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.
BBC Radio 4 has launched a new daily series on British songbirds, ‘Tweet of the Day’. It’s two minutes long, narrated by David Attenborough and is on at 5:58 AM London time. Given that, one way or another, many WEIT readers will be in bed at that time, here’s the link so you can all listen to it. You get the end of the farming programme for a few seconds, before the thrush and Attenborough kick in.
Attenborough quotes Robert Browning’s poem ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’:
Oh, to be in England,
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England – now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows –
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge – That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
– Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
And here’s a video of various song thrushes tweeting away:
Two days of rioting in Bangladesh by conservative Islamists demanding an antiblasphemy law have left at least 19 people dead, more than 100 wounded and dozens of shops and vehicles destroyed, the official news agency BSS reported on Monday. The violence convulsed a country that was still reeling from a safety crisis in the garment industry that was set off by a deadly factory collapse last month.
Police officers armed with water cannons, sound grenades, tear gas and cudgels battled the protesters on Sunday and Monday in Dhaka, the capital, while the authorities banned further rallies and closed an Islamist television station accused of inciting the trouble, BSS reported on its Web site. It said at least three of the dead were police officers.
. . . Bangladesh’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, but its government is officially secular. Confrontations between conservative Islamists and the governing Awami League of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina have become increasingly violent this year, inflamed in part by judicial prosecutions of Islamists for war crimes related to the country’s fight for independence from Pakistan in 1971.
The tensions have been further aggravated by what Islamists regard as unpardonable blasphemies by bloggers, who are accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The Hefazat-e-Islami organization has been demanding a new law that would severely punish such acts, but Ms. Hasina has rejected the demand.
Note:
1. Those who are rioting are not the “atheist bloggers” or those who “insult the Prophet Muhammed.”
2. The rioters are calling for more extreme laws to punish critics of Islam, even though strong laws are already on the books. The atheist bloggers (four of whom have been jailed) can, for instance, be sentenced to up to ten years in jail for “hurting religious sentiments.” You can bet your tuchus that nobody is going to jail in Bangladesh for hurting Christian sentiments.
3. These are not just a few rioters, but thousands of them. And they explicitly say they’re acting in the name of Islam. It’s hard to avoid the impression that many of them have literally been driven insane by their faith.
How much more evidence do we need that the extremists and their supporters are more than just a tiny fraction of Islamic faithful, or that they’re motivated by things other than religion?
It’s deeply misguided to criticize the New Atheists for attacking Islam and branding it as an especially pernicious faith. It’s even more misguided to label them as racist “Islamophobes”. Such critics are in fact erecting a double standard for human rights, as Islam is clearly more oppressive than other major faiths, and more eager to impose its religious “truths” on others. It is the faith whose members can embrace burqas, honor killings, fatwas, and acid attacks on schoolgirls. It is the unique faith that threatens to exterminate people who name teddy bears after their prophet. (I’ll be discussing the new Pew Report on Muslim beliefs later this week).
Rivzi begins by recounting Thomas Jefferson’s meeting in 1786 with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Libya’s ambassador to London. Jefferson noted:
The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
This thread of jihadist thought continues to this day. Yet while those words were once imputed to religious belief, now many liberals are desperately ascribe them to causes not in existence in 1786. Rivzi continues:
So where did Abdul Rahman Adja’s bin Laden-esque words come from?
They couldn’t have been a response to American imperialism (the start of the conflict precedes the presidency of George Washington), U.S. foreign policy, globalization, AIPAC or Islamophobia. Yet his words are virtually identical to those spouted ad nauseum by jihadists today who justify their bellicosity as a reaction to these U.S.-centric factors, which were nonexistent in Adja’s time.
How do we make sense of this? Well, the common denominator here just happens to be the elephant in the room.
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and the foiled al Qaeda-backed plot in Toronto, the “anything but jihad” brigade is out in full force again. If the perpetrators of such attacks say they were influenced by politics, nationalism, money, video games or hip-hop, we take their answers at face value. But when they repeatedly and consistently cite their religious beliefs as their central motivation, we back off, stroke our chins and suspect that there has to be something deeper at play, a “root cause.”
The taboo against criticizing religion is still so astonishingly pervasive that centuries of hard lessons haven’t yet opened our eyes to what has been apparent all along: It is often religion itself, not the “distortion,” “hijacking,” “misrepresentation” or “politicization” of religion, that is the root cause.
The recent attack on “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens by Nathan Lean and Murtaza Hussain have been endorsed by renowned liberal writers like Glenn Greenwald, who has also recently joined a chorus of denialists convinced that jihad and religious fervor had nothing to do with the Tsarnaev brothers’ motive, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. (HuffPost Live recently had a great segment holding Murtaza Hussain accountable for his claims.)
In a way, these attacks on Dawkins et al. are a good thing. Typically, resorting to ad hominem attacks and/or labeling the opposing side “bigoted” is a last resort, when the opponent is unable to generate a substantive counterargument.
I also understand that extremism in any ideology isn’t a distortion of that ideology. It is an informed, steadfast adherence to its fundamentals, hence the term “fundamentalism.” When you think of a left-wing extremist, do you think of a greedy capitalist? Would you imagine a right-wing extremist to be dedicated to government-funded social welfare programs? The “extremists” and strict followers of the Jain faith, which values the life of every being, including insects, don’t kill more than their average co-religionists. Instead, they avoid eating foods stored overnight so as not to kill even the microorganisms that may have collected in the meantime. In a true religion of peace, the “extremists” would be nonviolent pacifists to an extreme (and perhaps annoying) degree, not the opposite.
Too often in the aftermath of these tragedies, whether they occur in Boston or Karachi, I notice people rushing to defend the faith from judgment instead of acknowledging the victims. If a link is considered or even discovered, everyone from the Western media to Hollywood deems that person “Islamophobic” for linking Islam to terrorism.
But the number-one reason that terrorism is linked with Islam is not the media or “Islamophobes.” It is that jihadi terrorists link themselves with Islam.
. . . For the fast-growing secularist/humanist movement, criticism of religion isn’t a demonstration of bigotry but a struggle against it. To us, bigotry against bigotry isn’t bigotry, and intolerance of intolerance isn’t intolerance.
Those liberals who accuse critics of Islam of being “Islamophobes” remind me of those pro-evolutionists who get mad when I emphasize the obvious fact that virtually all creationism comes from religion. There is no doubt of that, and no doubt that the tenets of Islam motivate most Islamic terrorists. They say so! Are we to second-guess them? In fact, religiously-motivated creationists hide their true motivations (e.g., advocates of Intelligent Design) far more often than do Muslim jihadists.
The “Islamophobia” canard comes, in part, from a sneaking suspicion that it’s bad to criticize religion because some people simply need it. Combined with this faitheism is the double standard that we shouldn’t hold other ethnic groups to as high a standard as we do our own. But when religions infringe on basic human rights, as Islam does so frequently, then it is not bigotry to criticize it.
Even more misguided is the assertion that Islam’ is no worse than any other religion in suppressing human rights. As if Quakers would throw acid on schoolgirls or issue fatwas! Such claims are simply stupid, but typical of a mentality that abandons all rationality when defending faith itself.
What Sam proposed here is that he would post cartoons making fun of any faith other than Islam, and in return Greenwald would post anti-Islamic cartoons. A very clever proposal, and one with a predictable outcome.
Every month or so, an old friend in England sends me a pile of clippings from British newspapers: things he thinks I’d like to read. They’re eclectic but mostly about wine and music. Two nights ago, making my way through the latest batch, I found a piece from the March 6 Times by Billy Connelly, “My hero, a quiet guitarist called Bert.”
The “Bert” is, of course, Bert Jansch, one of my own musical heroes. If you haven’t heard him or know about him, I have no time to fill you in. He was a Glaswegian and died too young—in 2011 at 67, from cancer. And his music was sui generis. His voice was nasal but somehow melded perfectly with his guitar, and his style of playing was haunting. Sometimes he’d put his fingers underneath the strings.
In 1965, when I was in high school, I somehow discovered his first album, bearing just his name. The Times piece noted that Jansch was paid just 100 pounds for the work, but the album sold 150,000 copies (one to me).
Despite his influence on other musicians (including Neil Young, Jimmy Page, Paul Simon, and Donovan), Jansch never seemed to hit the big time. He remains, I think, a cult musician. As Connelly said in the piece, “Everyone else seemed heartbroken that he didn’t get what they saw as his due, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all.”
If you’re a fan of Jansch, you’ll enjoy hearing these songs again, all from his first album. (His later efforts with the group Pentangle don’t move me as much.)
The first is his most famous: a solo guitar piece called “Angie”. It was written by Davy Graham but Jansch’s cover remains the best. If you’re a Paul Simon fan, you’ll remember it reworked as the song “Anji” on the Simon and Garfunkel album “Sounds of Silence”:
“Running from Home”:
“I Have No Time”
Finally, another of my favorites: “Needle of Death,” about a heroin addict. Bit of this appear in Neil Young’s song, “Ambulance Blues,” and the two performed it together in 2006.
“As much of a great guitar player as Jimi [Hendrix] was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar … and my favorite.” —Neil Young
Having just read of Jerry’s lamentable indisposition (get well!), I thought I’d write something brief that at least might get discussion going among WEIT readers till he can post again. (And in passing I note that perhaps encountering the greatness of salamanders in the wild for the first time caused a sensory overload which upset Jerry’s homeostatic equilibrium.) So here goes.
Unlike some readers, I have no great qualms about philosophy as an academic discipline or realm of human endeavor. In fact, quite the opposite. For a considerable part of last academic year I was even the chairman of my university’s philosophy department (a fact still attested to at this time, due to the slowness with which webpages are updated; an unusual set of circumstances, mostly revolving around the fate of small departments at small universities, led to my being chair, but these need not detain us).
I think philosophy has much to offer us, and Jerry has remarked often upon the long traditions of the philosophy of ethics as the basis of secular ethics and a counterweight to faith-based ethics. But I’ll mention two things here that relate to philosophy of science in particular.
First, there’s conceptual clarification. Some ideas in science are difficult and complex, and philosophers have often contributed to the elucidation of the implications and assumptions underlying our ideas. Philosophers, qua philosophers, do not contribute empirical data, but by helping to clarify our ideas they help us think more clearly about our data and the world. Work by the late David Hull on species, and by Elliott Sober on the nature of selection are two examples that spring immediately to mind.
Second, understanding scientific methodology, and how/why it works, is a branch of epistemology– the study of how we know things. I found reflection on scientific methods, and what they imply about the nature of science, indispensable in my own development as a scientist (something I began thinking about in grad school). The understandings I achieved then, and their development over time, have been at the core of my nearly twenty years of teaching general education students about the nature of science, how we can evaluate claims about the world, and what claims can be said to be more or less reliable. It has also been very important in my teaching of statistics, for statistics is just a specific instantiation of the general problem of scientific inference. In this area, I think immediately of Philip Kitcher‘s contributions to a general understanding of the progress of scientific inquiry, and Elliott Sober and Malcolm Forster‘s contributions to statistical epistemology in particular.
I could go on, but I promised to be brief. Have at it.
You might have noticed a complete absence of posts today. That’s because your genial host has had a recurrence of his tummy bug, or whatever the damn thing is. I’ll spare you the details except that I am unable to do anything beyond lying in bed.
I hope to be in better form tomorrow, but if posts are thin blame it on microbes. Perhaps Matthew or Greg can fill in for a bit.
Over and out.
p.s. Anyone who brings me two liters of 7-up or Diet Coke gets an autographed book.
I’m posting a few holiday snaps from this week’s seminar trip to Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
It’s very strange for a biologist to reach his dotage without seeing a salamander in the wild, but I confess to that deficiency. But it was rectified Thursday night when my host, Howie Neufeld, along with accomplished herpetologist and naturalist Wayne Van Devender, accompanied me into the “field” (a wooded preserve near the Appalachian State University student parking lot) to hunt for salamanders. We’d failed to see one on Grandfather Mountain the previous day, and Wayne promised that we’d find one within ten minutes of searching on campus.
Still dressed in my lecturing finery, and equipped with a flashlight, I searched in vain for about 20 minutes with my companions.We were about to give up when Wayne gave a shout, and, sure enough, he’d found a fine (albeit juvenile) specimen of Plethodon cylindraceus, the “white-spotted slimy salamander” common in the Appalachian Mountains. (It’s not really slimy, but does have a sticky defensive substance on its body that adheres to your hands, leaving a residuum of dried goo.) The one below is, as you see small, but they apparently can grow to 20 cm (8 inches) long.
Wayne is a crack wildlife photographer, and photographed the salamander with a flash and macro lens. Look at this beautiful little creature!
I’m told that Wayne has taken about 150,000 pictures of salamanders (he’s now working on a book on the snails of North Carolina).
The streams of the Appalachians are also home to North America’s largest salamander, the “hellbender,” (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis), which lives solely in streams harboring large rocks under which it hides. One of the students did a master’s thesis on these animals, tagging them to see how much they move. The answer: not much. One apparently didn’t move for six months, while another transited every few weeks between a single pair of rocks.
Hellbenders (I didn’t see any) are big’uns. Wikipedia notes:
Both males and females grow to an adult length of 24 to 40 cm (9.4 to 16 in) from snout to vent, with a total length of 30 to 74 cm (12 to 29 in), making them the third-largest aquatic salamander species in the world (after the Chinese giant salamander and the Japanese giant salamander) and the largest in North America. An adult weighs 1.5 to 2.5 kg (3.3 to 5.5 lb). Hellbenders reach sexual maturity at about five years of age, and may live 30 years in captivity.
Here’s a nice short film of the animal with appropriate music:
Now the Chinese giant salamander(Andrias davidianus), which can reach 1.8 m long and weigh 36 kg (80 lb) , is the world’s largest salamander, but it’s critically endangered and I doubt I’ll ever see one in the wild (there are a few in U.S. zoos). But have a look at this photo:
And since I discovered the cuteness of salamanders, I’m adding a photo of the world’s second largest species, the Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus), only slightly smaller than its Chinese relative and also endangered:
A few other photos (click to enlarge). Boone is located high in the mountains, and on the way there from the Charlotte airport we stopped at Grandfather Mountain (1812 m), a very famous viewpoint that’s the centerpiece of a state park. You can see at least three states from the peak, and as far as Charlotte itself, a 1.5-hour drive away.
The mists had socked in the mountain by the time we reached the top, but on the way up they parted for one brief shining moment, and we got a view of a wooded, mountainous landscape stretching to the horizon, about to be veiled by cloud.
My host Howie studies a plant growing in the area, and there were lots of specimens in the park. It’s the ground cover below with the lovely round red and green leaves: Galax. Howie emailed me a bit about its biology:
The species name is Galax urceolata. It is also called beetleweed, since it is often pollinated by them.
Natives have harvested these leaves for over a century, but today, the plant is poached from public lands, and the sclerophyllous leaves (stiff, waxy, shiny) are used as table decorations in restaurants worldwide. Poachers get one penny/leaf on average, and it is a $20 M/yr business. It is the third most harvested plant in the southern Appalachians.
It forms huge clones, and only occasionally reproduces by seed (which are very tiny). Galax has deep underground rhizomes which help it survive the occasional ground fire, from which it sprouts quite readily. Leaves are evergreen, and usually last into their third season, dying as that year’s leaves come out in late May. In the winter, plants that get abundant sun turn a deep burgundy red, due to the production of anthocyanins. These anthocyanins protect the leaf from excess high light during cold weather, and reduce photoinhibition of photosynthesis.
. . . The Galax smell is mentioned by Charles Frazier in his bestselling novel Cold Mountain (which by the way, is a real mountain just east of Waynesboro, NC near some of my research sites), who writes that is smells like someone’s asshole. This refers to the fact that either the plant, or its roots, or perhaps some product of decomposition, gives off an odor very similar to dog poop. I’ve tried to determine what gives rise to the smell, but without success – the mystery continues. The first published paper on the smell was around 1918. If you place leaves in a bag and let them sit, no smell. Same for the roots. But in the field, you smell it. Very strange.
Finally, the iconic animal of the Appalachians is the American black bear (Ursus americanus), represented by this nice statue of a mother and cubs in the park’s small museum. Note that somebody placed fake bear poop under one of the cubs. We called this to the attention of the curator, asking about it, and, unfortunately, he removed it.
Boone, North Carolina is named after the famous American frontiersman Daniel Boone (1734-1820; second only to Davy Crockett in fame), who hunted in the mountains and plains nearby. There are several places where people have found inscriptions on trees supposedly carved by Boone and marking that he “killd a bar [bear] on this tree.” These were once thought to be fraudulent, but now, I think, some have been declared genuine. Here’s a replica of one marking a kill when Boone was about forty:
Wikipedia informs me that Lord Byron includes several stanzas about Boone in his poem “Don Juan”, including these immortal lines (not!):
Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals any where;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoyed the lonely vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.
Finally, the park and its environs are famous places to hunt for gemstones, and were the object of a gold rush that antedated the California gold rush of 1849. The museum displays gold nuggets and local minerals, including this specimen of amythest, the largest crystal ever found in North America (the information is below).
