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.
Okay, so the Mars rover “Curiosity” is landing on Mars around midnight in the U.S. In response to the question, “Where can I watch the live landing of the Mars Rover (Curiosity)?
Well, first, there is theNASA TV stationwhich has a schedule of events during the day today and early tomorrow after the landing:
August 5, Sunday (all times U.S. eastern time zone)
12 p.m. – NASA Television Video File – HQ (All Channels)
12:30 – 1:30 p.m. – NASA Science News Conference Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover Pre-Landing News Conference – Rover Communication overview – JPL (All Channels)
1:30 p.m. – Replay of NASA News Conference to Announce New Agreements for Next Phase of Commercial Crew Development – HQ (All Channels)
2 p.m. – Replay of ISS Update (8/3) – HQ (All Channels)
3 p.m. – NASA Science News Conference Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover Pre-Landing News Conference – Rover Communication overview – JPL (All Channels)
4-6 p.m. – Replay of NASA Social for the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover Landing – HQ (All Channels)
6 – 7 p.m. – NASA Science News Conference – NASA Science Mission Directorate – JPL (All Channels)
11 p.m. – Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover Landing Coverage of Entry Decent and Landing (Commentary #1 Begins 11:30 p.m.) – JPL (Public and Education Channels)
11 p.m. – Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover Landing Coverage of Entry Decent and Landing (Clean Feed with Mission Audio Only) – JPL (Media Channel)
August 6, Monday
NET – 2:15 a.m. – Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover Post-Landing News Conference – JPL (All Channels)
3:30 – 4:30 a.m. – Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover Landing Coverage and Commentary – Commentary #2 – (First Post-Landing Communication Session/Odyssey Downlink) – JPL (All Channels)
You can watch the main landing at the link above, or go directly to the live feed here (a high-def channel is here). The landing is scheduled for the following times:
Aug 5, 2012 10:31 p.m. Pacific
Aug 6, 2012 1:31 a.m. Eastern
Aug 6, 2012 5:31 a.m. Universal
You Brits: get up early to watch this! Now I’m not sure exactly what “watching the landing” will consist of, but surely it will involve watching the control room either celebrate or go into deep depression, and I suspect that we’ll see photos from the rover after it’s settled and deployed. What I don’t know is whether the entry vehicle will film part of the landing.
Everything is going well so far, and the “weather” on Mars (the amount of dust in the atmosphere, etc.) is good for landing.
What really stirs me about this mission is that it shows what an evolved species can do when it applies brains that evolved, after all, for living on the savanna. We have the savvy not only to calculate ways to get vehicles from Earth to Mars with pinpoint accuracy (the last rover travelled 140 million kilometers and landed within 200 meters of its target), but also to fabricate such vehicles by wresting elements from the surface and atmosphere of Earth. Yes, a species of primate did that. It’s fantastic.
Darwin said a lot of good stuff in The Origin. One of his less-recognized achievements was to explain not just the presence of rudimentary (“vestigial”) features as evidence for evolution, but also to recognize that such features, insofar as they’re not essential to the individual, would be more free to vary than would features critical for survival and reproduction. Here’s his discussion from Chapter 13: “Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs.” (I’ve put the sentence most important for this post in bold.)
On my view of descent with modification, the origin of rudimentary organs is simple. We have plenty of cases of rudimentary organs in our domestic productions, as the stump of a tail in tailless breeds, the vestige of an ear in earless breeds, — the reappearance of minute dangling horns in hornless breeds of cattle, more especially, according to Youatt, in young animals, and the state of the whole flower in the cauliflower. We often see rudiments of various parts in monsters. But I doubt whether any of these cases throw light on the origin of rudimentary organs in a state of nature, further than by showing that rudiments can be produced; for I doubt whether species under nature ever undergo abrupt changes. I believe that disuse has been the main agency; that it has led in successive generations to the gradual reduction of various organs, until they have become rudimentary, as in the case of the eyes of animals inhabiting dark caverns, and of the wings of birds inhabiting oceanic islands, which have seldom been forced to take flight, and have ultimately lost the power of flying. Again, an organ useful under certain conditions, might become injurious under others, as with the wings of beetles living on small and exposed islands; and in this case natural selection would continue slowly to reduce the organ, until it was rendered harmless and rudimentary.
Any change in function, which can be effected by insensibly small steps, is within the power of natural selection; so that an organ rendered, during changed habits of life, useless or injurious for one purpose, might easily be modified and used for another purpose. Or an organ might be retained for one alone of its former functions. An organ, when rendered useless, may well be variable, for its variations cannot be checked by natural selection.
Note the important point—often neglected by creationists—that vestigial organs can be functional (“Any change in function, which can be effected by insensibly small steps, is within the power of natural selection; so that an organ rendered, during changed habits of life, useless or injurious for one purpose, might easily be modified and used for another purpose.”). Thus the wings of penguins, no longer used for flying, are useful in helping them swim, and at the same time testify to penguins’ origin from flying birds. They are useful vestigial traits.
There are are least three reasons why a now-useless feature can be eliminated. First, mutations affecting it are no longer deleterious, so it would degenerate over time. Second, the feature could be injured and, if no longer useful, would be eliminated by natural selection because its injury would reduce fitness (this may be the reason why the eyes of cave animals gradually disappear). Finally, the metabolic energy that goes into producing a useless feature could be diverted to other features that are still useful (producing a useless organ like an eye has physiological “costs,” and maybe you could divert the metabolic resources involved in making it into other features, like the brain).
From all of these, but particularly the first, you can derive Darwin’s conclusion why useless features should be more variable than essential ones. In the technical jargon of evolutionists, those features are no longer under “stabilizing selection”, the kind of natural selection that eliminates deviations from features that are at a local optimum for being fit. Usually mutations causing deviations from such a feature are selected against, but may no longer be deleterious if the feature is no longer useful. Mutations can thus accumulate willy-nilly, and the feature becomes more variable.
The variability of vestigial organs is well known. The classic example is that of wisdom teeth, which are highly variable in both presence (Tasmanian aboriginals don’t have them; indigenous Mexicans all have them), and degree of expression, as many of you know. Some people can’t wiggle their ears because their ear muscles aren’t functional (we no longer need them since we can localize sound by moving our heads), while others, like me, can wiggle them freely. The palmaris longus muscle has been reduced to a small tendon in our forearm; it’s absent in 14% of people and, being pretty useless, is often used for tendon grafts in the wrist.
Further support for Darwin’s notion of increased variation in less-useful characters comes from a new study of variation in the inner ear of the three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus). A paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Billet et al. (download free; reference below) shows that several features of the inner ear, a part of the body crucial for maintaining balance, are much more variable in the sloth than in its relatives. This is expected if sloths, being notoriously slow, don’t have a critical need to maintain balance. The authors were particularly concerned with the semicircular canals (SC) of the animals, which are really crucial for keeping balance. There are three semicircular canals, each of which contains fluid and small hairs that detect the motion of the fluid. In that way the animal is able to sense its orientation.
As Billet et al. note:
Accordingly, one would expect to find among sloths a substantial degree of morphological variation in their SC, because significant travelling distances, speed and agility are not part of their locomotor repertoire. In this context, sloths constitute an ideal case to address Darwin’s hypothesis.
Well, sloths still have to hang in trees and maintain balance when they defecate (they do so once a week, climbing all the way down from their trees to do their business at the base of the tree before climbing back up, a behavior that’s not really understood), but maybe they don’t need a perfectly-formed inner ear to do that, so variations caused by mutation or developmental accidents might not be terribly injurious.
To test “Darwin’s hypothesis,” the authors used high-resolution computer tomography to examine and make 3-D reconstructions of the inner ears of individual three-toed sloths as well as of red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris), European moles (Talpa europaea), the collared anteater (Tamandua tetradactyla), and the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus). The anteater and armadillo are members of the Xenarthra, a suborder of New World mammals that include the sloths, and thus these species serve as “controls” for degree of variation in related species.
Billet et. al measured 12 features of each inner ear, and, since variation might be correlated with size, expressed variation as the variation among individuals in the ratios of one feature to another. Here’s the inner ear in situ of a three-toed sloth skull, and its reconstruction from the computer scan (“ASC,” “PSC” and “LSC” are the three semicircular canals, also called “horizontal,” “superior,” and “posterior”):
I’ll show the numerical values of variation in a second, but this figure from the paper shows the higher variation in sloths just by inspection of the degree of variation among individuals of four species. The sloth is clearly more variable than the anteater, armadillo, and squirrel. As you might expect, the squirrels show almost no variation:
Here are the data, with the height of the bar showing the degree of variability of ratios of inner-ear features. The red bars are the sloths, green bars are anteaters, purple bars are armadillos, yellow bars are squirrels, and blue bars are moles. In all cases the variation is highest in sloths, and in many cases it’s much higher than the other species (in nearly all cases the difference between sloths and other beasts is statistically significant):
The authors conclude that they’ve verified Darwin’s hypothesis and advance this reason for their observation:
Therefore, we hypothesize that relaxed selective pressure on the SC has permitted the persistence of the observed variants in three-toed sloths. The level of genetic and/or developmental constraints on the production of these variants might also depart from that of other placentals. . . The most plausible reason for such a released selective pressure on their SC morphology lies in their reduced activity pattern. Such high variation of the SC has not been detected in faster-moving xenarthrans, nor has it been documented in other fast-moving mammals.
It’s known that animals that are agile and move fast have relatively larger semicircular canals, so I find this conclusion plausible. What remains is a more definitive test of whether variation in the inner ears of sloths really does matter less than such variation in other species. I’m not sure how one would test that, for you can’t just go in and just manipulate the inner ear. Perhaps you could put sloths in jet planes, subject them to various sorts of vertigo, and see if they do better than other animals!
Another possibility is that sloths are simply more variable than related mammals in many features, and so the ear variation isn’t that special. Maybe, for instance, the sloths measured came from genetically isolated subgroups, and the variation we see is just variation among subspecies or ecotypes. The authors argue pretty convincingly that this isn’t true, but at least two other studies show substantial variation in other skeletal features of sloths that aren’t related to balance, and in the timing of when their cranial sutures (the fissures in the skull) close. So we need to look at variation in many morphological traits of sloths. Given the funding difficulties of this type of science, I doubt we’ll see such work in the near future.
It sort of suggests that Darwin’s theory in general was under question, rather than just this one small prediction that Darwin made. But even that prediction has already been verified in characters like wisdom teeth and human muscles, so the present study doesn’t really add much to substantiating that idea. What the work does suggest, though, is that it’s less important for sloths than for other animals to maintain their balance, and that’s cool in itself.
Finally, here’s a video of a three-toed sloth (and its faster two-toed relative, which isn’t all that closely related):
“Sloth” of course, is an adjective that applies to lazy humans. That reminds me of a joke: A city boy goes to the country and sees a bunch of hogs slopping noisily and messily at their trough. “No wonder they call them pigs!”, he exclaims.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been avoiding the Olympics out of sheer boredom, but I do want to put up one post about one victory.
Last night Mo Farah, born in Somalia and now a British citizen, won the 10,000 meter men’s race, the first Brit to ever win that event. He is doubtlessly the finest long-distance runner Britain has ever produced (he moved to England from Africa at the age of eight).
The noise in the packed 80,000-capacity stadium became deafening as Farah, 29, kicked past the Ethiopian world record holder Kenenisa Bekele to claim victory with a sprint finish in the last lap.
After crossing the line, amid wild cheering from the crowd, an emotional Farah dropped to the ground and covered his eyes. Moments later he was joined on the track by his daughter Rihanna, seven, clutching two Union flags as he swept her into his arms.
Then came Farah’s heavily pregnant wife Tania [JAC: twins!], who came down from the stands to kiss her Olympic champion husband. . .
The runner has now got halfway to fulfilling his dream of being able to give two gold medals to the twin daughters that he and Tania are expecting in September. He competes in the 5,000 metres later this week.
“It would be great to be able to give them one medal each,” he said before Saturday’s 10,000 metres final. “That would be amazing.”
As a refugee, and a black kid in a white working-class neighborhood of London, his life wasn’t easy. The Telegraph notes:
His gold is proof of how far Farah has come since arriving in Britain able to say only a few words of English, including “excuse me”, “where is the lavatory?” and the frequently misinterpreted “C’mon then” – a phrase innocently taught him by his father, but which would inevitably provoke fights with other boys.
Here’s Farah at the moment he won:
And his daughter embracing him on the track:
There are crappy videos of Farah’s victory on YouTube taken from the stands, but the emotionality of the moment is best expressed by this video, showing the BBC commentators’ reaction as Farah crossed the finish line. The caption: “BBC commentators go crazy when Mo Farah wins olympic gold – Colin Jackson, Denise Lewis and Michael Johnson.”
I think there’s more than pro-Britain jingoism going on here. This is the kind of Olympic moment I miss.
Francophile Matthew Cobb tells me that French filmmaker Chris Marker (real name: Christian Francois Bouche-Velleneuve) died in Paris on July 29 at age 91. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’ve seen his influence, noted by boston.com:
Marker was a photographer, novelist, documentarian, and multimedia artist, but he’s probably best known for 1962’s “La Jetée,” the 28-minute short that influenced an entire generation of filmmakers. “The Matrix” wouldn’t exist without it and Terry Gilliam famously expanded Marker’s storyline into 1995’s “Twelve Monkeys,” but the original obviously needs to be met on its own terms. Certainly there was nothing remotely like “La Jetee” when it came out in ’62: A post-apocalyptic sci-fi romance told almost entirely in black-and-white still photographs. The one exception — the one shot that moves — remains one of the most gracefully hair-raising moments in the history of the medium, and it encapsulates Marker’s obsession with time and memory, as well as his choice of film as the medium best suited to explore both.
You can watch the 26-minute movie “La Jetée” (“The Jetty”, with dubbed English narration) in its entirety here. I can’t embed it, but here’s Marker’s short documentary of a cat listening to music:
Matthew adds this:
He was famous in filmic and French circles. He did a brilliant but gruelling documentary about the politics of the 60s and 70s on a world scale called Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge (“The background/base of the air is red”; English title A Grin Without A Cat). The Wikipedia entry is succinct, but says “There are many subtle references to cats throughout the film, as well as brief shots of raccoons: (the raccoons are being shot as I recall).
Have a gander at this insane little female goat. I thought that the frenzied animal below had been smoking something, but apparently this is regular kid behavior. When I sent the video to regular poster Linda Grilli Calhoun, who raises and breeds goats for a living, I noted the hyperactivity of the little one and asked, “Is this normal?”
She answered:
Honestly? That looks pretty normal to me. The ones that are being placid just have different personalities. I’ve had plenty of kids that bounce off the walls like that doeling bounced off her herdmates. The ones that are quieter are more rare, at least in my herd.
The info given at YouTube is this:
Buttermilk Sky is a five-week-old Nigerian dwarf goat kid at Took a Leap Farm in Houlton, Maine. I think we’ll have our hands full with this little one! Learn more about our farm and goats at http://www.tookaleapfarm.com.
Over at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” section, Paula Kirby’s just written a nice piece, “How would Jesus vote?“, on the bizarrely non-Christian behavior of American Christians: their strange views on Obamacare, gun control, and income inequality. When she emailed me about the piece, Paula said this:
I have a new post up at WashPo’s On Faith page. It’s rather different from my previous posts there: this one says nice things about Christianity! The aim was to flag up the huge contrast between the political/social attitudes of the Religious Right and the teachings of the man they’re all supposed to be so devotedly following. At a time like this, it strikes me as far more urgent to try to keep Romney out of the White House than to attack liberal versions of Christianity.
It’s short and worth reading in its entirety: a sharp indictment of the hypocrisy of some right-wing Christians. I’ll publish just a snippet:
To Brits watching from across the Atlantic, U.S. society seems worryingly divided. Not just between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, but also between those who consider themselves respectable and those whom those same people do not consider respectable. I can think of no other industrially and commercially advanced country – much less an avowedly Christian one – in which it is apparently so acceptable to demonize those who do not share your beliefs, for example, or your sexual orientation. The sight of American Christians in full self-righteous fervor, working themselves up into a rage over other people’s beliefs and other people’s sexuality, is hard to reconcile with the Jesus of the Gospels, whose anger was almost exclusively reserved for those who dared to judge and look down on others; the Jesus who, himself, chose always to align himself with those so judged.
Remember that Paula is an atheist, and doesn’t believe that Jesus actually said or did what’s in the Bible. Her aim is to show the big divide between what some people (aka Republican Christians) profess to believe and what they really do.
Late summer is apparently open season on Richard Dawkins, and the inimitable Mark Vernon has procured his Dawkins Hunting License. (There’s another ludicrous attack on Dawkins’s atheism that I’ll discuss tomorrow). Vernon is a former Anglican priest who now embarrasses himself by writing accommodationist articles for the Guardian; his hallmark is using a lot of words to either say nothing or to go badly wrong (see here and here). He just did it again. In his latest piece, “Richard Dawkins: an end to mythmaking?“, Vernon contends that Dawkins’s notion of the “selfish gene” (a metaphor for the fact that natural selection operates by genes acting as if they were selfish) is not only a “myth” in the sense of being “a powerful story”, but is also becoming a myth in the sense of “a fictional story”, for, according to Vernon, it’s scientifically discredited.
Vernon has no idea what he’s talking about, at least with respect to the science. His main point seems to be that a recent paper in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson, completely dispels the idea of the selfish gene:
Richard Dawkins is a master mythmaker. His best fiction is that of the selfish gene. His great book of that title, published 35 years ago, described human beings as lumbering robots driven by immortal genes. It even had a brilliant, final twist. Sometimes, the myth promised, we can overcome the tyranny of the biological imperative inside us. Inevitably – though perhaps more quickly than many anticipated – his myth is going the way of the world. It spoke powerfully of what was taken to be truth for a time. But subject to the inexorable shifts of human knowledge, the myth is now starting to look outdated.
A crucial moment came in August 2010, when Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O Wilson published an article in Nature. They argued that the mathematics behind the idea that Dawkins had so successfully popularised doesn’t stack up. It was wrong, Wilson insists – and he should know as one of the few people who originally did the maths. He now prefers evolutionary theories that speak about altruism, based upon group selection. The next generation awaits a mythmaker of Dawkins’s stature to tell us this new story about life.
Does Vernon even understand what Nowak et al. said? Their idea was that the evolution of “eusociality” in social insects (that is, the sterility of workers who form castes and also help their mother, the queen, produce her own offspring) was based not on “kin selection” (natural selection involving individuals helping relatives), but on “group selection” (the evolution of a trait that is maladaptive within groups but spread by the differential extinction and reprodution of groups themselves).
Note that the paper was an explanation of a single behavior: the altruism of eusocial insects and a few other nonhuman animals. It did not address the idea of “altruism” in humans or other species. What it says about human altruism is only this:
We have not addressed the evolution of human social behaviour here, but parallels with the scenarios of animal eusocial evolutionexist, and they are, we believe, well worth examining.
However, Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, does impute human altruism, and much other human behavior, to group selection. (I believe that altruism in humans and other species is, in fact, explained more parsimoniously by individual selection involving reciprocity and relatedness than by group selection.)
Further, the paper of Nowak et al. says nothing about the mathematics of natural selection in general—that is, the maths behind the selfish gene. Those mathematics, embodied in population genetics theory, are still good. Neither Nowak, Wilson, nor Tarnita said anything about the idea of “the selfish gene” (i.e., garden-variety natural selection) being wrong in general. They merely claimed that one set of traits in one group of species was better described by group selection than by conventional natural selection.
And Nowak et al. were wrong even in this claim. After their paper was published, 156 authors signed five letters to Nature, pointing out that Nowak et al. gave no evidence that natural selection (in the form of kin selection) could not explain altruism in social insects. That group of authors included virtually every prominent person working on the evolution of social behavior (I, a tyro, was also a signatory). Now the weight of numbers itself doesn’t show that Nowak et al. were wrong, but the arguments made by the critics were correct. (I’ve posted about this controversy extensively on this site, e.g., here and here, here and here). Vernon has apparently conflated the view of eusociality advanced by Nowak et al. with the rejection of “selfish genes” (natural selection). That’s apparent when Vernon argues that Wilson has replaced Dawkins’s idea of selfish genes with “evolutionary theories that speak about altruism, based on group selection.” These are are not mutually exclusive alternatives anyway, and the latter theory is simply wrong, or at least undemonstrated. Altruism is only a very small subset of evolutionary biology.
Oh, and Wilson didn’t “do the maths.” The mathematical model was made by Tarnita and Nowak; Wilson’s contribution was apparently the idea of group selection, the biological description of eusocial species, and the verbal scenario that prompted the maths.
After getting the science dead wrong, and completely neglecting the extensive criticism leveled at the Nowak et al. paper, Vernon then tries to equate religious myths with scientific ones, to the detriment of the latter:
[Dawkins’s] latest book, which prompted the Paxman interview, trades on the genre in its very title: The Magic of Reality. The book describes many myths, religious ones as well as scientific. Myths are powerful because they fire the imagination, encourage play and make great poetic stories. They can only do so when there is something true in them.
There are, of course, differences between scientific and religious myths. For one thing, scientific myths are far less long-lived than religious ones. The great faiths of the world daily turn to myths that are thousands of years old and find truth leaping off the page as they read them. Scientific myths, on the other hand, do well if they last more than a century. Who today reads Newton? Both kinds of myth seek evidence in their support. The difference here is that scientific stories seek empirical evidence – and when the empirical evidence fails, the myth fails too, which is what appears to be happening to the selfish gene. Conversely, religious myths seek proof of a more personal kind. These myths work when they speak in their details about the truths of life. . .
. . . Religious people should be masters of myth, like Dawkins, for the greatest myths convey the truth of things to us, be that spiritual or scientific.
Note the sly dismissal of scientific “myths “as transitory. Maybe people don’t read Newton today, but that doesn’t mean that many of his ideas weren’t right: a lot of them were, and have become part of mainstream science. Accommodationists act as if every scientific “truth” is ultimately found false. Such truths are provisional, of course, but many have held up perfectly well. Matter is still made of atoms, the earth circles the Sun and the Moon the Earth, a water molecule has two hydrogen and one oxygen atom, and the gravitational attraction is proportional to the product of the masses of the attracting bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. And the metaphor of genes acting as if they were “selfish” is not only alive and well, but has helped a lot of people, including evolutionary biologists, see natural selection in a clearer light.
And about that “truth leaping off the page” when we read religious myths: what truth, exactly, is that? What truths leap off the page when we read about Noah’s Ark, or the Book of Job (a horrible book I’ve just read that describes an abusive relationship, with God playing the role of battering husband), or Revelation? Certainly we can make up “truths” from reading these fictions, but, unlike science, there’s no way to test them. A Muslim will read the Bible and claim that it’s wrong: that Jesus was neither crucified nor the son of God. Is the Muslim right? Who knows? We don’t even know if Jesus existed, even as an itinerant preacher.
The seeking of empirical evidence for scientific “myths” is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Science approaches the truth asymptotically, and has to reject some ideas along the way. But we still approach the truth about nature, for if we didn’t, we couldn’t cure diseases or send roving vehicles to Mars. Religious “evidence” (“proof of a more personal kind,” as Vernon euphemistically calls “making stuff up”), consists of either revelation, dogma, or the confection of post facto rationalizations. We are no closer to understanding a god, if there is one, than we were in 1200 A.D. So no, religious truth doesn’t leap off the page. It’s read into the page by the believer.
And Vernon should read up on evolutionary genetics, because he’s got it all backwards. Where is Terry Eagleton now, asking whether Vernon has done his homework by reading Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, or even the letters to the editors about the Nowak et al. paper?
Some joker at Alternet, who must have taken a Grumpy Pill before he wrote it, has made a short list of the five most awful atheists. Affronted, Grania Spingies of Atheist Ireland has sent me her take on the piece.
_______
Just sayin’: The Five Most Awful Atheists
by Grania Spingies
No, they’re not Mao or Stalin. This isn’t in fact the latest offering from the risible if thoroughly repugnant Conservapedia. It’s an opinion from Ian Murphy, self-styled alternative journalist, posted over on Alternet.
One must assume that Murphy just likes hyperbole, in the same way as teenage girls might tell you that there is nothing worse than messing their nail polish before it’s properly dried. It must be the hyperbole thing, or else Murphy lives in such a sheltered world that he thinks that people expressing ideas that he dislikes, disagrees with or objects to, is really The Most Awful Thing.
Standing in the dock, the accused are Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Penn Jillette, Bill Maher and S.E. Cupp (yeah, I had to look that one up, too). Their “crimes” are essentially espousing ideas that Murphy doesn’t agree with.
Personally, I’m all for criticising ideas that you think are ill-advised, ignorant or dangerous. You’re even entitled to dislike the person for espousing those ideas. However, if your primary skill is making lists rather than actually engaging in and rebutting the ideas you abhor, then I suppose making lists is what you do. And I suppose calling your list: ‘Five atheists I saw on American TV that I don’t like’ would be a little less punchy.
Blistering critiques such as “not knowing things is not a good reason to be an atheist”—a charge leveled at Jillette, and one that I’m sure stings him sorely—are a dead give-away to the real motive behind this little Rant on the Internet.
Actually, not knowing things is a very good reason to be an atheist, or at very least an agnostic. What Murphy really means to say is: “I don’t want people I disagree with to be in my club”. Life is such a bitch, isn’t it?
This is so abysmally clichéd that it shouldn’t have to be said at all, but here we go again: there is no High Church of Atheism, nor any Creed that we must all profess. Some atheists are smarter than you; others, not so much. Some you will agree with on almost every point of politics, philosophy and science; others again, not so much. And, occasionally, someone we vehemently disagree with might even have a point.
At the risk of belabouring the hyperbole point, to call someone “most awful” is arguably to condemn them to the ranks of history’s most dangerous, terrifying and insufferable. It is hard to see how a man most famous for magic routines and for popular skepticism TV shows comes close. It’s even harder to see how a woman who fled the misogyny of Islam and devoted her life to speaking out against that religion’s worst traits in defiance of pervasive and still active death threats somehow fits this category. Or a neuroscientist famous for writing books and speaking about difficult, complex and sometimes taboo subjects. Their opinions are controversial, and many disagree with them for a variety of reasons. But “most awful” doesn’t begin to describe them, except perhaps in the original sense of the word, which implied someone who was impressive and worthy of respect.
There was one thing that annoyed me more than Murphy’s diatribe. I originally caught sight of the article when it was posted on Facebook by Atheist Alliance International. Here’s a screenshot:
I have some sympathy for people manning (or womanning) a FB page on behalf of an organisation they volunteer for; indeed, I had this job myself a while back. This job involves a constant need to provide fresh content for the page and your readers, but doesn’t necessarily confer upon you the authority to provide an editorial comment for fear of misrepresenting your group. That is understandable—but in this case also lazy. It was only when readers posted their disagreement that AAI (a very worthwhile organisation that does great work promoting secularism and atheism around the world) decided to disavow any endorsement of the screed they had linked to:
Indeed. Sharing does not mean endorsement. So then just say it already! Sharing something on a Facebook page is often taken as implicit approval unless you add something to prove otherwise. If you want to remain neutral, just take the faint-hearted approach and say: Here’s an article with some heartfelt opinions criticising some notable atheists. What is your opinion of it?
There really is no such thing as “Just saying”. You either approve, disagree or have some issues with it. “Just saying” is the cowardly way of expressing your view or looking for attention while trying to avoid taking the heat for it.
