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.
I got this from Matthew with the message, “You owe me!” He added, “Cheltenham Science Festival is in June each year Here’s an exchange with Rutherford and Philomena that just took place…”
Adam Rutherford is a well known science communicator in the UK. He seems more enthusiastic about Philomena than about me, but maybe I can twist his arm. Cunk is on, and I want to be Science Man!
by Grania
Reader Barry alerted Jerry to an article in HuffPo relating the sad new that Tiffany Two, the world’s oldest living cat has died.
As cats go, she had a pretty good innings of 27 years in the lap of luxury. Her staff, Sharron Voorhees had this to say:
“She was truly remarkable. I think animals are such a blessing. They teach you all about love, and they expand your ability to love.”
I often think that well-loved pets get the best lives out of anyone on this planet, every day is a day in Paradise for them. There’s never enough time with them, no matter how long they live. But they enrich our lives, and the memories of happiness and love and togetherness stay forever.
As somebody once said: although they did live happily ever after, the point, is that they lived.
https://twitter.com/sdut/status/607041741833707522/photo/1
Hat-tip: Barry
by Matthew Cobb
This post is most definitely not for the faint-hearted, so you may wish to turn away now, or at least after you’ve looked at this very weird cat gif (pronounced…)
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About six weeks back I posted about the blue tit nest box we had set up in our garden in Manchester. Over the few weeks the parents have been flying back and forth, taking prey items (mainly caterpillars) into the nest. We could hear the chicks cheeping away, and although the parents looked a bit scrotty, they seemed to be doing their job. They were very worried about the cats, and would not fly into the box if the cats were around.
Last week the chirping ceased. We assumed they had fledged, and even announced it on Tw*tter. Later on, we heard one chick cheeping, the parents carried on going in. Then eventually there was silence, but the parents carried on bringing food, chirping and looking confused when they received no response from their offspring. Once it was clear that there was nothing going on inside the nest, we decided to take it down. What we found was not nice.
I managed to extract the nest intact:
The chicks were all dead, including the one on top, which looks like it might be alive, or sleeping. I fished them out to try and see what had gone wrong. There were five in total – one is still on the nest on this pic:
The one in the middle on the bottom was basically mummified – you can see on the top pic that it had been pushed to the edge of the nest. It was the smallest, so presumably was the first to die…
As if that wasn’t bad enough, a really grim discovery awaited when I got out the fifth chick from the nest:
It was heaving with blowfly maggots… The cycle of life – or, more strictly, the cycle of carbon – had taken on an unexpected form. The chicks had all died, and their carbon was about to be converted into flies, which would in turn be turned into birds or spiders or whatever. Nature is pitiless, and natural selection even more so.
So why did they die? Disease seems unlikely – it would have hit them all at the same time. It seems most likely that they simply starved to death. Spring has not been particularly early or warm this year, and although the parents seemed to be attentive, they appear not to have been able to find enough food for their brood.
We hope – but we don’t know – that the brood was bigger than the five dead nestlings we found, and that some of the chicks successfully fledged. On the other hand, we haven’t seen the parents around feeding babies in the trees, which we have done in previous years. I fear these five were all there were.
This is not an uncommon occurrence, but it is sad. I’ll clean out the box in the winter and then put it up again, ready for another attempt next year.
Apologies to those of you who found that too grim – you were warned.
by Grania Spingies
In the wake of complaints such as this one and angry reviews of Jerry’s new book Faith vs. Fact, one has to wonder whether any criticism of theism is acceptable or valid to a believer. One of the complaints that irks Jerry the most is the charge that he – or indeed we – as fellow atheists, have not read the right theology books, or not enough of them, or that we haven’t understood them properly.
The charge continues: therefore we haven’t truly understood religion, and therefore we lack the credentials to rebut it.
Of course, the charge is bogus. At very least, Jerry has read more theology than the average human being, more even than the average church-going believer. Tomes of Sophisticated Theology are rarely if ever referenced by ministers and priests in their sermons and homilies, because they know that those in the pews have not read them and don’t intend to either. The notion that the real answers to difficult questions lie between the covers of such books is simply a security blanket proffered where the congregation appear to be of above-average education and perhaps don’t literally believe in talking snakes chatting up naked women.
Perhaps because most theology books are rarely read, the champions of theology as Christianity’s best argument aren’t always aware of the fact that, for example C.S. Lewis (still so very popular after all these years, perhaps simply because he writes more accessibly than the average theologian) has been very comprehensively taken apart by other theologians.
However, I maintain that most theology is dead in the water from the outset. Here’s why: they all operate off the base assumption that God is real, and is moreover the Christian God of the bible. This is why theology fails to convince anyone who isn’t already in the club.
Lewis actually tried his hand at “proving” God with his infamous “liar or a madman” argument. Basically Jesus is God because he said so, and he wouldn’t have said so unless it was true, because we know he wasn’t a liar or a madman. Plenty of people have pointed out that those aren’t the only two other possibilities. And any non-believer who has read the bible can attest that in fact some of Jesus’s doings come across as quite mad (figs, anyone?). In any case, anyone can spot a circular argument. Cosmological arguments and Pascal’s Wager don’t get any better even though some of them use really long words with lots of syllables.
Anyway, the point here is to have a discussion about whether it is possible to satisfy a believer that your lack of belief is not owing to a lack of theology. If not, why not?
Here’s a bit of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s commencement address at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic girls school teaching students from kindergarten through 12th grade (age 18). This was his granddaughter’s commencement, which accounts for why he spoke. Scalia is a devout Catholic.
I start the video at 2:32, where Scalia remarks that humanity has been around for 5,000 years or so:
Of course the Vatican officially accepts the existence of evolution, but 23% of its adherents are still young-Earth creationists. It’s not impossible that Scalia is one of them. Of course how you interpret the word “humanity” is variable: it could mean “civilization” (but “urban” settlements began around 10,000 years ago), the advent of the genus Homo (about 2.5 million years), or the time when our ancestors diverged from those of modern apes (around 5 million years).
The Washington Post reproduced Scalia’s remark without comment, but some sites, but others, like Think Progress, have called this an episode of Scalia “blowing the creationist dog whistle,” while the Patheos website Progressive Secular Humanist argues with confidence that this expresses Scalia’s belief in young-Earth creationism, noting that, in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard (a creationism-in-school issue that 7 of the nine judges rejected), Scalia wrote a dissent claiming that the evidence for creationism was stronger than that for evolution, and that evolution could be accurately called a “myth”. (The other dissenter was William Rehnquist.) And I’ve written before how Scalia does appear to accept the existence of Satan (see here and here),
Still it’s hard to believe that a guy with this kind of brain (yes, he’s smart) could really be a young-Earth creationist. My guess is that it was just an offhand remark that’s been blown out of proportion. But I might be wrong, and a savvy interviewer should ask him.
Reader Bruce Lyon sends some photos of nesting Norther Harriers and a really nice story of their breeding biology and appearance:
In April I found a Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus) nest along the coast north of Santa Cruz in California. Harriers nest on the ground in marshy or brushy areas. Female harriers do all of the incubation but the male brings her food (mostly mice) while she incubates. The food is delivered in an aerial transfer: the female chases the male until he drops the prey item, which the female then snatches before it hits the ground. I knew the harriers had to have a nest in a patch of scrub because I saw several aerial transfers in the spot. In each of these, the male arrived with a mouse, gave his distinctive “I have a mouse” call, which brought the female up off the ground to get the mouse from the male, and she then returned to the same spot of ground. I knew the nest had to be within a ten by ten meter square area but I could not find it, both because the vegetation was dense and the female sat very tightly on the nest refusing to budge. Eventually I came within three feet the nest and the female flushed, and I was treated to the most adorable baby raptors I have ever seen. In the photo below below two chicks have just hatched and eventually all five eggs hatched:
The nest (bottom center of the photo) is in coastal scrub right next to the coast:
The female continued to bring in nesting material even after the chicks hatched. Here she is about to drop down to the nest:
Both parents dive-bombed me quite a bit the few times I checked the nest but they never actually hit me with their feet or talons. Some birds of prey will strike, and some can do serious damage. The pioneering English bird photographer Eric Hosking lost an eye to a Tawny Owl (and later wrote a book with the amusing title “An Eye for a Bird”). This is the female turning to come at me:
Female threatening with her feet:
Below: The male on his favorite perch. This species is quite dimorphic in plumage coloration—females are a lovely warm brown color while males have a pearly gray plumage coloration. I see mostly female plumage birds along the coast north of Santa Cruz and have often wondered if the sex ratio is really biased. In a related species in Europe (Marsh Harrier) it was recently discovered that some males bear female plumage their entire lives so I now wonder if something similar could be going in Northern Harriers. (Sternalski et al. 2011. Adaptive significance of permanent female mimicry in a bird of prey. Biology Letters 8:167-170). Spoiler alert: males with female plumage are treated with reduced aggression by territorial males in full male plumage.
Male leaving the perch to come and voice his concern to me:
Male in flight:
Male coming in for a landing:
Below: Harriers have facials ruffs (or disks) that make them seem like half hawk, half owl—the resemblance seems to be an example of convergent evolution. Like many owls, harriers can accurately locate prey entirely by sound cues and their sound-reflecting facial ruffs are similar to those found in owls. Bill Rice, now well known for his experimental evolution studies with Drosophila, did his PhD work on harriers and showed that (1) in the lab harriers are as accurate as many owls in locating sounds, and they are far more accurate than other hawks, and (2) wild harriers in the field can accurately target mouse-like sounds emitted from hidden speakers (“mouse-like” because Rice made the sounds himself after practicing to sound like a Microtus vole). Rice WR 1982 Acoustical location of prey by the marsh hawk: adaptation to concealed prey. Auk 99:403-413.The facial disk of the female (left) of my pair was much more distinct than the male (right) but this may be due entirely to contrasting color of the egg of the ruff on the female. According to species accounts for harriers, the brown eyes of this female means she is a young bird (one year old); older females have yellow eyes:
Though it’s Ceiling Cat’s Day of Rest, the Imagine No Religion meetings proceed, with talks today by Harriet Hall, me, Lawrence Krauss, and Carolyn Porco, and a speakers’ dinner tonight. There were some interesting talks yesterday, with three of them about how to address the growing problem of Islamic radicalism—two by ex-Muslims. All of the talks gave different suggestions, but Maryam Namazie’s was especially controversial for me, since she claimed that Islamic radicalism was not at all a problem of religion, but of “politics and control”—the desire of one group to control others, both Muslims of different sects and women. Yet she also asserted that bringing secularism to the Middle East would help the problem (why, if it’s not religious?), and at the end of her talk she quoted from Lennon’s “Imagine no religion” verse. But if religion isn’t at least a major part of the problem, why would its absence help anything? Her implication was that if there were no religion, things would still be as bad in the Middle East as they are now, for the desire to control others would still cause harm. I disagree strongly, for I see that as a Glenn Greenwald/Karen Armstrong approach based on avoidance of palpable motivations. I have great respect for Namazie’s work, but her words seem to contradict both her actions and even other words in her own talk.
Peter Boghossian had some interesting suggestions about how to intervene on both the macro and micro level to “de-brand” ISIS, including forming a PAC to develop an advertising campaign to take the “cool” out of ISIS, just as they took the “cool” out of cigarette smoking in the 80s. He suggested that we rebrand ISIS as “goofy” rather than cool, though I don’t know how one would do that. Both he and Faisal Saeed al Muttar, however, agreed that religion, not “power,” was the biggest problem behind Islamic radicalism, and that the key to solving that problem lies in first recognizing its religious nature.
Chris DiCarlo related the heartbreaking tale about how he had lost jobs and tenure by being an atheist—in Canada!—and proposed that we devise some kind of “fairness machine” that could make decisions without human bias. That, of course, presupposes some objective view of ethics, à la Sam Harris, and I’m dubious that such a machine could work without first being programmed by subjective human values. But it would at least have decided to give DiCarlo tenure, which he fully deserves as an articulate philosopher and excellent teacher who uses the Socratic method.
Finally, Robert Price, an atheist who works at a theological seminary, gave a nice talk about the question of the historicity of Jesus, which he doubts but can’t adduce convincing disproof, though he agrees that question has nothing to do with either the existence of God or the tenets of Christianity. His talk was full of erudite references, but was engrossing, as he showed convincingly that Christianity was just a myth resembling many that had gone before it. He also mentioned—and this is something I hadn’t thought about—that we have no proof that the Jesus person or myth didn’t begin forming long before the “zero A.D.” time we commonly think of.
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss had an hourlong conversation at the end of the evening, covering diverse topics including the security blanket of religion, the nature of alien life (what might it be like? carbon based? would it have eyes, and DNA?), the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics, and so on. I have pictures, but no time to share them today, I suspect. Tomorrow I have the day off before I fly to Vancouver, and a kind reader, a research biologist at the facility, has promised to give me a “behind the scenes” tour of the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park, which I certainly intend to do. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is jarred by religion:
A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: Either my ears are ringing or it’s the church bells.
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Albo mi w uszach dzwoni, albo to dzwony kościoła.
