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.
[JAC: There was some discussion this morning about why so many mammals have light bellies. Greg answered in the comments, but I’d also direct you to this article on countershading (yes, it’s from Wikipedia, but it’s the best I could find). Greg happens to be our resident expert on animal coloration, and decided to add a short post based on a picture he saw in the local paper.]
by Greg Mayer
As the picture below shows, countershading doesn’t always work– sometimes the hawk does spot the chipmunk.
Immature Cooper’s Hawk with chipmunk in Racine, Wisconsin (photo by Diana Hawes, from Journal Times).
I saw this just today in my local paper. As was discussed in the comments on the latest set of readers’ wildlife photos, chipmunks being dark above and light below gives them a “flattened” aspect and makes them harder to see, but no protective coloration is perfect. There have been years when hawks nested in trees on my block quite close to my house, and mangled chipmunk remains would appear frequently below the nest. This year, I haven’t seen any hawks near the house, and chipmunks seem more common than usual.
Sometimes the mask slips just a little on Sophisticated Theologians™—or, in the case of William Lane Craig, Slick Theologians. In this case it happened when Craig was forced to answer the question, one not often taken up by theologians, of how they know their god is the RIGHT God.
It came in the form of a letter posted by an anonymous reader from the UK on Craig’s website Reasonable Faith. The question formed half of a post called “If ISIS’s God were real, would I be obliged to follow him?” (The other half is Craig’s answer.) A distressed follower of Craig’s wrote in asking what would happen if a) the follower conformed to Craig’s “Divine Command Theory” (DCT), which says that what is moral is what God dictates, and b) the real god turned out to be not the God of Christianity, but the Muslim god Allah whose dictates are followed by ISIS. The distressed acolyte had two concerns:
Well, recently, an atheist flipped this question around and asked me “If the Islamic State were true (by which he means, if the specific type of Allah that IS believe in, existed) then likewise, would you become an IS member?”
Now, my gut reaction is to say no. I would not follow a God whom I find so horrendous as to condone rape, mass murder and forced conversion such as we’re seeing happen right now in the Middle East.
Two problems arise, however:
Firstly, if I say this, the atheist can simply reply, “exactly! And now I’m sure you’re aware how I feel too. Even if your Christian God existed, I would not follow him, because I find certain things about his morality horrendous and objectionable”. This would seem a conversation stopper.
But, secondly, there seems an even greater problem:
From my understanding of Divine Command Theory (DCT), it seems the response I ought to give, is “yes, under such circumstances I should become an IS member”. After all, if moral ontology is ultimately based in the character of God, then if the real God who existed after all was the IS God, and not the Christian God, then I would have no intellectual alternative other than to bite the bullet and treat his character as the paradigm of Moral Goodness. Rape etc really would be good, if their God existed, and if the principle of DCT applies.
It goes on and on, but that’s the gist of it. The writer really did perceive a serious problem with the DCT.
Craig quickly stepped in, however, with two qualifications of the DCT. But first he says this, which is almost funny:
Anonymous, I can’t help but observe that you seem to be emotionally caught up in this objection. I think the first thing that needs to be done, then, is to try to disentangle your emotions from the philosophical issues at stake here. Then you will be able to think more clear-headedly about the arguments.
Actually, if you read the letter, it’s not very emotional; it’s just concerned. And here’s the meat of Craig’s response.
1. You’ve got the wrong Divine Command Theory. Craig distinguishes between the “voluntarist” DCT, in which you have to do what God says because what is moral consists precisely and only of what God tells you to do, regardless of how you feel about it:
On voluntaristic theories God’s commands are based upon His free will alone. He arbitrarily chooses what values are good or bad and what our obligations and prohibitions are. It seems to me that the voluntarist has no choice but to bite the bullet, as you say, and affirm that had God so chosen, then we would be obligated to engage in rape, mass murder, and forced conversion.
But Craig says that very few DCT adherents actually buy into that form of DCT. No, they accept another form of Divine Command Theory, the non-voluntarist one. Here Craig pulls his bait-and-switch:
Most divine command theorists are non-voluntarists who hold that moral values are not grounded in God’s will but in His nature. Moral duties are grounded in His will or commands; but moral values are prior to His will, since God’s own nature is not something invented by God. Since His will is not independent of His nature but must express His nature, it is logically impossible for Him to issue certain sorts of commands. In order to do so, He would have to have a different nature, which is logically impossible.
What that means is that there is a set of moral goods that antedate God, though they’re said to inhere in his nature. So how do we know what God’s nature is? The only way is to see if he tells us to do what strikes us as moral. But how can you test that?
The only way I know is to see if God’s commands in Scripture comport with what we see as moral. And they very clearly don’t. We are all aware of the horrors that God commands in the Old Testament, including genocide, stoning of adulterers, killing of those who work on the Sabbath or curse their parents, and so on and so on. . . And that doesn’t include the genocides that God regularly orders up—genocides in which innocent women and children are slaughtered along with everyone else.
And yet Craig himself seemed in at least one case to hold to the voluntarist view of the DCT: when he justified God’s order to slaughter the Canaanites, including women and children. Craig thought that was perfectly moral because God ordered it and God’s ways aren’t our ways. As Craig said in his monstrous justification:
But God has no such prohibition [the prohibition not to take an innocent life]. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.
What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.
So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.
If that’s not voluntaristic DCT, I don’t know what is. It basically says that God’s commands ARE the arbiter of right and wrong. So Craig is either a hypocrite or a weasel, one who basically accepts the Euthyphro theory but imputes right and wrong to “God’s nature,” conveniently comporting with people’s innate views of right and wrong. I could go on, but there’s another interesting question for Craig: “How do you know that ISIS’s Allah is the wrong God?” Craig’s answer is funny.
2. Allah isn’t the right God because he’s not all-loving! Yes, that’s right. While Yahweh is clearly all-loving (right!), the Qur’an shows that Allah is not. And, according to the Ontological Argument, God must logically be all-loving. Oh, and there must be just one of those gods. No polytheism! My emphasis in the following:
But then, Anonymous, you begin to muddy the waters by bringing in epistemic considerations, which are not relevant to the truth or coherence of divine command theory. You ask, “What if, epistemically, I’d been mistaken and had the wrong God, what would the implications be of the DCT principle?” It is logically impossible that there be any other God. So if you were mistaken and believed in the wrong God, you would be a Muslim or a Hindu or a polytheist or what have you; but there wouldn’t be another God. Remember: on perfect being theology, God is a maximally great being, a being which is worthy of worship. Lesser beings are not “Gods” at all. In fact, in my debates with Muslim theologians, this is one of the arguments I use against the Islamic conception of God: that Allah cannot be the greatest conceivable being because he is not all-loving and therefore cannot be God.
And there you have it. Craig says that “Anonymous” is not even obliged to answer the question because there is no possibility that the right God is ISIS’s God, nor that the REAL God, i.e., Craig’s God, would order someone to engage in acts like beheading and stoning (right!).
Is only Craig’s god “all-loving”? And if He is so damn loving, why did he order the massacre of the Canaanites, man, woman, and child, as well as the massacres of many others? Why did he order she-bears to kill the group of kids who made fun of Elisha’s bald head? The questions go on forever. The fact is that Craig’s God, at least in the Old Testament (which Craig holds as correct), is a horrible bully and miscreant.
And things aren’t so cool in the New Testament, either. There’s that Hell thing, for instance. No all-loving being would fry someone forever for trivial “sins.” Further, why hasn’t Craig forsaken his wife and kids, as Jesus said he should?
This is Sophisticated Theology™ at its finest and funniest. It involves one positing not only a God, but a special kind of God, through logic alone, and in the face of empirical evidence. But there’s more! It also involves a tortuous logical twist so that that God (again, in the face of logic) just happens to have the exact kind of moral nature that corresponds to our own morality. The Right God could never order bears to kill kids for making fun of someone’s depilated pate. The thing is, though, He did!
“And if you buy my Divine Command Theory, I have some real estate in Florida I’d like to sell you.”
A gazillion people emailed me to tell me that, according to an article in Science, I was one of the “Top 50 Science stars of Twi**er”: to be precise, #30. That was a surprise to me, because I never tw**t, except to announce each post on this site, which is automatically fed to the Evolutionistrue Twi**er site. Never have I issued a single tw**t besides the posts, and, like a cat, I follow no one.
Click on the screenshot if you want to read tabloid journalism in a respectable journal, and see who the others are.
Here’s how they compiled the “star” index (the top three, in order, are Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, and Richard Dawkins). The formula is bizarre and convoluted.
The list of most followed scientists compiled here is far from scientific. To identify Twitter science stars, we began with celebrity scientists such as Tyson and checked out which scientists they followed. We also referenced online lists of scientists to follow on Twitter, such as this one by The Huffington Post. If we’ve missed someone who belongs on the top 50 list, do let us know in the comment section. Follower number is, of course, a very crude proxy of influence on Twitter, but it’s the most accessible metric for the purpose of this story.
The question of who counts as a scientist is itself a matter of debate. As a general guideline, we included only those who have completed a Ph.D. degree and published at least one peer-reviewed paper in a peer-reviewed journal. As an exception to this rule, we excluded professional journalists who fit the above criteria.
We recorded the number of Twitter followers for our list on 15 September. To tally the number of citations for each scientist, we over the past month looked up their Google Scholar profiles or, for those without a profile, used estimates produced by the Publish or Perish software, developed by business professor Anne-Wil Harzing of ESCP Europe. Due to limitations of both methods, the citation numbers are only rough estimates. For example, there’s no easy way to distinguish physicist Brian Cox of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom from physiologist Brian Cox of the University of Toronto in Canada in calculating the former’s citation count. Seven on our top 50 list appear on either the 2014 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list (*) or the Scholarometer’s top 100 authors (+) ranking, and each is noted with a symbol.
The Kardashian Index is calculated as follows: In his commentary, using data gathered on 40 scientists, Hall derived a formula for calculating the number of Twitter followers a scientist should have given one’s citation count. The K-index is the ratio of the scientist’s actual follower number to the follower number “warranted” by the citation count.
What I’m proud of: 1) the number of citations I have, despite my recent scientific inactivity as I approach retirement, 2. I never tw**t personally, and I bet I’m the only one like that on the list, and 3. most important, because I’m the ONLY one represented with a cat photo (it’s Hili, by the way). But it’s just weird. My “followers” come from the website, and are only very loosely connected to the number of my citations. In fact, had I published less and tw**ted more, I’d be much higher up on the list, for I’d have a lot more followers expected from my lower number of citations, which raises one’s profile.
At any rate, while I can appreciate the benefits that some people get from Twi**er, I simply don’t have time, and feel that I can’t really say anything substantive in 140 characters. Plus I deplore the Twi**er wars that the atheist/secular community is engaged in, in which some people obsessively comb Twi**er for tw**ts they don’t like, and then blog about them or tw**t back. It’s good for calling attention to new scientific papers, but I’m simply not motivated to do anything more than announce my own posts.
At any rate, the whole idea of “stardom” in science is distasteful, especially when it’s about success on social media. I’m not going to suggest a better index because the whole thing is invidious.
Here’s the headline of today’s New York Times, and if you click on the screenshot you’ll go to the article:
Judging by the number of responses to yesterday’s post, there was a huge emotional (and rational!) investment in the outcome of this vote, and I was surprised. The pictures below, though, show how deeply people felt about this vote.
The outcome wasn’t as close as I thought, though. From the NYT:
With results tallied from all 32 voting districts, the “no” campaign won 55.3 percent of the vote while the pro-independence side won 44.7 percent. The margin was greater than forecast by virtually all pre-election polls.
. . . Mary Pitcaithly, the chief counting officer for the referendum, said final figures showed the pro-independence camp securing 1,617,989 votes while their opponents took 2,001,926.
The campaign had injected a rare fervor and passion into Scottish politics, debated in bars and coffee shops, kitchens and offices, and producing a turnout that exceeded 90 percent in some districts. Across Scotland, 84.6 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the referendum.
Here are the results given (in the Guardian) by council: red is no (continuing union), blue is yes (independence). Who’s the blue?
Reader Grania sent me a better map, saying “from the Economist: a more helpful map in understanding the yes and no distribution. Those areas that bordered England were more likely to vote no, as were the cities.”
I suspect that those favoring the continuing union weren’t keen to say that to pollsters; perhaps it didn’t seem “Scottish.”
What will happen now? I’m not politically astute enough to know. Britain can keep its nuclear subs in Scotland, though I don’t really know why they’re there, and there will be bad feelings all around. But I love Scotland and its resilient people, and I know they’ll come to terms with this.
The happy and the sad:
“Yes” campaign supporters in Glasgow Square last night. (From NYT: Photo Lynne Cameron, Press Association via AP):
Supporters of independence, in their plaid, mourn in Edinburgh (photo: NYT; Lesley Martin, Agence France-Presse, Getty images):
From The Scotsman story: Better Together supporters celebrate in a Glasgow pub (Photo: Agency):
More celebrations in Glasgow:
This will no doubt come round again, but not for a long time. I presume that the referendum is something that can be repeated, but with the huge emotional investment—and the fairly decisive outcome—that won’t happen soon.
Reader Diana MacPherson has been busy photographing her chimpunks, and she’s sent a post in which she has characteristically anthropomorphized these adorable rodents. The title of the email she sent was “chimpmunks making human gestures,” and her interpretations are indented.
It was a good day for chipmunk (Tamias striatus) pictures. These are all pictures of whom I call “The Interloper”. I think this one is a juvenile by his/her energy level. Often, this chipmunk chases the chipmunk with the chunk missing from her ear.
“I cannot see or say evil. I can’t reach my ears at the same time, so I can still hear it.”
“Is that you, Ceiling Cat?”
“Oh hi—you wouldn’t have some seeds, would you?”
Nom nom nom nom!
“Hey, who’s that near my chippy hole?”
“Hey! You! Yeah you! Move it along!”
“Who am I?! Who am I?! I’m the chipmunk who eats here, that’s who!”
This is the chipmunk The Interloper chases. She has the chunk out of her ear and this is just a really funny pose.
I have a bunch of photos from reader Stephen Barnard of Idaho, but he has sent a largesse of red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis). So here’s a special post with those photos, one of which provides a lesson about evolution.
I can’t resist pointing out that humans carry the vestigial remnant of a nictitating membrane from our ancestors in the form of the plica semilunaris in the corner of the eye (full nictitating membranes are absent in nearly all mammals except monotremes and marsupials). Go look at your plica semilunaris in the mirror now! Spread your eye as in the diagram and look in the corner by the nose. That’s the remnant of the nictitating membrane that your reptilian ancestors had. (Some of you who are less evolved* will have a more pronounced remnant.)
Here’s a photo of what to look for:
The hawk with the membrane retracted:
*only kidding, but I like to joke about that with the students
I’m going to end Fox Week (only four days) on a high note. Reader Scott sent not one but three fox videos, along with some words:
I went on a fox hunt on yahoo and found some nice videos that I would like to share for three reasons: the fox’s speed, sound, and … apparent d*g preference. The comments from the poster are surprising.
Looking further, I found the third link which I think indentifies the call in the first video as a “vixen scream” — a possible mating call. That might put the first two videos in perspective!
1) What the Fox ACTUALLY Says (The Scream of a Fox):
