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.
This selection of gems comes from only one month on the internet (this May), and demonstrates once again the eternal awesomeness of The Felid.
The panoply of clips begins with Skateboarding Cat, which we’ve seen before, but the rest are new to this site.
My favorites are the cat who steals a cigarette (second clip; did the owner train that moggie to bring him a smoke?) and the cat having a fractious encounter with a banana peel:
Oy vey, you just never know. According to Leiter Reports (which apparently took the news from the Chronicle of Higher Education, where the story’s behind a paywall), the world-famous philosopher of mind Colin McGinn, who is 63, will resign from the University of Miami at the end of this year in the wake of sexual harassment charges. Although there was apparently no direct sexual contact between McGinn and his accuser, a female graduate student, she apparently received extremely inappropriate and salacious emails from McGinn. Leiter appears to quote the CHE for the details:
[The student] had previously taken a course with Mr. McGinn in the fall of 2011, and began serving as his research assistant soon after.
The student, who asked to remain anonymous because she is planning to pursue a career in philosophy, said in an e-mail that she began to feel uncomfortable around Mr. McGinn at the start of the spring semester a year ago. Her discomfort hit a high point in April, she wrote, “when he began sending me extremely inappropriate and uncomfortable messages, which continued until the beginning of the summer.”
The student declined to share the messages with The Chronicle. However, her long-term boyfriend…described some of the correspondence, including several passages that he said were sexually explicit. [The boyfriend], along with two professors with whom the student has worked, described one message in which they said Mr. McGinn wrote that he had been thinking about the student while masturbating.
Advocates of Mr. McGinn, however, say that the correspondence may have been misinterpreted when taken out of context.
Edward Erwin, a supporter of Mr. McGinn who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, said Mr. McGinn was working on a book about human evolution and the hand. Part of the reason Mr. McGinn was sending messages that could be interpreted as sexually explicit, Mr. Erwin said, was probably because of communication about that research.
“There was some sexual talk, banter, puns, and jokes made between the two,” Mr. Erwin said. “The written records, I believe, show that this was an entirely consensual relationship,” he said. And that relationship, he added, was not sexual.
Leiter Reports is the popular and influential website of Brian Leiter, a professor here at the University of Chicago.
Apparently there are those who claim McGinn was misunderstood, and the emails were innocuous, but in that case why did he agree to resign? And it’s hard to misinterpret messages having the content described above. Leiter discusses the ins and outs of this case (he’s apparently quoted in the CHE article) at the link above and at another post called “Reflections on the McGinn case and sexual harassment in academic philosophy.”
The young (20) anticreationist activist Zack Kopplin, highlighted in a post this morning, will be debating the Clown Duo, Michael Medved and Casey Luskin (both of the Discovery Institute) at 3 p.m. CDT (4 p.m. EDT) on Medved’s radio show. I presume the topic will be evolution versus intelligent design in the public schools.
You can listen live here (click at upper right).
The anti-science circus continues in Louisiana. Thanks to Zack Kopplin and others, the bill to repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) almost got out of committee (a 3-2 vote against). It’s an insidious bill that allows public school teachers to use “supplementary materials” to criticize “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” I wonder what those topics have in common? Why not quantum mechanics or plate tectonics?
The Act also contains an unbelievably duplicitous and weaselly disclaimer:
This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.
If you believe that, I have a levee in New Orleans to sell you.
The LSEA, by the way, was supported and signed into law by Governor Bobby Jindal, who seems determined to make Republicans, and Louisiana, look ridiculous.
Well thank Ceiling Cat for small favors. But the shenanigans continue in the State of Huey Long. According to a new Slate piece by Kopplin, one Louisiana senator thinks that maybe faith-healing should be taught in schools, too:
Evolution is not the only scientific theory that is controversial to Louisiana politicians. Apparently, modern medicine is also subject to debate. Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory had a novel argument in defense of LSEA: It should not be repealed because he doesn’t want to “prematurely” declare that faith healing is “pseudo-science.”
During this year’s state Senate hearing to repeal LSEA, Guillory explained that he wouldn’t want to keep the “science” behind an experience he had with a witch doctor—who “wore no shoes, was semi-clothed, used a lot of bones that he threw around”—out of a public school science classroom.
Guillory said he is worried that repealing Louisiana’s creationism law will “lock the door on being able to view ideas from many places, concepts from many cultures.” Have no fear, Sen. Guillory, there is a great place for ideas from many cultures: history class, or philosophy or comparative religion classes. Faith healing and creationism are not science, though, and do not belong in a public school science classroom.
Here’s Guillory defending the LSEA by arguing that a half-naked witch doctor throwing bones on the ground helped him medically, even though what the shaman purveyed seems like pseudoscience. This is unbelievable:
Kopplin gives two more videos showing the embarrassing ignorance of Louisiana legislators about science. Here’s Sen. Mike Walsworth reacting to a description of Rich Lenski’s work on bacterial evolution, asking whether those bacteria evolved into a human! Clearly, if they didn’t, then evolution is wrong:
Finally, here’s Kopplin, an indefatigable and courageous young man (now an undergraduate at Rice), testifying at LSEA hearings and enduring the ignorance of Senator Julie Quinn:
Tired of hearing that the campaign to repeal LSEA had been endorsed by 78 Nobel laureate scientists and multiple major science organizations representing tens of millions of scientists worldwide, Quinn explained that the scientists whose discoveries had built our way of life were just people with “little letters” behind their names whom she had no interest in hearing from.
Fortunately, Louisiana senator Karen Carter Peterson is at the table defending all those “little lettered” Nobel Laureates as well as the many science organizations opposed to the LSEA.
Is there any hope for America, or at least Louisiana, with people this ignorant at the helm of government? I’d send them my book, but I doubt it would help. It’s religion that’s putting on the blinders here.
h/t: Randy
I thought this was a joke when Matthew Cobb told me about it, but I don’t think it is. On a report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the mass emergence of periodical cicadas this year, the network actually pixillated a video of the insects mating. Here’s a screenshot. When the video shows them mating, the reporter says, “You really don’t want to watch—it’s kind of yucky.”
Is the CBC really that prudish?
UPDATE: More coverage of the Hedin case at
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During the Eric Hedin incident (the Ball State University professor who proselytizes about Jesus in his science class), I was contacted by Macaela Bennett, a reporter at the Campus Reform site. She wanted to talk to me about my views on Hedin and his class, and at first I assented. But over the years I’ve learned that, when I get such an inquiry, I should check out who the reporter is working for. And some quick inquiry revealed that Campus Reform, which bills itself as having a noble mission, is actually a right-wing rag dedicated to promoting conservatism and exposing what they see as rampant liberal bias on campuses. But you wouldn’t know that from their mission statement:
Campus Reform, a project of the Leadership Institute, is America’s leading site for college news.
As a watchdog to the nation’s higher education system, Campus Reform exposes bias, abuse, waste, and fraud on the nation’s college campuses.
Our team of professional journalists works alongside student activists and student journalists to report on the conduct and misconduct of university administrators, faculty, and students.
Campus Reform holds itself to rigorous journalism standards and strives to present each story with accuracy, objectivity, and public accountability.
More about those “rigorous journalism” standards in a second. The “Leadership Institute,” however, is a conservative organization. As Wikipedia notes:
The Institute was founded in 1979 by conservative activist Morton C. Blackwell. Its mission is to “increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists” and to “identify, train, recruit and place conservatives in politics, government, and media.”. . . While the Institute does not provide instruction in philosophical conservatism, it does encourage its graduates to read classic conservative authors like Edmund Burke and “classical liberal” authors like Frederic Bastiat, as well as more modern conservative thinkers including William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, and libertarian thinkers such as economists Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek.
And you can get an idea of what Campus Reform is about by reading their tabloid-style (and ugly) front page, which shows a definite conservative slant.
Based on this, my limited time, and my view that the site lacked objectivity, I decided to back out of the interview, suspecting that my words would be used against me in some kind of defense of Hedin’s right to teach intelligent design. I wrote an email to Bennett saying this:
I’m sorry, but I’ve checked out your website, and I find that Campus Reform is dedicated to providing resources for conservative students. After perusing the articles and their content, I do not think that you will do an objective job of writing this article, for that will not comport with your organization’s mission. In fact, I can guarantee that you’ve already decided to defend Eric Hedin and impugn my opinions about his unconscionable mix of science and religion.
So I will not talk to you, and none of this email is to be made public or for publication.
Yours,
Jerry Coyne
Bennett then went ahead and wrote her story, taking my quotes from my website and an inteview I did with the Muncie (Indiana) Star-Press.
Campus Reform added this headline to the story:
That seemed a bit tabloid-y to me, and a distortion of what I said, as if I equated the harms of creatoinism with the mass killing of the Nazis. In the meantime, the Campus Reform reporter had written to the News Office of The University of Chicago, asking them to comment on my comparison between Holocaust denial and creationism. Here’s her email:
From: Macaela Bennett
Date: Wednesday, May 22, 2013 11:29 AM
Subject: Comment on Professor Jerry CoyneI would appreciate a comment on behalf of the University of Chicago regarding Professor Coyne’s comment in reaction to Ball State teaching a “Boundaries of Science Class” in which he compared teaching creationism to denying the Holocaust.
Thanks for your time,
Macaela Bennett
I can’t see what purpose there was for them to write to my “bosses” except to make me look bad, using a comparison that wasn’t what it seemed to be. Fortunately, the University of Chicago wasn’t about to get involved in this, and, as Campus Reform noted, “UC administrators did not respond to Campus Reform’s requests for comment on the incident.”
I then wrote back to Bennett, explaining what I meant by the comparison between creationism and Holocaust denial, which was this: teaching creationism in a science class is teaching lies to students, and is equivalent to teaching Holocaust denial in a European history class. I was concerned that the headline could be read—and I suspect the paper intended it this way—as implying that I thought the harms of teaching creationism were equivalent to the harms of the Holocaust. I don’t, of course.
Angered at Bennett’s attempt to go over my head to my own university, I told her to not contact me further, adding again that nothing I wrote in the email was for attribution or publication.
That request was completely ignored, and the “Campus Reform staff” (what happened to the reporter? ) then produced another article with this logo on the front page:
The article goes on to explicitly quote from the emails I’d written Bennett—the ones that I asked her not to quote. I’ve talked to lots of reporters over the years, and when I say something that I don’t want quoted, I always say “that’s not for publication” right afterwards, and every reporter has respected that. Every one, that is, except Bennett. Campus Reform said this (my emphasis):
Coyne followed up that email with a second email in which he called Campus Reform’s story “distorted” and objected to reporter Macaela Bennett’s decision to request a comment from his employer, the University of Chicago (UC).
“Contacting my University is absolutely beyond belief,” he wrote. “You should be ashamed of yourself. What you ‘do your best’ at is ideology, not reporting. Your behavior comports exactly with what I’d expect for a reporter from Campus Reform.”
Despite a request from Campus Reform, UC administrators declined to comment on Coyne’s remark.
Coyne ended both emails by demanding his comments remain off the record.
“Do not contact me any more–I mean it!” he wrote at the end of the second email. “And none of what I’ve written here or previously is for quotation or attribution.”
Without a specific arrangement in place, Campus Reform’s considers all correspondences between sources and reporters to be on the record.
Well, I stand by what I said, and am not at all embarrassed by their publishing my remarks. But I was surprised that, for the first time, stuff I’d asked to remain off the record had been published. Contacting my University’s press department, they said told me that technically Campus Reform could publish what I said without a prior agreement, but that that this practice was borderline. The lesson, for me and all of us who talk to reporter, is this:
Do not talk to a reporter without him/her agreeing in advance—before you say a word—that stuff you want off the record will remain so. If they don’t agree, be aware that anything you say, even if you ask for it not to be published right after you say it, is fair game for publication.
At any rate, I’ll have nothing more to do with Micaela Bennett and Campus Reform, whom I consider sleazy and unethical. They can do all their reporting without any comments from me. And I’ve learned something about unprincipled journalists with an agenda. So much for “objective” reporting!
*****
In other Hedin-related news, the Discovery Institute has decided to make him a martyr, and has started a petition (I won’t link to it; it’s easy to find) to defend him for teaching intelligent design. It says this:
“We, the undersigned, urge the administration of Ball State University to support Prof. Eric Hedin’s academic freedom to discuss intelligent design and related issues in the classroom. We call on you to reject demands by the Freedom from Religion Foundation to censor or punish Dr. Hedin for exercising his right to free speech.”
They don’t mention that Hedin’s “punishment” (if he gets sanctioned at all) is not for exercising his right to free speech, but for abrogating the right of his students to be free from Christian proselytizing in a public university, and, especially, their right to be taught real science in a science class without learning about Jesus and discredited science instead. The Discovery Institute also has a few choice words about the ignorance of yours truly, and accuses Ball State of letting Hedin “twist in the wind” as the investigation of his course continues.
Well, since I know the Discovery Institute reads this website, searching for choice morsels to use against me, let me ask them this: where is the positive research program on Intelligent Design that you once promised us was “right around the corner”? Where are all those peer-reviewed papers substantiating the need for a “designer” (one whom you all know is the Christian God)? Why are all your views published in books and not the scientific literature?
In their hearts, ID advocates know that they’ve failed to come up with the evidence they need to substantiate their views, and so they’re forced instead to defend teaching creationism in schools, just like their forerunners Duane Gish and Henry Morris. They are absolutely pathetic.
*****
Finally, over at EvolutionBlog, my friend Jason Rosenhouse has weighed in in the Hedin case. While he finds Hedin’s course a religously-based incursion into science, he adds that Hedin’s proselytizing is “arguably unethical” and should be taken into account during promotion and tenure. But he also feels, as do P. Z. Myers and Larry Moran, that Hedin should be allowed to continue teaching his Jesus-infused science course:
As bad as this course appears to be, trying to shut him down would be even worse. When the creationists start arguing that it’s a first amendment violation for a biology department to teach about evolution, we want them to be laughed at. I think it’s better just to glare at him in faculty meetings, and let him teach his course.
I disagree. There are no First Amendment grounds for teaching evolution in a science class; there are First Amendment grounds, or so I think, for prohibiting teaching Christian views in a public university’s science class. And I certainly think that, freedom of religion aside, Hedin’s course should be shut down as a course for which students can get science credit, as it’s simply not what it purports to be. It might be reconfigured as a philosophy class, but even then it would, in its present structure, be one-sided and an embarrassment to Ball State.
Although Hedin and the university defend his course by saying that it presents several sides of an issue in a way that will stimulate student thought, they’re clearly wrong: the course gives a one-sided view of the universe as reflecting the actions of a Christian god. There are no readings by those who deny God’s involvement in biology or physics: people like Sean Carroll, Victor Stenger, Steven Weinberg, or Larry Krauss. Nobody at Ball State has even attempted to answer that objection.
As for this course not violating the First Amendment, it’s not so clear to me. I’m not a lawyer, and neither are most of the people who say that public universities are exempt from First Amendment restrictions that apply to public grade schools or high schools. It would be interesting to see this issue adjudicated, as I don’t think it really has been—certainly not by the U.S. Supreme Court. But there are lower court decisions implying that public-university professors don’t have a right to promote their own religious views in class.
But regardless of what happens legally, Hedin’s course is an embarrassment to his department and to Ball State. It is not a science course and should not be portrayed as one. No professor has the right to force his/her religious point of view upon students. I certainly wouldn’t do that with my own disbelief, and if I did I would deserve to be rebuked and told to stop it.
There have been other students complaining about Hedin’s Christian proselytizing in that class, but those views will come out shortly.
The Northern Ohio Freethought Society, a brand-new chapter of The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), is having a fundraiser in Akron on October 19 in conjunction with the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Akron. Part of the money will go to put up an atheist billboard to make the locals ponder and to welcome co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor to Akron. There are several good speakers at the meeting, including Annie Laurie.
There will be an auction at the meeting, and they asked me to donate an autographed book. I did, of course, and added an atheist billboard cat, modeled after the FFRF’s own billboards. I grant that I’m no Kelly Houle:
If you’re a heathen in northern Ohio, you might head to Akron on Oct. 19, and maybe ante up some serious folding green for the book. The FFRF is our Official Website Secular Organization™ and deserves your support.
So how religious are scientists in the UK compared to those in the US? I would have thought “a lot less”. A recent study by Elisabeth R. Cornwell and Michael Stirrat (reference and online link below) shows that’s close to being the case, but the differences are small. Michael Stirrat is a research fellow in psychology at the University of Stirling, while Elisabeth Cornwell is the director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
The link below (which used to give the entire dataset and some analysis) now has only the abstract, but I have permission to reproduce the original data, some of which I think has already been published in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.
Cornwell and Stirrat inquired about religious beliefs of every member of the Royal Society of London having an active email address. That is the UK equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, as it includes distinguished scientists throughout the United Kingdom. Requests were sent to 1074 members, who were asked to fill out an online survey. 253 of them responded (10 females, 243 males, which is proportional, sadly, to the gender ratio of members). About half the responses came from physical sciences (including physics, astronomy chemistry, computer science, and math) and the other half from biology (including medicine).
The four queries were these (taken from the survey); members had to agree of disagree with each of the statements below:
- I believe that there is a strong likelihood that a supernatural being such as God exists or has existed.
- I believe in a personal God, that is one who takes interests in individuals, hears and answers prayers, is concerned with sin and transgressions, and passes judgement.
- I believe that science and religion occupy non-overlapping domains of discourse and can peacefully co-exist. (NOMA)
- I believe that when we physically die, our subjective consciousness, or some part of it, survives.
Members were asked to indicate how much they agreed with each statement on a 1 to 7 point scale, with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and 7 indicating “strongly agree”. Thus lower numbers include higher disbelief.
And here are the results, given in Table 1 of the original website:
If you look at the “personal god” category, and lump 1 and 2 together as “nonbelief” and 6 and 7 together as “belief,” then 5.3% of the UK’s distinguished scientists believe in a personal god and 86.6% disbelieve, as compared to 7% and 72% of US distinguished scientists, respectively. Doing the same for immortality (the only other item surveyed in the US and the UK), we find that 85% of UK scientists don’t buy it, compared to 76.7% of US scientists. 8.2% of the UK scientists, however, believe that some part of them lives on after death; the comparable igure for US scientists is 7.9%.
Biologists tended to be significantly less religious than physical scientists: here’s the plot of their answers to the “God exists” question:
I’m not sure whether this difference reflects the same trend in the U.S.: that is, that chemists are more religious than biologists and physicists.
In general, then, the level of atheism among distinguished scientists in the UK is on par with that of the US, despite the fact that the U.S. is immensely more religious than the UK. This fact, however, doesn’t answer the question of whether the high degree of atheism among accomplished scientists reflects the conversion of scientists to nonbelief, the fact that nonbelievers are drawn to careers in science or, probably, a mixture of both. (As one reader suggested, this might reflect scientists’ higher level of education in general, though that doesn’t accountfor the difference in religiosity among “elite” versus “regular” scientists in the U.S.
One fact points to the first explanation (my favorite): religious upbringing appeared to play no significant role in the scientists’ current attitudes toward religion. 42.7% of UK scientists were, for instance, brought up Anglicans, and only 20.2% as nonbelievers.
Finally, if you look at responses to how UK scientists feel about the compatibility of science and religion through NOMA, they’re pretty even across all the numbers. That surprises me a bit; I would have thought that more atheistic scientists would be less willing to accept the “NOMA solution.”
I believe the authors are preparing this work for publication, so I’d be indebted to readers if they’d ask questions, make suggestions, and give feedback designed to improve the future paper.
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Cornwell, E. R., and M. Stirrat. 2013. Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: A survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society. Social Science Research Network