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.
There’s not a lot of information on this ant save that it’s from Southeast Asia, but one paper on it (reference below; free access) examines the microstructure of the hairs (and notes that the biology of this species and its relatives is almost completely uknown). What do the hairs do? The authors say that they convey mechanical stimuli to the ant and protect it from being nommed:
We suppose that the whole hair cover may serve as a shield against attacks of other arthropods, especially ants, which are highly common in the habitat of E. melanarctos. The sensory apparatus of the hairs gives exact information about contacts with the surroundings. The lipophilic secretions of the pedestal glands possibly function as lubricants that keep the non-living hair shafts intact, i.e. elastic and waterproof-like sebaceous glands or rump glands in mammals and birds, respectively.
Here’s a scanning-electron microscopic photo of the hairs, which arise from “pedestals” on the cuticle:
The International Humanist and Ethical Union has issued a long report on worldwide discrimination against atheists: “Freedom of thought 2012: A global report on discrimination against humanists, atheists, and the nonreligious” (“FT2012”; free download at link). The report was created with the cooperation of the American Humanist Association, the Center for Inquiry, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and the Secular Coalition for America (thanks, guys!).
The 69-page report was discussed in a recent article in the Washington Post, “The seven countries where the state can execute you for being an atheist.” Those countries are shown on the map below (in red), along with countries where nonbelief can send you to jail (orange), and those where nonbelievers have reduced rights (yellow):
Data source: International Humanist and Ethical Union (Max Fisher/Washington Post)
As the Post reports:
The report tracks, among other things, which countries have laws explicitly targeting atheists. There are not many, but the states that forbid non-religiousness – typically as part of “anti-blasphemy” legislation – include seven nations where atheism is punishable by death. All seven establish Islam as the state religion. Though that list includes some dictatorships, the country that appears to most frequently condemn atheists to death for their beliefs is actually a democracy, if a frail one: Pakistan. Others include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, the West African state of Mauritania, and the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. These countries are colored red on the above map.
You should have a look at the report, since it’s free and you don’t have to read the bulk of it, which details the discrimination in many countries. But a few remarks.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
But as FT2012 notes:
Although atheist speech is protected by both Article 18 and Article 19, there has been a regrettable tendency to defend atheist speech by appeal solely to Article 19 while religious speech is defended by appeal to Article 18. Indeed, when the UN debated whether to outlaw “defamation of religions”, some countries [JAC: I believe that the countries promoting the “anti-defamation” language were mostly Islamic] tried to frame the debate as a conflict between Articles 18 and 19, between the rights of religion and the right to free speech. Of course, there is no such conflict: religions do not have human rights; individuals have human rights, including the right to speak and the right to manifest their beliefs through religious criticism and persuasion. . .
Article 18 also protects the rights of atheists, humanists and other non-religious people beyond freedom of expression. It protects the right not to reveal your beliefs or religious identification, and the right not to take part in religious ceremonies. It protects the right to have or adopt atheist beliefs or to leave a religion. It also guarantees the right to practice and teach your non-religious beliefs, and even to perform ceremonies—including weddings, funerals and other rites of passage—in accordance with those beliefs.
Finally, the report notes the increase in nonbelief:
Atheists (those who do not believe in any god), and humanists (those who embrace a morality that does not appeal to any supernatural source), and others who consider themselves non-religious, are a large and growing population across the world. A detailed survey in 2012 revealed that religious people make up 59% of the world population, while those who identify as “atheist” make up 13%, and an additional 23% identify as “not religious” (while not self-identifying as “atheist”). The report by the Gallup International Association (available at http://www.wingia.co /web/files/news/14/file/14.pdf) is in line with other recent global surveys. It shows that atheism and the non-religious population are growing rapidly—religion dropped by 9% and atheism rose by 3% between 2005 and 2012—and that religion declines in proportion to the rise in education and personal income, which is a trend that looks set to continue.
The report aims to document threats to nonbelievers’ freedom of conscience, and 56 pages of the 69-page report are devoted to specific countries. Many of the violations occur in Africa and the Middle East, but Europe and North America aren’t immune. A few excerpts from reports on the latter:
Germany
Discriminatory Laws:
The constitution and other laws protect freedom of religion or belief. However, the criminal code addresses the insulting of faiths, religious societies, and ideological groups. Article 166 of the German Criminal Code states, “Whoever publicly or through dissemination of writings insults the content of others’ religious faith or faith related to a philosophy of life in a manner that is capable of disturbing the public peace, shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than three years or a fine.”
Italy
Discriminatory Laws:
The constitution and other laws and policies protect freedom of religion or belief. However, under article 724 of the penal code, blasphemy is considered as an “administrative offense” and punished with a fine. Administrative law requires that all classrooms in state schools display crucifixes.
Crucifixes???
Poland
Discriminatory Laws:
The constitution and other laws and policies protect freedom of religion or belief. However, Poland’s penal code states “Whoever offends religious feelings of other people by publicly insulting an object of religious cult or a place for public holding of religious ceremonies, is subject to a fine, restriction of liberty or loss of liberty for up to 2 years.”
Sweden
Discriminatory Laws:
The constitution and other laws and policies protect freedom of religion or belief. Members of religious communities are allowed to designate part of their income tax to go to their church, but the nonreligious have consistently been refused the right to designate their Humanist Association to enjoy the same privilege.
Chapter 16 Section 8 of the penal code criminalizes “A person who, in a disseminated statement or communication, threatens or expresses contempt for a national, ethnic or other such group of persons with allusion to race, colour, national or ethnic origin or religious belief…”
United Kingdom
Discriminatory laws
More than 30% of state-funded schools (which are 100% funded by public monies) in England and Wales are run by church authorities, and their number is increasing. These schools are allowed to discriminate against students—in their admission policies—and teachers—in hiring, discipline and firing, even in subjects that do not relate to the religious mission of the school—based on their religion (either because they are not religious or belong to a different religion or denomination than the school authorities) or their personal life (for example, teachers may be fired, or simply not hired, because of their sexual orientation or even because they have children out of wedlock). The right to discriminate in employment was recently extended to non-teaching posts in England. In addition, a large number of these schools have statutory obligations to provide confessional religious teaching rather than nonconfessional teaching which, again, is entirely publicly funded.
In England and Wales, every state-funded school (which are 100% funded by public monies) is legally required to hold a daily act of collective worship.
DAILY WORSHIP?
And oh, Canada!
Canada
Discriminatory Laws:
The constitution and other laws and policies protect freedom of religion or belief. However six of the ten provinces provide partial or full funding to religious schools. Most of these publicly funded religious schools are Roman Catholic. Although five provinces allow other denominations to run publicly funded schools. Publicly funded religious schools can discriminate on religious grounds in hiring and in accepting students. Around 16 percent of the Canadian population claims no religious affiliation, yet in the vast low-population expanses of Canada, the religious school may well be the only public school within a reasonable distance for many non-religious students.
Ontario is the only province that funds Catholic religious education while providing no funding for other religious schools. One third of Ontario’s public schools (around 1,400) are Catholic schools, and they receive 100% of their funding from the government. Catholic schools discriminate against non-Catholics in hiring staff. Catholic schools can also exclude non-Catholic children.
The U.S. isn’t immune, either, of course. Although we have constitutional protection of both religious and nonreligious expression, there are still (unenforceable) laws on the books like these:
At least seven states–Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas–have in place constitutional provisions that bar atheists from holding public office. One state (Arkansas) even has a law that bars an atheist from testifying as a witness at a trial. The Supreme Court effectively struck down these kind of provisions as unconstitutional in 1961. However, their continued existence is a reminder of the pervasiveness of the idea that atheists are untrustworthy, and perhaps even not truly American.
The report also refers to the pervasive proselytizing that occurs in the U.S. military.
Come on, Brits and Canadians—get rid of that government-funded, faith-based education! We’ll work on stuff here in the U.S.
The work week is almost behind us (except for me, of course!), and here’s some festive footwear, with fancy hand-stitched tops, to celebrate. What animal—yes, it’s an animal—do you think it is?
As the number of commenters and readers has grown here, so has the degree of rancor, name-calling and vituperation on this site; and I often can’t keep up with the comments because of other commitments. So let me emphasize again a few long-standing rules.
1. Please do not dominate threads with your comments. If you exceed 15% of the total comments, you are commenting too often. What I particularly dislike is one-on-ones, where two people go hammer and tongs at each other. (I have never seen a rapprochement from these engagements!). Take it to private email if that happens.
2. Please do not comment solely to advertise your own website or a cause that you want promoted. If you think there’s a cause that would interest the readers, please call it to my attention via private email.
3. Please do not call the other commenters names. If you wish, you can call public figures names (I have trouble restraining myself vis-à-vis creationists!), but I don’t want a lot of invective directed at the readers. There are plenty of websites where you can curse to your heart’s content. I can’t guarantee that I’ll find every violation here, but I expect people to abide by this request.
4. Please keep your posts reasonably short; do not write essays. If posts are too long I often contact the commenters and ask them to shorten their remarks. If that happens to you, please do the editing without complaint.
5. Finally, do not diss the host. I don’t mind people criticizing my ideas—indeed, I encourage it—but don’t call me names, don’t tell me I’m a hypocrite, that I should relax, that I should not be posting on certain topics,that I shouldn’t eat BBQ, and so on. This website is like a home to me, and you wouldn’t visit someone’s house for dinner and then insult them. There’s been a surprising lack of social grace in many recent comments. If anything will get you banned here besides moronic creationism, it’s rude behavior.
Some lovely magic to end the day, from the International Magic Convention in Beijing. The YouTube caption says this:
FISM award winner and French magic champion Yann Frisch is one of magic’s freshest talents. Yann has been creating a sensation wherever he goes with his unique take on classic magic, an absurdist take on the cups and balls. Cool, clever, stylish and oh so artful. We are proud to have one of France’s top performers at EMC.
Be sure to watch to the end; it’s only 4.5 minutes.
I’ve been reading Tanya Luhrmann’s best-selling book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Relationship with God, which describes her four years of association with an evangelical Christian sect. (You should read it!) Luhrmann is an anthropologist, and sought to understand how these people forge such a close relationship with God. One of her many conclusions is that for these Christians, a personal relationship with God arises through practice: constant prayer, various acts that people in the church undergo (being prayed for while crying, for instance), and endless striving to hear God’s voice. Eventually, the practice pays off: people suddenly realize that God is “speaking to them,” and from then on their faith is strong and immovable. (Luhrmann is not overtly religious, I think, and doesn’t endorse the sect’s views as providing evidence for God.) What struck me is the amount of hard work the Christians need to get to this state, though the importance of “personal revelation” in sustaining faith also reminded me of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.
While reading the book, I pondered what kind of neurological and biochemical changes these people were inducing in themselves through their “practice,” for of course I don’t believe they’re getting in touch with God at all. But my question has been partially answered in a new piece by psychiatrist Oliver Sacks in The Atlantic: “Seeing God in the third millenium.” Sacks explains how near-death- and out-of-body experiences can arise as the byproduct of accidents, traumas, diseases, or manipulation of the brain by experimenters. He totally debunks the “heaven” experience of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who’s gotten wealthy with his new book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. (I swear, it’s easy to get rich these days: just have an experience of Heaven when you’re ill or unconscious.)
Alexander, you may recall, says that he must really have seen Heaven because during his bout with meningitis, which put him in a coma, his cerebral cortex was shut down. His book is of course taken by credulous Americans as proof of God. But Sacks points out the fallacy with that:
It is not so easy, however, to dismiss neurological processes. Dr. Alexander presents himself as emerging from his coma suddenly: “My eyes opened … my brain … had just kicked back to life.” But one almost always emerges gradually from coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness, that NDEs [near-death experiences] tend to occur.
Alexander insists that his journey, which subjectively lasted for days, could not have occurred except while he was deep in coma. But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others, that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in 20 or 30 seconds, even though it seems to last much longer. Subjectively, during such a crisis, the very concept of time may seem variable or meaningless. The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander’s case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.
To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific — it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.
Coincidentally, and felicitously, Sacks takes up Luhrmann’s observations, concluding (as I did), that these people are, through their “practice,” eventually inducing the hallucination that they’re talking to God:
Sooner or later, with this intensive practice, for some of the congregants, the mind may leap from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God, feels God walking beside them. These yearned-for voices and visions have the reality of perception, and this is because they activate the perceptual systems of the brain, as all hallucinations do. These visions, voices, and feelings of “presence” are accompanied by intense emotion — emotions of joy, peace, awe, revelation. Some evangelicals may have many such experiences; others only a single one — but even a single experience of God, imbued with the overwhelming force of actual perception, can be enough to sustain a lifetime of faith. (For those who are not religiously inclined, such experiences may occur with meditation or intense concentration on an artistic or intellectual or emotional plane, whether this is falling in love or listening to Bach, observing the intricacies of a fern, or cracking a scientific problem.)
In the last decade or two, there has been increasingly active research in the field of “spiritual neurosciences.” There are special difficulties in this research, for religious experiences cannot be summoned at will; they come, if at all, in their own time and way — the religious would say in God’s time and way. Nonetheless, researchers have been able to demonstrate physiological changes not only in pathological states like seizures, OBEs, and NDEs, but also in positive states like prayer and meditation. Typically these changes are quite widespread, involving not only primary sensory areas in the brain, but limbic (emotional) systems, hippocampal (memory) systems, and the prefrontal cortex, where intentionality and judgement reside.
Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience.
Good for Sacks, who calls himself an “old Jewish atheist”! Although Luhrmann affords the Christians her respect (she is, after all, an anthropologist who had to report on their community by joining it), I don’t think she talks about how the “practice” of these Christians could induce the religious experience as a neurological phenomenon. But I’m only halfway through the book.
h/t: the many readers who called this piece to my attention
Flightless flies would seem to be an oxymoron, but there are plenty of them, and they include some of the most bizarre insects on Earth. Just search, for example, for “phorid” on this site. Some of these creatures are so bizarre, as either larvae or adults, that you’d never take them to be flies.
Get a load of this one. Matthew Cobb called my attention to a new post by the talented photographer and entomologist Alex Wild on his photography website (see also his great website Myrmecos) showing the larva of a syrphid fly so weird that it was once described as a mollusc (see caption below taken from Alex’s site). It preys on the brood of ants, and I suspect the “tube” at the upper right is for respiration (my Drosophila have a pair of these “spiracles” at their posterior end):
Larvae of syrphid flies in the genus Microdon are so odd that they were originally described as molluscs. The adults are more or less normal-looking flies, but larvae are predators of ant brood, living within the dark galleries of ant nests (in this case, with Linepithema oblongum). Termas de Reyes, Jujy, Argentina
As lagniappe, here’s a couple of very weird flightless flies from site “The Atavism” (and indeed, vestigial wings are atavisms). Remember, these are flies.
Here’s a “sheep ked,” a parasitic flightless fly from New Zealand with The Atavism’s (TA’s) caption:
Flies in the family Hippoboscidae are blood suckers. Many of these parasites fly from hosts to host, but a number of species have become so intimately associated that they’ve given up on flying – moving from one animal to another only while those hosts are in physical contact. The flightless hippboscids are generally called “louse flies” or “keds” and the most well known examples include species that specialise in drinking from pigeons, cattle and sheep.
Note the vestigial, useless wings: a testimony of its evolution from a flying ancestor:
Crataerhina pallida, the sheep ked
A parasitic bat fly, again with TA’s caption:
The bat flies have lost their eyes as well as their wings, by have made up for those loses in other body parts. The massive spider-like legs end in tiny claws that let the flies grip on the bat’s fur and move about. Once stuck on a bat these flies drink blood.
Photo by Giles San Martin
Look at those claws!
The anterior leg of a parasitic fly of the familly Nycteribiidae collected on a Plecotus auritus bat in Switzerland (Le chenit, Baume de la petite Chaux, Coll. P. Nyssen). The claws are particularly well adapted to grab the fur. Photo by Giles San Martin.
And here’s a bat fly from Kenya:
As far as we know, the family Mormotomyiidae is represented by a single species (Mormotomyia hirsuta) which is only known from a particular site in on one mountain in Kenya. As you may have guessed the site is a bat roost, and the animal, despite being only distantly related to the other bat flies discussed above, has taken on the spidery form that is associated with flies that spend their lives with bats.
You’d think this was an ant or something, wouldn’t you? We know it’s a fly because of its other traits that place it clearly with dipterans (and certainly molecular analysis would confirm that).
I’m not sure what the “War on Christmas” really is, nor do I bother myself much with the celebrations of a nonexistent Jebus. But what I do object to is using the excuse of the holiday to breach the American wall of church and state by putting religious symbols on public land. Nativity scenes crop up like mushrooms, and I don’t care if they’re in people’s front yards. But the faithful insist on the encroaching public creche, feeling that somehow they have a right to flaunt their beliefs in violation of the First Amendment.
The worst, however, is when a rabbi insists that Nativity Scenes on public land are okay. Who has suffered more from Christian hegemony than the Jews? And, sure enough, one Jew is glad to get in bed with the Christians on this issue: one Michael Gotlieb, identified byThe Los Angeles Times as “rabbi at Kehillat Ma’arav, or the Westside Congregation, in Santa Monica.”
In an op-ed published in the Times two days ago,”Threatened by faith in Santa Monica,” Gotlieb raises once again the fallacious argument for breaching the wall of separation: our nation is undergirded by religious principles, so why not show that? Gotlieb:
Christmas in Santa Monica has gotten a whole lot darker and a whole lot less tolerant. For almost 60 years Santa Monica’s Palisades Park embodied the Christmas spirit with its displays depicting the birth of Jesus. Through the use of large dioramas, the Christmas story unfolded chronologically, based on the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.
The life-size statues of baby Jesus, along with Mary, Joseph and others, added a visual reminder of our nation’s religious underpinnings. The Nativity scenes were an impermanent acknowledgment of the timeless role faith and organized religion plays for the residents of Santa Monica and visitors alike. No longer is that the case; the city has now prohibited the display of these dioramas on public land.
What about the Jews of Santa Monica, who don’t believe in the Jesus story, or, for that matter, the nonbelievers, whose lives aren’t based on “faith and organized religion”?
As you might recall, to avoid squabbles about this matter, Santa Monica took the ill-advised step of having a “lottery,” in which members of different faiths could compete to put up their special display. Faced with an inundation of atheistic displays, the city council simply gave up and banned all displays. That’s what they should have done in the first place. Competing displays might be constitutional, but they are still expressions of religion on public property, and serve no purpose except to inflame people
And they sure inflamed Rabbi Gotlieb. On whom does he blame the fracas? Guess!
The second factor [after lawsuits] driving this unfortunate ban is an unprecedented, angry form of atheism.
Yes, because atheism has turned angry—and for good reason given the proselytizing of evangelicals and the fulminating infection of American government and politics with faith. The only good atheism, says Gotlieb, is a kind and gentle atheism. Presumably, the only feminism is a kind and gentle feminism (why do those women get so angry?) and the only opposition to racism or homophobia must be conciliatory. Well, we all know how well that strategy works!
And so the familar words tumble from Gotlieb’s pen—the old trope about why New Atheists should be like the old ones:
Today’s atheism is different from the atheism of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Nietzsche, Russell and Voltaire did not gloat over the presumed death or nonexistence of God. There was no triumphalism in their assertions. While not enamored of organized religion, they did not view it as a singular force for evil.
Things have changed. Outspoken, angry 21st century atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens have sought to eradicate God and organized religion from the planet; faith-based religion in any form is unacceptable to them. When studying these modern-day thinkers, the late Herbert Marcuse’s lament proves fitting and prescient: “We, no matter the side, become fanatical in our own anti-fanaticism.”
Today’s atheists hold that religion educates children and adults to hate in the name of their pious doctrines. Religion, they tell us, encourages followers to engage in God-directed slaughter and conquest of innocents. Its mission is to convert skeptics — or worse, subdue nonbelievers — until the whole world buckles.
Well maybe the old atheists were wrong! After all, religious persecution has existed since time immemorial. Does the good rabbi know about the evils of Catholicism, the kids who die because their parents try faith-based healing, the murders of abortion doctors, the opposition to assisted suicide, and the innumerable murders of Muslims bent on converting the world to their point of view? Does the good rabbi ignore the fact that nearly all mainstream religions disenfranchise half the populace: those lacking a Y chromosome? Presumably he knows that in Orthodox Judaism women are second-class citizens, forced to worship behind covered screens and to “purify” themselves in ritual baths after their periods. But maybe that’s okay with Gotlieb. Hey, that’s not discrimination, but the “timeless role of faith.”
At least atheists don’t kill others in their drive to “convert skeptics.” Further, although Russell may not have gloated, certainly many older atheists (viz. Mencken) trenchantly emphasized the follies of faith and its lack of evidence—something that New Atheists, with their connection to science, constantly emphasize. Gloating? That’s trivial. And who gloats more than evangelical Christians, especially those who put up nativity scenes on public land. “Look—we did it!”
To be sure, the Rabbi admits that evils have sometimes been done in the name of faith (how could he not?), but he doesn’t name them. Does oppressing women count, because Judaism is good at that?
Anyway, he dismisses these evils because they’re counterbalanced by the “evils” of strident atheism:
But today’s atheists are as extreme in their convictions as the fire-and-brimstone believer. The resolute follower knows beyond any doubt that God exists, whereas the atheist knows beyond any doubt that God is a figment of the imagination. I’m reminded of the aphorism: To the believer there are no questions; to the atheist, there are no answers.
Really? As extreme as fire-and-brimstone believers? No fricking way! We don’t kill people, toss acid on schoolgirls, let people get AIDs or HPV rather than use birth control, or instill guilt and fear of a nonexistent hell in our children. We don’t maintain that atheism dictates the inferiority of women.
And no, atheists don’t know beyond any doubt that God is a figment of the imagination. For most of us, it’s sufficient to say that “there’s no evidence that God exists and, in view of the fact that there could be evidence but isn’t, and that the world suggest that there is either no deity or a malicious one, we consider the existence of a beneficent god very unlikely.” The rabbi knows nothing about atheism—or else he’s distorting it to fire up the faithful.
Finally, Gotlieb pats himself on the back—for the wrong reasons:
As a Jew and a rabbi, my speaking out in support of Christians who wish to display a Nativity scene on public land can potentially carry more weight than a priest or minister speaking out. The reason is simple: It’s not my religious narrative. More important, faithful Christians do not threaten me. If anything, I’m inspired by them. By definition, different people from different faiths view God and religion differently.
Well isn’t he special?
Well, Rabbi Gotlieb, maybe you don’t feel threatened by Christians (or Muslims, for that matter), but you should. They make Christian-based laws, they impede scientific research and the teaching of evolution, and, if they controlled the government, Jews would have a harder time of it. Muslims are even worse: look what they do when their faith gets the upper hand in a nation.
But it doesn’t matter whether Gotlieb feel threatened or not. Democracy itself is always threatened by the hegemony of religion (that’s why the Freedom from Religion Foundation always has its hands full), and the possibility of that hegemony is precisely why the founders wrote the First Amendment. Or, Rabbi, do you reject our Constitution?
