, and it was a spectacular feed (pictures of the noms later). Afterwards we had a constitutional around the grounds and Putchku followed us. She was wary, and the only person she’d let pet her was Mr. Dey:
As you can see, there was a dearth of cats. There are many more dogs than cats roaming around in India, perhaps because the cats have shorter lives or are simply less visible.
What all cats aspire to be: a tiger, Khajuraho temple:
Lagniappe: A Leon monologue! Here’s Leon, the Polish tabby owned by Elzbieta, taking his first walk as a kitten. He wears a harness because her previous cat, allowed to roam free, disappeared, and they won’t let that happen again. Leon is going for a hike in the mountains this weekend, and will wear his harness as well as sitting in a special “kangaroo pouch” that his staff carries for when he gets tired. (This reminds me of Baihu’s walks.)
The caption: “Learning to know the world is quite tiresome.”
Here he is last week practicing for the Big Hike. Caption: “I’m patiently learning how to be a kangoroo during mountain walks.”
Okay, until now I thought Hili was really saying those things, but today’s dialogue makes me wonder if Andrzej is just making it all up!
Cyrus: Would you like a piece of sausage?Hili: No, thank you, I’m on a diet.
Cyrus: Czy zjadłabyś kawałek kiełbasy?
Hili: Nie, dziękuję, jestem na diecie.