Readers’ photos: a doomed caterpillar

February 21, 2012 • 9:22 am

Reader André Schuiteman, who works at Kew Botanical Gardens and has previously contributed biology photos and stories here, sends the following pictures and a tale about death in nature:

On December 2010, during a brief excursion to Cuc Phuong National Park in Vietnam, about 80 km south of Hanoi, I came across the most unusual caterpillar I had ever seen. [He now thinks it’s a species of Orgyia, a tussock moth, or something closely related.] As shown in the photographs, it sported a luxuriant and colourful coat of long and short hairs, partly arranged in tufts, some resembling miniature shaving brushes, others bouquets of white eyelashes. It was sitting on a leaf of which it had evidently eaten quite a bit. As I was admiring the creature, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one who had taken an interest. A rather ordinary-looking fly was walking around it and clearly seemed to disturb the caterpillar, which tried to crawl away. Suddenly the fly curved its abdomen forward under its body, walked up to the rear end of the caterpillar and, raising itself on its hind legs, inserted its abdomen in the victim’s fur. I write ‘victim’, as there can be little doubt that this was one of those parasitic flies that lay their eggs on caterpillars.

All this took place slightly above eye-level, which made it awkward to photograph. I happened to have my camera with macro-lens ready, but the flash was still in the bag. As I didn’t want to lose an opportunity, I photographed it with natural light, which explains the shallow depth of field. Unfortunately, the photo of the moment of oviposition is highly unsharp because either the leaf or I moved too much.

As I walked on I felt sorry for the beautiful caterpillar, knowing that it almost certainly was going to die an extremely unpleasant death (slowly being eaten alive by a maggot). Should I have interfered? This moral dilemma occupied me for a while. Nature is wonderful, but full of horrors, most of which go unnoticed.

To bring up a bit of historical (and religious) context here, we have the famous quote from Darwin written in a letter to American botanist Asa Gray on May 22, 1860, using observations like the above as evidence against a beneficent God:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

Ichneumonids are not flies, but wasps (mostly parasitic ones) in the order Hymenoptera, along with bees and other more familiar wasps.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Take 2

February 21, 2012 • 5:41 am

I haven’t listened a lot to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but only for lack of time and opportunity. By all accounts he’s a superb communicator of science. I wasn’t as enthused as many about his Beyond Belief talk that I posted yesterday (the delivery was a bit uneven), but his Natural History article mirroring it was very good.

As you’ll recall, that talk came down pretty hard on faith, not only for being used as an excuse for not doing science, but also for being something that’s naturally abandoned by scientists—especially good ones.  In the talk he says this:

It’s a deeper challenge than simply educating the public; it’s deeper.  As you know, by the books written by our scientific colleagues, that do take these deeply resonant and charitable positions towards their religious beliefs, maybe the real question here— let me back up for a moment. You know, we’ve all seen the data: 40%. . . there’s 90% of the American public believes in a personal god that responds to their prayers, and then you ask: what is that percentage for scientists? Averaged over all disciplines, it’s about 40%. And then you say: how about the elite scientists—members of the National Academy of Sciences?

An article on those data, recently in Nature, it said: 85% of the National Academy reject a personal god. And then they compare it to 90% of the public. You know, that’s not the story there.  They missed the story! What that article should have said is: “How come this number isn’t zero?” That‘s the story!

So my esteemed colleague here. . .. .[appears to forget Krauss’s name]. . Professor Krauss here, says that all we have to do is make a scientifically literate public. Well when you do, how can they do better than the scientists themselves in their percentages of who’s religious and who isn’t? That’s kind of unrealistic, I think. So there’s something else going on that nobody seems to be talking about: that as you become more scientific, yes, the religiosity drops off, but it asymptotes.  It asymptotes not at zero, it asymptotes at some other level; so they should be the subject of everybody’s investigation—not the public.

Now this isn’t completely clear, but I think the message is that it’s almost incomprehensible that a brilliant scientist should accept a personal God, and we need to find out why 15% of them do (I think that figure is really about 2%). There’s also the suggestion that “making a scientifically literate public” won’t work in dispelling religion.  I also think, given the tenor of deGrasse’s talk (about how religion has been used historically to “stop science” by positing gods of the gaps), that he sees faith as an impediment in public acceptance of science.  But I may be projecting here.

Two readers have since mentioned other, more accommodationist talks that deGrasse has given since this one.  They appear to give a different take on the religion/science issue.

In the talk below, originally posted at Big Think, Tyson posits that religion doesn’t have an issue with science because most American’s “fully embrace science.” He says there’s been a “happy coexistence [between science and religion] for centuries.” He rightly decries the incursion of fundamentalist science into schools, and now says that the 40% of American scientists who are religious shows that there is no necessary connection between being a scientist and being an atheist.  Curiously, he doesn’t mention the 85% of National Academy members who are nonbelievers. Tyson asserts that the disparity in religiosity between scientists and the American public misleadingly paints their differences as a “built-in conflict.”

First, of all, I don’t agree that most Americans “fully embrace science.”  That’s certainly not true as far as my own field, evolution, is concerned.  Only 16% of Americans embrace the scientific view of evolution as a mindless, materialistic process, one that takes place without divine guidance. 40% of Americans (not a “tiny minority,” as implied in the talk) accept a fully Biblical view of creationism ex nihilo by God, and 38% believe in a God-guided process of theistic evolution. Americans are scientifically illiterate in many other ways, with that scientific illiteracy highly correlated with religious belief. And don’t forget the global-warming deniers and the antiscience Republicans.

Second: the message of the talk above. I realize that deGrasse tailors his message to his audience, as several readers pointed out yesterday,  but this one above, compared with the talk I posted yesterday, seems more than just a difference in emphasis: it’s a difference in what conclusions you draw from the data. That means that it’s Ecklundish, and a bit too flip-floppy for my taste. In the first talk he sees faith as an impediment to science; in the second he sees the two as either partners or, at the least, not in conflict.

Now you may excuse Tyson by saying he’s changed his mind and become less militant, and perhaps that’s the case. But others may say that he simply tells different audiences different things.  And that’s okay, too: when I talk about the evidence for evolution, and my book, I don’t tend to drag in religion, for that’s a separate issue (although, I think, it’s the root cause of creationism). But consider this.  Tyson’s talk that I posted yesterday could easily have been given by Richard Dawkins, at least in terms of the message about religion. If Dawkins gave the talk shown above, though, wouldn’t we be concerned about his change of message? And if we would be, why is it okay for DeGrasse to flip-flop and Dawkins not?

Here’s another video in which Tyson talks about religion and science:

“I personally don’t care what people want to believe—this country was founded on religious freedoms. . . I don’t have any issue what you do in the church, but I’m gonna be up in your face if you’re gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me that they gotta teach what you teach in your Sunday school, because that’s when we’re gonna fight.”

Bravo about fighting creationism! But where Tyson and I differ here is that I do care what people want to believe. I do care what they “do in the church”: I care if those churches treat women as second-class citizens, or tell the faithful that homosexuality is a sin, or teach lies to children.  I do care about the pernicious and divisive doctrines of Islam.

And most of all I care what people do in the church because it spills over not just into the science classroom, but into society as a whole.  Just read Sean Faircloth’s book, The Attack of the Theocrats, and you’ll see the many insidious ways that faith has insinuated itself into our government, and the special exemptions it enjoys not just from criticism, but from taxation.  If you think that the biggest problem of religion in America is creationism in the school classroom, think again. Read about how religious day-care centers are exempt from many of the regulations that secular centers have: they don’t even have to be inspected in many states! Read about the policies that many states have about not prosecuting parents who harm their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds only.  How does one weigh creationism in schools against the death of even a single child?

Of course I agree that we can’t force Americans (or anyone else) what to believe, and we should never prevent them from worshipping or professing their faith.  But the dangers of religion run far deeper than simply its incursion into the science classroom.  It always bothers me when folks like Tyson, or organizations like the National Center for Science Education, argue that if people profess belief in evolution, then everything becomes all right.  It’s not all right, because religion is far more pernicious than simple creationism. First, it’s the cause of creationism, and creationism won’t disappear until religion does.  Second, how do you weigh children learning creationism against children being terrorized for life by what they’re taught in a Catholic church?  Which one is worse? And there are all the other dangers of faith recounted in Faircloth’s book and those of the Four Horsemen.

The elephant in the room is religion, and Biblical views in science classrooms are its droppings. You won’t eliminate the droppings until you get rid of the elephant.

Finally, Tyson claims that our attack on religiously-based “bad science” in public schools should rest not on its religious roots, but simply on the fact that it’s bad science.  He says “it’s not an issue of separation of church and state.”  To a point I agree: we can dismiss creationism solely because it’s bad science, and it shouldn’t be taught on that basis alone. But we can’t legislate creationism out of science classrooms without citing the First Amendment, and, in fact, that’s how creationism has always been expelled from public schools in the Federal courts.  if we’re going to expunge creationism from schools, going after it as cases of teachers pushing “bad science” would involve a painful, step-by-step review of each teacher’s behavior, and then the onerous process of correcting or firing that teacher.  But going after creationism as an incursion of religion into the public sphere—a perfectly proper and justified thing to do—eliminates the problem in one swipe.  No creationism can be taught, anywhere.

By “problem”, I mean, of course, the legality of teaching creationist views (including intelligent design) in schools.  The bigger problem remains: religion, the source of creationism.  So even if you don’t care about the other inimical (and more serious) side effects of religion, ignoring it as the source of creationism is a blinkered view.  I aver that there’s precious little evidence for the accommodationist claim that one can bring religious people to science by telling them that their religious beliefs are compatible with science.

While I applaud Tyson for getting people to learn about science, and to become excited about it, I disagree with his strategy—at least the strategy suggested in the two videos above.  But to each his own.

Kitteh contest: Dirk, Arthur, and (now) Gordon

February 21, 2012 • 4:05 am

Reader Peter Landers first sent me a pair of black and white cats named, obviously well cared for and quite comfortable. They’re also named after Douglas Adams characters:

These are my roommates Dirk and Arthur, helping on laundry day. My previous cat died far too young and the apartment felt empty without kitties, so I went on the hunt and found these two brothers in need of a home. Arthur spent the first couple of weeks quite sad, it was wonderful to see how good Dirk was at snuggling in and making everything better. Even now, two years later, they’re as inseparable as ever. They’re the gentlest cats I’ve ever met, and my best roommates ever!


Writing to Peter to let him know his cats were on deck, I found that he’d adopted yet another black-and-whitie:

I might as well mention that as of two weeks ago I’ve added a third kitteh to the family. This little guy is a tailless cat (well, about a 1″ stubby tail–natural, not due to surgery or injury) who was found trapped in a storeroom above my mother’s workplace. He had apparently been up there for quite a while and he hadn’t eaten in that time; there was nothing to him. Mom got him out and fed him, but when I stopped by for a visit he pretty much adopted me at first sight. There was no response from any former owner to our announcements on the radio or in the paper, so I thought it would be best to hang onto him, having taken care of him while we waited. As of now, he’s named Gordon (got to keep with the Douglas Adams naming convention at this stage), he’s put on some weight, and he’s getting along very well indeed with Arthur and Dirk. The attached picture is from his first day out of the shop; he’s still looking a bit scruffy and skinny. But since then he’s gotten sleek and sturdy again. He still really needs his hugs whenever I come home, though. And he’s every bit as gentle as the others, who accepted him immediately.

Meowhaus

February 20, 2012 • 1:54 pm

According to Architizer Blog, a Seattle firm called Modernist Cat has designed a series of multi-purpose cat dens for stylish ailurophiles.

The description from the Modernist Cat website:

Modernist Cat is a pet furniture design studio based in Seattle, Washington. Our work brings the Mid-Century Modern aesthetic into the realm of litter box covers and dual-purpose pet furniture.

All of our pieces can function as a litter box cover, beautiful hideaway, play area, or den. Handcrafted from EuroPly with a hardwood veneer, each item is made to order and built to last.

Modernist Cat is committed to using eco-friendly materials in order to build products that minimize our environmental impact. For example, our plywood is FSC certified and made with formaldehyde free glue. It is finished using a UV curing process that eliminates all volatile organic compounds (VOC’s). We ship using recycled packing materials whenever possible.

Modernist Cat is the hard work of Seattle artist Crystal Gregory with modest help from her husband, their two Canadian Hairless cats, Jackson & Elliott, and their two Italian Greyhounds, Lusi & Linus.

Here’s one; be prepared to fork out $500-$900 to have your cat living in the “less is moar” style:


Cat doesn’t look too happy; would prefer San Francisco Victorian.

h/t: John Danley

Neil deGrasse Tyson goes all militant

February 20, 2012 • 11:45 am

Here’s Neil deGrasse Tyson at the 2006 “Beyond Belief” meeting. Tyson tends to keep a low profile about atheism, apparently preferring to be known for science communication rather than attacks on faith, but make no mistake about it—he’s an unbeliever.

In this 39-minute video, he makes no bones about his claim that religion is a “science stopper,” using examples from physics and astronomy that he sees as the precursors to the modern intelligent-design movement’s god-of-the-gaps arguments.  You’ll be familiar with some of his examples, but perhaps not with Tyson’s “militancy.” And you’ll learn a lot of good stuff from the history of physics.

The “strident” part starts at 10:30, when Tyson contrasts the pervasive religiosity of the American public with the pervasive atheism of scientists, showing that more than 90% of the former believe in God but that just 15% of members of the National Academy of Sciences accept the notion of a personal God (actually, I think the figure is closer to 2%).  Referring to the latter figure, though, Tyson says that everyone missed the big story about this disparity: why isn’t the percentage of scientist-believers zero?  (He mentions this later in the talk, too.) Tyson clearly thinks that science promotes unbelief.

I haven’t seen him that assertive about religion since, but then he usually talks to the public, not to an audience of skeptics and secularists.

Note: if the video below doesn’t work, go here.

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For a related discussion, see Tyson’s article”The perimeter of ignorance” from Natural History in 2005.

h/t: Grania Spingies

More “sophisticated” theology: John Polkinghorne proves that the Resurrection happened

February 20, 2012 • 6:31 am

The more I read “sophisticated” theology—and I’m reading the sort that tries to reconcile science and faith—the more convinced I am that it’s only superstition gussied up in academic prose and swathed in blankets of self-deception.  Right now I’m “into” (if one can use that word) John Polkinghorne.  Polkinghorne, now 82, was trained as a physicist, worked at Cambridge University, and then left his professorship to study for the Anglican priesthood.  He returned to Cambridge and became master of Queens College from 1989-1996.

He’s written many books, some on physics but most on the reconciliation of science and faith. Along the way he’s acquired a slew of honors, not only becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, but also garnering a knighthood (I suppose he’s called Sir Reverend John Polkinghorne or whatever).  And, inevitably, he won the Templeton Prize—ten years ago.

As Wikipedia notes:

Nancy Frankenberry, Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, has described Polkinghorne as the finest British theologian/scientist of our time, citing his work on the possible relationship between chaos theory and natural theology. Owen Gingerich, an astronomer and former Harvard professor, has called him a leading voice on the relationship between science and religion.. . the novelist Simon Ings, writing in the New Scientist, said Polkinghorne’s argument for the proposition that God is real is cogent and his evidence elegant.

But Wikipedia also quotes some detractors, including Richard Dawkins and Anthony Grayling, whose scathing review of Polkinghorne’s book Questions of Truth (co-written with Nicholas Beale) can be read and enjoyed at The New Humanist.

If anyone is considered a “sophisticated” theologian in the realm of science and faith, then, it must be Polkinghorne.  So read him I must, and, unfortunately, I did.

I’ve just polished off Polkinghorne’s short book Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (2011, Yale University Press), and didn’t find it nourishing fodder.  While it’s better written than similar books by Alvin Plantinga and John Haught (the other famous reconcilers of science and faith), Polkinghorne’s arguments are no better. Indeed, some of them are the same. I was astounded, for instance, to see Polkinghorne making the “Argument from Hot Beverages” to adduce evidence for God. That argument, also used by John Haught, supposedly shows the existence of an ultimate truth behind the naturalistic truths of science (“why tea?”:  science says the kettle is boiling because the water is being heated, faith tells us that that the ultimate purpose is because you want a cup of tea. Ergo Jesus.)  Other arguments for God, such as the fine-tuning of physical constants, the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”, and the fact that the universe is comprehensible through human rationality, are also familiar.

Where Polkinghorne differs from some other scientist/theologians is in his explicit defense of the use of empiricism (rather than simply revelation) to argue for God, and in his defense of miracles.  Not all miracles—Genesis, for example, is to be taken as metaphor—but certainly the crucial miracles of the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus.

He’s clear in his belief that both science and faith seek real truths about the universe:

The second mistake is about religion. The question of truth is as central to its concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusionary exercise in comforting fantasy.

Both science and religion are part of the great human quest for truthful understanding. . . . The claim will be that both are seeking truth through the attainment of well-motivated beliefs. (p. 2).

At least he’s explicit about this, and about the fact that that truth can be attained through more than simple revelation.  Polkinghorne does admit that faith doesn’t give one the same kind of empirical certainties as does science, but gives us something equivalent: “well-motivated beliefs.”  He uses those words over and over again, but I’m not sure what they mean.  For one person’s motivation is different from another’s, and “motivation” to believe in God may make some believers more credulous than others.

At any rate, there is the usual denigration of science, dragging it down to the level of faith:

Above all, science requires commitment to the basic act of faith that there is a deep rational order in the world awaiting discovery, and that there is a sufficient degree of uniform consistency in the working of the universe to permit successful argument by induction as a means to discover aspects of that order, despite the inevitably limited and particular character of the experience that motivates the belief. . . Science yields well-motivated beliefs, but it does not deliver complete and absolute certainty about them. (pp. 9-11).

As if religion does! Note Polkinghorne’s equation of scientific “truth” with the “well-motivated beliefs” of faith.

One finds in this book many of the tropes familiar from other science-friendly theologians, who may indeed have borrowed the tropes from Reverend Sir John.  There’s the customary denigration of scientism (“the metaphysical belief that science tells us all that can be known or is worth knowing”), the assertion that science and faith are pals because many early scientists were religious (this is one of the stupidest arguments these people make: everyone was religious back then!), in the the hand of God visible in the emergent properties of matter and consciousness, in the fact that we can understand the universe, especially through mathematics (the implication is that God made it comprehensible for us), and in the fact that humans have a sense of morality and aesthetics, which is supposedly not comprehensible if we are merely evolved creatures. (This use of “the Moral Law” as evidence for God is also a favorite ploy of Francis Collins).

But, like all of these theologians, Polkinghorne is desperate to find justification for his beliefs—Christian ones in his case.  Where religion really differs from science is in how it approaches the search for truth.  In science, we’re always open (or should be, at least) to having our pet theories overturned; indeed, the good scientist deliberately looks for holes in her data or experiments. That’s what the investigators at CERN did when they found what seemed to be faster-than-light neutrinos.  Religion, on the other hand, begins with certain core beliefs that must be buttressed, and then simply looks for data supporting them.  If you can’t find that data, you make stuff up.  Thus, while it’s easy to toss Genesis under the bus, for evolution has disproved that story, the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, as one-off miracles, are simply not negotiable.

And, indeed, Polkinghorne believes in those particular miracles, and in miracles in general.  He argues that theologians like him understand miracles as

“signs”, that is to say, events that manifest with specific clarity some particular aspect of the divine will and nature that is normally veiled from clear sight. Miracles are not arbitrary divine actions but events of deep disclosure.” (p. 95)

Polkinghorne does not tell us which miracles are real and which are merely stories, though it’s clear that the creation of humans ex nihilo was just a fable.  I want to concentrate on one miracle for which Polkinghorne says we do have evidence: the Resurrection of Christ.  For Polkinghorne this must be true, for if it isn’t, all of Christianity collapses in a heap.  So he goes about finding “evidence” for it.  Of course, such evidence is thin on the ground, for we have only the accounts of the gospels, but Polkinghorne wades in.

What is his evidence? According to Polkinghorne, there are two bits of evidence from the Gospels that convince him of the resurrection.

One line of evidence is the sequence of appearance stories recounting how the risen Christ met with his disciples. (p. 121)

Polkinghorne then cites Paul’s letter to the Corinthians as testimony for the Resurrection.

But what about the conflicting accounts of the resurrection in the different gospel?  These are many, and very well known; see here for a handy chart of the contradictions. Polkinghorne notes some discrepancies, but sweeps them away in favor of his two lines of evidence.

At first sight it might seem that we are faced with a bewildering confusion, consisting of a variety of stories, some set in Jerusalem and some in Galilee. Could this variety not simply reflect the fact that we are presented with a bunch of made-up tales, originating in the pious imaginations of a number of different communities? (p. 122).

Well, given that Biblical scholarship has shown us that the Bible is a farrago of made-up tales, perhaps the parsimonious answer here is “yes.”  But Polkinghorne dissents (my emphasis in the following):

I do not think so, for there is a recurrent theme, hardly likely to have arisen with such consistency from a gaggle of independent sources, namely that it was initially difficult to recognize the risen Christ. For example, Mary Magdalene took him to be the gardener (John 20:15), the couple on the road to Emmaus only recognised at the end of the journey who their companion had been (Luke 24:31); Matthew even tells us that it was on a Galilean hillside ‘some doubted’ who it was (28:17). It seems to me that this unexpected feature is more likely to be a historical reminiscence of the character of actual encounters, rather than a fortuitous coincidence in a set of independent confabulations. (pp. 122-123).

First of all, who ever said that the confabulations were independent? The gospels clearly borrowed from each other, as well as drawing from verbal accounts circulating at the time.  But what we see in the above is a man in the naked act of fooling himself—a man willing to ignore all the contradictions between the different accounts of the Resurrection to find truth in one or two things that are consistent. He is clearly desperate to show that the Resurrection actually happened.

Oh, but there’s one more consistency that heartens Polkinghorne.  This one I can’t believe (my emphasis again):

The second line of evidence is the story of the empty tomb, testified to in all four Gospels, with only minor variations of detail between the accounts. . .

. . . the most persuasive argument in favour of the authenticity of the empty tomb story is that it is women who make the discovery. In the ancient world, women were not considered to be capable of being reliable witnesses in a court of law and anyone making up a tale would surely have assigned the central role to men. (p. 123).

Indeed!  The very fact that a tale seems improbable makes it more believable!  And despite all the contradictions of the accounts in the four gospels, this is the one on which Polkinghorne seizes to show that the tale is true.  He doesn’t consider the fact that maybe somebody making up the story might have the empty-tomb finders be women because the women were Jesus’s relatives and chief mourners, including his mother, his aunt, and Mary Magdalene.

But there are contradictions even about who found the empty tomb, and what happened thereafter.  In Luke, the empty tomb is found by unnamed women who came from Galilee with Jesus, in Matthew and Mark the empty tomb is found by Mary and Mary Magdalene, while in John the tomb is found by Mary Magdalene alone. And in Luke it is the “women from Galilee” who prepare Jesus’s body with “spices and ointments,” while in the Gospel of John the body is prepared by men: Joseph and Nicodemus. Polkinghorne doesn’t mention these disparities.

It is the willingness to overlook contradictory evidence that distinguishes theology from science, and here we have a prime example. In his fervor to prove the central tenet of Christianity, which he must do if his faith is to have any credibility, Polkinghorne ignores all the confabulations of the gospel authors to seize on two elements of the story that are consistent, pretending that this consistency is evidence for the truth of a tale.  But the stories aren’t independent, and aren’t even consistent in the ways Polkinghorne maintains.

In trying to show a comity between faith and science, and in asserting that they use related methods of empirical investigation to verify their respective “truths”, Polkinghorne unwittingly shows us the real difference between these “magisteria.”  He ignores inconvenient inconsistencies in the account of the gospels, the non-independence of those gospels, and weaknesses in his own arguments.  (This, by the way, is characteristic of the rest of his book.)  His argument is not scientific, but tendentious, for he knows from the outset what truth he must arrive at, and is willing to accept or fabricate anything to support that truth. Even sophisticated theologians who argue for a harmony and complementarity of science and faith, then, inadvertently demonstrate that the areas are incompatible.


And now the Daily Mail . . .

February 19, 2012 • 9:32 am

The baying of the yellow hounds of journalism continues at other papers, with the Mail Online breathlessly reporting: “Revealed: how atheist Richard Dawkins’ family fortune came from the slave trade.” Note the use of the descriptive “atheist” instead of “biologist,” and the article’s complete neglect of the fact that the vast bulk of Richard’s “wealth” came from his writings.  The article’s claims are lifted directly from Adam Lusher’s Telegraph article, with the addition of these three lovely illustrations:

This is the journalistic equivalent of the racks and thumbscrews of the Inquisition.  There is no explanation other than Dawkins’s criticism of religion.  Will the Guardian join the pack?

I’d like to point out that the ancestors of Queen Elizabeth and her royal relatives engaged in torture, poisoning, and beheading of wives who didn’t produce sons.  Shall we then see a headline like “Revealed: Queen’s ancestors were murderous, misogynistic thugs”?