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.
Sea otters are awesome, and you don’t know the meaning of “animal cute” until you’ve seen one in the wild cradling its baby on its belly as it floats on its back. (In that position they also put rocks on their belly and pound molluscs on the stones to break them open.) Here’s a “senior” sea otter who was taught to play basketball as a form of therapy.
What I don’t get is the statement in the video that Eddie was “taken for voluntary X-rays.” Now that’s a smart animal!
h/t: SGM
Oklahoma may be about to join those states that, in an attempt to sneak creationism and global warming denial into the classroom, will enforce a “let a million criticisms flourish” bill on public school classrooms. The repeated failure of creationists and science denialists to force the teaching of antiscience in the classroom has, as you know, given rise to a new strategy: instead of mandating the teaching of, say, creationism or intelligent design, they try to allow “free criticism” of scientific theories (evolution) in the classroom, with the mandate that students not be penalized for views that contradict accepted science.
As Mother Jones reports, a new bill in the Oklahoma legislature, the “Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act” ( HB 1674; free download at link), has passed the education committee by a 9-8 vote and will soon go to the full legislature:
In biology class, public school students can’t generally argue that dinosaurs and people ran around Earth at the same time, at least not without risking a big fat F. But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider [JAC: as noted above, it passed] a House bill that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change.
Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. “I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks,” says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. “A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations.”
Stated another way, students could make untestable, faith-based claims in science classes without fear of receiving a poor mark.
Well, first of all, modern evolutionary theory doesn’t explain life by “chance mutations” alone: that’s the old creationist canard that “evolution says everything got here by chance,” like assembling a Boeing 747 by blowing wind through a junkyard. But of course that’s bogus, for complex life (i.e., complex adaptations) arise by a combination of a random process (mutation that creates variation) and a deterministic one (the sorting of that variation via natural selection). The statement shows that Blackwell doesn’t even understand evolution, but is mouthing creationist dogma.
Now as I read the bill (see below), it’s not completely clear whether students really can write papers and give creationist answers without academic penalty, but the intent of the bill is clear: to blur the teaching of real science and superstition in the classroom. It gives teachers free license to “go against what they see in the textbooks”—like evolution.
HB 1674 is the latest in an ongoing series of “academic freedom” bills aimed at watering down the teaching of science on highly charged topics. Instead of requiring that teachers and textbooks include creationism—see the bill proposed by Missouri state Rep. Rick Brattin—HB 1674’s crafters say it merely encourages teachers and students to question, as the bill puts it, the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of topics that “cause controversy,” including “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”
Eric Meikle, education project director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California, says Oklahoma has proposed more anti-evolution legislation than any other state, introducing eight bills with academic freedom language since 2004. (None has passed.) “The problem with these bills is that they’re so open-ended; it’s a kind of code for people who are opposed to teaching climate change and evolution,” Meikle says.
Meikle is right. Let’s look at what the bill says:
A. The Oklahoma Legislature finds that an important purpose of science education is to inform students about scientific evidence and to help students develop critical thinking skills they need in order to become intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens. The Legislature further finds that the teaching of some scientific concepts including but not limited to premises in the areas of biology, chemistry, meteorology, bioethics and physics can cause controversy, and that some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on some subjects such as, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.
Note the fields singled out: evolution, the origin of life (often lumped with evolution), global warming, and human cloning (not something often discussed in public-school biology classes). All of these subjects are mentioned because of how they resonate with the faithful.
B. The State Board of Education, district boards of education, district superintendents and administrators, and public school principals and administrators shall endeavor to create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues. Educational authorities in this state shall also endeavor to assist teachers to find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies. Toward this end, teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.
That is, teachers can go against the textbooks, which present accepted science. To me this is the most invidious part of the bill, for it mandates that the teachers themselves will address nonexistent controversies (i.e. whether evolution occurred, whether there’s anthropogenic global warming). This is not just a suggestion, but something that’s mandated. Imagine the confusion that will engender!
C. The State Board of Education, a district board of education, district superintendent or administrator, or public school principal or administrator shall not prohibit any teacher in a school district in this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.
This means, in effect, that teachers won’t be penalized for discussing creationism and intelligent design as viable alternative that address the “scientific weaknesses” of the modern theory of evolution. The same goes for global warming.
D. Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories. Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to exempt students from learning, understanding and being tested on curriculum as prescribed by state and local education standards.
To me, this reads as if students don’t have to believe what they’re tested on, but can still be penalized if their answers on tests or in papers don’t conform to state science standards. And that take doesn’t comport with the opening statement of the Mother Jones piece: “In biology class, public school students can’t generally argue that dinosaurs and people ran around Earth at the same time, at least not without risking a big fat F. But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma. . . ”
Blackwell’s statement, as reported by Mother Jones, contradicts Mother Jones‘s interpretation, but is still a bit ambiguous:
HB 1674 goes further than a companion bill under consideration in the state Senate by explicitly protecting students, teachers, and schools from being penalized for subscribing to alternative theories. It does, however, say that children may still be tested on widely accepted theories such as anthropogenic climate change. “Students can’t say because I don’t believe in this, I don’t want to learn it,” Blackwell says. “They have to learn it in order to look at the weaknesses.”
While implying that students will be “tested on widely accepted theories,” Blackwell also notes that they won’t be “penalized for subscribing to alternative theories.” But what is an F but a penalty? Or can you subscribe to one theory in your heart but be required to parrot the correct scientific answers? If the latter is the case, then this bill doesn’t do anything new vis-à-vis student behavior, for we never ask students to believe what they must write in their papers or tests; merely demonstrate an understanding of modern science. What worries me more than this is the mandate that teachers must “teach the controversy” when the controversies the bill’s authors have in mind don’t exist.
Finally, in a weaselly attempt to argue that religion isn’t behind all this, the bill has a disclaimer:
E. The provisions of the Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act shall only protect the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or nonbeliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion. The intent of the provisions of this act is to create an environment in which both the teacher and students can openly and objectively discuss the facts and observations of science, and the assumptions that underlie their interpretation.
What they mean is “hey, folks, don’t think this is religiously and politically motivated, even though it is.” Well, the courts may construe it differently, and let us hope that if this bill is enacted, they will. But let us hope first that the bill won’t get passed, but goes into the legislative dustbin with the eight other bills of this nature that have failed in Oklahoma.
In late January a similar bill was introduced in Indiana, our neighboring state, and in March I’m going there to help fight that one.
h/t: Sarah
Here’s another trace of an ancient moggy, this time from a 1975 paper by G. S. Maxwell, “Excavation at the Roman Fort of Bothwellhaugh, Lanarkshire, 1967-8″ (Brittania 6:20-35; free download). I quote from the paper and reproduce the photo in question:
The most remarkable find in this category was, however, the collection of twenty-five brick-fragments which were discovered in the fill of a disused post-hole belonging to a first-period building on the north-west side of the Via Principalis; four of these bore imprints of an animal’s paw; (PL. VII).
Dr. A. S. Clarke of the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, has kindly examined these pieces and identified the animal as a cat, probably Felis domesticus. The width of the prints varies from 25 to 35 mm, considerably smaller than that of the pad-impressions from the Roman fort at Mumrills (Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. lxiii (1928-29), 57I f.), which were identified as Felis sylvestris. [JAC: note that the name of the housecat, once Felis domesticus, is now Felis catus or, sometimes, Felis silvestris catus, the latter designating the housecat as a subspecies of the wildcat Felis silvestris. And a subspecies of F. silvestris, Felis silvestris lybica, the African wildcat, was probably the wild ancestor of all housecats.]
The fact that the impressions of the claws can also be seen in three of the Bothwellhaugh ex-amples, although more faintly than in the Mumrills fragment, would suggest that the animal was not allowed to maintain a regular pace in its progress across the drying bricks.
I like the dry humor of the last sentence.
h/t: Tweet by @DeepFriedDNA via Matthew Cobb
A piece in yesterday’s New York Times, the American House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved a bill (see link below) to allow government money to be used for repairing houses of worship damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
The bill, approved last week by a vote of 354 to 72, had support from Roman Catholic and Jewish organizations. It was opposed by 66 Democrats and 6 Republicans.
(Passage in the Senate, which is necessary to bring the bill to Obama for signing into law, isn’t yet assured.)
The disparity in political parties here is no surprise: Republicans are more often faith-heads. But what happened to religious organizations favoring the separation of church and state? Oh, right—that goes out the window if every faith can benefit equally.
This is, indeed, a violation of the First Amendment, for it uses taxpayer money to fix churches, and that’s a benefit to the church. Churches already enjoy benefits that I consider a violation of the Constitution: ministers’ housing for instance, is tax free, while Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, though they run a nonprofit secular organization, don’t get tax-free housing. And neither should I, as an atheist, have to pay to fix up a storm-damaged church. Isn’t such damage, after all, an “act of God”?
The House bill adds houses of worship to the list of private nonprofit organizations eligible for disaster relief. Federal law already allows such aid to museums, zoos, performing-arts centers, libraries, homeless shelters and other private nonprofit entities that provide “essential services of a governmental nature to the general public.”
The House bill would apply to property damaged by the storm and damage from future disasters.
Under the bill, “a church, synagogue, mosque, temple or other house of worship, and a private nonprofit facility operated by a religious organization,” would be eligible for federal disaster assistance “without regard to the religious character of the facility or the primary religious use of the facility.”
Museums, zoos, libraries, and homeless shelters are public goods, to which we all should contribute. Religion is not. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in charge of helping finance restoration of areas damaged by natural disasters, has historically refused to fix up houses of worship, except for those parts that provide social services. FEMA is opposed to this bill, too, on the ground that it would force them to make impossible decisions between “worship space” and “secular space”. Does fixing up a roof, for example, protect only the secular parts of a church?
And here’s a distinction without a difference:
The speaker of the New York City Council, Christine C. Quinn, had unsuccessfully urged FEMA to change its regulations without legislation, writing in a letter to the agency: “Recovery from a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy isn’t a matter of state sponsoring religion. It’s a matter of helping those in need after one of the worst natural disasters our country has ever seen.”
Well, can’t churches and synagogues buy insurance like the rest of us?
In the end, it comes down to this:
But Representative Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, said: “This bill would direct federal taxpayer dollars to the reconstruction of houses of worship. The idea that taxpayer money can be used to build a religious sanctuary or an altar has consistently been held unconstitutional.”
The American Civil Liberties Union agreed, saying it was a bedrock principle of constitutional law that “taxpayer funds cannot go to construct, rebuild or repair buildings used for religious activities.”
This is just another attempt to breach the American wall between church and state, and give unconscionable and unconstitutional privilege to religion.
If you choose to write or call your Senator, who will be voting on the bill soon, you can find his/her contact information here; the bill is H. R. 592. I expect that the Freedom from Religion Foundation will have something to say about this.
In other news, a cat and a DVD drive fought to a standstill.
Alert readers Veronica Abbass and Linda Grilli called my attention to today’s Jesus and Mo, and the nice h/t that the artist gave me:
Today’s script is thanks to Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980). The quote, which is heavily edited in the barmaid’s speech, was spotted and posted by Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True. Thanks!
The artist reads me! I’m chuffed!
The J&M link goes to the original quote by Walter Kaufmann (remember Kaufmann Week?), which came from his 1961 book Faith of a Heretic (pp. 126-127).
Indeed, [theologians] resemble lawyers in two ways. In the first place, they accept books and traditions as data that it is not up to them to criticize. They can only hope to make the best of these books and traditions by selecting the most propitious passages and precedents; and where the law seems to them harsh, inhuman, or dated, all they can do is have recourse to exegesis.
Secondly, many theologians accept the morality that in many countries governs the conduct of the counsel for the defense. Ingenuity and skillful appeals to the emotions are considered perfectly legitimate; so are attempts to ignore all the inconvenient evidence, as long as one can get away with it, and the refusal to engage in inquiries that are at all likely to discredit the predetermined conclusion: that the client is innocent. If all else fails, one tries to saddle one’s opponent with the burden of disproof; and as a last resort one is content with a reasonable doubt that after all the doctrines that one has defended might be true.
I forgot that WEIT was being published in Hebrew—by an Israeli firm called Books in the Attic. At last my people will be able to read it in the original language through which Yahweh transmitted the book to me.
Here is the new cover (reversed, of course, because Hebrew is written right to left). I can’t read Hebrew (shame on me), but perhaps a literate reader can let me know if all is okay.
That makes 16 languages, and the next one (the one I’m most keen on) is Arabic!
In a post last week called “A specious argument for the comity of evolution and faith,” I discussed a misleading HuffPo piece by Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist who claimed that although many American reject evolution, the official positions of their churches often don’t. On that basis he made this claim:
I feel that people bent on science-religion conflict are picking the wrong battle. The real battle is against the daunting challenges facing the future of humanity, and regardless of our religious views, we’re all better off fighting this battle united.
On the same day that Tegmark’s piece was published (Darwin Day!), the stalwart Victor Stenger responded at HuffPo, noting that most evolution-friendly churches, especially Catholicism, accept theistic evolution, which is usually not scientific evolution. (The conflation of theistic evolution with naturalistic evolution as the latter is accepted by scientists, and taught in science classes, annoys me no end. Scientists don’t posit that evolution is guided by God, and there’s no evidence for that guidance.)
Tegmark never learned the first lesson of posting on a blog (yes, his site is a blog): never respond to your critics, for it just makes things worse. And so he’s just put up at HuffPo a whiny response to all those strident, misguided atheists who criticized his argument: “Religion, science, and the attack of the angry atheists“. It’s a self-pitying diatribe against the opprobrium that he got from atheists and fellow scientists—opprobrium he claims was expected from religious people, but not from us. Here’s part of Tegmark’s response to the “angry atheists,” whom he sees as harmful in three ways (indented parts are Tegmarks’s). I was struck at how poorly written Tegmark’s piece was: it was obviously a thrown-together and reflexive response, one that does him no credit. Here are our sins:
1) They [“angry atheists’] help religious fundamentalists.
Tegmark thinks that because more Americans reject evolution than do their churches, pro-evolution scientists should play up the harmony between official church positions and evolution, and not harp on the widespread rejection of evolution by the faithful (indeed, that’s the goal of the ineffectual Clergy Letter Project). That’s worked really well, hasn’t it? Catholicism is a prime example of how easy it is for members of a church to completely ignore its dogma.
I quote the next part in its entirety, as its incoherence is almost funny. (By the way, every time you hear the words “humility” and “modesty” coming from an accommodationist, prepare to grate your teeth.)
2) They could use more modesty:
If I’ve learned anything as a physicist, it’s how little we know with certainty. In terms of the ultimate nature of reality, we scientists are ontologically ignorant. For example, many respected physicists believe in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a fundamentally random process called “wavefunction collapse” occurs whenever you observe something. This interpretation has been criticized both for being anthropocentric (quantum godfather Niels Bohr famously argued that there’s no reality without observation) and for being vague (there’s no equation specifying when the purported collapse is supposed to happen, and there’s arguably no experimental evidence for it).Let’s compare the ontological views of Niels Bohr to those of a moderate and tolerant religious person. At least one of them is incorrect, since Bohr was an atheist. Perhaps neither is correct. But who’s to say that the former is clearly superior to the latter, which should be ridiculed and taunted? Personally, I’d bet good money against the Copenhagen Interpretation, but it would be absurd if I couldn’t be friends with those believing its ontology and unite with them in the quest to make our planet a better place.
What the bloody hell does that mean? Because Bohr (who did not win the Nobel Prize for the Copenhagen Interpretation, but for studying the structure of atoms and its relationship to quantum phenomena) had a view of what quantum mechanics meant, that makes his view equivalent to the superstition of “a moderate and tolerant religious person”? I don’t see the Copenhagen Interpretation as in any way equivalent to religious superstition; for one thing, it is subject to some experimental verification (e.g., Bell’s inequality), it is not accepted on faith (that’s why it’s controversial) and, most important, it doesn’t make its adherents do things like instill guilt in children or denigrate gays. One is not enabling bad stuff by befriending someone who accepts the Copenhagen Interpretation.
3) They should practice what they preach:
Most atheists advocate for replacing fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance by careful and thoughtful scientific discourse. Yet after we posted our survey report, ad hominem attacks abounded, and most of the caustic comments I got (including one from a fellow physics professor) revealed that their authors hadn’t even bothered reading the report they were criticizing.Just as it would be unfair to blame all religious people for what some fundamentalists do, I’m obviously not implying that all anti-religious people are mean-spirited or intolerant. However, I can’t help being struck by how some people on both the religious and anti-religious extremes of the spectrum share disturbing similarities in debating style.
Yes, here again we see the false equation between atheists and fundamentalists. Someone should invent a name for this fallacy (can readers suggest one?).
Since when has a tenet of atheism been that one can’t be passionate in one’s views? Given that our job is to fight entrenched superstition, passion is one of our most powerful weapons. I, for one, claim that I not only read Tegmark’s piece carefully, but responded without making ad hominem remarks. Does that make my “debating style” identical to that of, say, William Lane Craig?
Perhaps some atheists or scientists did make such remarks, but isn’t it curious that Tegmark doesn’t give any examples? In the end, his “response” is just silly, and the fallacy of his original argument—saying that America is more evolution-friendly than we think because many churches support evolution (theistic or not)—still stands.
*****
As a palliative, read Victor Stenger’s newest piece, which went up yesterday at HuffPo: “Science and religion cannot be reconciled”, based on his 2012 book God and the Folly of Faith. Perhaps it (and my blurb for his book and piece) are preaching to the choir here, but it’s heartening to know that there’s a stentorian voice out there tellling HuffPo readers the unwelcome truth. Stenger doesn’t mention Tegmark’s articles, so it’s not a “rebuttal” in that sense, but a rebuttal of Tegmark’s message of science/faith harmony. The truths Stenger imparts include these:
Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies — the separate assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside the body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural. Science is the systematic study of the observations made of the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments.
By contrast, all major religions teach that humans possess an additional “inner” sense that allows us to access a realm lying beyond the visible world — a divine, transcendent reality we call the supernatural. If it does not involve the transcendent, it is not religion.
No doubt science has its limits. However, that fact that science is limited doesn’t mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits.
and this:
Most of the scientific community in general goes along with the notion that science has nothing to say about the supernatural because the methods of science as they are currently practiced exclude supernatural causes. However, if we truly possess an inner sense telling us about an unobservable reality that matters to us and influences our lives, then we should be able to observe the effects of that reality by scientific means.
If someone’s inner sense were to warn of an impending earthquake unpredicted by science, which then occurred on schedule, we would have evidence for this extrasensory source of knowledge. Claims of “divine prophecies” have been made throughout history, but not one has been conclusively confirmed.
So far we see no evidence that the feelings people experience when they perceive themselves to be in touch with the supernatural correspond to anything outside their heads, and have no reason to rely on those feelings when they occur. However, if such evidence or reason should show up, then scientists will have to consider it whether they like it or not.
Take that, NCSE, the National Academies, and the AAAS! I am so tired of the completely bogus claim that “science cannot test the supernatural”! Of course it can.
And this:
From its very beginning, religion has been a tool used by those in power to retain that power and keep the masses in line. This continues today as religious groups are manipulated to work against believers’ own best interests in health and economic well-being in order to cast doubt on well-established scientific findings. This would not be possible except for the diametrically opposed world-views of science and religion. Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion will change its commitment to nonsense.
My name is Jerry Coyne and I approve of that message.
From this week’s L’Osservatore (English edition):
h/t: Terry