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.
The post about atheism in UK scientists will go up in about 1.5 hours; in the meantime, listen to Feynman on scientific honors.
As you’ll see from the video, Feynman feels pretty much the way I do about scientific honors. The real honor is being able to see something that nobody else has ever seen—to learn a brand new fact about nature. That’s an enormous thrill and a privilege. Everything else is gravy, and pretty thin gravy. In fact, I’m not sure that they should give out prizes to scientists at all. Ditto for honorary societies, which, as Feynman notes, seem to function largely to choose who else gets to join you in the pantheon. We’d still do exactly what we do even without the Nobel Prize or the Royal Society, for the greatest honor is the attention and approbation of fellow scientists.
After saying that he sees the Nobel Prize as a “pain in the neck,” Feynman adds this: “I’ve already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick of the discovery, the observation of it; people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors.”
Well, he did use part of his Nobel Prize money to build a beach house! But I wasn’t aware that he’d resigned from the National Academy of Science. (My advisor, Dick Lewontin, also did that, but such resignations are rare.)
I’ll put up two posts today about the atheism of scientists. The first—this one—is old news, but I’ve separated it from one I’ll put up a bit later, which is a new survey of atheism among scientists in the UK.
It’s been known for a long time that American scientists are far more likely to be atheists than are members of the general populace, and that the more distinguished the scientist, the higher the probability of atheism. About 90% of Americans believe in God, and the proportion of nonbelievers varies between 3% to 10%, depending on how one asks the question. But among all scientists in America, roughly 40% are atheists, a big difference. (Curiously, chemists are more religious than either biologists or physicists.) But the degree of nonbelief skyrockets among more accomplished scientists.
As Edward Larson and Larry Witham noted in a well-known pair of papers (references and links below), surveys of scientists who carry some imprimatur of “accomplished” show a higher degree of atheism than that of “regular” (i.e., less distinguished) scientists. For example, the 1996 survey asked about the beliefs of scientists listed in American Men and Women of Science, replicating a survey done by James Leuba in 1916. Larson and Witham found that about 39% of notable scientists believed in a personal god, 45% were disbelievers, and 14% were doubters or agnostics. That’s a rate of atheism at least five times higher than that of average Americans. I don’t think there’s much of a response bias here, at least in the two-survey comparison, since the scientists in L&W’s paper were selected randomly from the book (although choosing a predetermined mixture of half biologists, a quarter mathematicians, and a quarter physicists/astronomers; this is the same mixture as Leuba used. Leuba got a 70% response rate, and Larson and Whitham got 60%.
Here’s the full chart from their 1997 paper. Religious belief either held steady or declined over the 80 years spanning the two surveys:
In 1998, Larson and Witham took a new survey of members of the U.S.’s most prestigious scientific organization, The National Academy of Sciences (several of our readers are members). They compared their results to a subset of scientists surveyed by Leuba: those he deemed “greater”. Leuba reported data on the “greater scientist” group in both 1914 and 1933. The response rate in this second L&W survey was 50%. The data, below, again show two things: religious belief among scientists is much lower than that of the general public, and religious belief among more accomplished scientists is far less than among less accomplished but still notable scientists. Look for example, at the belief in a personal god: it was 39.3% in L&W’s 1996 survey of people in American Men and Women of Science, but only 7% among National Academy members:
Now the higher proportion of atheists among scientists, which is yet higher among more notable scientists, could be explained by two things: either science turns people into atheists, and the better scientist you are the more atheistic you become; or atheists are drawn to science in the first place, and the more atheistic ones tend to be higher achievers. I think both factors are in play, but I suspect the former hypothesis explains most of the variance. That, of course, is just a guess based on my own experience and observation.
At any rate, L&W’s second paper quotes a “militant” atheist, chemist Peter Atkins, who seems to support the second hypothesis:
Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, “You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.”
Yay for anti-accommodationism! The last seven words express a trenchant view of the incompatibility of science and faith.
At the end, L&W question the NAS’s pro-accommodationist stand reflected in several of the organization’s public statements:
As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet
assures readers, “Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral”. NAS president Bruce Alberts said: “There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists.” Our survey suggests otherwise.
And you NAS members who are reading this, can you please do something about the accommodationist distortions still being promulgated by your organization? It smacks of hypocrisy to issue statements like the one above, or about the comity of science and faith, when so many of you have rejected that faith—presumably for good reason. Can’t you just refrain from mentioning religion at all?
One of my friends went to Harvard’s graduation ceremony last Thursday, and I asked him who the main speaker was (the speaker at my own ceremony, when I got my Ph.D. there, was Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn). When my friend replied, “Oprah Winfrey,” I about fell over. Oprah Winfrey? That peddler of woo, lachrymose feel-good guru, promoter of questionable science—she got an honorary doctorate of laws and gave the main speech?
I am appalled. Of all the substantive and non-wooish people Harvard could have lured with an honorary degree, they chose Oprah? Yes, I admire her work ethic and the determination that helped her attain superstardom by overcoming a horribly hard childhood and early life, but she’s still a symbol of attitudes that contravene the dictates of reason.
According to several accounts, her talk was just a string of platitudes—but of course nearly all graduation speeches are. The Reuters link above says this, for instance (but judge for yourself, as I’ve put the video below):
In a commencement address at the Ivy League school outside Boston, Winfrey told the graduates that they were bound to stumble no matter how high they might rise, but that “there is no such thing as failure — failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
No it isn’t, because “life” is not trying to do anything to us. Lord! Ceiling Cat!
At any rate, at least one major news outlet saw this degree for what it is: a tacit endorsement of woo and antiscientific attitudes. At the Time Magazine “Ideas” site, rika Christakis and Nicholas A. Christakis note excoriate Winfrey and Harvard in a piece called “Oprah as Harvard’s commencement speaker is an endorsement of phony science”:
But Oprah’s particular brand of celebrity is not a good fit for the values of a university whose motto, Veritas, means truth. Oprah’s passionate advocacy extends, unfortunately, to a hearty embrace of phony science. Critics have taken Oprah to task for years for her energetic shilling on behalf of peddlers of quack medicine. Most notoriously, Oprah’s validation of Jenny McCarthy’s discredited claim that vaccines cause autism has no doubt contributed to much harm through the foolish avoidance of vaccines.
. . .But this vote of confidence in Oprah sends a troubling message at precisely the time when American universities need to do more, not less, to advance the cause of reason. As former Dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, pointedly noted in a blog post about his objections, “It seems very odd for Harvard to honor such a high profile popularizer of the irrational. I can’t square this in my mind, at a time when political and religious nonsense so imperil the rule of reason in this allegedly enlightened democracy and around the world.”
Indeed! What were the folks at Harvard thinking when they extended this invitation?
I am heartened, though, that the writers of the Time piece are both at Harvard, and were bold enough to speak out:
Erika Christakis, M.P.H, M.Ed., is an early childhood educator and Harvard College administrator. Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of medicine and sociology at Harvard University. The views expressed are solely their own.
Well, my Ph.D. isn’t worth a plugged nickel now. What if Chicago revokes my professorship?
If you want to see her Harvard speech, here it is. I can’t bear to watch.
[JAC: In response to my own and other readers’ questions about turtle morphology and evolution, Greg kindly put up another post to clarify matters.]
by Greg Mayer
To really appreciate what turtles have done with their shells, it helps to see into one. So here’s a view into a turtle’s shell. The shell has been cut parasagitally, to the right of the midline, so we can see the vertebrae, but the rest of the skeleton– head, neck, limbs, girdles, and tail– are left intact so we can see their relation to the shell. (As Turtle Dundee once said, “That’s not an evolutionary novelty– that’san evolutionary novelty.”)
Inside a turtle.
Note that the shoulder and pelvic girdles are both within the dome of the carapace. And in turtles, the shoulder girdle is a bigger affair than it is in mammals. Turtles not only have a scapula, but also a coracoid as a major bony element, plus turtle scapulas are two pronged affairs with an acromial process nearly as big as the main part of the scapula itself, so that the whole girdle is a tri-radiate structure.
The shell itself is composed of epidermal, dermal, and deeper skeletal elements, and all three can be seen in this view. The horny scutes on the exterior of the shell, made of the same material as scales and fingernails, are epidermal, with a layer of live cells between the scutes and the bone. The bony part composes parts of the deeper axial skeleton: the vertebrae and ribs, which are preformed in cartilage during development; and the more superficial dermal bones, that ossify directly in the dermis without being preformed in cartilage. The plastron (bottom shell) consists of just epidermal and dermal elements. The plastral bones may be homologous to some of the dermal bones of the shoulder girdle (clavicle and interclavicle) and the gastralia of other reptiles.
As mentioned in the previous post, what the new paper by Lyson and colleagues (see previous turtle post for references) has especially done is to try to interpret the disputed turtle precursor Eunotosaurus in terms of the developmental processes proposed to underlie the evolution of the shell as seen in the undoubted turtle precursor Odontochelys and more derived turtles. Much of that recent developmental work has come from the Laboratory of Evolutionary Morphology at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan, especially this 2009 paper by Hiroshi Nagashima and colleagues (see additional figures in RIKEN’s press release; and a nice review by Shigeru Kuratani and colleagues from 2011).
“[T]he amniotes’ ribs and muscle plate grow together ventrally and make a single layer in body, outside of which the scapula is situated. In turtles, ribs grow laterally and are confined dorsally. However muscle plate is folded at the tip of ribs and runs inside the scapula as in other amniotes, showing basic topology between the elements is not changed both in turtles and other amniotes.” From RIKEN.Lyson and colleagues integrate Eunotosaurus into Nagashima and colleagues’ developmental scenario by proposing that the rib broadening seen in Eunotosaurus is homologous with that in Odontochelys and Proganochelys. One problem that I see with this attempt is that, if I’m interpreting Eunotosaurus correctly, the distal ends of its ribs curve ventrally and tuck in around the lateral edge of the body, while in turtles the ribs grow out straight to the sides towards a feature in the embryo called the carapacial ridge; this is how, in fact, the scapula gets inside the ribs. It could be argued, though, that this straightness is a later evolved feature, although it’s the straight lateral growth that is associated with getting the cartilaginous ribs associated withe bone-producing dermis that produces the broad plates of bone.
Figure 4 from Lyson et al. 2013 (click to see enlarged view).
To stress again how profound are turtles’ morphological changes in skeletal and soft tissues, and how they ramify throughout its physiology, ecology and behavior, let me quote from the famous morphologist and paleontologist Rainer Zangerl (1969; and who, in the quoted paper, also refers to the development of the turtle shell as “astounding”):
This shell did not merely cover the pre-existing anatomical structures of the body, but it modified them profoundly. The drastic alteration was probably the consequence of an intimate involvement of the dermal shield with parts of the axial skeleton (vertebrae and ribs) and with dermal portions of the primary skeleton (clavicles, interclavicle and gastralia). The restructuring had far reaching morphological, physiological, evolutionary, and ecological consequences . Anatomically, the presence of a rigid shell led to extensive modification of the structure of the body wall, and to the differentiation of the locomotor apparatus, of the neck region and of the copulatory mechanism, to mention just a few . Functionally it necessitated changes in the mode of respiration ; it impaired locomotion, especially on the ground, and restricted aquatic locomotion to the “paddle types” ; it delimited the storage capacity of the body for air, food, water, fats (oil in the shell bones of sea turtles), and waste materials . It probably affected the permeability of the body wall and hence modified the capacity of the animal to retain water . It drastically modified the behavioral pattern of the animal.
Kuratani, S., S. Kuraku, and H. Nagashima. 2011. Evolutionary developmental perspective for the origin of turtles: the folding theory for the shell based on the developmental nature of the carapacial ridge Evolution & Development 13:1-14. abstract
Nagashima, H. et al. 2009. Evolution of the turtle body plan by the folding and creation of new muscle connections Science 325: 193-196. pdf
Zangerl, R. 1969. The turtle shell. Biology of the Reptilia 1: 311-339. pdf
The German language is known for its jawbreakingly long words, and I mastered a few of them when I was learning the language. One I remember (I hope this is right) is Feuerversicherungsgesellschäften, or “fire insurance companies.” But according to The Independent, there are even longer ones, and the longest has just been deep-sixed:
It has 63 letters and would span more than four Scrabble boards, but is no more after a change in EU law.
The word, abbreviated to RkReÜAÜG (and reproduced at the bottom of this article to avoid page display problems!) means “beef-labelling monitoring assessment assignment law” and was conceived in 1999 in the wake of the BSE crisis. Now Brussels has relaxed testing rules and the law has been ditched, along with RkReÜAÜG.
Where does that leave a language fond of words so long they require a sip of water to get through? The longest word in Duden, the German dictionary, is Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung (36 letters; “motor-vehicle liability insurance”) but Guinness World Records also records Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften (39 letters; “insurance firms providing legal protection”).
What’s was longest word, though? Get a load of this:
Our correspondent from near Silver Creek, Idaho, sent more wildlife pictures. You might remember his photographs of the bald eagle nest, and here are the female (presumed) with her two chicks, clearly close to fledging:
Click to enlarge.
There’s also an insect photo, identified as follows:
This is a Brown Drake mayfly on Silver Creek. These are huge and prolific mayflies, and the trout go nuts for them. Billionaires fly here on private jets to fish this hatch.
Since I’ll get criticized by the Europeans if I call it “soccer” and by the Americans if I call it “football”, I’ll use a neologism here. The important thing is that yesterday the U.S. beat a powerful German team 4-3 yesterday. Sadly, the victory, at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., can be attributed largely to an own goal by Germany, as their goalkeeper, Marc-Andre ter Stegen, flubbed a back pass from his own team, letting it roll into the German goal. I don’t know what he was thinking, but here is what the announcer called “eine gemütliche Rückgabe”:
Here’s a 13-minute clip of the game’s highlights (auf Deutsch):
And to my German friends, including Florian Maderspacher, I say this: “Die Vereinigten Staaten über alles!”
Michael Medved, a conservative radio host of the Rush Limbaugh stripe, hosted a 20-minute “debate” on his show the other day between Dan Barker (co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, or FFRF) and Casey Luskin, creationist and research director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, an intelligent design “think” tank. (The “thought” is obviously not scientific, but about how to make up stuff to hide the lack of evidence for ID.)
The debate dealt with the case of Eric Hedin, the professor at Ball State who teaches a science class for honors students that is heavily infused with his love of Christianity. I brought Hedin’s proselytizing for Jesus to the FFRF’s attention, and their lawyers wrote to Ball State University saying that Hedin’s activities may constitute a First Amendment violation and, at any rate, are certainly not “science.”
I was initially asked to debate Luskin on this show, but had to teach at that time—thank Ceiling Cat!! Barker is a much better debater than I, and you can hear on the PodoMatic recording how coolly and calmly he responds to Medved’s constant interruptions and Luskin’s overheated rhetoric. The debate is 20 minutes long followed by 15 minutes of audience questions. (I haven’t had time to listen to the questions.)
Medved is obviously not an unbiased moderator, and I found out with a few strokes of the keyboard that he is in fact a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute. That’s unbelievable: Medved has no scientific training whatsoever. I guess the Discovery Institute just wants his name. In their announcement of Medved’s appointment as a Senior Fellow, the Discovery Institute said this:
“Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him,” said Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman.
. . . Chapman saluted Medved “as the national radio host—make that ‘media host’—who is best able to understand science issues, including the current conflict over Darwinism and intelligent design. He’s very smart, quick and resourceful. Yet he also is respectful of those he disagrees with.”
“Over the years, I’ve greatly appreciated Discovery’s scholarship and advocacy in many areas,” Medved commented. “We may not agree on every issue, but I often have been struck by how much our worldviews overlap. It has been my pleasure to have Discovery fellows on my show as guests, including Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, and David Klinghoffer. Formalizing the relationship will, I’m sure, only deepen the feeling of collegiality I already have with my friends at Discovery. I look forward to working with Discovery on future projects.”
Oh, and Barker makes a slip of the tongue around four minutes in, when he says I teach “biography” at the University of Chicago. I think he meant “biology.” But he does a remarkable job of keeping his cool in trying circumstances.
!["[T]he amniotes' ribs and muscle plate grow together ventrally and make a single layer in body, outside of which the scapula is situated. In turtles, ribs grow laterally and are confined dorsally. However muscle plate is folded at the tip of ribs and runs inside the scapula as in other amniotes, showing basic topology between the elements is not changed both in turtles and other amniotes." From RIKEN.](http://whyevolutionistrue.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/turtle-shell-muscles.gif)
