A curious new species

August 15, 2013 • 8:13 am

I just this minute got a “CNN breaking news alert”: this is it in its entirety:

Smithsonian announces new species called olinguito and describes it as cross between house cat and teddy bear.

(CNN usually reserves its “news alerts” for important world events.)

Well, what they mean is that this new creature looks like the offspring of a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear.  This is not a joke, and I’m curious to see what on earth this is. Readers can post updates below.

But I will relate a joke that my father used to tell me:

Dad: “What do you get when you cross a lion with a parrot”?
Jerry: “I don’t know, Dad.”
Dad: “I don’t know either, but when it talks, you’d better listen!”

Well, that’s a joke, but the olinguito apparently is not.

I’ll be here all week, folks.

UPDATE:  Here’s a photo of it, one of three from the BBC report:

69301447_2photoofolinguito

 

It’s described as the first new species of carnivore to be found in the Western hemisphere in 35 years. It resides in Colombia and Ecuador.

Chinese zoo bilks viewers by labelling dog as a lion

August 15, 2013 • 8:07 am

According to Business Insider (via Matthew Cobb),  a zoo in China pulled a fast one on customers:

A Chinese zoo’s supposed “African lion” was exposed as a fraud when the dog used as a substitute started barking.

The zoo in the People’s Park of Luohe, in the central province of Henan, replaced exotic exhibits with common species, according to the state-run Beijing Youth Daily.

It quoted a customer surnamed Liu who wanted to show her son the different sounds animals made — but he pointed out that the animal in the cage labelled “African lion” was barking.

The beast was in fact a Tibetan mastiff — a large and long-haired breed of dog.

“The zoo is absolutely cheating us,” the paper quoted Liu, who was charged 15 yuan ($2.45) for the ticket, as saying. “They are trying to disguise the dogs as lions.”

Three other species housed incorrectly included two coypu rodents in a snake’s cage, a white fox in a leopard’s den, and another dog in a wolf pen.

Here’s the photo from the article, though not the beast in question:

 china-dog-lion
This is not the first time a dog has been on exhibit in a zoo. One of my friends visited the Moscow zoo, and reported that it had a cage containing two domestic dogs.  But they were labelled as such, though Lord knows why.  I promptly dubbed them “Fidostoyevsky” and “Spottsky.”
But my question is this: how in tarnation can anyone think that this looks like a lion? Everyone knows what a lion looks like.
Also, it is grossly immoral to pretend that a d-g is actually a felid.

Open season on atheists at the Torygraph: two new attacks on heathens

August 15, 2013 • 5:38 am

Well, it’s the Telegraph, Jake, but even so, the paper has viciously attacked atheism and atheists twice in two days, and, as you know, these attacks are burgeoning everywhere.

Why is this happening? I can think of several reasons, including the success and visibility of New Atheism, a slow news summer, or simply a feeding frenzy, with one shark biting and the others smelling blood in the water. It can’t be Dawkins and his tweets, for that’s just an excuse for people who already dislike Richard to chew on his tuchus. I’d be interested in readers’ take on the spate of recent attacks, but there’s little doubt it’s a real phenomenon.

The worst is by novelist and journalist Sean Thomas, who also writes under the name of Tom Knox. His thesis is summed up in the piece’s title, “Are atheists mentally ill?”  His answer, of course, is “yes.” Why are we mentally ill? Because, according to a “vast body of research”, the data show this:

  • A study at UCLA nine years ago showed that “college students involved in religious activities are likely to have better mental health”
  • A 2009 study at Harvard discovered that believers with broken hips healed faster and had shorter stays in the hospital
  • Believers have better medical outcomes than atheists when afflicted by coronary disease breast cancer, AIDS, and even more success using IVF
  • Believers are happier and less likely to commit suicide
  • Believers are less likely to smoke, drink, or take drugs
  • Believers are nicer than heathens (Thomas cites a study from Harvard discussed in the Sydney Morning Herald)
  • Believers donate more to charity

Thomas doesn’t pull any punches in his conclusion:

So which is the smart party, here? Is it the atheists, who live short, selfish, stunted little lives – often childless – before they approach hopeless death in despair, and their worthless corpses are chucked in a trench (or, if they are wrong, they go to Hell)? Or is it the believers, who live longer, happier, healthier, more generous lives, and who have more kids, and who go to their quietus with ritual dignity, expecting to be greeted by a smiling and benevolent God?

Obviously, it’s the believers who are smarter. Anyone who thinks otherwise is mentally ill.

And I mean that literally: the evidence today implies that atheism is a form of mental illness. And this is because science is showing that the human mind is hard-wired for faith: we have, as a species, evolved to believe, which is one crucial reason why believers are happier – religious people have all their faculties intact, they are fully functioning humans.

Therefore, being an atheist – lacking the vital faculty of faith – should be seen as an affliction, and a tragic deficiency: something akin to blindness. Which makes Richard Dawkins the intellectual equivalent of an amputee, furiously waving his stumps in the air, boasting that he has no hands.

Of course, he doesn’t ask whether religious beliefs are actually true; that’s irrelevant to his thesis.  Nor does he mention that there’s a strong negative correlation between the well being of societies and the health of those societies: the healthiest societies are the most atheistic, and there’s evidence that this is not just a spurious correlation.

If atheism is a mental illness, then put me in that asylum.

No, Thomas is arguing for belief in belief.  Now, I haven’t read any of the studies that Thomas cites, but even if they’re all true, I couldn’t force myself to believe just so I’d become a nicer and healthier person.  How could anyone do that? Thomas’s is clearly not an argument for atheists to adopt religion; it’s an argument to diss atheists and help religious people feel better about themselves. And the part about Dawkins waving his stumps is not only mean-spirited, but silly. We all know that God can’t heal amputees.

*******

O’Neill’s attack lacks data but makes up for it with plenty of spleen. (O’Neill describes himself as an “atheist libertarian”.) He has his own little list of accusations:

  • “Atheists online are forever sharing memes about how stupid religious people are.” He supports this by linking to a site called Atheist Meme Base.
  • Atheists are smug and irritating (he uses Dawkins’s tweets about Muslims as an example).  Of course, I could link to any number of religious sites that are even more smug and irritating, but for some reason O’Neill leaves out the bad behavior of the faithful.
  • Atheists are self-congratulatory; O’Neill’s evidence is his attendance at at least one atheist convention, where he sees patronizing people “afflicted with repetitive strain injury from so furiously patting themselves on the back” and where one sees “unprecedented levels of intellectual smugness and hostility towards hoi polloi.” I wonder if O’Neill has ever gone to a religious revival? Talk about back-patting! At least atheists don’t claim that believers face eternal perdition.
  • “Atheists in the public sphere spend their every tragic waking hour doing little more than mocking the faithful.”  Has O’Neill read any books by New Atheists? First, when they’re not discussing other issues, like evidence and the lack thereof, they’re mock faith, not the faithful. Second, he overlooks many atheists’s attempts to not mock faith, but limn a secular alternative to religion and religious ethics (viz., Peter Singer and Anthony Grayling).

Why, asks O’Neill, are atheists behaving this way.? After all, he says, the good old atheists, and I suppose he means people like Camus or Sartre, were content to keep atheism as a small and inconspicuous part of their persona. (But has he read Bertrand Russell, H. L. Mencken, or Robert Ingersoll?) No, the problem is that the New Atheists have turned nonbelief into a worldview.

So, what’s gone wrong with atheism? The problem isn’t atheism itself, of course, which is just non-belief, a nothing, a lack of something. Rather it is the transformation of this nothing into an identity, into the basis of one’s outlook on life, which gives rise to today’s monumentally annoying atheism. The problem with today’s campaigning atheists is that they have turned their absence of belief in God into the be-all and end-all of their personality. Which is bizarre. Atheism merely signals what you don’t believe in, not what you do believe in. It’s a negative. And therefore, basing your entire worldview on it is bound to generate immense amounts of negativity. Where earlier generations of the Godless viewed their atheism as a pretty minor part of their personality, or at most as the starting point of their broader identity as socialists or humanists or whatever, today’s ostentatiously Godless folk constantly declare “I am an atheist!” as if that tells you everything you need to know about a person, when it doesn’t. The utter hollowness of this transformation of a nothing into an identity is summed up by the fact that some American atheists now refer to themselves as “Nones” – that is, their response to the question “What is your religious affiliation?” is “None”. Okay, big deal, you don’t believe in God, well done. But what do you believe in?

This is ludicrous.  If by “what do you believe in?”, O’Neill means, “What do you accept without evidence, or in the face of evidence?”, then, yes, atheists believe in fewer things than the faithful. But that’s good!

But I think here O’Neill is accusing atheists of lacking values and positive worldviews.  And that’s just dumb.

Here, among others, are some of the things I “believe” in. I believe in trying to be nice to other people, and helping them with their problems. I believe that there should be no discrimination against people based on things they can’t change, like gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.  I believe in being kind to animals and respecting and preserving nature. I believe that science helps make a better world for everyone.  I believe that teaching people science will expand their world. I believe that, in general, Republicans are selfish, greedy, and far inferior to Democrats. I believe that governments should strive to make free medical care available for everyone. I believe that the most important thing in life is the love of friends, family, and companions, and that achievement and work rank below that. I believe that good food and drink are essential pleasures of life. I believe that literature, art, and music are components of a well-lived life.

And I’m sure any of us could produce such a list. I know a lot of atheists, and some religious folks as well, and I can’t say that atheists have a worldview more negative than that of believers. Atheists appreciate that life is transitory, and many are devoted to making the best of our short span here. That makes them better company than many believers, especially those who want to natter on about their supernatural and unevidenced beliefs.

I remember last fall when I spent several hours in the company of two Big Atheists, Dawkins and Dennett, as we drove from Boston to Stockbridge for the conference on naturalism. It was a great pleasure to be in their company. Did we talk about atheism? No, we talked of this and that, including philosophy, science, and world affairs. Because we arrived early, we all went to the Normal Rockwell Museum to admire the paintings. Was it dolorous? Not at all; it was fun, and we had a fine lunch.  And I can’t remember a single moment of “negativity.”

Finally, O’Neill comes up with the ultimate accusation: atheism leads to nihilism!

Today’s atheism-as-identity is really about absolving oneself of the tough task of explaining what one is for, what one loves, what one has faith in, in favour of the far easier and fun pastime of saying what one is against and what one hates. An identity based on a nothing will inevitably be a quite hostile identity, sometimes viciously so, particularly towards opposite identities that are based on a something – in this case on a belief in God. There is a very thin line between being a None and a nihilist; after all, if your whole identity is based on not believing in something, then why give a damn about anything?

If O’Neill can level accusations like that, he must not know many atheists.  And has he been to Sweden, Denmark, or France, countries teeming with atheists? Are those people “viciously hostile”? When I think of France, I think of a country where people try to enjoy their lives; and Sweden and Denmark are extraordinarily kind, accommodating, and socially caring countries.

Here O’Neill is simply mouthing the same hollow complaints leveled by other journalists looking to give atheists a good spanking . Of course some atheists are jerks, are negative, and natter on too long about their unbelief.  But I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of atheists, and I find them generally positive, cheerful, and, importantly, enamored of science.  As Billy Joel wrote, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”

Darwin did not cheat Wallace out of his rightful place in history

August 15, 2013 • 4:22 am

by Greg Mayer

Before writing my notice of John van Wyhe’s new book on Wallace, Dispelling the Darkness, I hadn’t come across this piece by him on Wallace in last week’s Guardian. The piece addresses and dispels the claim, advanced a number of times over the years—especially in popular media—that Darwin stole his ideas from Wallace, and that there was an unsavory conspiracy to rob Wallace of proper credit. This is a view that has gotten some recent attention, and John deals with it head on. The short answers: he didn’t steal, and there wasn’t a conspiracy.

Do read the whole piece. Some excerpts:

Wallace deserves more attention but much of what you will have heard about him in the last few months is factually incorrect – and amounts to a misguided campaign to reinstate the reputation of a genius who (according to his fans) has been wronged by history and robbed of his rightful fame….

Darwin’s life and works have been meticulously studied by many scholars for over a century. But while some very able scholars have studied Wallace, he by contrast has remained mostly the preserve of amateurs and enthusiasts.

There has not been enough progress with our understanding of Wallace because some of the important research projects that have unveiled a treasure trove of new findings about Darwin had never been done for Wallace: his complete works had not been assembled on one scholarly website, his Malay archipelago expedition correspondence had not been collected and edited and his notebooks and journals had not been edited and their contents made intelligible.

All of these have recently been done, the latter two not yet published. These new sources have shown us that every substantive claim in the popular narrative about Wallace turns out to be incorrect.

And the money quote:

Darwin’s fame and reputation, and Wallace’s comparative obscurity, stem from the impact of Darwin’s Origin of Species. As Wallace himself wrote: “this vast, this totally unprecedented change in public opinion has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought about in the short space of twenty years!”

For my take on the second of these questions, which very much agrees with John’s, see my post on “Why is Darwin more famous than Wallace“. In attempting to promote Wallace, these modern admirers, perhaps unwittingly, portray Wallace as a hapless chump who was unaware of his own contributions. He was neither of these things.

(I also want to take this opportunity to bring above the fold Michael Barton’s review of Dispelling the Darkness on his fine website The Dispersal of Darwin; see also an earlier piece there on the conspiracy theory.)

Hamster time

August 14, 2013 • 11:51 pm

by Matthew Cobb

It’s Thursday, and we all need cheering up. In the UK, several hundred thousand 17 and 18 year olds will get the results of their A and AS level exams, which will have a decisive influence on their future. So here for them, and for the rest of us who don’t have to get their results (although some of us have children in that age bracket to worry about), is a hamster eating a piece of baby corn:

This being a somewhat educational blog, we can’t just go ‘aww, so cute’. So here are today’s questions. Write on one side of the paper only:

– Is it strictly speaking ‘eating’? What’s a good definition of ‘eating’?

– The advantage of having a shopping basket in your mouth is fairly obvious. Why haven’t other animals evolved this adaptation? Or have they?

– If you look at a hamster skeleton, can you tell that the living animal has a pouch? Might stegosaurs have had pouches to stuff all those ferns in?

Here’s a picture of a hamster skull ((c) skullsunlimited.com). If this were a fossil, would we reconstruct the hamster with pouches?

To get some idea of how big those pouches are, here’s a reconstruction from the National Museum of Ireland, which seems to have attached condoms to a hamster skeleton:

And to remind you what it’s all about, this video shows a blue hamster snuffling up rice:

Mormon theology and Mr. Deity

August 14, 2013 • 10:12 am

I’ve been reading a bit about Mormon theology for my book, and that theology is not only plenty weird, but a major part of it has been decisively disproven by modern genetics, archaeology, and linguistics. (One of my theories, which is mine, is that the closer in time to the present day a theology arose, the weirder it looks. Really, Mormon theology is no weirder than Christian or Hindu theology, and Scientology seems ridiculous largely because we were alive when it was made up.)

An important part of Mormon theology is the contention that the ancestors of Native Americans were in fact Israelites who migrated to the Americas from the Middle East about 2,600 years ago in the form of two tribes: the Nephites and the Lamanites.  About a millennium later, their descendants had a big war, with the Lamanites wiping out every Nephite but one. That survivor was Moroni, who helped write the book of Mormon, buried the golden plates in upstate New York, and then reappeared as an angel in 1827 to tell Joseph Smith where the plates were. (These, supposedly written in a hieroglypic language, were read by Smith using “peepstones” and gazing into a hat, as lampooned in the video below.) The Lamanites, by the way, had been cursed by God because they ignored prophetic teachings. Their curse was to become dark-skinned, or, as the Book of Mormon says, God “did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.” That’s one of the reasons why, until 1978, blacks weren’t allowed to be lay priests in the Mormon church. A convenient and timely “revelation” by Mormon elders—the church was expanding into South America—did away with that policy.

But science shows that the Middle Eastern origin of Native Americans is a total fiction (duhhh!). The data are clear: Native Americans, and all native peoples in the New World, descended from east Asians who migrated over the Bering Strait about 15,000—not 2,600—years ago.  This comes not only from dating of settlements, but from other archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence.  Native American languages are more similar to Siberian ones than to Hebrew, and the genetics is dispositive: Native Americans from throughout the New World show a close genetic affinity to east Asians, and are far more genetically removed from inhabitants of the Middle East.

Mormon accommodationists have tried the usual tactics, including moving the migration from the Middle East to Central America (that doesn’t work, because Central American are also closely related to East Asians), or positing interbreeding of the “Israeli” Native Americans with others, an interbreeding that effaced their Hebrew ancestry. That doesn’t seem likely, either.

As far as I know, the Mormon Church still supports the fiction of the Book of Mormon, and can’t even admit that the “Middle East” migration was fictional. And it would be hard to make that into a metaphor! (By the way, the Book of Mormon also claims that Jesus visited North America.)

But enough Mormon theology. The latest Mr. Deity, a good one, shows how the whole fraudulent beginning of the church took place, including the fabled hat. The last few minutes of the video are an interesting disquisition on skepticism.

A doomed fly

August 14, 2013 • 7:40 am

by Matthew Cobb

I was in the garden reading about Francis Crick and the genetic code (the way one tends to do at this time of year), when I noticed Pepper the cat staring intensely at something small on the ground that was moving erratically. I went over to see what was going on and discovered that he was looking at a greenbottle fly (Lucilia sericata), which had one wing still stuck in its golden pupal case. That accounted for the erratic movement – it was trying to fly away, but couldn’t for obvious reasons.

Feeling curious, I managed to remove the pupal case, and then brought the fly over to the table to see if its shrivelled wing would be pumped up and it would be able to fly. After 30 minutes, this was the result (iPhone 5 pic):

fly2

That wing is never going to inflate. This, I’m afraid, is a soon-to-be ex-fly. It will have expired. It will be pining for the dog crap. With only one wing, it’s a walk, not a fly, and it will either be eaten by one of the cats when they’re bored, or it will be snarfed by a bird or an arthropod predator. It seems very unlikely that it will be able to mate (and no, I can’t tell which sex it is).

That’s natural selection for you, but not evolution. It seems unlikely that the problem faced by this fly had a genetic origin (something just went wrong), and therefore the death of this fly will almost certainly have no effect on the future of the species. Unless, of course, you think that Ray Bradbury’s time-travel story about killing a butterfly in the past may have some credibility, in which case, who knows what may happen in an election in a few million years time…