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.
Paducah, Kentucky, about an hour from Murray State, is the smallest airport I’ve ever seen: one gate, one ticket counter, and two flights per day, both to Chicago. I don’t know how it supports itself!
Here are some photos of the place. First, the outside:
The lobby (one gate and a few chairs):
The United ticket counter (the only one)
Readers Sue and Lee sent me this photo in response to my “make yourself into Batman with your cat” contest. Due to Clawing Danger, Sue said she couldn’t put her black moggie Hob on her head, but sent the picture below because he resembled a bat, along with the note: “…just lying around. This is Hob, Manx cat, cooling off on the kitchen floor this summer.”
I wrote for more information about Hob, and got this from Sue and Lee:
Hob is a black “stumpie,” a Manx cat with a 1” tail. He’s big, for a Manx, and has the breed’s massive (and limber) hindquarters and long rear legs, resulting in a pronounced California rake to his posture . His coat is very thick, furry even between his toes, giving him the plushness of a teddy bear. This is misleading, however, as he is not cuddly. He likes to share a room with people, but until he turned five, laps weren’t his thing. Age is mellowing him; now he condescends to curl up on a lap, but sets clear boundaries — too much petting elicits first a nibble; then claws and teeth. While other cats rub up against your legs in greeting, Hob head-butts. At night, he likes to be under the covers; this is tricky because he can’t resist attacking bare feet. Painfully. A skillful hunter, he brings down half-grown rabbits as well as mice – a skill that makes his breed popular on farms and ships both. He’s a fearless beastie; last spring, a strange Labrador retriever saw him sitting outside on the grass and charged, barking. Hob stayed put, laid his ears back, and clearly transmitted “Go ahead, make my day.” The Lab (smart for a d*g) stopped short. We’ve had a good many cats, but never one that has “stood on his dignity” — with humans and animals both — as convincingly as Hob.
She also gave some interesting information about Manx cats, whose condition is due to a single dominant gene (the homozygote is lethal as a fetus):
There are five categories of Manx cats, the names based on tail length: Rumpie, rumpie riser (a bump), stumpie (about 1”), stubbie (from 1” to about 5”); and tailie (half- to normal- length tail). On Manx, the island off the west coast of Britain where the breed first appeared, they’re collectively called “Stubbins.”
Here are some bats (banded) that I photographed hanging on the field station in La Selva, Costa Rica. Their posture resembles Hob’s:
h/t: Sue and Lee
UPDATE: Apparently Comfort’s account is still hacked, and an atheist is posting the tw**ts there. He’s doing a good job of imitating Comfort, but making his statements just a bit too bizarre to be real–even for Ray. The commenters below make a good case that Comfort hasn’t regained control of his site yet.
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Ray Comfort screwed up (not for the first time) and let his Twi**er account lapse for just a few minutes. That was long enough for an atheist to seize his name. As TheBlaze reports:
Comfort told TheBlaze on Friday that his official Twitter account, which has more than 31,000 followers, ”was seized upon by an atheist.”
The non-believer was able to secure Comfort’s Twitter handle (@RayComfort) after one of his staff members accidentally changed his username. Just moments after the error occurred, someone else registered the @RayComfort, making it impossible for Comfort’s team to get it back.
As a result, the Christian leader has been forced to change his Twitter handle to @RayComfortLW. But that’s not the most intriguing part of the story. The individual who ended up with Comfort’s Twitter handle is now using it to push back against the evangelist’s beliefs and contentions — and the person has even given Comfort some demands.
“The atheist who took my Twitter name, then gave me an ultimatum. He said that he would return it if I made a public statement,” Comfort told TheBlaze. “He tweeted that I must say that I would ‘no longer denigrate, blame and demonize skeptics and nonbelievers, including agnostics and atheists.’”
Here’s one of the atheist’s tw**ts as Ray:
Ray wasn’t having it, and complained to Twitter. In the meantime the atheist hijacker published several other good posts under Ray’s name, which you can see on TheBlaze site (the story is more involved and funny than I can recount here).
Right now it appears as if Ray got his account back, for his recent tw**ts are coming from the asylum again. He also can’t spell:
h/t: Michael
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According to the BBC News, Fred Sanger (I never heard anyone call him “Frederick”) died yesterday at age 95. He was the only English person to ever win two Nobel Prizes. These were both in chemistry. One, given in 1958 (and to Sanger alone), was for determining the amino acid sequence of insulin from cows, dispelling a common idea that proteins did not have a definite and repeatable sequence. The method, involving paper chromatography, was laborious.
The second prize was for a unique method of DNA sequencing (the so-called “Sanger sequencing”) that he published with in 1977 with Alan Coulson and S. Nicklen in the Proceeding of the National Academies of Science (click the link to see a paper that nabbed a Nobel). Sanger, Wally Gilbert (who developed another method of sequencing DNA) and Paul Berg (who worked on the chemistry of nucleic acids) shared the chemistry Nobel in 1980.
Wikipedia gives a few interesting tidbits about the man:
He has lost his religious faith and calls himself an agnostic. In an interview published in the Times newspaper in 2000 Sanger is quoted as saying: “My father was a committed Quaker and I was brought up as a Quaker, and for them truth is very important. I drifted away from those beliefs – one is obviously looking for truth but one needs some evidence for it. Even if I wanted to believe in God I would find it very difficult. I would need to see proof.”
Ah, the old “lack of evidence” statement that turns so many scientists into nonbelievers.
Also, when reading his obituary I didn’t see any reference to “Sir Frederick Sanger,” and don’t ever remember him being called “Sir Fred.” That’s because of this:
He declined the offer of a knighthood as he did not wish to be addressed as “Sir” but later accepted the award of an Order of Merit.
Sanger was one of the good guys, known for his lack of cant and arrogance.
By the way, can you name the other three people who won the Nobel Prize twice? I’m sure you’ll know at least one, but think before you look up the answer (here).
In his accommodationist book Rocks of Ages, Steve Gould importuned both science and religion to keep their distance from each other: “Thou shalt not mix your magisteria.” But he didn’t say anything about mixing metaphors.
Now that they’re starting to build atheist churches (a horrible idea), are we going to start making similar embarrassing errors on our signs?
Evolution, Mr. Roemer, is not rocket surgery!
h/t: Barry
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On November 16 I wrote about Nicky Vaught, a student at North Carolina State University who published an article in the student newspaper The Technician that looked to be pure creationism: “How to argue against evolutionists.” It was so laden with dreadful creationist tropes that I suspected it might be a joke, but in the end thought the weight of evidence suggested it was genuine.
Well, an editor at the paper has finally admitted it was indeed a joke, saying “*Note: This column was intended to be satirical.” And Nicky himself came over to our site to assure us his letter was indeed satire. He said that, despite his Christian past, he was indeed taking the mickey out of creationism, and I’m told that Nicky is now a member of NC State’s Secular Student Alliance. Here’s part of his comment:
Yes. I am Nicky Vaught. I no longer identify as Christian. This article was a joke–or more like me just having fun. Admittedly, upon rereading, it was next to humorless. I thought my exaggerated diction would offer a good enough tell that this was, in fact, satirical. The video comes from years ago when I was Christian only in name–note the content of the meditation having nearly nothing to do with Christianity.
Well, satire is effective only insofar as one can recognize that it is satire, so perhaps Nicky, if he’s serious about going after creationism, will do a better job next time.
In the meantime, someone named David Roemer has written a genuine creationist letter at The Technician. Roemer has commented several times as a theist on this site (one example is here), so this letter is no surprise:
Biological evolution includes adaptation and common descent. The adaptation of species to the environment is an observation. Common descent is the theory that microscopic organisms evolved into whales in period of about 100 million decades. I use decades rather than years because it take 20 years for a single fertilized human egg to produce all of the cells in the human body. People who contradict creationists by insisting evolution is a fact tend to think it is a fact that free will is an illusion. One theory answers the question: Where do fossils come from? The other theory answers the question: What is the relationship between myself and my body?
Fact or theory, evolution gives rise to the question of what caused it. Biologists invented the theory of natural selection acting upon innovations. The old paradigm for innovations was random mutations. According to James Shapiro of the University of Chicago, the new paradigm is “natural genetic engineering.” Be that as it may, not enough is understood about the innovations natural selection acts upon to understand how mammals evolved so rapidly from bacteria. Evolutionary biologists always speak of “adaptive evolution.” An old model for evolution was a tornado hitting a junkyard and producing a Boeing 747 in flight. The new model is a computer generating an English sonnet by the random selection of letters.
The only theory that even attempts to explain evolution is the theory of intelligent design (ID). Advocates of ID compare this theory with natural selection to make ID look more rational than it is. ID is an irrational theory because there is no evidence for it. Atheists go along with this scam because they don’t want to admit that ID is a better theory than natural selection, in some sense.
Evolution is connected to religion, and religion causes conflict between people. Conflict produces anxiety, and inhibition is a defense mechanism for anxiety. When it comes to evolution, people are inhibited from thinking rationally and intelligently and behaving properly.
Another biologist from the University of Chicago, Jerry Coyne, is so obsessed with his hatred of creationism and the theory of intelligent design, that he saw fit to lambast Nicky Vaught on his widely read blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” Jerry Coyne will never admit publicly that natural selection explains only adaptation.
David Roemer
I’m not sure why the editors published this given all the good respnoses to Vaught’s letter, but this letter is an ignorant mess. First, it was more than a billion years between the first microscopic organisms and whales. Stromatolites (cyanobacteria) are about 3.6 billion years old, while whales didn’t appear until about 45 million years ago. The 20-year generation time is completely irrelevant.
Why Roemer throws in free will is mysterious, unless he’s got an animus against this site (which he probably does). But I don’t see any evidence that there’s a correlation between accepting evolution and rejecting free will.
James Shapiro’s theories of “natural genetic engineering” make no sense, and can’t explain adaptation, the appearance of design (see here for some of my critiques of Shapiro’s views). Shapiro is a renegade biologist, much beloved of creationists and antievolutionist philosophers, but his views have gained no traction in mainstream evolutionary biology.
I love this part of Roemer’s rant:
Evolutionary biologists always speak of “adaptive evolution.” An old model for evolution was a tornado hitting a junkyard and producing a Boeing 747 in flight. The new model is a computer generating an English sonnet by the random selection of letters.
That bespeaks a total misunderstanding of natural selection, and was, in fact, refuted by Dawkins’s famous “methinks it is like a weasel” analogy from The Blind Watchmaker. Natural selection involves not just a random production of “mutant” letters, but a process of nonrandom selection among them.
Dawkins’s original analogy used selection among mutations that brought a string of gibberish closer to a target sequence, but there need be no fixed target—just a mutant sequence that confers the ability to leave more offspring than the previous sequence. Given random mutation and the nonrandom selection among new mutations that confer higher “fitness” on an organism, adaptation follows. That is the “new model” to which evolutionists adhere, and it isn’t “rocket surgery” (see next post). If Roemer doesn’t understand natural selection, what credibility does he have to criticize it?
The paragraph on intelligent design (ID) is completely incoherent and you can puzzle it out for yourself. The penultimate paragraph, about religion, evolution, and anxiety, is also incoherent—it’s not clear exactly who is affected by evolution to the extent that they don’t think rationally or behave properly. Given that Roemer is a theist, I suspect he’s talking about those immoral and irrational people who accept evolution.
Finally, why does reasonable criticism of a supposedly creationist letter betoken obsession and irrational hatred? That’s just one more creationist canard, casting evolutionists and atheists as angry, student, and obsessive. In fact Mr. Roemer’s letter is far more “strident,” and far more ignorant, than mine. He needs to bone up on his evolutionary biology.
As far as “Jerry Coyne never admitting that natural selection explains only adaptation,” those words are so garbled that I’m not sure what I’m supposed to admit. I will “admit” that natural selection is the only viable theory that explains the appearance of design: “adaptations.” But it also explains things that are maladaptive, like occasional pleiotropic byproducts of an adaptation that don’t override its net positive effect. At any rate, if Roemer could learn to write better, I could answer him better.
h/t: Lynn
Today’s Jesus and Mo is a repost of an older one, but it’s still relevant, as theological arguments never change.
Well, it’s not really an argument for God—it’s an argument against reason (and therefore science). And, as I noted in my recent Slate piece, we don’t have “faith” in reason, we use reason as a tool, and we use it because it works. In other words, we have justified confidence in it, not the religiously based “faith” that means “belief based on either no evidence, not enough evidence to convince a nonbeliever, or against the evidence.”
Actually, I’m not sure this strip works, for the use of reason is not a circular argument (you might as well argue that using a hammer instead of a noodle to drive in a nail is based on “faith”), and circular arguments are logically invalid. In other words, the refutation of Jesus and Mo’s claim isn’t in this strip.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I importune the Jesus and Mo artist to update the panel. I’d love to see something on our supposed “faith” in science.
h/t: Linda Grilli
Hili: It’s not fair!A: What’s not fair?
Hili: Your shadow is much longer than mine.
In Polish:
Hili: To niesprawiedliwe!
Ja: Co jest niesprawiedliwe?
Hili: Twój cień jest dłuższy od mojego.