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.
It’s Monday, May 2, at least in Chicago, and I can hear the wind howling outside my crib. It will be more dire weather today. On this day in 1611, the first King James Bible was published in London, gulling all subsequent Christians into thinking that its lovely bits were written, in English, by God. And, in 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces.
Notables born on this day include Catherine the Great of Rusia (1729), Emma Darwin (1808), without whose care (and money) Charles might have had to get a real job, and famous cricketer Brian Lara (1969). Those who breathed their last on May 2 include Leonardo da Vinci (1519), on my list of the best 5 painters of all time (others are Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Turner, and Picasso), J. Edgar Hoover (1972), and Lynn Redgrave (2010). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dissing Andrzej again, but at least the cherries are doing well:
A: So far everything is well.
Hili: A bit of rain would be useful.
A: But we might get a hailstorm instead!
Hili: You farmers are always afraid of something.
In Polish:
Ja: Jak dotąd wszystko dobrze.
Hili: Przydałoby się trochę deszczu.
Ja: Żeby tylko nie spadł grad.
Hili: Wy, rolnicy, ciągle się czegoś boicie.
And, in Wrocklawek, Leon is riding in the car, perhaps to his future country home, which is now under construction.
UPDATE: I’d forgotten, but perhaps not completely, that John Brockman edited a book in 2009 in which he asked Science Heavy Hitters the exact question above. This was based on a 2008 Edge Question, and you can find a lot of the answers here. I don’t think I contributed to that annual question (I’ll be horrified if I did), but the question may have been bubbling in my subconscious.
__________
All of us like to pride ourselves on our open-mindedness and receptivity to new ideas. After all, that’s one of the main reasons to favor freedom of speech, for the assumption behind that stand is that people will eventually come to the truth, or to the best solutions, via the clash of ideas. That is, people can be persuaded to change their minds. The tacit rider is that we can change our minds as well.
But we all know that we’re less open-minded than we like to believe, and the amount of evidence required to do so is likely to be more than we’d think would be necessary to change our opponents’ minds.
In science, of course, changing your mind is supposed to be a virtue, and in principle it is; scientists change their minds more readily than do others in, say, the humanities. After all, evidence is evidence, and humanities is not so evidence-driven. And religion isn’t evidence-driven at all. Richard Dawkins gives a nice anecdote about this in The God Delusion:
I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said–with passion–“My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal–unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.
As Richard notes, that’s not always the way it works. For one thing, public admissions of error are rare. Usually scientists just shut up and stop espousing their erroneous views while incorporating better ones into their work. For another, scientists are human, and thus loath to relinquish their pet theories. If you’re strongly identified with a theory, it makes it harder to give up, because it becomes part of your reputation and your persona.
By way of asking readers to let us know what they’ve changed our mind about, I’ll give a list of where I’ve veered away from earlier views:
I was initially in favor of Richard Nixon in his 1960 Presidential race against Kennedy. To partly exculpate myself, I’ll add that I was only 11 years old (and thus unable to vote), and was good friends with a guy who turned out to be a Republican, and who had a lot of influence on me. By 1965, however, I had become a committed Democrat, though my father remained a fan of Nixon. That became a source of friction with my dad.
I believed in God, without really thinking about it, until I had my “conversion experience” in 1967. Religious people still make fun of me because I had a flash of insight while listening to the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, that there was no good evidence for God. It is as if, to these mockers, music cannot be a catalyst of—or even a background for—thought.
I was once in favor of the second Iraq war, buying the bogus evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I eventually realized that I was not only duped, but was not particularly skeptical, and I am ashamed of that. I now think that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do, but I also decry those who say that there’s no discussion to be had about the war and no good argument for deposing Saddam Hussein. I think it’s at least worth discussing, which is what Nick Cohen does in his excellent book What’s Left: How the Left Lost its Way. Cohen thinks starting the war was wrong, but that the Left showed distressingly little sympathy for the horrible evils Saddam Hussein and the Baath party inflicted on the people of Iraq.
I haven’t changed my mind about that much in science, simply because I’ve tried not to adopt pet theories to which I’ve become wedded. I’ve certainly accepted new evidence in areas where I previously was a doubter (e.g., Homo erectus having gone extinct without issue), but haven’t often been a strong proponent of theories that have later been shown to be wrong. One of them, though, is the possibility of sympatric speciation: that new species can form without the need for geographic separation, and that the populations destined to become new species can exchange genes during the process. Adhering to Ernst Mayr’s views on this, I once thought there was no good evidence for such speciation. Now I think there is, though I still don’t see it as a major form of speciation in nature.
I once was a strong opponent of the notion of “species selection”: that patterns of biological diversity could reflect the differential extinction and speciation of different species. When writing Speciation with Allen Orr, however, I realized that there was indeed evidence that some patterns, like the number of sexually dimorphic versus sexually monomorphic bird species, could indeed reflect a form of species selection. I discuss this in the very last part of the book. Let me hasten to add, though, that my belief that species selection sometimes goes on does not mean I endorse Steve Gould’s view of punctuated equilibrium (in which species selection played a major role), for I think the process he proposed as part of that theory is completely wrong.
Your turn. What have you been wrong about, or changed your mind about?
Here are the 32 minutes of President Obama’s last appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which the press annually and traditionally trades ripostes with the press. I have to say that it’s pretty damn funny, what with the Hillary-bashing references to Goldman Sachs and “CPT“, as well as to next “first lady”, his aging, Donald Trump, and so on. And the final with his hamhanded attempts to use Snapchat, the weeping John Bohener, Joe Biden, the visit to the driver’s license bureau, is fricking hilarious. He ends on a serious note and a paean to the press.
Obama’s speech was preceded by an 8-minute humorous video prepared by the press, which you can see here.
Say what you will about Obama—and I have a lot of good things to say about him—nobody can deny he has a sense of humor, something that Republicans seem to lack. Can you imagine any other President, for instance, Yes, I know he didn’t write it all, or perhaps none of it, but his delivery is impeccable.
I’ll miss him, and whoever replaces him won’t have his panache.
One of the disadvantages of shopping for food early Sunday morning is that Krista Tippett’s “On Being” program is on National Public Radio at 7 a.m. And, of course, I have to listen, cursing to myself for an entire hour. Why do I do it, you ask? I could say that I need to keep my finger on the pulse of America, and that’s one reason, but it also serves as an Orwellian Sixty Minutes of Hate. (“Hate” is too strong; I think that Tippett and her followers are pitiable, though she’s very well compensated.)
Today’s show, actually, wasn’t so bad (I heard only about 40 minutes), as it featured a man who resisted all attempts to couch his thoughts as woo: Frank Wilczek, an MIT professor who, along with David Gross and H. D. Politzer, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work on the strong interaction. Tippett being Tippett, the topic, of course, wasn’t really physics per se but, as you can see from the show’s title (“Why is the World So Beautiful?“), the “spiritual.” Wilczek has also written several popular books (I haven’t read them), one with the unfortunate title of A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design. I doubt that it’s teleological or osculates faith, but I wouldn’t have used the word “design”, which of course implies a Designer.
At any rate, Wilczek tackled an interesting topic: the beauty of mathematics and how well “beautiful and simple equations” describe the structure of the cosmos through physical laws. Why are such simple and “beautiful” theories so useful in describing the laws of physics? The wonder that Wilczek evinced resembled that expressed by Eugene Wigner in his famous 1960 paper, “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” Here’s a quote from that paper:
It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them. The observation which comes closest to an explanation for the mathematical concepts’ cropping up in physics which I know is Einstein’s statement that the only physical theories which we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.
I doubt that most physicists would consider this a “miracle” (Wilczek didn’t come close to using that word); and, as I discuss in Faith versus Fact, there are anthropic reasons for the laws of physics being constant rather than variable (our bodies wouldn’t function, and no organism could evolve, if the laws varied wildly), as well as for mathematics being able to describe the laws of physics.
This leaves two questions: why are the laws of physics described with such simple—and, to physicists, beautiful—equations? And why, as Wilczek maintained, has beauty served physicists so well as a guide to truth? In fact, at one point Wilczek said that, when deriving an equation to explain physical phenomena, “It was so beautiful that I knew it had to be true.”
As a working (or ex-working) scientist, I recoil at such statements. To me, beauty cannot be evidence of truth, though it may be a guide to truth. If so, how does that work? But I even wonder how often mathematical beauty itself, which, after all, doesn’t come out of thin air but builds on previous equations known to describe reality, guides the search for truth completely independent of empiricism. I’m not qualified to answer that question, nor the questions of whether even more beautiful equations could be wrong, or whether it’s all that surprising that the effectiveness of math in describing physics is “unreasonable.”
Of course Tippett tried to turn all this toward spirituality, and at one point asked Wilczek if this beauty was evidence for Something Bigger Out There that others have called God, but he batted away the question. The woman tries to force everything into her Procrustean Bed of Spirituality. But leaving that aside, I have three questions for readers to ponder, and—especially for readers with expertise in math and physics—to give their take in the comments:
Aren’t there “ugly” theories that describe reality? What is a beautiful theory, anyway?
Are there beautiful theories that physics has proposed that turned out to be wrong?
Is it even worth pondering the question (if the proposition is true) about why physical reality is explained by such simple and “beautiful” equations? My own reaction would be “that’s just the way it is,” but clearly people like Tippett want to go “deeper.”
*********
By the way, at the end of the show, Tippett announced the major donors to the show, and the first of these was—surprise!—the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). I hadn’t heard that before, and the JTF isn’t listed among the “funding partners” on the show’s main page:
There would be every reason, of course, for the JTF to sponsor a show that tries to connect science with something “deep”. Further, the blurb for the show on Google, below, jibes very well with Templeton’s aims, for both deal with the Big Questions:
Templeton:
The “Big Questions” are usually those that have no satisfactory answer, like “What does it mean to be human?” or “Why are equations describing the world so beautiful?”, but they serve to reassure the public that science, as Sir John Templeton asserted, could point us to the divine. That was the explicit aim of the millions left by Sir John to the JTF.
If you didn’t live through the antiwar protests of the Sixties, you may well not have heard of Daniel Berrigan or his brother Philip, activist Catholic priests (the former a Jesuit, the latter a Josephite). But to my generation they were heroes of a sort. Passionately antiwar and devoted to social causes like civil rights and the abolition of nuclear weapons, they were most famous for invading the Catonsville, Maryland Selective Service office on May 17, 1968, absconding with draft files, and then burning them with homemade napalm in the parking lot. That’s shown in the photo below, Philip is on the left and Daniel on the right. Seven other Catholic activists were arrested along with them—the so-called “Catonsville Nine.”
Photo credit: UPI
This got all of them three years in prison. After sentencing, Daniel became a fugitive (not a good move for one practicing civil disobedience), but was soon caught and served two years in prison. Over the years, he and Philip were arrested many times for their activities, including trying to damage nuclear warheads. Philip, who secretly married a Catholic nun, died in 2002, but his older brother Daniel, it was announced today, died yesterday at 94 in a Jesuit infirmary in New York. So passes a left-wing icon.
Here’s an image that really brings those times back: Daniel Berrigan, on the right, with his radical attorney William Kunstler after the Catonsville trial. Kunstler was most famous for his defense of the “Chicago Seven“, a radical group indicted for antigovernment activities in 1968.
Photo: AP
Daniel was something of a polymath, author of more than fifty books, including works of poetry, and taught at several universities, most notably Fordham. His and Philip’s actions of course angered the Catholic Church, though the brothers said that their political acts derived directly from Catholic teachings. Archbishop Spellman of New York, a conservative Catholic, exiled him to Latin America, where of course Berrigan became even more radicalized. After he returned, he continued his activism right up to his death.
If the word “social justice warrior” has any positive meaning, it applies to Daniel Berrigan, who did much more than talk about activism, and certainly did not flaunt his moral purity, but took risk after risk in service of his views. I didn’t always agree with him—he flirted with bombing and kidnapping, for instance—but let’s hand it to him: this is the kind of civil disobedience priests would do if they really, truly believed in the ideals of their church. Are there any Catholic activists like him and Philip still among us? If there are, I don’t know of them.
Reader Tom Hennessy from Virginia sent some nice flower photos:
I clipped off a bit of a Columbine [Aquilegia sp.] flower from my garden to bring indoors for a few macro photos. Only after I had the photos up on my computer screen did I realize that I had a tiny stowaway on the stem of the flower. The first two shots are what I was looking to get from the photos; the next two show the insect which may be some type of aphid, and appears to be sucking on the stem. If I had known it was there I would have tried to get a closer shot of it.
Randy Schenck from Iowa has pelicans (what are they doing in Iowa?):
Another group of American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) came by, late afternoon today. The last picture of this group includes all 14 inthe photo. The first photo shows how a pelican sits with a layered look on the water. The large wings make up the upper or second layer with the body beneath. This makes the pelican look top heavy because those huge wings are all folded up on top. Also note, the bottom of the beak is almost black or muddy and this is probably caused by sticking the long beak down in the water to catch fish. The bottom of the lake is a very black mud.
Templeton:
