From the Guardian‘s Week in Wildlife via Matthew Cobb (click to enlarge):
Which one of these things is not like the others?
March 23, 2012 • 11:14 am
Still more religious insanity in Tennessee
March 23, 2012 • 8:48 am
I’m giving a talk in Tennessee on Monday, and will be entering a state rife with religious lunacy. Alert reader Eliot called my attention to a new bill in that state called the “Religious Viewspoints Antidiscrimination Act” (download pdf at link). Proposed by state representative Andy Holt (a Republican, of course), the bill (SB 3632/HB 3616) prohibits restrictions on students giving “reasoned” religious answers to questions on tests or essays, or from bringing their faith into the classroom. It’s all meant to make public schools more religious.
As the Tennessean reports:
Under the bill, school districts also would require teachers to treat a student’s faith-based answers to school assignments the same as secular answers. But while the bill allows faith-based answers, those responses must be justified like any other student’s.
“This is not a bill that is intended to give special advantages to those who hold a particular faith. This is to protect those who have a particular faith,” Holt said.
Holt couldn’t cite cases in Tennessee involving that particular type of discrimination against students.
This is complete insanity. Imagine a biology class in which a student writes a paper on biogeography as a result of the Great Flood, explaining how Noah’s Ark could hold all the animals. After all, one can “justify” that, as well as many other ludicrous creationist scenarios. “Justification” does not mean “convincing rational evidence,” but merely “a plausible rationale,” and who is to say what is “plausible” here? This would make a dog’s breakfast of biology, and of course has implications for other fields as well, including cosmology, physics, and the humanities.
The paper reports further:
Rep. Andy Holt, R-Dresden, said he feels the legislation would alleviate school districts’ fear of allowing such expressions. His bill is slated for hearings in House and Senate subcommittees next week.
“We live in a society that’s hypersensitive to statements of faith, and so I think in many ways, students have been disincentivized to make statements of faith,” he said.
As if students can’t make statements of faith in school (they can pray on their own), in church, or anywhere else! They just can’t expect to get credit for unjustified, faith-based answers in their assignments.
The blatant purpose of this bill—to sneak religion into state schools, where its public expression is illegal—is evident from another of the bill’s provisions:
Requires LEAs [local education agencies] to adopt a policy that includes the establishment of a limited public forum for student speakers at all school events where a student will speak publicly.
As the paper reports,
The legislation would require school districts to implement a policy to create a “limited public forum” before campus events such as the beginning of a school day or before a football game. Select students would be eligible to speak freely at these forums, including about religion, and the school district would issue a disclaimer before those speeches.
“I think the free expression of religion extends to those who may be in the public institution of education,” Holt said. “I do believe in the freedom of religion, but I do not believe in the freedom from religion.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has of course objected to this bill on several grounds: students already have the right to express their religion privately, to pray, and to discuss their faith with peers in a non-classroom setting; students would experience coercion during public prayer if they don’t share that religion or any religion (do atheists get a right to make a statement before a football game?); the legislation would be divisive and lead to costly litigation (such litigation is a certainty if the bill passes); and the bill burdens schools with onerous duties of setting up religious forums in which a diversity of viewpoints could be publicly expressed. If you endorse one religion, then you must endorse them all—and atheism as well.
If you’re from Tennessee, the ACLU website above has a link to send a letter to your state representative, though I can’t see the link from Chicago (I think it works only if you have a Tennessee zip code).
Here’s a summary of the bill:
SUMMARY OF BILL: Requires local education agencies (LEAs) to treat a student’s voluntary expression of a religious viewpoint in the same manner that the LEA treats a student’s voluntary expression of a secular viewpoint on an otherwise permissible subject. Prohibits LEAs from discriminating against a student on the basis of the expression of a religious viewpoint.
Requires LEAs to adopt a policy that includes the establishment of a limited public forum for student speakers at all school events where a student will speak publicly. This disclaimer shall be provided at all events where the LEA feels there is a need to dispel confusion over the LEA’s sponsorship of a student’s speech. Prohibits student expression on an otherwise permissible subject from being excluded from the limited public forum because the expression is based on a religious viewpoint.
Authorizes students to express their beliefs about religion in assignments and requires such expression to be free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submission. Requires homework and classroom assignments to be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance and against other legitimate pedagogical concerns identified by the LEA.
Prohibits students from being rewarded or penalized on the basis of the religious content of their work.
Authorizes students to organize prayer groups, religious clubs, or other such gatherings before, during, and after school to the same extent that students are permitted to organize other noncurricular student activities and groups. Requires religious student groups to be given equal access to the school facilities for assembling as those given to other non-curricular groups.
Requires religious student groups that meet for prayer or other religious speech to be allowed to advertise or announce their meetings in the same manner that the LEA authorizes other nonreligious student groups. Authorizes LEAs to disclaim school sponsorship of non-curricular groups and events in a manner that does not favor or disfavors groups that meet to engage in prayer or other religious speech.
A birthday and the illuminated “Origin of Species”
March 23, 2012 • 6:18 am
Today’s the birthday of artist and biological illustrator Kelly Houle, who will spend the day working on her stupendous hand-lettered and hand-illuminated copy of The Origin of Species. The project will take several years, and, though I’ve mentioned it before, I thought I’d bring it up once more while giving her a shout-out. You can wish her happy birthday, but I bet she’d like it better if you’d donate to the project!
I’m a huge fan of this endeavor and have supported it in both on this website and in a pecuniary way. You can donate here, either via a direct PayPal contribution or by purchasing some of the great spinoff items that Kelly has created to support her work. For only $250 you can get an 8″ X 10″ hand-painted and illuminated version of a beetle of your choice. And the greeting cards, with an embossed gold “tree of life” (the one drawn by Darwin in his notebooks), are less pricey but lovely.
Follow the work’s progress at Kelly’s “Illuminated Origin of Species” Facebook page. I’ve taken the liberty of lifting two posts from her page:
Here is a snapshot of the stages of a typical beetle painting. You can see the beetle specimen in the top center, the line drawing and color map in the lower left, my watercolor sketchbook in the upper left with color studies in stages with notes (so I can easily paint it again on the table of contents page later), paint mixes in the upper right, and a Daniel Smith “dot card” with small amounts of iridescent paints on the lower right.
And her latest beetle:
I finished three more beetle paintings this week! This Photuris lucicrescens, or firefly, really glows with a halo of shell gold. Framed prints of this adopted beetle painting will be available by next week. I’ll post more information soon.
Philosopher uses a lot of words to say nothing new about theodicy
March 23, 2012 • 5:12 am
What’s going on with philosophy at Notre Dame? First they give us Alvin Plantinga, the emperor with no clothes, and now Gary Gutting, an expert in French philosophy and the philosophy at religion at Notre Dame. In a piece published at the “Opnionator” in yesterday’s New York Times, “Does it matter whether God exists?“, gutting uses up a lot of dead trees to say essentially nothing.
His first point, which is bloody obvious, is that it matters to a lot of people whether the claims of religion are true. Responding to a BBC piece by John Gray that claims otherwise, Gutting argues:
The obvious response to Gray is that it all depends on what you hope to find in a religion. If your hope is simply for guidance and assistance in leading a fulfilling life here on earth, a “way of living” without firm beliefs in any supernatural being may well be all you need. But many religions, including mainline versions of Christianity and Islam, promise much more. They promise ultimate salvation. If we are faithful to their teachings, they say, we will be safe from final annihilation when we die and will be happy eternally in our life after death.
If our hope is for salvation in this sense — and for many that is the main point of religion—then this hope depends on certain religious beliefs’ being true. In particular, for the main theistic religions, it depends on there being a God who is good enough to desire our salvation and powerful enough to achieve it.
So what’s new? Nothing above, but then Gutting makes the equally obvious claim that even an all-powerful and all-loving God might not be able to prevent evil. That’s also bloody obvious, because there is evil. Gutting then offers up the same tired old theodicy: we’re not sure about why there’s evil, but maybe it has something to do with free will.
An all-good being, even with maximal power, may have to allow considerable local evils for the sake of the overall good of the universe; some evils may be necessary for the sake of avoiding even worse evils. We have no way of knowing whether we humans might be the victims of this necessity.
Of course, an all-good God would do everything possible to minimize the evil we suffer, but for all we know that minimum might have to include our annihilation or eternal suffering. We might hope that any evil we endure will at least be offset by an equal or greater amount of good for us, but there can be no guarantee. As defenders of theism often point out, the freedom of moral agents may be an immense good, worth God’s tolerating horrendous wrongdoing. Perhaps God in his omniscience knows that the good of allowing some higher type of beings to destroy our eternal happiness outweighs the good of that happiness. Perhaps, for example, their destroying our happiness is an unavoidable step in the moral drama leading to their salvation and eternal happiness.
There are five responses here. The obvious one is that the most parsimonious hypothesis is not a God who allows horrible suffering for some purpose completely incomprehensible to humans, but simply that there is no God, and evils are the byproduct of a physical universe containing evolved beings. Second, if there is a God who allows things like the Holocaust for the greater good, who would want to worship Him? Third, if God is really omnipotent, why is it not in his power to allow free will, but ensure that people only make good choices? If not, why not? Fourth, what about natural evils, like earthquakes and tsunamis? Couldn’t God prevent those? After all, they have nothing to do with free will. (Plantinga’s ridiculous answer is that there is such a thing as “natural” free will: we have to allow Earth to do its thing so that evolution can proceed smoothly.) Fifth, do animals need to suffer, too, even if they don’t have free will? Why couldn’t an omnipotent God prevent that, too?
Gutting then argues that if an omnipotent God allows suffering for reasons beyond our ken, then perhaps he might not give us an afterlife for equally obscure reasons.
I’m not sure why Gutting feels compelled to cover this well-trod ground, showing us for the elebenty gazillionth time that there’s no successful response to the problem of evil save appeal to a mysterious God. He concludes:
We can, of course, simply will to believe that we are not being deceived. But that amounts to blind faith, not assured hope. If that doesn’t satisfy us, we need to find a better response to the problem of evil than an appeal to our ignorance. Failing that, we may need to reconsider John Gray’s idea of religion with little or no belief.
Well, that’s a decent conclusion, but surely everyone knows by now that the problem of evil is the Achilles Heel of religion, but that plenty of people are satisfied with the answer that “it’s all mysterious.” Gray could have used tangible examples, though, to make this point clearer and more damaging to faith. And he neglects another alternative to consider: not “religion with little or no belief”, but no religion at all. Why doesn’t he say that? Has he been talking to Alain de Botton? In my view “religion with no belief” is like “a steak with no meat”: an oxymoron.
Not a caterpillar
March 23, 2012 • 3:45 am
If you glanced at this for just a brief moment, I might be able to convince you that it’s a brightly-colored (and hence perhaps distasteful or dangerous) caterpillar.
It’s not, of course. Look closer. Some of you will know what this is; for the answer, see Wild Wonders of Europe, where it won a photo competition.
h/t: Michael
We’re all apes, including Dawkins
March 22, 2012 • 11:09 am
Last week I wrote a post highlighting a silly piece by Vlasko Kohlmayer in the Washington Times denying that Richard Dawkins (or any human) was an ape. If you construe apes according to the definition I used—i.e., “Old World anthropoid mammals, more specifically a clade of tailless catarrhine primates, belonging to the biological superfamily Hominoidea”—then, yes, we’re all apes, along with gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, chimps, and bonobos.
Anthropologist John Hawks objected, arguing that humans, though nested within the monophyletic groups above, formed their own clade, and that the word “ape” isn’t a precise taxonomic term, but a term of folk taxonomy:
“Ape” is an English word. It is not a taxonomic term. English words do not need to be monophyletic. French, German, Russian, and other languages do not have to accord with English ways of splitting up animals. Taxonomy is international — everywhere, we recognize that humans are hominoids.
I didn’t quite get this, because I was using “ape” in the way defined above: as a truly monophyletic group. Hawks doesn’t allow comment on his website, so there was no discussion.
On his website Evolving Thoughts, the philosopher of science John Wilkins took issue with Hawks, and agreed with me that humans are apes, summarizing the anti-ape argument and then refuting it with a simple diagram that shows us nested within the Hominoidea along with other apes:
The claim that humans are apes is less clear. In folk taxonomy, “ape” is a term that has no comparable scientific meaning. It basically means any primate that lacks a tail and is not human. “Human”, however, denotes a single and scientifically accepted species (or group of species), so here the claim is that the technical taxon falls within a prior folk taxonomic category interpreted scientifically. This is not new, of course, since Linnaeus famously placed humans (Homo) within the same genus as other apes, a classification that was later changed to reflect folk taxonomic preferences (by Blumenbach, and later Oken).
Now the claim is that humans (Homo sapiens) are apes (Homininae), which is a group defined as the African Great Apes. In short, it is a claim that humans are a species of African Great Ape (and therefore a member of Hominoidea, which includes gibbons and orangutans, also included among these apes). The issue is whether or not the taxon name denotes a natural group. And what counts as “natural” in taxonomy is that the group is monophyletic, or is all of the taxa that can be included without any not being included, in that group.
Here’s a diagram showing humans nested within the monophyletic group Hominoidea. The red bit includes the other apes:
He then explains why he thinks we’re apes:
“Ape” has (once again) been redefined by the experts, and to make a rhetorically memorable point, some taxonomists say “humans are apes”, which is the vernacular way to say “members of Homo are members of Hominoidea” without turning off the aforementioned ten year olds. Any professional that continued to talk about “non-human apes” and meant “non-Homo Hominoidea” should be asked to justify why that is a group of interest, especially as new fossils continue to blur the intuitive lines that motivated the distinction.
Here’s a phylogeny of primates. Note that the “ape” group is monophyletic if it is construed to include humans. Note, though, that “monkeys” do not form a monophyletic group, because Old World monkey are more closely related to the apes than they are to New World monkeys. In other words, the group “monkeys” does not include all the descendants of a common ancestor; it is what’s known as a paraphyletic group. But construing things broadly, we could consider humans and apes as monkeys, just as we see humans as apes.
Finally, Brian Switek weighed in today on the Coyne/Wilkins side (I must say, Wilkins hasn’t always agreed with me!) in a post at Laelaps, “I’m an ape, and I’m also a fish.” What he means by being a “fish” means that humans are also nested in the monophyletic group that includes all the descendants of our fishy ancestors:
And the words we choose depend upon how specific we wish to be. In an evolutionary context, I am simultaneously an ape, a monkey, a primate, a mammal, a therapsid, a synapsid, an amniote, a tetrapod, and, to pick an arbitrary stopping point that suits this post’s purpose, a fish. You are a fish, too. Now, I typically don’t come home from an afternoon walk and tell my wife “There were so many fish walking around the park. Everyone’s out today” – such a statement would make it sound as if I had slipped into a Ray Troll painting – but, in an evolutionary sense, it still would have been true. Among other things, we’re fish. The term isn’t terribly specific, but it’s not inaccurate, either, as a newly-announced cousin of ours demonstrates. . .
I don’t expect the idea that we are fish to pick up much popular currency. The everyday, paraphyletic meaning of the term is entrenched, and I don’t expect anyone to refer to the salmon in their sushi as a “non-tetrapodomorph fish.” But the idea is still a useful one as we explore our relationship to the rest of life on earth. After all, we share a common ancestry with every other living thing on the planet, and, for a time, our ancestors and kin were snake-like fish with thick fins supported by stacks of bone. The way those fish swam, and walked, through prehistoric seas formed the foundation for the flowering of vertebrate evolution on land, including the later origin of a lonely species of upright ape obsessed with its own beginnings.
Yep, we’re apes. I don’t know what Hawks is on about, really, since apes are a monophyletic group, even if not a formal category. But Hominoidea is a formal category, and includes not just us, but everything that’s recognized as an ape by biologists.
In the end, this is a tempest in a teapot, for what the misguided Kohlmayer meant was that we do not share a common ancestor with other apes. And that’s clearly wrong. But yes, we are apes, and mammals, and reptiles, and fish, just as birds are dinosaurs. In the end, all that’s important is that we recognize where we fit in on the tree of life.
Elebenty gazillion Basement Cats audition for a film
March 22, 2012 • 9:53 am
From Retronaut, we have pictures of tons of people bringing their black cats to a Hollywood audition in 1961. I didn’t know what this was about but Catsparella (a great felid site) gave the answer:
Tales of Terror was a 1962 horror film starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone. Billed as a “Trilogy of Shock and Horror,” the film consisted of three short sequences, all based on Edgar Allan Poe stories: “Morella”, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, and “The Black Cat.” On one auspicious day in 1961, an open audition was held in Hollywood to find the perfect cat to play the part of the the eponymous feline. Fortunately for us, photographer Ralph Crane was on hand to capture every glorious moment!
Casting call!
Preliminary inspection:
The stars see if they’re compatible with the felids:
Final tryouts on the set:
A sad loser goes home:
A new book on science and theology
March 22, 2012 • 5:03 am
Because it contains a really nice essay by physicist Sean Carroll,”Does the universe need God?” (online for free), I was interested in buying The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, edited by J. G. Stump and A. G. Padgett (Wiley). But now I see that it’s going for the absolutely ridiculous price of $199. And there’s another reason to avoid it: Carroll’s piece, which decries the infusion of faith into science, is probably an outlier among a bunch of accommodationist essays. Here, for example, is the evolution section:
Denis Alexander is director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, which was originally funded (and still gets funds from) the Templeton Foundation. He’s also on the Board of Trustees of the Templeton Foundation.
We already know Michael Ruse, who is sympathetic to religion and, in fact, despite his atheism is very generous (and ingenious) in offering the faithful arguments for reconciling religion and science. I would hope his piece would highlight the incompatibility between Darwinism and religion, but I’d bet heavily against that.
The work of Simon Conway Morris, a paleontologist at Cambridge who studies evolutionary convergence, is supported by a grant from the Templeton foundation to the tune of nearly one million dollars. He believes that convergence (the independent evolution of similar features in diverse lineages) is evidence for God.
Stephen C. Meyer is an intelligent-design creationist and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
Francisco Ayala won the one-million-pound Templeton Prize in 2010.
John Haught, whom I debated in Kentucky last year, is a theologian at Georgetown University who is famous for concoting the “Argument for God from Hot Beverages.” He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the John Templeton Foundation.
Paul Draper, a philosopher of religion at Purdue University in Indiana, is a Templeton Research Fellow.
Of the seven authors in this section, all are sympathetic to religion, and five are or have been associated with or supported by the Templeton Foundation. One is a creationist. Yet this book is not published by Templeton, but by Wiley, a (formerly) reputable publisher.
It’s distressing that the ties between a commercial publisher and the Templeton Foundation are so close (how did they choose the authors?), and even more distressing that there doesn’t seem to be one article in the evolution section that takes a critical stance about the connection between Christianity and evolutionary biology (granted, I haven’t read the book yet, as it isn’t out). One of the pieces is even by a creationist who touts that cells are too complex to have evolved!
(A side note: I just read Ayala’s book, Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, which argues that the conundrum of evil in the world as evidence against a loving and omnipotent God was absolutely and permanently resolved by Darwin’s idea of natural selection. No longer do we need to wonder why there is suffering in the world: it’s an inevitable byproduct of the way God chose to evolve His creatures! But of course that’s no solution, because God could have chosen some other way to produce his creatures that didn’t involve suffering. After all, he’s omnipotent! This is yet another case of a scientist sympathetic to religion making a theological virtue out of a scientific necessity.)
h/t: Dom