A Christian sends me email

May 4, 2013 • 7:09 am

Well, I assumed that this bloke was a Christian from the tone of his email, and verified it later (see below) with a few clicks of the mouse.

A person named—ironically—Jeff Templeton attended my speech at Appalachian State University on Thursday and tried to leave this comment on the ASU thread. Instead of putting it up as a comment, though, I thought it deserved to be seen above the fold, allowing Mr. Templeton the attention he so richly desires and deserves.

Jeff Templeton of Boone, North Carolina is one of the owners of Templeton Tours, Inc. an outfit that runs “Christian cruises.”

Here’s what he sent. Feel free to respond if you wish, but be polite (or try to!) No comments that he looks like an ape!

I attended your lecture last night at ASU and found your comments during the question and answer section to resemble those of a Radical Fundamental Evangelical Atheist. You went well beyond the world of empirical science and ventured into the realm of hyperbole and rhetoric. Substitute the word “religious” in your comments with “homosexual” and it would qualify as hate speech. You have no more evidence to support your claims that the “world would be better off without religion” than a believer does that a single deity created the universe. Wait a minute, the believer at least has the Bible as a reference text. Stick to science, and leave the social-engineering evolutionist conjecture to the Hitlers and Stalins of the world.

It’s a great pity that Mr. Templeton didn’t see fit to cite any examples of the kind of stuff that he sees as hyperbole or unevidenced, but the data on the connection between religiosity and antievolutionism was amply evidenced, as were the data showing a connection between social dysfunctionality and religiosity.

The Bible, in contrast, is pure fiction, not a “reference text.”  As for Hitler and Stalin, well, I don’t think that merits an answer, unless Templeton sees my desire to make a more egalitarian and more just world reminiscent of those dictators.

Pity that Mr. Templeton didn’t have the guts to stand up and air his differences with me in the Q&A session. But I did appreciate the tone of Christian love in his message.

Oh, and here’s a specimen of a Templeton Tour.  Sounds like a grand time!

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Caturday felids: Doctor Who kittehs

May 4, 2013 • 6:13 am

I’ve never watched a single episode of Doctor Who, but I know that many readers love this series, which I think has been on television for nigh on five decades.  Here are a series of cat photos related to the show, and your job is to guess the relationship.  These were contributed by Who-loving reader Grania.

There is no prize except your satisfaction in getting the right answer.

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catmask

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xxx

Doctor Who Kitty

New Yorker cartoons on religion

May 3, 2013 • 11:31 am

Four days ago I posted on Gary Marcus’s nice piece in the New Yorker, “Can science lead to faith?“, decrying the new brand of natural theology that purports to find evidence for God, the divine, or the numinous in the natural world.

An alert reader has called my attention to a column that Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of the New Yorker (and himself a cartoonist), posted on the magazine’s site, “The cosmology of cartoonists.” Mankoff, apparently inspired by Marcus’s piece, first posts one of his cartoons—a good one:

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And then offers his own beliefs:

Just to clear up any ambiguity, I’m not a believer, or even agnostic, I’m an atheist (denomination: Jewish). That means the God I don’t believe in is different from the God you don’t believe in if, for example, you’re a Muslim atheist, a Catholic atheist, or a Protestant atheist. But if we’re all wrong and God actually does exist, in my opinion He’s going to turn out to be Jewish. At least, I certainly hope so, because if He is Jewish I figure He can take a joke.

That’s my opinion. Is it representative of other cartoonists?

Mankoff then polls other cartoonists for their beliefs, and almost all of them turn out to be nonbelievers, though most call themselves “agnostics” rather than “atheists”. Each artist also contributes a cartoon. I’ll put up a couple, but go see the lot:

Roz Chast:

I’m an agnostic. I would be an atheist, except that when I was a young ’un I took L.S.D. a few times, and, especially the first time, had an experience that made me not so sure of my atheism. When I am old and farther along Decrepit Highway than I am now, I want to try them mind-expanding chemicals again. Because what will there be to lose?

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Jack Ziegler:

Agnostic, I suppose, but it’s not something I ever think about. Raised Catholic, but stopped at age thirteen, when I realized what a load it was. Don’t like any religions at this point—think they’re all nuts to one degree or another. And they cause way too much trouble in the world—as they always have.

Don’t get me started.

130506_cn-4_p465One moar:

Frank Cotham:

I think of myself as a believer, but without interference from a church.

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I’d love to see the New Yorker get tougher on religion, for it’s had a history of being soft on faith. These cartoons are, by and large, a good start.

h/t: KCS

A modern bestiary

May 3, 2013 • 9:51 am

by Greg Mayer

Last month the University of Chicago Press published The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson. I’ve not seen the book yet, but it seems to be a natural history of a diverse set of odd and interesting animals, in the style of a classic or medieval bestiary, and The New York Review of Books has published a chapter excerpt, the one on the octopus.

Greater blue ring octopus, Indonesia, from NYRB.
Greater blue ring octopus, Indonesia, from NYRB.

A taste of the excerpt:

In Victor Hugo’s 1866 blockbuster, Toilers of the Sea, the hero is caught in the grip of a giant octopus. The creature is “the very enigma of evil, a viscosity with a will, a boneless, bloodless, fleshless creature with one orifice serving as both mouth and anus, a medusa served by eight snakes, coming as if from a world other than our own.” Hugo seems to have read his Pliny, but he pulls out all the stops in wild exaggeration and extreme anatomical confusion:

It is a pneumatic machine that attacks you. You are dealing with a footed void. Neither claw thrusts nor tooth bites, but an unspeakable scarification. A bite is formidable, but less so than such suction. The claw is nothing compared to the sucker. The claw, that’s the beast that enters your flesh; the sucker, that’s you yourself who enters into the beast. Your muscles swell, your fibers twist, your skin bursts beneath this unworldly force, your blood spurts and frightfully mixes with the mollusk’s lymph. The beast is superimposed upon you by its thousand vile mouths….

Coincidentally, I was just mentioning octopuses to my evolution class the other day, noting that while the eyes of octopuses and vertebrates are not homologous as eyes— the common ancestor of mollusks and vertebrates did not have eyes, nor did the common ancestors of each of the two groups (there are many primitively eyeless mollusks and chordates alive today)– their eyes are developed, in part, from common genes, opsins and crystallins. Their visual systems exhibit what is sometimes called deep homology— the structures of modern forms were not present in the common ancestor, but some of the genes that contributed to the convergent or parallel evolution of the structures were present in distant ancestors.

Octopus are also known for their smarts, their ability to travel overland for short distances, and their strength, as well as their eyes. The following video highlights their strength

My talk at Appalachian State University

May 3, 2013 • 7:37 am

My talk at ASU last night (poster below) was live-streamed, so although there was an overflow crowd, lot of other people apparently watched it on the livestream feed.

I thought it went well, and, surprisingly, there was virtually no hostility from the audience, either in their reactions when I said things like “we must loosen the hold of religion on the American mind” or during the Q&A period.  No creationists came forth, either.

The book-signing, during which I had to draw many cats (they sold out of books, and virtually everyone knew the secret phrase, “Felis sylvestris catus“), also was heartening. Lots of people confessed to me that they were also nonbelievers but couldn’t “come out” in a place like North Carolina for fear of alienating their family, friends, or coworkers.  If you were one of them, thanks for sharing, and if at some point you feel like going more public, I’d urge you to do so. I see the growth of atheism like a nuclear chain reaction: for every person who goes public, that inspires several others to do likewise. What I do know is that there are lot of closet atheists in Boone!

But reaction wasn’t uniformly positive. If you look on the ASU Facebook page, you’ll find an announcement of my talk with, as of 10 a.m. today, 72 comments. (A faculty member alerted me to this.)

This is what we’re up against, and I suspect most of these folks are either students at or alums of ASU. Note that all of these were posted before my talk!

Neg 1

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And then there were comments bespeaking the worst sort of antintellectualism:

Koolaid

Send me back

Don’t worry, Ms. Cobb, I’m leaving today. And, fortunately, the people I met at ASU were, unlike you, lovely and hospitable!

Monkey

Yes, Mr. Long, that’s the way to oppose an idea: remark on the speaker’s appearance.  Stay classy! But I have news for you: I resemble a monkey because I am closely related to them—and so are you.  And, whether or not you want to believe it, both you and I are apes. Yes, apes!

There are of course positive comments on the thread, but so far not much reaction to the talk itself, which should be interesting. I welcome pushback because, as General George Patton said in the opening speech of the eponymous movie, “Every true American loves the sting of battle.” I prefer lecturing to an audience that includes some opponents!

Thanks very much to the friendly students and faculty of ASU I met, who ply their trade in one of the most beautiful locations in the U.S., and especially to Dr. Howie Neufeld, who took a lot of time out of his busy schedule to sponsor me and shepherd me around.

JAC poster

Is there moral responsibility?

May 3, 2013 • 4:38 am

I’m travelling today and have little time to post, but I wanted to add one comment  to what I said yesterday.  That is this: I favor the notion of holding people responsible for good and bad actions, but not morally responsible. That is, people are held accountable for, say, committing a crime,because punishing them simultaneously acts as a deterrent, a device for removing them from society, and a way to get them rehabilitated—if that’s possible.

To me, the notion of moral responsibility adds nothing to this idea.  In fact, the idea of moral responsibility implies that a person had the ability to choose whether to act well or badly, and (in this case) took the bad choice. But I don’t believe such alternative “choices” are open to people, so although they may be acting in an “immoral” way, depending on whether society decides to retain the concept of morality (this is something I’m open about), they are not morally responsible.  That is, they can’t be held responsible for making a choice with bad consequences on the grounds that they could have chosen otherwise.

That said, all the strictures and punishments I mentioned yesterday still hold, and retributive punishment is still out.  But moral responsibility implies free choices, and those don’t exist.

Now someone will ask this: “Why not punish innocent people because that could also serve as a deterrent?”  I don’t agree with that because such a strategy is bad for society for two reasons. It removes two of the three justifications for punishment (rehabilitation and removal from society of dangerous elements), and has the additional deleterious effect of making everyone scared that they can be arrested and punished even if they’re completely innocent. That casts a bad pall over society, making everyone paranoid.

On the way back from the natrualism conference in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, I argued this point of view with Dan Dennett for 2.5 hours. Dan maintained that, despite determinism, it’s valuable to retain the notion of moral responsibility, while I saw nothing that it adds to society.  I know Dan knows a lot more about philosophy than I do, but when I feel that I’m right, I’ll hold my ground, always trying to see if there’s some way I could be wrong. In this case I don’t think I was.

The perils of “balanced” reporting

May 2, 2013 • 7:06 pm

by Greg Mayer

Curtis Brainard, editor of The Observatory, the Columbia Journalism Review‘s online science journalism section, has a nice article up tracing the role of the news media in encouraging and spreading anti-vaccination pseudoscience, including the role of the disgraced British physician Andrew Wakefield, and the fear mongering of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (The latter once wrote a piece for Salon, which Salon later deleted, in doing so decrying the fraud tainted “science” of those propagating ” the debunked, and dangerous, autism-vaccine link.”) He discusses the differing reactions and developments in the UK and the US, including how  anti-vaccine pseudoscience developed later in the US, and how some journalists built their careers around promoting pseudoscience.

One thing he notes is that “balanced” reporting seems to have helped encourage the spread of the bogus claims:

[T]he study [of journalistic coverage] raises the problem of “objectivity” in stories for which a preponderance of evidence is on one side of a “debate.” In such cases, “balanced” coverage can be irresponsible, because it suggests a controversy where none really exists. (Think climate change, and how such he-said-she-said coverage helped sustain the illusion of a genuine debate within the science community.)

Although Brainard did not mention it, I’m sure that WEIT readers will immediately see the parallels to coverage of creationism and “teach the controversy” campaigns. I once parodied such he said-she said coverage here at WEIT:

You’ve all read the kind of story that will have a line like, “Dr. Smith, a paleontologist at the natural history museum, said Triceratops had been extinct for more than 60 million years before the origin of man, while Dr. Jones from the institute said Triceratops had been ridden by men like horses until the recent worldwide flood drowned them all”.

I’m glad to see that media critics like Brainard are critiquing this type of reporting, and that many journalists are becoming aware of the dangers of “balance” when one side has nothing at all. Other previous posts on vaccines at WEIT here and here. For regular coverage of medical pseudoscience, see Orac’s Respectful Insolence, and Ben Goldacres’s Bad Science.

h/t Andrew Sullivan