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.
Matthew Cobb sent this Bowie-esque video with an explanation:
This is from a kids’ show called Horrible Histories which is one of the best things on tv. (My kids love it)
Now this BBC video may be a bit too twee (or elementary) for the science readers here, but can you imagine this—with its explicit denial of creationism and statements about religious objections to evolution—being shown on a kids’ show in the U.S.?
This is from page 145 of a book I’ve just finished, Carl Sagan’s posthumously published (2006) The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (Penguin Press, New York). The book, edited by Ann Druyan—Sagan’s third wife—was transcribed from audiotapes of Sagan’s Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1985.
Sagan’s title is of course a play on William James’s own published Gifford Lectures, the very famous The Varieties of Religious Experience.
“When you buy a used car, it is insufficient to remember that you badly need a car. After all, it has to work. It is insufficient to say that the used-car salesman is a friendly fellow. What you generally do is kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you do not feel yourself expert in automobile engines, you bring along a friend who is. And you do this for something as unimportant as an automobile. But on issues of the transcendent, of ethics and morals, on the origin of the world, on the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny?”
This book is as anti-religious as anything Dawkins or Hitchens ever published, though the tone is a bit softer. I’m curious, though, why Sagan wasn’t attacked and reviled in his day for “militant atheism.”
Having been thoroughly trounced in the cat/dog/baby poll at Pajiba, P.Z. has resorted to pouting on the internet, accusing his minions of treason. Faced with this decisive result (and don’t get complacent folks—the poll runs till May 10):
he’s taken to posting a pouty picture pretending that squids are smarter than cats. Note that in this picture the cat is dead.
P. Z. is apparently furious that many of his minions, who apparently like cats rather than tentacled invertebrates, have “betrayed” him (his words). Well, let’s do the above experiment on dry land and see who wins!
PZ, cats are far more intelligent than cephalopods. They have enslaved an entire species who now cater to their every need. Those octopi? Stuck doing the work for themselves.
Established in 2007, the NOM is dedicated to preserving marriage in America as a union only between a male and female. It works tirelessly to quash state bills that allow same-sex marriage and to support initiatives (like California’s Proposition 8) that prohibit it. NOM also fights against adoption by same-sex couples. It’s an odious organization that has engaged in many questionable tactics. Here’s one tactic, taken from the Wikipedia article on NOM:
In March 2012, NOM documents showing their strategies of pitting the African-American and homosexual communities against each other, of discouraging Latino assimilation, and of painting Obama as a “social radical” were released by a federal judge in Maine and published by the Human Rights Campaign.[132][133][134] The revealed tactics were described as “one of the most cynical things I’ve ever heard”[135] and “scary”[136] by Julian Bond, Chairman Emeritus of the NAACP.[135] The National Black Justice Coalition said that the “documents expose N.O.M. for what it really is – a hate group determined to use African American faith leaders as pawns to push their damaging agenda.”[136]
You can download a pdf of the donors list here. The most interesting donor is one we know well; he’s also the biggest donor by far:
This appears to be the John Templeton Jr., the son of the founder of the John Templeton Foundation, its current president and chairman, and a notorious supporter of right-wing causes. His wife also gave $100,000, making a family total of over half a million dollars!
The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, put in their dollop:
And, finally, Mitt Romney’s political action committee (PAC), Free and Strong America. Romney, of course, will be the Republican candidate in the next Presidential race:
Who knows what other nefarious organizations are supported by the Templetons?
I think we’re all familiar with the political agenda of both Templeton and his Foundation (right wing, supportive of untrammeled capitalism and free enterprise), as well as the Foundation’s aim to show a consilience between science and religion. A lot of scientists who take Templeton money, and are hence paraded on the Templeton website as their pet scientists, assert that so long as Templeton gives them money to do pure science, untainted by religion, it’s okay. I disagree. And I agree with what Abbie says:
I recognize that John Templeton the person and The Templeton Foundation as a foundation are different entities. However considering the personal financial and political causes taken up by Johnny boy, its hard to take the mission statement of the organization he heads seriously.
“The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will.”
(It’s worth noting that the Dalai Lama, who recently won the £1,000,000 Templeton Prize, considers gay sex to be “sexual misconduct.”)
Indeed. As the political and religious agenda of Templeton becomes more evident, the pocketing of Templeton funds by money-hungry scientists becomes more embarrassing. Really, are the political views and activities of the president and chairman completely irrelevant to whether its money constitutes honorable funds? After all, that money comes from the same source: the mutual-fund empire of John Templeton senior.
I ask those who take Templeton money if they’d still take it were the Templeton Foundation headed by someone like David Duke, a politicial and former member of the Ku Klux Klan who continues his racist activities. Suppose Duke were to continue to agitate against blacks and immigration on his own time, donating his own money for those causes, while running the “Duke Foundation” that gave money to scientists with the aim of finding a consilience between science and ethnic diversity. Suppose that some of that money were go to pure science alone, without any racial connotations or strings attached. Would it then be okay to take that money? If not, why not?
How right-wing and pro-religion does an organization have to be before scientists will no longer accept its money? The sad thing is that most scientists who pocket the funds don’t even consider this question.
There seem to be a lot of readers who like owls (I do, too!), and here are some nice shots from reader Mark (click to enlarge):
Here’s a picture of me with an owl chick. The owls nested and hatched under my patio for the last three years, but didn’t hatch last year.
I asked Mark about the fate of the chick, and got this response and further photos:
That chick left the nest a few days before, but wasn’t yet flying. It had wandered into the yard. I picked it up and brought it back to the patio where I posed with it. Sometimes they got in the pool where I found them standing on the skimmer ledges. At first they threaten you, but seem unafraid. Sometimes the chicks are perched on the patio furniture, and they allow us to stroke their backs. One of the parents hit me in the head once. I’m pretty sure that they are Eastern Screech owls.
Birders, is he right?
I’ll append a quotation about owls from my favorite nature book. I’ve posted this before, but it’s appropriate (“little owls” are a species, Athena noctua, from the Old World):
A little owl’s legs are surprisingly thick and powerful for so small a bird. They look slightly hairy, like an animal’s legs. The whole bird looks completely out of proportion when perching, like a two-legged head. One must try not to be anthropomorphic, yet it cannot be denied that little owls are very funny to watch. In flight, they are just owls, but at rest they seem to be natural clowns. They do not know it, of course. And that makes them much funner, for they always appear indignant, outraged, brimming over with choler. There is nothing funny about their sharp claws and rending beak. They are killers. That is what they are for. But whenever I see one close, in a tree, I laugh aloud.
In a hubristically misguided attempt to exercise his power and squash all competitors, P. Z. Myers tried to pharyngulate the cats-vs.-dogs-vs.-babies poll atPajiba, and so far has failed miserably. I urged readers to vote their conscience (i.e., for cats), and they came through. P. Z.. noting the absence of squids, just told his sycophantic minions to vote for “none of the above”. For a while that category was swelling alarmingly, but ailurophiles have come back in spades.
The current standings are shown below:
I didn’t realize that the contest runs until May 10, so, despite the huge lead, we mustn’t be complacent. Vote for the cats.
In the meantime, as promised, I have randomly selected a cat-voter to receive an autographed copy of WEIT. Taking all voters in consideration on two threads, the winner is . . .
glenister_m, which links to Michael Glenister, a magician from British Columbia who admits that he’s “married to a dog person”.
Michael, email me with your contact information and collect your autographed copy of WEIT, which will contain a hand-drawn kitteh as a free bonus.
And the rest of you, well, we’ll have more contests, but keep your eye on that poll!
On Friday, which would have been Christopher Hitchens’s 62nd birthday, the American interviewer Charlie Rose discussed the man with several of his friends, including Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, and of course Martin Amis. The video hasn’t yet been put up, but I’ll link to it when it is.
In the meantime, here’s a two-minute “memorial” that Rose broadcast the day after Hitchens died last December 15. It’s the interview when Hitch was asked whether he would still have smoked and boozed had he known what the consequences would be.
Rose: If you had known that there was a possibility of getting cancer, you would have never smoked—you would have never smoked a cigarette—you would never drank, or consumed the amount of liquor you consumed?
Hitchens: No, I think all the time I’ve felt that life is a wager, and that I was probably getting more out of leading a bohemian existence, as a writer, than I would have if I didn’t. So, writing is what is important to me, and anything that helps me do that—or enhances or prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me, for sure. So I was knowingly taking a risk, though I wouldn’t recommend it to others.
On that inteview he added (not shown in the video) that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”
His life was tragically short, but I’ll wager that he packed more into that existence that any other writer who was given eight decades. And I remember this when I’m reproved by readers, as I sometimes am, for displaying the “unhealthy” foods I consume on my travels. I’d ask those people why they’re not consuming a diet consisting solely of vegetables and nuts, and starving themselves—all of which enhance longevity. (BTW, I don’t eat like that all the time!)
Past a certain age, the content of a life is at least as important as its duration, and all of us, save perhaps the exercise and vegetable mavens, are doing things that we know, whether or not we repress that knowledge, will shorten our lives. The important thing is this: when, like Hitchens, you look back on your life from your deathbed, will you think that it was a good run? Will you really regret not having published more scientific papers? Or will you regret having not taken more risks?
Excuse the lachrymosity; I miss the man this morning.
This week the New York Times reviews two biology books, one of which I’ll be reading for sure.
The one I’ll probably give a miss is in today’s Book Review section: The Great Animal Orchestra, written by musician Bernie Krause and reviewed by Jeremy Denk, a concert pianist and blogger. The review is mixed:
After a stint with the Weavers (he replaced Pete Seeger), a foray into electronic music and some not-too-surprising drug use, by “Hardyesque chance” he ended up in the Muir Woods recording nature sounds for an album. Now he is high on hippo grunts and insect drones, having spent decades recording and archiving wild soundscapes. He chronicles his life choices and epiphanies, guides us through nature’s sonic treasures, makes interesting assertions about the musicianship of animals (human and nonhuman), and begs us to pay attention. . .
Krause spends many pages challenging the human monopoly on musicianship. He asserts that in the wild, animals vocalize with a musicianly ear to the full score of the ecosystem — a mix of competition and cooperation. Since animals depend on being heard for various reasons (mating, predation, warning, play), they are forced to seek distinct niches: “Each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth — to blend or contrast — much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.”
An extraordinary claim arises from this “niche hypothesis”: the healthier the habitat, the more “musical” the creatures, the richer and more diverse their scores. Sound complexity is a measure of health.
Well, I’m not sure how one defines the “health” of a habitat. If it’s vulnerability to human damage, the rainforest is at least as vulnerable, but far more acoustically diverse, than the Antarctic.
. . . spadefoot toads, chorusing together to confuse predators as to any individual location. That last example is heartbreaking; when a jet flies overhead, the toads get out of sync. The temporary lack of ensemble proves deadly: soon hawks swoop down on individual choristers. In other words, the toads’ music is a communal shelter. Music is expression, communication — but also protection.
Denton’s review is generally positive but mixed: he faults the book for being messy and tendentious; but perhaps some of you, including the many readers who are musicians or know a lot about music, may want to read it (it’s here on Amazon).
*****
Richard Fortey is a science writer who was formerly a respected paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. Like Dawkins, he has the rare double honor of election to both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In Madrid last Thanksgiving, I had dinner with Richard and his wife Jackie, and found them delightful dinner companions (Fortey is a terrific raconteur):
Richard and Jackie Fortey at a post-conference dinner in Madrid (see his hourlong lecture on trilobites posted by Matthew Cobb)
Fortey has written seven books and, though I’ve read only three, they’ve gotten better with time. I gave Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Eartha mixed review in the New York Times (I thought the writing a bit overblown), but recommended it on the whole. In the interim Fortey’s prose has become tighter and better, and the man has some marvelous stories to tell. I loved Trilobite! and especially Dry Storeroom No. 1, an engrossing look at London’s Natural History Museum, where Fortey worked for so many years (at dinner he told me some anecdotes about the place that were too salacious for the book).
Fortey has a new book, and it’s about “living fossils,” those plants and animals that have persisted for millions of years without much change in their morphology (think ginkgo tree, coelocanth, and horseshoe crab, and see my earlier post here). To evolutionists, these species are a mystery: why have they remained unchanged so long? One explanation—that they simply lack genetic variation that fuels evolution—is probably wrong: work ages ago by Bob Selander and Dick Lewontin showed that horseshoe crabs are just as genetically variable in their DNA as more malleable species. Another classic explanation is that these species simply live in unchanging environments, so that they arrived at their optimal morphology eons ago and there’s nothing new to adapt to. That’s an appealing but largely untestable explanation, especially because some creatures that live in similar habitats (like the shallow marine habitats of the horseshoe crab) have undergone substantial evolutionary change.
At any rate, Fortey’s new book is Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind, and it was reviewed in Thursday’s NYT. Reviewer Dwight Garner gives it two thumbs up, and I’ll be reading it for sure, if for no other reason to see Fortey’s explanation for unchanging species. A snippet from the review:
The good news about “Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms” is that Mr. Fortey is as vivid and charming about live things as he’s long been about dead ones, perhaps even more so. Reading this book is like stepping into the field with a man who’s equal parts naturalist and poet, let’s say equal parts E. O. Wilson and Paul Muldoon. The Wilson in him wields the notebook; the Muldoon flutters. It’s a bewitching combination.
At that orgy on the Delaware beach Mr. Fortey delivers real science, reminding us, for example, that horseshoe crabs aren’t crabs at all. Like trilobites, they are arthropods, “animals with jointed legs and all the muscles and tendons tucked inside an exoskeleton.” He dilates on their history, their character and what threatens them still.
But he also describes them, wonderfully, as resembling “inverted colanders.” The sharp spines on their head shields remind him of “the perky eyebrows I associate with clerics of a certain age.” He describes their hue as “the kind of color I used to get as a kid when I mixed all my powder paints together.”
Can I quote Mr. Fortey on horseshoe crabs a moment longer? Noting the pincers at the bottom of one, he says, “I am reminded of the manual toolkit owned by the eponymous hero of the movie ‘Edward Scissorhands.’ ” When he flips a stranded horseshoe crab over, it moves away with “the slow progress of a confused old lady on a walker.”
You begin to love Mr. Fortey as much as he loves horseshoe crabs. You want to throw him over your shoulder, like a big stuffed animal won at a fair, and lug him home to explain the mysteries of your backyard.
Having spent several hours with Fortey, I agree with this assessment. Like Dan Dennett, he’s a lovable bear of a man, infectiously excited about biology. The reviewer, noting that the writing isn’t quite perfect, still gives the book a strong recommendation:
There is no denying that, as “Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms” moves on, there are numbing moments. Your enthusiasm about sponges, for example, will not equal his. He is not utterly immune to cliché.
Yet his book is not only well built and witty but emotionally profound too. It’s the work of a survivor appraising other survivors. “The inescapable truth is that luck for old-timers will eventually run out,” he writes. “It always does.”. . .
. . . In the meantime Mr. Fortey’s book is an inducement to be as awake and observant as possible. A wallflower at life’s orgy, he’s delivered a book that’s a squirming eyeful.
Sadly, Garner doesn’t mention Fortey’s own explanation for morphological “stasis,” and that’s a serious omission. After all, it’s their unchanging appearance over millions of years that makes these plants and animals so interesting, and the hypotheses for that surely form an important part of the book. I’m sure they’re in there, but you’ll have to buy it, as I will, to find out.
