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.
Mr. Deity and Johnny discuss the “Occupy Heaven” movement. There’s a theologically sophisticated discussion of free will and theodicy beginning at 2:30. (The last 2.5 minutes are an appeal for viewers.)
h/t: Gregory
The Religion section of HuffPo is still carping on Dawkins for not quite remembering the exact title of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In a dire piece called “Religious self-definition a major issue in Dawkins’s poor debate performance“, Christopher Lane, an English professor at Northwestern University here in Chicago, calls out Dawkins not just for forgetfulness, but for arrogance.
Not that many people off-the-cuff would likely recall the full title of Darwin’s book, including its contentious subtitle: “or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” But it is surprising that Dawkins, of all people, would forget the part of the title that captures Darwin’s key argument, his emphasis on “natural selection.”. . .
. . . Even Dawkins’s supporters winced online over the awkward, unforgettable moment on digital radio, especially when he invoked “God” in struggling to remember the title to Darwin’s book. Granted not in a devout way, but it’s not quite the word you expect to hear from the man who gave us “The God Delusion” or who regularly calls believers “faith-heads.”
Oh for crying out loud; it’s as if he thinks Dawkins doesn’t understand natural selection (which was, by the way, the subject of most of his famous books). And is there anyone in the English-speaking world, atheist or not, who doesn’t use the word “god” in vain? Have you no sense of decency, Dr. Lane, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
You can see how that could quickly become contentious, not least with Dawkins seeming to set himself up as judge and juror over who gets to call themselves devout at all. . .
Umm. . . I don’t think Richard, Paula Kirby, and the Ipsos MORI polling organization were trying to determine who gets to call themselves devout. What they showed, indubitably, is that those who call themselves devout, or whom others call devout, don’t share many of the traits we associate with devotion.
Lane goes on:
While Dawkins wrestles with the fall-out from that fumble, he might venture to revisit Darwin’s “Autobiography,” including the famous passages where Darwin writes eloquently, with great humility, about his own blind spots. It’s also the place, we should note, where Darwin talks about the “beauty” of “New Testament morality,” even as he adds that “its perfection,” for him at least, “depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.”
“I cannot presume to throw the least light on such abstruse problems” as the “First Cause,” Darwin writes late in life, including whether the evolution of humanity was “the result of blind chance or necessity…. The mystery of the beginnings of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”
It’s all about the “humility” again, isn’t it? Well, if you read the God Delusion you’ll see that Dawkins doesn’t declare that there isn’t any god; he just assertions, correctly, that there is no evidence for one and that he’s a 6.5 on the 7 scale in which 7 corresponds to “I am absolutely certain there is no God.” That’s the proper amount of humility for a scientist who sees no evidence for sky fairies. And, by the way, “the mystery of the beginnings of all things” is, I think, soluble by us: Darwin had no inkling about The Big Bang or advances in cosmology to come.
Lane simply doesn’t understand how a scientist judges the “God hypothesis,” and yes, it is indeed an empirical hypothesis, so long as you believe in a God who either interacts with the world or did so in the past. The proper position is to reject that hypothesis as being unsupported by evidence—indeed, negated by counterevidence, like the existence of evil and the fact that the universe is headed for extinction.
Dawkins, of course, is far from content about others adopting such positions — he’s strongly implied that that they’re tantamount to “wishy-washy fence-sitting.” The problem is, he then assumes a position of certainty from which to judge and alas sneer at everyone else further along the continuum. It’s a deeply unattractive position, not least because it’s wholly unconducive to the aims of genuine secularism, for which liberty of belief, including for religious self-definition, is actually — and very properly — considered a key principle.
It is no more “fence-sitting” to have a provisional view of God than to have a provisional view of homeopathy, garden fairies, or astrology. And yes, secularism does mandate liberty of belief, but, crucially, insists that beliefs be supported by reason, and that no belief is exempt from criticism.
I’m not sure what Lane is on about here, except that he almost wholly neglects the certainty and dogma that afflicts the religious, who have no doubt that there is a God, that they know his nature, and that they will inflict their god-derived morals on the rest of the world. Why is Lane banging on about Dawkins’s supposed dogmatism when he’s fighting the ultimate dogmatism: the certainty that fairy tales are not only true, but that their lesson must be inflicted on the rest of us? The reason, of course, is that Lane has belief in belief.
Curiously, Lane touts a Guardian piece by Julian Baggini on the supposed dangers of creeping secularism in British life. It’s a pretty reasonable piece except for Baggini’s ending, which Lane cites:
But as Julian Baggini correctly pointed out in The Guardian, after Dawkins’s disastrous interview, “allowing the free expression and discussion of religion is as much a non-negotiable tenet of secularism as maintaining the neutrality of the core institutions of civil society. It may be unfair to criticise secularists for being ‘militant’ or ‘aggressive,’ but we are often ham-fisted and heavy-handed. If secularism has come to be seen as the enemy of the religious when it should be its best friend, then we secularists must share at least some of the blame.”
No, I don’t think we are often ham-fisted. Dawkins is firm but not ham-fisted (unless you see his inability to produce the full title of Darwin’s book as “ham-fisted!”). Most of the New Atheist leaders are not only eloquent, but effective. And yes, some of us may be “heavy-handed”, but what else should we be if we are trying to excise the cancer of faith from society? If there’s anything we should have learned by now, being deferential to the faithful has no effect on eliminating religion.
And why on earth should secularism be the best friend of religion? It is, and should be, its worst enemy. Religion and secularism can’t be friends any more than can rationalism and superstition, for that’s the difference between the “magisteria”. I’m wondering if Baggini misspoke here.
By all means let religion be freely discussed in the public sphere, but by no means should it be free from the kind of strong criticism it deserves. It is not only unfounded superstition, but superstition that has, in the main, bad consequences.
Via the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), we have good news and bad news on the creation/evolution front.
First the good news:
1. The House Education Committee of the state of New Hampshire has dismissed two ridiculous bills. They never stood a chance of passing, but show that the crazies are at work even in supposedly liberal New England. According to the Concord Monitor:
The first bill, sponsored by Rep. Gary Hopper of Weare, told teachers to present all scientific theories as works-in-progress that students should challenge. The second, introduced by Rep. Jerry Bergevin of Manchester, required teachers to present evolutionary scientists’ political and religious affiliations along with their scientific theories.
Thoughtcrime! You can read more about the bill at the NCSE’s website.
2. A bill passed by the Indiana Senate last year, which made it legal to teach creationism in science classes, was tabled by the other branch of the legislature, the Indiana House. According to the Indy Star:
A bill passed last month by the Indiana Senate that would have allowed schools to teach religious stories of creation along with the theory of evolution when discussing the origins of life in science class is dead.
House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, moved the bill to the rules committee, a procedural step that all but assures it will not make it to a vote this year.
Bosma said he made the move to avoid the possibility of a costly lawsuit for the state, given the likelihood of a court challenge from evolution advocates.
“I felt, given the fact that we have a U.S. Supreme Court case that appears to me to be directly on point, that this is a fight that really should not be fought at this point,” he said.
You can read the bill here. The relevant part is this:
Sec. 18. The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.
That was a loser from the outset; teaching creationism was ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987.
The bad news comes from Alabama, one of the most creationist states in the country (and, of course, one of the most religious), where a religious instruction bill, with apparent creationist intent, has been introduced in the House of Representatives. House Bill 133 (download at link) stipulates that public school students (in America, “public schools” are civic schools run by state governments) can receive credit for religious instruction, so long as that instruction doesn’t take part on school grounds, that the state doesn’t pay for transportation to class, that the school doesn’t sponsor it, and the school doesn’t require it. Such off-site religious instruction is legal in the U.S.
What is probably not legal is that the students would receive class credit for this religious instruction. That’s likely to be an illegal incursion of religion into the public schools—a violation of the First Amendment mandating separation of church and state. Further, part of the bill’s design—or at least how the faithful plan to use it—is to teach creationism as an alternative theory of evolution. (The NCSE notes that “The sponsor of the bill, Blaine Galliher [R-District 30], is on record as saying that the point of the bill is to balance the presentation of evolution in the public schools.”) And if that is shown in court to be part of the bill’s intent, it’s also illegal. Galliher messed up badly with that statement, which will come back to haunt him if a legal challenge is ever mounted.
The NCSE also reports that at least one legal expert on church-state matters, Douglas Laycock of the Univesity of Virginia (founded, of course, by church/state separationist Thomas Jefferson), pronounces the bill unconstitutional on its face:
Laycock argued, “the state should not be granting credit for instruction in religion, either from a believing perspective or from a non-believing perspective. The only state credit for religion courses should be objective study of what each of the great religions does or teaches.” It would be problematic for schools to offer credit for released time religious instruction, he explained: “We don’t want the government telling churches how to provide the religious instruction. … There’d be an entanglement problem with the school trying to regulate these courses, trying to tell the churches what kind of religion course they can offer.”
You may recall that Alabama, to its eternal shame, is the only state in the U.S. that requires an evolution disclaimer to be affixed to public-school biology textbooks in the form of a sticker. Here it is (I cringe to even reproduce this thing), courtesy of Al Stefanelli:
If you can’t read it, here’s Al’s transcript:
“The word “theory” has many meanings. Theories are defined as systematically organized knowledge, abstract reasoning, a speculative idea or plan, or a systematic statement of principles. Scientific theories are based on both observations of the natural world and assumptions about the natural world. They are always subject to change in view of new and confirmed observations.
Many scientific theories have been developed over time. The value of scientific work is not only the development of theories but also what is learned from the development process. The Alabama Course of Study: Science, includes many theories and studies of scientists work. The work of Copernicus, Newton and Einstein, to name a few, has provided a basis of our knowledge of the world today.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is a controversial theory that is included in this textbook. It is controversial because it states that natural selection provides the basis for the modern scientific explanation for the diversity of living things. Since natural selection has been observed to play a role in influencing small changes in a population, it is assumed that it produces large changes, even though this has not been directly observed. Because of it’s importance and implications, students should understand the nature of evolutionary theories. They should learn to make distinctions between the multiple meanings of evolution, to distinguish between observations and assumptions used to draw conclusions, and to wrestle with the unanswered questions and unresolved problems still faced by evolutionary theory.
There are many unanswered questions about the origin of life. With the explosion of new scientific knowledge in biochemical and molecular biology and exciting new fossil discoveries, Alabama students may be among those who use their understanding and skills to contribute to knowledge and to answer many unanswered questions. Instructional material associated with controversy should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”
It’s a constant battle in Alabama to stem the tsunami of creationism that threatens to inundate public-school science education. But while I’m bemoaning that, let me give plaudits to my biology colleagues at the University of Alabama who have to do damage control afflicted on their students in their earlier education. Faculty from several departments have banded together to create an Evolution Working Group, which, among other things hosts a seminar series on evolution; I gave a lecture for it in 2009. And the same group has created an evolutionary studies minor that offers interdisciplinary courses in philosophy, geology, anthropology, and biology.
The one fly in the ointment is that the University of Alabama’s (Tuscaloosa) Department of Biology doesn’t require evolution for biology majors. We do at Chicago (as do most good universities) and, given the central position of evolution in all biology, that’s simply sensible policy. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that all biology departments, if they want to be considered enlightened, should require evolution for their majors. It should not be merely an option. Alabama—get on the stick here!
h/t: Newman
I reported the other day on Achilles, the cat trapped in the ceiling of a Colorado airport. I’m pleased to add that he’s finally been freed. According to The Broomfield Enterprise:
Employees at the Denver Air Center, a ground services provider for private pilots at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, are reporting today that Achilles, the young Bengal cat that this week spent more than a day and half stuck in the business’s ceiling, has been safely coaxed out of hiding.
The feline, who according to his owner spent his third birthday Tuesday trapped in a suspended ceiling between the building’s first and second floors, was lured down from the space by Denver Air Center staff around 6:15 a.m.
Denver Air Customer Service Representative Luann Ezeonu, who did not work on Tuesday, said she came to work at about 5:30 a.m. today and immediately asked what was making the strange noises emanating from the ceiling. Forty-five minutes later Achilles was being herded into a cat carrier, safe and sound and ready to be returned to his owner.”
He’s a lovely Bengal; here’s his photo:
Of course this means that he wasn’t really Ceiling Cat after all, but Happy Cat, an incarnation of Ceiling Cat who took feline form and returned to Urf.
This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen published on HuffPo, and that’s saying a lot. On Tuesday, Richard Dawkins was on BBC Radio 4 discussing his new poll showing that England was not nearly as Christian a country as everyone supposed (I’ll have more on that soon). Debating the issue with Richard was Giles Fraser, former canon chancellor of St. Paul’s in London. Fraser took umbrage at one of the results of Dawkins’s poll, which showed that only 35% of Christians could identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament (39% didn’t know).
By way of riposte, Fraser asked Dawkins to recite the full title of Darwin’s Origin. Really, how many of us know that long title by heart? HuffPo reports:
Dawkins was pretty close; the book’s full title is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”
But his failure to summon the name on command has led a number of British media outlets to label the appearance as “deeply embarrassing” for Dawkins and claim “the High Priest of Darwinism doesn’t know the title of his own secular bible.”
But this is the worst part. First, HuffPo reports what Richard said:
“‘On The Origin Of Species’ … Uh. With, Oh God. ‘On The Origin Of Species.’ There is a subtitle with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”
He named the deity! Anyway, the HuffPo (the “Religion” section, of course) leaped on that and called its report—wait for it:
“Richard Dawkins, famous atheist, appeals to God on radio program.”
All I can say to that is, “Jesus H. Christ, that’s pathetic!”
Speaking of newly found herps, an article by Frank Glow et al. in the latest PLoS One describes what may be the world’s smallest reptiles—indeed, among the world’s smallest amniotes. They’re four species of leaf chameleons in the genus Brookesia from northern Madagascar. Here they are, and note that the scale bar is 5 mm—about 0.2 inch! These are adults, and B. micra adults are about 15-27 mm long: about 0.6-1 inch long! That’s a small lizard!
Here’s a baby on a matchstick from the BBC website, which gives more information but doesn’t identify the species. Cute, eh?
And, as is often the case in animals, the diagnostic traits involve the shape of male genitalia, perhaps because those genitals evolve rapidly by sexual selection:
“In general, the hemipenes found in the B. minima group are remarkably dissimilar among species.”
Here’s a figure of the hemipenes (the bifurcated penis of many reptiles):
In other news, the Torygraph has reported that goats can develop different accents when moved to new social groups, so that their bleats come to resemble that of their companions, a form of cultural “inheritance”. There also appears to be a genetic component to among-family differences in bleats. I haven’t read the paper, which was published in Animal Behaviour.
Finally, Larry, the official Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street (a rescue cat), has celebrated his first year in residence with a party. Details and photos are at the Prime Minister’s official website.
h/t: David and a couple of others whose emails I’ve lost.
I am quite proud that I have one species of animal named after me: Atelopus coynei, a small “harlequin frog” that was first caught (by me, when I was a student) in the forests of western Ecuador. It was formally described by my best friend in graduate school, the polymath Ken Miyata (co-author of Tropical Nature), who, tragically, was killed in a fishing accident in 1983. The story of Ken, how he came to name the frog after me, and other details of these beautiful creatures (I include Ken in that category), are described here, here, and here.
For years Atelopus coynei has been thought to be extinct: it’s a denizen of the wet forests of western Ecuador, which are being lost to human depredation at an alarming rate; and of course frogs worldwide are being decimated by a chytrid fungus. A. coynei has not, in fact, been seen since 1984.
Until a week ago.
I found out yesterday that it’s STILL ALIVE! Here’s a short email I received last night.
I would like to inform you about my observation of an individual of “Atelopus coynei” on February 7, 2012 at Chinambi, Carchi, Ecuador. Attached are 2 photographs. The species is listed as Critically Endangered.
Best regards,
Dr. Andreas Kay, Cotacachi, Ecuador
Dr. Kay enclosed two photographs he took of the living frog, which are only the second and third pictures that have been made. It’s far prettier than the pickled type specimen at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which lost its color (click to enlarge to full glory):
Perhaps I’m too steeped in theology, but I sense a metaphor here: like the memory of my erstwhile best pal, the frog is still with us.
I’m sure that most of us think that marine fish evolved in the sea, but a new paper by Greta Vega and John Wiens in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (B) says that that just ain’t so. The vast majority of them evolved from ancestors who lived in fresh water (themselves derived from marine ancestors) and then re-invaded the sea—just as marine mammals evolved from terrestrial mammals whose distant ancestors were aquatic.
As Vega and Wiens point out, compared to the land, the sea is biologically depauperate: marine habitat covers 70% of the Earth’s surface but contains only 15-25% of Earth’s species. It gets worse if you count “habitable space”: since the ocean is three-dimensional, Vega and Wiens claim that it contains “90-99% of the volume of the habitable biosphere.”
Why this relative lack of marine species compared to those on land (or freshwater)? A number of hypotheses have been proposed, including the water habitat itself (this doesn’t stand up because freshwater fish are far more diverse per unit area than marine fish), and a greater net primary productivity (NPP: the amount of atmospheric carbon that finds its way into plants) in terrestrial than marine habitats. (NPP is the base of the biological food pyramid.) But the difference in NPP between terrestrial and marine habitats is not very large, and freshwater NPP is by far the lowest despite having more fish diversity than marine habitats.
My own guess, which is also that of Vega and Wiens, is that geographic barriers, which are the first step in most speciation events, are simply less common, or arise less frequently, in open water than in terrestrial habitats (riverine fish, of course, are geographically isolated in river systems). It’s telling that the greatest diversity in the ocean is found in the Indo-Pacific, which Vega and Wiens describe as “geographically complex,” limiting dispersal and facilitating the formation of new species.
Vega and Wiens try to resolve this issue by doing a DNA-based phylogeny of the actinopterygians (the ray-finned fish, so called because of the bony struts in their fins). Ray-finned fish are by far the most numerous of all “fish”—about 96% of them. What they found was surprising: here’s the phylogeny of different actinopterygian groups and the number of species in each group , with the colors indicating where they live (red is freshwater, blue marine, and mixed colors indicating that members of the group occupy both habitats. Notice that the three “basal groups”, Polypteriformes, Chondrostei, and Amiiformes, are all exclusively freshwater (click to enlarge):
The completely freshwater nature of the basal (and hence oldest) actinopterygians indicates that all the others came from freshwater ancestors. And that means that every ray-finned fish in the sea derived from freshwater species.
We know from the fossil record the ancestor of all fish was marine, so what has happened here is that the sea is populated with things that came from freshwater, but whose ancestors themselves originally came from the sea. I’m not sure whether actinopyterygians themselves evolved in the sea (Vega and Wiens suggest no, but one expert I consulted said they probably did), but if the answer is “no” it probably means that there was an extinction event that wiped out marine actinopterygians and perhaps other groups as well. Then freshwater actinopterygians re-invaded the empty sea and repopulated it.
Vega and Wiens speculate that such an extinction event, whatever groups it decimated, helps account for the lack of marine biodiversity, though they don’t present independent evidence for such an event. It may just be that the equilibrium number of all species in the ocean is lower because they are formed less frequently due to the lack of geographic barriers. If extinction rates are comparable in terrestrial and marine environments, but speciation rates are lower in marine habitats, then the equilibrium number of species will also be lower in the sea.
This is all speculation, but what does seem solid from the Vega and Wiens paper is that marine ray-finned fish, which to an approximation means all marine fish, derive from ancestors that were freshwater. And that’s surprising.
You may wonder what fish are in those three freshwater “basal” groups. Here’s an example of each.
From the order Polypteriformes, or bichirs, a group of bizarre fish with primitive traits (note the subdivided dorsal fin, unique in this group):
From the subclass (I think it’s a subclass!) Chondrostei, a chinese paddlefish:
And the bowfin, the sole living species in the order Amiiformes:
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Vega, G. C. and J. J. Wiens. 2012. Why are there so few fish in the sea? Proc Roy. Soc. Lond. B: online, doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.0075
