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.
Today is the final exam in my ecology-and-evolution course (I teach the evolution part), and it will all be over at noon. If any students are reading this, good luck!
Even though it’s slushy and sleety today, I decided to wear a nice pair of boots, these hand-tooled jobbies from Falconhead:
The hand-stitching on the shafts, and the tooled pulls at the top, are also nice, so I took a photo of the entire boot:
by Greg Mayer
The Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is becoming a hotbed of evolutionary activity. I already posted about their Darwin Day celebrations, and now I want to announce an upcoming event in their Spring Lecture series: Life and Death in a Cretaceous Coastal Swamp by my colleague, Prof. Chris Noto. The lecture is this Wednesday, March 20, at 6 PM, and is free and open to the public. His topic will be his work at the Arlington Archosaur Site in Texas, and I’m sure he’ll include a discussion of his work on the feeding habits of giant Cretaceous crocodiles, which we’ve remarked upon here at WEIT before.
The previous event at the Museum was Women in Science Day, which I unfortunately neglected to announce until the day of the event. There was a good turnout nonetheless, as many people, including lots of kids, came to meet the women scientists and see the special exhibits they had set up. My colleagues Drs. Summer Ostrowski and Natalia Taft , joined by MaryRuth Kotelnicki (a trilobite enthusiast who is an adjunct professor at Edgewood College in Madison) entertained and educated the visitors.
I was pleased to find that some WEIT readers were able to attend Darwin Day, so perhaps with a less tardy notice than for Women in Science Day, some might have a chance to make the upcoming Cretaceous coastal swamp lecture. Kenosha is close to both Milwaukee and Chicago. I’m also glad to report that the cartoon Charles Darwins from Darwin Day, as I thought they would, have become a permanent part of the signage for the main dinosaur exhibit.
by Matthew Cobb
A couple of weeks back, a chicken in Bijie, a small village in southwest China, laid a massive double-yolk egg which contained ANOTHER EGG. In fact, the chicken (name unknown, owner 87 year-old Granny Yang) has laid a few of these monsters. EGGstraordinary Don’t believe me? Here’s THE PROOF:
And if that wasn’t enough EGGcitement for you, here’s a genuine photo taken on a field course I ran in the foothills of the French Alps.
My colleague Henry McGhie and I published this in New Scientist in 2006, with this question:
Some of our students noticed a seemingly intact duck egg found in a small pond contained something moving; when we broke the shell by poking it with a finger, we found three live minnows (Phoxinus phoxinus – see picture). As 21st century scientists rather than 17th century antiquarians, we think it is somewhat unlikely that this represents a hitherto unknown mode of fish reproduction.
I emphasise that this has not been photoshopped, it is not a fake. But what is the EGGSplanation?
The image subsequently went round the world, including to China, where we were featured in a children’s science magazine called Young Copernicus (the editor apologised to me as the circulation was ‘only’ 380,000…). I subsequently got a letter from a Chinese man saying he had seen one of these eggs 50 years ago…
This is funny but also touching: a tom jumps to a balcony to woo his inamorata, a lovely white cat. I can’t embed it (click on the link( but here’s a screenshot.
Trigger warning: there’s a LOT of meowing, and your cat might react if nearby.
Gary Gutting is a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame who writes regularly for the “Opinionator” site of the New York Times. The pieces I’ve read have been religion-friendly, accommodationist, not very convincing, and devoted largely to bashing New Atheism on the usual flimsy grounds (e.g., see here, here and here). I’m not sure whether Gutting is religious, but he certainly despises atheism and shows a weakness for the numinous.
His piece in last Sunday’s Opinionator, “Mary and the zombies: Can science explain consciousness?” is in the latter vein, questioning whether consciousness can be explained by physical phenomena. He’s not touting a soul here, but mounting an attack on physicalism: the idea that, at bottom, there’s a physical explanation for all phenomena in the universe. In this case, the phenomenon that supposedly defies physical explanation is consciousness. (This, of course, is also an argument of many religious people.)
Gutting gives two examples that, he claims, raises serious questions about a physical explanation of consciousness. Both of these are well known to philosophers: “Mary’s room” and “the zombie hypothesis.”
I’ll present them both and then tender a few remarks. I am under no illusion that I know enough about philosophy to analyze them thoroughly, and though I’ve read books on consciousness, I’m certainly no expert. My comments are from the viewpoint of an interested evolutionary biologist.
First, Mary’s room:
First, consider Mary, a leading neuroscientist who specializes in color perception. Mary lives at a time in the future when the neuroscience of color is essentially complete, and so she knows all the physical facts about colors and their perception. Mary, however, has been totally color-blind from birth. (Here I deviate from the story’s standard form, in which—for obscure reasons—she’s been living in an entirely black-and-white environment.)
Fortunately, due to research Mary herself has done, there is an operation that gives her normal vision. When the bandages are removed, Mary looks around the room and sees a bouquet of red roses sent by her husband. At that moment, Mary for the first time experiences the color red and now knows what red looks like. Her experience, it seems clear, has taught her a fact about color that she did not know before. But before this she knew all the physical facts about color. Therefore, there is a fact about color that is not physical. Physical science cannot express all the facts about color.
What Gutting fails to mention here is that there have been many criticisms of the idea that Mary has learned a “fact about color” not conveyable by knowing “all the physical facts about color.” You can read a series of refutations in the Wikipedia article on “The knowledge argument,” most of them apparently arguing that Mary gains no new “facts” or “knowledge,” but experience. Others, like Dan Dennett, argue that that experience is knowledge that Mary would have acquired in advance if she knew everything neurological about color. I’m not capable of judging these, but since science has given us no evidence for anything that doesn’t comport with physicality, I’m loath to exempt consciousness from this generalization.
I see the experience of red as something that is still a deep puzzle to us, but one that could in principle be explained. We might, for example, some day build a computer that mimics our brain, and which will be able to convey to us its consciousness of color. Our brain is, after all, composed of atoms, and evolved from primordial molecules that certainly had no consciousness, much less a consciousness of color. Given the continuity of material phenomena inherent in evolution, I simply cannot see how subjective sensations, which arose some time during evolution, represent a non-materialistic reality. Gutting characterizes that reality thusly:
They [Frank Johnson and David Chalmers, who proposed the two scenarios] maintain that there is no world beyond the natural one in which we live. Their claim is rather that this world contains a natural reality (consciousness) that escapes the scope of physical explanation. Chalmers, in particular, supports a “naturalistic dualism” that proposes to supplement physical science by postulating entities with irreducibly subjective (phenomenal) properties that would allow us to give a natural explanation of consciousness. Not surprisingly, however, some philosophers have seen Jackson’s and Chalmers’s arguments as supporting a traditional dualism of a natural body and a supernatural soul.
Given that these entities evolved from nonconscious physical entities, I fail to see how they can be “irreducibly subjective,” that is, independent of or not explainable by material phenomena. Maybe this is logically possible, but given the history of scientific successes resting firmly on materialism, I doubt that “naturalistic dualism” (which seems an incoherent oxymoron) will be the case. And I certainly see no reason to abandon scientific studies of consciousness resting on analyses of our brain, studies of artificial intelligence, and so on.
Gutting’s second example involves zombies (highlights are mine):
Second, consider a zombie. Not the brain-eating undead of movies, but a philosophical zombie, defined as physically identical to you or me but utterly lacking in internal subjective experience. Imagine, for example, that in some alternative universe you have a twin, not just genetically identical but identical in every physical detail—made of all the same sorts of elementary particles arranged in exactly the same way. Isn’t it logically possible that this twin has no experiences?
It may, of course, be true that, in our world, the laws of nature require that certain objective physical structures be correlated with corresponding subjective experiences. But laws of nature are not logically necessary (if they were, we could discover them as we do laws of logic or mathematics, by pure thought, independent of empirical facts). So in an alternative universe, there could (logically) be a being physically identical to me but with no experiences: my zombie-twin.
But if a zombie-twin is logically possible, it follows that my experiences involve something beyond my physical makeup. For my zombie-twin shares my entire physical makeup, but does not share my experiences. This, however, means that physical science cannot express all the facts about my experiences.
I’m not sure I understand the conundrum here. My view is that a being physically identical to me would have the same neuronal configuration as me, and therefore the same stored memories, the same Coyne-ian consciousness, and the same subjective experiences. Whether or not the laws of nature are logically necessary—and some of them could be, resting on certain basic facts—seems irrelevant to this argument. So I’m not sure that using the word “logically possible” gives this argument any scientific force—indeed, I’m not sure what Gutting means by “logically” possible. Yes, the laws of nature could be different for the zombie than for me, producing different subjectivity, but that’s assuming what he’s trying to prove. Or so I conclude. Further, science gives us no evidence that the laws of nature would operate differently in a body identical to mine, except for the possibility that quantum phenomena could cause slight differences between the consciousness of me and my zombie. But even quantum phenomena are physical, not some kind of “irreducible subjective property.” Quantum phenomena are part of physicalism.
What Gutting seems to be floating here is a kind of “philosophy of the gaps” argument, resting not on scientific studies but on “logical possibilities”. It’s also logically possible that we were all created yesterday by aliens or gods, with all our memories and a bogus history implanted by our creators, but I don’t see the need to devote time to that. I’m concerned with scientific probabilities, not logical possibilities.
I am confident, as is Dennett, that one day consciousness will be explained by reductive physical analysis. It’s a hard problem, but many problems once thought insuperable have yielded to scientific study. For many years everyone believed in dualistic free will, but now we’re beginning to understand that our sense of “agency” is bogus, and that in fact our “free” choices may be largely or completely predicted from our genes and our environments, i.e., physical phenomena. Our feeling of agency is, of course, one aspect of our consciousness. This doesn’t explain the source of that feeling, but it’s entirely possible that agency is a confabulation installed in us by evolution to help make sense post facto of what we do, or relate our experiences to others.
At any rate, these are just some preliminary thoughts, and I’m prepared to accept that they’re naive, incomplete, or dead wrong. Gutting claims that he takes no stand on the irreducibility of consciousness, and solicited readers’ comments on his piece. I do the same here.
He’s promised a follow-up Opinionator on this topic this week, but I haven’t yet searched for it.
h/t: Michael
Reader Aidan Karley called my attention to the Irish comedian Dave Allen (1936-2005; real name David Tynan O’Mahoney). He seems to be a forerunner of Dara O’Briain, sans the profanity.
Here’s Allen recalling his initiation to Catholicism at the age of four. It’s hilarious, but the hilarity comes largely from his befuddled encounter with religious “truth”. I’m sure this will ring true for many Catholics.
I’m surprised that Allen got away with taking the mickey out of Catholicism in the UK of the 60s and 70s, but perhaps criticism of religion was more tolerated then.
Wikpedia says this about Allen’s religious beliefs:
He was a religious skeptic (according to Allen himself, “what you might call a practising atheist”, and often joked “I’m an atheist, thank God”) as a result of his deeply held objections to the rigidity of his strict Catholic schooling. Consequently, religion became an important subject for his humour, especially the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, generally mocking church customs and rituals rather than beliefs. In 1998 he stated “The hierarchy of everything in my life has always bothered me. I’m bothered by power. People, whoever they might be, whether it’s the government, or the policeman in the uniform, or the man on the door – they still irk me a bit. From school, from the first nun that belted me— people used to think of the nice sweet little ladies … they used to knock the fuck out of you, in the most cruel way that they could. They’d find bits of your body that were vulnerable to intense pain—grabbing you by the ear, or by the nose, and lift you, and say ‘Don’t cry!’ It’s very hard not to cry. I mean, not from emotion, but pain. The priests were the same. And I sit and watch politicians with great cynicism, total cynicism.”
Here’s a YouTube video that I’m sure will be called a fake. For one thing, the notes below say that the effect is visible only with the camera, and not with the naked eye. I’m not sure why that is, but I still think this is real. Maybe it’s just blind faith. . . .
The YouTube notes say this (and also give instructions for making the device):
Ever since I created the first version of this video a year ago I’ve been wanting to try it again with more water and better lighting / footage. This is a really fun project and when you first see the results, chances are your jaw will drop. The main thing to keep in mind for this project is that you need a camera that shoots 24 fps.
The effect that you are seeing can’t be seen with the naked eye. The effect only works through the camera. However, there is a version of the project you can do where the effect would be visible with the naked eye. For that project, you’d have to use a strobe light.
I’m sure some of the physicists who read this can say a. whether it’s real and b. if so, how it works.
Mississippi always ranks poorly among American states: close to the poorest in education, at the top in religiosity, and home of America’s most obese people. It’s also conservative and largely Republican. The combination of religiosity and conservatism has led to one of the stupidest things I’ve seen states do to circumvent the Constitutional First Amendment barring public endorsement of religion. No, it’s not cheerleaders holding up signs with Bible verses on them—it’s an official bill to allow prayer in the public schools. The New York Times reports:
Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi has long wanted children to pray at public schools. This week, with his grandmother’s worn Bible on his desk, he signed a bill that gets him closer to that goal.
The new law requires public schools to develop policies that will allow students to pray over school intercoms, at assemblies and at sporting events.
While not allowing school-sanctioned prayer, the law permits students to offer public prayers with a disclaimer by the school administration. “You might put on the program that this is not a state-sanctioned prayer if a prayer does break out at a football game or graduation,” Mr. Bryant said.
Although the state is not in the business of establishing religion, he said, “we are about making sure that we protect the religious freedoms of all students and adults whenever we can.”
. . . Under the law, Mississippi school districts would have to follow guidelines allowing a “limited public forum” at school events for students to express religious beliefs. For example, the districts must include a disclaimer that says the students’ prayers do not reflect an endorsement or sponsorship by the district.
But that still exposes children who might not share the religious views of the students expressing themselves, said Bear Atwood, legal director of the Mississippi A.C.L.U.
“People never think, what if it’s a different religious prayer than my child’s faith?” she said.
That’s just one lie after another, and everyone knows it. This is a state-sponsored program to bring prayer into schools. Individuals are already allowed to pray in schools on their own, but there cannot be prayers over the intercoms or assemblies, or mass prayers at sporting events. Those violate the Constitution. Even a bill requiring schools to develop policies allowing prayer is, to my mind, unconstitutional. If students can pray on their own, why try to make this official policy?
As the Times reports, there has been a spate of these bill lately, all meant to circumvent a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that Texas students could not utter prayers over the public-address system during high school football games. What an affront! So here’s the response:
Lawmakers in South Carolina this year introduced legislation that would allow for prayer during a mandatory minute of silence at the start of the school day, provided that students who do not want to hear the prayer can leave the classroom.
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Last year, Florida approved a bill to allow students to read inspirational messages at assemblies and sporting events, which prompted groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Mr. Conn’s organization to send letters to every school district in the state threatening legal action if the law was put into practice.
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
In Missouri, voters in 2012 approved a constitutional amendment that gives residents the right to “pray and acknowledge God voluntarily in their schools,” and in Virginia this year, State Senator Bill Stanley has introduced a similar amendment.
CONSTITUTIONAL so long as the prayers are private and not foisted on other students.
For those who claim that “moderate” religion is fine, realize that most of the people behind these bills are not fundamentalists, but just devout people. Yet they can’t resist foisting their beliefs on others. If you feel you have the absolute truth, and those who ignore it are damned, then of course you’ll want to trumpet those truths over loudspeakers and public address systems.
And you’ll also make up phony excuses why you have to do it:
In the days after the December school shooting in Newtown, Conn., former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who is a minister, advocated school prayer.
“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” he said in a television interview. “Should we be surprised that schools would become places of carnage?”
h/t: Don