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 haven’t had a chance to see this movie yet, but there’s a huge amount of buzz about it, including a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a recommendation by my captious nephew that it’s “the best movie of the year”. It’s “The Master,” directed by Paul Anderson and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Dern, and Amy Adams.
The plot is a thinly veiled account of the rise of Scientology (called “The Cause”); Lorraine Devon Wilke, an ex-Scientologist who loved the movie, describes the parallels:
Is this the story of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard? Not in name or detail, no. But in broad strokes, intention, in laying out the nascent, seedling efforts that grew into the billion dollar, billion year mega-theocracy it is today, yes. We in the audience recognized it: the jargon, the theories, the science fiction of it all. We recognized the drills and exercises, the “TRs” and “locationals.” We’d heard the speeches, participated in the highly anticipated and often disappointing book launches, and while most of us never met L. Ron Hubbard in person, we’d watched endless tapes of his smiling, jovial visage pontificating on his theories, philosophies, and dictates. Seymour Hoffman’s got him down, to an eerie similarity that was undeniable to those in the know. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
The Ontological Argument for God (“OA”) is not only infuriating in itself—the hauteur of thinking you can demonstrate the existence of something by logic (and bad logic) alone, without any reference to observation!—but also by its persistence: that generation after generation falls for this philosophical scam. The OA embodies the worst aspects of both theology and philosophy, which it straddles.
In case you don’t know how it runs, the OA goes roughly like this (there are several variants):
God is the greatest being conceivable.
One of the qualities of the greatest being conceivable is existence in reality, for something that exists is surely greater than something that does not exist.
Ergo, God must exist.
If you want to hear this claptrap dissected in extenso, listen to a new 43-minute program hosted by Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4 :”The Ontological Argument.” Here’s the BBC precis:
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Ontological Argument. In the eleventh century St Anselm of Canterbury proposed that it was possible to prove the existence of God using reason alone. His argument was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries, but was analysed and improved by later thinkers including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Other philosophers have been less kind, with the Enlightenment thinker David Hume offering one possible refutation. But the debate continued, fuelled by interventions from such heavyweights as Immanuel Kant and Kurt Gödel; and it remains one of the most discussed problems in philosophy.
With: John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews; Peter Millican, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford; Clare Carlisle, Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at King’s College London.
Actually, I recommend listening to this if you have time, because it’s largely a critique of the OA, and it’s incumbent on every atheist learn something about this important but impotent weapon in the arsenal of Sophisticated Theology™. And kudos to BBC 4 for taking up such an arcane topic. The discussion is quite clear and absorbing.
It starts off very badly, though, when Bragg introduces the enduring popularity of the Ontological Argument in this way:
“The young Bertrand Russell experienced a philosophical ephiphany on the way to the tobacconist, declaring, “Great God in boots—the Ontological Argument is sound!”
He fails to mention that the older Bertrand Russell totally rejected the argument on the grounds (adduced earlier by Kant), that “existence” is not part of the definition of any entity (i.e., existence is not a “predicate”), but after an entity is defined, then you can go out and see if it does exist.
Dr. Carlisle makes the telling point that you can prove the existence of anything with this tomfoolery, conceiving of “the most perfect island” or “the most perfect pizza”, and then then adding existence as part of each entity’s perfection. Ergo, we have a new island and a great pizza. Theologians, of course, then come back and say that God is the only entity for which existence must be a predicate. That’s hilarious!
In the end, it’s simply impossible to prove the existence of anything through the power of thought alone. One needs to observe the thing! At least for the OA, then, science beats philosophy and logic as a “way of knowing.”
A while back, Amazon ran out of the hardcover version of WEIT, for —or so I had assumed—hardcover books eventually stop being printed after the paperback is available. In fact, since I had run out of hardcovers for gifts and the like, I had to buy some from used-book dealers.
For some reason, though, Amazon U.S. has the hardcover available again, and it’s a bargain: only $11.18, or only about a buck more than the paperback from Amazon. Just in time for Christmas!
I’m still getting requests to send out autographed and cat-illustrated books in return for donations to Doctors Without Borders, but unfortunately that offer expired last Wednesday, and I simply don’t have enough books—even with the new ones I’ve ordered—to accommodate new requests. But I’ll always entertain requests to autograph and maybe even draw on copies that are sent to me, assuming that they’re accompanied by a self-addressed, postage-paid envelope. Email me if you want address details. One per customer, please!
Oh, and stay tuned: one awesome copy that’s triply-autographed will be up as a prize in the near future.
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UPDATE: Alert reader Chris tried posting this, but somehow failed:
Daedalus Books has them for $5.98 so I bought two. One for me, one for my local library. They are a “bargain” books but unmarked. The spine, dust jacket and pages are all clean.
I jumped at the chance to write something about this, as Randall Munroe’sxkcdcartoons have long been favorites of mine. Beginning with his early and endearing random musings, his site has become a great source of hilarious, insightful and thought-provoking drawings on a variety of subjects ranging from fantasy to world economics to physics and beyond.
One of my favorite ones is Spirit which chokes me up every time. Click on the link for the whole heartbreaking strip.
xkcd.com/695/
Recently he also captured headlines with his insanely enormous Click and Drag cartoon which had most of his fans clicking feverishly for hours through subterranean tunnels and oceans and seemingly endless sky searching for every last visual gag and nerdy reference. If you think you might have missed some, there is a handy zoomable map here.
xkcd.com/1110/
A couple of months ago he also started his What If? series answering whimsical science-related questions. He bagan with what is still my favorite, The Relativistic Baseball. Here’s part of his answer to the question, “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?”
All of this is to let you know that The Atlantic has a new interview with Munroe where they chat about his earlier career, how he comes up with his ideas, and how he works. It’s essential reading if, like me, you enjoy his work.
Some rather cute geckos have breakfast. Now why would a gecko eat a Cheerio? Can it even taste sweet?
The receptors that are involved in tasting sweet things are encoded by a gene called T1R2, which is not present in cats or in a number of other mammals, such as bats and horses. (This has featured on WEIT a number of times, including here.)
A 2011 paper in PLoS ONE (open access) describes smell and taste genes in a wide variety of animals, and above all links to this chemoreceptor database hosted at the University of Toronto, which shows that the taste receptor is a functional gene in the Anolis lizard. My guess is that it will be functional in this gecko, too!
Go and mooch around on the database – it’s easy to access, and the accompanying paper will help you identify which kind of receptor induces which kind of sensory experience. If you don’t want to do that – just look at the geckos!
[EDIT I have just watched the post with the sound on – the twee soundtrack might not be to everyone’s taste (ha!)]
It’s a rather rambling piece, most of it devoted to simply recounting William James’s famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902),a description of how men and women come to believe in God, largely because of their personal revelations and presumbed encounters with the ineffable.
Himelfarb recounts how James divided believers into two types: the “once-born,” the light-hearted and romantic religionists who make light of suffering and deny the existence of hell, and the “twice-born,” whom Himelfarb describes as:
. . . the “sick souls” and “morbid-minded”—are all too aware of the existence of evil, indeed, of the “experience of evil as something essential.” Where the once-born look upon the “children of wrath” as “unmanly and diseased,” the twice-born look upon the “healthy-minded” as “unspeakably blind and shallow.”
James—and, obviously, Himmelfarb— come down on the side of the twice-born. Why? Because they have a firmer grip on reality. And although this may make them more depressed, it also gives them a saner view of life. Quoting James, she says:
“It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience.” Healthy-mindedness is simply inadequate as a philosophical doctrine “because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”
Himmelfarb’s conceit in the article is to see the same dichtomy among New Atheists. She presages this distinction at the beginning of her piece, where she contrasts the Four Horsemen (Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris), with the faitheist Alain de Botton, who, though an atheist, thinks that even nonbelievers need some of the trappings of faith: the rituals, the festivals, and even the cathedrals. Thus her distinction:
The “New Atheists” easily fall into the category of the once-born, being as monolithic in their devotion to science as religious fundamentalists are in their monotheism. “Neo-Atheists,” on the other hand, are aware of the psychological and spiritual deficiencies of atheism and eager to import into secular society some of the enduring “goods” of traditional religions. Thus, they exhibit more of the character of the twice-born.
Here she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Atheists don’t fall into those classes so easily. Many of us, while disdaining de Botton’s call for cathedrals and rituals, recognize that religion fulfills some basic human needs, and that it won’t go away unless those needs are met by secular alternatives.
I agree with Philip Kitcher, for instance, that one reason Europe is less religious than the U.S. is because it provides for many of the needs that our society doesn’t, including a more pervasive sense of local community and more mundane things like medical care. It’s well known from the work of Greg Paul that the dysfunctionality of a society (e.g., high murder rates, official corruption, and public drug use, lack of medical care, high suicide and abortion rates, and so on) is positively correlated with its religiosity among a sample Western countries. The sicker the society, the more religious it is. This is also true among America’s fifty states, as shown by Harry Roy.
While these correlations are subject to varying interpretations, the most coherent (and one supported by other data) is that people tend to turn toward religion more fervently when their lives seem not only bad, but incapable of being improved through secular interventions. In that sense I—and probably all Four Horsemen—are “twice-born” atheists. Sam Harris obviously falls in this class, as he always claims that meditation or other forms of secular “spirituality” will help us lead better lives.
Himmelfarb concludes:
In the debate between religion and science, between believers and nonbelievers, the terrible simplifiers on both sides tend to dominate the discourse. Today the contenders have become more aggressive than ever—and more simplistic. This is why William James can speak to us with a special relevance and cogency. And he does so not in an affable spirit of compromise or conciliation but as a hardheaded realist—a twice-born, in short. If he was so appreciative of the varieties of religious experiences, it is because he was so acutely aware of the varieties—and complexities, anomalies and difficulties—of life itself. This may be James’s legacy to us: the idea of the once-born and twice-born that illuminates so many of our controversies, not only about religion but about philosophy, politics, literature and much else.
How lame; how seemingly profound but ultimately empty.
Screw the terrible complexities of life itself: what we’re asking for here, and apparently what Himmelfarb favors, is realism. The twice-born religionists view life through non-rosy spectacles, and both Himmelfarb and I see that as a healthier approach to life. Why, then, doesn’t she go to the next step and see whether the religiosity that people embrace is realistic, too—whether its tenets are true? That question is not a “terrible simplification”: it’s the first question one must ask oneself before embracing a faith.
Himmelfarb, by embracing a “middle way” (Americans, with their sense of fair play, do so love middle ways and compromises!), falls into the trap endearingly portrayed by xkcd below (more on that comic this weekend): she manages to feel superior to everyone.
Unfortunately, when you add into your notion of “realism” whether there actually is a god, the probability isn’t somewhere in the middle, but much, much closer to the atheist end of the spectrum. New Atheist’s “militant quest for certitude” (whatever that is) has led to the conclusion that there’s no evidence for God, though of course there’s always a miniscule doubt. The ones who don’t doubt are the faithful, who have indeed succeeded in their own militant quest for certitude. Sadly, they’re certain about the wrong thing.
Our felid for today is actually five felids: a mackerel (striped) tabby, a blotched tabby, a spotted cheetah, a king cheetah and a black-footed cat. In a new paper in Science by Christopher Kaelin and colleagues, the physiological basis of these pattern variations in both domestic cats and cheetahs is shown to be due to mutations at the Transmembrane aminopeptidase Q locus (Taqpep for short ) that alter the function of its encoded protein, which they call Tabulin.
Allelic variation at Tabby [mackerel (TaM) is dominant to blotched (Tab)] controls the arrangement of dark- and light-colored areas. Diagrams indicate how the distribution of black or brown eumelanin versus yellow or pale pheomelanin within individual hairs underlies the macroscopic color patterns, although in reality cat hairs frequently exhibit multiple pheomelanic bands.It has long been known that the dark areas in a tabby’s coat are places where the hairs are colored mostly by eumelanin (a darker pigment), while the hairs of the lighter areas have more phaeomelanin (a lighter pigment). In both areas, the individual hairs have bands of color (look closely at your cat’s hairs: you’ll see that few are unicolored– most are banded in some way). In mackerel tabbies, the dark and light areas are arranged in a periodic pattern, creating tiger-like stripes. This is the pattern found in the wild cats that are the domestic cat’s progenitors, and is still one of, if not the, most common patterns in domestic cats.
It has also long been known that the blotched tabby condition is due to recessive alleles at an autosomal (i.e., non sex-chromosomal) locus, called Ta, so that having two copies of the mutant allele b makes the tabby blotched. What Kaelin and colleagues have done is show that the Ta locus is in fact the gene Taqpep. In domestic cats, blotched tabbies have one (or more) of three single nucleotide mutations that alter the Tabulin protein’s function. If you have one copy of the dominant (M) allele, you’re mackerel (see diagram above).
One of the coauthors of the paper is Ann van Dyk, who, back in 1986, with R.J. van Aarde, first definitively demonstrated that king cheetahs, at one time thought to be a different species and the object of much cryptozoological speculation, were in fact a color-pattern variant of the common cheetah, with the same mode of inheritance as the blotched tabby: an autosomal recessive gene.
In the new paper Kaelin et al. extend their work to cheetahs, sequencing their Taqpep genes, and found that in king cheetahs there is a single base pair insertion in the gene that causes a frameshift, a type of mutation that alters every amino acid encoded downstream in the gene from the site of the insertion. Thus the king and blotched patterns result from alterations of a homologous gene, but the mutations themselves are not identical, being caused by a single nucleotide substitution in domestic cats but by an insertion in cheetahs.
Black-haired areas are larger, more irregular, and associated with dorsal stripes in the king cheetah.
Kaelin et al. also sequenced the Taqpep locus in 29 other species of wild cats, assessing any nonsynonymous substitution (i.e., those that change the amino-acid sequence of the protein produced by the gene) for how likely they were to alter protein function. All the cats had “normal” genes, except for the black-footed cat (Felis nigripes), which had five substitutions that were collectively judged as being very likely to alter the protein’s function. Interestingly, the black-footed cat has a pattern similar to domestic cats with a “swirled” pattern associated with the mutation T139N of the Taqpep locus:
Black-footed cat (Felis nigripes); note swirled pattern. Photo by Pierre de Chabannes pour http://www.photozoo.org.
Kaelin et al. note that blotched tabbies rarely appear in early illustrations of cats, but that by the 18th century they had become more common. They also note that there is a fairly large region (244kb of nucleotides) around the Taqpep locus that is invariant in blotched tabbies, while it has usual levels of variability in mackerel tabbies. This is the exact pattern, both historically and genetically, that we would expect if the blotched pattern had been favored by (presumably artificial) selection over the last few hundred years.
When an allele is favored by selection, closely linked forms of genes will also increase in frequency (a phenomenon known as “hitchhiking”), leading to higher frequency or fixation for a whole block of genetic material. Recombination will eventually break up the association of the favored and hitchhiking alleles, and new mutations will increase variability; but this dissociatio takes time, and until it happens the region of low variability persists as a record of the selection (which in this case may still be ongoing).
[Note by GCM: While the paper, at five pages, is long by Science‘s standards, there are still 27 pages of online supplements, and it is difficult to follow the authors’ train of argument and evidence since it requires constant switching between the paper and the appendices to fully appreciate what they’ve done (not to mention it would be impossible to do so if you were reading the journal or a reprint, rather than an online version). More justice would have been done to the authors’ work, and to their readers, had a substantially longer paper been published (which, of course, could not have appeared in Science). I mention this not to criticize the authors, but to decry the increasing practice of putting essential parts of a paper into relatively inaccessible and, I fear, ephemeral, appendices.]
Kaelin, C. B., X. Xu, L. Z. Hong, V. A. David, K. A. McGowan, A. Schmidt-Küntzel, M. E. Roelke, J. Pino, J. Pontius, G. M. Cooper, H. Manuel, W. F. Swanson, L. Marker, C. K. Harper, A. van Dyk, B. Yue, J. C. Mullikin, W. C. Warren, E. Eizirik, L. Kos, S. J. O’Brien, G. S. Barsh, and M. Menotti-Raymond. 2012. Specifying and sustaining pigmentation patterns in domestic and wild cats. Science 337:1536-1541. abstract
van Aarde, R.J. and A. van Dyk. 1986. Inheritance of the king coat colour pattern in cheetahs Acinonyx jubatus. Journal of Zoology 209: 573-578. pdf
