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.
Finally, after years of agonizing, I’ve found at least one reader in Greenland. There were eight views from Ultima Thule this week, but it’s too much to hope that they came from more than one reader.
Sadly, now China and much of West Africa has gone missing. The next goal is Iran, but perhaps we’re blocked there.
I was brought up on edgy kids’ shows like Soupy Sales, so the warm and fuzzy children’s television of a later generation, like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, or Barney and Friends, creeps me out a bit (I still want to put my fist through the television screen whenever I see that unctuous purple dinosaur). I’m always surprised to find some younger adults who absolutely loved not only Mr. Rogers, but Barney.
Nevertheless, Fred Rogers (an ordained Presbyterian minister) was a friend of my uncle (a Pittsburgh Jew), and so I feel a wee bit of fealty to the show. I like to think that this remixed video conveys a Feynman-esque message of curiosity and rationality. But maybe it’s just weird.
His phenotype reminds me a bit of E. O. Wilson.
From the YouTube notes:
Mister Rogers remixed by Symphony of Science’s John Boswell for PBS Digital Studios.
(Headphones highly recommended!)
When we discovered video mash-up artist John D. Boswell, aka melodysheep, on YouTube, we immediately wanted to work together. Turns out that he is a huge Mister Rogers Neighborhood fan, and was thrilled at the chance to pay tribute to one of our heroes. Both PBS and the Fred Rogers Company hope you like John’s celebration of Fred Rogers’ message.
UPDATE: Beale has kindly graced us with his presence (and a snarky remark) at comment #21. Feel free to respond. There will be more quotes from him and Polkinghorne in the next few days.
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I think we’re going to have Polkinghorne Week, with a quote a day from one of the world’s most Sophisticated Theologians®. This enables me to convert my own frustration and rage at having to read him (and coauthor Nicholas Beale) into useful website posts. The following quote is an unintentionally amusing gloss on the Trinity, and how it came to be accepted as a “correct” model of reality. It’s from Polkinghorne and Beale, Questions of Truth, pp. 36-37:
Any deep understanding of the fundamental nature of reality is bound to be something of a mystery. Theologians arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity after long and careful reflection on the facts that they observed, in a rather similar way to how physicists arrived at the Standard Model after sixty years of reflection on a whole series of remarkable discoveries and theoretical insights and a great many blind alleys. . . This is not the place to discuss in detail either the reasons behind the doctrine of the Trinity (John’s Science and the Trinity would be a good place to start) or the parallels explored in John’s Quantum Physics and Theology. In the end, in formulating the doctrine of the Trinity, pretty well the simplest and most symmetrical model that fits the observations turns out to be the correct one—as far as the official theology of at least 90 percent of Christians is concerned: that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all God but in such perfect loving unity that there are not three Gods but one God.
My friend Steve sent me a list of the most popular stories in Wednesday’s New York Daily News, highlighting Orville, the dead helicopter-cat that I refuse to discuss (I have eliminated the link below). His comment:
Note that half of these are about zombies and/or cannibalism. (Well, one of them is borderline L “‘Vampire’ Skeletons found in Bulgaria.”) Note that number 8 is going mainstream. WEIRD!
Here they are. I weep for my country:
While we’re always pointing out the insanity of Western religion, let us not forget Islam. This video is the Islamic equivalent of snake-handling: though it doesn’t endanger the speaker, it endangers other Muslims. Yasser Al-Habib is a Shi’ite Muslim cleric living in London; he has a checkered history and fled Kuwait to avoid imprisonment. He now spouts his vicious nonsense on British television. Please take five minutes to watch this and remind yourself of the poison of religion.
You might think this is funny, and the biology is completely insane (about two minutes in he implicates an “anal disease” that produces a sense of unease calmed only by semen); but remember that, as Wikipedia notes, “acccording to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) seven [majority-Muslim] countries still retain capital punishment for homosexual behavior: Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen.” In other Muslim countries it’s illegal and punishable by up to life in prison. (I have some doubts about the punishment in Pakistan). Now homosexuality is illegal as well in some non-Muslim countries (e.g., Belize, Trinidad and Tobago), and I doubt that government executions for homosexuality are common anywhere, but there’s little doubt that religiously based bigotry, as spouted by this cleric, inflames the severe anti-gay bias of many Muslims.
It also behooves us to remember the internecine hatreds within Islam. Here Al-Habib claims that the Shi’ites are protected by Allah from passive homosexuality, but Sunni Muslims can be turned into homosexuals or (if female) “whores” when an infant is penetrated by the finger of the Devil.
Remember that this was broadcast by a cleric living in the UK on a UK television station (Fadak TV., headquartered in London) a bit over two weeks ago.
h/t: Malgorzata
UPDATE: Don’t miss the exchange of letters (published at New Humanist) between co-author Nicholas Beale and Anthony Grayling. Beale invited Grayling to yet another launch of their accommodationist book, but Grayling replied icily, including this paragraph about the “scandal” of launching Polkinghorne and Beale’s execrable religious book at the Royal Society.
The scandal resides in the fact that this was comparable to the premises of the Royal Society being used to promote astrology, healing with crystals, or worship of the Norse gods. For as your pamphlet yet again shows – it being familiar stuff, save for your novel but bizarre attribution of free will to nature as an “explanation” of natural evil – religious apologists are not in the same business as scientists, but wholly in the business of metaphysical casuistry: twisting, interpreting, rationalising, cherry-picking, appealing to ignorance and special pleading. It is very sad stuff you drag into the light again; if it did not rest on a continuum whose nether end lies in murder – heretics at the stake, fundamentalists wearing suicide bomb vests – it would be comic.
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I’ll deserve many encomiums if I make it through the latest theology book I’m reading (John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale. 2009. Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief), but it does contain lots of good stupid bits of theology. Here’s one I found within the first three pages. Of all the science-friendly theologians around, Polkie is the most odious in claiming that theology and science operate in similar ways.
It is easy to ‘prove’ that nothing can be both a wave and a particle, or that Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead. Yet deep reflection on physics shows that all sufficiently small objects can manifest both wave and particle properties, and even superficial reflection shows that if Jesus is the Son of God in anything like the sense that Christians claim, then the resurrection is not only possible but in a certain sense necessary.
How many things can you find wrong with that quote?
Oh, and for a masterpiece of special pleading, there’s little to match Polkie and Beale’s explanation about why we can’t see obvious evidence for God in the world:
The Creator has not filled creation with items stamped “made by God.” [JAC: They thought he did before 1859.] God’s existence is not self-evident in some totally unambiguous and undeniable way. The presence of God is veiled because, when you think about it, the naked presence of divinity would overwhelm finite creatures, depriving them of truly being themselves and freely accepting God.
What is this—some kind of divine game?: “You can’t accept me freely unless you’ve done so without evidence.” And what about those finite Apostles? Were they overwhelmed and prevented from accepting God?
Polkinghorne, of course, was a theoretical physicist at Cambridge who left the university to become an Anglican priest. He is an official Sophisticated Theologian®. And he won the one-million-pound Templeton Prize in 2002.
Anthony Grayling wrote a scathing review of this book (whose publication was launched at London’s Royal Society) for The New Humanist. It’s vintage strident Grayling, and I can’t resist including the last bit:
What is not complicated, though, is the scandal that the Royal Society is allowing its premises to be used for the launch of this book. The accompanying publicity material has in the small print the statement, “This book is being launched at (not by) the Royal Society…” Indeed again. No doubt the Royal Society required this disclaimer to be entered somewhere, having reluctantly and uncomfortably felt that it had to give one of its Fellows (Polkinghorne was made one before becoming a vicar) use of its facilities because he asked. Of course the point is that Beale-Polkinghorne and their tuppence-halfpenny religious publishers wish to get as much of the respectability of the Royal Society rubbed off on them as they can. This is the strategy adopted by the Templeton Foundation too, of sidling up to proper scientists and scientific establishments and getting their sticky religious fingers on to respectable coat-sleeves in the hope of furthering their agenda – which, to repeat what must endlessly be repeated in these circumstances, is to have the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research. Polkinghorne dishonours the Royal Society by exploiting his Fellowship to publicise this weak, casuistical and tendentious pamphlet on its precincts, and the Royal Society does itself no favours by allowing Polkinghorne to do it.
The good news for me is that the book is short. I know many of you think I’m wasting my time reading stuff like this, but I like to think I’m doing a service by repeatedly showing that Sophisticated Theology—of the brand touted by Terry Eagleton and supposedly ignored by Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists—is just empty and wishful thinking encased in a bunch of fancy words.
This is the first time I’ve heard of this behavior, but maybe some birders among you have seen similar incidents.
The photo below comes from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Facebook page, which is public. The original post was in Spanish, but reader Andy ran it through Google translate and came up with this translation:
Alvaro Gonzalez, naturalist guide in Punta Culebra Nature center had the opportunity to observe a rare event with a mantis and a hummingbird. Here is his story:
I was in the area of contact, when I saw the gardener emerald hummingbird taking nectar from the golden trumpets (Tecoma stans (L.) Juss. Ex Kunth), near the Hummingbird, was two birdwatchers trying to identify it. I said the species and then see how the mantis caught a hummingbird at first thought he had tangled with the same plant. I looked for a ladder, because the height was 3 meters (approximately) when subject to the hummingbird, I feel something I press the index finger, I thought it was a snake, but in looking good, I saw the mantis as holding the hummingbird’s neck I tore through his chest. I proceeded to search the camera and take some pictures. Neither visitors nor I believed what we were seeing. The mantis will eat only certain organs and released it.
Many people have contacted me and I said what I saw, I wonder if this had been before or is the first time that this phenomenon occurs?
Andy is skeptical, but the photo looks real for sure. The video below confirms that it can happen, and a similar video shows an unsuccessful attack.
My two questions are these: how does the mantis kill the hummingbird? And how on earth does it eat it?
I won’t post these amazing pictures here as I haven’t requested permission to use them, but Phil Plait has, and you can see them over at Bad Astronomy. There are two pictures, actually, and here’s Phil’s description. Go have a look!
I figured I was done posting Venus Transit pictures, but I should’ve realized I hadn’t heard from Thierry Legault yet. And as soon as I saw his name in my email Inbox this morning, and before I even opened it, I knew I’d have at least one more picture to show you.
And I was right. Thierry is a master astrophotographer, and he’s not one to just let an astronomical event go by without figuring out some way to make it even cooler. He traveled to northeast Australia to view the Venus transit… not just because it had a good view, but also because from there, he could see the Hubble Space Telescope transiting the Sun at the same time! On June 6th, at 01:42:25 UTC, he got [an] amazing shot:
You can see Venus as the big black circle, as well as dozens of sunspots. But you can also see multiple images of Hubble as it zipped across the Sun, circled in the image above. Orbiting the Earth, Hubble moves across the sky so quickly that it crossed the Sun in just under a second. Blasting his DSLR away at ten frames per second (and with an exposure time of only 1/8000th of a second per frame) Thierry managed to get 8 shots of Hubble silhouetted against the Sun.
I previously posted another stunning picture by Thierry, this one showing the International Space Station transiting the Sun during a solar eclipse. He went to Oman to take that one, and (as with the Hubble picture) had exactly one second to get the shot before the ISS sailed out of view.