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 don’t think the inventors of this eggcam intended it to be used this way. It was, I presume, meant to mimic a rockhopper penguin egg and thereby help film the colony without disturbing it. But they didn’t count on a hungry striated caracara and a vulture. . .
It’s from the BBC show “Penguins: spy in the huddle,” and has the first aerial footage of a penguin colony filmed by a flying bird.
h/t: Gattina
Good Lord, is Mark Vernon, of “holy rabbit” fame, still writing for the Guardian? And why? In their columns he regularly takes up the cudgels against science: as an ex-Anglican priest, he simply can’t help but cheer when someone disses science, no matter how bad a job they do. And so each year Vernon gives an award to a woo-ish science book that he snarkily calls “the most despised science book of the year”.
Ergo his latest Comment is Free column: “The most despised science book of 2012 is. . . worth reading.” What’s the book? Guess!
Every year, I give an award to the Most Despised Science Book of the Year. The 2010 award went to Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini for What Darwin Got Wrong. In 2011, Ray Tallis won with Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity.
Well, as I concluded in my review of What Darwin Got Wrong in The Nation (and I wasn’t the only one), Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book was absolutely dreadful: a hamhanded and spelentic attack on the concept of and evidence for natural selection. It has sunk without a trace, testimony to the scientific ignorance of two ambitious men bent on overthrowing a paradigm of biology.
I haven’t read Tallis’s book (perhaps a reader can weigh in here), but it appears to be an attack on both scientism and evolutionary psychology.
Vernon then tells us his 2012 also-ran:
My runner-up this time is Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion, though in fact it had a strikingly decent reception for a book also critiquing scientistic dogmatism.
Not a decent reception from the people I know (see my take on it here). That book was a critique of scientific materialism, a materialism that goddycoddlers like Vernon can’t abide. There’s simply got to be more to the universe than material and the laws of physics! And so Vernon’s winner this year is an obvious choice—another attack on natural selection and materialism:
So the winner for 2012 must be Thomas Nagel, for his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
Steven Pinker dammed it with faint praise when he described it in a tweet as “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker”. Jerry Coyne blogged: “Nagel goes the way of Alvin Plantinga”, which is like being compared to Nick Clegg. All in all, Nagel’s gadfly stung and whipped them into a fury.
A fury? I don’t think so. And isn’t it funny that Vernon mentions a tweet by Pinker and a website post of mine, while ignoring three non-furious and scholarly reviews in major venues, each of which politely tore Nagel’s book to shreds. I refer to the reviews by Allen Orr (New York Review of Books) Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg (The Nation), and Elliott Sober (The Boston Review). So here we have three philosophers of science and one evolutionary biologist with philosophical training, all writing very long, scholarly, and devastatingly critical analyses of Vernon’s favorite book, and Vernon ignores them all.
Why? Because he likes what Nagel suggests: that evolution is not driven by a purposeless and materialistic process, but by some teleological force (Nagel never says what it is). Vernon likes the idea that the universe has purpose, evincing his usual sneaking sympathy for theism:
There it is. The t-word [teleology]– a major taboo among evolutionary biologists. Goal-directed explanations automatically question your loyalty to Darwin. As Friedrich Engels celebrated, when reading On The Origin of Species in 1859: “There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done.” But has it? This is the moot point.
The scientifically respectable become edgy when approaching this domain. Read Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson’s measured piece on the reaction Nagel’s book sparked, published in Prospect. The possibility that the universe wants, in some way, to become conscious will “appear absurd” or “strange”, he warns. But bear the anxiety, he doesn’t quite continue, and consider the arguments.
We don’t get “edgy” when we hear about teleology in evolution; we get bored. For there’s simply no evidence for it, and Nagel doesn’t provide any. Have a look, for instance at Orr’s review. Nagel, it seems, simply doesn’t like materialism either, but he doesn’t have any good arguments against it. Like Laplace, we simply have no need of the Divine Hypothesis when we consider evolution.
And, God help us, Vernon is now teaming up with another minion from the dark side to show that science proves God:
I’m considering some of them with Rupert Sheldrake in a series of podcasts, if you’ll forgive the plug. But it is striking that they can be aired in relatively kosher scientific circles too. A recent example is Paul Davies’s bestseller, The Goldilocks Enigma. Davies argues that the refusal of natural teleology rests on an assumption that nature obeys laws that are written into the fabric of the cosmos. However, quantum physics offers every reason to doubt that this is so. The upshot is that Davies himself favours a universe that contains a “life principle”.
So how come teleology is acceptable among cosmologists? It may be that they are used to the basic assumptions of their science being regularly overturned.
Sheldrake and Vernon! Now there’s some podcasts to miss!
But Vernon is wrong about cosmology and teleology. Teleology is acceptable only among cosmologists who are religious or who are angling for the Templeton Prize. I suspect Sean Carroll would have something to say about this. After all, he’s the one who wrote a very good essay called “Why (almost all) cosmologists are atheists,” showing why materialism was a far better explanation for the universe than theism.
All scientists are used to revisions of their paradigms, yet that doesn’t make us sympathetic to teleology. What would is the finding of scientific phenomena that show the hand of God, i.e., the suspension of the “laws of nature”. But we don’t see that, either in evolution or cosmology.
And for quantum mechanics refuting the idea “that nature obeys laws that are written into the cosmos,” I don’t know what the hell Vernon is talking about, and I suspect he doesn’t, either. After all, quantum mechanics obeys its own laws, sometimes probabilistic ones, and has actually provided reductionist explanations for some of the macroscopic laws of nature. Davies, of course, is a deist who won the Templeton Prize in 1995, so he’s not quite your typical cosmologist.
What bothers me is that the Guardian, a paper I once respected, regularly publishes this kind of pap by people like Vernon and Andrew Brown. In the end, it’s every bit as anti-science as straight “scientific” creationism, for it implies that the facts of science themselves point to an Ineffable Deity. And that’s not true. There is no more evidence for teleology in physics as there is for the hand of God in evolution. By publishing junk like this, the Guardian is simply warping the public understanding of science.
If Vernon were a creationist loon like Ray Comfort, he’d never be published in the Guardian. He has just enough respectability to get away with unfounded criticisms of materialism that he coats with the patina of science. Vernon is mendacious and he’s wrong. Give me an honest creationist over that man’s mush-brained lucubrations any day!
by Greg Mayer
As part of our observations of the Alfred Russel Wallace Centenary, we have an extra felid this weekend, the Bornean Bay Cat (Catopuma [or Pardofelis] badia). It’s one the world’s rarest species of cat (see the IUCN Red List), endemic to the island of Borneo, and known (as of 2007) from only 15 localities and 10 specimens (some of the localities are sight records or photos), mostly in the center and north of the island.
Jerry has noted them here at WEIT before (here and here). Wallace’s connection to the species is that he collected the holotype specimen in Sarawak, and sent it to the British Museum in 1856, where it was received by J.E. Gray (who was also a scientific acquaintance of Darwin). Gray hoped to study further specimens before describing it, but having received none, he finally described it in 1874 (from the wonderful Wallace Online).
To my knowledge, Wallace made only one published statement about the Bay Cat. In the second edition of Island Life (1892), he analyzed the mammalian fauna of Borneo and concluded that its fauna must have been derived by a land connection:
Nearly a hundred and forty species of mammalia have been discovered in Borneo, and of these more than three-fourths are identical with those of the surrounding countries, and more than one half with those of the continent. Among these are two lemurs, nine civets, five cats, five deer, the tapir, the elephant, the rhinoceros, and many squirrels, an assemblage which could certainly only have reached the country by land.
He goes on to list Felis badia among the relatively few mammal species peculiar to Borneo. He infers, however, that these endemic forms do not indicate a long separation of Borneo from the Asian mainland:
These peculiar forms do not, however, imply that the separation of the island from the continent is of very ancient date, for the country is so vast and so much of the once connecting land is covered with water, that the amount of speciality is hardly, if at all, greater than occurs in many continental areas of equal extent and remoteness. This will be more evident if we consider that Borneo is as large as the Indo-Chinese Peninsula, or as the Indian Peninsula south of Bombay, and if either of these countries were separated from the continent by the submergence of the whole area north of them as far as the Himalayas, they would be found to contain quite as many peculiar genera and species as Borneo actually does now.
Wallace’s zoogeographical conclusions regarding Borneo have been abundantly confirmed by subsequent discoveries, most especially in geology. It is now known that the lowering of sea level by the sequestration of water in glaciers during the most recent glaciation amounted to a worldwide lowering of about 120 m in sea level, an amount quite sufficient to drain the broad yet shallow Sunda Shelf, thus firmly uniting Borneo to the Asian mainland. According to the exquisite paleogeographic reconstructions of Harold Voris of the Field Museum and colleagues, the rising postglacial waters did not sever Borneo’s connection to the main till between 10,550 and 10,210 years ago.
JAC addendum: I’ve embedded a video (nb: cheesy music) below; it has photos of the cat and some very rare video footage:
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Azlan, M.J. and J. Sanderson. 2007. Geographic distribution and conservation status of the bay cat Catopuma badia, a Bornean endemic. Oryx 41:394-397. (pdf)
Gray, J.E. 1874. Description of a new Species of Cat (Felis badia) from Borneo. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1874:322-323. (pdf)
Kitchener, A.C, S. Yasuma, M. Andau, and P. Quillen. 2004. Three bay cats (Catopuma badia) from Borneo Mammalian Biology 69:349-353. (pdf)
Sathiamurthy, E. and Voris, H. K. 2006. Maps of Holocene sea level transgression and submerged lakes on the Sunda Shelf. The Natural History Journal of Chulalongkorn University. Supplement 2:1-43.(pdf)
Wallace, A. R. 1892. Island Life. Second and revised edition. London: Macmillan and Co. (text and pdf)
As we all know, crows and their close relatives are awesomely smart. If you doubt that, read Bernd Heinrich’s wonderful book Ravens in Winter. Certainly crows exceed in cognitive achievement invertebrates like, say, cephalopods.
Here are two videos showing the behavior of these curious and mischievous birds.
The first has a Russian title that reader Sameer translates as “stoned crows”, but I doubt they’re stoned (for one thing, they’re not eating). It looks like pure play behavior, and it appears as if the crows are having a grand old time frolicking in the snow, rolling around in it, picking up chunks, and sliding down windshields.
Now I don’t think that the crow in this next video is untying shoelaces because he wants the guy to relinquish the prized frying pan (crows aren’t that smart, are they?), but the pan is lagniappe for this corvid:
h/t: Jim E. Yam
UPDATE: I’ve heard from Dr. Randall, who objected to my characterization of her as an “atheist.” I apologize for that and add the correction she wishes to make:
“. . . I rarely say I’m an atheist–I say I’m a nonbeliever. I actually think it’s a stupid word.
(Do we have a word for non-most things? It’s not an active process.)I’d like that corrected.”
_______________
Last year a film came out that I just became aware of (h/t to Mike M.): “Cosmic Origins: The Scientific Evidence of Creation“. It’s pretty much a put-up job for God, narrated by Fr. Robert Spitzer, religious philosopher, Jesuit priest, former president of Gonzaga University, and author of New Proofs for the Existence of God. The synopsis and video clips (see below) suggest that it’s the standard boilerplate argument for “fine tuning” of the universe as evidence for God. It also throws in the cosmological argument: the universe could not have created itself, so goddidit. Do these people even know physics? Here’s part of the blurb:
And this clip, a trailer for the movie, makes the God connection palpably clear:
The genial Fr. Spitzer (aren’t these Catholic accommodationists always the most affable priests around?) says this (be prepared to cringe):
If from nothing only nothing comes, and the universe came into existence, the universe, when it was nothing, could NOT have created itself—because it was nothing. Something else—not the universe—something else would have had to have done that. And that something else would have to transcend the universe.
I wonder what that “something else” is? And who created the “something else”?
I love the confident pronouncement that the universe could not have created itself. And these people are asking scientists to be humble?
What struck me, though, was this list of people appearing in the film:
Well, Polkinghorne and Heller are Templeton flaks, Owen Gingerich is well known as a religious apologist, and Jennifer Wiseman is an evangelical Christian who heads the Templeton-funded Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (Many of you subscribe to Science, the AAAS magazine, so be aware that your organization is afflicted by this religious cancer, which, among other things, sponsored a “holiday lecture” by Denis Alexander, physicist, evangelical Christian, and head of Cambridge’s odious Faraday institute, also funded by Templeton. Sense some commonality to all this?)
But Arno Penzias and Lisa Randall? I had to look up Penzias’s views, and it turns out that he’s not only a religious Jew, but has suggested that the elegance of the universe bespeaks the glory of God. A report/interview from Ceio (link above) says this:
In connection with the Big Bang theory and the issue of the origin of our highly ordered universe, on March 12, 1978, Dr. Penzias stated to the New York Times:
“The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” (Penzias, as cited in Bergman 1994, 183; see also Brian 1995, 163).
Arno Penzias’ research into astrophysics has caused him to see “evidence of a plan of divine creation” (Penzias, as cited in Bergman 1994, 183).
In an interview published in the scientific anthology The Voice of Genius (1995), Dr. Penzias says:
“Penzias: The Bible talks of purposeful creation. What we have, however, is an amazing amount of order; and when we see order, in our experience it normally reflects purpose.
Brian: And this order is reflected in the Bible?
Penzias: Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order.
Brian: So we can assume there might be purpose?
Penzias: Exactly. …This world is most consistent with purposeful creation.” (Penzias, as cited in Brian 1995, 163-165).
Randall is an avowed atheist, but has gone back and forth on accommodationism. In a 2009 comment comment on the Edge website, when several public intellectuals were asked to react to my New Republic piece on the incompatibility of science and faith, Randall was an explicit accommodationist. After describing how she met a science-friendly actor on a plane who nevertheless rejected evolution, Randall said this:
This reinforced for me why we won’t ever answer the question that’s been posed. Empirically-based logic-derived science and faith are entirely different methods for trying to approach truth. You can derive a contradiction only if your rules are logic. If you believe in revelatory truth you’ve abandoned the rules. There is no contradiction to be had.
Randall’s defense of a NOMA hypothesis was handily eviscerated by Sam Harris in a subsequent comment:
I am confident that Randall’s airplane adventure will mark a turning point in our intellectual discourse. Not only has she resolved all the contradictions between science and religion (and magic, voodoo, UFO cults, astrology, Tarot, palmistry, etc.), she has reconciled apparently conflicting religions with one another. Hindus worship a multiplicity of gods; Muslims acknowledge the existence of only one, and believe that polytheism is a killing offense. Do Hinduism and Islam conflict? Only “if your rules are logic.” Just as paths ascending a mountain slope can seem discrepant at the mountain’s base, and yet once we stand upon the summit, we find that all routes have led to the same destination—so it will be with every exercise of the human intellect! The Summit of Truth awaits, my friends. Simply pick your path…
On the other hand, reader Bob Carlson notes that, in Randall’s latest book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, she takes a completely opposite stance:
[A]ny religious scientist has to face daily the scientific challenge to his belief. The religious part of your brain cannot act at the same time as the scientific one. They are simply incompatible.
And yet she appears in a movie that explicitly uses scientific “evidence” to prove God. I presume she wasn’t aware of this movie’s aim when she was approached to help with it, but, given her atheism and latest statement on incompatibility, I’d suggest that she might want to publicly disclaim the film.
At any rate, this humorous blurb appears on the film’s website.
Zefrank1 has posted yet another in his series of “true facts” nature videos, which always combine science and lulz in a felicitious way; and I find the voice-over mesmerizing. For your delectation, the chameleon:
h/t: Gregory
I’m not really keen on atheist meetings—I think there are too many of them, and they often feature the same line-up of speakers. But TAM (“The Amazing Meeting”), sponsored by the James Randi foundation, is different: it’s a diverse event loosely centered on skepticism, and with a lot of entertainment and (something I dearly want to attend) Penn Jillette’s Famous Bacon, Doughnut, and Rock and Roll Party. So I was honored when D. J. Grothe invited me to be a speaker this year; the meeting is in (as usual) Las Vegas, and it’s from July 11-14 (details here).
The theme is “Fighting the Fakers,” or how scientific skepticism can be used to dispel woo, and the lineup is very promising. Here’s an incomplete list.
The headliner:
And some of the speakers:
There are lots of other speakers, workshops, entertainment, and, above all, this:
I don’t often stay up late, but that’s worth it!
I look forward to meeting old friends and making new ones, and maybe I’ll see some of you there. If you bring a copy of my book (or buy one there; I think they’ll be on sale), I’ll autograph it and draw a cat if you say the secret word (“Maru”).
I’ve just finished physicist Sean Carroll’s new book, The Particle at the End of the Universe (subtitled: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World), and want to give it two thumbs up. As far as I know, it’s the only popular account of the Higgs Hunt in book form, but even if it weren’t I’d recommend it as a lucid description of the meaning of the Higgs boson, how it fits into the Standard Model of particle physics, and as an engaging account of how the LHC was built and the interactions between the colorful personalities involved in the search (many of them were interviewed for the book).
I have to admit that although Carroll writes extremely clearly and knows his material inside out, it’s occasionally heavy going, but that’s because of the nature of the material. To understand the meaning of the Higgs boson, and why finding it was so important, you have to know how it fits into the Standard Model, and what other particles are involved in that model. That means learning about fermions, bosons, quarks, and their properties and interactions; and even as a scientist I had to concentrate hard on the text. But the payoff is large: the reader comes away with a feeling that she now knows why the hunt for that particle was so important. (See the many positive reviews on Amazon for confirmation.)
I particularly liked Carroll’s last chapter, “Making it worth defending,” which explains why physicists invested so much time and money in hunting for a particle that doesn’t have obvious practical applications. Yes, there might be technological spinoffs, as there was with other work on particle physics (the Internet originated with physicists’ need to access each other’s data), but in the main Carroll extols the virtue of simple curiosity:
At heart, science is the quest for awesome—the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It’s a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives. When a big event happens, like the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, that child-like curiosity in all of us comes to the fore once again. It took thousands of people to build the LHC and its experiments and to analyze the data that led to that discovery, but the accomplishment belongs to everyone who is interested in the enterprise.
Mohammed Yahia writes Nature magazine’s House of Wisdom blog, dedicated to science in the Middle East. After the July 4 seminars announcing the discovery of the Higgs, he celebrated the universality of the scientific impulse:
As people across the Arab world are all dealing with their politics, revolution, human rights issues and uprisings, science speaks to all of us equally and we become one. The only two human endeavors that are cross-boundary at this massive scale are art and science.
Compare that to religion, where there is no commonality of understanding or “knowledge”!
Carroll’s last chapter reminds me of a quote from H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices:
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves some of the greatest men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigators. What animates a great pathologist? Is it the desire to cure disease, to save life? Surely not, save perhaps as an afterthought. He is too intelligent, deep down in his soul, to see anything praiseworthy in such a desire. He knows by life-long observation that his discoveries will do quite as much harm as good, that a thousand scoundrels will profit to every honest man, that the folks who most deserve to be saved will probably be the last to be saved. No man of self-respect could devote himself to pathology on such terms. What actually moves him is his unquenchable curiosity–his boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but the dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
Carroll has it right: particle physics—like evolutionary biology—is akin to art. There aren’t many practical applications in terms of making people rich or healthy, but they’re both fulfilling in helping us understand our world and in feeling a commonality with others. Stretching our minds, whether it involves knowing how the universe works or putting oneself in another’s shoes, is one of the great luxuries of humanity now that (largely by virtue of science!) we’re freed from the drudgery, misery, and short lives of our ancestors. And it’s worth spending money on: public money, for we all benefit from it. Granted, there’s a limit to how much society can afford (the LHC cost about $6 billion dollars to build, and the running expenses are about $25 million per year).
I have been extraordinarily lucky to have a job I love, in which nobody tells me what to do except myself. Most people aren’t that fortunate. And I’m doubly fortunate that my job—my research—is underwritten by the largesse of American taxpayers: the grants given by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to fund my studies.
And when you’re that fortunate, you feel a debt that should be repaid. Carroll and I both try to do that, in part, by making our fields accessible to the people who finance us. We write.
