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.
A: Don’t bother me—you’re not hungry at all.
Hili: When you make a statement without evidence, think about how you know that!
In Polish:Ja: Hili, nie przeszkadzaj, wcale nie jesteś głodna.
Hili: Kiedy wygłaszasz jakieś twierdzenia bez dowodów, zastanów się skąd to wiesz.
(Zdjęcie: Sarah)
In case you’re an atheist and not sufficiently miserable today, reader Pliny the in Between has produced a cartoon detailing how you’re supposed to feel:
There seems to be a bit of science-dissing going on in the U.S. A while back Jonah Lehrer wrote a New Yorker piece about the “decline effect,” whereby positive scientific results tended to erode over time. Then a Greek statistician named John P. A. Ioniddis reported that most results published on medical research were wrong, for they couldn’t be reproduced. Finally, last week science writer George Johnson at the New York Times started his new column, “Raw Data,” reprising the claim that most research is not reproducible, and therefore likely wrong.
The problem is that Johnson’s column, “New truths that only one can see,” deals again with medical research: mainly drug studies. But the implication is that most science is wrong, and Johnson’s column comes off as a claim that new scientific findings really can’t be trusted. He doesn’t talk about all the findings in physics, biochemistry, chemistry, and other fields that are implicitly repeatable because researchers rely on them when doing further work. If the original studies were wrong, we’d know it. DNA will remain a double helix, benzene will never have more than six carbon atoms in its ring, and HIV/AIDS is caused by a virus. We also know the speed of light in a vacuum is invariant, and we know that speed to an accuracy of one meter per second. The Standard Model of particle physics still holds.
I was going to take Johnson’s column apart, but then I heard from science writer Faye Flam, who was in the process of doing so herself. She’s just published her critique at Science Tracker, and you should have a look. The fact is that despite Johnson and Lehrer’s barking headlines, the caravan of science moves on. Physics, for instance, has made enormous progress, and dubious findings like the faster-than-light neutrinos soon get weeded out. Remember cold fusion? If not, why not?
Well, now there’s another faux-kerfuffle. As you may know, Stephen Hawking has revised his description of black holes, arguing that while they still exist, they aren’t bounded by “event horizons,” an edge from which no information or light can escape. But other scientists disagree. Our Official Website Physicist, Sean Carroll, weighed in at National Geographic Daily News:
“I would caution against any belief that Hawking has come up with a dramatic new solution answering all questions regarding black holes,” said theoretical physicist Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology, who did not participate in this study. “These problems are very far from being resolved.”
Indeed. And that inspired a hilarious spoof of Michelle Bachmann at The Borowitz Report of the New Yorker:
Dr. Stephen Hawking’s recent statement that the black holes he famously described do not actually exist underscores “the danger inherent in listening to scientists,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) said today.
Rep. Bachmann unleashed a blistering attack on Dr. Hawking, who earlier referred to his mistake on black holes as his “biggest blunder.”
“Actually, Dr. Hawking, our biggest blunder as a society was ever listening to people like you,” said Rep. Bachmann. “If black holes don’t exist, then other things you scientists have been trying to foist on us probably don’t either, like climate change and evolution.”
Rep. Bachmann added that all the students who were forced to learn about black holes in college should now sue Dr. Hawking for a full refund. “Fortunately for me, I did not take any science classes in college,” she said.
Borowitz’s column was sent to me by at least one reader who, not realizing that the column is a spoof, thought that this was Bachmann’s real reaction. The sad part is that it’s close enough to reality to be a Poe.
Regardless, it is disheartening to see these science journalists using the irreproducibility of some medical studies—and I agree that many can’t be repeated, as they’re based on limited populations or families—to imply that science itself is deeply flawed. Sure we get things wrong, but if everything was wrong we’d never make any progress! And look how much farther we are in physics, molecular biology, chemistry, and, yes, medical research, than we were thirty years ago. Science seems to have a way of discarding away its mistakes.
I wonder if George Johnson takes the drugs that his doctors prescribe. . .
One thing is for sure: even though it’s wicked cold, the squirrels are out foraging when they can. Lots of them are raiding the buffet I’ve set out for them on the windowsill, and they’re gorging themselves like pigs.
Since I’ve scraped the snow off the sill, and it faces south, sometimes the squirrels have a little nap after their feast of nuts and seeds. I photographed this guy (or girl—who knows?) a few minutes ago, curled up and enjoying what warmth he can extract from the weak sun. The remains of his repast are at his feet.
Thanks to reader Rik, who cleaned up the photo for me:
Twelve days ago anti-creationism activist Zack Kopplin wrote a long piece for Slate about how Texas’s “charter schools” (special schools that are supported by state money), particularly those using the Responsive Education Solutions system, are openly teaching not only creationism (using, of course, materials provided by Responsive Ed), but a grossly distorted right-wing view of history. Have a look at that article to see some egregious examples; suffice it to say these schools teach lies to 17,000 students in 65 schools, and get about $82 million in taxpayer money.
It is, of course, illegal to teach creationism in public schools, for it violates the First Amendment mandating the separation of church and state. Court after court has supported this stand, but the schools persist simply because bringing a court case requires a student and his/her parent to complain to a legal organization such as the ACLU or the Freedom from Religion foundation. And to do that in a place like Texas makes you a pariah.
Now Slate has published a complementary map showing where in the U.S. publicly-funded schools either teach creationism or are permitted by law to do so. Each dot on the map below represents one such school, and the map at the Slate site is interactive, so you can place your mouse over the dot and identify the school. Note that both Tennessee and Louisiana are ridden with such schools (the color of the dots represents the type of funding supporting creationism; green represents places where teaching creationism of some sort is legal). In Louisiana, for example, they have a law allowing teachers to use supplementary materials to analyze and criticize “controversial” science like evolution and global warming, and Tennessee likewise has a “teach the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories” law.
The many green dots in Louisiana and Tennesee are mostly just regular high schools (there are more), and many don’t teach creationism, so this is a bit of an exaggeration. In Texas, however, the red dots are Responsive Ed schools that can and do teach creationism. The orange dots in other places are largely Christian schools that are publicly funded and do teach creationism:
Note that Ohio, Indiana, and Florida are rife with creationism taught at taxpayer expense. As we learned this year, Indiana, at least, is a hotbed of religious conservatism. Note as well that the number of dots surely underestimate of the number of schools teaching students lies about science, since many schools may not have been investigated. Finally, realize that every single one of the red and orange dots, and perhaps many of the green ones, is a school that violates the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps you’re a parent of a student attending one of these schools, which would entitle you to file a lawsuit. Check it out on the map at Slate if you’re interested.
Here’s the roll of shame, taken directly from the Slate piece. (And thanks to the many readers who brought this to my attention.)
Arkansas: Responsive Education Solutions operates two campuses in Arkansas that use creationist curricula. (See Texas.)
Colorado: At least eight schools in Douglas County teach creationism while participating in the Douglas County Scholarship Program.
Florida: At least 164 schools teach creationism while participating in the state’s tax credit scholarship programs for disabled children and children from low-income families.
Georgia: At least 34 schools teach creationism while participating in the state’s tax credit scholarship program for disabled children.
Indiana: At least 37 schools teach creationism while participating in the state’s voucher program for children from low-income families.
Louisiana: The Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008 allows teachers to use “supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner,” specifically theories regarding “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning”—in effect, allowing creationist material inside classroom. It’s no coincidence that the Discovery Institute, a creationist think tank that provides such “supplemental textbooks,” helped write the bill, which the American Association for the Advancement of Science described as an “assault against scientific integrity.”
Ohio: At least 20 schools teach creationism while participating in a tax credit scholarship program for children in underperforming public schools.
Oklahoma: At least five schools teach creationism while participating in a tax credit scholarship program for disabled children.
Tennessee: A 2012 state law, like Louisiana’s, permits public school teachers to teach the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of theories that can “cause controversy,” specifically citing evolution, global warming, and cloning, thereby providing legal cover for teachers who want to forward creationist pseudoscience.
Texas: The state’s largest charter program, Responsive Ed, receives $82 million in taxpayer money each year, but that hasn’t stopped its schools from adopting a creationist curriculum that seriously misrepresents the science of evolution. These materials wrongly portray the fossil record and the age of Earth as scientifically controversial, assert that there is a lack of “transitional fossils,” and claim evolution is untestable.
Utah: At least five schools teach creationism while participating in a tax-credit scholarship program for disabled children.
Washington, D.C.: At least three schools teach creationism while participating in a tax-credit scholarship program for children from low-income families.
Wisconsin: At least 15 schools teach creationism while participating in a Milwaukee or Racine voucher programs.
For reasons known best to himself, author Damon Linker, whose website notes that he writes on “faith and politics,” has lately narrowed this topic down to criticizing New Atheism. His criticisms, of course, aren’t new, and he seems to publish the same ones repeatedly. I’ve discussed his pieces at The Week twice (see here, and here); in the last one he notoriously endorsed David Bentley Hart’s Highly Sophisticated view of God. In Linker’s words:
. . . according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality — of absolutely everything that is — from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.
That is what passes, in Linker’s circle, as the best argument for God, but it’s only “best” because it’s so slippery as to be untestable, and, in truth, it really means almost nothing (check out the last sentence).
But now Linker has decided to reprise one of his earlier arguments in The Week—“Where are the honest atheists?”—in a new piece at the same site, “How to be an honest atheist.” I’m so glad Linker is around to tell me how I should approach unbelief, and how to do it honestly. In fact, his new article is virtually identical to the older one, and I’m not sure why he gets paid to recycle the same arguments.
Well, how does one become an honest atheist? Linker’s argument is an old one: we have to suffer—and suffer a lot. For, if you’re honest, denying God and all the perquisites He affords—most notably the afterlife—is painful, turning life into a tragedy. Somehow, the “honest atheist” has to come to terms with that, and although he or she may wind up with some equanimity, it’s achieved at the cost of considerable pain.
For Linker, the most honest atheists were the existentialists, who really, truly saw the truth about disbelief:
Existentialism differs from the greeting-card version of atheism so prevalent today, in taking its cue from the realization that life without God is hard.
It’s hard because human beings tend to be anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of the worries wrapped up with our mortality. It’s hard because our lives and our loved ones matter to us more than we can possibly express — and the prospect of losing them for good in the annihilation of death is irrevocably terrifying. It’s hard because part of us wants to believe that we reside in a moral universe — that an immoral deed violates an intrinsic standard of right and wrong, even if the perpetrator eludes human punishment. And it’s hard, finally, because we crave good things for ourselves — many of which (fame, fortune, honor, glory) only the luckiest will ever acquire, and some of which (happiness unmixed with sorrow) no one will ever enjoy within the limits of our finite lives.
Rather than denying these core human truths in an effort to make godlessness seem more palatable, existentialists insist on living in their light, even when doing so cuts against the grain of the human heart and its deepest longings.
I’m not sure what Linker means by the dishonest, “greeting-card” version of atheism that he so decries, but presumably it’s an atheism that hasn’t come to terms with the finality and futility of life—a life that, says Linker, lacks reason and purpose. Linker’s hero in this respect is Camus:
Reading those lines, our shallower atheists are sure to respond: What do you mean “no good reason”? I have plenty of good reasons for what I do with my life!
To which an existentialist like Albert Camus would reply: Can you really give a spiritually satisfying answer to the question of why you do what you do — an answer that transcends arbitrariness and contingency?
Camus didn’t think it was possible, and he considered that a problem — one that an honest atheist needs to confront. That’s because what Camus called “the unreasonable silence of the world” in the face of the human quest for intrinsic meaning threatens to render absurd every form of human striving, from the ambition to accomplish great deeds to the far more mundane activities of pursuing a career, raising a family, and even getting out of bed in the morning. An existentialist understands that in the absence of a God who provides an ultimate answer to the question of “why,” the goodness of human life can appear to dissolve, requiring reconstruction from the ground up.
. . . Which is why it’s so important that atheists not deny the struggle in the first place.
I truly don’t get this kind of argument, which is quite common among believers and faitheists. Virtually every atheist, merely by professing disbelief, acknowledges that death is the end of our existence. Which atheist thinks otherwise? And one comes to terms with that the best way one can. Most of us do it by acknowledgment and then moving on—recognizing our mortality but then living knowing that our lives are finite. In the long view, of course, all striving is “meaningless”: a few generations after we’re gone our presence will have been effaced, our strivings amounting to nothing.
But that is true for the religious as well. For believers have jobs, interest, hobbies, families, and loved ones, and those “strivings” are, in the end, just as meaningless as those of atheists. The only difference is that believers think that they get to start a new life in Heaven. For many of them that constitutes a “reason” or “purpose” to live, but in reality their daily activities are spent like the rest of us, with the real “purposes” of working, having fun, and interacting with loved ones and friends. If that is meaningless to atheists, it’s also meaningless to believers. And is that really a “spiritually unsatisfying view of life”? How so? Why, exactly, must the way we find meaning in our lives transcend arbitrariness and contingency? How could it possibly do that, given that who we are is an accident of chance, and our lives turn largely on whatever environments we happen to encounter. If you don’t accept God, then of course we make our own meanings, and those will perforce be arbitrary and contingent.
In the face of the so-called “meaninglessness” of life, Camus said, in The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” But what would that solve? There is still pleasure and joy to be gotten from life, and is it shallow to say that the pursuit of that pleasure and happiness is what constitutes “meaning”? So what if all my work on fruit flies is superceded by others, or that the whole Earth will die a heat death in a few billion years? My science gives me pleasure, and fills my short life with a kind of joy. I drink nice wine, have good food, and, though reading, looking at art, and listening to music, am able to commune with the great minds of the past? Why is that inferior to the lives of squirrels, whose existence comprises only a search for sex, nests, and nuts? Why do we have to have more “meaning” in our lives than other sentient creatures? Why must our search for “meaning” transcend what gives us happiness and what Sam Harris calls “well being”?
I have had my own atheistic “struggle” (it lasted just a few minutes in 1967 and sometimes recurs in the middle of the night), and no, I don’t like the idea of dying. As Hitchens said, I don’t want to leave the party and have it continue without me. But we have no choice. Would Linker counsel me to ruminate endlessly on my mortality and even, like Camus, contemplate suicide? Why does that make me a more “honest” atheist?
No thanks. I enjoy my life, and will be sad when it draws to an end, but what’s the advantage of endless brooding over mortality? What do we gain by endless philosophizing on the supposed meaninglessness of life? Nothing that I see! What do we gain from suicide, except permanent oblivion and the denial of any happiness to come? To be sure, what do we lose by pretending that we’re immortal (so long as we remember to make out our will)—which is pretty much how most people live their lives?
Life is a fatal disease, and you can deal with it either by letting it cast a pall over your life (as many terminal patients do) or you can approach it with dignity and whatever optimism you can muster. Linker, it seems, thinks that we’re only serious if we take the former route.
To be sure, he does admit that we can find some kind of equanimity if we’re “honest” atheists:
That is a monumental spiritual challenge — one that can only be undertaken on the basis of an admittedly absurd leap of faith that affirms the goodness of life despite its ultimate pointlessness. . . Existentialists do not counsel despair. They seek, rather, to provide us with clear-sighted and candid guidance as we make our way through a disenchanted world.
But in the end I get the feeling that Linker, like many who make this argument, really wants atheists to be brooding and unhappy creatures, for that’s what he sees as our just deserts for rejecting God. He may deny this, but I feel it nonetheless. It’s just not seemly to reject God without contemplating suicide. The strange thing is, though, that whole nations like Denmark, Sweden, and France have largely done this, and remain happy and well-adjusted countries, though their mainly atheist population is, to Linker, clearly not “honest.”
But what is most bizarre about Linker’s argument is that the Sophisticated Notion of God he proposes above doesn’t include an afterlife—the key reason atheists are supposed to be dolorous. Nor is it clear how the idea of God as “the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all” is supposed to confer either meaning or morality to our existence. Where does the morality come from, for instance?
In the end, Linker thinks that the “honest and serious atheist” is one who has come to terms with the absence of a God who, according to Linker, doesn’t exist anyway. So must the “honest believer” also come to terms with a God who is not personal, but a distant and apophatic Ground of Being? Linker can’t have it both ways.
According to the New York Times, Pete Seeger died just a few hours ago of “natural causes” at New York-Presbyterian hospital. He was 94.
The Times’s obituary, obviously written in advance, is very good, and all I can do is highlight briefly his accomplishments as a singer, songwriter, political activist, and inspiration to us activists in the Sixties, when he was already in middle age. His fame began when he sang with the Weavers, one of the first popular folk groups, beginning the year I was born. He never parlayed his fame into money, but into politics—particularly antiwar activities and, later, environmental causes (I saw him once—at an antiwar rally at Washington Square Park in New York City). In the Fifties was indicted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, refused to testify, and managed to escape being jailed.
Beyond his politics and his influence on so many singers who came after him, let’s remember the great songs he did write:
Mr. Seeger was a prime mover in the folk revival that transformed popular music in the 1950s. As a member of the Weavers, he sang hits including Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” — which reached No. 1 — and “If I Had a Hammer,” which he wrote with the group’s Lee Hays. Another of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” became an antiwar standard. And in 1965, the Byrds had a No. 1 hit with a folk-rock version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Mr. Seeger’s setting of a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes.
And let’s not forget the song that inspired many of us protestors during the Vietnam era, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” decrying the stupidity of that misguided war. Seeger was also responsible for popularizing, at least in the white community, the old black gospel song “We Shall Overcome,” which became an anthem for the civil rights movement.
Here are two clips to remember him by, which include his three greatest songs.
The antiwar song (and a beautiful one), “Where have all the flowers gone?”, performed here with Peter, Paul and Mary. Be sure to watch the whole thing: at 2:30 there are brief clips of all the singers, including Seeger, talking about the song.
An equally lovely ballad,”Turn! Turn! Turn!, made popular by the Byrds. (This version includes my third favorite Seeger song, “If I had a Hammer,” as well as “We Shall Overcome”)
I’ll miss him; he was an all-around nice guy and the last of the old-time activists:
Be sure to look at the slideshow accompanying the NYT article; there are some great pictures. Here’s a photo of Seeger’s famous banjo. The motto was obviously inspired by the one painted on Woody Guthrie’s guitar: “This machine kills fascists”:
