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.
Stephen Barnard just keeps them coming. First, a panoramic view of the Nature Conservancy’s Silver Creek Preserve in Idaho. Barnard lives near here and, I believe, takes many of his photographs in the area:
A mated pair of American avocets (Recurvirostra americana) feeding:
An osprey (Pandion haliaetus), described by the Cornell bird site as “unique among North American raptors for its diet of live fish and ability to dive into water to catch them.”
Finally, another avocet, in flight:
There is a new d*g, Cyrus, in Hili’s house. Cyrus, a black canid, is about seven, and spent four years in the pound before he was rescued by Malgorzata and Andrzej. Hili, however, doesn’t want to share her digs.
Hili: Will this huge dog go away soon?A: No, he is a new member of the family.Hili: So why am I afraid of him and not vice versa?
Hili: Czy ten wielki pies zaraz sobie pójdzie?
Ja: Nie, to jest nowy członek rodziny.
Hili: To dlaczego ja się go boję, a nie on mnie?
I’m convinced that the famous “Jesus-in-a-dog-butt” picture is a Photoshop job, but this one, showing the rear of a Mexican trapdoor spider, is undoubtedly authentic. And what it proves is that the One True God is the Aztec Sun God. Clearly the sensus divinitatis was really installed not in the Middle East, but in Mesoamerica.
It’s also a really cool spider, and the patterns of its butt-plug are completely mysterious to me.
h/t: Twi**er of Zia Tong via Matthew Cobb
When I saw today’s Google Doodle, which looks like this:
I knew instantly that it had something to do with Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), who won the Nobel Prize in 1964. In fact, she would have been 104 today had she lived. And you should know that this Doodle was about her, too, because I’ve posted about Hodgkin before, showing the model of penicillin that she made from X-ray crystallography, a field she helped found. Here’s that model, which I showed in my previous post, and which appears in the Doodle:
It was for determining this structure, and that of vitamin B12, that Hodgkin got The Big Prize. You can read more about her at the link above. She remains the only British woman to ever get a Nobel Prize in science.
The attitude toward women scientists of her era, and her persistence in ignoring it, is expressed by a nice article in this January’s Guardian:
When, in 1964, she was awarded the Nobel Prize, did the press regard her in the same light as they would a man in the same position? Absolutely not. The Daily Telegraph announced “British woman wins Nobel Prize – £18,750 prize to mother of three”. The Daily Mail was even briefer in its headline “Oxford housewife wins Nobel”. The Observer in its write-up commented “affable-looking housewife Mrs Hodgkin” had won the prize “for a thoroughly unhousewifely skill: the structure of crystals of great chemical interest”.
. . . Hodgkin was a woman not prepared to let her gender get in the way of her work. When married, but still working under her maiden name of Crowfoot, she presented a key paper at a major meeting at the Royal Society in 1938 when eight months pregnant. Another long-term collaborator, Nobel Prize winner Max Perutz, referred to her appearance at this meeting in his speech at her memorial service: “Dorothy lectured in that state as if it were the most natural thing in the world, without any pretence of trying to be unconventional, which it certainly was at the time.”
The days have passed, I hope, when a woman who wins a Nobel Prize is described as a “housewife” or a “mother.” But there are still too few women in science, and, as several recent studies have shown, still unconscious gender bias against them by scientists of both sexes. Yet I fear we’re still in the days when headlines might say “British woman wins Nobel Prize” when they wouldn’t say “British man wins Nobel Prize.” The day will come, in our children’s lifetime, when all scientists will be judged not by the content of their chromosomes, but by the character of their science.
Whenever someone claims that the Catholic Church is down with science because it accepts evolution, I remind them that:
1. The Church accepts theistic evolution, with human exceptionalism, so that humans are the unique species into whose lineage God inserted a soul. (And 23% of Catholics, defying their own faith in a more conservative direction, are young-earth creationists.)
2. The official doctrine of the Church is that Adam and Eve were the literal ancestors of all humanity. That, too, is wrong, and clearly does not comport with what science tells us.
3. The Church accepts the notion of Satan and Hell, which is about as retrograde a belief you can have in our modern world; and
4. The Church accepts demonic possession that can be reversed by exorcism. In fact, I believe the Vatican has its own official exorcist, and there are hundreds of trained priests operating as exorcists throughout the world.
In a piece in Saturday’s Washington Post, “A modern pope gets old school on the devil“, we learn that Pope Francis is a big booster of the demonic-possession hypothesis:
Largely under the radar, theologians and Vatican insiders say, Francis has not only dwelled far more on Satan in sermons and speeches than his recent predecessors have, but also sought to rekindle the Devil’s image as a supernatural entity with the forces of evil at his beck and call.
Last year, for instance, Francis laid handson a man in a wheelchair who claimed to be possessed by demons, in what many saw as an impromptu act of cleansing. A few months later, he praised a group long viewed by some as the crazy uncles of the Roman Catholic Church — the International Association of Exorcists — for “helping people who suffer and are in need of liberation.”
. . . “Pope Francis never stops talking about the Devil; it’s constant,” said one senior bishop in Vatican City who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely. “Had Pope Benedict done this, the media would have clobbered him.”
Indeed; Francis is given a pass. When are those people who are so impressed by his “humility” going to learn that it’s just a facade, behind which lurks all the incense-scented malfeasance and superstition of Catholicism? And, far from reforming his church by nudging Catholics toward more enlightened sentiments, Pope Francis is keeping the Church mired in the Middle Ages, at least on the issues of Satan and demons:
By most accounts, the ranks of official exorcists number between 500 and 600 in a global church of more than 1 billion Catholics, with the vast majority operating in Latin America and Eastern Europe. This week, at the ninth and largest Vatican-sanctioned convention on exorcism, attendees gushed about the fresh recognition being afforded the field.
Almost 200 delegates — most of them priests and nuns — from more than two dozen nations talked about how Satanic cults are spreading like wildfire in the age of the Internet.
The new pope, exorcists say, has become their champion in the face of modern skeptics, many of them within the Catholic faith. Officially, those claiming to be possessed must first undergo psychiatric evaluations. But exorcists say that liberal Catholic bishops have often rejected their services even after such due diligence.
“The sad truth is that there are many bishops and priests in our church who do not really believe in the Devil,” said the Rev. Gabriele Amorth, the 89-year-old priest who is perhaps the closest thing the church has to a Hollywood-style exorcist. “I believe Pope Francis is speaking to them. Because when you don’t believe, the Devil wins.”
Yes, these people really do believe in Satan, and that itself is unbelievable! Where’s the evidence for Satan, much less God?
The reader who sent me this link, reader Matt, added a note to this effect:
“More Catholic craziness below. I clipped a quote from the article. Get a load of how one exorcist determines if a person is possessed. It’s amusing. But then you realize that people who really need psychological help sometimes get mixed up with these jackasses and it is sad and pathetic. And then to know that the Pope supports this nonsense is horrifying.”
Matt was referring to the following “clip” from the Post piece:
During the conference, the Rev. Cesar Truqui, an exorcist based in Switzerland, recounted one experience he had aboard a Swissair flight. “Two lesbians,” he said, had sat behind him on the plane. Soon afterward, he said, he felt Satan’s presence. As he silently sought to repel the evil spirit through prayer, one of the women, he said, began growling demonically and threw chocolates at his head.
Asked how he knew the woman was possessed, he said that “once you hear a Satanic growl, you never forget it. It’s like smelling Margherita pizza for the first time. It’s something you never forget.”
And Matt added:
“I’ll never think about Margherita pizza the same way. Now, how does Truqui know these women are lesbians? Does he believe lesbianism is consistent with demonic possession? And what growling demons attack by throwing chocolates? Booooorrrrring. No spitting vomit? No spinning heads? If this guy wants a career in exorcism he better get a better story.”
The article ends with the description of an exorcism by Amorth. Have a look if you want to truly apprehend the craziness of this faith. The only thing that’s missing is the vomiting of pea soup.
I’d love to ask Catholics who are scientists or science-friendly—like Kenneth Miller of Brown University or Peter Hess of the National Center for Science Education—what they think of the Catholic Church’s acceptance of demons and the historicity of Adam and Eve. I’m sure they’d say it is nonsense—if they had the courage to answer—but then how can they maintain, as they do, that there’s no conflict between science and Catholicism?
A take on feline consciousness from today’s “Off the Mark” by artist Mark Parisi:
h/t: jsp, Tom Nagel
As the saying goes, even a blind pig can find an acorn. And even Dinesh D’Souza, a nasty piece of right-wing, religious work—now under indictment for campaign-fund shenanigans—can be right, as he is in this video from the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. Before you watch it, be aware of two tropes raised by defenders of Islam when its tenets, or the horrible actions it inspires, are criticized. (These came up in the discussion of Brunei this week.)
1. If your ancestors did anything wrong, you have to apologize for that before you criticize anyone else.
2. All bad acts are equally bad. That is, Western “imperialism”, or the forced circumcision of kids by Jewish mohels, is just as bad as Boko Haram’s kidnapping of schoolgirls, the throwing of acid in the faces of schoolgirls, and the aiming of missiles at civilian populations. State-sponsored religious hatred by Palestinians is no worse than the fulminations of a few extremist Israelis (not representatives of the government) who spew hatred towards Muslims. I sometimes think that many have lost their moral compass.
Another defense of Islam is that only a very few Muslims engage in the acts of horror like the abduction of schoolgirls. True, but a much larger number of Muslims repress their women, brainwash their children, and, by their failure to speak up against their murderous co-religionists, tacitly give them approval. Poll after poll, even in Western countries, has shown that surprisingly high proportions of the world’s Muslims approve of the death penalty for apostasy. (Is over 30% of these in Bangladesh, Iraq, Malaysia, Jordan, Palestine, Pakistan, Egypt, and Afghanistan a “small minority of extremist Muslims”?) Here are some data from the Pew Poll:
And these views aren’t limited to majority-Islamic nations. Here are some data from a compilation of Muslim opinion polls, which is pretty scary:
Pew Research (2007): 26% of younger Muslims in America believe suicide bombings are justified.
35% of young Muslims in Britain believe suicide bombings are justified (24% overall).
42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified (35% overall).
22% of young Muslims in Germany believe suicide bombings are justified.(13% overall).
29% of young Muslims in Spain believe suicide bombings are justified.(25% overall).
http://pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf#page=60
In the video below, Bill Maher and Dinesh D’Souza agree on some of the points above, with libertarian author Matt Welch expressing agreement. They are opposed by the unctuous Ariana Huffington—to think I used to admire her!—and author/comedian Baratunde Thurston. Thurston manages to whitewash the whole issue with the true but misleading statement, “I don’t think Islam has any monopoly has any monopoly on darkness and nutbags and crazy rhetoric and violence.” The man doesn’t comprehend the difference between individual cases and statistics.
Now I don’t think D’Souza is criticizing Islam for the same reason that many of us—or Maher himself—do. He’s a Christian and is simply dissing another faith to buttress his own. Nevertheless, in this video he is largely right about the misguided defense of Islam. D’Souza’s money quote, to me, starts at 6:10:
“What’s going on here is that there is a civil war in the mind of the liberal. So on the one hand you’re a defender of individual rights and minorities; and if this were the Catholic Church you’d be all on it. But on the other hand you’re committed to multiculturalism. And Islam is the victim, and we don’t want to make the Muslims feel bad. And so these two impulses have got to be brokered one against each other. The problem isn’t the Muslims; the problem is all the multiculturalists on campus who protect and defend them.”
Now I don’t agree that “the problem isn’t Muslims”, for it is; or rather, the problem is Islam. Without the tenets of that faith, we would have no problem. But the brokering that takes place in the liberal mind is true. Certainly Muslims should have free speech on campuses, and everywhere else too (including Muslim countries, where by and large they don’t). But free speech should also be the rule for those who criticize that faith, or any faith. The latter doesn’t happen, as we saw when Brandeis withdrew the offer of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Maher and D’Souza are right about the double standard applied to Islam versus religions like Catholicism. If 84% of Catholics called for the death penalty for those who left the Church, it would be a huge story!
I never thought the time would come that I would agree with something that D’Souza said in opposition to the views of Ariana Huffington. That’s how far the defense of the indefensible, in the name of multiculturalism, has come.
Do watch the whole video: it’s only 11 minutes long and exemplifies the views of both sides on this issue. Maher is, as usual, eloquent and straightforward about religion.
Some of the YouTube notes:
May 9, 2014 – Bill Maher took on Boko Haram Friday night and focused on what he believed was the most important aspect of the case: the religion of Islam itself influences this kind of brutality and is therefore a serious problem. But Maher was bothered by how liberals “do not stand up for liberalisms” and outright condemn brutal Islamic laws that go against values of equality and freedom, especially where women are concerned.
Reason’s Matt Welch agreed that Islam “is providing a disproportionate share of radical nut bags killing people.” Arianna Huffington and Baratunde Thurston pushed back a bit, arguing that you can’t condemn a whole faith just based on what the radicals do. Thurston pointed out that Islam doesn’t exactly have a monopoly on extremism.
BTW, one thing I don’t want to hear in the comments is that Bill Maher is anti-science. That may be true in part, but it’s completely irrelevant to this thread. People who believe this have had their say many times before, and so all comments to that effect will be considered expendible on this thread.
Remember, even reprehensible and right-wing people can sometimes be right.
h/t: Diana MacPherson
I woke up to several links from readers about religion—mostly Islam, but also Catholicism. So we shall have a bit of documentation.
Here are three items found, and scanned, by reader Howard from a single page of this week’s The Economist. Tell me again how Islam is the religion of peace? (Oh right, the opposition to polio and educaton is the West’s fault.):
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Humans wiped out smallpox, and we wiped out rinderpest. Those are two of the great triumphs of science and humanism. We could have wiped out polio, too, but it would be a lot easier if Islam didn’t exist. Instead of eliminating polio, Muslim extremists”—I no longer know if that phrase is nearly a tautology (see the following post)*—try to eliminate girls who want an education.
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UPDATE: Since people are getting exercised by the phrase in dashes (“I no longer know if that phrase [‘Muslim extremists’] is nearly a tautology”), let me clarify it briefly. Yes, I certainly recognize that there are some liberal and moderate Muslims who do support things like gay rights, women’s rights, and decry violence. My question is how many of these there are among all the Muslims of the world. The evidence I’ve seen is that they’re only a handful compared to a greater majority with more extremist views, and most of them are in the West. But even in the West a surprisingly large number of Muslims (see post above) hold what I see as “extremist” views. And even those so-called “moderates” like Reza Aslan show a darker side when pressed, or vociferously decry fatwas or the death penalty for apostasy.