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 Hump Day, and it’s 1 degree F (- 17 C) in Chicago. Fortunately, I’m going to Boston for four days tomorrow, where the weather should be tropical (NOT!). But here’s Hili:
Hili: I always believe that after dinner a cat should rest a little.
M: My eyes are closing as well.
In Polish (by now you should all know that “cat” in Polish is “kot”):
Hili: Zawsze uważałam, że po obiedzie kot powinien troszkę odpocząć.
Małgorzata: Mnie się też oczy przymykają.
From Answers in Genesis, via reader Chris:
The Earth is 4.54 billion years old. We know that not from radiometric dating of rocks on our planet, as the oldest rocks haven’t yet been found, but from dating meteorites that fall on earth from the solar system, which formed around the time Earth did.
But of course that’s not fodder for creationist, for we also have old homegrown rocks, clearly showing that the earth is far older than, say, 10,000 years.
And now we’ve found the oldest bit of Earth yet. As ZME Science and a new paper reported yesterday, it’s a zircon crystal from Australia dated at 4.37 billion years. The paper with the original report is in Nature Geoscience (reference and link below; free download [I think]).
Here it is.
And it’s not big:
The geological relic indicates, for one, that Earth’s crust formed shortly after the planet stabilized and formed. John Valley, a University of Wisconsin geoscience professor who led the research, said the findings suggest that the early Earth was not as harsh a place as many scientists have thought.
No doubt, this is an extraordinary find, however, the untrained eye would have surely missed it. Measuring about 200 by 400 microns, or roughly two times the width of a human hair, the tiny gem was luckily retrieved by geologists in 2001 from a rock outcrop in Australia’s Jack Hills region.
The researchers used two ways to check the date: radiometric uranium-lead dating and atom-probe tomography, which uses the actual position of individual atoms in the crystal to check the accuracy of the U/Pb method. I’ll let the readers enlighten us about how this method works, as I don’t fully understand it myself; but the upshot is that the APT dates comport with the uranium lead dates, making hash of the creationist objection that dating methods are unreliable, even in the hands of experts.
The APT was used because of worries that U-Pb dating might be off because lead might have moved within the crystal. This shows that scientists do know the ways that dating could be off, and have checks for them. And APT showed no evidence of such movement. I’ll show that by simply posting part of the paper’s abstract:
Here we use atom-probe tomography to identify and map individual atoms in the oldest concordant grain from Earth, a 4.4-Gyr-old Hadean zircon with a high-temperature overgrowth that formed about 1 Gyr after the mineral’s core. Isolated nanoclusters, measuring about 10 nm and spaced 10–50 nm apart, are enriched in incompatible elements including radiogenic Pb with unusually high 207Pb/206Pb ratios. We demonstrate that the length scales of these clusters make U–Pb age biasing impossible, and that they formed during the later reheating event. Our tomography data thereby confirm that any mixing event of the silicate Earth must have occurred before 4.4 Gyr ago, consistent with magma ocean formation by an early moon-forming impact about 4.5 Gyr ago
h/t: Ant
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Valley, J. W. et al. 2014. Hadean age for a post-magma-ocean confirmed by atom-probe tomography. Nature Geoscience. doi:10.1038/ngeo2075
by Greg Mayer
After security forces abandoned the Ukrainian presidential palace amidst street-fighting in Kiev, protesters seized control of the opulent mansion and its grounds (which include a zoo and a pirate-themed restaurant). The protesters, who seem well organized, did not loot the palace, but have opened the grounds for the people to tour, and have opened the house for limited guided tours. One of the tours was given to the NY Times, which posted a video of the tour here.
At 2:17, it shows two little cat statues playing golf, then a bronzish cat statue, and then, finally, the cat above, apparently sleeping on a couch. A voice is heard to ask “Is he alive?”, to which a slightly accented voice replies, “No. It was alive.” Full video below.
In a recent New Yorker piece, “Bigger than Phil: When did faith start to fade?” (free online), Adam Gopnik tried his hand at a bit of accommodationism, arguing two things. First, he said, nobody still believes in a hands-on, old-man-in-the-sky God who works miracles, and the New Atheists’ critique of such beliefs is misguided. That’s a familiar argument: we see all religionists as fundamentalists.
Well, as I pointed out in my analysis of Gopnik’s article, many religions are fundamentalists about important things, with large majorities of Americans believing in stuff like heaven, a personal God, Satan, angels, and hell. I’m an academic, and so, like Gopnik, don’t mix much with the average religious person, but even I know that few Americans accept a deistic, ground-of-being God—a Deus absconditus.
Second, Gopnik argues, in a very strange passage, that both atheists and believer are united in a love of the numinous, and of ritual. Weirdly enough, Gopnik found my own religion in cats! That is supposed to make me similar to religious believers (my exercised emphasis):
But, just as surely, most noes believe in something like what the Super-Naturalists would call faith—they search for transcendence and epiphany, practice some ritual, live some rite. True rationalists are as rare in life as actual deconstructionists are in university English departments, or true bisexuals in gay bars. In a lifetime spent in hotbeds of secularism, I have known perhaps two thoroughgoing rationalists—people who actually tried to eliminate intuition and navigate life by reasoning about it—and countless humanists, in Comte’s sense, people who don’t go in for God but are enthusiasts for transcendent meaning, for sacred pantheons and private chapels. They have some syncretic mixture of rituals: they polish menorahs or decorate Christmas trees, meditate upon the great beyond, say a silent prayer, light candles to the darkness. They talk without difficulty of souls and weapons of the spirit, and go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve to hear the Gloria, and though they leave early, they leave fulfilled. You will know them by their faces; they are the weepy ones in the rear.
. . . If atheists underestimate the fudginess in faith, believers underestimate the soupiness of doubt. My own favorite atheist blogger, Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, regularly offers unanswerable philippics against the idiocies of intelligent design. But a historian looking at his blog years from now would note that he varies the philippics with a tender stream of images of cats—into whose limited cognition, this dog-lover notes, he projects intelligence and personality quite as blithely as his enemies project design into seashells—and samples of old Motown songs. The articulation of humanism demands something humane, and its signal is disproportionate pleasure placed in some frankly irrational love.
Well, it’s a huge stretch to equate ailurophilia and LOLcats (does Gopnik think I believe that LOLcats are really thinking what the captions say?) with belief in God. And New Republic editor Isaac Chotiner, in a further analysis of Gopnik’s piece at his site, “Religious believers have a lot more common with atheists than they realized,” isn’t having it:
This comparison is, at best, strained. For starters, to say that my love for my cat is not based on reason is quite different from the belief that God exists. The latter is objectively false, or perhaps very, very unlikely. The former is a matter of feelings. Of course people’s feelings are irrational; but not all feelings involve making claims about reality. I can have the feeling that being around my family is uncomfortable. I can also have the feeling that the government is out to get me. Only one of them can be labeled true or false.
Indeed. The commonality of believers and atheists based on their both having emotions is a specious commonality, for it’s a commonality among all humans. It does not betoken some comity between believers and athiests. Chotiner continues:
The second odd thing about these passages, and the argument that non-believers are irrational, is that I don’t quite see what Gopnik intends for us to make of them, even if we accept their worth. For example, suppose I divide the world up into men who hate women and men who believe in feminism and female equality. And then let’s say that I can prove that even the more enlightened men exhibit sexist behaviors. What does this have to do with the merits of sexism? Nothing, of course. Sexism is still wrong. If atheists exhibit all the signs of belief that believers do, as Gopnik argues, this tells us next to nothing about the validity of belief. (It also, as Coyne points out, tends to strengthen the idea that there is something ingrained or genetic about faith, which, again, does not tell us anything about its validity.)
This homes right in on what’s missing in Gopnik’s piece: his failure to address straight on the validity of religious claims. He says he had his own son bar mitzvahed (Gopnik is Jewish by tradition), but says nothing about the existence of Yahweh.
In the end, Chotiner says that Gopnik misses even more: the true commonality between atheists and believers—their acceptance of science:
Even believers, then, live their lives according to science and reason 99% of the time. It’s only regarding that other 1% of things–which concerns issues like the creation of the universe, or faith in a supernatural power–that many believers depart from the scientific consensus. I imagine most religious people are as rigid about a belief in gravity as the average atheist, so why is the atheist scolded for rigid scientism when he or she also believes in the areas of science that conflict with religion?
I yearn to read a piece that, rather than scolding atheists for being scientifically minded, actually noted that we are all scientifically minded. And hooray for us.
And hooray for Chotiner, and especially The New Republic for its newfound emphasis on secularism!
Meanwhile, at his blog at the New York Times, Ross Douthat also takes on Gopnik in a piece called “Among the believers.” Douthat’s take, which, ironically, resembles mine, is that, contra Gopnik, many believers do accept a theistic, interventionist God. It’s refreshing, to me at least, to see a Christian admit that so explicitly. Douthat, for instance, claims that David Bentley Hart is no watery deist, but a defender of traditional Christian dogma:
Okay, but hang on a minute. Is this what Hart actually believes about God — that he “communicates with no one and causes nothing,” that he has no interest in bacon or seraphs or any other created thing? Well, no, actually Hart is a (capital-O) Orthodox theologian with (small-o) orthodox beliefs about not-insignificant matters like the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, among other cases where Christians believe that God has very directly communicated with his creatures, and intervened directly in the time and space that he sustains. Hart’s view of God, in other words, is maximalist in its conception and expansive in its potential implications, which include most of the things (angels, miracles, etc.) that Gopnik has already insisted that the modern “we” must pre-emptively dismiss.
And the same would go for an awful lot of the “ayes” whom Gopnik implies have replaced the old-time religion with a more abstract, post-personal God. Of course there are believers whose conception of divinity is functionally deistic, liberal religious intellectuals for whom apophatic faith substitutes for revelation rather than enriching it, and probably Gopnik’s social circle includes more examples of this type than it does of Hart’s more traditional sort. But make a list of prominent Christian scholars and philosophers and theologians (to say nothing of apologists and popularizers … artists and novelists … or, God help us, journalists), and you’ll find that plenty of the names — from Charles Taylor to Alvin Plantinga, Alasdair McIntyre to N.T. Wright, Rowan Williams to Joseph Ratzinger — do actually believe in all that Nicene Creed business, believe that the God of philosophy can still care about Phil and Ross and Adam, and share Hart’s view that religion can be intellectually rigorous without making prayer empty and miracles impossible.
Do read the Nicene Creed to see all the tangible and empirical claims it makes. I often use it in my talks on theology to show that its adherents are professing belief in a whole panoply of empirical claims about God, Jesus, Mary, and their actions.
Douthat’s piece is too long to analyze in depth, but the upshot is that not only many believers, but also many famous Church fathers and modern theologians,espouse things that Gopnik claims are no longer accepted. And believers do that not as a retreat from the advances of science (here I can’t completely agree with Douthat), but simply because it’s theological tradition:
If Hart’s God is a vast irrelevancy or a senile dinner guest, in other words, then so is the God of Aquinas and Augustine and Anselm (and, as Hart would be quick to point out, the God of various Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and pre-Christian philosophers as well). If his argument is an implicit surrender to secularism, then the real surrender happened ages back. But it seems passing strange to suggest that the greatest thinkers of the age of faith were actually just engaged in a pre-emptive retreat from an atheism that hadn’t even taken shape. Did the “long, withdrawing roar” really begin — and more than that, end — with the Summa Theologica? It’s an argument, I suppose: The Angelic doctor as John Shelby Spong. But it can’t really be the one Gopnik intends to make.
Here I’d argue that Douthat isn’t completely correct. For Aquinas, Augustine, and their ilk believed in literal truths of the Bible (the Garden of Eden, Original Sin, the Resurrection) that only recently have been seen by many theologians as complete metaphors rather than literal truths. It’s a fact that theologians like Augustine saw stories like those in Genesis as narratives that could be read on two levels—metaphorical and literal; but the primacy always went to the literal interpretation, which could not be questioned.
Many religionists still adhere to some Biblical literalism (I like to say that every believer is a literalist about some things), but it’s also the case that people like Spong, Haught, and Armstrong are removing religion from the realm of empiricism to immunize it against disproof. They would never admit that of course, but it’s bloody obvious.
In the meantime, I’m chuffed because one of my heroes, while retweeting Chotiner’s excellent piece, also mentions Professor Ceiling Cat:
Here’s The Pretenders’ best song (and one of my favorite rockers), “Don’t get me wrong” with the inimitable Chrissie Hynde, who wrote the whole thing. I love the largely monotonic background (or whatever it’s called; I’m sure some music buff will explain). The song’s origin is explained by Hynde on Wikipedia:
Hynde stated in the VH1 Story Tellers series that she got the inspiration for the chorus’ melody while on a British Airways flight. The airline’s distinct “tone” jingle, which was played at certain times in the flight (for announcements from the pilot, seatbelt attention, etc.) had the same series of tones/notes as the chorus: DON’T- GET- ME- WRONG.
Here’s the song performed live in Sydney.
Also, listen for this (my emphasis):
The song features a jangly guitar sound and an emphasis on melody. Hynde’s lyrics contain literary and scientific references in addition to the more relationship-based subject matter typical for pop music.
I appreciate your thoughtful discussion of my Atlantic piece. It deserves a deeper response than I can give right now, but I would like to say four things:1. The point of my article was to defend the importance of reason in our everyday lives. I am arguing against those who believe that philosophical theory and psychological data show that we are fundamentally irrational beings. Apparently, you aren’t one of these skeptics. In fact, you seem puzzled that anyone would doubt the important of reason; at one point, you summarize my argument and write “Nobody claims otherwise”.Really? You should go to any psychology or neuroscience conference—or just reread my article, where I discuss the ideas of many of these skeptics.You cite me as saying “The genetic you and the neural you aren’t alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.”, and then you add “Who says otherwise?”. Well, David Eagleman says otherwise. This quote is a response to his claim: “It is not clear how much the conscious you–as opposed to the genetic and neural you–gets to do any deciding at all.”2.
The metaphor “puppet” is grossly misleading and determinists should stop using it. Actually, only a certain sort of theist should ever use it. A puppet is something that looks like it has agency but that is really controlled by a person who is pulling the strings. Since neither of us believes that the fates of humans are dictated by external intentional forces, I hope we can agree that the term is a bad one. If you want a alternative phrase, I prefer one I heard from Tamler Sommers: “Biochemical Roombas”.3.
I don’t think that free will exists, and said so in many places, including here. I assume this argument is familiar to you and many of your readers, but here it goes again:“Common sense tells us that we exist outside of the material world—we are connected to our bodies and our brains, but we are not ourselves material beings, and so we can act in ways that are exempt from physical law. For every decision we make—from leaning over for a first kiss, to saying “no” when asked if we want fries with that—our actions are not determined and not random, but something else, something we describe as chosen.
This is what many call free will, and most scientists and philosophers agree that it is an illusion. Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.”
4.
What about getting rid of other notions, like “choice”, “deliberation”, “responsibility”, and “moral responsibility”? I agree that most people have mistaken views about these, thinking of them in terms of (a) an immaterial soul and (b) free will. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. People have mistaken views about all sorts of things, after all. Dan Dennett gives the example of time. Your average non-physicist—me, say—has all sorts of views about time that scientists know to be false. But nobody concludes from this that time doesn’t exist. Same for a psychological phenomenon like dreaming. I know that people have all sorts of beliefs about dreaming that are false—but I don’t say that dreaming doesn’t exist.Now, one might argue that notions like moral responsibility are essentially linked to false ideas, so that once the ideas corrected, the notions just have to disappear. In other words, “responsibility” is not like “dreaming”, it’s like “demonic possession”. I assume that this is your view. But I am not convinced, and don’t see that the philosophical and psychological literature—including the experimental philosophy work—supports this radical eliminativist position. It is an interesting issue, though. It wasn’t the focus of my Atlantic article—again, the article was a defense of reason—but it’s an area that I hope to explore in the future.
Would you like to look at all my baby pictures? Well, you’re gonna.
Reader Gayle Ferguson of New Zealand is fostering an abandoned brood of five kittens: four females, including three tabbies and a ginger cat, and one male, whose name is Jerry Coyne. Here are some pictures of the brood, concentrating of course on my namesake. He happens to be very particular about noms:
I finally found a wet food brand that the kittens are enthusiastic about eating! Well, all but Jerry Coyne, who refuses to even try Whiskas Kitten Tuna Loaf.
Jerry weighs over a pound!
Yes, Jerry won’t eat Whiskas Kitten Tuna Loaf. He is the only kitten who won’t. But he’s very cute and he continues to grow, weighing in at 620 grams on Saturday. Of the others, Hoover has the most interesting personality. She seems to have the real killer instinct. Yesterday she caught and killed a piece of duct tape and carried it around in her mouth, making growling noises when other kittens tried to take it from her…
Heeeere’s Jerry:
Jerry does like milk and dry noms. In fact, as you see, he likes them to excess:
Jerry’s girlfriend, with whom you saw him snogging in an earlier post, is named Isis Carter, after one of Gail’s friends who also foster-parents kittens. Here is Jerry sleeping with his inamorata. Isn’t she lovely?
Jerry encounters the book by his namesake. He looks a bit daunted:
Gayle with Jerry and an unknown female littermate (I’m sure she’ll be identified in the comments):
Jerry Coyne is fastidious (the headshot from this photo will be my Twi**er icon for a while):
And of course, like all kittens, he sleeps a lot. . .
Sometimes in awkward positions:
Is he cute or what? (Negative answers will be trashed.)
If you’re a Kiwi and want to adopt Jerry Coyne (you must keep his name) or one of his four littermates, contact Gayle in the comments or through me.
