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.
Everyone says that atheists don’t have heroes, as if heroes are somehow like gods. The “no-hero” claims comes across to me as a bit smug. Well, I have heroes, and one of them is Richard Feynman, a great physicist, science teacher, science popularizer, and fascinating human being. Yesterday‘s Telegraph, “Richard Feynman: Life, the universe and everything,” recalls the life and work of The Great Man. The occasion is the release of the animated video shown below, which, says the paper, has gone viral. I think it’s fine, for the sentiments are eloquent and true, but frankly I prefer to see the real Feynman himself, expatiating as he waves his hands in the air. Nevertheless, it’s worth revisiting, if for no other reason than to denigrate the unduly famous antiscientific poem of Walt Whitman, “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer”:
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
5
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
That poem has always irritated me immensely, with its smug assertion that scientific understanding detracts from wonder. Feyman dispels that bit of antiintellecturalism here:
Three excerpts from the Torygraph piece:
[Feynman] graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939 and obtained perfect marks in maths and physics exams for the graduate school at Princeton University — an unprecedented feat. “At 23 there was no physicist on Earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science,” writes his biographer James Gleick.
. . . In the late Seventies, Feynman discovered a tumour in his abdomen. “He came home and reported, ‘It’s the size of a football’,” remembers his son Carl. “I was like ‘Wow, so what does that mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, I went to the medical library and I figure there’s about a 30 per cent chance it will kill me’.” Feynman was trying to turn his predicament into something fascinating, but it was still not the kind of thing a son wanted to hear from his father.
. . . With failing kidneys and in a great deal of pain he decided not to go through surgery again and went into hospital for the last time in February 1988. His friend Danny Hillis remembers walking with Feynman around this time: “I said, ‘I’m sad because I realise you’re about to die’. And he said, ‘That bugs me sometimes, too. But not as much as you’d think. Because you realise you’ve told a lot of stories and those are gonna stay around even after you’re gone.’”
There’s also a new BBC biopic about Feynman, “The Challenger,” which has William Hurt in the key role and concentrates on Feynman’s role in discovering the cause of the Challenger disaster (remember the O-rings?). The Telegraph also has ‘s an interview with Hurt about the movie here, A precis:
The 90-minute drama depicts Feynman as the outsider on the commission, fighting against the vested interests of the others, to arrive at the truth. “The bluntness of his character was something that I personally love, because I just hate being given the runaround, you know?” says Hurt. In a film full of talking heads, Hurt, in a shaggy wig, keeps things energised by imbuing Feynman with an exuberant intelligence that is gripping to watch.
Hurt as Feynman. But can he do that New York accent?
Had Feymnman lived (he died in 1988), he would have been 95 tomorrow.
The inimitable zefrank1, of the biology “True Facts About . . .” series, has upped his game, and has produced a video called “Sad cat diary.” Henri-like in its dolorous resignation, it’s also hilarious.
It shows Tyson losing it in a science discussion with Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Tracy Day, Ira Flatow, and Bill Nye. The discussion was at an Arizona State University panel on “The Storytelling of Science” (you can see the full discussion here), where Tyson reacted rather violently when Krauss suggested that manned space exploration is driven mainly by the spirit of adventure rather than a search for scientific answers. I happen to agree with that, since the answers are about just as easily obtained with unmanned ventures.
In fact, I think that when John F. Kennedy first announced, in an address to Congress in 1961, that the country would try to send people to the Moon by the end of the decade (a prediction that proved correct), he explicitly referred to adventure—and also alluded to a race with the Russians. Speaking at Rice University in 1962, Kennedy famously said this: “We choose to to to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Shades of Edmund Hillary! But he’s right, for that speech kindled the American spirit, making it seem as if every American were participating in a marvelous adventure.
Tyson, promising to keep silent while Krauss speaks, can’t contain himself, and blurts out a stentorian stream of incoherence, asserting that manned space exploration was never driven by either exploration, science, or curiosity. Rather, Tyson claims, it was driven by the search for immortality (?) and for wealth. I don’t get that at all. When the Large Hadron Collider is mentioned, Tyson leaps from his chair and has to be restrained by Bill Nye.
This doesn’t seem to be a joke to me, or a James-Brown-like moment of fictional restraint. Rather, Tyson is simply ticked off. I have to say that, while applauding Tyson’s contributions to science education, I don’t share my readers’ enthusiasm for him. I dislike his weasel-words approach to admitting his nonbelief, and underneath his veneer of cordiality there seems to be a stream of anger. And of course there was the incident of Tyson withdrawing David Albert’s invitation to an American Museum of Natural History debate on the origins of the universe.
All the reprimands, prayers, chastisements, and denigrations of evolution I receive from religious people recede into obscurity when I get something like this email. It arrived yesterday and is posted with permission ( last name abbreviated by request). I’ve also verified, as far as I can, that this person is real and not pulling some kind of hoax:
Dear Professor Coyne:
I have been contemplating how to write this email to you. Let me start by saying I am a Christian but I am not here to argue about faith vs. belief vs. science nor am I here to tell you that what I believe is right while what you research is wrong. I am here to tell you that I wish I could apologize for the treatment of the scientific community by the majority of Christians.
In the past few days, I have seen the various blogs/posts/comments about your speech at Appalachian State University. In all honesty, it is hard for me to find a way to express the level of aggravation that I have with the majority of Christians who are posting on blogs and commenting about your speech. I had no idea just how badly the scientific community is maligned (it is much more observable in the era of social media). My frustration comes from so many areas.
I am frustrated because the majority of Christians who are critical have never researched evolution nor do they understand true science in general (in fact, I am still an amateur in this area as well but have been taking the MIT online open-course for biology to start learning). Christians will argue that “evolution” is simply a theory and holds no true weight. They do not understand what the theory even is nor do they understand how it has developed through the years. Those same Christians are also quick to discredit the major impact evolution has had on various areas of science such as genetics, medicine, and paleontology for no reason other than it does not agree with their beliefs.
Instead of trusting science, they would rather discredit true research with faulty methods. Instead of letting the evidence lead them to a hypothesis which can be tested (how evolution was developed and refined through the years), they start with two unproven starting points. Their two starting points are that God exists (which cannot be proven) and that Genesis (and the Bible in general) is the literal representation of how God created the universe (which is also 100% accurate). Their unproven starting points mean that every bit of evidence that supports evolution either has to fit in with their beliefs or has to be discredited as “flawed” science. In essence, their practice of research is backwards. Of course, the majority of people have no idea what any of the research says as they were born and raised and taught in an environment which does not allow for critical thinking and they simply argue what they were brainwashed to learn.
What bothers me most about this frustration is that they are taking biased opinions and putting them in an argument where they themselves have no standing! I would find their arguments about evolution similar to an Afghan Taliban cleric telling an American historian that Muslim terrorists did not fly jets into the World Trade Center on 9/11 but that Mossad (Israeli Secret Service) blew the buildings up from within. The evidence of the videotapes, the audiotapes and the remains of the jets doesn’t matter because of the presupposition of belief that the cleric has!
This leads me to my second point and another aspect of my frustration. This comes from the fact that most Christians ignore critical thinking in regards to their own religion. There are many ways that I can prove that Genesis is not a literal account of creation (thus disproving their second starting point above). If one researches how the Old Testament was written, one can see that the book cannot be 100% true in the ways that most Christians want it to. Most Christians believe it was a spoken word direct from God that Moses composed, however; there are too many inconsistencies for this opinion to be correct. Most research shows that Genesis (and most of the Old Testament in general) was an oral mythology that was spoken down from generation to generation. Those tales were likely composed much later in history when Israel was ruled by Persia and later exiled by Babylon. The scribes would add and retract from the stories when needed (usually in ways that would support Israel’s greatness and hope for a national future). They usually did not pay attention to consistency thus creating various accounts of events that do not align with one another (read the first two Chapters of Genesis carefully to see that there are two separate accounts of creation that are in disagreement with each other). There are inaccuracies, inconsistencies and errors when looking at the Bible as 100% in agreement with itself. These cannot be avoided in careful study of a Bible.
Also, if one researches the society in which the books were composed, they would find that the overall beliefs of that society (similar to the beliefs of Israel composed in Genesis) are grossly inadequate to comprehend what has since been learned through modern-day scientific truths. This can be proven and shown even without the controversial topic of evolution! If we look at how the Ancient societies viewed weather, we can see how inadequate their worldview was to understand rain and snow. If one believes in a literal Genesis they must also believe that there are heavenly storehouses that God would open and close in order to allow rain and snow to fall to the earth from the heavens. Most Christians don’t understand that this is how Israelites viewed weather but a careful reading of a Bible (and understanding of neighbor societies) shows it to be true. Science has shown us that there is much more to weather than an invisible dome covering the Earth that God opens and closes as he pleases. The way I view Genesis and much of the Old Testament is that they are mythologies that were created to explain the unexplainable (much of which has now become explainable). I can go into more detail about how inaccurate Genesis is in understanding today’s society but the discussion would get much longer.
With that said, I have my reasons for being a Christian, but I am not going to pretend that I will be able to find adequate scientific evidence for the existence of God or even that I can show that YHWH or the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible is the “correct” God to believe in. I will simply say that I follow Christianity because I find that if one decides to be humble, living in accordance to Jesus’ command of “loving others” as “loving one-self” this world would be a better world to live. I also feel that much of Jesus’ life reflects this ideal. Of course, this is my last and greatest frustration in reading the comments of those who cowardly confront you in anonymity and call themselves Christian. I feel that many Christians are extremely hypocritical and know nothing of love. They are supposed to follow Jesus in how they live their lives but are instead extremely self-righteous and arrogant always being right and tearing others down. If the identifying trait of Christianity is meant to be love, we do an extremely terrible job of making that known to the world; in fact, I would say the identifying trait of Christianity in today’s world is hypocrisy.
As a Christian, it did take me time to get used to your blog as much of the anti-religious topics and comments were hard to get through. In honesty, they still can be. However, when I first started reading your blog, I figured that many of the anti-religious comments were unprovoked, malicious and hateful. Now, after seeing how combative the Christian world is, how malicious and hateful they can be, I can say that the views of your readers can be seen as justifiable.
This email was meant in sincerity. My faith is a journey that has changed much through the years with studying and critical thinking. In the beginning of this email, I said I wish I could apologize. This is 100% accurate. I wish I had a position of influence in the Christian community where I could speak for them. I do not. I wish I could influence people to think critically and learn how to study properly. I do not. All I can do is come here and express my sadness in how a supposedly “loving” community treats a fellow man and his profession in the institution of science at large. I can apologize for times that I may have contributed to their arrogance (in the past before I began studying the topic). I can also apologize for being silent when mistruths about creation were taught in the Churches I lived in but that is the extent of it.
For my contributions I am sorry. For the actions of others, I am simply ashamed.
Sincerely,
Jim P
Now I could go on and ask Jim why he doesn’t just adhere to the “love” part of his faith and jettison the superstition, or I could question whether it’s a good strategy to unconditionally love everyone, but why bother? Jim is a gracious person who took the time to write a thoughtful and kind letter about the pushback I got for criticizing religion at Appalachian State. As Steven Weinberg famously said, a bit hyperbolically, “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” This is a case of a good person with religion doing good things. And if all the faithful were like this, and didn’t impose their revelations on everyone else, I wouldn’t worry so much about religion.
This email meant a lot to me, and I’ll acknowledge that the only way I can: by putting it up and sending Jim an autographed copy of WEIT with a cat drawn in it. It’s a good reminder that, in the end, we must judge religious people by both content of their character and their effect on the world.
Reply to Jim if you want, but I think you’ll agree with me that lecturing him or trying to dispel his notion of Christianity isn’t really the thing to do here.
The anonymous reader who lives in Idaho, and has sent us spectacular pictures of the landscape and animals around him (see here as well), just sent a new group of his photos. These feature a nesting bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and they are, as always, beautiful. Click to enlarge.
Yesterday reader/photographer Al Denelsbeck sent me this picture with the caption:
The pic is from yesterday, after a horrendous deluge cleared. We’d had a mantis hatching in an azalea bush by our porch a few weeks ago, and I’ve been following the little guys regularly.
