Conundrum

February 26, 2013 • 2:35 pm

There’s an old and slightly antisemitic joke that goes: “What’s a Jewish dilemma?” The answer is “free ham.” (I’m allowed to tell this because I’m a cultural Jew.)

But here’s an even bigger dilemma for me:

The Pope likes cats.

As the BBC News reports in “Benedict XVI: 10 things about the Pope’s retirement” (my emphasis):

6. Life in retirement Announcing his resignation, the Pope said he would spend his time praying for the Church. His elder brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, has also said Benedict would be happy to advise his successor, if required. Writing and studying also seems likely to be on the agenda – Benedict had a library of 200,000 books installed in the papal apartments when he was elected in 2005. He also enjoys playing the piano and watching old black-and-white comedies – and he loves cats. At least one, Contessina, is known to live at Mater Ecclesiae [the monastery inside the Vatican where Ratzi will live].

Here she is:

Contessa. Is she safe with the Pope?
Contessina. Is she safe with the Pope?

The article gives other fascinating details, like his title in retirement (“Pope Emeritus”; I am not kidding) and his retirement package (not much, but he’s free from prosecution!).

Addendum: The Pope likes all cats, but not all cats like the Pope:

vbJS7xX

h/t: Aaron, Sigmund

E. O. Wilson mistakenly touts group selection (again) as a key factor in human evolution

February 26, 2013 • 9:43 am

As most of you know, Edward O. Wilson is one of the world’s most famous and accomplished biologists.  He was the founder of evolutionary psychology (known as “sociobiology” back then), author of two Pulitzer-Prize-winning books, one of the world’s great experts on ants, an ardent advocate for biological conservation, and a great natural historian. His legacy in the field is secure.

So it’s sad to see him, at the end of his career, repeatedly flogging a discredited theory (“group selection”: evolution via the differential propagation and extinction of groups rather than genes or individuals) as the most important process of evolutionary change in humans and other social species. Let me back up: group selection is not “discredited,” exactly; rather, it’s not thought to be an important force in evolution.  There’s very little evidence that any trait (in fact, I can’t think of one, including cooperation) has evolved via the differential proliferation of groups.

In contrast, there is a ton of evidence for an alternative explanation for cooperation: kin selection, the selection of genes based on how they affect not just the fitness of the individual, but the fitness of relatives that share its genes.  Features like parental behavior, parent-offspring conflict, sibling rivalry, and preferential dispensing of favor to relatives, as well as features like sex ratios in insects—all of these are all easily explained by kin selection.  And many aspects of cooperation can easily be explained by individual selection: individuals that live in small groups, especially those in which one can recognize group members, can evolve cooperation as an individual good based on reciprocity: the “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” hypothesis.  And, as I’ve discussed before, the cooperative and “altruistic” behavior seen in our own species shows many features suggesting that it evolved via individual or kin selection and not group selection.

I’ve covered this issue many times (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here), so I won’t go over the arguments again. Wilson’s “theory” that group selection is more important than kin selection in the evolution of social behavior (published in Nature with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita) was criticized strongly by 156 scientists—including virtually every luminary in social evolution—in five letters to the editor, and sentiment about the importance of group selection has, if anything, decreased since Wilson’s been pushing it.

But Wilson persists, to the detriment of his reputation. In a new piece at the New York Times “Opinionator” site, “The riddle of the human species,” Wilson continues to make the same argument that group (or “multilevel”) selection was a key force in making humans (and social insects) the socially complicated species they are.  Since his arguments are virtually identical to those published in a NYT Opinionator piece last June, and in his book The Social Conquest of Earth (see part of my review here), I won’t dissect them in detail. I just want to highlight three points that I think make Wilson’s argument for group selection—and against kin selection—deeply misleading. I wouldn’t spend my time writing time-consuming critiques like this were Wilson not famous, influential, and given a big public forum in the New York Times. Someone has to address his arguments!

Here are Wilson’s errors (quotes indented), and my responses:

1. Wilson: Humans are a “eusocial species”:

. . the known eusocial species arose very late in the history of life. It appears to have occurred not at all during the great Paleozoic diversification of insects, 350 to 250 million years before the present, during which the variety of insects approached that of today. Nor is there as yet any evidence of eusocial species during the Mesozoic Era until the appearance of the earliest termites and ants between 200 and 150 million years ago. Humans at the Homo level appeared only very recently, following tens of millions of years of evolution among the primates.

My response:  “Eusociality” as defined by Wilson and every other evolutionist is the condition in which a species has a reproductive and social division of labor: eusocial species have “castes” that do different tasks, with a special reproductive caste (“queens”) that do all the progeny producing, and “worker castes” that are genetically sterile and do the tending of the colony. Such species include Hymenoptera (ants, wasps and bees, though not all species are eusocial), termites, naked mole rats, and some other insects.

But humans don’t have reproductive castes, nor genetically determined worker castes.  Wilson is going against biological terminology, lumping humans with ants as “eusocial,” so he can apply his own theories of “altruism” in social insects (i.e., workers “unselfishly” help their mothers produce offspring while refraining themselves from reproducing), to humans. But human cooperation and altruism are very different from the behavior of ants, most notably in our absence of genetic castes and genetically-based sterility associated with helping others reproduce. Human females aren’t sterile, and don’t usually refrain from reproduction just to help other women have babies.  My guess is that Wilson lumps humans with insects as “eusocial” because he wants to subsume them both under a Grand Theory of Social Evolution.

2. Wilson: Kin selection doesn’t work, ergo it certainly couldn’t have played a role in the evolution of eusociality and human cooperation.

Still, to recognize the rare coming together of cooperating primates is not enough to account for the full potential of modern humans that brain capacity provides. Evolutionary biologists have searched for the grandmaster of advanced social evolution, the combination of forces and environmental circumstances that bestowed greater longevity and more successful reproduction on the possession of high social intelligence. At present there are two competing theories of the principal force. The first is kin selection: individuals favor collateral kin (relatives other than offspring) making it easier for altruism to evolve among members of the same group. Altruism in turn engenders complex social organization, and, in the one case that involves big mammals, human-level intelligence.

The second, more recently argued theory (full disclosure: I am one of the modern version’s authors), the grandmaster is multilevel selection. This formulation recognizes two levels at which natural selection operates: individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups. Multilevel selection is gaining in favor among evolutionary biologists because of a recent mathematical proof that kin selection can arise only under special conditions that demonstrably do not exist, and the better fit of multilevel selection to all of the two dozen known animal cases of eusocial evolution.

My response:  There is so much fail here I don’t know where to start.  The first paragraph is basically correct except that Wilson omits “individual selection” along with “kin selection” as an accepted evolutionary process that can promote the evolution of cooperation. As I mentioned, selection on individuals in small groups can allow the evolution of cooperation without any need to invoke the unparsimonious process of differential group survival based on genes.

Wilson’s claim that the “special conditions of kin selection” demonstrably do not exist is an egregious and (I think) willful misstatement.  Kin selection can cause evolution whenever the genes in an individual benefit relatives that share copies of that individual’s genes, and can do so whenever the benefit of that behavior to the recipients, devalued by their degree of relatedness to the donor (a figure usually ranging between 0 and 1, but which can be related if an individual helps another less related to it than the average member of the population) is greater than the reproductive cost to the donor.  (“Hamilton’s rule”: rb > c.) That is known to obtain in many cases, and explains things like parental care, parent-offspring conflict, sex ratios in insects, and many other features (see the five letters in Nature mentioned above, which list some features of social behavior that clearly evolved by kin rather than group selection).

The mathematical “proof” given by Nowak et al. does not show that group selection is a better explanation than kin selection for social behavior in insects, for their “proof” does not vary the level of kinship, as it must if it could allow that conclusion.

The second egregious and false claim in this paragraph (a paragraph that’s the highlight of the piece) is that “multilevel selection is gaining in favor among evolutionary biologists” because of the Nowak et al. paper. That’s simply not true.  The form of multilevel selection adumbrated in that paper is, to my knowledge, embraced by exactly four people: the three authors of the paper and David Sloan Wilson. There is, and has been, no increase in acceptance of group or multilevel selection in the past ten years. The Nowak et al. paper has sunk without a stone, except to incite criticism by other biologists and excitement by an uncomprehending press.

3. Wilson: Eusociality in insects arose not via kin selection, but via the initial construction of a defended nest site.

The history of eusociality raises a question: given the enormous advantage it confers, why was this advanced form of social behavior so rare and long delayed? The answer appears to be the special sequence of preliminary evolutionary changes that must occur before the final step to eusociality can be taken. In all of the eusocial species analyzed to date, the final step before eusociality is the construction of a protected nest, from which foraging trips begin and within which the young are raised to maturity. The original nest builders can be a lone female, a mated pair, or a small and weakly organized group. When this final preliminary step is attained, all that is needed to create a eusocial colony is for the parents and offspring to stay at the nest and cooperate in raising additional generations of young. Such primitive assemblages then divide easily into risk-prone foragers and risk-averse parents and nurses.

My response:  Phylogenetic studies show that eusociality in Hymenoptera always originated in species whose females mated only once: this is a statistically significant result.  And that alone militates for kin selection as an important factor in eusociality: if a female founds a colony consisting only of full siblings (as is the case when she mated only once), they are more related to each other than if she had mated multiply. In the later case, colonies would consist of half-sisters or even more distant relatives, making kin selection less efficient.

Further, relatedness is high in virtually every species of eusocial insect with the exception of a few highly derived species of ants that have many queens.  The connection between relatedness and eusociality is exactly what we expect if kin selection is important in social evolution, and is not expected if Wilson’s nest-based group selection was important. The model of Nowak et al., which starts with the construction of such nests by single females who stay in the nests with their offspring, produces precisely the condition in which relatedness can promote the evolution of sterility and cooperation.  They argue that this relatedness is a consequence of their model and not a cause of eusocial evolution, but that’s unconvincing, for they do not vary the level of initial relatedness in their model.

*****

Wilson’s claim, the theme of his newest book, is that humans are both angels and devils: we are both selfish and cooperative species, and this combination of good and bad is what makes our species unique. (That’s not true, of course, because many species show that mixture of behavior. Lions, for instance, cooperate when hunting, but when males take over a pride they immediately kill all the female’s cubs, which are unrelated to them. And that, by the way, is due to kin selection, because those cub-killing males replace the cubs with new cubs containing their own genes, including the genes for killing cubs. Cub-killing could have evolved only by individual selection and not group selection, for while killing another male’s cubs is good for an individual, it’s bad for the group, forcing females to waste reproductive energy.)

Yes, we have both selfish and cooperative behaviors, though most of our “cooperative” behaviors that didn’t arise through culture arose through forms of selection that involve maximizing our reproductive output—individual and kin selection.  There is not a scintilla of evidence, in humans or any other species, that group selection has been responsible for the evolution of any adaptation.  In contrast, individual and kin selection have productively explained the evolution of “problematic” traits like altruism and cooperation. They have been tested and work.

Why does Wilson keep writing article and article, and book after book, promoting group selection? I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know the answer. What I do know, though, is that his seeming monomaniacal concentration on a weakly-supported form of evolution can serve only to erode his reputation.  His theories have not gained traction in the scientific community. That doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, for, in the end, scientific truth is decided by experiment and observation, not by the numbers of people initially on each side of an issue. But the facts of science already show that Wilson is unlikely to be correct. What is sad is that, as a great natural historian, he doesn’t recognize this.

Wilson’s reputation is secure. It’s sad to see it tarnished by ill-founded arguments for an unsubstantiated evolutionary process.

h/t: Phil Ward, Laurence Hurst

Readers’ wildlife: owls! (and a new piece on owl research)

February 26, 2013 • 6:59 am

This weekend, reader Diane G. went on a birding trip to northern Michigan, and, still juiced from her avian adventure, sent me some of her photos with this excited note:

I am still on cloud nine after a fantastic Michigan Audubon Society field trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this past week-end. We could not have had a better time–weather-wise, group-&-leader-wise, and especially bird-wise!

All of her photos, and a description of the trip, can be found at the whatbird.com forum, but I thought I’d put up three species of owls snapped by Diane. There are two videos, too!

Two shots of the great gray owl (Strix nebulosa). What an intimidating glare! (Go here and click on upper left to hear the variety of sounds it makes.)

great grey owl

Great gray owl2

And a video of the great gray, showing how far it can turn its head. (Many owls can swivel their heads a full 270°.  Researchers have recently found how the owl’s anatomy permits this, and I’ll post about it soon.)

The northern hawk owl, with the mellifluoous name Surnia ulula. (click on the upper left of the link to hear its calls).

hawk 3

Northern Hawk owl

And a video. Note the head-swivelling again; it’s as if it’s a toy owl with its head on a stick:

And my second favorite owl (favorite is the pygmy owl), the magnificent snowy owl, Bubo scandiacus.

Snowy

Fortuitously, Natalie Angier (fellow winner of the EHNC award) had a nice piece on these birds in yesterday’s New York Times, “The owl comes into its own.”  It’s written in her inimitable humorous style, but has, as usual, lots of interesting biology, including these tidbits (bullet points are direct quotes from her piece):

  • In the Western imagination, the owl surely vies with the penguin for the position of My Favorite Bird. “Everyone loves owls,” said David J. Bohaska, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who discovered one of the earliest owl fossils. “Even mammalogists love owls.”
  • Researchers have discovered, for example, that young barn owls can be impressively generous toward one another, regularly donating portions of their food to smaller, hungrier siblings — a display of altruism that is thought to be rare among nonhuman animals, and one that many a small human sibling might envy.
  • The scientists also discovered that barn owls express their needs and desires to each other through a complex, rule-based series of calls, trills, barks and hoots, a language the researchers are now seeking to decipher.
  • Other researchers are tracking the lives of some of the rarer and more outlandishly proportioned owls, like the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl of Eurasia. Nearly a yard high, weighing up to 10 pounds and with a wingspan of six feet, Blakiston’s is the world’s largest owl, a bird so hulking it’s often mistaken for other things, according to Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia program. It could easily look like a bear in a tree or a man on a bridge.Or maybe Ernest Hemingway. This powerful predator can pull from the river an adult salmon two, three or more times its own weight, sometimes grabbing onto a tree root with one talon to help make the haul.

Okay, so when I read this I immediately had to see a Blakiston’s fish owl (Bubo blakistoni). Here’s a photo and a movie:

Look at that monster!
Look at that monster!

A video from Japan:

More from Natalie’s piece:

  • Owls were long thought to be closely related to birds of prey like hawks and eagles, which they sometimes superficially resemble — hence the names hawk owls and eagle owls. But similarities of beak or talon turn out to be the result of evolutionary convergence on optimal meat-eating equipment, and recent genetic analysis links the owls to other nocturnal birds, like nightjars.
  • Would that owls might lend us their ears. Species like the barn, barred, screech and horned have some of the keenest auditory systems known, able to hear potential prey stirring deep under leaves, snow or grass, identify the rodent species and even assess its relative plumpness or state of pregnancy, based on sound alone.Again scientists attribute that to a consortium of traits. Prof. Tim Birkhead of the University of Sheffield points out in his new book, “Bird Sense,” that the owl cochlea is “enormous” and densely packed with sensory cilia. The barn owl, for example, has three times the number of hair cells expected for its body size. The paired ear openings are also exceptionally large and asymmetrically placed on either side of the skull, the better to help localize a sound’s origin; the super-swively neck further enhances the power to sample the ambient soundscape.Then there is the owl’s famously flat face, also called the facial disk — pie-shaped in some species, heart-shaped Kabuki in the barn owl. The facial disk serves as a kind of satellite dish, to gather sound waves, which are then directed to the owl’s ears by stiff, specialized feathers along the disk circumference.Even the owl’s forward-facing eyes may have as much to do with hearing as with vision. Graham Martin of the University of Birmingham has proposed that with so much of the lateral real estate on the owl’s skull taken up by the giant ear openings, the only place left to position its eyes is in the middle of the face.

Let’s end with a photo of my favorite owl, the northern pygmy owl (Glaucidium gnoma). Owls are at their cutest when they’re small:

From http://www.birdsphotography.com/gallery/birds_of_prey/owls/northern_pigmy-owl/content/northern_pigmy_owl_7_large.html
From http://www.birdsphotography.com/gallery/birds_of_prey/owls/northern_pigmy-owl/content/northern_pigmy_owl_7_large.html

Storm warning footwear

February 26, 2013 • 5:41 am

The wind is blowing like a banshee in Chicago, and we’re predicted to have a fairly large storm: four to six inches (10-15 cm for the rest of the world).

In such a case one doesn’t want to wear fancy footwear, for the combination of snow, slush, and salt (liberally applied to Chicago’s streets and sidewalks to melt the ice) is toxic on boots.  Ergo, I donned my special pair of “storm boots”: a tough-as-nails pair that I never clean or condition.  I’m not sure who made them, but they’re probably Mexican, and have fancy stitching on the vamps and shafts:

boots

Rabbi Lord Sacks touts atheist churches

February 25, 2013 • 2:39 pm

The Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Sacks, has a piece at at HuffPo: “Worship at the atheist altar,” whose title is just a wee bit misleading. Yes, he does urge atheists to worship at churches, and describes one of them in London, but his real point is that even “church”-going atheists are doing it rong.

It is, so the reports say, the first atheist church in Britain. Set in a former church in Islington, hymns include Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The altar is surmounted by an image of saintly former pop star turned physics professor, Dr Brian Cox. In place of a sermon there is a stand-up comic routine, and instead of readings from the sacred texts, there is a power-point presentation on the origin of dark matter.

It sounds terrific, though as a Jew I have to advise the organisers: If you want to flourish, make sure there are whisky and fishballs after the service.

Well, Sacks’s attempt at humor falls a little flat, but I have to say that I’d rather get a root canal than worship at that atheist church.  An altar with Brian Cox on it? Really? Don’t they know that atheists don’t have gods? And if I want a stand-up routine, or a talk on science, I’d rather trawl the internet.

The whole thing sounds like an ineffectual substitute for church—much like Tofurkey substitutes for a vegetarian’s Thanksgiving turkey—but to each their own. I doubt that this type of faux worship is what atheists would suggest to fill the lacuna left by the faith we strive to dispeal.

But what Sacks really want to say is that atheist churches can’t substitute for the real thing, for they leave out the important thing: the meaning that can come only from God. For those artificial religions just do bad things, like make Stalin a god.

The holy church of atheism Islington-style takes its place in a long line of attempts to create a religion without God. The most famous was that of August Comte, the man who when asked where was God in his scientific theory replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

The most terrifying man-made religion was, of course, communism, eventually recognised by its former devotees, among them Andre Gide and Arthur Koestler, as “the god that failed.” But 19th century intellectuals, hearing the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the retreating sea of faith, were full of suggestions as to what might replace religion as a way of celebrating the human spirit.

It’s as if Sacks is offering us a choice here: Stalin or Jesus.  But of course there’s humanism, which isn’t a religion but a worldview, and doesn’t demand idolatry.  In the end, says Sacks, humanists can’t bond in the same way as the faithful, so there’s no divinity around which to weave a web of empathy:

In short, we seem to have a natural disposition to worship, perform rituals, sing and celebrate together, feeling our separateness momentarily dissolve into the experience of community. The trouble is: it depends on what we worship. Absent God and we tend to end up worshipping ourselves.

What distinguished monotheism was its insight that the only thing worthy of worship is the Author of all. The worship of less than all — be it science, reason, class, race, the nation state, wealth, power, success or fame — is idolatry, and we have no evidence to suggest that idol-worshippers are more tolerant, easy-going and capable of laughing at themselves than those who feel secure in the everlasting arms of a caring and forgiving God.

Real community, the kind that you can rely on to give support in times of crisis, is made of something deeper and more demanding than singing ’70s songs together. It means sharing a world of meaning — hard to do if you believe that life and the universe are essentially bereft of meaning. It involves a willingness to sacrifice in the name of high ideals. Religions create communities because they have a sense of the holy, and are thus capable of inducing real humility, knowing how small we are in the sum total of things, yet redeemed from insignificance by the love and grace of God.

Sacks is wrong, of course, for people can sacrifice for the ideals of humanism: the idea that what gives meaning to our lives isn’t God, but the chance to help others (both human and animal), and leave the world better than when we found it.  We don’t need redemption from anything, and I doubt that the Swedes and Danes, largely atheistic yet not devoid of meaning, feel a deep need for redemption.  We are not born sick, but we can be better than we are.

Religion, is, of course, the real Tofurkey, for it offers the most deceptive plate of all:

Pawprints 4: Ancient monk immortalizes his cat

February 25, 2013 • 11:39 am

The first cat I had as an adult was a wonderful black moggie (a rescued stray) named Pangur, who lived to the ripe age of 18.  Everyone used to ask about his name, and I told them that it is was first cat name to appear in English literature—if you count Gaelic as English!

Well, I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but the name does appear in a 9th-century Irish manuscript written at Reichenau Abbey, and has since been turned into both poetry and music. It all started when a bored monk took a break from his studies to write a poem about his white cat (“Pangur Bán” apparently means “white Pangur”).

As The Victorian Librarian recounts:

When I began learning Old Irish, one of our texts was the poem written by a monk about his cat and was found in the Reichenau Primer (MS Stift St. Paul Cod. 86b/1), a ninth-century manuscript which comprises of said monk’s Greek language study notes. Compare it to Zürich Zentralbibliothek MS C 58; as mentioned above, Dr Lähnemann described it as an arts student’s lecture notes. The poem has become known as Pangur Bán.

Whitley Stokes’ translation is available here. [JAC: Stokes’s translation is scholarly, but I prefer another that I’ve put below.] You’ll find that the poem compares the study of Greek to the cat’s hunting of a mouse, and it makes for a most entertaining read. I don’t doubt for a second that all cat owners will see their own cat’s adventures as they read.

More information appears at Fish Eaters:

But let’s end this digression and move on to the absolutely delightful poem, Pangur Ban. It was written in the 8th or 9th century, on a 4-page manuscript (see picture at the bottom of the page) by an anonymous Irish Benedictine monk who lived in the extant St. Paul’s Monastery on Reichenau Island in Lake Constance (Bodensee), where Germany meets with Carinthia, Austria. Imagine the monk at night in his candlelit cell, delving into Sacred Scripture’s eternal Truths, together and happy with his kitty, who went about his own business. Little did he know that 1,200 years later, others would fall in love with Pangur Ban, too.

The famous Pangur Bán poem, which I dearly love, is in the lower left here, and is enlarged in the second photograph:

pangurban3

x

pangur-ban-ms-page

Here’s the original Gaelic, which you can make out in the manuscript above, and what I think is the best (or most artistic) translation, by Robin Flowers. It resonates with me because I was a postdoc and young professor when I owed my black Pangur:

Picture 1

Wikipedia gives a bit of other information:

A critical edition of the poem was published in 1903 by Whitley Stokes and John Strachan in the second volume of the Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus.[2] The most famous of the many English translations is that by Robin Flower. In W. H. Auden’s translation, the poem was set by Samuel Barber as the eighth of his ten Hermit Songs (1952-3).

Fay Sampson wrote a series of books based on the poem. They follow the adventures of Pangur Bán, his friend, Niall the monk, and Finnglas, a Welsh princess.

In the 2009 animated movie The Secret of Kells, which is heavily inspired by Irish mythology, one of the supporting characters is a white cat named Pangur Bán who arrives in the company of a monk. A verse of the poem is read out during the credit roll.

Here is a rendition of Samuel Barber’s song by Gerald Finley. I really like what Barber did with the poem.

pangursmall

More sex scandal in the Catholic church: Cardinal of Scotland resigns because of sexual improprieties

February 25, 2013 • 8:17 am

I don’t know what is going on in the Vatican, or how much truth there is to the rumors of a secret sex club that led to Ratzi’s resignation, but the troubles in the Church continue to mount.  Just today, the Cardinal of Scotland, Keith O’Brien, the Vatican’s senior official in the UK, resigned amidst rumors of (his) sexual improprieties:

A report in Saturday’s Guardian gives details, and the pattern is  familiar:

Three priests and a former priest in Scotland have reported the most senior Catholic clergyman in Britain, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, to the Vatican over allegations of inappropriate behaviour stretching back 30 years.

The four, from the diocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, have complained to nuncio Antonio Mennini, the Vatican’s ambassador to Britain, and demanded O’Brien’s immediate resignation. A spokesman for the cardinal said that the claims were contested.

O’Brien, who is due to retire next month, has been an outspoken opponent of gay rights, condemning homosexuality as immoral, opposing gay adoption, and most recently arguing that same-sex marriages would be “harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of those involved”. Last year he was named “bigot of the year” by the gay rights charity Stonewall.

One of the complainants, it is understood, alleges that the cardinal developed an inappropriate relationship with him, resulting in a need for long-term psychological counselling.

The four submitted statements containing their claims to the nuncio’s office the week before Pope Benedict’s resignation on 11 February. They fear that, if O’Brien travels to the forthcoming papal conclave to elect a new pope, the church will not fully address their complaints.

“It tends to cover up and protect the system at all costs,” said one of the complainants. “The church is beautiful, but it has a dark side and that has to do with accountability. If the system is to be improved, maybe it needs to be dismantled a bit.”

This is what happens when an authority figure grossly abuses his power.

It is understood that the first allegation against the cardinal dates back to 1980. The complainant, who is now married, was then a 20-year-old seminarian at St Andrew’s College, Drygrange, where O’Brien was his “spiritual director”. The Observer understands that the statement claims O’Brien made an inappropriate approach after night prayers.

The seminarian says he was too frightened to report the incident, but says his personality changed afterwards, and his teachers regularly noted that he seemed depressed. He was ordained, but he told the nuncio in his statement that he resigned when O’Brien was promoted to bishop. “I knew then he would always have power over me. It was assumed I left the priesthood to get married. I did not. I left to preserve my integrity.”

In a second statement, “Priest A” describes being happily settled in a parish when he claims he was visited by O’Brien and inappropriate contact between the two took place.

In a third statement, “Priest B” claims that he was starting his ministry in the 1980s when he was invited to spend a week “getting to know” O’Brien at the archbishop’s residence. His statement alleges that he found himself dealing with what he describes as unwanted behaviour by the cardinal after a late-night drinking session.

“Priest C” was a young priest the cardinal was counselling over personal problems. Priest C’s statement claims that O’Brien used night prayers as an excuse for inappropriate contact.

This is what happens when you take a bunch of single males and forbid them all sexual contact. Men are not so constituted by evolution as to abstain wholly from sexual acts. It works itself out in these ways, and the only way to stop it is to eliminate the odious doctrine of forcible celibacy.  That, mixed with the huge and unquestioned authority of priests and their immersion in toxic superstition, almost guarantees that these things will happen.

Oh, and there’s this little tidbit:

O’Brien has been an outspoken critic of gay rights, denouncing plans for the legalisation of same-sex marriage as “harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved”. He was named bigot of the year in 2012 by the gay rights group Stonewall because of his central role in opposing gay marriage laws in Scotland.

Cardinal O'Brien
Cardinal O’Brien

Guest post: Bigwig Oxford theologian tries to harmonize science and faith

February 25, 2013 • 6:03 am

Here’s a guest post by pseudonymous reader Sigmund (Martin Corcoran). He was brought up as an Irish Catholic and is now an atheist and a scientist; this made him particularly incensed when he saw an Irish Catholic from Oxford University bang on about how science and Catholicism are friends.

____________

The Conflict between Faith and Science: the Catholic response.

by Sigmund

The Iona Institute is a Dublin-based conservative Catholic lobby group whose aim is to preserve the prevailing influence of Catholicism in Ireland. Although concentrating largely on traditional Catholic opposition to female reproductive rights and gay marriage, Iona has devoted some effort in recent years to answering the challenge of New Atheism.

On February 18th, they hosted a talk in Dublin by Fr Andrew Pinsent on “The Alleged Conflict between Faith and Science”.  Pinsent is both a priest and particle physicist and is described as “Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University, a member of the Theology and Religion Faculty, a Research Fellow of Harris Manchester College and a priest of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton.” [JAC: Note that Templeton has now insinuated its filthy paws into both Oxford and Cambridge Universities: the latter in the form of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.]

Of course the Ian Ramsey Center is heavily supported by—who else?—the Templeton Foundation.

Here’s a 53-minute talk by Fr Pinsent (you don’t have to watch it all; see below):

Pinsent introduces his talk as a response to New Atheism.

“The challenge of our time is that it is alleged that there is a conflict between science and faith and indeed this is one of the main battlegrounds in what are called the culture wars, so it is important that we are able to respond.”

Unfortunately, he then proceeds n to elaborate what must be, outside the confines of the Huffington Post religion section, the worst set of arguments on this subject I have ever heard.

Pinsent is a dreadful speaker, and if you don’t have 53 minutes to spare, I’ll save you the pain of watching by summarizing his argument as follows:

A)  In the past, lots of famous scientists were religious.

and

B) Atheists are communists.

These two points are padded out with a lot of straw about the New Atheists who, according to Pinsent, “generally argue, and probably want to believe, that theists are generally irrational and evil”.

He then describes an interminably long list of priests who were scientists: Gregor Mendel, George Lamaitre, Nicholas Steno, Ruder Boscovich, and so on.

Echoing Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, Pinsent goes on to tell us all the wonderful things the Catholic church has done for us.

Catholic civilization is described having given the world modern geography

”Almost exclusively, the great voyages of discovery were launched by Catholic powers or Catholic individuals”

It has given us law (apparently legal systems are derived from the Catholic middle ages).

And any past transgressions are exaggerated.  For example what punishment did Galileo really have to suffer?

“He had to stay in his villa and the church made him recite seven psalms a week.

Well, in two thousand years, if that’s the worst thing we did that’s not too bad, eh.

And actually the church admitted Galileo was right, once the scientific evidence came in.

Is this that dogmatic evil institution that held back science?”

Well, considering that the Church’s admission that they were mistaken, and that Galileo was correct, occurred only in 1992, nearly 360 years after the initial trial, I guess Pinsent has some other unspoken reason why this shouldn’t be seen as the church hindering research. Perhaps they are just incredible sticklers for peer review?

Pinsent then wanders off on a strange detour to describe how religious imagery has gradually disappeared from works of art over the centuries, a point that serves no purpose in his argument except provide him with an opportunity to sneer at modern art.

Finally, we get the old tired tropes about atheistic communist regimes, Soviet Russia, Albania and North Korea—this is what happens when atheists get power!—and no mention whatsoever of secular democracies like the Scandinavian nations.

And that’s about it!

The important thing to take from this talk is that Andrew Pinsent is not some nobody on the internet. He is the head of a major Catholic theological center in Oxford university. He’s turned up at the culture wars armed only with one of those toy guns that, instead of firing bullets, just unfurls a flag. Only in Pinsent’s case the flag doesn’t say “BANG!” It says “COMMUNIST!”

Having been brought up a Catholic myself (I’m better now!) I can almost feel sorry for him. Catholic teaching, as exemplified by the Nicene Creed, is so vulnerable to scientific thinking that any efforts at apologetics are, by necessity, exercises in avoiding the subject. The direct, unflinching approach of the New Atheists have made this task almost impossible and it shows, both in Pinsent’s arguments and in his clear discomfort while enunciating them. Perhaps he is seeing what we can glimpse on the edges of this clip—that the audience is almost exclusively elderly. The young, and indeed the middle-aged, have long since abandoned the fight.