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.
by Matthew Cobb
I was in Vancouver a couple of months ago, but somehow I missed these ads for the Vancouver Science World museum. Have any WEIT readers been? BuzzFeed has a selection of 13 of these posters. Here are some of my favourites.
They also have a series of video/TV ads. I particularly like this one:
h/t @PygmyLoris
Over at The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan reprints a dreadful, dreadful piece written for Newsweek by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander: “Proof of heaven: a doctor’s experience with the afterlife.”
Alexander got meningitis and was in a coma for seven days in a Lynchburg, Virginia, hospital.
Here’s what he experienced:
It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. . .
Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.
Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.
A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet. . .
It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again.
And there were the usual comforting messages, identical to those that used to be imparted by mediums at seances:
Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.
The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You have nothing to fear.”
“There is nothing you can do wrong.”
And of course Alexander concludes:
What happened to me demands explanation.
The explanation: there is more to the universe than science and materialism:
Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.
But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.
Give that man a Templeton Prize! My explanation: Alexander had a long dream, one conditioned by his religious upbringing (he describes himself “as a faithful Christian”). Isn’t that more parsimonious?
Note that the title of the piece is “Proof of heaven.” Proof! And from a single long dream.
It’s bad enough that a man of science (if doctors deserve that monicker) buys the whole hog of religion from such an experience, but it’s worse that this is foisted on Americans in a best-selling magazine as “proof of heaven.” That’s how hungry we are for assurance that our death will not be the end.
And it embarrasses me, especially before my foreign colleagues.
h/t: Michael
My friend Martim Melo sent me three photos he took at the launch of WEIT in Portuguese at the Serralves Foundation in Porto. Immodestly, I present them here.
The book cover is nice:
The discussion afterwards, with Nuno Ferrand, my host at the Institute, lasted about an hour. Every single question from the audience was about religion and science; there were none about straight biology. And this is in a country where many academics I met claim that there is no controversy about evolution! It goes to show that the religion/science dichotomy is on many people’s minds:
And the book-signing afterwards. We moved 40 copies, which is a lot given the high price of the book (and all academic books) in Portugal and the fact that most of the audience was young:
I may be wrong about this, but I thought Victor had posted on this topic before, and at HuffPo, too. Never mind, for it’s good to be reminded that most Americans who accept evolution accept a form of evolution that scientists don’t buy.
That is theistic evolution: the notion that somehow God guided the process. The scenario takes different forms, from the Catholic church’s insistence that evolution indeed occurred, but that humans were special in being the only recipients of God-installed “souls” (but the Church’s believes in a literal Adam and Eve, too!); to the idea, buttressed by people like philosopher Elliott Sober, that God might have made special but undetectable mutations allowing the evolution of H. sapiens; to the view that God set up evolution and then didn’t intervene, but planned it so that that humans would result.
All of this comes from the religiously-based view that humans are special: made in the image of God.
In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, in a section on “Theistic Evolution,” Collins writes:
“God, who is not limited in space or time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanics, of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him (pp. 200-201, first edition).”
He doesn’t tell us how he knows all this.
Most scientists and science organizations in America wish to stay on good terms with the believing majority, and so the fundamental incompatibility between random evolution — which is what science says happened — and divinely-guided evolution — for which no evidence exists — is kept under wraps. However, the time has come for scientists and their societies to face up to the fundamental incompatibility between naturalist and theistic evolution.
by Greg Mayer
Jerry beat me to posting the just announced Nobel winners, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka (see here also), but I can’t help but note that the prize was awarded for work in embryology, Gurdon having done classic cytological (cell and nucleus) manipulation experiments 50 years ago, while Yamanaka has applied more recently available molecular tools to the same problem. Gurdon was able to place an adult nucleus inside a frog egg, and induce the egg to develop into a normal tadpole (showing that the adult nucleus retains all the information for normal embryonic development), while Yamanaka discovered the molecular signals in the egg that tell the nucleus to “start over”.
Congressman Paul Broun (R-Georgia), of course, has just become a media star (see here, here, and here for just a few examples; some background on Broun and his colleagues here) for denouncing embryology as a hellish lie. That Broun is an MD spewing such nonsense is made deliciously comic by the Nobel Prize for Medicine being awarded for work in embryology the day after Broun became infamous, but the tale becomes tragic when you realize he is a member of the House Science Committee. Andrew Sullivan‘s take:
Fundamentalism is not about being dumb; it is an act of will to over-ride reality with totalist faith, so that nothing is left unresolved and everything can be explained by a single text, or a single religious leader.
As Bill Nye told Huffpo:
Since the economic future of the United States depends on our tradition of technological innovation, Representative Broun’s views are not in the national interest… For example, the Earth is simply not 9,000 years old… He is, by any measure, unqualified to make decisions about science, space, and technology.
h/t JonLynnHarvey
I have been here a week and have seen elebenty gazillion dogs, but despite having an eye for felids, I’ve seen precisely one cat—this one creeping along the wall of my pension in Porto. I was so excited that I ran into the garden in my underwear to snap it.
It is a basement cat.
Using statistical methodology, I calculate that
a. the ratio of dogs to cats in Portugal is about 750 to 1
b. there are about 1,231.83 cats in this country
I’m just back from a national park in eastern Portugal, where it’s remote, unpopulated, and eerily beautiful. I saw the national bird of Portugal, the azure-winged magpie (Cyanopica cyanus) as well as a group of griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus). The vulture breeds only on vertical rocky cliffs, and we spotted a group of four—or rather my companion Martim did—by the streaks of white vulture droppings on the rock face.
The magpie is a biogeographical oddity: it has a disjunct distribution, with one population of the species in Portugal and western Spain, and the other in eastern Asia (Japan, Korea, etc.) This is not due to human introduction, but must be the remnant of an ancient continuous distribution. (There’s some controversy over whether they’re the same species, but they’re clearly sister groups.)
Here are two pictures I took: vultures on the rocks and one in flight:
Whoops, but I digress! The Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was just awarded to two men: the Englishman Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese (don’t you love how international science is?). Their work showed that even after adult cells mature they retain the genetic capacity to be “totipotent,” i.e., to transform into other types of cells.
The Guardian report (which you should read for more information) notes that Gurdon didn’t start out showing a lot of promise:
According to his Eton schoolmaster, the 15-year-old Gurdon did not stand out as a potential scientist. Writing in 2006, Gurdon quoted a school report as saying: “I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous; if he can’t learn simple biological facts, he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part and of those who would have to teach him.”
Yamanaka responded modestly, as a scientist should:
Responding to the prize announcement, Yamanaka said: “I don’t know how I am going to celebrate yet. I think I just need a beer.”
And here’s an azure-winged magpie (related to crows, of course); not my picture, but Neil’s (see BirdForum page for information):
Here’s its bizarre distribution:
The two greatest sweet wines in the world are, in this order:
1. Sauternes (and their cousins, Barsacs). The greatest sweet wine I ever had was Chateau d’Yquem 1976.
2. Vintage port. While good specimens of these sweet wines are expensive, they are still greatly undervalued compared to their quality, for America (a huge market for these wines) is not a land where people like sweet wines.
Other sweet wines are even more undervalued. Here are the two greatest bargains in sweet wine that I have found:
3. Late-harvest muscats and tokays from Australia. The Aussies call them “stickies,” but they’re worthy of a more dignified name. A good sticky like Chambers Rosewood Muscat, for example, is a world-class wine, and will set you back no more than$15 per half-bottle.
4. Pedro Ximenez sherries. These intensely sweet sherries from Spain taste like you’re drinking liquid raisins and prunes. The Pedro Ximenez grape is often used to add color and a bit of sweetness to other sherries, but can be vinified on its own to make a terrific after-dinner drink. There are several makers selling these in half- and full bottles. A good specimen, like that of Emilio Lustau, costs only about $20 for a full bottle, and will afford you hours of sipping pleasure.
Since I was in Porto, where ports are blended, how could I resist spending a morning trying them?
Before I headed up the Douro Valley, I visited several of the famous port lodges of Porto. These are large buildings where the wine produced upstream in the valley is blended into various types of port: vintage port, ruby port, late-bottled vintage port, white port, tawny port, and so on.
To get to the lodges, one crosses the river Douro from Porto on a pedestrian bridge; the lodges are right on the other side of the river:
The lodges are all close by near the river. Here are a few; you can recognize some famous names here:
A bit of graffiti along the way tells you what you’re in for:
I visited Graham’s first, as that is my favorite port. I love their sweet, fruity, and rounded style:
It is a commercial operation, and geared for tourists. That morning there were many Germans who came in in buses and quaffed a glass or two as part of a tour. But then they left, leaving me alone to wander in the lodge. There’s a display of all vintage ports from the mid-nineteenth century. “Vintages” are declared only about every third or fourth year, when the weather has been especially salubrious for producing good grapes.
Here’s an old one, probably now an undrinkable vinegar but still worth many hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars. Wine collectors buy and sell these bottles and never open them, something I don’t understand:
Because nobody was in the winery, I got a one-person tour, conducted by a nice Russian emigrant named Anastasia from Novosibirsk. We saw the huge barrels containing vintage and other types of port:
Here’s a barrel destined to be an “LBV” or late-bottled vintage port. These aren’t quite as good as true vintage port, but are nevertheless excellent; they are left to mature in barrel for a few years longer than the 2-3 years experienced by true vintage ports:
Graham’s, like all big companies, maintains a stock of vintage ports going way back. Here is their “library.” These bottles are almost never opened.
Because I know something about vintage port, and Anastasia was so nice, I got try try some special ports beyond the three mandated by the 10-euro ticket I bought, which normally allows one to try three kinds of single-quinta vintage port. She replaced one of them with a very expensive true vintage port from 1994, added a glass of expensive 40-year old tawny port, and threw in a free glass of “white port”, often used in France as an apéritif. Here are the big four. Remember, I was drinking at 11 a.m, and these are big pours (port is 20% alcohol):
And the wines I tried, with the per bottle price:
- Quinto do Bonfin 1999 32 Euros
- Graham’s Quinto dos Malvedos 1999 40 Euros
- 1994 Quinto do Vesuvio 109 Euros (spectacular; the only port now crushed entirely with people’s feet), 130 Euros
- Graham’s 40 year old tawny 118 Euros
- White port (inexpensive, no price listed).
I then visited another spot, Taylor’s which makes a favorite of mine, and had two more glasses. It was not as friendly, and I left after a short while. But I was very tipsy, and it wasn’t yet noon.
In that state, one needs food. I chose to have a francesinha, the local speciality sandwich of Porto. (It means “little French woman”). The students at the institute where I spoke the day before recommended that I try this comestible. As Wikipedia describes it:
[It is] made with bread, wet-cured ham, linguiça, fresh sausage like chipolata, steak or roast meat and covered with melted cheese and a hot thick tomato and beer sauce served with french fries.
Yes, yes, I know it’s a coronary on a plate, but I don’t eat like this every day, and it’s just the ticket for sopping up alcohol. And it was good. (If you’re tempted to lecture me on eating healthy, please refrain.).
A closeup for the brave of heart:
After this I headed up the Douro Valley to explore where and how port is made. I have some beautiful picture of this area, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, and will post those as soon as I get a chance. Today I will do some more exploring and then head back to Porto.