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.
I like Guinness and I especially loved the defunct British television show “One man and his dog,” in which sheepdogs and their masters competed in herding contests. This new commercial from Guinness celebrates them both. Round up your mates for a stout!
Of course I post dogs only reluctantly, so here’s a St. Paddy’s Day felid for ailurophiles:
h/t: Otter
What is Templeton doing with its millions these days? As usual, infusing religion into science, thereby corrupting the latter. Two items have caught my attention:
1. According to Gulfnews.com, the Templeton Foundation has given $817,000 (what I calculate is “Dh 3M”) to the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates
Muslim students across the region now have the opportunity to delve into ongoing debates on the relationship between science and religion.
This opportunity comes after a recent Dh3 million grant was awarded by the John Templeton Foundation to Prof Nidhal Guessoum, professor of physics at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). Prof Guessoum and Dr Jean Staune from the Interdisciplinary University of Paris were jointly awarded for their proposal titled ‘Islam and Science: An educational approach’.
“In recent years, I have been involved in discussing science and religion, particularly Islam, worldwide,” Prof Guessoum said. “The idea behind the proposal is to widen the discussion and address it more specifically for students.”
And this isn’t about pure science: it’s about science and religion together, in mutual and loving harmony:
“International discussion on science and religion is taking place at an advanced level — and we need to produce a new generation of scholars who can bring the Islamic voice to them,” the astrophysicist said. “The goal is for us to produce educational material from the workshops so other students and the general public will benefit from them; which is part of a larger initiative to produce more information and knowledge.”. . .
Applications to attend the workshops are open to all students in the respective countries. However, up to 25 students will be chosen per workshop based on a mandatory academic essay about the relationship between Islam and an area of science.
2. The Templeton Foundation has just announced a huge initiative (over 5 million dollars) to support “New Frontiers in Astronomy and Physics.” God help me, it’s administered by The University of Chicago and directed by Donald G. York, a professor in the U. of C.’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It will support 15 grants in theory or experimental work (up to $500,000 each) and monetary prizes of up to $50,000 to 16 high-school and college students for essays. That’s $50,000 for an essay, for crying out loud! What a waste of money. Here are the essay topics:
For high school students:
For college students:
- What is the origin of the complexity in the universe? ($50,000 top prize)
Such opportunities for woo, and lots of cash to be made!
The research grants are for work on four “Big Questions”:
The predictable response from accommodationists and scientists eager to grab those bucks is, “So what? The money will be used for science, and if it’s funded by an organization devoted to marrying science and woo, who cares? Our work will be pure!” Well, consider that the eight “honorary advisors” to the program are all previous Templeton Prize winners (most of them religious), including Paul Davies, Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson, and John Polkinghorne. They’ve already earned their million pounds, and have now been installed permanently into the Templeton Stable. And they’ve been given the job of overseeing this program. Which brings up the second point: scientists who take this money are proudly paraded on the Templeton website (and usually given further employment or grants by the Foundation!), which gives credibility to Templeton’s real mission: to marry science and faith.
One scientist who isn’t buying this is Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University who criticized this Templeton Initiative in a post at his website, Not Even Wrong, called “Templeton millions“:
Normally I try and avoid editorializing directly about news like this, but this time I’ll make an exception. I think what is going on here is very dangerous. The Templeton Foundation’s agenda is not the advancement of science, it is the advancement of a particular religious point of view about what science is and how it should be done. They are very cleverly putting large sums of money into backing theology and pseudo-scientific research at the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. One reason that these places are happily taking the money is because public funding is drying up. The organization is extremely wealthy, and now led by Templeton’s son, who when he isn’t spending his father’s money on this is spending it on promoting Rick Santorum’s political career or other far-right causes (see here for example).
Woit also calls attention to a new Templeton-funded position:
. . . DAMTP at Cambridge has just posted a job ad for Templeton-funded hiring in “Philosophy of Cosmology”. Note that this hiring is not in the Philosophy department but in the physics department. The announcement says that there will also be a similar job at Oxford. The “Philosophy of Cosmology” grants used to fund this and similar positions in the US seem to involve at least a couple million dollars, more here and in my earlier blog entry about this.
Finally, and this makes me sad, Woit notes that physicist Sean Carroll,—who, on the website Cosmic Variance, has previously objected to Templeton sticking its nose into the tent of science—has now changed his tune. Here’s Carroll in 2005, writing at Preposterious Universe explaining why he wasn’t taking Templeton money to go to a conference:
I personally am in no danger of winning the Templeton Prize, having gone on record repeatedly as saying that science and religion are intellectually inconsistent, and that taking science seriously as a method for understanding the world is incompatible with honest religious belief. (Yes, I know, not everyone agrees with me.) But I recently received an invitation to speak at Amazing Light, a conference in Berkeley in honor of Charles Townes. The conference is devoted to science, not anything about religion, and I was asked to give a standard review talk about dark matter and dark energy. But the timing was suspiciously close to the announcement of Townes’ Templeton Prize, and a quick glance at the conference web page revealed that it was indeed receiving funding from the Templeton Foundation. It is being organized by something called the Metanexus Institute, and is part of a program known as Foundational Questions — organizations that are somehow associated with the Templeton web.
So I thought about turning down the invitation, since I didn’t want to get mixed up with this group with whose purpose I completely disagree. But the conference program seemed innocuous, and the impressive list of participants is full of good and smart people, so eventually I accepted. I figured that there wasn’t a moral obligation to completely dissociate myself from any activity involving people with whom I have disagreements. After all, some of my best friends are even Republicans.
Upon further review, I’ve changed my mind, and decided not to go to the conference after all. (As of right now my name is still on the list of participants, but it will go away eventually.) I talked to Mark, with whom I’ve discussed these issues before, and he made an argument that seems pretty convincing. The point is that the entire purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between straightforward science and explicitly religious activity, making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big undertaking. It’s all about appearances. You have a splashy scientific conference featuring a long list of respected participants, and then you proudly tout the event on a separate web page for your program to bring science and religion together. It doesn’t matter that I am a committed atheist, simply giving a talk on interesting findings in modern cosmology; my name would become implicitly associated with an effort I find to be woefully misguided. There are plenty of conferences, with less objectionable sources of funding; I can give this one a pass.
But now he’s in favor of the new physics initiative, as he wrote on March 2 at Cosmic Variance:
A group of philosophers and scientists interested in cosmology have started a new project, funded by the Templeton Foundation, imaginatively titled the Rutgers Templeton Project on Philosophy of Cosmology. It’s a great group of people, led by David Albert and Barry Loewer, and I’m looking forward to interesting things from them. (Getting tiresome questions quickly out of the way: like the Foundational Questions Institute or the World Science Festival, I’m totally in favor of this project even though I’m not a big fan of the Templeton Foundation. This isn’t the place to talk about that, okay?)
Why isn’t this the place to talk about that if Carroll sees Templeton money as tainted?
I consider Sean a friend, though I’ve never met him. I’m a big fan of his website, and he’s helped me out many times with physics questions. So I’m not going to lambaste him here, but merely point out the inconsistency of his views (and I’ll send him this link). Why is it okay for physicists to take Templeton money sometimes, but not at other times—like the perfectly innocuous physics conference that Carroll didn’t attend? And, the real Big Question that nobody wants to answer is this:
How odious or woo-laden must an organization be before scientists should no longer take money from it?
Would Carroll approve of a physics project funded by the Catholic Church? How about the Southern Baptists? The Tea Party? The white-nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens?
These organizations won’t fund physics, of course, but that’s not the point. The point is whether taking money from organizations with woo- or hate-laden agendas is somehow okay. Sure, scientists who pocket Templeton grants can say, “At least the money I take won’t be used to promote religion,” but it does—it does by lending their names to the Templeton agenda, thereby giving it credibility.
As Sean said, “The point is that the entire purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between straightforward science and explicitly religious activity, making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big undertaking. It’s all about appearances.” And I agree with him 100%. I just wonder why, since that agenda is still in force, it’s now okay for physicists to take more than $5 million in Templeton funds.
h/t: Todd
Today’s Doonesbury is the last in Garry Trudeau’s parody of the Texas ultrasound-before-abortion law.
The Washington Post Entertainment section summarizes many of the week’s kerfuffles around the cartoon, including a video of Rachel Maddow’s reaction and an animated video by the Taiwanese news spoof site “Next Media Animation” (below) showing Trudeau as an action hero promulgating his views.
(Be sure to click on the Slate link to give Trudeau “click credit”.)
The video from Taiwan:
I’ve posted before on the black-footed cat, Felis nigripes, a rarely seen nocturnal hunter from southern Africa. Only 52 individuals are in captivity, and they don’t breed well. The solution is surrogate birth using a common housecat. As Nola.com reports, this was accomplished for the first time at the Audubon Center for Research In Endangered Species in Algiers, Louisiana, near New Orleans.
In my previous post I reported successful births using frozen embryos, fertilized in vitro, that were implanted into a different female black-footed cat. This time the surrogate mother was of a different species, but the birth went fine. According to Nola.com:
Domestic and African black-footed are different species of cat but members of the same group of felines. Their similar sizes and gestation lengths, Pope said, appear to be what made the pregnancy and birth physically possible even though the genetic makeup of the kitten differed from the mother.
“They’re considered to be of the same lineage,” he said. “Somewhere back a couple of million years ago, they’re descended from the same ancestor.”
Here’s a video of the kitten; notice how wild she is, even at this young age. Her behavior is undoubtedly genetically hard-wired, as she seems fearful and angry despite the fact that she was handled by humans and reared by a tame mother (see below):
The kitten, named Crystal, was born on Feb. 6 to domestic cat Amelie without any human assistance in the birth itself. It exhibits all the characteristics of a black-footed cat despite being nurtured by a domestic cat mother, Pope said.
“It’s not changed genetically in any way,” from other black-footed cats, he said. “It is totally a black-footed cat in behavior.”
Researchers handle the kitten almost every day as they study it, but she remains decidedly unadapted to human contact.
“It just wants you to leave it alone and stay away from it,” Pope said. “It gets along beautifully with the domestic cat mother. They don’t know, or do not care, that it’s a different species.”
Here’s mom and Crystal:
And here’s an adult black-footed cat:
The embryo was created in 2003, so they can remain viable for at least nine years. The next step in the process will be to produce cloned kitten by injecting nuclei from “regular” cells into fertilized eggs from housecats, which are easily obtained:
Solving the problem of using cloned embryos will be one of the next steps in the center’s long history of breakthrough genetic work, which includes a previous birth of another type of wild kitten to a domestic cat, the first wildcats born to cloned parents, the cloning of sand cats, caracal cats and African wildcats and even a kitten born with eyes, gums and a tongue that glow green under ultraviolet light. That showed it is possible to introduce a new gene to an animal without hurting it, which has medical ramifications for humans in the development of gene therapy. The center also works on reproduction programs for endangered birds: Mississippi sandhill cranes and whopping cranes.
Audubon Senior Scientist Martha Gomez said she has created cloned embryos using egg cells from domestic cats and replacing their nuclei with material from skin cells of African black-footed cats. Using skin cells potentially expands the methods of producing kittens even further because the cells are numerous and can be saved from animals that have died.
But none of the pregnancies have lasted, Gomez said. The arrival of Crystal narrows the field of possible causes by proving domestic cats can carry black-footed kittens. Gomez said she now can focus on fixing flaws in the genetic information of the cloned embryos.
h/t: Dom, Michael
This is from the “Overheard” section of the March issue of Freethought Today, the terrific publication of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It’s part of Joseph Roberts’ response, published in the Monroe (Louisiana) News Star, to a “prayer warrior’s” letter to the editor, “Atheist unswayed by God’s wrath”:
[Although] he thinks it a “profound question” asking, “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”, it’s actually quite cliché. To use language he might understand, it’s like asking “if God created us from dust, why is there still dust?”
Via Matthew Cobb and Ed Yong, here are a handful of (dead) queens of the Japanese hornet, Vespa mandarina, the largest wasp in the world. In a previous post on this species, I described how they attack and completely destroy bee colonies by decapitating the workers, and how the bees defend themselves by surrounding the wasp scouts, cooking the wasps to death by vibrating their bodies to generate heat. Both the wasps’ predation and the bees’ defense are impressive adaptations, ones that I used to begin the chapter on natural selection in Why Evolution is True. If you haven’t read my earlier post, do so, as it includes two amazing videos showing a wasp raid on a bee colony and the “bee ball” defense.
The photo was taken by Addicted2Hymenoptera 🙂, who apparently bought these queens from a commercial outfit, insectsale.com. (I don’t recommend buying such stuff.)
Look at the size of those things! Their stings kill several dozen Asians every year. (Of course it’s the workers, not the queens, who do most of the stinging.)
How often is my government going to embarrass me this year? Election season in America is always insane, and this year even more so as the Republicans try to out-conservative and out-religion each other in their desperate bid to gain the G.O.P. nomination for President. This has trickled down to Republican state legislators, whose activities would be funny if they weren’t so dreadful—especially with regard to women’s reproductive freedom. Here are two items called to my attention just yesterday.
1. Bill to force women to carry dead fetuses. In Georgia (of course), a Republican state legislator (of course) has introduced a bill that would force a woman to carry a fetus to term even if the fetus is dead. According to ThinkProgress:
State Rep. Terry England was speaking in favor of HB 954, which makes it illegal to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks even if the woman is known to be carrying a stillborn fetus or the baby is otherwise not expected to live to term.
He then recalled his time working on a farm:
“Life gives us many experiences…I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive. Delivering pigs, dead or alive. It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.”
Suggesting that if a cow or pig can give birth to a dead baby, then a woman should too was not enough for Rep. England though. He then delivered an anecdote to the chamber in which a young man who was apparently opposed to legislation outlawing chicken fighting said he would give up all of his chickens if the legislature simply took away women’s right to an abortion.
And recommending continuing a non-viable pregnancy is a violation of the standard of care, meaning the Georgia Representative would like to legislate medical malpractice standards despite the fact that England is not a doctor.
Here’s a video of England spewing his insanity at the Georgia legislature:
And that’s how Republicans like England see women: as cows—reproductive machines who must give birth, even to a dead baby, at the behest of their masters. Carrying a dead infant, of course, poses serious risks to a woman, including the deadly risk of infection from a decomposing fetus. England wants women to run that risk—for what?
2. Pennsylvania proposes mandated ultrasound for women seeking abortion, and, unlike the bill in Texas, would force the women to watch it. She does, however, have the option of closing her eyes! From HuffPo
During a discussion of a far-reaching mandatory ultrasound bill, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) on Wednesday dismissed off-handedly the insinuation that the measure goes too far, saying, “You just have to close your eyes.”
Corbett reaffirmed his support for the “Women’s Right to Know” Act, which would require doctors to perform an ultrasound on a patient, offer her two personalized copies of the image and play and describe fetal heartbeat in detail before she can have an abortion — “as long as it’s not obtrusive.”
Invasive transvaginal, as opposed to abdominal, ultrasounds are required in the first trimester; these would presumably include every woman who had been raped, producing a second violation:
Pennsylvania’s ultrasound bill, unlike the revised version passed in Virginia, does not specify a type of ultrasound, so the doctor will have to use an “interior” procedure for most first-trimester abortions in order to meet the requirements of the law.
And can you believe this inhuman requirement?
Even if the woman opts to “close [her] eyes,” as Corbett suggests, the doctor will have to turn the ultrasound image toward her face, give her two signed copies of the printed image, describe the number of heartbeats per minute and tell her if that’s normal or not for a fetus of that age. She then has to wait 24 hours and bring all the signed paperwork and both ultrasound images to her abortion doctor in order to have the procedure legally, and the doctor has to repeat to her the age of the fetus.
Here’s Corbett defending the bill and saying that women don’t have to watch the ultrasound:
It’s always the men proposing this stuff, isn’t it? I hope this kind of wickedness drives women away from the Republican party. I weep for my nation, and can only imagine how this looks to people from other countries.
Meanwhile, women—even Republican women—are starting to push back. Several bills have been introduced to regulate the reproductive “rights” of men. These include an Ohio Viagra bill, which, while clearly tongue in cheek, makes a deadly serious point: men wouldn’t want their reproduction regulated in the way they’re trying to do to women. Business and Health describes one:
The most recent gambit came late last week, when Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, a Cleveland Democrat, introduced a bill that would effectively regulate the sex lives of men. The legislation, Senate Bill 307, would require men seeking prescriptions for the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra to see a sex therapist receive a cardiac stress test and obtain a notarized affidavit signed by a sexual partner affirming the man’s impotency.
And, in Georgia, eight of the nine women senators (all Democrats, of course) walked out of the legislature protesting the Republican “war on women” (and that’s indeed what it is). You can see the video here.
h/t: Gayle, Sigmund
In a report written by Andrew Brown at the Guardian, Rowan Williams has just resigned as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and is going to academia:
The archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is to resign and return to academia as master of Magdalene college, Cambridge.
Williams, 61, will leave at the end of December in time to start his new role next January.
I’ll miss those amazing eyebrows—which reminded me of two huge, hairy caterpillars on his forehead—but not much else. He was one of those annoyingly obfuscatory liberal theologians. And I was surprised to see that he’s six months younger than I: the dude looks ancient!
