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.
From the Facebook page of Harberin Bizdin, which appears to be a Turkish-language news website, we have a great video of a domestic cat catching fish in a large body of water (the sea?).
The original seems to be here, a French fishing news site. The cat’s tenacity and skill is astounding; it must have been hungry!
If you give a cat a fish, you’ll have fed it once, but if you teach a cat to fish, it will have food forever.
There are no prizes, but this photo, sent by reader Jonathan Wallace, is cool:
UPDATE: Jonathan sent this information with the photo:
It is a Herring Gull (Larus argentatus) on the roof of a factory.
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From The Big Think we have famed biologist E. O. Wilson talking about “the meaning of meaning,” and telling us that the answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” must come from science alone, with no input from religion or, especially, philosophy. Massimo Pigliucci will be incensed! Wilson is talking about some material from his new book, The Meaning of Human Existence, a book that I really have no desire to read (I disliked his previous book, The Social Conquest of Earth, and said so in a review in the Times Literary Supplement).
But I have to agree with what Massimo would surely say: the denigration of philosophy here is unwarranted. What Wilson is practicing is in fact scientism: the unwarranted intrusion of science into other spheres of inquiry. (I’ve only seen two people actually engage in this practice: Wilson and Alex Rosenberg.)
My problem is that Wilson conflates “meaning” with “fact”. While how we construe meaning surely rests on factual considerations, Wilson says that the origin and evolution of humans is the meaning of human existence, and depends only on the disciplines of evolution, paleontology and archaeology, brain science, artificial intelligence, and robotics):
And of course meaning has a number of meanings, but generally speaking after you’ve gone past the basic religious definition of meaning, which is of course: “The divine creator is responsible for the design and nature of humanity and what else do you want to know?” After you get past that particular response then the subject moves to meaning as history, that is essentially: What are we and why? Where do we come from?” And this is part of meaning too: “Where are we most likely to be headed?”
But meaning is, at least to me, not just history but a personal and subjective issue (I’m not going to get into what “meaning” means, a Clintonesque exercise at best that Wilson just finesses but defining “meaning” as “history,” something that nobody else does). Wilson would be better off saying simply, “How do we scientifically explain humans and their behavior”?
Wilson also denigrates philosophy, which of course is essential for an individual person to suss out the meaning of his or her life, or at least to express it in words.
I like to say that most of philosophy, which is a declining and highly endangered academic species, incidentally, consists of failed models of how the brain works. So students going into philosophy have to learn what Descartes thought and then after a long while why that’s wrong and what Schopenhauer might have thought and what Kant might of thought or did think. But they cannot go on from that position and historical examination of the nature of humanity to what it really is and how we might define it. So by default the explanation of meaning, of humanity, falls to science and we are making progress, if I might speak for science.
Now that’s scientism!
There is no right answer to “what is the meaning of human existence?” There are right answers to the question of “How do our brains work?” and “How did we evolve?”, though we may never know all the answer to those questions. But there is no overarching “meaning” of human existence, for that existence is simply the produce of a blind and materialistic process. What meaning our own lives have, or even that of humanity itself, varies from person to person, and is imbued by people. Now perhaps science can, one day, tell us why Jane sees the meaning of her life as learning about astronomy, while Joe sees it as communing with friends and family, but that still doesn’t answer the question. With everyone giving a different answer, science isn’t going to give us The One Correct Answer. That is, unless (like Wilson), you define “meaning” differently from someone else, like a theologian defining “God” as a “ground of being” or Steve Gould defining “morality” as something that falls only in the ambit of religion.
Clearly, as Wilson gets older he is becoming more afflicted with the Big Questions syndrome, something I’ve noted before. He is apparently unsatisified with his massive contributions to biology: both ant biology and evolutionary biology. Rather, he wants to leave us the legacy of The Answer About the Meaning of Life. But his expertise in biology gives him no special ability to answer that question. What his expertise gives him are some facts that may bear upon that question.
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By the way, trying to find a link to my TLS review of Wilson’s book, which is cited on my Wikipedia page but isn’t available online, I found a new addition to my page, under “Other”:
That’s fricking hilarious! Kudos to whoever added that.
Baseball writer Keith Law—suspended from tw**ting by the television sports network ESPN for reasons that are unclear, but almost certainly had to do with his Twi**ter battles about evolution with the creationist pitcher Curt Schilling (also an ESPN employee)—is back. Law, who eloquently defended evolution against Schilling’s stupidities, was given a forced hiatus from Nov. 19 to Nov. 24.
And here’s his first tw**t after the suspension—quite appropriate. I’m sure the folks at ESPN have no idea what it means:
Harvard boy! Law also has a website that is quite diverse, covering baseball, books, board games, and. . . food!
This report is from a year ago (and the data go up to only 2011), but I thought I’d put it up anyway, because, although secularism is on the rise in nearly ever Western nation, but it’s particularly pronounced in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports, in a census of what looks to be nearly everyone in Oz, that every index of religiosity is declining—and sharply. The data appear to be part of a general Australian census, in which people are asked to tick a box describing their religious affiliation.
The census gave people options of reporting which faith they adhered to, and here’s the statistics for those reporting “no religion”. The proportion of Australians choosing that category has increased from 0.4% in 1911 to 22% in 2011. The increase was particularly striking in the decade between 1961 and 1971, and perhaps some Aussie readers can explain that:
Here are the data for the last forty years: an increase from about 7% to 22%.
Here are the data for the “no religion” reporters broken down by any information they added to explain their choice. As the survey says:
Most people who reported no religion selected the ‘No religion’ box on the Census form (98%), however some provided additional information about their views, including the belief that a god or gods do not exist (Atheism), or cannot be proven to exist (Agnosticism). Other responses included Humanism, which rejects religious beliefs and centres on humans and their values, capacities, and worth; and Rationalism, which states that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or an emotional response.
It’s not clear what this means except for the heartening result that those self-described as “atheists” were by far the most common: twice as commong as “agnostics.” (Look at the numbers corresponding to those views, implying that the number of people surveyed in total (4,796,791/0.22) was nearly 22 million!:
In the last decade, every “established” religion has declined in proportional membership except for “non-Christian religions” (are those Muslims?) and “no religion,” as we’ve seen above:
As expected, older people are likely to have a definite religious affiliation, almost certainly because they’re clinging to the faith of their youth, a time when more people had a formal affiliation. For those over 25 years old, we see the familiar pattern that women are more religious than men, a result substantiated for other parts of the West. That is at least one explanation for why “movement atheism” is more weighted with males than females.
The proportion of those reporting no religion—and remember, these could be people who still believe in God but don’t see themselves as part of a church, or people who are “spiritual but no religion”—goes up as education goes up, another familiar pattern:
Finally, two more bits of information from the survey. The figure below shows the proportion of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher that report having “no religion”, divided up by the field of study defined by their highest degree. I was surprised to see “creative arts” at the top, where I expected “natural and physical sciences” to be. But it’s no surprise to see “health” and “education” at the bottom, where (as I recall) they also rank in the US. I have no psychological explanation for the bottom-rankers, though:
One possibility is that the proportion of people reporting “no religion” simply reflects a greater willingness of people to respond positively now, and that the a-religionists have always been about the same. Even if that were true it would reflect a changing climate in Australia about the willingness to “go public” about the issue, even in a survey, but the data below show it’s unlikely. For example, only about 2-3% of people surveyed refused to respond to the question about religious affiliation between 1901 and 1921, which means that 97-98% of people answered. And yet now 22% of Aussies do answer with “no religion”. That implies either a sea change in religiosity, or that Aussies of the early 20th century were lying on the survey.
The survey gives a funny comment on how people answered in the earlier censuses:
Others choose to answer in such a way that the question is not really answered (like an informal vote in an election). A hundred years ago, as now, there were responses to the question on religion that may or may not have been intended to be taken seriously, and as now, they were classified as ‘not defined’. With such responses as ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘infidel’, ‘single taxer’, ‘calathumpian’, ‘idolater’ and ‘wowser’, were these people the Jedis of 1911? There was even one person who put their religion as ‘scientist’, and may have seen (with some satisfaction?) their single response published in the list of religions.
h/t: John S.
The readers’ wildlife tank is running low again; I don’t have my usual comfortable backlog. Send in good photos, please.
From reader John Harshman:
Wait, I have more from my trip to Australia.
A laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaehollandiae). He was sitting on a fence, periodically descending to the ground to dig earthworms. You can see the dirt on his beak.
A white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster), very similar to its North American congener.
A male magpie goose (Anseranas semipalmata). You can tell he’s male because of the big lump on top of his head. Magpie geese are famous for forming stable threesomes, one male and two females.
A Papuan frogmouth (Podargus papuensis). This is as close as I get to a nightjar photo.
A male Cairns birdwing butterfly (Ornithoptera euphorion), taken at the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary in Kuranda, Queensland. [JAC: This is Australia’s largest endemic butterfly.]
I believe this is a Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus lumholtzi) taking a nap in a tree; best picture I could get.
Our spell of warm weather is about to end, and we’ll plunge back into subfreezing temperatures. We’ve as yet had only a light dusting of snow in Chicago. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili evinces some knowledge of ancient philosophy “The cat is the measure of all things”), but where Cyrus learned this stuff I’ll never know!
Cyrus: We are sophists.Hili: Yes, but we need a feline Protagoras here.
Cyrus: Jesteśmy sofistami.
Hili: Tak, ale brakuje nam tu kota Protagorasa.
