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.
Imagine if a Jew told a true story about how he was brought up by his religious parents and his rabbis to hate Muslims and Palestinians, and then—after reading about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and visiting Palestine—changed his mind and discovered that Muslims (and the country of Palestine) weren’t so bad after all. That would be good, right? Or at least something one could put on YouTube without fear?
Now imagine the opposite: a Muslim brought up by his parents and imams hating Jews and Israel, but who changed his mind after some reading and a visit to Israel. What would be the fate of such a video?
Yep, you guessed it. The former would be okay, but the latter would be deemed HATE SPEECH. And so deemed by both Muslims and Regressive Leftists.
And so YouTube deemed this video from Prager University, which was taken down after complaints of hate speech. Regardless of what you think of Israel and Palestine, watch the story of Kasim Hafeez, a British-born Muslim. (And yes, I know that Prager University is right-wing and has its problems. And you don’t even have to believe this story (though Hafeez’s story is also on Wikipedia with references): the point is how such stories are treated by places like YouTube.)
After Prager put up a petition, the video was reinstated, though it’s still said be “restrictable” by parents and schools (I don’t know how that’s done). The petition also lists 18 other Prager videos that are restricted; these are, of course, pushing a right-wing agenda or are anti-Islam.
I quote my friend Malgorzata, who sent me the link:
Of course, it was “hate speech” according to the definition of “Social Justice Warriors” and Islamists. Anything bad about Muslims, no matter whether it’s true or not, is “hate speech”. If you say that Muhammed consummated his marriage with a 9-year-old girl it’s hate speech. It may be in the Qur’an, but you are not allowed to say it because somebody might think something unflattering about the Prophet and about Islam. And that is “Islamophobia”.
Whatever you think about the video above, under what definition of “hate speech” does it fall?
Below is the list of the best books of this year selected by the New York Times; one of them was recommended by Nigel Warburton in his Five Books post about the best popular philosophy books.) If you’ve read any of these, weigh in below. I provide the Times‘s brief synopsis and a link to their reviews. I’ve also put asterisks before the two books I want to read. So many books and so little time. . .
As always at the end of the year, I ask readers what books they’ve enjoyed the most (they need not have been published this year). Do weigh in below; this thread is often a good source of information for both me and the readers.
My reading was delayed by my trip to Singapore and Hong Kong, but I’ve just finished The Master and Margarita, a splendid novel about Soviet Russia (and the crucifixion of Jesus) written by Mikhail Bulgakov between 1928 and 1940, but not published until 27 years after the author’s death (1940). It’s a novel that can be read on several levels: a satire of the Soviet system and of Russian literati, a collision between Soviet atheism and religion (worked out through recurring flashbacks to Pontius Pilate and his treatment of Jesus), and a cracking good story, one of the earliest serious novels using magical realism—long preceding Marquez and Rushdie. In this case the magic is enacted by a visit of Satan (named Woland) and his retinue to Moscow, where they proceed to drive the whole city into a frenzy using black magic. One of Woland’s retinue is a huge black cat named Behemoth, who has a penchant for pistols, vodka, and food, and gilds his whiskers. While Satan is portrayed as evil, he also has his beneficent side, doing favors for the Master and Margarita, an author who’s writing a book on Pontius Pilate and the married woman who falls in love with him. It’s a modern classic. (Thanks to reader Nicole Reggia for sending the book.)
English: A sculpture of the cat Behemoth from the novel The Master and Margarita, on a wall in Kiev, where Bulgakov was born. Source here.
I’m now about 100 pages from the end of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer (about 1100 pages long), which I read after recommendations by readers on a thread like this one. It’s a page-turner, and though I’m told by others that it’s now outdated, it’s still a fascinating read—especially because Shirer was a war correspondent who lived in Nazi Germany until 1940, and also combed through the Nazi government’s papers for his narrative. One of the striking aspects of the novel is how often the whole Nazi enterprise could have been easily derailed before and during the war by politicians and disaffected German Army officers. But of course the laws of physics deemed otherwise. Also impressive was Hitler’s command of military strategy and human psychology, which finally went to ground when he decided to invade Russia and then failed to recall his troops when they were overwhelmed by the Soviet Army. The two-front war doomed the Reich to its wretched end.
What will I read next? I have no idea, and am open to suggestions. I prefer nonfiction, but certainly don’t abjure all fiction.
The NYT selections, five fiction and five nonfiction (sadly, no science):
*A finalist for the National Book Award, Mahajan’s novel — smart, devastating and unpredictable — opens with a Kashmiri terrorist attack in a Delhi market, then follows the lives of those affected. This includes Deepa and Vikas Khurana, whose young sons were killed, and the boys’ injured friend Mansoor, who grows up to flirt with a form of political radicalism himself. As the narrative suggests, nothing recovers from a bomb: not our humanity, not our politics, not even our faith.
Propelled by a vision that is savage, brutal and relentless, McGuire relates the tale of an opium-addicted 19th-century Irish surgeon who encounters a vicious psychopath on board an Arctic-bound whaling ship. With grim, jagged lyricism, McGuire describes violence with unsparing color and even relish while suggesting a path forward for historical fiction. Picture a meeting between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port as they offer each other a long, sour nod of recognition.
In Han’s unsettling novel, a seemingly ordinary housewife — described by her husband as “completely unremarkable in every way” — becomes a vegetarian after a terrifying dream. Han’s treatments of submission and subversion find form in the parable, as the housewife’s self-abnegation turns increasingly severe and surreal. This spare and elegant translation renders the original Korean in pointed and vivid English, preserving Han’s penetrating exploration of whether true innocence is possible in a vicious and bloody world.
Inspired by the notebooks and reminiscences of his grandfather, a painter who served in the Belgian Army in World War I, Hertmans writes with an eloquence reminiscent of W.G. Sebald as he explores the places where narrative authority, invention and speculation flow together. Weaving his grandfather’s stories into accounts of his own visits to sites that shaped the old man’s development as a husband and father as well as an artist, Hertmans has produced a masterly book about memory, art, love and war.
** [JAC: This was the book recommended by philosopher Nigel Warburton as the best philosophy book of the year.] The author of the Montaigne biography “How to Live” has written another impressively lucid book, one that offers a joint portrait of the giants of existentialism and phenomenology: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and a half-dozen other European writers and philosophers. Around the early 1930s, the story divides between the characters who eventually come out more or less right, like Beauvoir, and the ones who come out wrong, like Heidegger. Some of Bakewell’s most exciting pages present engaged accounts of complex philosophies, even ones that finally repel her. And the biographical nuggets are irresistible; we learn, for example, that for months after trying mescaline, Sartre thought he was being followed by “lobster-like beings.”
In 1980 Charles and David Koch decided they would spend vast amounts of their fortune to elect conservatives to all levels of government, and the world of American politics has never been the same. Mayer spent five years looking into the Koch brothers’ activities, and the result is this thoroughly investigated, well-documented book. It cannot have been easy to uncover the workings of so secretive an operation, but Mayer has come as close to doing it as anyone is likely to anytime soon.
In May 2008, Desmond moved into a Milwaukee trailer park and then to a rooming house on the poverty-stricken North Side. A graduate student in sociology at the time, he diligently took notes on the lives of people on the brink of eviction: those who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes in rent, often for homes that are, objectively speaking, unfit for human habitation. Desmond’s empathetic and scrupulously researched book reintroduces the concept of “exploitation” into the poverty debate, showing how eviction, like incarceration, can brand a person for life.
When Faludi learned that her estranged and elderly father had undergone gender reassignment surgery, in 2004, it marked the resumption of a difficult relationship. Her father was violent and full of contradictions: a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and Leni Riefenstahl fanatic, he stabbed a man her mother was seeing and used the incident to avoid paying alimony. In this rich, arresting and ultimately generous memoir, Faludi — long known for her feminist journalism — tries to reconcile Steven, the overbearing patriarch her father once was, with Stefánie, the old woman she became.
Matar’s father, Jaballa Matar — a prominent critic of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s dictatorship — was abducted in exile, in 1990, and turned over to the Libyan regime. Whether Jaballa was among those killed in a prison massacre six years later is impossible to know; he simply disappeared. Hisham Matar returned to Libya in the spring of 2012, in the brief honeymoon after Qaddafi had been overthrown and before the current civil war, and his extraordinary memoir of that time is so much more besides: a reflection on the consolations of art, an analysis of authoritarianism, and an impassioned work of mourning.
Reader Bruce Lyon sent what he calls a “wood duck fairy tale.” Well, like the old timey fairy tales, it’s not all beer and skittles, but does have a happy ending. And there’s some nice biology included. The story stars a beleaguered mother wood duck (Aix sponsa), some predatory California scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica), and a protective California quail (Callipepla californica).
Bruce’s notes are indented.
My colleague John Eadie and I observed a bizarre natural history event at a wood duck nest. John has been studying within-species brood parasitism in several populations of these ducks near Davis, California for the past decade. Some background before the bizarre observation. Wood ducks lay eggs in each others’ nests with reckless abandon and we are trying to figure out the adaptive basis (if any) of this ‘conspecific brood parasitism’. Parasitism is so common that most nests seem to have eggs from more than one female and some nests with 40 or 50 eggs are not that uncommon.
John Eadie checks a duck box at a site near Butte City, California:
A hen incubating in a box:
Example of a large clutch that results when several females lay in the same box. The different colored eggs were laid by different females so the parasitism in this nest can be seen with the naked eye:
Wood ducks nest in tree cavities (and nest boxes) and the ducklings are famous for leaping from the high nests the day after they hatch. Because we were monitoring nests closely, we knew for many nests when the ducklings hatched, and we decided to stake out one nest and watch the little jumpers in action the day after hatch. This nest was right beside our cabin, so we were able to sit in our cars and watch the nest departure without disturbing the hen or her ducklings.
The mother duck was very cautious about having the kids leave the nest (the kids seem to wait for a signal from mom before jumping). She came to and from the nest box three different times, each time sitting in the entrance for at least five minutes time scanning the surroundings carefully. Unfortunately, the local scrub jay pair had learned that a duck box is a lunch box and had been around earlier in the morning checking things out, so perhaps they jays had made her cautious. She finally flew to the ground, walked around quietly for a bit and then must have called to the ducklings because they suddenly started coming out of the box like popping popcorn.
Female flying to the ground to finally call the ducklings out:
Out they came!
The ducklings seem to get a bit of lift from their webbed feet:
The ducklings came out in batches—three or four in a pulse, then a break for few minutes, and then another three or four. Unfortunately, we don’t know if this pulsed departure is a normal departure pattern because as soon as the first duckling hit the ground one of the scrub jays swooped in, snatched the duckling and took it off and killed it. The jays grabbed a couple of the first ducklings to jump. We suspect that this freaked out the female because she took the ducklings away into the woods when only only eight of the total of 18 ducklings had left the nest. Ten ducklings remained in the box.
The scrub jays show up:
The scrub jay dispatches a duckling:
Many of the ten ducklings in the box did eventually jump but since Mom was not there to give them instructions, they just sat under the nest box peeping their heads off. After a few minutes they started wandering about aimlessly:
The jays got two more ducklings, but then something astonishing happened. A male California quail rushed in and started defending the ducklings—he attacked the jays three times when they came in for a duckling and prevented them from getting any. The ducklings then followed him around for 45 minutes as he fed at the edge of the woods. The quail was clearly conflicted about the situation because, in addition to chasing off the jays, he also frequently pecked at the ducklings. After about half an hour, the quail and the ducklings went into the woods and the ducklings eventually stopped peeping. We could hear the female duck in the woods not far off, calling to ducklings, so our best guess is that she came back and got the remaining ducklings.
Male quail with his temporary adoptees:
John and I were pretty stunned by this interaction and we do not have a good explanation for what happened. Male quail defend their own chicks them against predators. One possibility is that the duckling distress calls were similar enough to the distress calls of baby quail that they triggered his defensive response. That he pecked at them, however, suggests that something was not quite right to him.
There are a few bizarre examples of ‘misdirected’ parental care like this in the literature. My favorite example is the textbook classic shown below: a male cardinal photographed feeding goldfish (from the web by unknown photographer). The gaping fish may have resembled begging baby birds.
It’s December 6, National Gazpacho Day—a toothsome soup. It’s also Independence Day in Finland, celebrating its independence from Russia in 1917. On this day in 1768, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published. 97 years later, the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, banning slavery, was ratified. On December 6, 1933, a federal judge ruled that James Joyce’s Ulysses was not obscene. And, exactly 20 years later, Vladimir Nabokov completed his excellent (but controversial) novel Lolita.
Notables born on this day include Ira Gershwin (1896), Baby Face Nelson (1908), Dave Brubeck (1920), and JoBeth Williams (1948, ♥). Those who died on this day include Jefferson Davis (1889), Honus Wagner (1955; as a kid, he used to throw baseballs against my great-grandmother’s outhouse), B. R. Ambedkar (1956), and Roy Orbison (1988). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the former lodgers, including their lovely daughter Hania, have come to visit Malgorzata, Andrzej, Hili, and Cyrus. Here Hania shares a tender moment with the cat:
Hili: Go and conquer the world!
Hania: First, the backyard.
In Polish:
Hili: Idź i zdobywaj świat!
Hania: Najpierw podwórko.
As usual, there’s snow in Winnipeg. Reader Taskin built a snow cat in the image of Gus (except its ears are longer), and Gus posed next to it.
Here’s a photo I took at the entrance of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum a few years back. Istanbul is full of cats, and many people, including those who run mosques, take care of them. Thus many of the strays are in good condition.
In these censorious times, made even more censorious by liberals’ counter-reaction to Trump (his election heightened fears by Leftists of more “Islamophobia” and racism), we can expect to see even more calls for bowdlerizing books or removing them from libraries. This is the case with two wonderful books—To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberrry Finn—in some schools in Virginia. As the Guardian reports, parental complaints have led to both books being removed from school libraries.
Harper Lee and Mark Twain’s literary classics were removed from classrooms in Accomack County, in Virginia after a formal complaint was made by the mother of a biracial teenager. At the centre of the complaint was the use of the N-word, which appears frequently in both titles.
The woman who made the complaint said her son struggled to read the racist language, telling the Accomack County public schools board: “There’s so much racial slurs and defensive wording in there that you can’t get past that.” The challenge also appears to be motivated by the current political landscape in the US, as the mother told the board: “Right now, we are a nation divided as it is.”
. . . . As a committee has yet to discuss the future of the books, a permanent ban has not yet been placed on the two books. However, they have already been removed from classrooms in the district, a move the National Coalition Against Censorship described as “particularly egregious”. The NCAC slammed the action in a post on its Kids Right To Read website, writing: “By avoiding discussion of controversial issues such as racism, schools do a great disservice to their students.”
The worst thing we can do in a time of increasing conservatism is to abandon our liberal values. And, in fact, neither of these books are racist. In both cases they express racism of time and place, but that is simply an accurate depiction of American attitudes at the time. Huck Finn was raised in a racist milieu, and absorbed some of that, but as the novel unwinds he becomes more sympathetic to Jim and even expresses opposition to slavery and fealty to Jim, the former slave. The the Harper Lee novel is explicitly antiracist, with Atticus Finch defending a black man unjustly accused of rape, and Atticus’s daughter Scout observing the trial from the “colored section”. It is a moving novel and and a wonderful movie.
To deprive children of these books because they contain expression of racism, including the hot-button word “nigger”, is to deprive them of not only a knowledge of American history, but of empathic human emotions and the idea that a man is a man, whether black or white. It scares me that this kind of censorship might increase simply because Donald Trump appeals to bigots.
We liberals shouldn’t change our values because of unfounded charges of bigotry. (As progressive, of course, we’re conditioned to hate racism, and to imagine ourselves as racists is about the worst thing we could think.) This change happens when we retreat from confronting the homophobia and misogyny of Islam, and it happens when we censor books because they depict an unpleasant but realistic history of America. For that deprives children, both black and white, of their heritage. And seriously, kids are tougher than you think.
________
UPDATE: At 1 pm today EST the National Coalition against Censorship hosted a reddit discussion of the banning of these books in Virginia. Sadly, there wasn’t much discussion, and the live bit ended at 2:30 EST. But the NCAC did do its bit:
NCAC will explain the importance of reading these classic novels; each book enables readers to gain a historical understanding of race relations in America and invites them to examine race in the present day. Although discomforting to some, the racial slurs are realistically depict American history and should be addressed under the guidance of a teacher. By avoiding discussion of controversial issues such as racism, schools do a great disservice to their students.
David Sloan Wilson is known as an ardent promoter of group selection, the evolutionary idea that the unit of selection is not the gene or individual, but groups of individuals whose differential extinction and reproduction (group “splitting”) can give rise to traits that are maladaptive within groups, like purely altruistic behavior. (E. O. Wilson, not a relative of D. S., shares this view). But Wilson’s many attempts to push this view haven’t won over most evolutionists, for we have very little evidence that this kind of selection has occurred in nature. I won’t dwell on the group selection debate today; if you want to see a good critique of the idea, read Steve Pinker’s excellent Edge Essay, “The false allure of group selection.”
D. S. Wilson is also engaged in other enterprises promoting his view of evolution, particularly his website The Evolution Insittute, which, along with his other projects, has been generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation. And, as with so many Templeton fundees, Wilson shows the expected weakness for religion. After all, that’s what Templeton loves, since Sir John T. started the Foundation as a vehicle for showing that science gives evidence for God. And although Wilson himself is an atheist, he osculates faith on a regular basis.
Case in point, his new essay on “Does a God exist? Actually, yes.” Now that’s weird for an atheist, right? Well, not for a Templeton-funded atheist. But what is the kind of God that Wilson envisions if not the theistic one?
Before getting to his god, Wilson disposes of several others, including a theistic God that intervenes in the universe. (Wilson does say that it’s possible that a nonfunctional and vestigial deistic God could exist.) He then looks for other kinds of gods using these definitions (his emphasis):
God (or Goddess): A superhuman being worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes.
Worship: An act of devotion, usually directed toward a deity. The word “worship” is derived from the Old English weorþscipe, meaning honor shown to an object, which has been etymologised as “worthiness or worth-ship”—to give, at its simplest, worth to something.
Well what could qualify as a god that can be worshiped if not a theistic one? Wilson brings up the Gaia Hypothesis of Lovelock, the idea that the Earth is a self-regulating “superorganism” in which both living creatures and their physical environment are coadapted—and self-regulating—in a way to keep life safely and happily on our planet. Wilson properly dismisses this idea, which I’ve never found to have any merit, as it’s quasi-teleological, lacks a mechanism for the self-regulation, and is susceptible to evolutionary changes in organisms that are detrimental to other organisms or to their environment.
So Gaia is not a god. But Wilson manages to find one! And, mirabile dictu, it turns out to be the “superorganisms” that comprise social insects and humans, and Wilson’s own line of work. Here’s what he says:
Superorganisms do exist, even if the whole earth does not qualify as one. Scientists agree that social insect colonies such as bees, ants, wasps and termites qualify as superorganisms because they are products of between-colony selection. The general rule is that any biological unit acquires the properties that we associate with “organism” when it is a unit of selection. Organisms and social insect colonies qualify and the whole earth does not.
Is it accurate to say that honeybees worship their hive? If by worship we mean subordinating ones [sic] own interest to the interest of a larger whole, then honeybees do worship their hives and the cells in our bodies worship us. If we wish to define worship in a way that requires conscious intent, then it would be a more distinctively human phenomenon. It is fascinating to note that religious believers themselves often compare their communities to bodies and beehives, as in this quote from the Hutterites, a Christian sect that leads a highly communal lifestyle:
“True love means growth for the whole organism, whose members are all interdependent and serve each other. That is the outward form of the inner working of the Spirit, the organism of the Body governed by Christ. We see the same thing among the bees, who all work with equal zeal gathering honey.”
Well, the notion that social insects are products of between-colony selection is controversial at best. To most evolutionists eusociality—insect societies that have castes, some of which are usually sterile—are explained more easily by kin selection: the relatedness of ancestral social insects to their offspring, who may have stayed in the same nest (with that relatedness enforced by the haplodiploid genetic condition of Hymenoptera). And kin selection is not “group selection”—at least not in a way that makes individuals “subordinate their own interest to the interest of the larger whole (the nest or hive).” In fact, what happens is that genes in individuals that reduce their own reproduction but still enhance their propagation through queens or other individuals leave more copies than “selfish” genes that allow workers to reproduce. There is no “worshiping”, even in this sense. To even use the term “worship” in this way is invidious—an unconscionable nod to religion. And if bees worship their hive by subordinating their own genetic interests to the whole (they don’t), then soldiers worship their army and volunteer firemen, who often die in the line of duty, worship the fire station.
But wait! It gets worse. For Wilson believes, without the slightest evidence, that humans are also “superorganisms,” with many of our behaviors (especially altruistic ones) shaped by group selection. (E. O. Wilson proffered the same thesis in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, which I reviewed—not positively—in the Times Literary Supplement. You can see a copy of my review here.) When you read the bit below, remember that Wilson’s statement that “small groups [of humans] are thought to have been units of selection,” really means “I, D. S. Wilson, think that small groups of humans were the units of selection”:
Recently, the concept of superorganisms has been extended to human evolution. Small groups are thought to have been units of selection, in the same way as single organisms of solitary species and social insect colonies. Individuals work on behalf of others and their group as a whole, sometimes because they want to, and sometimes because they are morally obligated even if they don’t want to. Do such individuals worship their groups? This strikes me as a valid statement, based on the face value definition of “worship” and its etymological origin. Moreover, when people worship gods of their own construction, these gods are usually symbolic representations of their groups, as Durkheim proposed long ago and a great deal of scientific evidence has affirmed since. The gods don’t exist in a literal sense, but the groups that they stand for do exist.
Today, there are innumerable cultural entities that deserve the status of superorganisms, at least crudely, because they have been units of selection. Some are called religions, others are called nations, and others are called corporations. All of them call upon their members to work on their behalf. Those that are not called religions often have the same trappings as religions and use the same lexicon of words. Kings are worshipped and often regarded as divine. In a 1990 Atlantic Monthly article titled “The Market as God” the theologian Harvey Cox shows how Capitalism has all the trappings of a religion. The pantheon of superorganisms in modern life is like the pantheon of Hindu gods, some strong and others weak, some benign and others malevolent.
Well, I belong to a group of evolutionary biologists, but I don’t worship it. I belong to the University of Chicago faculty, but I don’t worship the University, either, though I like it. Do workers at Ford Motors worship their CEO? I doubt it. Yes, individuals do like belonging to groups (after all, we evolved in them), and sometimes make sacrifices for them, but more often then not we gain more than you lose by joining a group. Most human groups are not “superorganisms” in which members of a soccer club lose their well being for the greater glory of Manchester United, or workers at the Planters Peanut factory sacrifice their well being for the sake of Propagating Peanuts. Just because one type of human group is religious, and believes in supernatural beings that must be propitiated (my definition of religion), doesn’t mean that all of them are religions or engage in the act of worship. And peanut companies aren’t supernatural.
In the end, Wilson jumps the rails by praising the work of the muddle-headed Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who had a teleological theory of human evolution. Humans, said Teilhard, were being propelled (by God) to some apex of perfection called “The Omega Point.” No such teleological forces have been identified, of course, and Teilhard is regarded by all thinking evolutionists as a crank. (If you want to see a hilariously splenetic takedown of Teilhard’s views of human evolution, read Peter Medawar’s review of his book The Phenomenon of Man. Both Richard Dawkins and I think that this is the best review—in terms of dry humor and devastating criticism—ever written of a popular science book.)
By praising Teilhard’s book, and even the teleological idea of the Omega Point, Wilson completely jettisons his credibility:
Recent developments in evolutionary thinking called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis are overturning conventional wisdom that evolution is always undirected. The French paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was prescient when he described humanity as just another species in some respects but a new process of evolution in other respects, which began as “tiny grains of thought” and then coalesced into larger and larger groups. Looking forward, Teilhard envisioned a single global consciousness called the Omega Point. The main updating required for Teilhard’s vision is to note that there is nothing inevitable about reaching the Omega Point. It is something that we must steer toward by mindfully selecting our practices with the welfare of the whole earth in mind. If this isn’t worshipping a Goddess that actually exists or can be brought into being, what would be?
Note to D. S. Wilson on the last sentence: no, it isn’t worshiping a Goddess. It’s just people trying to improve their lot.
Admittedly, here Wilson notes that the teleology might be not in the forces of evolution but in the hands of humans, who do act with purpose. But by noting that the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis says that evolution can be “directed” by something other than natural selection, Wilson is making a statement that is wrong. There is no such evidence, except perhaps perhaps the long-accepted view that evolution is restricted and channeled by developmental and genetic constraints. But what Wilson is talking about here are dubious ideas that evolution is “directed” by the organism evolving “evolvability”, producing mutations that are adaptive when needed, and creating a physiological system that, without being selected, can nevertheless respond adaptively to environmental change. Only a few outlier biologists have this view.
So we see in this piece Wilson acting deviously in two ways. First, he pretends that evolutionists agree that there are novel ways that evolution is directed—ways that severely violate modern evolutionary theory. More important, he gives people the idea that evolution itself has produced gods in the form of superorganisms that are “worshiped” by their constituent individuals. Both of these are misleading distortions: one of science and the other of society. What Wilson is doing, like so many of his Templeton-funded colleagues (viz. Martin Nowak at Harvard), is both promoting his own controversial biological agenda at the same time as he’s giving credibility to religion. This is a good case of natural theology: Wilson doesn’t believe in God, but he doesn’t mind using science to buttress those who do. Well played, Templeton!
JAC note: I didn’t pick this photo of D. S. Wilson to make him look weird. It’s the one he chose for his website. Photo by Jonathan Cohen, Binghamton University
