O Canada!

July 5, 2012 • 3:51 am

Canadians are always dissing America for its over-the-top religiosity, and rightly so. But their country (which I am now visiting) is not completely immune. Two days ago Canadian Raffi P. sent this email to both P.Z Myers and me, and I post it with permission:

Anyway here is my story from this past weekend which included my first run in with a preachy evangelical.  So it’s Canada Day on Sunday and we are at a huge public park across the street from our house in suburban Toronto.  There are thousands of people out, there are kids everywhere, music, games rides and food—just a good time!  So my wife and I are sitting on a park bench with our one and half year old son taking it all in.

At this point, this man walks up to us and has a card trick ready to show us.  So he does it and then hands me a couple of pieces of paper.  I quickly scan them and see Bible verses printed all over them.  So I know what he’s about but I don’t say anything; I wait for him to finish his trick.

No sooner had he done that, then he turns to me and says “Have you heard of the Gospel”?  I didn’t answer his question; instead I just turned and said “So is this what you do, you go up to people enjoying themselves and try to peddle your religious views?” Safe to say he didn’t like that much, but at the same time you could tell in his eyes that he had perked up, realizing that he had a “live one” so to speak.

So he gets very engaged and starts ripping into me.  He asks if I am an atheist; I say yes.  Then, as if he was reading a checklist of idiotic things creationists say, exactly as I have read from your experiences on your websites every day, he says” Do you believe in heaven?”.  Of course I say “no” and describe why (lack of evidence and all).

“Do you believe in Evolution?”. Well of course.  Then he says that if evolution is true then where are the fossils? (I swear).  Then he adds, “Well explain to me the dragonfly.  The dragonfly is the one thing that has never evolved”*.  And he was so adamant about this.  As if the his entire religious belief hinges on the damn dragonfly.

Then he says how do you explain Love?  I mean I can go on and on but it wouldn’t stop.  I put him in his place, didn’t back down, threw it all in his face trying my best to channel Coyne and Myers. The one thing I have learned from the two of you, as well as from, Hitchens, is that when one has facts, evidence and science at hand, one must never back down.  I asked him on three separate occasions to leave my family and I alone but he wouldn’t.  After a while I got rid of him.  Some people who had gathered and watched though said “He’s religious, you came off a little harsh”.  I couldn’t believe it,  as if I am supposed to bend over backwards and let this idiot ramble off his stupid thoughts.

After this experience I just became very angry and agitated and this was just one time!  I have a new found appreciation for the crap that you guys deal with on an almost daily basis.

Now those who accuse us atheists of being strident and quasi-religious in our fervor should answer this question: would any atheist go up to a randomly-chosen family in the park and start prosyletizing against God? We don’t do stuff like that.  Yes, we write articles and give talks at meetings and on the radio, but we don’t collar strangers, ruining their day by saying, “Have you heard the bad news about Jesus?”

Come on, liberal religious folks—let’s hear you decry this intrusive behavior instead of that of atheists, who don’t disturb people and their families on Canada Day!

_______

*And yes, dragonflies have evolved.  There are ancestral forms in the fossil record, and while some ancient dragonflies look similar to modern ones, they are no means identical! (See also here.)

My Little Atoms podcast

July 4, 2012 • 5:57 am

As I’ve mentioned before, Neil Denny, a British writer and podcaster, just did a three-week road trip across America, exploring the state of science in America. He writes about his adventures for the Guardian and puts up his interviews on the Little Atoms “roadtrip” website. The one-month trip ended on June 9, but its aim was this:

Neil will be interviewing scientists working on ground-breaking, cutting edge science, educators combatting the encroachment of anti-science and irrationality into politics and the classroom, and writers attempting to popularise amazing ideas and concepts to the wider public. And he’s going to explore some major scientific (and some not so scientific) sites of interest along the way.

Back in England, Neil is gradually editing and putting up his interviews, and his 50-minute chat with me can be heard here. (I haven’t yet listened to it; the Feedburner site is here). The topic is, naturally, why scientists accept evolution as fact but many laypeople don’t.

There are eleven podcasts so far, and a fair few to come. The ones currently posted include Eugenie Scott, the physicist Sean Carroll, and a group of people from the Freethought Alliance Annual Conference.

Neil was a delightful guy and asked intelligent questions—and he’d actually read my book!

Higgs boson found! (probably)

July 4, 2012 • 3:10 am

I’m off early to Canada, and what good news to awaken to!

As everyone expected from rumors leaking out over the past few weeks, it was announced yesterday at a physics conference in Melbourne that a particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson was found by two groups using the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border. The results are characterized as “preliminary”, but I’m betting and hoping they’re right.  This is the last particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics, and its discovery is a true triumph of the human intellect. Not that we’re created by God or anything, but squirrels couldn’t have found this!

The CERN press release says this, and we should be proud as scientists that it’s properly cautious:

Geneva, 4 July 2012. At a seminar held at CERN1 today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV.

“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

“The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”

(See more at the press release.)

As the BBC reports,  Peter Higgsg himself was on hand to hear the vindication of his prediction. How satisfying that must be!:

At the meeting, Prof Peter Higgs, the former University of Edinburgh theoretician who with five others predicted the Higgs particle’s existence in 1964, praised the efforts of the LHC teams.

“It’s really an incredible thing its happened in my lifetime,” he said. . .

Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, told BBC News earlier this week: “The evidence is piling up… everything points in the direction that the Higgs is there.”

The Higgs is the cornerstone of the Standard Model – the most successful theory to explain the workings of the Universe.

But most researchers now regard the Standard Model as a stepping stone to some other, more complete theory, which can explain phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy.

Scientists will look at how the new particle decays -or transforms – into other, more stable particles after being produced in collisions at the LHC to figure out whether the particle they see is the version of the Higgs predicted by the Standard Model or something more exotic. .

“We’ll look at how often it decays into a pair of photons, how often it decays into Z bosons, how often it decays into W bosons,” said Dr Tara Shears, from the University of Liverpool.

“It could match what the Standard Model predicts, but if there are deviations, that means there is new physics at work. That would be the first glimpse through the window at what lies beyond our current understanding.”

The New York Times now has a long article about it, including this paragraph and these photos:

At CERN itself, 1,000 people stood in line all night to get into the auditorium, according to Guido Tonelli, a CERN physicist who said the atmosphere was like a rock concert. Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh theorist for whom the boson is named, entered the meeting to a standing ovation.

Joe Incandela, a CERN spokesman, right, gestured next to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN’s director general, during a press conference at the organization’s offices near Geneva on Wednesday. Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The British physicist Peter Higgs arrived at CERN’s headquarters on Wednesday. Pool photo by Dennis Baliebouse.

Kitteh contest: Hallie and Max, and a reminder of the KittenQwest contest

July 4, 2012 • 3:06 am

Reader Cheryl and her husband Fred submitted their two tailless cats for the kitteh contest.  Remember, you can still submit your cat, along with a nice paragraph describing it, by sending it to my email address, easily obtained by Googling.

Oh, and I’ve extended the KittenQwest Contest for another week while I attend the Evolution meetings.  Contest now closes July 12, so submit one picture (by email) or link to the cutest kitten you’ve seen on the internet (it doesn’t have to be yours!). Links should be given as comments at the contest website, not on this post!. The prize is an autographed copy of WEIT with a kitten picture hand drawn by moi.

On to Hallie and Max:

Having missed the deadline for your “cutest kittens” pictures, I’m attaching a couple you might enjoy.  One shows Hallie, our cat who’s seemingly a candy fan.  She’s a Tabby-Manx mix that we adopted (probably too young) in Cincinnati. She is now Age 6, with a very skittish but loving personality.


Our other cat, Max the Manx, also is shown.  We adopted him from a Louisville, KY shelter, and he’s now 7 years old.  He’s a character and runs the household, as you might imagine.  He obviously feels he has to supervise all our goings-on, and he is the fast friend of our 9-year-old son, James.   We are currently teaching Max to ring a bell to gain access to the garage–with slow but improving results. 🙂  Now he is ringing the bell MANY times a day–perhaps overdoing it!

RIP Andy Griffith

July 3, 2012 • 9:57 am

Best known as Sheriff Andy Taylor of “The Andy Griffith Show,” Andy Griffith died this morning at age 86.  If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember that show with its cast of colorful characters, including Opie (Ron Howard), Aunt Bea (Francis Bavier), Gomer (Jim Nabors) and of course the nervous deputy Barney Fife (Don Knotts), whose gun was always empty, with Andy retaining one bullet in case of emergency.

The show ran from 1960-1968, and was immensely popular. I watched it nearly every week. The NYT notes:

But the 35 million viewers of “The Andy Griffith Show” would have been reassured to learn that even at the peak of his popularity, Mr. Griffith drove a Ford station wagon and bought his suits off the rack. He said his favorite honor was having a 10-mile stretch of a North Carolina highway named after him in 2002. (That was before President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.)

World’s smallest fly found, and oy, is it small!

July 3, 2012 • 8:32 am

I don’t consider myself a “geek” (indeed, I hate that word, since it’s basically anti-science), but I have to admit that the publication of this paper, which I learned about from Brian Brown—one of its authors who posted about it on his website, flyobsession—got my juices flowing a bit faster.  In a paper in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America (reference below), Brown describes the world’s smallest fly, a phorid.

Phroids are weird flies (I’ve posted about them twice, here and here): often parasitic, tiny, and wingless, and assuming bizarre forms. The picture below, taken from Brown’s paper, shows some other phorids, and check out my two posts in the last sentence. Remember, these are adult flies!:

Fig 1 from the paper: Variety of body forms in adult female Phoridae. Clockwise from upper left: Thaumatoxena sp., a termitoxeniinae,
and Vestigipoda sp.

One female specimen of the new species, named Euryplatea nanaknihali, was found in Thailand. This is what it looks like (like many phorids, its wings are tiny); the photo is from Brown’s website:

Okay, so how big is it? Brown’s paper says (my emphasis):

Of all the contenders for the title of world’s smallest species of fly, it seems that a species of Phoridae described here is the champion. At a body length of 0.40 mm, it is smaller than all of the tiny gnats, mosquitoes, and other flies so far described.

Four-tenths of a millimeter is 0.016 inch. In other words, you’d have to line up 63 of these little guys to make an inch.  Here’s a line that is about 1 mm long, so the fly is less than half this size:

–

Here’s how big it is compared to a housefly (Musca domestica); the figure is again from Brown’s paper:

Although only one specimen was found, Brown hypothesizes, almost certainly correctly, that this is parasitic on small ants.  Brown’s website notes:

The smallest fly in the world is a member of the family Phoridae, and is one of the “ant decapitating flies”. Adult females lay an egg in the body of an ant, and the resulting larva feeds in the ants head, eventually causing the decapitation of its host. Some of these flies are being used to attempt biological control on imported fire ants, and were even featured on an episode of the popular television show “King of the Hill”.

Because these flies usually develop in the head of their host ant, they are smaller than their hosts. One would think that the smallest ants would be therefore immune to these nasty parasites, as their heads are vanishingly small. But the world’s smallest fly is one of these ant killers, and at the astoundingly small body length of 0.4 mm, these flies can probably decapitate ants with heads as small as 0.5 mm. That is pretty close to the smallest size that ants can get!

So is this the world’s smallest insect? Nope. According to Brown’s paper, “the smallest known insects are reputedly mymarids that are only ≈0.14 mm in length, also making them the smallest animals in the world.” That’s a third the size of this fly, and 0.0055 inches long (you’d have to line up 182 of them to encompass an inch). Mymarids, which are minute wasps, are so small because they parasitize the eggs of other insects. And within these flies, and those wasps, are tiny, tiny brains that have enough information to control their complex behaviors.

Ain’t nature wonderful?

_________

Brown, B.V. 2012. Small size no protection for acrobat ants: world’s smallest fly Is a parasitic pphorid (Diptera: Phoridae). Ann. Entomol. Soc. Am. 105(4): 550-554.

Elliott Sober argues again that God might have caused mutations

July 3, 2012 • 5:04 am

It no longer baffles me why philosophers like Elliott Sober and Michael Ruse, both professed nonbelievers, spend their time telling the faithful how they can reconcile God and evolution.  To me it seems like a complete waste of time, especially for atheists and agnostics, but Sober explains his reasons at the end of this post.  I completely disagree with them, but first let’s revisit the controversy.

Last April, Elliott, a distinguished philosopher at the University of Wisconsin, gave a talk at my university about the possibility of God-guided mutations. His thesis was that science could not rule out the possibility that some mutations had been engineered by God, and although they look random, we can’t rule out that God created a few of them in his desire to get certain forms of life—presumably us. (Note: by “random” mutations, evolutionists mean that mutations arise irrespective of whether they’d make an individual more or less fit.  A fruit fly made to live on medium containing high concentrations of toxic alcohol, for instance, doesn’t suddenly experience more mutations for alcohol tolerance.)

Elliott thought that God’s actions might be “hidden variables” in the mutation process.  Thus, although most mutations might be random, a few might be made by God to foster adaptation (say, if an ancestral primate obstinately refuses to experience those mutations producing bipedal walking).  And we wouldn’t be able to detect God’s actions.

Now Sober doesn’t really believe this happens, but he wants to argue that one can’t rule that out as a logical possibility, nor can we rule it out as an empirical issue—so long as God-driven mutations are sufficiently rare.

I took severe issue with Elliott’s thesis (see here and here), as did Jason Rosenhouse at EvolutionBlog (see here). Elliott replied in a post on my website.

Elliott wrote me yesterday calling attention to a new paper on his website about the issue: “Evolutionary theory, causal completeness, and theism—the case of ‘guided’ mutation” (free pdf at the site). Ironically, the paper is intended for a Festschrift for Michael Ruse, his brother in theistic apologetics. It’s short and clear (15 pages of text), and easily accessible to philosopher, biologists, or laypeople interested in science.

The arguments haven’t changed, but I wanted to offer a final critique, and explain why I think Elliott is misguided.

The thesis is “the idea that God intervenes in the evolutionary process by causing this or that mutation to occur in a given time and place.” He emphasizes again that he doesn’t really believe this, but presses on nonetheless, claiming that evolutionary theory “is logically compatible with this type of divine intervention.”

Sober then describes a thought experiment that could show (and in fact real experiments have shown) that mutations look random: if it’s good to be red rather than green, an green organism put in a red environment shows no increase in mutations to red coloration, nor does the reverse situation obtain for a red organism in a green environment. Neverthless, Sober argues that:

These models, old and new, describe the effect of manipulating an organism’s natural environment and how those manipulations affect (or fail to affect) mutation probabilities. None of these models rules out hidden variables. So none rules out supernatural hidden variables. Just as a model can be true without being causally complete, so too can a model be both true and inductively generalizable without being causally complete.

Yes, of course science can’t prove that God didn’t have a hand in some of these mutations, especially if they’re rare. But considering this possibility is a waste of time for five reasons:

1.  There is no evidence that God exists—at least a theistic God, which is the type demanded by Sober’s thesis.  Ergo, we needn’t consider the rest of his hypothesis. We don’t have to consider that tiny, fire-breathing dragons actually ignite the gasoline in your pistons once every 10,000 ignitions, because we’ve seen no evidence for them.

2.  Experiments have repeatedly showed that mutations do appear to be random: we don’t jack up the probably of an adaptive mutation by putting an organism in an environment where such adaptive mutations would be useful. (The immune system, often cited as a counterexample, isn’t: the shufflings of antibodies against the body’s invaders are random, but those shufflings that produce adaptive antibodies are fed back to the genome so that the organism makes more of the useful molecule.)  This rules out the possibility that mutations could be massively nonrandom.

Sober would presumably respond that yes, well, they look random, but some rare ones might be caused by God. And of course we can’t logically or empirically rule that out, but there’s no evidence for it.  We needn’t consider all logical possibilities in science that have no evidence supporting them, particularly because in this case the biggest piece of evidence—the existence of an interventionist God—is so implausible as to be unworthy of consideration.  Theist-apologist are always confusing what is logically possible with what, given the evidence, is probable.

3.  If you’re a theist, and thus have some idea of how God works, then you have to ask, “Why would God do it that way, rather than just bringing new species or complex adaptations into existence de novo?”  The answer, “God works in mysterious ways,” is not only unsatisfactory but unparsimonious. If you appeal to God’s unknowable ways, then you have to give some evidence for an interventionist God in the first place.  The whole business is simply an attempt to rescue God from the palpable fact that his actions have always remained hidden.  As Delos McKown said, “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”

4. If you’re going to make an argument that God intervenes rarely to cause an outcome—so rarely that the process looks random—then you might as well argue that God intervenes everywhere in a rare fashion: in the rolling of dice at Las Vegas, at coin-tossings in the Superbowl, and so on.  We can’t rule out a rare God-effect there, either, but we don’t see Sober arguing for such things.  Why not? Because that idea is scientifically sterile.  If a hypothesis is compatible with all conceivable outcomes, it’s not a hypothesis worth entertaining, for there can be no evidence against it. As such, there’s no reason to accept it.

5.  Because Sober considers the idea of God-guided mutations one that science can’t reject, our assertion that those mutations don’t occur doesn’t come from science, but from philosophy. Further, the question isn’t within the ambit of science:

If the existence of guided mutations doesn’t show that God exists, then the nonexistrence of guided mutations doesn’t show that God does not exist. Atheists and theists should agree that the biological question is separate from the theological question.

This is the old “the absence of evidence isn’t evidence for absence” argument.  And yes, the nonexistence of guided mutations doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but militates against it in a Bayesian way, particularly since there’s no evidence for a guiding force. As others have noted repeatedly, the absence of evidence is evidence for absence if that evidence should be there. There really isn’t a distinction between biological and theological questions here, since the action of the supernatural on mutation rates is a biological question.

I believe firmly that science doesn’t rule out the supernatural a priori (see here, for instance); our concentration on natural rather than supernatural causes for phenomena comes not as an accepted a priori fiat of scientific research, but as a result of centuries of experiments. We have found that invoking the supernatural has never helped us understand anything about the real world, and hence we’ve stopped invoking it because it hasn’t proven useful. As Laplace said, “We don’t need that hypothesis.”

Now some misguided souls define “supernatural” as “that which can’t be investigated by science.” That’s not only tautological but wrong.  The supernatural was not only been part of science in its earlier years (natural theology as an explanation of organismal diversity, God’s supposed tweaking of the planetary orbits, and so on), but has also been tested repeatedly (finding out the age of the earth, refutations of precognition, ESP, and the efficacy of intercessory prayer, and so on).  None of these studies has shown the slightest evidence for the action of the supernatural. Science can test the supernatural, so long as gods are supposed to affect the universe.  (We can’t of course, look for evidence for a deistic, hands-off god.)

In contrast, assuming there are natural and material causes for material phenomena is a strategy that has been immensely productive in science.  We don’t invoke the supernatural not because science forbids us to do that, but because it has never helped us understand the universe.  Again, “methodological naturalism” is not something science has assumed as a fiat from the outset, but is a research strategy that has been productive.  In the same way, plumbers and electricians don’t assume that God causes power outages and plumbing blockages.  As Hawking says, “Science wins because it works.”  Religion doesn’t work in that way, and never has.

Why, then, does Sober (and his confére Michael Ruse) write papers and book on this topic? It becomes clear at the end of Sober’s paper:

It is important to distinguish the evidential grounds one has for accepting a proposition from the practical reasons one has for asserting it in public. This essay has considered accommodationism under the first heading, but I want to close by saying something about the second. I bother to publish in defense of accommodationism in part because I want to take the heat off of evolutionary theory. The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States; if the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion. Indeed, the risk is more profound, since what happens in public education often has ramifications for what happens in the wider culture. Creationists have long held that evolutionary theory is atheistic; defenders of the theory are not doing the theory a favor when they agree. Atheists who think that evolutionary theory provides the beginning of an argument for disbelieving in God should make it clear that their arguments depend on additional premises that are not vouchsafed by scientific theory or data. Philosophy is not a dirty word.

Evolutionary theory is no more atheistic than are the theories of chemical bonds or plate tectonics.  It’s just perceived that way because evolution is the strongest evidence ever adduced against the existence of a theistic god. If you think God created the world and helps bring new species into existence, the observations of evolutionary biology show that you’re mistaken.  If that causes people to disbelieve in God, well, so be it. But the theory isn’t more atheistic than any other scientific theory—it’s just seen that way because of its implications for beleivers. (That reminds me of Jessica Rabbit’s statement: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way!”) If evolution is an atheistic theory and shouldn’t be taught in schools on those grounds, then we can’t teach cosmology, physics, or geology, either.

As philosopher Maarten Boudry said in a recent “quote of the week“:

[Robert] Pennock’s concern about the perceived conflict between science and religion is a legitimate one, but muddled philosophical reasoning will do little to avert that conflict. Science educators should not equate evolution with atheism, but neither should they pretend that the conflict between science and religion is wholly imaginary. Most religious believers would find out for themselves in any case.

And no, philosophy is not a dirty word, but Sober’s recent work on God-guided mutations is making it one, at least among scientists.  What a waste of a good mind to produce such papers, and how immensely disingenuous to toss believers a life preserver when Sober himself isn’t holding the rope!

Music history about to be made

July 3, 2012 • 4:00 am

If you don’t know what happened a few minutes after this picture was taken in 1969, you are either way too young or have no knowledge of rock history.  I’m serious.

Note that Paul is wearing flip-flops here; he obviously removed them before they made the iconic album cover.

You can see more outtakes of this famous shoot at Laughing Squid.

On the album cover they cross the street from left to right. It’s inconceivable to me now that they could have done it in the other direction, so engraved is that photo on my mind. But they did it that way in the outtakes!

Oh, and remember the last line of that awesome second side of Abbey Road; it’s the best line to ever appear in a Beatles’ song: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”