Grammar that irks

December 19, 2016 • 7:19 am

I’m going downtown this morning for various errands, so all posts will be delayed until about 10 a.m. Chicago time. No worries, though: we will have Hili, we will have animals, and we will have a “spot the” feature. And there will be more on human sexual dimorphism as well.  In the meantime, perhaps you can fill this thread with things that bother you—or words and phrases that bother you.

Being a grammar Nazi, one of the things I don’t like to see is the use of the word “hopefully” in place of “I hope that.” Hopefully is an adverb that means “with hope”, as in “he looked at Shirley hopefully.” It is not to be used like this: “Hopefully, things will turn out for the best. Yes, I know that some dictionaries say “hopefully” can be used as “in the hope that”, but I don’t like it.  And I don’t care if Steve Pinker says it’s okay, for this is a thread about words that bother us.

Here’s another: “I could care less.” Well, if you don’t care about something, you couldn’t care less. If you could care less, that means there’s room for less caring, and that’s now what you want to say.

Alternatively, just talk about what’s on your mind, which would be a nice experiment.

Back in a few hours.

I get pushback on the sexual-selection theory for sexual dimorphism

December 18, 2016 • 12:33 pm

Last week I published a post intended to show that the profound sexual dimorphism for human size (and musculature) reflected sexual selection in our ancestors, a form of selection that can be explained only by an evolved difference in behavior: in humans, as in many other species in which females invest more in reproduction than do males, males (who often make little reproductive investment, sometimes only sperm) must compete with each other for access to females. The behavioral difference is a marked tendency to be promiscuous, compared to the greater choosiness of females. That behavioral difference is in turn a direct result of an evolved difference in gamete size and reproductive investment between males and females.

Competition among males for females can involve either direct male-male “battles” (as in elephant seals, gorillas, and chimps, as well as stag beetles and deer), or female choice of males based on of their ornamentation (as in African widowbirds, peacocks, and lions). I think the size dimorphism of humans is more likely a result of male “battling” for dominance and access to females than simply female preference for large males, though of course both factors can be involved. But regardless of whether the sexual selection involves inter-male competition—what Darwin called “the law of battle”—or female preference, it implies a behavioral difference between the sexes, and one involving the traits most crucial for evolution: those directly involved in sexual reproduction.

I also adduced four other bits of evidence predicted by the sexual selection hypothesis, which you can see at my earlier post. Those predictions were made before the data were collected, and they were confirmed. There are many other data supporting the sexual selection theory, and I’ll discuss them tomorrow. One I’ll mention now is that the measured variance in reproductive success among human males is higher than among human females, particularly in hunter-gatherer tribes. That is, in such groups some males leave a lot of kids (and thus their genes) and many others leave none, while, in contrast, the variation in offspring number among females is much lower. The difference in variance between males and females, by the way, is directly correlated with the degree of sexual dimorphism in those groups: the greater the difference in variance among males than among females—and thus the more polygynous the society—the greater the sexual dimorphism for body size. That relationship is a prediction made by the sexual selection theory.

Now, however, Holly Dunsworth, a biocultural anthropologist at The University of Rhode Island, has taken issue with the long-accepted theory of dimorphism (it’s not mine; Darwin was the first to suggest it!), and goes after me in a blog post called “In man’s evolution, woman [sic?] evolve too.” (That post was also picked up and supported by Jesse Singal in a column in New York Magazine, which makes the same errors as Dunsworth).

Dunsworth offers her own thesis, which, she says, puts more emphasis on female evolution.  I suspect her own hypothesis is in fact ideologically driven, and also neglects the possibility, which I did indeed raise, that female preference has evolved.  Apparently anthropologists bridle when what evolves in females during sexual selection is psychology rather than morphology! I also see that Dunsworth has emitted a very long string of tweets about my piece, which suggests some obsessiveness about the sexual-selection hypothesis and male-male competition. I don’t engage in Twitter battles, which are unproductive, but will make my positions clear on this site.

At any rate, here is Dunsworth’s own theory of why human males are bigger than females (I’ve put her theory in bold).

It’s not that Jerry Coyne’s facts aren’t necessarily facts, or whatever. It’s that this point of view is too simple and is obviously biased toward some stories, ignoring others. And this particular one he shares in this post has been the same old story for a long long time. [JAC: Yes, because it’s supported by lots of diverse evidence and makes predictions that have been met!]

What about the other side of the body size sexual dimorphism story?

What about the women?

Selection could well be the reason they stop growing before men and why they end up having smaller bodies than men, on average.

Perhaps men can make babies while growing, but perhaps women can’t. Energetically, metabolically. So reproduction wins over growth. We reach sexual maturity and stop growing. Is that just a coincidence?

Why doesn’t this (and other tales) fit alongside the big-aggressive-males-take-all explanation for sexual dimorphism? #evolution

Not only is it absent, but selection on women’s bodies be the driving force (if such a thing could be identified) and, yet, it’s as if women don’t exist at all in these tales except as objects for males to fight over or to fuck (but *thankfully* there’s that female choice!).

Knowledgeable people aren’t objecting to facts, as Coyne suggests. They’re objecting to biased story-telling and its annoying and harmful consequences, which Coyne doesn’t acknowledge or grapple with in his piece. [JAC: I do indeed acknowledge that we must be mindful of the misuse of biological facts, and not use what we deem “natural” to make social policy. Did Dunsworth even read what I wrote?]

I’ll respond to her hypothesis tomorrow (she calls mine a “story,” a snarky way of denigrating it since there’s ample evidence supporting the sexual selection hypothesis), but right now I want to make three points:

  • Dunsworth, who says that I am a sucker for unsupported just-so stories in evolutionary psychology, doesn’t seem to realize that I have a long history of criticizing adaptive evolutionary-psychology stories unsupported by evidence (go here, for instance).  In fact, evolutionary psychologists used to be mad at me, considering me overly critical. But there are some aspects of evolutionary psychology, like that of human sexual behavior mirrored by sexual dimorphism in body size, that are more scientific, for they make testable predictions that have been met. It would be churlish and intellectually blinkered to ignore both this hypothesis and the evidence that supports it, equating this to more speculative adaptive hypotheses that I’m warier of.
  • Dunsworth’s own “story” really is closer to a story, as it’s contradicted by the known facts about human reproduction. I’ll let the readers figure out what those facts are.
  • Finally data on the nature and traits that are sexually dimorphic in humans have, as noted above, been predicted by the sexual-selection hypothesis but not by Dunsworth’s “growth and reproduction tradeoff hypothesis.” So not only is her hypothesis contradicted by data already known, but is countered by many facts about sexual dimorphism in body size, not only in humans, but also in our primate relatives and other animals. Comparing the sexual selection theory with the tradeoff story, it’s clear that the former is the best explanation for the facts.

I conclude that Dunsworth knows nothing of my history of writing on evolutionary psychology and, further, is remiss in her own scientific approach, offering a story that’s amenable to her ideology because it allows females to evolve (mine does too!), and also a story that not only fails the empirical tests, but can’t predict the observations that sexual-selection theory can. Too, there seems to be more than a touch of intellectual mendacity in the way both she and Singal blithely ignore the supported predictions of the sexual-selection theory. Believe me, it’s more than “just a story.”

I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow, but am throwing it out here now for the readers to chew on.

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Male and female gorilla. Guess which one’s the male?

National Geographic publishes “gender” issue, still doesn’t satisfy SJWs

December 18, 2016 • 9:15 am

I don’t see any problem discussing the issues of gender roles, transgender people, and their activism, nor do I think we should discriminate against trans or “other-gendered” folk. Like gays, I think they feel a biological compulsion for their behavior and emotions, and we should respect that—and call them what they wish.

But I’m not sure whether National Geographic, which historically dealt with travel and social issues, should be the place to have this discussion. Here are two new covers of the January, 2017 gender issue. The first features Avery Jackson, a 9-year-old transgender girl from Kansas City who began her transition at age 4:

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The alternative cover features a non-binary intersex, a bi-gender, two transgender females, a male, a transgender male, and a male:

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With their increasing osculation of faith, and now this, National Geographic is increasingly dealing with social issues rather than scientific/geographical ones, and I’m not quite sure why. The magazine was purchased by Murdoch, and perhaps they’re trying to stem decreasing revenues with a bit of sensationalism. Or perhaps they’re becoming National Sociologist. 

One explanation for the topic is provided at the magazine’s site by Susan Goldberg, the head editor, “Why we put a transgender girl on the cover of National Geographic“:

The most enduring label, and arguably the most influential, is the first one most of us got: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” Though Sigmund Freud used the word “anatomy” in his famous axiom, in essence he meant that gender is destiny.

Today that and other beliefs about gender are shifting rapidly and radically. That’s why we’re exploring the subject this month, looking at it through the lens of science, social systems, and civilizations throughout history.

In a story from our issue, Robin Marantz Henig writes that we are surrounded by “evolving notions about what it means to be a woman or a man and the meanings of transgender, cisgender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, agender, or any of the more than 50 terms Facebook offers users for their profiles. At the same time, scientists are uncovering new complexities in the biological understanding of sex. Many of us learned in high school biology that sex chromosomes determine a baby’s sex, full stop: XX means it’s a girl; XY means it’s a boy. But on occasion, XX and XY don’t tell the whole story.”

. . . But let’s be clear: In many places girls are uniquely at risk. At risk of being pulled out of school or doused with acid if they dare to attend. At risk of genital mutilation, child marriage, sexual assault. Yes, youngsters worldwide, irrespective of gender, face challenges that have only grown in the digital age. We hope these stories about gender will spark thoughtful conversations about how far we have come on this topic—and how far we have left to go.

I put key sentence here is in bold (my emphasis): “On occasion, XX and XY don’t tell the whole story.”  How common are these “occasions”? The Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy at UCLA has a document by scholar Gary Gates giving these data:

  • An estimated 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and an estimated 0.3% of adults are transgender.
  • This implies that there are approximately 9 million LGBT Americans, a figure roughly equivalent to the population of New Jersey.
  • Among adults who identify as LGB, bisexuals comprise a slight majority (1.8% compared to 1.7% who identify as lesbian or gay).

Lesbians, gays and bisexuals don’t, I think, count as those who feel they’re of different gender from their birth sex; they simply prefer sexual partners who are male, female, or both, and don’t conform to their own biological sex. True transgenders, who feel they’re of a different sex from their “birth” sex (whether identified by genitalia or chromosome constitution), constitute 0.3% of the population.

If you use the data on transexuals, and plot on a graph the frequency of people who identify as transexual versus those who identify (chromosomally, morphologically, and as sexual proclivity) as male versus female, you’d get two giant peaks (one at “male,” the other at “female”, with a valley in between representing transexuals. If you added lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, you’d still get a total frequency of those in the valley of about 3.8%, meaning that 96.2% of people conform to the genders of male and female (roughly 48.1% at each peak). If that is a gender “spectrum,” then it’s a spectrum on which the vast majority of people fall into two distinct classes, with a lower-frequency tail between these peaks.

This isn’t for a moment to imply that gays and transgender people are “freaks,” “abnormal”, or shouldn’t be treated with respect and dignity. All it means is that it’s false to imply that everyone is sexually fluid, or that the gender “spectrum” is roughly even, with no peaks. That’s simply not the case.

Sadly, even National Geographic’s attempt at empathy wasn’t good enough for some.  At Feminist Current, for example, writer Meghan Murphy objects to the first cover on numerous grounds, including that Avery was raised by a conservative family in the South:

Some have questioned the ethics of putting such a young child on the cover of a magazine, especially if this child is truly struggling with a disorder. Also troubling is the regressive presentation of Avery, decked out in a colour and posed in a way that is traditionally considered “feminine.” McNamara claims the cover “drives the point home that being transgender isn’t a choice, but just something you are,” implying that this feminized presentation represents something innate. Rather than saying that kids are drawn to various colours regardless of their sex and that boys should feel just as comfortable in pink as girls, the supposedly “revolutionary” cover conveys the opposite message: that this male child must be a girl because he wears pink.

Where does socialization and societal expectations factor into this “revolution?” Will it address the fact that boys are told they cannot wear dresses (lest they be called “girls?”)

While indeed Avery may be suffering from what the DSM calls “gender dysphoria,” having declared himself to be a girl numerous times, both Jackson’s and National Geographic’s choice to focus so heavily on a feminized appearance is telling. Conservative America wouldn’t accept a boy in “girly” clothing, but shouldn’t liberal America see things differently? And if a child truly does suffer from body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria, why are sparkles, pink, and “princess dresses” the primary focus of discourse surrounding these conditions? Surely we can support kids to be whoever they want to be and dress however they like without further reinforcing sexist stereotypes…

. . . Is this really what a “gender revolution” looks like? A boy whose “femaleness” is proven by stereotypically “girly” clothing and colours and an apparent rainbow of “genders” that excludes women entirely?

Gender, under patriarchy, is not the “spectrum” so many well-meaning liberals claim, but is, as feminist activist Lierre Keith says, “a hierarchy.” Gender functions in our society to devalue those born female and systemically empower those born male. A true “gender revolution” would fight stereotypes that say girls are inherently drawn to wear pink dresses and grow their hair long, while boys have short hair and are “rough-and-tumble.” It would, in fact, challenge society’s idea of gender itself, acknowledging that some humans are born female and others are born male, but that this doesn’t mean one is passive and submissive while the other is aggressive and dominant.

Others have objected that Jackson’s post is sexualized and provocative. I didn’t even see that; you have to be sniffing out improprieties to object to stuff like that. Every image must absolutely conform to the political agenda of those advocating trans rights.

I agree that there are ethical problems with presenting children so young on the cover, as there are issues about the proper age of consent. But presumably Avery dresses as she wishes, and perhaps she wishes to present as many young girls do: wearing pink and sparkles. Is that a problem? After all, the magazine has photos of eighty nine-year-old transgender people, and ten to one not all of the transgender girls are wearing pink. Is it the fact that Avery is the cover image that’s a problem?

Here are some photos from one essay that I think is in the paper issue (the entire issue is not free online). I don’t see a preponderance of pinkness or sparkliness in the women, and the boys dress diversely; the only consistency is that members of each gender try to dress as non-trans people of the sex they feel they are:

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As for what a true “gender revolution” is, Murphy really means a shift to equal treatment and valuing of men, women, and transgenders. She’s mostly talking about feminism and stereotypes, though I feel that the higher aggressiveness of men, at least, has some biological basis. (Again, that’s not to say that I think it should be accepted as the norm, just that it’s partly genetic and, on average, differentiates males and females.)

Murphy objects to the second cover, too:

While the cover features a male, two “transgender females,” an “intersex non-binary” person, a “transgender male,” an “androgynous” person, and an individual who identifies as “bi-gender,” notably absent is… A woman!

Her article shows tweets with similar sentiments, including this one:

https://twitter.com/boodleoops/status/809708877088456704

What I don’t get here is the claim that a woman is absent from the cover. In fact, there are two transgender women, and these are usually said to be, simply, “women.” That is, if you feel like a woman, you are one. I don’t have particular objections to this, but if that’s the sentiment held by most activist Leftists, then there are indeed women on the cover. If they don’t agree with that, then they’re saying that there’s something different about being a transgender woman and a “regular” woman, and I suspect it’s that the latter have two X chromosomes and a vagina. But that’s not the line taken by much of the Regressive Left.

The lesson is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too; if the Left sees transgender women as the same as non-transgender women, they can’t object to the absence of “real” women.

This all exemplifies the divisions that are fracturing the Left, and I can’t see us going back to even a remotely unified movement. What with the growing prevalence of identity politics, with each group having their own personal agenda; the use of “purity tests”, so that if you don’t conform to a specified agenda you’re a racist, a sexist, a transphobe, and so on; and the profound differences among progressives in those agendas—all this means we’re in for trouble, especially when, in an Age of Trump, we need more cohesion.

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 18, 2016 • 8:00 am

Please keep those photos coming in, for they get depleted quickly!

Today we have two sets of photos showing aggressive behavior. The first is from reader Dick Kleinknecht of Washington State. His notes:

We have an acre or so meadow just below our house (near Seattle, Washington) that often provides entertainment from wildlife: lots of deer, some elk, rare bear, occasional coyote, … etc.  I saw something weird the other day and took some photos.  A coyote [Canis latrans] was “strafing” a doe.  That is, making running passes by her, never closer than about 15-20 feet.  Then the coyote would run around the meadow before making another pass.  The critter sometimes stopped near the doe, as if teasing her, or trying to entice her into action.  A few times she started toward the coyote, who then took off.

The doe had two ~7 month old twins she left at the edge of the meadow and they just watched from a distance.

I have no idea what was going on, as the coyote was no match for even the young deer, and I saw nothing I would interpret as aggressive behavior on its part.  Most unusual!  Any idea about what was happening?

Readers are invited to weigh in here, including identifying the deer.

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 And some insect photos from Roger Sorensen:
Here are a couple altercations in my central Minnesota backyard this past summer. I have several patches of native perennials growing and they attract a lot of pollinators.
This Eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) feeding at purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) is about to get the bum’s rush from the carpenter bee (Xylocopa sp.). I saw this behavior a lot over the summer, with carpenter bees chasing off conspecifics (2nd & 3rd photos), bumblebees, and anyone else landing on “their” coneflowers. The carpenter bee would hover a few inches away and then dart in and ram the intruder.
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The other two photos show one bee on the coneflower with abdomen raised. The aggressor arrived and hovered about 6” away, slowly orbited the flower and then dove in. I wish the bee-tussle shot wasn’t motion-blurred but it happened that fast.
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Sunday: Hili dialogue

December 18, 2016 • 7:03 am

It’s a snowy Sunday in Chicago (December 18, 2016), with seven shopping days until Christmas and the first day of Koynezaa. As for food, it’s both National “I Love Honey” Day and National Roast Suckling Pig Day, I have some lovely homemade honey that I’ll have on toast, but there’s no pig—suckling or otherwise—in sight. It’s also International Migrants Day as decreed by the UN, and we should be mindful of those who leave everything they’ve known behind in search of a better life–often one without the fear of death or murder. Those who spurn migrants should consider what they would do in the same situation.

It’s not a day in history on which much happened. On this day in 1892, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker had its premiere in Saint Petersburg, Russia; it’s now a Christmas staple most everywhere.  And, in 1916, the Battle of Verdun ended with 337,000 casualties: a staggering number. It’s no wonder that a generation of British and American writers tried to come to terms with the situation of much of a generation of young men killed for no good (or comprehensible) end.

Notables born on this day include Nobel Laureate J. J. Thompson (1856), Joseph Stalin (1878), Paul Klee (1879), Ty Cobb (1886), Betty Grable (1916), Cicely Tyson (1924), Harold Varmus (1939), and Brad Pitt (1963). Also born on this day in 1946 was Steve Biko, the famous anti-apartheid activist murdered in 1977 while under torture by the South African police. Biko coined the phrase “Black is beautiful”, Google has a Doodle for him today (below), and Wikipedia says this about his death (remember, his activism was nonviolent):

On 18 August 1977, Biko was arrested at a police roadblock under the Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967 and interrogated by the Port Elizabeth security police, including officers Harold Snyman and Gideon Nieuwoudt. The interrogation took place in Police Room 619 of the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth. The 22-hour interrogation included torture and beatings, sending Biko into a coma. He suffered a major head injury while in police custody at the Walmer Police Station in a suburb of Port Elizabeth, and was chained to a window grille for a day.

On 11 September 1977, police loaded him into the back of a Land Rover, naked and manacled, and drove 1,100-kilometre (680 mi) to Pretoria to a prison that had hospital facilities. He was nearly dead from his injuries. He died shortly they arrived at the Pretoria prison on 12 September. Police said his death was the result of an extended hunger strike, but an autopsy revealed multiple bruises and abrasions and found that he succumbed to a brain hemorrhage from massive head injuries.

screen-shot-2016-12-18-at-6-41-42-amThose who died on this day include Antonio Stradivari (1737), Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1829), Richard Own (1892), and my academic grandfather Theodosius Dobzhansky (1975).  I started graduate school as Dobzhansky’s student at Rockefeller University in New York, but then I was drafted as a conscientious objector and had to work in a hospital. When I became free (after taking the government to court), Dobzhansky had moved to the University of California at Davis and was no longer taking students. I remember when I interviewed and met him: he took me into his office, where there was a huge framed portrait of Darwin over his desk. Doby (that’s what many called him, along with “Dodak) put his arm around my shoulders, pointed to the portrait and said, in his high, nasal voice, “See? There’s the old boy who started it all!”  I couldn’t help but feel that there was a line of succession, then, extending from Darwin to Dobzhansky, with me in the next generation. But of course I never had pretensions to be as good as either of those guys.

Here’s a picture of Dobzhansky working in Death Valley, where I continued the work begun by the people in the photo. Left to right: Dobzhansky, Steve Bryant (kneeling), my Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin (Dobzhansky’s student), a hippy-ish Steve Jones (Lewontin’s postdoc), and my postdoc advisor Tim Prout, also a Dobzhansky student. Dobzhansky died not long after this photo was taken.

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Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows she’s use any excuse to get noms:

Hili: A hot radiator stimulates appetite.
A: Interesting.
Hili: Yes, warming up the tail improves the taste of food.
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In Polish:
Hili: Ciepły grzejnik pobudza apetyt.
Ja: Interesujące.
Hili: Tak, podgrzewanie ogona poprawia smak jedzenia.
Lagniappe: A cat cartoon to brighten this gloomy day (h/t: reader jsp). You might recognize the cat god as Bastet, late incorporated into Greek mythology as Ailuros,  which gave rise to the formal term for cat lover: ailurophile.
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And so it begins: a petition to Mike Pence to ban the teaching of evolution

December 17, 2016 • 1:45 pm

I swear that the ignorance of Americans sometimes astounds me, not that I think we’re all ignorant. But I have to question the rationality of people who started the petition below (click on screenshot to go to petition, but for god’s sake don’t sign it!). Lots of biologists and scientists were sent this link by a creationist whom I’ll leave unnamed to protect the benighted.

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I won’t reproduce the whole thing, but you can get its tenor from the first two paragraphs:

To Mike Pence, Vice-President of the United States of America:

We the undersigned note that, when you were a member of the U.S House of Representatives, you spoke out on the subject of science education and for presenting students with all available information. Recently, we have seen the passage of academic freedom bills in Louisiana and Tennessee which have allowed for critical evaluation in the classroom and improved educational standards. However, whilst an important development, they were only enacted owing to the need to protect students from indoctrination. We object to the teaching of the very controversial theory of evolution as part of the K-12 science curriculum which we regard to be unnecessary and unhelpful.

It is obvious to us that Evolutionism-Darwinism is an anti-Christian atheistic dogma masquerading as science. According to renown philosopher of science, Professor Michael Ruse, himself an ardent evolutionist, there is no doubt that the theory of evolution represents a philosophical worldview: “Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity.”

The usual blather follows: evolution denies a creator and thus is an atheistic “religion,” we’ve changed our minds on some scientific issues, therefore evolutionists are fallible (Christianity, of course, never changes), etc. etc. And there’s this old claim:

Of course, it is absolutely necessary to teach observable limited biological change, generally termed “microevolution” or “adaptation”, such as the acquisition of antibiotic resistance in bacteria through loss-of-function mutations. However, this can be effectively taught as part of a course on ecology without reference to the wider theory and the distraction of its flawed historical narrative of origins which includes telling students that humans are walking sarcopterygian fish!

Well, the petition isn’t going to go anywhere, or so I hope, but when Trump appoints another conservative justice to the Supreme Court, that will make a 5-4 majority, one that could overturn the existing federal ruling banning the teaching of creationism and its subspecies in public schools as a violation of the First Amendment.

There are only three signatures on the petition to date, and here they are:

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I tried adding another humorous one like the above, but for some reason (LOL) they apparently aren’t accepting signatures. You might want to try one.

h/t: Joseph

The TLS osculates Christianity

December 17, 2016 • 12:30 pm

I used to write a lot of reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), but I do that no longer. But as far as I’m aware, the TLS is turning into an organ of religious-osculation, with piece after piece making nice to faith. Now I may be wrong, as I don’t subscribe and have to depend on what people send me (surely a biased sample), or what is free online.  But what is free online now is pretty dire: an article by Rupert Shortt called “How Christianity invented modernity.” (Note: it’s free this week only.)  Shortt is in fact the religion editor of the TLS, so one can get an idea of what their attitude is to religious books—OSCULATION OF FAITH. Shortt is a Christian whose written a book called , Christianophobia: A Faith under Attack, and, as this interview shows, is clearly afflicted with a Christian persecution complex . He’s also written a book about the former Archbishop of Canterbury: Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop, and a theological book called God is No Thing: a Coherent Christianity, which appears to be a polemic against New Atheism.

In this piece Shortt reviews two books: The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values, by Nick Spencer, and Sceptical Christianity: Exploring Credible Belief, by Robert Reiss. The two things you discover on plowing your way through this review is 1. It’s not really a review, but a sermon, setting out Shortt’s views on Christianity and his opprobrium towards nonbelievers (at the end Shortt lapses into full Jonathan Edwards mode) and 2. for a literary editor, Shortt can’t write very well. You’ll see that from the excerpts. I’ll give a few from different areas (indented, with emphases mine), so you can see how his “sophisticated” views consist, as with Sophisticated Theologians™, of academic prose veiling a simple will to believe.

New Atheism: In shortt, he doesn’t like New Atheism because it gives us no purchase for morality. Further, Shortt raises the usual canard that New Atheists criticize only a strawman: a simplified version of Christianity.

First, is secularism really robust enough to carry the freight once shouldered by the Church in Europe? Ask politicians or NGOs about the functional aspect of human rights, say, and you’re likely to get an assured answer. Ask about the source of those rights, or about deeper questions of truth and purpose, and the replies are coy. Second and more significantly, is Moran’s apparent assumption that we are simply dancing a minuet around the void actually true? Armchair philosophers – many of them far less acute than James or Moran – regularly announce that the centre cannot hold. As Terry Eagleton among others has emphasized, such people can purchase their unbelief on the cheap, usually by setting up a straw man version of religion no thoughtful believer could accept, before felling it with a single puff. To counter that things do not fall apart may take courage, or insight of another sort – or maybe just the innocence of a child.

. . .A forward glance – this time taking account not just of postmodern discontents, but also of the formidable forces arrayed on Murdoch’s side of the argument – might reference the work of Charles Taylor or Alasdair MacIntyre in the English-speaking world. Murdoch’s spiritual leanings were idiosyncratic. She accepted tags such as Platonist and Christian Buddhist. But MacIntyre and Taylor, standing at different points on the Catholic spectrum, have set out with greater clarity a revised humanism based on the creative agency of human beings over and against reductive and instrumental patterns of thinking. Their work rests on a potentially far-reaching awareness: that if we are not self-created, we are answer­able to a truth we don’t make. 

First of all, what does he mean by “answerable to a truth”? Morality is not an objective truth, at least not in my view. Our ethics are devised to conform to our preferences, informed by empirical observation. Throughout the article, Shortt is distressed that there’s no basis for morality without God, and Christianity in particular. The response to this is to show that atheists are at least as moral as religionists, which seems to be the case. If that weren’t true, most of Northern Europe would be a den of perfidy and criminality.

Social contributions of Christianity

Liberalism’s theological pedigree has been forcefully set out by Christopher Insole in The Politics of Human Frailty (2004). He also points to elements of secular thinking in areas like law that a Christian can own and celebrate, for instance John Rawls’s emphasis on the importance of reciprocity, the withholding of coercive power, and the difficulty of making moral judgements given the tangled nature of experience. Here we get a glimpse of Christianity’s protean character. Theology has spawned many schools of thought, both complementary and competing, including secularism itself. 

Is that a contribution of religion, or a reaction against religion? I think the latter. Shortt has some chutzpah to give credit to theology for secularism! But don’t forget justice!:

. . . (Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae contains a far more detailed treatise on justice than anything Aristotle provided. It addresses a host of topics including homicide, unjust enrichment, injuries against the person, slander, fraud and professional misconduct.)

Yes, and he also believed in divine punishment, consigning sinners to hell, which is a form of ‘justice’ founded on wish-thinking and social control. I’ll let those more learned than I comment on the nonreligious social contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas. But wait! Shortt gives Christianity credit for almost everything!

In brief, it is no accident that developments including the rule of law, the market economy, democracy and the welfare state have flourished most strongly in traditionally Christian societies. Within the past few generations, the UN Declaration of Human Rights emerged mainly from the hands of Catholics and Protestants working in tandem, while faith-based conviction has mobilized millions of people to oppose authoritarian regimes, inaugurate democratic transitions, and relieve suffering on a grand scale.

What he means is not “traditionally Christian societies”—for much of Western Europe is not Christian now, but is still capitalistic and all that other stuff—but “the West”. And of course Marxism and Nazism, as well as nuclear weapons, also arose in traditionally Christian societies. Further, democracy arose in ancient Greece, not to my knowledge a Christian society.

If Christianity gets all the credit for stuff that arose in the West, then it must take the blame as well. And faith-based conviction has also motivated millions of people to construct and obey authoritarian regimes, and to inflict suffering on a grand scale. (I refer to the Catholicism Shortt lauds.) What galls me most, though, is that Shortt gives Christianity credit for science:

The scientific contributions of Christianity 

What is true of social developments applies in large measure to science. Taylor’s A Secular Age (TLS, February 1, 2008) is among the most important works of revisionist scholarship to have overturned religion-versus-science clichés. For all the obduracy of certain theologians and church leaders, modern science did not arise in opposition to religion; on the contrary, it grew in a godly crucible. Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and countless other pioneers were nothing if not serious Christians. The secularist turn only arose later. In establishing his thesis, Spencer supplies bite-sized introductions to the work of contemporary figures including Stephen Gaukroger, Peter Harrison and David Bentley Hart.

My guess is that from the 19th century on, scientists were, by and large, far more atheistic than the general public, a finding clearly documented in modern society. Once again Shortt gives to Christianity everything that arose in the West. The notion that all of these men wouldn’t have made their discoveries if they weren’t religious is dubious, with perhaps the exception of Newton. Note that neither Gaukroger, Harrison, nor Hart are scientists: they are theologians, philosophers, and historians (none is all of these).

Finally, Shortt might be asked, “Well, even if Christianity made those contributions, is it true? Or doesn’t that matter?” It surely does matter, for if the truth claims of Christianity be false, then there’s no reason to prize Christian morality above secular morality—or the morality of any other faith. And Shortt lays out the reasons we should believe in God (clearly the Christian God). For the life of me it all sounds like pure gibberish, but of the academic species:

You cannot (to posit a crazy thought experiment) add up everything in the universe, reach a total of n, then conclude that the final total is n + 1 because you’re also a theist. God belongs to no genus; divinity and humanity are too different to be opposites. By definition, then, no physical analogy will describe our putative creator adequately. We are migrating off the semantic map. But light is among the more helpful. The light in which we see is not one of the objects seen, because we apprehend light only inasmuch as it is reflected off opaque objects. From a monotheistic standpoint, it is the same with the divine light. The light which is God, writes the philosopher Denys Turner, we can see only in the creatures that reflect it. “Therefore . . . when we turn our minds away from the visible objects of creation to God, . . . the source of their visibility, it is as if we see nothing. The world shines with the divine light. But the light which causes it to shine is itself like a profound darkness.”

In other words, we know God exists because humans are godly and the world evinces divinity. But those aren’t the humans and the world I know.

Shortt also recycles the “first cause” argument, though he pretends it’s something else:

Given the hostility of many believers – let alone atheists – to the philosophy of religion, it is important to be clear about what theistic arguments amount to. They do not “prove” the existence of God. Apart from anything, a deity established on the Procrustean bed of human reason would be a small thing by comparison with the Creator who immeasurably surpasses our imaginings. To those who accept any of them, arguments such as Aquinas’s frequently misinterpreted Five Ways establish a more modest premiss: that theism is a valid inference of metaphysical reasoning, because contingent existence is not its own cause. There is no such thing as pure potentiality; even a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is an entity within a structured cosmos. That God defies definition should neither surprise nor trouble enquirers. Reason infers the existence of causes from the existence of effects, without always being able to specify the nature of the causes from the nature of the effects. Perceiving God’s presence is a far cry from knowing what God is.

That’s just the old argument of “everything had a beginning, and the Beginning of the Beginning must have been God.” But that begs the question, because God is defined as not having a contingent existence. Finally, there’s always that good old “leap of faith”: you accept God’s existence simply because you want to. Here Shortt tricks that notion out a bit, but it’s still wish-thinking:

None of this, then, is to downgrade the importance of a leap of faith, better termed a leap of the imagination. Many take a lead from figures including Luther and Pascal here. Pascal thought that God can be expected to appear openly to those who truly search, but to remain hidden from those who do not seek. His work points to the importance of the motivational heart and will, rather than just the mind or the emotions. This path in turn connects with the gospel summons to newness of life.

Well, I’ve looked for God, and I haven’t found him. Why does He hide himself from me? Is it possible that a “seeker” is someone who is predisposed to find God? More tautology afoot.

I am weary of theology, and swore I wouldn’t discuss it much after I wrote Faith Versus Fact. Theology is pablum for intellectuals, an unworthy enterprise on a par with learned discourse about fairies. As Dan Barker quipped, it’s a subject without an object. So I’ll end with an excerpt from the end of the review. Here Shortt puts on his dog collar and steps into the pulipit (he’s not just summarizing a book’s thesis). It’s embarrassing, and I weep for the TLS of old:

Over and again, Jesus indicates that the question of how people relate to him will govern how they relate to the God he called Father. In effect, he is re-embodying and radicalizing God’s call to Israel at the dawn of the biblical drama. The message of the early Church is that a new phase of history has been ushered in by the cross and resurrection. God is not to be seen as a monad, but as a pattern of loving relationship (the awareness refracted in language by the doctrine of the Trinity). God invites humanity to share in this mutual exchange of love – that is, to partake in the divine life – as daughters and sons by adoption. The Church is the community on earth representing a “new creation”. It is both a human society with a sometimes woeful history, and a divine society called to implement God’s will for universal reconciliation.

There is much else that Reiss might have conveyed more vigorously. For example, that although the Scriptures as a whole are humanly written and developed history riddled with ambiguities and dead ends and fresh starts, they nevertheless form powerfully challenging calls to humanity to grow and reform itself. Or that because of the conviction that God’s world helps make itself at every level, the believer can fit into one picture evolution and its costliness, and the Christian redemptive answer to human and natural evil. Or that, in the words of the Dominican theologian Cornelius Ernst, God is not only the background and the presupposition of human experience; “he is the foreground, the personally access­ible sense in human terms of the human search for the absolute beginning and the absolute end”

That last bit is, as far as I can see, meaningless. Readers are welcome to torture themselves trying to interpret it. And with that I’ll end.