RIP Nora Ephron

June 26, 2012 • 6:31 pm

This came as a real shock to me: Nora Ephron, reporter and writer of engaging books and screenplays, died today at only 71.  The cause was myodysplasia, the same disease that killed Carl Sagan at 62. She got three Oscar nominations for screenplays: “Silkwood,” “When Harry Met Sally,” and “You’ve Got Mail.”  She also wrote the screenplay for “Sleepless in Seattle,” several books of essays, and the novel Heartburn, a lightly fictionalized account of her dysfunctional marriage to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein.

I’ve seen all of the movies mentioned above, and read Heartburn and two of her essay collections. Of these, I’d nominate the screenplays for “Silkwood” and “When Harry Met Sally” as her finest accomplishments.  Some found her romantic comedies schlocky, and yes, they have happy, tear-jerky endings, but the dialogue in “When Harry Met Sally” (the full movie is available on YouTube) is superb, and reminds me of my dolorous self when I dated happy, sunny shiksas in college.  And who could forget this scene with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, filmed in Katz’s Delicatessen in New York? The last line is sheer genius.

Did human social behavior evolve via group selection? E. O. Wilson defends that view in the NYT

June 26, 2012 • 10:11 am

Here’s one last (I hope) post on the brouhaha about the evolution of social behavior that I’ve covered over the last year or so.

I think E. O. Wilson must be feeling a bit beleaguered about the criticism he’s endured for his relentless advocacy of group selection.  Not only was he an author of the Nowak et al. paper in Nature arguing that group selection rather than kin selection was the prime mover of social evolution in insects and humans—a paper that was excoriated by biologists who work on the evolution of behavior—but his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, which makes the same group-selection argument, has also been strongly criticized.

Perhaps this explains why Wilson took to the pages of the Sunday New York Times to defend his views in an Opinionator piece called “Evolution and our inner conflict.” His thesis is this:

Within biology itself, the key to the mystery is the force that lifted pre-human social behavior to the human level. The leading candidate in my judgment is multilevel selection by which hereditary social behavior improves the competitive ability not of just individuals within groups but among groups as a whole.

“Multilevel selection” is another word for “group selection.”

How did social behavior evolve? Wilson gives a nod to kin selection, the idea that genes can evolve that produce behaviors favoring kin over oneself, so long as the genetic benefits of that behavior among all individuals outweigh the genetic costs to the altruist.  (This is weighted by the degree of kinship between actors: behaviors favoring your brothers and sisters over nonrelatives will evolve more readily than those favoring cousins over nonrelatives.)  But in the end Wilson dismisses kin selection in favor of selection among human groups:

This seems plausible, but in 2010 two mathematical biologists, Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, and I demonstrated that the mathematical foundations of the kin selection theory are unsound, and that examples from nature thought to support kin selection theory are better explained as products of multilevel selection.

Sadly, Nowak et al. demonstrated no such things. In fact, while they did offer what seems to be an alternative theory based on selection among groups, there is not a scintilla of evidence that it explains the evolution of social behavior in either humans or insects better than a kin-selection approach.  Their model is in fact unable to rule out kin selection, since they begin with groups that are highly related and do not vary the level of kinship in their models to determine if, as they predict, kinship is not a “driver” of social evolution.  So they simply cannot rule out kin selection as a powerful cause of social evolution.

Wilson goes on:

A strong reaction from supporters of kin selection not surprisingly ensued, and soon afterward more than 130 of them famously signed on to protest our replacement of kin selection by multilevel selection, and most emphatically the key role given to group selection. But at no time have our mathematical and empirical arguments been refuted or even seriously challenged. Since that protest, the number of supporters of the multilevel selection approach has grown, to the extent that a similarly long list of signatories could be obtained. But such exercises are futile: science is not advanced by polling. If it were, we would still be releasing phlogiston to burn logs and navigating the sky with geocentric maps.

Well, their mathematical arguments may hold, but others have shown that a). their model is basically one that does involve kin selection, and adds nothing new to the kin-selection perspective, and b). their empirical arguments about the intellectual vacuity of kin selection are serioiusly flawed. Several authors have produced lists of advances in our understanding of nature that have derived from a kin-selection perspective. In contrast, the idea of group selection has added virtually nothing to that understanding.

The number of signatories on the letters critiquing the paper of Nowak et al. is simply an indication of how much opposition their ideas faced in the scientific community. I urge readers with some biology expertise not to count the numbers, but actually read the critiques. No, science isn’t advanced by polling, but it is advanced by the open airing of arguments.  All the numbers show is that a lot of scientists—virtually every prominent worker on the evolution of social behavior—have pointed out flaws of the group-selection approach.

For a clearly written critique of Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson’s group-selection argument for social behavior, and a lucid defense of the value of kin selection, I highly recommend a recent paper by Andrew Bourke (reference below).

But on to the evidence that we humans became altruistic and cooperative by group selection. Wilson makes a strong claim here:

In fact, it seems clear that so deeply ingrained are the evolutionary products of group selected behaviors, so completely a part of the human condition, that we are prone to regard them as fixtures of nature, like air and water.

What are these supposedly group-selected behaviors? Wilson gives three (I quote):

  • “Among them is the intense, obsessive interest of people in other people, which begins in the first days of life as infants learn particular scents and sounds of the adults around them. Research psychologists have found that all normal humans are geniuses at reading the intentions of others, whereby they evaluate, gossip, proselytize, bond, cooperate and control. Each person, working his way back and forth through his social network, almost continuously reviews past experiences while imagining the consequences of future scenarios.”

Given that we’re social animals (see below), it is to an individual’s advantage to suss out one’s fellows in the group, and to your advantage to label potentially damaging or helpful individuals as such, for they can help or hurt not only you, but your relatives.  There is no individual disadvantage that I can see to this behavior. Au contraire: any individual who can better read other people could have a reproductive advantage.  So this can evolve via individual selection; there’s no need for group selection.

  • “A second diagnostic hereditary peculiarity of human behavior is the overpowering instinctual urge to belong to groups in the first place. To be kept in solitude is to be kept in pain, and put on the road to madness. A person’s membership in his group — his tribe — is a large part of his identity.”

Yes, but why does this suggest group selection? It’s a common mistake, one pointed out by Steve Pinker in his Edge essay, to mistake adaptations for living in groups with the notion of group selection.  Cooperation can evolve by several forms of individual selection, including associating with others for protection or the ability to bring down larger prey, or through reciprocal altruism. The advantages of grouping are not only multifarious, but widespread in animals.  And if you evolve grouping behavior, then you will likely evolve the urge to want to stay in a group.  None of that needs group selection to evolve.  Given the relative difficulty of group selection compared to individual selection, it would be extraordinary if the huge variety of animals who group all evolved that trait, and the penchant to aggregate, via group selection.

And finally, some xenophobia,which is probably the flip side of the second behavior given above:

  • “All things being equal (fortunately things are seldom equal, not exactly), people prefer to be with others who look like them, speak the same dialect, and hold the same beliefs An amplification of this evidently inborn predisposition leads with frightening ease to racism and religious bigotry.”

No problem for individual selection here: if you’ve evolved to be cooperative with others in groups, but simply haven’t encountered people who are different, it is to your advantage to be suspicious of them, for they haven’t passed the test of familiarity.  Or, if groups compete with each other for food, individuals might also selected to be wary of those belonging to other groups.  That involves group competition, but not group selection.  A group-selection explanation would invoke xenophobia being maladaptive within groups, but a trait that has spread to all humans because xenophobic groups simply killed off the groups of “nice people.” That doesn’t sound so plausible to me.

 In a book review by Michael Price of Brunel University, which I’ve discussed here, Price criticizes the view that human cooperation and other social traits must have evolved by group selection, pointing out the many features of human cooperation that suggest its evolution by selection among individuals.  I won’t reprise the evidence here, but go to Price’s review (or my summary) and read the paragraph that begins as follows:

The view that group selection is needed to explain most human cooperation seems inconsistent with the fact that over the past several decades, most successful research on this cooperation has theorized that it is produced by individual-level adaptations (Price, 2011; Price and Johnson, 2011).

Price then enumerates the features of human “cooperation” that suggest it confers advantages to individuals. And if it does that, then there is no need to invoke selection among groups, which posits that “cooperative” traits are really disadvantageous for individuals within groups.

Nevertheless, Wilson blithely paints a group-selection scenario whereby the traits above, presumably disadvantageous in individuals, spread throughout the species:

Probably at this point, during the habiline period, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, versus group-level selection, with competition among groups. The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor. The competitor between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

“Probably”? We have no evidence that altruism and cooperation evolved in this way, and suggestive evidence it evolved by individual selection—and not only in humans.  Sadly, Wilson, though at least expressing some uncertainty with the word “probably,” is severely misleading people about the evolution of cooperation.  So are others, like Jon Haidt and D. S. Wilson.  The force with which the adherents of group selection push their theory contrasts sharply with the paucity of evidence that their favorite process actually operates in nature.  It’s puzzling.  Well, maybe not so puzzling given that scientific egos and Templeton funding are on the line.

_____________

Bourke, A. F. G. 2011. The validity and value of inclusive fitness theory. Proc. Roy. Soc. Biol. 278:3313-3320.

Religious diet jokes

June 26, 2012 • 8:04 am

Re this morning’s post about Jewish dietary restrictions, I offer two jokes. Stop me if you’ve heard them before.

An elderly rabbi, having just retired from his duties in the congregation, finally decides to fulfill his lifelong fantasy–to taste pork. He goes to a hotel in the Catskills in the off-season (not his usual one, mind you), enters the empty dining hall and sits down at a table far in the corner.  The waiter arrives, and the rabbi orders roast suckling pig.

As the rabbi is waiting, struggling with his conscience, a family from his congregation walks in!  They immediately see the rabbi and, since no one should eat alone, they join him.

Shocked, the rabbi begins to sweat.  At last, the waiter arrives with a huge domed platter. He lifts the lid to reveal-what else?–roast suckling pig, complete with an apple in its mouth.

The family gasp in shock and disgust, and quickly turn to the rabbi for an explanation.

“This place is amazing!” cries the rabbi. “You order a baked apple, and look what you get!”

*****

A priest and a rabbi were, by coincidence, sitting next to each other on a long flight.

About an hour passes and not a single word was exchanged by the two men. Finally, the priest turns to the rabbi and says, “Rabbi, do you mind if I ask you a personal question”? The rabbi said, “Of course you may.”

“I understand that many of you Jewish people, especially rabbis, keep kosher and, as such, don’t eat things like bacon or ham”. The rabbi acknowledged that. “Haven’t you ever even tasted bacon or ham?”, asked the priest.

The Rabbi explained, “Many years ago, I was a visiting rabbi in a small town in the middle of nowhere and found myself in a diner one Sunday morning. There was no one around so I ordered bacon and eggs. It was quite good but that was the only time that ever happened.”

After some time, the rabbi turned to the priest and said, “Father, do you mind if you ask you a very personal question”? The Priest said, “okay.”

“You priests take an oath of celibacy, right”?, asked the Rabbi. “Why, yes”, answered the priest, wondering where this was going.

“Well, haven’t you ever had sex since you’ve become as priest”?, asked the rabbi. The priest looked about nervously, leaned toward the rabbi and answered very softly, “Well, as a young parishioner I once met a lovely woman who was much taken with me.  One thing led to another and, well, I wound up having sex with her. But that’s the only time it ever happened.”

A few moments pass and the rabbi leans over to the priest and says, “A lot better than pork, isn’t it?”

*****

I’ll be here all week, folks—and don’t forget to tip the waitress!

Note: if you have humorous “Jewish jokes” that aren’t anti-Semitic (e.g., those that make fun of Jews’ supposed tight-fistedness), feel free to post them below. I reserve the right to censor comments! And I recommend Joseph Telushkin’s book: Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes say about the Jews.

Biblical morality part 2: Killing non-virgin brides and rebellious kids

June 26, 2012 • 4:35 am

Ye have heard of the LORD’s immorality from Christopher, son of Eric, and from Clinton Richard, son of Clinton John, but I give His commands here so ye shall see them with thine own eyes. For lo, if your son is obstinate and wayward, the Lord not only giveth you permission to kill him, but decrees that you kill him, and in a painful manner.  From Deuteronomy, chapter 18:

18If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

19Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

20And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

The same fate befalleth those women taken unto marriage and whose husbands, who do not like them, discover that they have lost their maidenheads (Deuteronomy, chapter 22):

13If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her,

14And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid:

15Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate. . .

20But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel:

21 Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.

The stoning-to-death decree also holds for virgins who are betrothred, but “lie with” another man. In that case they both get stoned to death. If you know about stoning, at least as it’s practiced in modern-day Islamic countries, it is an excruciatingly prolonged and horrible way to die.

Now you’ve surely heard of this kind of God-derived “morality,” but what perplexes me is that these decrees are uniformly rejected by apparently sane Jews (and Christians), yet those very same Jews scrupulously obey God’s other dictates in Deuteronomy. Because of what God said, many Jews don’t eat pork or shellfish, use different pots for cooking meat and dairy products, do no work on the Sabbath. (Some Orthodox Jews won’t even flip light switches or tear toilet paper: that’s done in advance. Alternatively, you can cheat and employ a shabbos goy to do the work for you). You can find the 39 kinds of work prohibited on the Sabbath on this list (toilet paper falls under #10)*.

By God’s decree Jews also eat unleavened bread (matzo) on Passover. And the good scholars of Judaism have decreed that to prevent wild yeast from working, those matzo must be baked within 18 minutes of the moment when the flour gets wet (don’t ask me how they arrived at this figure).  They circumcise their sons, and don’t cut their beards or forelocks.

Now what makes one decree of Yahweh acceptable, and the other not? If you subscribe to a divine command theory, whereby all morality comes from God’s will, then you simply must stone your son unto death if he’s bad.  The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God’s or Jesus’s commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources.

What are those sources?  Because some moral instincts seem universal, I suspect that their precursors were installed in our brains by natural selection. But certainly much morality is learned—either from observing your culture, via direct inculcation by parents and peers, or by simple introspection about how to behave in a just manner (Peter Singer’s book The Expanding Circle gives an appealing explanation of the latter).  So with the exception of loons like William Lane Craig, Euthyphro was right: morality cannot come from God.

________________

*I should have known that Jewish ingenuity has found a way to avoid the pre-Sabbath chore of tearing toilet paper. As the Jewish Times reports, an outfit called Kosher Innovations has produced tear-free, single sheet toilet paper:

The Kosher Innovations Shabbos Bathroom Tissue replaces the regular roll of toilet paper and hangs within easy reach. Removing the roll prevents accidental tearing on Shabbos.

On Shabbos and Yom Tov, there’s no issue with their tissue, you might say . . .

The most important and often overlooked part of bathroom preparations is making sure that you don’t mistakenly tear any paper on Shabbos. This relates to the prohibited melacha of mechatech. Some people pre-tear their toilet paper and fill a basket with it. This is fine if you want to spend the time and effort, but it often ends up with scraps of paper underfoot and wasted toilet paper. It’s also very hard to keep the pile of toilet paper looking neat and staying in the basket.

Some people use facial tissue. Many brands of facial tissue have sheets of paper that are attached by tiny perforations. This means that when you pull out a tissue, you are actually tearing the two sheets apart. [JAC: Oh noes! You can’t do that!] There are a few brands of facial tissue that do not have perforations but they are often very expensive and the large size of the tissue sheets are often wasteful.

The Shabbos Bathroom Tissue from Kosher Innovations avoids the prohibited melacha of mechatech on Shabbos. It does not tear, because each sheet is individually pre-cut and folded. And since each sheet is the size of two toilet paper squares, you only take what you need, reducing wasted paper and saving you money. Most importantly, when you replace the regular toilet paper roll with Kosher Innovations Shabbos Bathroom Tissue, you are preventing other people from accidentally tearing on Shabbos. This is true especially for children and any guests you may have who are unaware of the prohibition.

I am not making this up.

Kitteh contest: Lucrezia and Luigi

June 26, 2012 • 3:52 am

Reader Huw Jones found two cats on an Italian holiday, and sent us their pictures.  Although this is no longer a real “contest,” I invite readers to send snaps and a bit of information on their cats. (Click photos to enlarge, though you may find Luigui a bit daunting!)

I thought you might like or want to use few photos of two cats (brother and sister) which we got to know when on holiday in a friend’s villa in Liguria – they’re Lucrezia and Luigi.
Luigi looks a bit of a bruiser (and he probably was with other cats) but he absolutely adored being petted, and had a fabulous face. Although you can’t see it on the stills, he also had a rather curious way of walking – stiff-legged – which was both characteristic, amusing and endearing. The other shot is of him sleeping on a warm and comfortable woodpile.

Lucrezia also enjoyed attention, and she found my photo-rucksack extremely comfortable, as one of the shots shows. I literally had to drag her off the bag before I could use it.

How not to do science journalism: the Guardian screws up the group-selection debate

June 25, 2012 • 8:39 am

I’m particularly peeved about the Guardian‘s latest report on the group-selection debate, one fueled by a Nature paper by Nowak, Tarnita, and (E. O.) Wilson, and by Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, that was very critically reviewed by Richard Dawkins in Prospect.  If you’re a regular here, you’ll know that the debate centers on Wilson’s claims that kin selection (inclusive fitness theory) is a largely useless way of studying evolution, and that the idea of group selection is more productive.

As I noted yesterday, the scientific debate is technical, arcane, and often mathematical.  It’s hard to convey to the public, but it can be done. But the Guardian has screwed it all up in its new piece, “Richard Dawkins in furious row with E. O. Wilson over theory of evolution” (subtitle: “Book review sparks war of words between grand old man of biology and Oxford’s most high-profile Darwinist”). It was written by Vanessa Thorpe.

They screw up in two main ways:

1.  They don’t understand the science behind the debate about whether group selection is plausible and kin selection wrong, so they just characterize the debate as a “squabble” between eggheads (the title and subtitle above says it all). That means, of course, that they don’t even attempt to discuss the scientific issues at stake.

2. They drag in a single expert who doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about.

It’s a short article, but there are so many fails:

  • Failure to engage the arguments.  The Guardian characterizes the argument about the number of people on each side of the debate: Wilson, Tarnita, Nowak, and perhaps D. S. Wilson on one hand, and everyone else on the other (about 135 scientists signed critical letters about the Wilson et al. paper).  From the Guardian piece:

The Oxford evolutionary biologist, 71, [Dawkins] has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve. Wilson, in a short piece penned promptly in response to Dawkins’s negative review, was also clearly annoyed by this attempt to outflank him.

“In any case,” Wilson writes, “making such lists is futile. If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston [a mythical fire-like element] and navigating with geocentric maps.”

But it’s not just about numbers.  Each of the several critiques of Wilson et al.’s attack on kin selection dealt with science.  Is kin selection different from “regular” natural selection? Do Nowak et al. really have a new theory for the origin of eusocial behavior in insects? Has kin selection failed to tell us anything interesting about nature?

And there have been several published papers in the last year that criticized Wilson’s views.  None of the scientific arguments are even mentioned in the Guardian piece.  And of course a scientific consensus on this, and on other topics, is not completely meaningless. As someone pointed out either here or somewhere else (I forget), at any given time, for every lone voice in science who stands against the consensus and turns out to be right, there are dozens who stand against the consensus and turn out to be wrong.  Cold fusion, homeopathy, anti-vaxers, HIV denialists, anti-global-warming-ites. . . the list goes on. In this case, I’m pretty damn sure that there is no merit to E. O. Wilson’s claims and that the consensus is correct.

  • Failure to properly describe the science.  The Guardian notes:

Wilson is an advocate of “multi-level selection theory”, a development of the idea of “kin selection”, which holds that other biological, social and even environmental priorities may be behind the process.

Multi-level selection theory is not a development of the idea of “kin selection,” at least in Wilson’s mind. It is something completely different and not related to kin selection.  Nor do either kin selection nor multilevel selection hold that the environment is irrelevant to the operation of natural selection.  I’m not sure what the Guardian means by “other biological or social priorities,” but if these are factors impinging on natural selection, they’d hold for both theories.

  • Failure to ask the proper experts.  There are several people the Guardian could have consulted, on both sides, to enlighten its readers.  D. S. Wilson or Martin Nowak on Wilson’s side, for instance, or nearly every other expert on the evolution of social behavior on the other side.  But who do they ask to adjudicate the debate? Professor Georgy Koentges of Warwick University, a genomic biologist who, while appearing well qualified in his area, seems to have no expertise or publications on the evolution of social behavior.  And it shows.

For example:

According to one expert in evolution and development, Professor Georgy Koentges of Warwick University, the central problem is the impossibility of defining “fitness”, whether in organisms, organs, cells, genes or even gene regulatory DNA regions. As a result, he sees both Dawkins and Wilson as “straw men” in this debate.

That’s complete hogwash.  Fitness can be perfectly well defined for a gene as the average number of copies it leaves after a generation relative to other forms of that gene.  It can be defined for genotypes (the genetic constitution of individual organisms) in a similar way.  And used in that way it has proved enormously productive in understanding genetic evolution, whether it be the change in frequency of black versus white moths in polluted areas, or the number of males versus females produced by wasps that parasitize fly pupae. If fitness were impossible to define with reasonable accuracy, the whole area of population genetics would be useless and unproductive. It isn’t.

Koentges then goes off into an irrelevant tirade, making statements that are not only dubious, but completely beside the point when considering the group-selection argument. Here’s a dubious one:

“This is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a good or bad gene. It doesn’t work that simply. Genes are used and re-used in different contexts, each of which might have a different overall fitness value for a given organism or a group.”

Well, yes, but this is irrelevant to the argument, which is about what conditions are required for a gene conferring eusocial behaviors (sterility and caste formation) to be good. And though a gene’s ability to replicate does indeed depend on its environment, there are some decent examples of genes that are unconditionally bad.  A dominant gene that kills a fruit fly in the embryo stage, for example, is just plain bad, and nothing is going to make it good.  The dominant gene for retinoblastoma (eye cancer) seems pretty unconditionally bad.  Lots of mutations that simply inactivate essential genes are unlikely to be good under most circumstance—although some can be.  But again, this statement of Koentges says nothing about the debate.

The Guardian goes on:

In later life Darwin said he wished he had called his theory natural preservation, rather than selection, but even the preservation of certain genes down the ages is no proof that they are good.

“To use a simple human example, someone with the perfect set of genes for walking with two legs might die early because they jump off a cliff,” said Koentges.

Yeah, so what? That’s an unfortunate environmental effect that has nothing to do with leg genes. It may select against behaviors for walking on cliffs, but it won’t select for having only one leg! There are all kinds of environmental accidents that are irrelevant to selection on certain genes.  A tiny mutant krill with a slightly different color won’t reap or suffer the benefit of selection if it’s one of a gazillion of its fellows engulfed in the mouth of a baleen whale.  Again, Koentges’s argument is completely beside the point.

And he makes a final, sweeping, and equally irrelevant statement:

Like other scientists commenting on this “tit-for-tat” dispute between Wilson and Dawkins, Koentges also detects the old struggle between those who focus purely on the gene and those who see it as “an anthropological insult to our own feeling of self-belief”.

“The field has moved on, and so should we all,” says Koentges.

Sorry, Dr. Koentges, but both sides in this dispute are arguing about what happens to genes involved in producing certain behaviors.  The mooshy idea of “self-belief”, whatever that is, has nothing to do with this struggle.  And no, the field hasn’t “moved on.”  We are in the midst of a scientific dispute (one pretty well resolved on the side of kin selection, in my opinion), and we won’t move on until everyone takes the real issues on board.

But Koentges should move on: back to his genomics lab.

Shame on the Guardian for publishing this kind of trashy science journalism.

The Bible a source of morality? You’re kidding!

June 25, 2012 • 5:03 am

People like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have long emphasized the genocide, the brutality, the bloodshed, and the sheer immorality of much of the Bible. I encountered some of that myself this weekend, and thought I’d present it in black and white.

Two passages from the Old Testament struck me. In Chapter 31 of Numbers, God tells the Israelites to go after the Midianites, presumably because they’re worshiping Teh Rong God (Yahweh is a jealous old coot). On God’s orders, this is what the children of Israel do:

7And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded Moses; and they slew all the males. . .

15And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?

16Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD.

17Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

The boys and men get slaughtered, as well as nonvirgin women, but the virgins are saved—”for yourselves.”

Worse happens to the people of Heshbon.  The Israelites merely wanted to pass through their land, but God intervened, hardening the spirit of King Sihon and making his spirit “obstinate.” That allowed God to order the destruction of Sihon and all of his people (why on earth didn’t God just soften the king’s heart?).  So we find, in Deuteronomy, Chapter 2:

31And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have begun to give Sihon and his land before thee: begin to possess, that thou mayest inherit his land.

32Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight at Jahaz.

33And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people.

34 And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain:

This time nobody survived, though the Israelites did leave the cattle for themselves.  Now people like William Lane Craig and other Sophisticated Theologians™ have tried to rationalize the mass slaughter of children and noncombatants using the “Divine Command theory” (i.e., God said it, so it’s good), but modern morality recoils from such behavior.  How do evangelical Christians who are less demented than Craig rationalize this type of God-sanctioned behavior?

Tomorrow: dietary prescriptions and the stoning of harlots.

*****

Coincidentally, on EvolutionBlog Jason Rosenhouse posted his own experience with tackling scripture, “On reading the Bible“, just the day before I wrote about the same thing.  Thinking he might be missing something that his religious friends had, Jason actually prayed and read the Bible straight though while in graduate school. The praying didn’t help him, and he found the Bible, well . . .

The Bible, on the other hand, had a big effect on me. I quickly came to loathe it. When it wasn’t flat-out horrifying it was so unbearably boring that many nights I could only manage to get through one chapter. There are a few good nuggets, but you have to wade through a lot of dross to find them. Page after page just screamed out to me that this was written entirely by human beings, with no guidance at all from a just and loving God. Just to pick one example, how can anyone read Leviticus, with its endless internecine rules for designing the priestly garments and constructing altars, and think these are the sorts of things the God of all creation would care about?

He singled out the same dull passages that I did. I swear that I didn’t read his post before I wrote mine!  He adds:

I spend a lot of time at this blog talking about the problem of evil. But there is another famous argument for atheism called the argument from divine hiddenness. Put in crude terms, it asks why, if there really is a loving God who seeks communion with his creatures, do so many sincere seekers never find any trace of Him? There are many Kanalley’s out there, but there are also many people just like me. Why would God speak so clearly to him but not to me?

Well, of course Sophisticated Theologians™ have many answers to the vexing question of Why God is Hidden.  John Haught’s hilarious answer is this: “It is essential to religious experience, after all, that ultimate reality be beyond our grasp. If we could grasp it, it would not be ultimate.”  How many errors can you find in that logic?

But in your case, Jason, it’s simple:  you’re Jewish! Why would God speak to anyone who didn’t even recognize His son?

Teenage ducklings

June 25, 2012 • 4:20 am

Is there a word for ducklings when they’re no longer small, but not yet fledged? Anyway, all seven of the ducklings in our pond have survived the rigors of predation and disease, and are beginning to get the characteristic blue feathers of mallards.

Here’s a movie I took of them this morning; perhaps some alert reader can tell me, from the state of their feathers, how close they are to flying.  As always, an alert and protective mom is standing by, her behavior a product of kin selection.