Nasty atheist-bashing in Salon

March 31, 2013 • 7:45 am

Christ has risen, and so has the bile of Nathan Lean, author of a particularly nasty bit of atheist-bashing in Salon, “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheist flirt with Islamophobia.”  It’s so over the top that it made me wonder about the guy who wrote it. Lean, it turns out, is a graduate student at Georgetown University, editor-in-chief of a group called Aslan Media, a “militant” opponent of Israel, and author of the following book (note the endorsement):

Lean

After reading several of these tirades this week, all very similar, I’m wondering about the reason behind the recent spate of attacks on New Atheists (NAs).

The main reason, I think, is their success. Despite arguments that the efforts of people like Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins have failed, new books and articles attacking them continue to appear. If New Atheism is such a failure, why do so many people continue to attack it? There’s no point in beating a dead horse.

But the dead horse refuses to lie down.  And, in fact, books by New Atheists continue to decisively outsell books by its critics. That brings us to a second possible motivation: jealousy.  Many of these critics, including Clay Naff (see yesterday’s post), Michael Ruse, and now Lean (see below), harp repeatedly on the success of NA books and lectures. Indeed, they even use this success to accuse the NAs of being motivated by money. But that’s clearly untrue. NAs are driven by passion to expunge a poisonous superstition from humanity. Anyone who knows them sees this is true.

Here is the Amazon ranking of three books by the NAs that Lean despises, as well as the ranking of his own book, which appeared just a few months ago. (The NA books are, of course, much older.)

Lean’s book, The Islamophobia Industry: #106,786 (Sept. 2012)
The God Delusion (Dawkins): #720
The End of Faith (Harris): #2802
God is not Great (Hitchens):  #1652

Hell, even my book, at #9355, tops Lean’s by a long shot, and it came out four years ago.

But that aside, let’s examine Lean’s claims.

His main one is that the Three Horsemen he names are guilty of “Islamophobia,” which he never really defines. So let me draw a distinction here: I see “Islamophobia” as “fear or hatred of Muslims,” that is, a bigotry against Muslims that leads people to see them as less than human, to treat them worse than other people, or to discriminate against them in unlawful or immoral ways. And that’s the way critics like Lean use it.  Used this way “Islamophobia” is a fear and hatred of Muslim people, not a fear and hatred of the religious doctrine they hold. The latter, which is the main object of New Atheist criticism, is not identical to the former. Granted, it’s hard to like someone who wants to kill teachers who name teddy bears after the Prophet, but the whole object of New Atheist opprobrium is exposing the irrationality of religious beliefs and the harm they do to society.  There’s little doubt that Islam is the most harmful of beliefs ascendant in today’s world. To oppose it is not bigotry, but rationality.

Nevertheless, Lean trots out the usual accusations (all indented quotes are from Lean’s piece):

1.  The New Atheists are strident and motivated by money. They’re just too popular!

The New Atheists, they are called, offer a departure from the theologically based arguments of the past, which claimed that science wasn’t all that important in disproving the existence of God. Instead, Dawkins and other public intellectuals like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens suffocate their opponents with scientific hypotheses, statistics and data about the physical universe — their weapons of choice in a battle to settle the scores in a debate that has raged since the days of Aristotle. They’re atheists with attitudes, as polemical as they are passionate, brash as they are brainy, and while they view anyone who does not share their unholier-than-thou worldview with skepticism and scorn, their cogitations on the creation of the universe have piqued the interest of even many believers. With that popularity, they’ve built lucrative empires. Dawkins and Harris are regulars in major publications like the New York Times and the Economist, and their books — “The Selfish Gene” and “The God Delusion” by Dawkins and “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Harris — top bestseller lists and rake in eye-popping royalties.

If Lean is going to accuse New Atheists of venality, then it’s fair to accuse him of jealousy. So I do.

2. The New Atheists are arrogant.

Four days after the [9/11] tragedy, Dawkins could barely contain his intellectual triumphalism. “Those people [the terrorists] were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards,” he wrote in the Guardian. “On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East, which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place.”

What, exactly, is “triumphalist” about that? It doesn’t denigrate the bombers as idiots, but singles out religion as their main motivation. Is something wrong with that?

3. The New Atheists hate Muslims.

The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason. “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death,” writes Harris, whose nonprofit foundation Project Reason ironically aims to “erode the influence of bigotry in our world.”

For Harris, the ankle-biter version of the Rottweiler Dawkins, suicide bombers and terrorists are not aberrations. They are the norm. They have not distorted their faith by interpreting it wrongly. They have lived out their faith by understanding it rightly. “The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge,” he writes in “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

The invective is not against human beings, but against their beliefs and how those beliefs make them—à la Steven Weinberg—do bad things. It’s against Islam, not Muslims.

I see nothing wrong with what Harris wrote. “Backwoods racists”? Really? And Lean’s accusation of “bigotry” is way off the mark.  Is someone who opposes the ideology of the Republican party in the U.S. an “anti-Republican bigot”? Is someone who despises homophobia and the claim that gays are sinful an “anti-homophobic bigot?” Only opposing religion earns you the label of “bigot.” As always, religion demands special privileges.

4.  New Atheists are theologically unsophisticated. This comes from one claim: that Dawkins hasn’t read the Qur’an:

Dawkins, in a recent rant on Twitter, admitted that he had not ever read the Quran, but was sufficiently expert in the topic to denounce Islam as the main culprit of all the world’s evil: “Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter and verse like I can for Bible. But [I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today.” How’s that for a scientific dose of proof that God does not exist?

A few days later, on March 25, there was this: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read the Qur’an. You don’t have to read “Mein Kampf” to have an opinion about Nazism.”

It’s an extraordinary feat for an Oxford scholar to admit that he hasn’t done the research to substantiate his belief, but what’s more extraordinary is that he continues to believe the unsupported claim. That backwards equation — insisting on a conclusion before even launching an initial investigation — defines the New Atheists’ approach to Islam. It’s a pompousness that only someone who believes they have proven, scientifically, the nonexistence of God can possess.

Curiously, Lean doesn’t mention that both Harris and Hitchens have read the Qur’an (as have I), or that even atheists know the Bible better than do Christians. Does that mean that Christians are less qualified to defend Christianity than atheists are to attack it? And Dawkins’s point is right: do we really need to read Mein Kampf before criticizing neo-Nazis? How many of us who readily and rightly decry the Nazis have read Mein Kampf?

This is all a distraction, of course, for Lean spends his whole piece attacking New Atheists as bigots without addressing their arguments against faith. He also manages to say that some right-wing people—genuine bigots—are also opposed to Islam, as if somehow that invalidates the arguments of Dawkins & Co. This shopworn guilt-by-association trope is like saying that anyone who favors highway construction is evil because Hitler built the Autobahn.

Lean closes by instantiating his own ignorance of what New Atheism is all about: the eradication of baseless superstition by pointing out a lack of evidence for God, our inability to know what a god wants, even if it existed, and the damage that religion does to society:

How the New Atheists’ anti-Muslim hate advances their belief that God does not exist is not exactly clear. In this climate of increased anti-Muslim sentiment, it’s a convenient digression, though. They’ve shifted their base and instead of simply trying to convince people that God is a myth, they’ve embraced the monster narrative of the day. That’s not rational or enlightening or “free thinking” or even intelligent. That’s opportunism. If atheism writ large was a tough sell to skeptics, the “New Atheism,” Muslim-bashing atheism, must be like selling Bibles to believers. After all, those who are convinced that God exists, and would otherwise dismiss the Dawkins’ and Harris’s of the world as hell-bound kooks, are often some of the biggest Islamophobes. It’s symbiosis — and as a biologist, Dawkins should know a thing or two about that. Proving that a religion — any religion — is evil, though, is just as pointless and impossible an endeavor as trying to prove that God does or doesn’t exist. Neither has been accomplished yet. And neither will.

Lean apparently doesn’t realize that religious superstition, which leads one to believe that he possesses the absolute truth, is of a piece with actions based on those superstitions. For if you have a pipeline to God’s will, it’s almost incumbent on you to do something about that.  Ergo opposition to abortion, meddling with peoples’ sex lives, suicide bombings, witch-burnings, and so on. Decrying the harms of religion is not a “digression,” but the very reason we oppose the follies of faith.

Maybe we can’t convince people that religion is evil (and not all are, I think, viz., Quakers), but I think that religion would be better if we left out the goddy parts. Then it wouldn’t be religion any more, but secular humanism.

As for proving that God doesn’t exist, we don’t do that. We argue that the evidence is overwhelming that God doesn’t exist—certainly not the Abrahamic “disembodied-person” God who is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient.  I suppose Lean would also criticize us because we haven’t proved that the Loch Ness monster or UFOs don’t exist.

In the end, it’s Lean who looks like a bigot, for he simply smears the New Atheists as people without taking on board their arguments. It is he who hasn’t read the relevant texts, and dislikes a group as people without engaging their views.

Easter in Poland

March 31, 2013 • 5:04 am

I have a deal with my friends Malgorzata  Koraszewska and Andrzej Koraszewski, who run the well-known Polish website Racjonalista, a beacon of secularism in that religious country. In return for letting them translate any of my posts they want without asking (it’s into the hundreds now), I get a daily picture of their young tabby cat Hili.  And it’s always in the form of a “dialogue,” in which Andrzej and Hili exchange quips. (They also own two dogs, Darwin and Emma.)

As it’s Easter in Poland, Hili got a special Easter treat: a “cat sausage” that she loves. Here’s today’s photo of Hili nomming her treat on the Good Book, along with the daily “Hili dialogue” (click to enlarge)

Hili: Would eating Easter sausage on the Koran offend religious feelings?
A: Yes, definitely.
Hili: And on the Bible?
A: Thank God, a bit less.

Hili on Easter

Malgorzata also explained the rest:

The strudel is a poppyseed cake, obligatory in Poland at Easter. I borrowed the Easter basket from the owner of Fitness [another cat who lives there, named after a health club where she was found as a kitten] and the tablecloth was embroidered by my mother. Our religious friends who got such a tablecloth from her are always using it at Easter, so we got it out for this picture. They will understand the meaning.

Easter in the Philippines: Man crucifies himself yearly

March 31, 2013 • 5:00 am

National Geographic put up this video two days ago on Good Friday; it shows a Filipino man who, every year, allows himself to get crucified (nails driven through the hands, not the feet) to fulfill a promise he made to God when his wife and baby daughter survived a dangerous episode of childbirth.  (Warning: very slight cringe-making moment when the nails are pounded into his hands. But there’s no blood.)

He also wears a “crown of thorns” made of barbed wire.

The sickest thing is that this is only one of 15 people who get crucified together in the Philippines. Well, this guy isn’t hurting anyone but himself, so I’ll just highlight this as just one more episode of religious delusion.

Maybe he should be thanking the doctors instead of Jesus.

h/t: SGM

An Easter treat: French cats play ‘Dansons la Capucine’

March 31, 2013 • 12:52 am

by Matthew Cobb

French children play a clapping game and sing a song called ‘Dansons la Capucine’. So too do French cats, as proved by this video. Even if you are allergic to cute commentaries put on videos, this will definitely amuse you. If you understand French, you’ll find it even funnier (though the subtitles are pretty good). For those of you who are among the >2 million people to have already seen this, well you can just watch it again.

NB ‘Capucine’ is the French common name for Nasturtium, though what that has to do with the dance that the song is about is unclear. Feel free to pitch in if you think you know (please go beyond the first page of Google in your research!)

TED revokes license for TEDx West Hollywood event!

March 30, 2013 • 12:26 pm

Oh boy, get ready for an explosion of wrath from Sheldrake-ians, woomeisters, and other pseudoscience boosters who are ready at a moment’s notice to cry “censorship.” My inbox is yearning for the hate mail!

Alert reader Jay just informed me that TED has revoked the license for the entire upcoming TEDx West Hollywood event, that is, the execrable parade of self-help and numinosity called “Brother can you spare a paradigm?” (See my posts on it here, here, and here.)

The official notice is on this site, and is announced as follows (note the new name and plea for dosh):ExTEDAn angry pro-PSI blog has published excerpts of an email from a representative of TED to organizer Suzanne Taylor, explaining their decision (Taylor’s credentials included making a video about how aliens produce crop circles):

…) And when we look at your speaker line-up, we see several people who promote — as fact — theories that are well outside what most scientists would accept as credible. We’re not saying all the speakers are off-base. Perhaps you could make a case for each of them individually. But when we look at the program as a whole, it’s clear that it doesn’t meet our guidelines.The problem is not the challenging of orthodox views. We believe in that. We’ve had numerous talks which do that. But we have rules about the presentation of science on the TEDx stage. We disallow speakers who use the language of science to claim they have proven the truth of ideas that are speculative and which have failed to gain significant scientific acceptance.

More than 2000 TEDx events will take place in the year ahead.  If your program is allowed to proceed, it will truly damage other TEDx organizers’ ability to recruit scientists and other speakers. (Indeed many in the TED and TEDx communities have already reached out to us to express their concern.)

We have reluctantly concluded that your program is not appropriate for TEDx, and we have to therefore terminate your license. You are of course welcome to still hold an event with these speakers. You just can’t associate it with TEDx. We are happy to work with you to figure out how to smoothly transition it into an event under a different name.  I’ll be happy to speak with you directly to facilitate this.

This is a nice victory for rationalism, and big plaudits go to TED and TEDx for making this decision. They’re gonna catch a lot of flak for this, and many accusations of “censorship”, but what they did was to stand up for science.

And don’t forget to keep an eye open for TEDx events in your area (there are hundreds worldwide), and report it to the TEDx organizers (and me) if you see anything really wonky, including pseudoscience or antiscience.

Clay Naff: Coyne isn’t filling that God-shaped hole

March 30, 2013 • 11:18 am

It’s so tiresome to read repeatedly that New Atheism is a failure because we aren’t replacing religion with anything else. This claim has been made once again in a HuffPo piece by Clay Naff called “Humanism’s moment of opportunity, going to waste.” Naff spends a lot of time going after me, and I’ll try to respond politely.

He first touts the success of American megachurches, and claims that, by comparison, non-theists (not just New Atheists) are a miserable failure:

Their non-theistic rivals? Not so much. The evidence is in, and it is clear: New Atheists have been a media success and a societal failure. They know how to sell books, how to debate, how to sneer, skewer, and satirize — in short, how to use all the squabbling skills of the modern academic (cf. the letters section of the New York Review of Books) — but the New Atheists seemingly have no idea how to build a positive social movement.

First of all, it’s not true that atheists aren’t trying to fill the gap left by God. Anthony Grayling, by all accounts a New Atheist, has just written a book suggesting the replacement of religion by enlightened humanism. And there are plenty of “nontheists”—granted, most not New Atheists—suggesting other replacements for religion, including Alain de Botton and Philip Kitcher.

Finally, is New Atheism really a failure? Naff’s only “evidence” is that the rise of the “nones” in America (those who profess no formal religion) has “passed the New Atheists by.” But I’m not convinced that vociferous atheism hasn’t contributed to this trend, nor do I think that all of us are required, when criticizing the follies of faith, to suggest replacements. Isn’t it enough to instill doubt in the young and fence-sitters that belief without evidence is not necessarily a good thing? How are we supposed to give hidebound Muslims, for instance, an alternative to the marginalization of women? Nevertheless, Naff takes us to task for our lack of positivity:

What gives? Surely, this is a moment of opportunity for us secular humanists. What are we doing wrong? The trouble, as I see it, is that leading public figures in New Atheism are known only for what they seem to be against: God, free will, purpose, hope … everything but apple pie. That’s great for the media, which feasts on conflict. But for building a mass movement? Clearly insufficient.

Worse yet, far from having the common touch many seem to revel in their elitism. A decade after Richard Dawkins endorsed “The Brights,” 50,000 people worldwide have signed on — a smaller crowd than you’d find at a college football game.

Well, I was never too keen on “The Brights,” but really, that’s a red herring.  Nobody but atheist-butters like Naff still talk about the “brights”. That idea is moribund. And “reveling in elitism” is just a pejorative term for “criticizing religion.”

Naff then takes me on:

One prominent New Atheist, biologist Jerry Coyne, recently addressed claims that the movement is failing in his blog. Much of his commentary follows a common New Atheist pattern: our critics are stupid (he uses the label twice in successive paragraphs), motivated by hatred, and prone to lie. (All of which is true in some instances, but it has become a reflex, a crowdpleaser, a litany.) What is most striking, however, is the semi-reflective passage near the end of his piece:

“Maybe atheism doesn’t answer the fundamental questions, but why should it–it’s simply a refusal to accept deities and those systems of worship that claim (in conflicting ways) to answer the “fundamental questions.” Most of us know that many of those so-called “fundamental questions,” like “Why are we here?” don’t have an answer beyond the laws of physics. Others, like “What is our purpose?” must be answered by each person on their own, for their [sic] is no general answer. Still others, like “How are we to live?”, are answered far better by secular reason than by dogmatic adherence to outdated or even immoral religious strictures.”

What a tangle of confusion. There’s the admission that perhaps atheism doesn’t fill the vacuum left when religion is left behind, followed by an angry retort that to do so would go beyond the brief of atheism. “That’s not my job!” you can almost hear him say.

Sorry about that typo, Mr. Naff, but that’s the only thing I’d change! I don’t descry an “angry snarl” in that quote, not any “tangle of confusion.” True, I don’t see it as my job to answer the Big Questions of Life, except for myself. Who am I to tell people where to find meaning in their lives? My non-academic job, as I see it, is simply to point out weaknesses in reasoning, and the inimical results when those weaknesses become public asseverations of faith that, in turn, have bad social consequences.  I’ll let Alain de Botton and Philip Kitcher do the heavy lifting when it comes to suggesting alternatives. I’m not a sociologist.

And, oh noes, I am guilty of scientism:

But Coyne can’t leave it at that. He rolls on beyond the pale and into scientism itself. “Most of us know,” he begins, and then reels off a list of philosophical questions and answers (or non-answers) that lie outside the realm of knowledge. It’s fine to assert that the laws of physics are foundational — provided you recognize that this is not knowledge but belief. (The difference being that knowledge must be justified by reason and evidence.) By definition, we have no evidence of anything beyond the light horizon, and certainly none that the laws of physics are foundational. It’s not even clear that any statement about getting to the bottom of reality is coherent. Does reality necessarily have a bottom? You don’t need a doctorate in cosmology or philosophy to answer that; you just need a modicum of rational humility: We don’t know.

Thanks to science, there are indeed things we know with a reasonable degree of certainty. Among these are the natural laws that govern everything we can observe, out to an astonishing distance. But whether there is anything “beyond” that (say, an infinite multiverse, a vast but finite cosmic landscape, or a mischievous teenager running the simulation) remains a matter of conjecture. That does not entitle us to affirm “There be dungeons and dragons,” but neither does it sanction the conjectures of cosmologists. There is room to imagine, interpret, and explore.

Of course it sanctions the conjectures of cosmologists, for many such conjectures, like the existence of a multiverse, may one day be supported by reason and evidence. Insofar as cosmology progresses, it is by trying to test conjectures. And at least we can try to answer scientific questions, and are sometimes successful. In contrast, centuries of conjecture by the faithful have brought us no closer to knowing whether there is a god (i.e., the ultimate Dungeon and Dragon), much less understanding what said god is like.  Theologians can interpret, imagine, and explore as much as they want, but they’ve been doing that for two thousand years and have come up with. . . nothing. Instead, they’ve produced over ten thousand religions, all with conflicting conjectures, moralities, and guides to living.  The record of cosmology is much better.

Finally, I’m accused of being contemptuous:

Now, let me state that I do not think Jerry Coyne stupid, venal, or deliberately untruthful. His writings on evolution are great. I share much, though not all, of his worldview. It seems to me, however, that he and all too many of his New Atheist colleagues have fallen into an all-too-human trap: building the solidarity of their group by fostering indiscriminate contempt for “the enemy.”

F’rinstance: Coyne brands any nontheist who reaches out to non-atheists an “accommodationist.” It’s meant to sear. But consider: If we cannot make accommodation for those who don’t share our particular worldview, we can only prepare for war (of one type or another).

There is a better way. Humanism can speak with a positive voice. I’m not suggesting we should be intellectually soft. On the contrary, I’m calling for greater intellectual honesty. Let’s be honest about what we do and do not know. There is plenty enough evidence to discredit traditional theism, and the effort to do so must continue, but it only marks a beginning. As I’ve written many times, the same evidence means we should reject all claims of the supernatural. Still, that doesn’t make atheism or scientism the only worthy worldview.

In truth, I don’t know what it means to accommodate those who don’t share our worldview. Do we ignore the things with which we disagree, and tell the faithful that it’s okay to believe what they want? Well, if what they believe has no implications for society, that’s fine. But the problem with many religions is that they can’t refrain from imposing their unevidenced superstitions on the rest of us. Would Naff suggest that we accommodate those Mormons who marry 12-year-old girls, those Muslims who put their wives in burqas and kill them if they’re seen with an unrelated male? Should we “accommodate” those who think that homosexuality is a sin? Should we accommodate the African bishops who tell their flocks that it’s better to get AIDS than use condoms? Am I supposed to accommodate those who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and try to force public schools to teach creationism?

No, I won’t do that, and am implacably opposed to such follies of faith. In one sense we are in a war—a war of rationality against superstition. And Ceiling Cat help us if superstition wins.

In the end, we do know some things. We know, for instance, that 12-year-old girls don’t want to be married to 50-year old men with six other wives; we know that condoms prevent AIDS; and we know that many Muslim women, given a choice, would choose freedom over oppression.

If, as Naff argues, we should reject all claims of the supernatural, then why is any religion a worthy worldview? At bottom, such worldviews always depend on supernatural claims.

A nice anti-hate video from the Anti-Defamation League

March 30, 2013 • 8:08 am

The Anti-Defamation League, an American organization devoted to combatting bigotry of all sorts, and headquartered here in Chicago, just produced a touching and inspiring video. It took me a few seconds to catch on, but the 80-second clip is well worth watching.

The ADL blub:

Join ADL in our Centennial Year as we Imagine a World Without Hate™, one where the hate crimes against Martin Luther King, Anne Frank, Matthew Shepard and others did not take place. Support us in the fight against bigotry and extremism by sharing this inspirational video and taking the pledge to create a world without hate at http://www.adl.org/imagine.

h/t: Ginger

Guest post: Natural selection in real time via road kill

March 30, 2013 • 6:00 am

by Greg Mayer

A new paper in Current Biology by Charles & Mary Brown with the folksy title, “Where has all the road kill gone?”  reports evidence for rapid evolution of wing length in cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) nesting on highway overpasses in Nebraska. (See also this news piece on Science‘s website.) For those evolution-deniers who demand to see natural selection in “real time,” this is one bit of evidence.

During the course of a 30-year field study, the Browns found that the number of road killed birds declined, from about 20 per year, to about 4 per year (panel A in the figure). They could rule out most of the obvious possibilities: the bird population size had not declined (panels A & D), and they had not changed their survey effort or methods. They then compared the wing length of the road killed birds to a sample of the population at large (obtained from netting fatalities, but corroborated by released birds), and found that wing length had declined by several millimeters (panel B) and that the change was cumulative over the 30 years, with the road-killed and population at large birds slowly diverging (panel C; I must say I’m a little perplexed that the dead birds keep getting bigger).

A. Roadkill declines, but the population increases. B. Road-kill birds have shorter wings than the population at large. C. The difference in wing size increases over time, D. Again, the population size goes up.
A. Road kill declines, but the population increases. B. Road kill birds have longer wings than the population at large. C. The difference in wing size increases over time, D. Again, the population size goes up. (From Brown & Brown, 2013, Current Biology)

Wing shape in birds is well known to relate to specific functional abilities, and shorter-winged birds are better at vertical take off and pivoting. The Browns suggest that as the birds moved from their pre-industrial nesting spots (on cliffs) to bridge abutments and highway overpasses, the ability to avoid speeding cars conferred a selective advantage (the swallows frequently land in the road).

The authors acknowledge that other selective factors may influence wing size in the birds, and allow that a decrease in road kills could be due to learning.

[JAC note: one problem here is the lack of demonstration that the changes in wing length really were due to genetic as opposed to purely environmental causes (for example, perhaps temperature changed over the years in a way affecting wing length). A genetic basis for the change is, of course, essential for showing that the short-term change really did reflect evolution. Given that the dead versus live birds did not change in the same direction, however, one can tentatively rule out some environmental factor affecting all birds the same way. Nevertheless, results like these must always remain tentative until genetic work—ideally breeding under constant conditions in captivity—is performed. See Greg’s caveat below.]

This study joins a growing list of observations of evolution-in-action over short time periods in birds. These include the pioneering studies of selective mortality in house sparrows by Hermon Bumpus,  and the now classic, decades-long studies by Peter & Rosemary Grant and their colleagues on Galapagos finches.

Bumpus’ work, which Matthew posted about recently, was one of the very first studies of natural selection, and his data has been much analyzed (see the data, bibliographies, and discussions posted by the Field Museum, Clark University and Pearson College). Like Bumpus’s study (but unlike the Grants, who also had quantitative genetic data), the Browns’ study is of phenotypic selection, and does not demonstrate the genetic basis of the observed changes (although a several millimeter change in wing length begins to approach low-level taxonomic importance).

One unusual aspect of this study is that there appears to be an increase in the size of the population. Sir Ronald Fisher showed 80 years ago that in simple, but fairly general, models of natural selection, the effect of selection is to increase mean population fitness, something he called the “fundamental theorem of natural selection“. In laboratory populations, this is actually not infrequently observed: a newly established population of flies or a culture of bacteria will increase in equilibrium population size or reproductive rate as the population adapts to the new laboratory conditions. But in nature, populations are subject to control by a wide variety of factors (e.g. predators, competitors, climate), so that populations may evolve genetically (increasing their mean “fitness”) without changing in size (because the carrying capacity is set by these other ecological factors). Alternatively, size changes that do occur may be in response to these ecological factors and not to changes in fitness. In the swallows, viability with respect to road kills (a component of fitness) is seen to quite directly increase (i.e., the mortality rate declines), and the population size correspondingly increases. I think it certain that many factors influenced the increase in population size of the swallows, and it would be hard to partition out the effect of decreased car-collision mortality. Nevetheless, in this case an increase in mean fitness due to selection among individuals appears to be reflected in overall population size.

Darwin would, I think, be gratified by all the evidence for evolution by natural selection that has accumulated since the Origin was published in 1859, but I believe nothing would have astounded him more than the now-abundant evidence for evolution occurring on the timescale of a single human life.

________________________________________________________

Brown, C. R., and M. B. Brown. 2013. Where has all the road kill gone? Current Biology 23:R233-R234.

Bumpus, H.C. 1899. The elimination of the unfit as illustrated by the introduced sparrow, Passer domesticus. Biological Lectures from the Marine Biological Laboratory Wood’s Holl, Mass. 1898: 209-226. (BHL)

Grant, P.R. and Grant, B. R. 2008. How and Why Species Multiply. The Radiation of Darwin’s Finches. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.