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: Here we go again! I can’t stop the man. . . But don’t spoil it in the comments just yet; you can say if you’ve found it, but all will be revealed in time ]
by Matthew Cobb
Two for the price of one, both posted by @ProjectNightjar on Tw*tter. The first is pretty straightforward:
The John Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions website is chugging away at a slow pace after having been moribund for a while. And it’s still purveying the same brand of accommodationism. But in contrast to other websites, it’s said to pay its authors very well. Shame on those scientists who aren’t religious but still publish there! But the religious and religion-friendly scientists also take advantage of the site, including Martin Nowak and Ian Tattersall as well as today’s highlighted accommodationist, Dr. Denis Alexander, who’s written a new article called “How are Christianity and evolution compatible?” (Note: it’s “how,” not “whether”.) There’s also a long and tedious author-led discussion following the piece.
Alexander, a molecular biologist, is Emeritus Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmund’s College of Cambridge University. Wikipedia confirms my memory that this is a Templeton-sponsored Institute:
It was established in 2006 by a $2,000,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation to carry out academic research, to foster understanding of the interaction between science and religion, and to engage public understanding in both these subject areas.
Alexander, an evangelical Christian, has long been in the Templeton stable. His Institute was founded by them, he’s published at least one book with the Templeton Foundation Press, and is on the Board of Trustees of the Foundation. He writes extensively on how science and religion are compatible and, in fact, how science gives evidence for God. His Templeton-published book, The Language of Genetics (note the similarity to Francis Collins’s title: The Language of God), has this précis (my emphasis):
Alexander surveys the big picture, covering such topics as the birth of the field; DNA: what it is, how it works, and how it was discovered; our genetic history; the role of genes in diseases, epigenetics, and genetic engineering. The book assumes the reader has little scientific background, least of all in genetics, and approaches these issues in a very accessible way, free of specialized or overly technical jargon. In the last chapter, Dr. Alexander explores some of the big questions raised by genetics: what are its implications for notions of human value and uniqueness? Is evolution consistent with religious belief? If we believe in a God of love, then how come the evolutionary process, utterly dependent upon the language of genetics, is so wasteful and involves so much pain and suffering? How far should we go in manipulating the human genome? Does genetics subvert the idea that life has some ultimate meaning and purpose?
You know what his answers to most of those questions are already. And what the hell is that theology doing in a science book? Surely Templeton sees Alexander as one of the prize thoroughbreds in their stable, so willing is he to twist science into supporting God.
Frankly, I’m a bit distressed by how a prominent British biologist can be so religious (aren’t the Brits supposed to be less soaked in belief than Americans?), and especially by how Cambridge University has corrupted itself by taking $2,000,000 to found an institute aimed at harmonizing to science and superstition. To use Dan Barker’s words, it is studying a subject without an object.
But on to Alexander’s piece, which has two points (these are my words):
1. Everything we know about the world, especially evolution, is absolutely consonant with the existence of God. In fact, evolution and life bespeak the presence of God.
2. Even though scripture may appear to conflict with evolution, as in Genesis, that’s just based on a form of literalism that is a modern innovation. Early theologians like Aquinas and Augustine did not take scripture literally, but read it metaphorically, and so would not be disturbed by evolution. The Genesis story was always understood to be a metaphor, and that is how it was interpreted up to the rise of fundamentalism in the 20th century.
Really? Do I have to go through these misconceptions again? I’ll try to do so briefly, though I tend to get angry when I read stuff like this—particularly point #2. The claim that both lay religionists and Church fathers didn’t see the Bible as telling literal stories (except, of course, the ones about Jesus) is a willful misreading of people like Aquinas and Augustine, and if you read them, as I have, you’d know that. Alexander is either ignorant about their writings, or (I suspect) deliberately distorting them to support his views. And it’s maddening.
Alexander first tells us that many theologians and pastors accepted Darwin’s theories soon after they were broached in 1859. And he’s right, although what they accepted was evolution, not necessarily the idea of natural selection. The latter idea, which Darwin saw as his real innovation, wasn’t widely accepted, even by biologists, until the 1920s or so.
Alexander then tells us The Truth, i.e., his own interpretation of theology, which he says is in line with that of the early Church fathers. (By the way, I don’t think Augustine is seen as a “Church father”, and believers have called me out for saying that he was). Here’s Alexander’s view of God and creation, thoroughly Tillichian:
The biblical creation theology of the early Church Fathers, mediated to the European Church by great theological scholars such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, provides a framework within which evolution can comfortably be accommodated. The Christian understanding of God creating is very different from human types of creating. God as creator in the Christian view is the ground and source of all existence. Anything that exists, be it the laws of physics, mathematics, quantum fluctuations, Higgs bosons or the processes of evolution are therefore, ipso facto, aspects of this created order. When human beings make things they work with already existing material to produce something new. The human act of creating is not the complete cause of what is produced; but God’s creative act is the complete cause of what is produced.
So speaking of God as the ‘creator’ of the evolutionary process is not some attempt to smuggle ‘God language’ into a scientific description, as if God were some ‘extra component’ without which the scientific theory would be incomplete. Far from it, for then such a concept of ‘God’ would no longer be the creator God of Christian theology. Rather the existence of the created order is more like the on-going drama on the TV screen – remove the production studio and the transmitter and the screen would go blank.
The biblical writers underline this point by employing the past, present and future tense when speaking of creation. God is immanent in the created order, an insight with a Christological focus in the New Testament, where John insists in the prologue to his Gospel that “Through him [Jesus the Word] all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” and the Apostle Paul makes the astounding claim that not only by Christ have all things been created, but also that in Christ “all things hold together”.
So God created everything and then let it run, and everything that happened couldn’t have existed without God, who sustains everything from bosons to bisons. There is, then, no observation about nature that could refute God’s causation. Alexander then denies that he smuggles God into a naturalistic paradigm, asserting that that paradigm couldn’t even exist without God. But of course Alexander has no evidence for the “blank TV screen” scenario save the Bible and what he was taught by his religious peers and authorities. The Ground-of-Being God, while it has it roots in early theology, has for Very Sophisticated Theologians™™ completely replaced the interactive, theistic God for one reason: the G.o.B. God cannot be refuted. He’s more or less deistic, or at least sustains things in a way that we can’t fathom or test. It’s the refuge of the beleaguered believer.
I’m a bit confused about how God, who creates the universe and then let it run, is still claimed to be active in it: this seems to be an unholy compromise between theism and deism. In fact, Alexander says this:
It was such reflections that led 19th century theologians like Aubrey Moore to celebrate Darwin’s theory because, in their view, it helped to move theology away from the deistic notion of God the distant law-giver to the idea central to Christian theism of the creator God actively involved in upholding and sustaining the complete created order in which the evolutionary process is a contingent feature.
How, exactly, does God “uphold and sustain” a naturalistic process, one that requires his constant upholding and sustaining lest the t.v. screen become blank? Perhaps I’m theologically naive, but if God lets evolution run, how does he “uphold and sustain” it at the same time? Would a bird fall if he wasn’t there? That would seem to imply active intervention. Or perhaps we simply couldn’t have birds without God. Yet it all seems like the Argument from Having Your Cake and Eating it Too.
But never mind. There are two juicier bones to worry. One is Alexander’s bizarre view of evolution:
This [the “God-upholding-and-sustaining” process just described] is the evolutionary process which, as a matter of fact, provides the best explanation for the origins of all the biological diversity on this planet. Taken overall it is a tightly constrained process. The late Stephen Jay Gould likened evolutionary history to a drunk lurching around on the side-walk, but the point about a side-walk is that it’s a very constrained space. In the phenomenon known as ‘convergence’ the evolutionary process keeps finding the same adaptive solutions again and again in independent evolutionary lineages. Replay the tape of life again and it’s very likely that the diversity of life-forms would end up looking rather similar. There are only so many ways of being alive on planet earth. A pattern of order and constraint is rather consistent with a God who has intentions and purposes for the evolutionary process.
This is arrant nonsense. How do we know how constrained evolution is? Convergence, in which unrelated species develop similar traits (the fusiform shape of fish, ichthyosaurs and porpoises is one example) shows only that organisms have to adapt to an environment in which they live, not that evolution is in some way “constrained.” After all, fish left the water to become all the terrestrial vertebrates we know, and then went back to the water in the form of aquatic mammals and marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs. What kind of constraint is that? And often there is no convergence: humanlike intelligence evolved only once, as did feathers and the elephant’s trunk. Those are one-off adaptations, and further show a lack of constraint.
As for getting the same species we have now (humans are the important one, of course) if we replay the tape of life, I have a big section in my book on why that’s probably not true. For one thing, mutations may be quantum phenomena, not repeatable in a replayed tape of life. And if the raw materials for evolution differ, so might its products: the animals and plants we have today. Further, the Big Bang itself, so I’m told by Sean Carroll, was a quantum-like phenomenon, and if it were repeated (and presumably God made that happen, too), the likely result is that we wouldn’t have Earth and the Sun. We’d have other planets and galaxies, but probably not the ones we have now. And if we can’t guarantee Earth, can we guarantee humans? Perhaps there might still have been life on other planets, but would it be the kind of life made in God’s image?
In sum, Alexander’s claim that the “pattern of order and constraint” is consistent with a God with “intentions and purposes for the evolutionary process” is dumb, for precisely the same pattern can be explained by naturalism. I defy Alexander to show how what we see in evolution would differ had God not produced and sustained it. In fact, how does he explain the many disease organisms afflicting humans which evolved to torture us only after hominins had evolved? Are the body louse and the HIV/AIDS virus consistent with a God who had intentions and purposes? To me such things look like the pure opportunism of naturalistic evolution.
Finally, what is most maddening is Alexander’s distortions of early theologians. He claims, as do many G.o.B.s, that Augustine the Hippo (yes, it’s a joke) and Aquinas did not take scripture literally, and that literalism is a misguided product of our own time. This is also the position of many modern and Sophisticated Theologians™ like David Bentley Hart.
And they’re wrong. But first: Alexander’s contentions:
. . . a sizable segment of the American Church has adopted a literalistic stance towards the interpretation of the Bible. Reacting against the inroads of liberal theology into its ranks in the earlier decades of the 20th century, many American Christians started reading Biblical texts, such as Genesis 1-3, in a highly literalistic manner, as if it were teaching science rather than theology. Such modernistic handling of ancient texts inevitably leads to a clash with science.
Once we return to a more traditional way of interpreting the Bible, assisted by the early Church Fathers, then any possible clash between science and Biblical texts simply vaporizes. Augustine, for example, wrote a commentary between AD 401 and AD 415 entitled The Literal Interpretation of Genesis. The twenty-first century reader coming to this volume expecting to find the term ‘literal’ interpreted in terms of strict creation chronology and days of 24 hours, is in for a surprise. Instead Augustine read Genesis 1 as a theological literary text written in highly figurative language. Other Church Fathers (such as Origen, 3rd century) did likewise, as did Jewish commentators like Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century.
The biblical creation theology of the early Church Fathers, mediated to the European Church by great theological scholars such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, provides a framework within which evolution can comfortably be accommodated.
I’ve written about this over and over again. While it is true that both Augustine and Aquinas, for instance, entertained a metaphorical interpretation of some scripture, that was overlain on an absolutely historical interpretation as well. Both readings were seen as necessary, with the historical truth taking precedence over the human interpretation. And while Augustine did waffle on whether the “days” of Genesis were 24-hour days, he didn’t waffle on the existence of Paradise, the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and so on. I will quote from V. J. Torley at Uncommon Descent; yes, he’s a creationist and Intelligent Design advocate, but I’ve read the parts of Augustine’s City of God that Torley cites below, and he’s right. In his piece “Misreading St. Augustine,” Torley says this:
St. Augustine is often cited by theistic evolutionists (see here) as a theologian whose mindset was hospitable to the modern neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Unfortunately, theistic evolutionists who make these claims are guilty of the same carelessness as Dr. David Bentley Hart: they haven’t read St. Augustine’s own writings on the subject. Instead, they’ve read essays and scholarly commentaries instead of sitting down and reading the texts themselves. If they did that, they would discover that St. Augustine expressly taught that the world was 6,000 years old (City of God, Book XII, chapter 12); that creatures of all kinds were created instantly at the beginning of time; that Adam and Eve were historical persons; that Paradise was a literal place; that the patriarch Methusaleh actually lived to the age of 969; that there was a literal ark, and that the Flood covered the whole earth; and that he vigorously defended all of these doctrines against skeptics in the fourth century (yes, they existed back then, too), who scoffed at them. The curious reader can confirm what I have read by consulting St. Augustine’s City of God Book XIII and Book XV.
. . . Let me finish with a piece of advice for Dr. Hart: if you’re going to defend Christianity, do it intelligently. Don’t misquote sources that even skeptics can check for themselves, and don’t gild the lily. Please portray the past accurately, warts and all.
So while Denis Alexander touts Augustine’s “metaphorical day-length” idea as consonant with evolution, everything else cited by Torley isn’t. Alexander is, to my mind, either ignorant of Augustine or deliberately hiding the rest of the man’s views.
The same goes for Aquinas. Yes, Aquinas also saw room for metaphor, but maintained that each section of the Bible must be read as both historically accurate and containing further meanings for the reader. And if you read the Summa Theologica, you’ll find that he believed not just in the historicity of Adam and Eve, but also in Paradise, the creation, the Fall, and Noah and his Big Flood. Hilariously, Aquinas also devoted a lot of the Summa Theologica to angels, in which he was deeply interested. Aquinas muses extensively, in the section called “Treatise on the Angels,” on how many angels there were, how they moved, what they knew, what they liked, and what they wanted. What a waste of a good mind!
One could say the same thing about Alexander and his accommodationism. How much more might we know about molecular biology had Alexander devoted his considerable intelligence to biology rather than squashing theology into the Procrustean bed of science! If he did to science what he did to the history of theology, he’d be excoriated for distorting the facts. As it is, how many people actually read Aquinas and Augustine these days?
No, Biblical literalism was not an invention of 20th century Fundamentalism. It was there from the start. So were metaphorical interpretations, but for the great theologians Aquinas and Augustine—I really hesitate to call any theologian “great”—literalism was their first priority, and interpretation took a back seat.
h/t: Mark
I believe this chipmunk is one of the babies. He was happily hoovering up sunflower seeds left on the deck for him when the mangy guy came and he hid then chased the mangy guy but must’ve lost because mangy guy returned.Here he eats and opens the seeds. You can see how he peels back the seed in the second photo. The last photo is cute because you can see how his little hands appear and how he knits them together. Chipmunks always seem worried to me and the way they hold their hands is cute and almost human.
This little guy is a specimen of the Golfo Dulce poison dart frog (Phyllobates vittatus). The species is endemic to the Golfo Dulce region of Costa Rica that includes the Osa Peninsula. While limited to the area, they are relatively common along lowland tropical forest streams along with Green and Black poison dart frogs (Dendrobates auratus). My wife and I got especially lucky when we came across this male because it is exhibiting brood caring behavior typical for this species. It is carrying its tadpoles on its back to deposit them in small pools.
Like other dendrobatid frogs, Phyllobates species are thought to acquire their toxins from dietary sources. One source for batrachotoxin may be melyrid beetles, which have been shown to contain high levels of this toxin. Melyrid beetles may also be the dietary source for batrachotoxin in the toxic New Guinea passerine bird genera Pitohui and Ifrita (Dumbacher et al. 2004).
Finally, I checked on the mallards in our departmental pond (“Botany Pond”) on my way to work. More often than not, a female mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) produces a brood in the pond and then all the young are killed before they fledge. This year, however, all five chicks survived, and they look nearly ready to fledge. I took this photo a few minutes ago. The mother (right) still watches attentively.
None. If you are a good person (I was!), you watched both World Cup games yesterday. Here are the results:
The Belgians simply couldn’t do much against Argentina, and, after the Argentinian goal in the first half, the team held back, with Messi largely playing a defensive role. His passes, though, were superb, and he had a wonderful one-on-one chance to score in the last few minutes, foiled by a savvy Belgium keeper.
The Netherlands/Costa Rica match was exciting, with the Dutch dominating almost all the way, but being unable to score despite several chances. Kudos to the Costa Rican keeper, who made many saves. It went into overtime and even after that was still tied nil/nil, and so was settled (again, in an unsatisfactory way, to me at least) by penalty kicks. I know some readers feel that those kicks do demonstrate skills, and they’re right, but I feel that a game settled on kicks leaves something wanting.
Here are the video highlights of the Argentina/Belgium game (click on the screenshot of the only goal):
And of the Costa Rica/Netherlands game:
We get a break now. On Tuesday Brazil plays Germany, on Wednesday Netherlands plays Argentina, and the final is a week from today: Sunday, July 13, at 2 p.m. Chicago time. My team is Argentina!
There are still, I’m told, 46 people still eligible for the prize in the WEIT guess-the-winner contest. That will diminish next week, of course, but I’m surprised at how many people are still in contention. There will be only one winner: the person who guesses both teams in the final, as well as the score. The first person to get it gets the special book. If nobody gets that, a special algorithm will be applied.
Now let’s all get back to work for two days!
Hili and Cyrus are becoming more able to tolerate each other, though Hili is still fearful of being nommed.
Hili: The devil’s not so black as he is painted.Cyrus: You and I have common ancestors.Hili: But we still do not know whether they were cannibals.
Hili: Nie taki diabeł straszny jak go malują.Cyrus: Mamy wspólnych przodków.
Hili: Ale nadal nie wiemy, czy nie byli kanibalami.
From Twi**er:
My own squirrel babies (actually juveniles now) go by the name of “Tufty” because of their fluffy tails. (There was once a male named Tufty E., but now there are three siblings, including two females that I call Tuftina and Tuftette.) But their tails are as nothing compared to those of a ground squirrel from Borneo described in a new paper in Taprobanica by Emily Mae Meijaard et al. (reference and free download below; see also report in Science).
The squirrel has been known for a while: it’s the largest squirrel in Borneo, lives mostly on the ground, and its Latin name is Rheithoscirus macrotis. The researchers, from Australia and Jarkarta, note that its closest living relative is in South America, bespeaking either an unknown extinct ancestor in Asia (likely) or a long-distance migration event (unlikely).
What’s remarkable about this rodent is that it has the fluffiest tail of any squirrel—in fact, the fluffiest tail (measured by relative volume) of any animal in the world.
It’s not easy to find, and over many years the authors got exactly 7 camera-trap photos of the best. I’ve put three below. The first picture shows the critter looking almost straight on, with its tail plumed out. Look at that monstrous tuft!!!
Jebus! Using measurements from the photos, the authors calculate that the squirrel has a volume 130% that of the rest of its body. That’s the biggest tail volume/body volume of any mammal—by far.
The table below gives its competitors in relative tail volume, along with the putative function of the voluminous tail. The red squirrel is the closest, but it’s lame: the tail is only 90% the volume of its body.
Of course we wonder why it has this huge plume, especially for a frugivore (fruit eater) which lives on the ground. The authors examine various hypotheses, including warmth (not viable since it’s not hot where it lives), and signalling (perhaps). Reader Malcolm, who called this article to my attention, suggested sexual selection. That’s a viable theory, but would be more viable if we knew that males had larger tails than females, and there’s no evidence of that.
The most viable hypothesis, according to the authors, is defense: it may confuse predators in pursuit (there are several species of felids on Borneo, including the clouded leopard and marbled cat), or make it easier for the squirrel to escape if it’s grabbed by the tail. The authors admit, however, that this hypothesis is speculative.
An interesting sidelight is that there are some hints that this animal may be partly carnivorous. The end of the paper gives some anecdotal evidence which has led to this animal being nicknamed “the vampire squirrel”:
It will not be easy to study this uncommon and elusive species on the ground in dense rainforests where direct observation would be much hampered. Some insights may be obtained from talking to local hunters who may have more frequently observed the species, either at rest or in flight when chased by a hunter or his dogs. In fact, there is a relatively rich animal folklore regarding Rheithrosciurus. People of Borneo have traditionally hunted the species for meat and ornamental use of its tail, among others to adorn machetes (Banks, 1931). Remarkably for a squirrel, forest-dwelling people consider this squirrel to be quite fierce (J. Payne, pers. comm.). One of us (RD) was in fact told a story by a local hunter in northern Central Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) of Rheithrosciurus attacking and killing deer to eat the ruminant’s stomach contents, liver and heart. On asking how a squirrel could kill a large animal such as a muntjak, Muntiacus muntjak, the response was that the squirrel waits on a low branch for a deer to pass below, jumps on its back and bites the jugular vein, whereon the deer bleeds to death. Once dead the squirrel proceeds to disembowel the deer and eat the stomach contents, heart and liver. Dayak hunters sometimes find these disembowelled deer in the forest, none of the flesh eaten, which to them is a clear sign of a squirrel kill. In villages close to the forest edge there were also accounts of the squirrel killing domestic chickens and eating the heart and liver only. Although, the existence of carnivorous squirrels might be a bit hard to believe, the above might fit the description of Banks (1949), who notes that Rheithrosciurus is known as being “wary, difficult to observe and biting fiercely”.
I have my doubts about this thing biting jugular veins.
h/t: Malcolm via Doubtful News
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Meijaard, E. M. R. A. Dennis, and E. Meijaard. 2014. Tall tales of a tropical squirrel. Taprobanica 6:27-31
Reader Grania was incensed when finding out that a big-time thief appears poised to get leniency from the courts because “he’s a good Christian”. She wrote a brief report for us:
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The Importance of Being Christian
by Grania Spingies
Even the guiltiest of criminals has a right to a robust defence, and a good lawyer will do their best to ensure that their client is represented fairly, a practice that helps ensure that justice will be done. Too often lawyers to whose lot is to defend the indefensible must take ignorant abuse from people who seem to think that criminals deserve nothing and to represent an accused person is to show a lack of morality.
On the other hand, in the 21st century I naively thought that “He’s a God-fearing man, Yeronner” was an anachronism. Surely no lawyer would try that one anymore? Surely no judge would fall for that these days? And the police, hardened cynics that they are, wouldn’t buy that either. Amirite?
No. I am wrong.
So, this guy steals €2.8 million euros, gambles on the stock market and loses it. But his lawyer avows that his client is a devout Christian, and even the Detective Sergeant agrees he is “driven by Christian values”. We don’t know yet if the judge is convinced yet, for sentencing will only happen later this month.
The last time I checked, one of the things that both liberal and fundamentalist Christians agreed on—and God knows, agreements are few and far between—was that robbing your clients blind was not endorsed by the Ten Commandments. It’s not even in the Sermon on the Mount. Nor is being sorry after you get caught a trait unique to the devout Christian.
Tugs at your heart-strings, it does.
Being a “devout Christian” is not shorthand for being a moral or good person. If it was, our penitent sinner would not be standing in the docks in the first place. It’s both lame and lazy to use the phrase as some sort of Monopoly Get Out Of Jail card.