Al Sharpton reviews a book about James Brown

June 3, 2012 • 3:12 am

In today’s New York Times, the opportunistic Reverend Al Sharpton reviews The One, a new book on James Brown by R. J. Smith. And of course he begins with an homage to—Sharpton:

When James Brown’s children and I brought his body back to Harlem from Georgia after his untimely death in 2006, tens of thousands greeted us in the streets upon our arrival.

Greeted us!

Predictable. What distinguishes this review is its unrelenting tedium, its attempt to draw huge lessons about Brown and the black experience. The writing is leaden:

For years, writers have attempted to tell James’s story and to dissect his complex and multilayered life. Either too naïve or just unaware of the nuances of societal challenges and cultural norms alike, they failed to fully grasp the depth of value that James and his music played in transforming American life as a whole. Going to great lengths researching and interviewing those closest to the music icon (myself included), Smith not only effortlessly highlights James’s unmatched musical career, but also provides a well-studied historical context for the basis of his artistic expression.

Myself included!

Sharpton makes James Brown something that he never was in real life—boring. He was The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, and mesmerizing to watch. It’s a sign of Sharpton’s ham-handedness that he doesn’t mention even one song by The King of Funk.  Where is “I Feel Good”? “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”? And my favorite, despite its political incorrectness, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World“?

In its desire to get books appraised by celebrities rather than qualified reviewers, the Times screwed up here.

If you ever saw James Brown, you remember the cape routine. (If you didn’t, it’s too long to describe.) I always wanted to give a science talk like that, walking offstage with a minion draping me with a cape, and then throwing off the garment to return to the podium. Oh well . . .

At any rate, the dullness of Sharpton’s prose made me look on YouTube for some James Brown, and there’s a lot. Here’s an unknown gem: Brown doing a duet of “Man’s World” with, of all people, Luciano Pavarotti!

And perhaps Brown’s greatest recorded performance ever: the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, which included stars as diverse as Leslie Gore, Brown, the Beach Boys, the Supremes, Chuck Berry, and the Rolling Stones. (If you can get a CD of this concert, by all means do.) His rendition of “Night Train” may be the most energetic bit of soul music ever filmed. Here’s part of it (the cape routine begins at 5:30).

You either love James Brown or you hate him. I’m in the first group.

God has sent me a toy

June 2, 2012 • 11:10 am

Here’s a post from an oxymoronic new website, “Intelligent Reasoning.”  Naturally, the author—one “Joe G.”—doesn’t have the courage to post under his name.

Now what would a loon who would write something like that look like?  Like this (the guy, as noted by a reader in the comments below) has been identified repeatedly; this is from “The IDiots of Intelligent Design” and the “coward” caption is theirs):

Meet Joe G.

I love the smell of lunacy in the morning.  And in return for this fun, I have just given Joe the only traffic he’ll ever get—one link.

But what’s with the voles?

Uncle Karl disses evolution for no good reason

June 2, 2012 • 8:29 am

UPDATE: Karl has asked that I make this correction:

Several people have noted that I quoted Richard Dawkins as describing anti-evolutionists as  “stupid, wicked, or insane.”  The Dawkins quote should have been “ignorant, stupid or insane.”  Richard gets enough flak from Christians without me adding fuel to that fire

____________________

As you know, I am fond of Karl Giberson although he’s an evangelical Christian and an accommodationist who once worked for BioLogos (they’ve since parted ways). But from time to time he does things that I find very odd, and erode my affection. One of them is his column “Mythologizing evolution” that came out two days ago at HuffPo.  It’s so scattered and unfocused that I can’t be sure what Giberson is trying to say.  But the impression that the column leaves is that there’s something deeply wrong with evolution.  That itself is odd, because I know Karl accepts evolution, at least in its theistic flavor.

What got Karl’s ire up was my recent series on “Mencken week” at this site; Giberson links to it but can’t quite bear to mention my name (go ahead, Karl—I’m not ashamed!).  As far as I can discern, these are Karl’s points:

  • Evolution is a myth.  As he says about my Mencken story (note also his title):

“The series represents ongoing efforts to enhance the mythology of evolution, efforts that have been particularly successful when it comes to the Scopes Trial.”

He uses the word “myth” and “mythology” twice more in his piece. Well, how many Americans are going to read “myth” in its meaning as “a story—even a true one”?  Most of them will read it in its more common meaning: “a false or concocted story.” Karl is too smart not to know that. Either that, or he’s clueless. You don’t call evolution a “myth” these days unless you want to pander to creationists.  If you must characterize it, call it a “true story”.

  • Mencken unfairly tarred William Jennings Bryan. I agree to some extent: Bryan was a serviceable statesman for a long time, and had some decent political views. As I said when I posted Mencken’s obituary of Bryan, I found it a bit over the top.  But remember that Mencken’s reportage on Bryan was from the Scopes trial, and there Bryan was indeed a doddering old fool. Just read some of his testimony from that trial.  This is from Bryan’s classic cross-examination by Darrow. (Yes, a defense lawyer cross-examined a prosecutor, for Bryan considered himself an expert on the Bible, and actually wanted to be cross-examined. That was one of the biggest mistakes he ever made.)

DARROW: And you believe that is the reason that God made the serpent to go on his belly after he tempted Eve?

BRYAN: I believe the Bible as it is. And I do not permit you to put your language in the place of the language of the Almighty. You read that Bible and ask me questions and I will answer them. I will not answer your questions in your language.

DARROW: I will read it to you from the Bible: “And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?

BRYAN: I believe that.

DARROW: Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?

BRYAN: No, sir.

DARROW: Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?

BRYAN: No sir, I have no way to know. [Laughter.]

  • Some evolutionists were racists and eugenicists. Yep, Giberson raises this old trope again: I swear, he’s starting to use the tricks of undiluted creationism, which he claims to deplore. He says:

The concerns about evolution that Bryan expressed — perhaps inarticulately — represent a dark chapter in the history of Darwin’s theory that many of its champions today would like to suppress as they mythologize the story of evolution. In Bryan’s day evolution was almost universally believed to sanction draconian measures to improve our species by eliminating the less fit. The textbook from which John Scopes supposedly taught evolution — George Hunter’s “A Civic Biology” — spoke in chilling language of “parasitic” families that do harm by “corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease.” The students were warned of the importance of preventing the propagation of such a “low and degenerate race.”

Not for a minute do I, or many other evolutionists, want to suppress this dark chapter in the history of genetics (by the way, more geneticists espoused this stuff than evolutionists, and no, Hitler didn’t rely on Darwinism to kill the Jews).  Steve Gould wrote an entire book on this gloomy chapter in our history, for crying out loud: The Mismeasure of Man.  Yes, it was a sad instance of science being misused to further extra-scientific aims. There will always be people willing to misrepresent and misuse science—sometimes even the scientists themselves. But does this cast any doubt on the truth of evolution? No! Jesus, Karl, think of how your own Christianity has been far more severely misused  (if one considers that “misuse”) to persecute other people.  If we’re the goose, you’re a far bigger gander!

  • Not all creationists are buffoons and morons.  This seems to be Giberson’s biggest beef:

Such images [Mencken’s portrayal of Bryan as a rustic] serve the purposes of those that want evolution to be our creation myth. Anyone who rejects evolution must be, according to Mencken, an ignorant mangy buffoon. Or, as Richard Dawkins has stated, in language only slight more temperate, “stupid, wicked, or insane.”

Such uncharitable caricatures of the critics of evolution make it easy to dismiss their concerns. If our critics are buffoons, we can ignore them.

. . . [Giberson’s last sentence] In the same way, we should listen more carefully to the critics of evolution today. Not all of them are stupid, wicked or insane.

Now tell me if those last two sentences aren’t ambiguous, implying that perhaps, those critics of evolution have something meaningful to say.  That is, maybe there are problems with evolution.  That’s easy to read, especially if, like most readers of PuffHo, you don’t know Karl’s beliefs or history.  But perhaps what he means is simply that we should listen to the critics of evolution simply to understand their mindset.  I’m fine with that; in fact, that’s what Jason Rosenhouse did in his fine new book Among the Creationists.  It always helps to fight a battle if you understand the enemy.

And no, not all critics of evolution are stupid, wicked, or insane. Some of them are simply ignorant, either willfully or otherwise. See Jason’s book for a close-up look at the enemy.  But all of them are deluded by faith.

It would have been nice, given the pervasive opposition to evolution in the U.S., if Karl had said something about his own acceptance of evolution. But the rest was silence.

Oh Karl, my friend, you’ve lost your “Uncle” moniker again!

Evolution acceptance still flatlined in America

June 2, 2012 • 4:56 am

A new Gallup poll shows that, as in the past thirty years, acceptance of evolution in the U.S. has remained static. In fact, the latest statistics (light green line in figure below), show that 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists, 32% adhere to some form of god-guided or theistic evolution (dark green line), and only 15% adhere to evolution as we scientists know it (“human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process”).  Young-earth creationism rose 6% since the last survey, which may not be a statistically significant change.

These data of course show several things:

  1. My book didn’t convert huge numbers of Americans to evolution (duh!)
  2. The ongoing strategy of accommodationism by scientific organizations, the NCSE, the Clergy Letter Project, and others who assert a harmony between religion and science didn’t work, either
  3. The books and writings of the New Atheists didn’t work, although they’ve had far less time to operate than accommodationism

That is, nothing much works. Although there are of course converts to evolution produced by atheist writings (I got an email from one yesterday), they are way too few to be reflected in the statistics, and may well be counteracted by the conversion or incursion of people who don’t accept evolution (Hispanic immigrants?).  I’d bet ten to one, though, that somebody claims that the gains of accommodationism are counterbalanced by the effect of atheists on turning people away from evolution! I would dispute that given the constant presence of accommodationism over several decades and the relatively recent rise of New Atheism.

As you know, I think this stasis is due almost entirely to the extreme religiosity of the United States. I claim that acceptance of evolution won’t increase until the grasp of religion on America weakens. We can win court cases all we want (thank you, NCSE!), but America remains obdurately resistant to Darwin.  And those court cases, and creationism in increasingly cryptic guises, will continue.  I am confident that America is becoming more and more secular (after all, acceptance of naturalistic evolution has risen from 9% to 15% (see update below), but it’s going to take a long time before most Americans accept evolution the way scientists do.  In other words, not in our lifetime.

In a recent paper in Evolution (free download), I documented the evidence that evolution-denial is largely caused by religion. Here are some more stats from that poll supporting my claim; they show the expected correlation between acceptance of evolution and attendance at church:

Who are the biggest evolution-deniers besides the faithful? Republicans, of course.  Here are the data divided up by political affiliation. Note that Democrats and Independents share similar views:

Finally, education plays a role, as it always has.  Acceptance of both theistic and naturalistic evolution increase with education, and young-earth creationism, as ever, is most prevalent among the undereducated.  Note, however, that 25% of American with some postgraduate (i.e., after college) education are still young-earth creationists, and remember that these factors are cross-correlated: I suspect that religiosity, for example, is higher among the less educated.  Earlier work has shown that when you partition out these factors independently, religion and education have similar effects on science literacy (that work deliberately didn’t assay acceptance of evolution, though).

Gallup concludes the statements in bold are either my emphasis or my interpolation:

Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans’ views of the origin of the human species since 1982. The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.

More broadly, some 78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, just slightly less than the percentage who felt this way 30 years ago.

All in all, there is no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins.

Most Americans are not scientists, of course, and cannot be expected to understand all of the latest evidence and competing viewpoints on the development of the human species. Still, it would be hard to dispute  that  that most scientists who study humans agree that the species evolved over millions of years, and that relatively few scientists believe that humans began in their current form only 10,000 years ago without the benefit of evolution. [JAC: what a lame-o statement! “Hard to dispute”? Really? Would Gallup say that it “would be hard to dispute that the earth rotates on its axis?” This sounds like a sop to creationists.]  Thus, almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.

No, it’s not half of Americans who hold an anti-scientific belief about evolution.  It’s more than 3 out of 4—78%, to be exact.  God-guided evolution is just as antiscientific as the idea that God guides photons and electrons—or chemical reactions.  It’s time to stop saying that the beliefs of theistic evolutionists are in harmony with science.


Caturday felid: kitten survives four days in car’s exhaust pipe

June 2, 2012 • 4:13 am

From Metro, an amazing story of felid survival in Brazil. The poor thing was wedged in an exhaust pipe—while the car was being used.  I’d adopt it if I were in Brazil.

The motorist found the two-month-old creature wedged inside the exhaust system, with just its head and a paw sticking out. It was only when he took the vehicle to a garage to have the animal removed that mechanics noticed it was still alive. The part was taken out and rushed to a fire station where a crew cut the feline free. The kitten had intestinal surgery and is now recovering at a sanctuary in Rio Verde, western Brazil. Fire commander Coronel Candido Cleber said: ‘The kitten was cold and must have climbed into the engine to try to warm up. ‘But when the driver started the engine he was suddenly sucked in. ‘It’s a miracle he was still alive. The driver drove around for hours before deciding to find out what was wrong.’

Picture by Matt Roper

Mystery of Amelia Earhart solved?

June 1, 2012 • 1:27 pm

If you’re like me, you’ve been fascinated forever by the disappearance of the aviator Amelia Earhart in 1937 on a round-the-world flight.  There has been increasing evidence that she managed to make it to an isolated South Pacific island, Nikumaroro.  There are reports that a female skeleton was found there in the 1940s, and excavations have suggested strongly that the island harbored castaways. Could one of them have been Earhart? (She was flying with a navigator, Fred Noonan.)

According to ABC news, a jar of what looks to have contained freckle cream of the type used by Earhart (who didn’t like her freckles) was found on the site, along with buttons, a zipper from a flight jacket, and what may have been fragments of human bones.  Here’s the found jar (left) that looks pretty much like freckle cream:

TIGHAR
A freckle cream jar believed to belong to Amelia Earhart was found on the southeast end of Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean. Archaeologists are finding artifacts that suggest Amelia Earhart may have survived for a time there as a castaway.

The report continues:

TIGHAR [The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery] has long been investigating Earhart’s disappearance and has conducted nine archaeological excavations on the uninhabited island Nikumaroro in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati.

“This is one of several bottles that we’ve identified from the castaway campsite that seem to be and, in some cases, are very definitely personal care products that were marketed exclusively to women in the United States in the 1930s,” Gillespie said.

The jar was found broken into five pieces, four of which were together. The fifth piece was about 65 feet away near the bones of a turtle and appeared to have been used as a cutting tool.

Fish bones and eel remains were also discovered, and the remains indicated that they had not been prepared the way natives would have prepared their food.

“This is not a Pacific Islander,” Gillespie said. “This is a westerner grabbing anything they can find and cooking it and preparing it the way westerners do.”

Gillespie said that according to recovered documentation, the partial skeleton of a female castaway was discovered in 1940 in the area along with part of a woman’s shoe, part of a man’s shoe and a navigational tool, but the artifacts were later lost.

Along with the cosmetic jar, TIGHAR found pieces of a woman’s compact, a zipper that was manufactured in the 1930’s, and a bottle of hand lotion that has been chemically analyzed to match Campana Italian Balm, which was popular during Earhart’s time.

Of course the results aren’t in (can they do DNA analysis?), but it looks increasingly as if Earhart and Noonan made it to the island, lived there a while, and then died a slow death as castaways.

Here’s Nikumaroro ; read more about it here:

The island is a coral atoll that is one of the Phoenix Islands, a remote archipelago here:

A petition for open access to citizen-funded science

June 1, 2012 • 9:58 am

As I’ve pointed out before, there are lots of holes in new initiatives to force academics to make their research (particularly that funded by taxpaying citizens) accessible to the public.  Some “open access” journals don’t release the data for a year (an enternity in the fast-moving world of, say, molecular biology), while some universities allow faculty an “out” so they can publish in “closed access” journals like Science and Nature.  Well, there’s a new pending bill (and a citizens’ petition) to reduce the waiting time to 6 months maximum and improve access in other ways. The bill is the Federal Research Public Access Act.

You can see and sign the petition, which apparently will be going to President Obama, here. You have to create an account, but that involves giving only your name, email address, and zip code, and a brief wait until you get an email verifying the account.  This site says that as of today they need only 2300 signatures to reach the goal of 25,000.  I’ve signed, and urge you to consider signing, too, particularly if you use or want to look at scientific articles.

Now I can’t guarantee that this will actually accomplish the needed changes, but what do you have to lose? Read the petition and the provisions of the Federal Research Public Access Act, and sign if you feel so moved.

This is what the petition requests:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

h/t: Peter

My dinner with Ivan

June 1, 2012 • 6:47 am

I always love visitors because I can take them to some of the awesome restaurants that festoon our town.  And I particularly like it if the visitors are partial to Chinese food: not that Americanized goop slathered with brown sauce, but the real thing.  And there’s one place to get the real thing if you like Hunanese food: the Lao Hunan Restaurant on Wentworth Avenue in Chinatown. Open only for about a year, it specializes in the hearty peasant food of Hunan (Chairman Mao’s homeland), and oy, is it good. Here is the tail end of last night’s dinner that I shared with my friend Ivan, here for the Oncology Meetings. (You think science meetings are big? This one has 35,000 attendees!) I’ve posted on this place before, but last night we tried three new dishes.

Dishes:

  1. Appetizer: Jade tofu, a great starter with chili oil and scallions
  2. Stir-fried green chilis with black bean sauce: one of the best Chinese dishes I ‘ve had anywhere, including China.  If you’ve never appreciated the concept of a hot green chili as a vegetable, this is the place to start. It’s a marvelous melange of strong flavors, and incendiary.  Eat only a bit of a time. But it’s addictive (maybe they should tax it!)
  3. Ground pork with sour beans. The “sour” beans are beans that are pickled in-house, and the combination is marvelous.  It’s spicy but not over the top.
  4. “Famous Hunan stir-fried lamb” with chives and cilantro. Another addictive dish: we kept picking at it even when we were full.

The dishes, except for the chilis, are not sauce-heavy (that dish is oily), and the flavors of the ingredients really shine through.  Ivan, a Chinese-food maven, agreed that it was a stupendous meal.

Here are The Remains of the Night. I have a lot of leftovers to eat in the next two days. Note in the photo how my upper lip is—like that of Richard Nixon—sweating copiously!

Photo taken with Ivan’s iPhone camera

I’ve eaten in all the high-reputation Chinese restaurants in Chicago, I’ve been to the Cantonese and Shanghai emporia of New York and San Francisco, gagged on what passes for “Chinese food” in the UK, and dined copiously in Beijing and Chengdu (Szechuan).  And without a doubt the Lao Hunan is not only the best Chinese restaurant in Chicago, but ranks among the best Chinese restaurants I’ve been to anywhere.