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.
I doubt that this will excite many readers, given that over the last 365 days there were only about 3,500 views from Ukraine, but, unaccountably, WEIT is to be published in Ukrainian—by NashFormat Publishers. I am pleased, though, because that makes a round total of 15 languages (besides English) into which the book’s been translated.
Checking the stats from Ukraine, I saw this chart on yearly viewership of this site. There have been two views from North Korea (KP on the map below), where Internet access is prohibited! Can the Dear Leader have been reading?
I’m still working on Arabic, and Egypt promised to come through. Given what’s going on there now, though, there may be a slight delay. . .
Readers here will know that, being a determinist, I’d prefer to dispense with the term “moral responsibility,” replacing it with the simply idea of “responsibility.” That’s because I don’t think we have dualistic free will that would allow us to decide between doing “right” and “wrong”. If that’s the case, then why add the adjective “moral,” which implies that one does have a choice?
And, as most of you know, I don’t think this omission would overthrow society. We’d still put people in prison for bad behavior (but for sequestration, rehabilitation, and as deterrence, but not for retribution), and could also praise them for good behavior—for praise is an environmental effect that can change someone’s behavior or impel others to act well—but we would be less likely to see people as good or bad by “choice”. And the prison system would be run more humanely, involving studies about the best way to change people’s behavior or the best way to deter other people’s latent criminality.
What I’d like to ask here, though, is when humans supposedly became morally responsible—if that’s what you believe.
We always hear that “unlike humans, nature is amoral.” You can’t say that the actions of animals are moral or immoral—they just are. When a male lion invades another group and kills the cubs, when a chimp tears another chimp to bits, those are just bits of nature, and aren’t seen as wrong. And the amorality of nature is touted even by those who realize that our primate relatives show rudiments of morality, making it likely that some of our moral instincts were inherited from our pre-hominin ancestors. So why, when a stepfather kills his stepchild (something that, presumably is not something he decides to do “freely”), that is morally wrong, but when a lion does it, or a chimp kills an infant, it’s just nature, Jake.
Now the idea of ethics—a codified set of rules to which we adhere for various reasons, usually as a form of societal glue—clearly was concomitant with the rise of human society and language. But much of our morality is surely based on evolution. I’m not saying that those evolved principles are the right ones to use today: clearly in many cases, as with xenophobia, they aren’t. But some of them remain salubrious, including reciprocal altruism, shame, guilt, and so on. So why can we do wrong but chimps can’t?
In other words, is it really true that all of nature, including primate societies, must be seen as amoral, while human actions must be judged by this thing called “morality”?
Why, if a male lion has no more choice about killing step-cubs than a human does about killing stepchildren, do we hold the human morally responsible but the lion not? (The ability of humans to foresee consequences and take in a variety of inputs seems to me irrelevant here). Should we punish cub-killing lions, given that they cause enormous pain and terror to the cubs and their mothers?
This is the second installment in the “Hey kids, get off of my lawn!” series.
I woke up this morning and, during desultory browsing of the internet, found an announcement of Avril Lavigne’s latest song, “Rock”. Have a listen, if you can stand it.
Here’s what’s wrong with this song, and with many rock songs and videos these days:
Blatant product placement
No musicality: shouting
Song shows no signs of creativity; sounds like many other songs on the air. Tune (if there is one) is dull; words forgettable.
Attempt to cover up lack of creativity with shock value: cursing; girl-on-girl kiss featuring Danica McKellar (think Katy Perry); superheroes; and even a shark beheaded by a buzzsaw. Other recent music videos have covered up the lack of interesting music with unclad women.
AUTOTUNING (voices are adjusted electronically): the curse of modern rock. Who had that bad idea, which is grossly overused?
When all these bells and whistles are used to gussy up what is essentially a mediocre song, you know there’s something wrong. And the overweening thing wrong is that rock and roll is dead. It’s had its run and now it’s over. It is an ex-music form and sings with the choir invisible.
My theory, which is mine, is that eventually every art form, with the possible exception of movies and the novel, degenerates. Modern art is execrable, most modern classical music lame, especially in comparison to the greats of the 16th-19th century, modern jazz has degenerated to a cult embracing but a few aficionados. Modern poetry can be okay, but I’d rather read Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, or Yeats.
I know I will face pushback here. People will say, “Hey, there are still some great rock songs around,” or “Hey, what about this jazz musician?” But really, those are the equivalent of anecdotes. I’m talking about a trend. Can modern jazz really compare to that of the 30s, 40s, and early 50s, when Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Django Reinhardt, and innumerable greats held sway? You’d be hard pressed to make the case, for jazz has largely exhausted itself. The same holds for classical music. Do you believe that in 200 years symphony orchestras—if they still exist—will be playing largely the “classical” music composed today? I doubt it. It will be Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms.
And in 20 years, do you think the “oldies” rock stations will be playing the rock that is popular today? They should, because today’s kids will be tomorrow’s consumers, and presumably they’d want to conjure up their youth by listening to the music of their halcyon days.
Now not all modern rock songs are lame; there are some that I actually like. One of them, to use a band on the current charts, is Maroon 5’s “Sunday Morning,” but that’s already nine years old. Songs like that are thin on the ground.
No, the songs on the oldies stations in 20 years will be pretty much what they are now: the Beatles, the Stones, the great soul music of the 60s and early 70s, the Band, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, and . . . well, I can go on forever. Why will their music last? Because these people were artists, who produced interesting music, with lovely tunes and (often) meaningful lyrics. That’s simply not on tap these days. What we have is a crop of overhyped, oversold, autotuned mediocrities.
I am Professor Ceiling Cat, and I endorse this message.
If you’re like me, and at work before 6 a.m., and haven’t yet had coffee, any challenge you face better be an easy one. So here’s one: a picture sent in by reader Sarah, with this note:
I took this picture 24 years ago in Malta, and it has scanned surprisingly well. I was walking along and saw this wall overgrown with a prickly pear type plant. As I looked again I saw a cat, and then another, and then another, all sitting quietly and ignoring each other. I can find four in this picture but I have a feeling there might be more.
Some of the cats aren’t too cryptic, but first find the four and then see if there are others (click the photo to enlarge). What’s strange is that cats are sitting among prickly pears, which have annoying spines that easily detach and stick in your skin.
How can they do this to cute little squirrels—four of which I’m feeding and nurturing at this moment? Well, the venality of Hollywood knows no bounds—without a moment’s pause they’ll turn these adorable little rodents into rapacious killers.
From Bleeding Cool, we have a notice that director Timur Bekmambetov, who produced such classics as “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” has a movie in the works called “Squirrels,” with a screenplay written by Daniel Antoniazzi and Ben Shiffrin based on an idea by Bekmambetov. The movie doesn’t seem to have been actually made yet, but there’s a trailer, and I can’t see obvious clues that it’s a joke.
Here’s the officlal blurb:
When a young man’s estranged father is killed under suspicious circumstances, he returns home for the first time in years to get to the bottom of the mystery. Hoping to uncover some logical explanation, he instead finds his mom’s sleazy new boyfriend, a natural gas company buying up the town, an angry female sheriff who happens to be his ex-girlfriend, and an army of flesh-eating squirrels hellbent on destroying everything in their path due to an erosion of their food chain as a result of environmental destruction by the gas company.
Flesh-eating squirrels!!!!!! Well, see for yourself.
WARNING: the video is a tad gory, although it’s likely to disturb squirrel lovers more than the gore-averse.
And here is the trailer for the Lincoln/Vampire movie by the same director, as well as an advertisement.
This will be my sole contribution to Wallace Year, and, I suppose, an insubstantial but possibly humorous one.
In 2003, my friend friend Andrew Berry, a lecturer at Harvard, published a fine collection of Wallace’s writing: Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology. While he was putting it together, he told me that Steve Gould had agreed to write the preface. I instantly had a premonition of what Gould would contribute, guessing that he would use a baseball metaphor to emphasize Wallace’s “secondary” status as less prominent discoverer of natural selection. So, on June 15, 2001, I wrote a parody/prediction of Gould’s preface, emulating his style:
In the cathedral of baseball history, Roger Maris occupies only a small spandrel in comparison to the great—in both physical and athletic stature—George Herman Ruth. Indeed, Maris’s crewcut-topped visage has all but vanished from our memory, while the image of bandy-legged Yankee #3 remains undimmed. Yet in 1961 Maris surpassed the Babe’s record by poling a record sixty-one home runs out of American League parks.
Why do we remember the Great Bambino so vividly, while Maris has retreated to but a small nook of our cerebrum? Surely because the Babe was the first to reach the magic “sixty” mark. It is sad that precedence counts for so much in human history—perhaps as an evolutionary byproduct of male competitiveness. And in the scientific race to be first, there is no sadder story than that of The Man Who Came Second to Darwin: the profligate but neglected Alfred Russel Wallace.
On September 5 of that year, Gould sent Andrew his real preface, which was uncannily close to what I had produced. The main difference was in the baseball players chosen. This was what was published:
Perhaps all cultures do not judge in this unfair manner, but in our system, winning or being first takes all the kudos and wins all renown, whereas even the most honorable second place finish spells oblivion or, even worse, a grudging memory as an also-ran, even when your ranking did not reflect a true beating by the “winner,” but only recorded the happenstance of age or logistics. In my favorite American example, everyone knows Jackie Robinson as the first African-American player in Major League baseball (for the Brooklyn Dodgers of the national League). But who even recognizes the name of Larry Doby – a splendid ballplayer and human being – who entered the game just a few months later as the first black to play in the other division of the totality, the American League.
Wallace, as we all know – but we should know so much more about him! – devised the theory of natural selection, independently of Darwin in 1858, writing out his ideas feverishly (literally in the midst of a malarial attack) in a short paper, while doing field work in Indonesia. He sent the manuscript to Darwin, knowing about his senior colleague’s interest in evolution, but having no inkling that Darwin had devised effectively the identical theory long before in 1838, when Wallace was still a teenager. Darwin had then refined his ideas and collected data in privacy for 20 years (revealing the content only to a handful of most trusted friends), and had already written several hundred pages of a projected long book of several volumes on the subject (that Darwin would have called Natural Selection, had not Wallace’s prod spurred a decision to quicken the pace and produce the single-volumed, and still substantial, Origin of Species, published in 1859). Wallace therefore became the Larry Doby of biology, known and admired to all professionals, but effectively invisible in the public eye, except as a factoid or footnote.
The International Humanist and Ethical Union, and many other venues, report that a well known Indian humanist and rationalist, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, was assassinated this morning in India:
He was reportedly shot four times by two men on a motorbike this morning on Omkarweshwar bridge in Pune, Maharashtra state. He was reportedly taking his daily morning walk when he was assassinated, a route that may have been known to his attackers.
The murder comes days after the state government pledged to re-introduce an anti-superstition bill closely associated with Dabholkar’s work and opposed by many rightwing and Hindu nationalist groups as “anti-Hindu.”
I’d be very surprised if the murder didn’t have anything to do with Dabholkar’s activities:
Dr. Dabholkar, a medical doctor, plunged into anti-superstition work in 1983 and built a concrete movement in his home state of Maharashtra. He was founder of the Maharashtra Forum for Elimination of Superstition, Maharashtra Andha Shraddha Nirmulan Samiti, editor of Sadhana magazine devoted to propagation of progressive thought, and had served previously as vice president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA), an Member Organization of IHEU.
Dabholkar’s work over many years confronted and exposed the fraudulent practices of babas and swamis by explaining the science behind so-called miracles, often used to defraud some of the least well-off members of society of their money or possessions. Dabholkar organised teavelling troops of activists travelling all over the state, and campaigned at a political level with great erudition against superstition and so-called ‘black magic’.
Dr Narendra Dabholkar
An Indian anti-woo activist perhaps more well known to us Sandal Edamarku, whom I met at TAM 2013, weighs in on the assassination at howabi.com:
During the course of his battle against superstition, Dabholkar had received many threats from various groups but had never allowed it to deter him. Edamaruku, the president of an organisation called the Indian Rationalist Association says the threats usually come from those who are perpetrating superstitions and other beliefs.“The rationalist movement has been growing very fast over the last 10 years. I have experienced a lot of threats in my life and so have many others,” he said.
Narendra Dabholkar’s death should be taken as an inspiration by people, who should be encouraged to realise the importance of the struggle against superstition and take inspiration from his struggle, he said.“It is not the victims of superstition who are normally against rationalists but the exploiters who are using superstition and are using the gullibility of people, they are the ones against us,” Edamaruku said.
However, successes are few. Edamaruku pointed out that Dabholkar’s mission ” the anti-superstition bill ”had been significantly watered down and had still not been passed by the Maharashtra legislation.
India is a land steeped in religion and other forms of woo: many people, and, I believe, even the government, plans their schedules using the astrological calendar. Edamarku is on the lam, having fled India under threat of jail for violating blasphemy laws, and has also received death threats. Apparently the price of rationalism in India can be death.
I’m still working on Arabic, and Egypt promised to come through. Given what’s going on there now, though, there may be a slight delay. . .
