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.
Oh dear—this is so sad. Oliver Sacks, who was treated for a melanoma of the eye nine years ago, has just discovered that the cancer has metastasized to his liver, and there is no cure. He’s written a short piece in the New York Times op-ed section, “My own life,” which is incredibly poignant and moving.
We all must face this some day, and my own hope is that I die quickly, preferably in my sleep. Sacks is now saying The Long Goodbye, and I’ll miss him. Do have a look at his piece.
The indefatigable tabby continues his hikes in the snowy mountains of Poland.
Leon: Come quickly, we can see Tatra Mountains from there!
All I know about this is that I’d like to be the guy; and we have some brief YouTube notes below:
A breeder in China’s Sichuan Province wants to take this panda down from a tree, but the lovely panda wants a reward. So it asks the breeder for a hug before moving!
It’s never a pleasure to criticize the views of someone I admire, especially if they’ve been active in the fight against creationism, like Jonny Scaramanga. He started calling out creationism in the Guardian and Salon (and creationism’s vehicle, “Accelerated Christian Education”) when he was a student at London University; I’ve posted favorably about his activities several times before; and he runs a good, solid atheist website at Patheos, “Leaving fundamentalism.” (Scaramanga was raised as a fundamentalist.)
But I think that his two recent post on creationism, “Why creationism matters” and “Creationism is inherently homophobic and misogynistic” miss the mark. Scaramanga’s argument is simple: those people who are creationists also tend to hate gays and oppress women. That makes it all the more important to fight creationism.
Here are quotes from both of his posts:
It’s not some mystery why organisations that oppose women’s rights and trample on LGBTQ people also frequently happen to be creationists. The foundational texts of creationism, read literally, point to a world where men rule over women, where people who don’t fit into the gender binary don’t exist, and marriage is between one man and one woman. Creationism is evil because it encourages discrimination and oppression.
To avoid being anti-religious, organisations like the National Center for Science Education, which campaigns for evolution education in schools, usually insist that the argument is purely about science. Don’t get me wrong: it is partly about science. As science, creationism is junk. But most people are not professional scientists, and it’s possible to be creationist and also have an adequate understanding of science for many purposes.
Creationism matters, and not only because of science. It matters because it harms people in society who are already marginalised. Teaching creationism in school means teaching homophobia and misogyny. That’s why it needs to be opposed.
And of course the Bible is indeed full of references to the inferiority of women, and occasional references to the sinfulness of men lying with men. Raised as a Christian fundamentalist, Scaramanga knows and gives these quotes. And he’s right: the Bible certainly sees women as an inferior group and doesn’t have much truck with gay behavior, either.
Scaramanga makes a similar point in the “Why creationism matters” post:
In sum, here’s my argument about why creationism in schools is a major problem, leaving aside the scientific problems:
Creationism requires that the Bible is entirely and (for the most part) literally true
That means that creationism is inextricably linked with enthusiastic acceptance of the ugliest parts of the Bible: child abuse, wifely submission, hating gay people, eternal damnation for non-Christians, women submitting to men, and opposition to abortion, for starters.
Further, it means there is a huge body of received wisdom which cannot be challenged, because questioning it is questioning God. This is the opposite of education.
I think the problem with this logic is obvious. Yes, of course the same people who accept creationism by and large favor a secondary role for women and promote discrimination against gays. But that doesn’t make creationism any worse than it already is; all that means is that it’s a symptom of a larger syndrome.
That syndrome is called religion, and its instantiation in this case is fundamentalist Christianity and much of Orthodox Judaism. But just because creationism is linked to these other symptoms doesn’t make it matter more. It’s like saying that because nerve damage, frequent thirst, and slow healing of cuts are all symptoms of diabetes, the frequent thirst matters more than it did when we were unaware of the other symptoms.
What matters is the underlying cause of all three conditions, and that is religion. The Biblical connection between these three forms of bigotry and ignorance means that we should fight harder against religion, not fight harder against creationism. If we prohibit the teaching of creationism in schools, will that efface the homophobia and misogyny of its adherents? I don’t think so. Now Scaramanga would be right if by concentrating on creationism, rather than on religion in general or on homophobia and misogyny, we could get rid of religion faster. But I’m not sure that’s the case. You cure the disease by attacking the disease, not by treating one of its symptoms.
Why do I care about this logical fallacy? Because I see the evolution/creation battle as separate from the other battles about “social justice” that currently sunder the atheist “community” (if there is one). While I think all atheists are opposed to creationism, and most of us see religion as harmful, there are huge schisms in the movement about matters of social justice—more often about “misogyny” (a word sometimes applied to feminists who don’t agree with other feminists) than about homophobia, which all of us despise. I don’t want to have my battles against creationism subsumed into the “atheist wars”.
In fact, oppression of women and of gays are matters of greater import than is the teaching of creationism, and if I could wave a magic wand I’d make the first two disappear before the third. But it’s important to recognize that the bigger battle for social justice, however you define it, is the battle against religion, not against its symptoms. Those symptoms can and should be fought individually, but just as we can’t say that homophobia becomes more important because it’s philosophically linked to creationism, so we can’t say that creationism is more important because it’s philosophically linked to homophobia. There’s that unrecognized third variable in the mix!
UPDATE: I’ve been informed that Dan Arel, at his website “Danthropology,” has an even longer list of Twi**er exemplars as well as his analysis.
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Reader Barry sent me a couple of bizarre tw**ts emitted yesterday by Reza Aslan, and when I went over to verify them, I saw this:
Blocked! Aslan is, as far as I know (and I don’t know very far), the first person to block me on Twi**er, even though I don’t read tweets and don’t follow anybody. I’ve never directed a tw**t at the man, or anyone else for that matter, though I have posted about him, and those posts automatically go to my Tw**er feed.
Fortunately, Aslan’s tw**ts were retweeted by Sam Harris, so I can verify their authenticity. What I find bizarre is this: I am a very small fish compared to Sam, and my skirmishes with Aslan have been minor compared to Sam’s. So why am I blocked and not Sam? Well, never mind: it’s not that I care if I’m blocked, for, as everyone knows (so I’m told), you can see tw**ts from someone who’s blocked you by simply signing out of Twi**er.
Anyway, here are Aslan’s tw**ts; he is responding to Harris’s podcast about the Chapel Hill murders, in which Harris accuses Aslan not only of intellectual dishonesty (I agree), but also of making life more dangerous for people who criticize Islam (I agree with that, too).
This is no way to have a rational, much less intellectual, discussion, but I’ve come to expect this from Aslan. Like Chopra (who, by the way, has not blocked me), Aslan is afflicted with Chronic Maru’s Syndrome (inability to not enter any box he sees), and responds to disagreement with childish and ad hominem insults. This is not exactly what I’d call a response to what Sam said. Further, who is obsessed with whom? Aslan takes every opportunity he can to go after Sam and also Richard Dawkins, for he knows that he can dine out on attacking the New Atheists. And the stuff about not giving Harris a second thought is simply a lie: Aslan talks about him constantly.
Here is Harris’s response:
Well, this is all internet drama, but there’s also a larger purpose here: I see Aslan as a dangerous man, one who tries to pretend that Islam has no fangs and, by minimizing the very real dangers that some of its adherents pose to the West, makes people less aware of those dangers. Now we see that he’s not only wrongheaded, but narcissistic and immature as well. That makes him even more of what they call a “useful idiot” for religious appeasers.
But of course we know how to deal with people who have Maru’s Syndrome. . .
H is for Hawk, a new memoir by Helen Macdonald, came to my attention through a hugely favorable review in yesterday’s New York Times. Although it hasn’t quite been released in the U.S.—it comes out on March 3, published by Grove Press, but has been out in England for a while—it’s already #39 on Amazon, has received starred reviews by Kirkus and Booklist, and is destined to be a big bestseller. The good thing is that it’s largely about natural history: a woman who, traumatized by her father’s sudden death, finds respite in training a goshawk to hunt. From the Times review:
Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, “H Is for Hawk,” her first published in the United States, reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.
Ms. Macdonald is British, and when we meet her in this memoir, she is in her 30s, with “no partner, no children, no home.” Her fellowship at the University of Cambridge is coming to an end. When her father, a newspaper photographer, dies suddenly on a London street, it steals the floor from beneath her.
She has been obsessed with birds of prey since she was a girl, and is an experienced falconer. In her grief, to escape into something, she begins to train one of nature’s most vicious predators, a goshawk. She unplugs her telephone. She tells her friends to leave her alone.
Every review I’ve seen has been very favorable. Here’s one from the Guardian
Macdonald struggled to put her complicated life back together but two parts of her unusual restorative therapy were the acquisition of a goshawk called Mabel and a year-long plan to tame and train her to hunt. H is for Hawk is at once a misery memoir, as the author grapples with the grieving process, and a falconer’s diary about the hard-won trust between hawk and human. Yet she also splices into her narrative a biographical account of a literary hero and fellow austringer (the title for one who trains goshawks): TH White.
You can read more about this book for yourself, and can even preview it by reading select pages on Amazon, but I know that I, for one, will be reading it.
Surprisingly, the Times doesn’t mention an obvious comparison for Macdonald’s work: the absolutely wonderful book The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. It recounts a year’s observation of peregrine falcons in Essex, and contains some of the most beautiful nature writing I’ve ever read. If you have a birder, an outdoor person, a nature lover, or simply a lover of good prose in your life, you could do worse than to give them Baker’s book. I wrote a lot about it during “Peregrine Week” nearly five years ago, so you can read some selections at the previous link. Baker, like Macdonald, seems to have suffered some trauma that led him to the birds, but it isn’t made explicit in his book.
Here’s the author of H is for Hawk:
And here is a northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis), an individual similar to the one Macdonald Trained:
Reader Scott from Australia sent me this short video of two of his religious countrymen (countrypeople?) discussing whether God wants them to have sex. The answer was a resounding “yes,” and when I was told this was a video designed by Anglicans to be part of the religious curriculum in public schools, I thought it was a joke. But it isn’t. As Scott noted, “it is by a group called Youth Works run by the Sydney Anglicans.”
Apparently, a secular group called “Fairness in Religions in School” (FIRIS) nabbed the video and slapped it on YouTube before the Anglicans could take it off their site. As you may know, in some Australian states “special religious instruction” is allowed in the public schools, and it’s supposed to teach about the characteristics of faith rather than promote a particular faith. FIRIS fights this because it has indeed been used to proselytize kids. (See here for one example.) I understand that kids can also opt out of this instruction, though readers from Oz might educate us in the comments.
At any rate, it puzzles me that a country as secular as Australia still has government-sponsored religious education in its public schools. But maybe it’s not so bad if it teaches stuff like this!:
It’s hilarious! Some quotes:
“God actually invented [sex], and so he thinks it’s good. . . These physical parts that [God] has created are different, but they go perfectly together. . . And not only that, but they come together in a way that’s actually pleasurable for us, and God made it that way so that we’d actually enjoy having sex together.”
It goes on, and Steve and Naomi Chong (I think they’re married, not brother and sister) later add that God designed sex to be enjoyed in marriage, and it’s physically and emotionally “damaging” if that plan is obviated, but I doubt that kids will pay attention to that part!
And you just know that after the cameras are turned off, these two went for each other like a pair of lustfully crazed weasels. . .
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