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 doesn’t get more sqeelicious than this: a science-themed love song featuring a ukelele-playing kitten!
Note: this is slightly NSFW.
The notes at TheRealDeAnne site say this:
I made this video for my friend Shane Adamczak’s show Up Late Live, an episode of which you can see here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3c0fw…
Clark, the kitten I was fostering, stole the show.
http://www.deannesmith.com
Want me to come to your town/school/bed/wedding? Email: comideanne@gmail.com
h/t: L.
In today’s New York Times Sunday Review, Frank Bruni interviews author Joyce Carol Oates in a piece called “Tweeting toward sacrilege.”
I hadn’t realized that the literarily prolific Oates had a Twitter feed—nor that she was an atheist—and it seems uncharacteristic, but she does use Twitter (here) and is quite prolific. As Bruni reports, her recent tw–ts dealt with the problem of sexual harassment and rape in Egypt:
On her Twitter feed she saw a statistic that chilled her. And she tweeted, “Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic — Egypt — natural to inquire: what’s the predominant religion?” [Bruni, by the way, notes that the 99.3% figure is questionable.]
. . . She also wrote, “ ‘Rape culture’ has no relationship to any ‘religious culture’ — how can this be? Religion has no effect on behavior at all?”
Fellow writers and intellectuals freaked. On various byways of the Internet, she was blasted for anti-Muslim bigotry. A “furor,” The Wall Street Journal called it, and in a headline no less.
Oh, for crying out loud? The Islamophobia canard again. If people claim that misogyny in Muslim cultures has nothing to do with religion, they’re blind, and I won’t engage them. Oates is eminently sensible in her interview:
Oates calls herself a humanist, rejects the conventional notion of divinity and told me, “I don’t have a sense that there are sacred institutions. To me, all religions and all churches are created by human beings.” In that regard, she added, “They’re not that different from, say, the whole legal culture or the medical culture or the scientific culture.” About which you can say or ask almost anything at all.
SHE finds certain barriers and etiquette curious. “If you thought that women were being mistreated 50 miles from where you are, you might want to go help them,” she said. “But if you were told it was a religious commune or something, you’d think, ‘Uh-oh, that’s their religion, maybe I shouldn’t help them.’ It’s like religion is under a dome. It gives an imprimatur to behavior that shouldn’t be tolerated.”
Is she saying that Islam oppresses women?
Although she expressed concern about Shariah law, she didn’t go that far, and she noted that most religions were patriarchies.
Islam stands out for her in terms of the extra-special sensitivity surrounding discussion of it. . . “We can have cartoons about the pope,” she said. “Making fun of the pope just seems to be something that a Catholic might do.” She added, “But if you have a cartoon, or make a film, about radical Islam, then you’re in danger of your life.”
Oates is surprised at the media kerfuffle her tw–ts engendered, but if she’d been following the Islamophobia crowd like Glenn Greenwald, it was entirely predictable.
She shook her head, looked toward her llama-less yard [she’s buying a her of llamas] and said, “It’s a little surprising to me that social media have turned out to be kind of prissy and prim and politically correct.”
And racist towards Muslims, who aren’t expected to behave as well as everyone else. Really, whose fault is it that you risk death by publishing a cartoon about Mohamed? The West’s?
h/t: Greg Mayuer
I’ll be going to talks and having interviews most of the day at TAM, so don’t expect much beyond persiflage. Alert reader Linda Grilli sent me today’s Non Sequitur strip, which is quite funny. I don’t know how Wiley Miller gets away with this stuff: the strip appears in over 700 newspapers.
Oh, and don’t forget: it’s Bastille Day!
I got two bits of cool swag at The Amazing Meeting. At my book-signing yesterday, a nice fellow came up to me and, before getting his book signed, presented me with two things. The first was a DVD of “Marjoe,” the documentary about the famous evangelist Marjoe Gortner, who started preaching at age four and then subsequently exposed the whole business as a lucrative scam. (“Marjoe” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1972.)
Here’s a clip of 8-year-old Marjoe preaching:
As one of the commenters notes below, the entire movie is on YouTube, and it’s well worth watching.
It turns out that the man bearing gifts was Marjoe’s nephew Brian Gortner: an atheist!
Oh, and Brian gave me this most awesome present, which he had specially made in Southeast Asia. He said it’s one of only five existing specimens: a Hitchens bobblehead doll!!!!!
It will not have escaped your notice that Hitch has his ciggie and glass of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, and his name is on the base. This will have a place of honor in my office.
And D. J. Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a lovely fellow, presented me (and all the speakers) with a personalized bottle of wine, etched with our names:
I am informed by the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) that the five-professor panel empowered to investigate Professor Eric Hedin’s proselytizing for Christianity and intelligent design creationism in one of his physics classes has finished its investigation. After the FFRF sent a letter to every member of the panel detailing the case about Hedin (including student complaints), the FFRF was informed by a Ball State University (BSU) spokesperson that the panel had already finished its deliberations:
(email addresses redacted; Ryan Dwyer is a legal intern at FFRF):
From: “Caty Pilachowski”
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2013 12:52pm
To: “‘Ryan Dwyer'”
Cc: “‘Fluegeman, Richard'” “‘Todd, Joan'”
Subject: RE: Information on Professor Hedin’s classDear Mr. Dwyer – Thank you for your message. The Review Panel concluded its work when we submitted our report to the Provost at Ball State, and I am unable to comment further on the content or recommendations of the report, since our deliberations and the report itself are confidential. Joan Todd at Ball State is the appropriate conduit for further correspondence on the matter
Best wishes –
Caty Pilachowski
Andrew Seidel, the crack FFRF lawyer handling this case, then wrote to Joan Todd asking for more information; here’s the letter:
Although BSU maintains that the panel’s deliberations and decision are confidential, as well as the student evaluations of Professor Hedin (which are anonymous, of course), this is not certain. I suspect that the FFRF will try to pry these things out of Ball State using public records laws like the Freedom of Information Act.
I hope that the panel’s recommendation will be vetted by higher authorities such as the provost and president of BSU, and that then we’ll finally learn what the University is going to do about Hedin’s course. It would look pretty bad for them if they kept the entire decision secret.
If I had to guess, I’d say that BSU will take Hedin’s “Boundaries of Science” course out of the lineup of courses for which students can get science credit, and somehow move it to religion or philosophy. But even then it would be unsatisfactory, for it presents a one-sided view of the universe as a product of God’s design, and still violates the First Amendment by foisting a Christian view on the students.
If you like evolution and natural history, you should already be reading Ed Yong’s terrific site Not Exactly Rocket Science at National Geographic. In his short post “This snake has a tail that looks like a spider,” he describes a remarkable and newly found type of mimicry.
The snake is, appropriately, the spider-tailed viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides), first described formally only 7 years ago from Iran. It was known since the sixties, but the one specimen’s tail was dismissed as a tumor or deformity. We now know from other specimens that this is indeed a species-specific trait. As Yong notes:
The tail is bizarre. If you saw a close-up photo of it, you’d struggle to believe that there was a snake at the other end. There’s a large orange or grey bulb at the tip, and the scales just before that are bizarrely long and thin. Together, these features look a bit like the legs and abdomen of a spider or their close relatives, the solpugids or ‘camel spiders’.
A close-up photo:
This video shows the snake waving its tail, and the “appendages” of the mock spider look amazingly lifelike.
Now what is this bizarre appendage for? Two possibilities come to mind: the mock spider could be used to scare off potential predators, or it could be used as a lure to attract prey. Given that this viper has a pronounced threat display (see Yong’s piece), the latter seems more likely. And tests show that the “lure” hypothesis is probably correct:
And then there’s the tail. It’s probably a lure, like a fisherman’s fly. By resembling a tasty morsel, it draws potential prey into the snake’s striking range. Fathinia tested this idea by putting a chick into the same enclosure as his captive viper, which duly undulated its tail.
“It was very attractive and looked exactly like a spider moving rapidly,” Fathinia wrote. “After approximately half an hour, the chick went toward the tail and pecked the knob-like structure. The viper pulled the tail structure toward itself, struck and bit the chick in less than 0.5 seconds. The chick died after 1 hour.” A sparrow met the same fate.
Yong notes that “caudal lures” aren’t uncommon in snakes, but this one is extraordinarily elaborate. A more normal lure is present in the northern death adder from Australia (Acanthophis praelongus); it’s a wormlike tip of the tail that’s moved to attract prey while the rest of the snake remains absolutely still:
h/t: Ben
According to Wikipedia, here are some facts about Virginia Heffernan (my emphasis):
Virginia Heffernan was born [1969] in Hanover, New Hampshire. She received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1991, and an English LiteratureMaster’s Degree and Ph.D from Harvard University, in 1993 and 2002, respectively.
Heffernan began her career as a fact-checker with The New Yorker magazine. She served as an editor at Harper’s and Talk magazines, and as TV critic for the online magazine Slate. In June 2002, the Columbia Journalism Review named Heffernan one of its “Ten Young Editors to Watch.” In September of the following year, Heffernan departed Slate to join The New York Times.
Which makes it all the more bizarre that Heffernan has become. . . a Biblical creationist. Or so she explains in a piece at Yahoo News, “Why I’m a creationist.” It’s a celebration of willful ignorance that begins with a denigration of scientists followed by some false modesty:
. . . the people I know who consider themselves scientists by nature seem to be super-skeptical types who can be counted on to denigrate religion, fear climate change and think most people—most Americans—are dopey sheep who believe in angels and know nothing about all the gross carbon they trail, like “Pig-Pen.”
I like most people. I don’t fear environmental apocalypse. And I don’t hate religion. Those scientists no doubt see me as a dopey sheep who believes in angels and is carbon-ignorant. I have to say that they may be right.
I’ve been around scientists all my life, and I don’t recognize the stereotype. Even though most scientists aren’t religious, they usually keep quiet about it, and I rarely hear a denigration of most Americans as “dopey sheep.” The data do show, however, that between 60% and 70% of Americans believe in angels, so that’s not a stereotype. But most scientists aren’t even aware of that figure.
Here’s Heffernan’s explanation of how she came to creationism. In the end, she did it because the Bible tells a better story than evolutionary biology. Damn the facts—and this from a fact-checker!
I’ve put every lie or misconception in her explanation in bold:
Also, at heart, I am a creationist. There, I said it. At least you, dear readers, won’t now storm out of a restaurant like the last person I admitted that to. In New York City saying you’re a creationist is like confessing you think Ahmadinejad has a couple of good points. Maybe I’m the only creationist I know.
This is how I came to it. Like many people, I heard no end of Bible stories as a kid, but in the 1970s in New England they always came with the caveat that they were metaphors. So I read the metaphors of Genesis and Exodus and was amused and bugged and uplifted and moved by them. And then I guess I wanted to know the truth of how the world began, so I was handed the Big Bang. That wasn’t a metaphor, but it wasn’t fact either. It was something called a hypothesis. And it was only a sentence. [JAC: the preceding sentence is a “deepity”.] I was amused and moved, but considerably less amused and moved by the character-free Big Bang story (“something exploded”) than by the twisted and picturesque misadventures of Eve and Adam and Cain and Abel and Abraham.
Later I read Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population” and “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, as well as probably a dozen books about evolution and atheism, from Stephen Jay Gould to Sam Harris.
The Darwin, with good reason, stuck with me. Though it’s sometimes poetic, “The Origin of Species” has an enchantingly arid English tone to it; this somber tone was part of a deliberate effort to mark it as science and not science fiction—the “Star Trek” of its time. The book also alights on a tautology that, like all tautologies, is gloriously unimpeachable: Whatever survives survives.
If she knew anything about evolution, she’d know this isn’t a tautology. For an explanation, see the discussion of “the tautology argument” at the TalkOrigins archive. With all the education Heffernan received, she can’t be bothered to keep educating herself.
But I still wasn’t sure why a book that never directly touches on human evolution, much less the idea of God, was seen as having unseated the story of creation. In short, “The Origin of Species” is not its own creation story. And while the fact that it stints on metaphor—so as to avoid being like H.G. Wells—neither is it bedrock fact. It’s another hypothesis.
The Origin is full of facts—did she actually read it? No, it doesn’t touch on human evolution (Darwin didn’t do that till 1871), but there’s plenty of evidence for evolution in general: so much so that within a decade the book convinced virtually every thinking scientist of the truth of evolution. And has Heffernan kept up with all the multifarious evidence for human evolution that has accumulated in the last 100 years? It’s absolutely unbelievable that someone so educated and intelligent can ignore that evidence. A trip to the American Museum, or the Smithsonian, would be most enlightening for her. Finally, she needs to learn the difference between a hypothesis and a theory.
Cut to now. I still read and read and listen and listen. And I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God.
“Compelling” does not equal “true”, and that’s the big mistake that religion makes.
She adds that evolutionary psychology’s “just so stories” change all the time—that women used to be the monogamous gender and men the polygamous one; now evolutionary psychology tells us it’s the opposite (something I hadn’t heard). From this Heffernan concludes that you shouldn’t trust anything that science comes up with! That’s a typical creationist ploy: if science was wrong before, as with continental drift, then we can’t trust its conclusions at all. That’s like saying that if one of your friends made a mistake, you can never trust her judgment again. That ploy is also used by Sophisticated Theologians to show the “limitations of science.” But I wasn’t aware that evolutionary psychologists had reversed their conclusions about the differences between the sexes in their variance in offspring number. Well, even if that’s not the case, we still have cold fusion and Piltdown Man. . .
Heffernan finishes with a flourish of remarkable ignorance.
All the while, the first books of the Bible are still hanging around. I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics, and it’s certainly a livelier tale. As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”
What a remarkable celebration of ignorance! ”What do I know” indeed!! Well, maybe she could figure out what she knows if she’d acquaint herself with the facts, which show to all rational people that the world and its inhabitants were not created within a few days.
And no, you can’t choose your story—not if you want a true story. You can’t choose a story in which you never die, and you can’t choose a story in which you win the lottery. Yes, those are better stories than the ones we have, but if we want to live in a rational world instead of some dopey la-la land, we’d better choose stories that are true. It’s the adherence to false stories, of course, that is the basis of all religious mischief that’s been inflicted on the world.
It reminds me of the verse in Hebrews 11:1:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Rarely do we have someone of intelligence and education (a Ph.D from Harvard, for instance) showing themselves to truly be a “dopey sheep.” I wonder if Heffernan regrets what she wrote. I haven’t read the 300-odd comments after her piece, but I doubt she’ll find much agreement that we should ignore the facts and just believe “the better story.”
I wonder what Yann Martel thinks of evolution.
h/t: Alberto
Most Caturday felids are upbeat, but this one is a bit sad. Cats, after all, are part of life, and life isn’t all beer and skittles.
Below I’ve reposted an animated Google doodle that appeared, as far as I know, only on the Polish Google site (July 2).
It was in honor of the 90th anniversary of Wisława Szymborska’s birth (she was born in 1923 and died last year). I hadn’t heard of Symborka, though I should have, for she received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature for her poetry, and led a colorful life.
How little do we read the Nobelists whose literature isn’t in English! Fortunately, much of her poetry has been translated into English, and the doodle above apparently refers to a poem about a apartment cats whose owner has died suddenly, and away from home. It was translated by two other poets and appeared in The New York Review of Books:
Cat in an Empty Apartment
Wisława Szymborska
translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare CavanaghDie—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.
h/t: Grania, Malgorzata