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.
There are no convincing proofs of God, but here, thanks to reader Lauri Tormä, we have a good Cosmological Argument for Ceiling Cat. It’s based on a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and clearly shows the figure of Ceiling Cat punching out the lights of a teddy bear.
Ad astra per aspera! (For more proofs of Ceiling Cat, go here).
The paradigmatic example of “natural selection in action” is the case of industrial melanism in the peppered moth, Biston betularia (see the Wikipedia article for a good summary). Briefly, the moth has several genetic forms, the most famous being the “typica” or white form, which is ivory colored with peppery black spots:
And the carbonaria form, which is pure black.
These forms differ by mutations at a single gene, with the carbonaria allele (gene form) dominant over the typica form. (That is, if you carry one typica allele and one carbonaria allele, you’re a black moth.)
During industrialization in 19th-century England, the black form increased from very low frequencies to nearly 100% in some locations, with the most polluted woods having the highest frequency of the black form. In unpolluted woods, as in the picture below, moths were said to rest on the light-colored trunks, and the typica form was more camouflaged from bird predators (note that both types of moths are in the picture).
When woods became polluted during industrialization, the trees got darkened from both soot deposition and the acid-rain-induced death of light-colored lichens. The typica moths, previously camouflaged, were now conspicuous, while the carbonaria ones were more camouflaged. Differential bird predation based on camouflage was said to explain why the black allele reached such high frequencies, especially in industrial areas. And this, of course, was natural selection, which is defined as repeatable genetic change based on differential reproduction/survival of alleles.
After pollution-control laws were passed in the 1950s, the typica form again began to increase in frequency, presumably because the woods returned to their more pristine condition, giving the typica form a selective advantage once again. Now in many places that form is predominant, reaching frequencies of 95% or more. Thus we saw, over less than a century, a reversal of selection pressures coupled with a reversal in the direction of gene-frequency change.
Here is a color photo of both forms on the trunk of an unpolluted tree, showing the camouflage of the typica form. The classical pictures are in black and white, but of course birds see in color, and in fact in the ultraviolet, so someone should do a picture like this photographed with UV light.
This became the classic case of natural selection in action, and appeared in nearly all evolution textbooks. It was supported by predation experiments using dead moths of different colors pinned to tree trunks of different colors; these showed that contrasting moths were always attacked by birds at higher rates. Lab experiments using moths caged with birds showed the same thing. And there were parallel reductions in the frequency of melanic forms of a subspecies (B. betularia cognataria) in the northeastern United States with the decline of pollution in the latter half of the 20th century. This parallelism strongly suggests parallel selective pressures, though not necessarily birds.
The most famous evidence, however, involved Bernard Kettlewell’s release-recapture experiments beginning the 1950s, in which he released both light and dark moths into both polluted and unpolluted woods in England, finding that he always recaptured more of the camouflaged morph (typica in unpolluted woods, carbonaria in unpolluted woods). This suggested that birds were eating the more conspicuously-colored moths in both types of woods.
I was a notorious critic of Kettlewell’s experiments, and in a review in Nature of a book on melanism by Michael Majerus (download the book review “Not black and white” here), I suggested that Kettlewell’s experiments were so poorly designed that their results couldn’t be taken seriously. This, combined with the absence of much information on where the moths really rested during the day (when they are subject to bird predation), suggested to me that the Biston story was weaker than presented in textbooks, and needed more attention and—especially—more research. In my review, I wrote the following assessment, which was widely cited, especially by creationists:
Majerus concludes, reasonably, that all we can deduce from this story is that it is a case of rapid evolution, probably involving pollution and bird predation. I would, however, replace “probably” with “perhaps”. B. betularia shows the footprint of natural selection, but we have not yet seen the feet. Majerus finds some solace in his analysis, claiming that the true story is likely to be more complex and therefore more interesting, but one senses that he is making a virtue of necessity. My own reaction resembles the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve.
This drew not only the ire of British ecological geneticists, who thought I was both unfair and unnecessarily dismissive of a classic story (I stood by my guns here), but predictably attracted creationists and other evolution-deniers, who found in the weaknesses of the Biston story a lack of evidence for natural selection (ignoring all the other cases that were well supported), and, indeed, a conspiracy by evolutionists to prop up a tale they knew was wrong! Judith Hooper, a science journalist, wrote an execrable book claiming that Kettlewell committed deliberate fraud designed to buttress Darwinism, and that evolutionists were complicit in this coverup. I trashed Hooper’s dreadful book in another review in Nature (if you want a pdf, email me). Kettlewell was not a fraud, just a naturalist who wasn’t that good at experimental design.
Despite the defensiveness of British evolutionists, I think my criticisms carried some weight, because Cambridge biologist Michael Majerus decided to repeat Kettlewell’s experiments, but doing them correctly this time.
Between 2001 and 2007 in his garden near Cambridge, England, Majerus collected both black and white Biston moths in the proportions that were flying in his area (most of these were typica). He put each moth in a mesh sleeve on a tree, allowing it to settle in its preferred resting places at night (which is what they do in the wild), and then removed the sleeves before dawn. Since moths don’t fly during the day, any moth that disappeared by four hours after dawn was presumed to have been eaten (26% of these moths were actually seen being eaten by birds). This was supplemented by Majerus climbing up trees and finding out where uncaptured moths normally rest.
Majerus’s experiment was one-sided: that is, he released both types of moths at their naturally-occurring frequencies (a good design) in only unpolluted woods, for polluted woods aren’t around in Britain any longer. Nevertheless, it’s still a decent test of the bird-predation hypothesis, which under Majerus’s conditions predicted that relatively more of the dark moths than of the light moths would be eaten.
And that is what he found, along with observing that a significant fraction of moths found in their natural daytime resting position (35%, to be exact) were sitting on tree trunks, as the predation hypothesis requires (birds have to see the moths to eat them).
Sadly, Majerus died soon after he did the experiments and didn’t publish his results, except as a Powerpoint presentation that was available on the internet. Now, however, a group of four biologists headed by L. M. Cook have published Majerus’s data on his Biston releases posthumously. The paper (reference below, and access is free) is in Biology Letters, and that’s important since it’s passed peer review, giving us extra confidence in the results.
And here are those results, succinctly summarized in a single graph. It shows the fraction of the two types of released moths that actually survived predation in a single day. You can easily see that in all but one experiment the typica form survived predation more readily than the carbonaria form, as expected since typica is less conspicuous to sharp-sighted birds in Majerus’s woods. Overall, the survival difference between the forms is highly significant (p = 0.003, which means that the probability of this difference this large arising by chance is only 3 in a thousand). The average survival difference in a day is about 9%.
One can go further and estimate the “selection coefficient” against the dark moths assuming they live several days in the wild. That selective coefficient is between 0.1 and 0.2, which means that, relative to the light moths, the dark moths suffer a survival disadvantage of 10-20% per generation in unpolluted woods. To evolutionists that is very strong natural selection, and it’s easily able to account for the increase in frequency of the light form since the Clean Air laws were passed in the 1950s.
Although it’s unfortunate that Majerus couldn’t do the reciprocal release—releasing and recapturing both forms in polluted woods—these data, along with his observations of live resting moths actually being eaten by birds and the fact that a substantial fraction of moths rest naturally on trees, where they’re exposed to bird predation, show fairly conclusively that the Biston story is sound. It’s great that Majerus repeated Kettlewell’s experiment properly. And kudos to the quartet of scientists who wrote up Majerus’s results and got them published properly.
The authors conclude:
Factors other than predation have often been argued to play a substantial role in the rise and subsequent post-industrial fall of melanism in Biston [5,15–17]. Nonetheless, with this new evidence added to the existing data, it is virtually impossible to escape the previously accepted conclusion that visual predation by birds is the major cause of rapid changes in frequency of melanic peppered moths [3,5]. These new data answer criticisms of earlier work and validate the methodology employed in many previous predation experiments that used tree trunks as resting sites [3]. The new data, coupled with the weight of previously existing data convincingly show that ‘industrial melanism in the peppered moth is still one of the clearest and most easily understood examples of Darwinian evolution in action’ [21].
I am delighted to agree with this conclusion, which answers my previous criticisms about the Biston story. But we have to remember that the evidence for natural selection never rested entirely—or even substantially—on the bird predation experiments, but rather on the datasets documenting allele frequency changes that were consistent, parallel on two continents, and then reversed when the environment changed. What was important about the bird-predation experiments (especially the one discussed here) is that they identified the agent of selection.
There are dozens of other cases of selection in action: see the two last papers cited below or John Endler’s book Natural Selection in the Wild. And of course there is Peter and Rosemary Grant’s famous work on natural selection on beak size in Galapagos finches, summarized in Jon Weiner’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, The Beak of the Finch. Like the Biston story, the work of the Grants also demonstrates not only selection but the agent of selection: changing seed size and hardness in the case of finches.
h/t: Bruce Grant, my undergrad advisor (and an author of the new Biston paper), who critiqued the original version of this post and gave it a B+. Hoping to earn an A, I’ve made some changes.
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Cook, L. M., B. S. Grant, I. J. Saccheri and J. Mallet. 2012. Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus. Biology Letters online,:doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1136.
Hoekstra, H. E., J. M. Hoekstra, D. Berrigan, S. N. Vignieri, A. Hoang, C. E. Hill, P. Beerli, and J. G. Kingsolver. 2001. Strength and tempo of directional selection in the wild. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98:9157-9160.
Kingsolver, J. G., H. E. Hoekstra, J. M. Hoekstra, D. Berrigan, S. N. Vignieri, C. E. Hill, A. Hoang, P. Gibert, and P. Beerli. 2001. The strength of phenotypic selection in natural populations. American Naturalist 157:245-261.
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If this lovely underwater video—”Dakuwaga’s Garden,” filmed in Fiji and Tonga—doesn’t make you relax, you’ve had too much coffee.
Although I’m not a strong swimmer, I love snorkeling and floating amidst schools of colorful tropical fish. I’d love to scuba dive but haven’t. This film makes me want to even more.
As a bonus, the video tells you what species appear (click “CC” if you can’t see them), though as a biologist I regret that they don’t give the Latin binomials. Enjoy, and do enlarge to full screen for maximum fun.
Chris Mooney is back with a new book, The Republican Brain, and that means we’re going to be subject to the hard sell: loud self-aggrandizement in every possible venue. Be prepared to hear things like “I guess I hit a nerve” when the book is criticized, as I am about to do. Note, though, that I haven’t read the book yet—it hasn’t been released—so my comments are based on Mooney’s summary of its thesis at HuffPo (in the Science section!): an essay called “Want to understand Republicans? First understand evolution.”
Mooney’s thesis is that the difference between conservatives and liberals is based on differences in their genes, and that those differences are reflected in physiology (we’ll get to the evolution part in a bit):
Santorum’s absurd global warming conspiracy theory is the kind of thing that absolutely outrages liberals — but to my mind, they really ought to be getting used to it by now. From global warming denial to claims about “death panels” to baseless fears about inflation, it often seems there are so many factually wrong claims on the political right that those who make them live in a different reality.
So here’s an idea: Maybe they actually do. And maybe we can look to science itself — albeit, ironically, a body of science whose fundamental premise (the theory of evolution) most Republicans deny — to help understand why it is that they view the world so differently.
In my last piece here, I commented on the growing body of research suggesting that the difference between liberals and conservatives is not merely ideological in nature. Rather, it seems more deeply rooted in psychology and the brain — with ideology itself emerging as a kind of by-product of fundamentally different patterns of perceiving and responding to the world that spill over into many aspects of life, not just the political.
To back this up, I listed seven published studies showing a consistent set of physiological, brain, and “attentional” differences between liberals and conservatives. Later on my blog, I listed no less than eleven studies showing genetic differences as well.
The papers cited by Mooney do show some genetic evidence that differences in social and political attitudes have a reasonable genetic component (quantified as “heritability”: roughly the proportion of variation in social attitudes that is explained by variation in genes), though some work suggests otherwise. And, of course, there is also a large cultural component to social attitudes as well: conservative parents inculcate their kids with conservative values, and so on.
The genetic and cultural components can be separated by either adoption studies or twin studies. The latter have their own problems, since a greater similarity of political attitudes among identical than among fraternal twins (the evidence often used for a genetic influence) can be explained by both more similar genes—identical twins have identical genes, fraternal twins share half their genes—or more similar environments, since identical twins tend to hang around with each other more, are treated more alike, and in general experience more similar environments than do fraternal twins. It appears that a lot of Mooney’s data indeed rest on higher correlations of political attitudes between identical than fraternal twins.
I find the physiological and some of the psychological differences even less convincing. If there’s a difference in skin conductance or brain physiology between conservatives and liberals, or in the way that they react to pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton (that was one test!), this could be a consequence rather than a cause of political attitudes. That is, the “biological” differences need not be involved in the causation of poltiical attitudes, but be an inevitable result of adopting a set of political attitudes, whether that adoption be due to the influence of environments or genes. Your brain lights up in new ways when you drink coffee, or see a new love, but those brain patterns are the the result of drinking coffee or being in love, not a cause of those phenomena.
Mooney goes on to characterize differences between liberals and conservatives as reflecting fundamental life strategies, and that’s where the evolution bit comes in.
As the new research suggests, conservatism is largely a defensive ideology — and therefore, much more appealing to people who go through life sensitive and highly attuned to aversive or threatening aspects of their environments. By contrast, liberalism can be thought of as an exploratory ideology — much more appealing to people who go through life trying things out and seeking the new.
Note that that conclusion is based on a single published study in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (a journal I consider good but not outstanding). Mooney continues:
To show as much, the Nebraska-Lincoln researchers had liberals and conservatives look at varying combinations of images that were meant to excite different emotions. There were images that caused fear and disgust — a spider crawling on a person’s face, maggots in an open wound — but also images that made you feel happy: a smiling child, a bunny rabbit. The researchers also mixed in images of liberal and conservative politicians — Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
While they did all of this, the scientists measured the subjects’ “skin conductance” — the moistening of their sweat glands, an indication of sympathetic nervous system arousal — as well as where their eyes went first and how long they stayed there.
The difference was striking: Conservatives showed much stronger skin responses to negative images, compared with the positive ones. Liberals showed the opposite. And when the scientists turned to studying eye gaze or “attentional” patterns, they found that conservatives looked much more quickly at negative or threatening images, and spent more time fixating on them. Liberals, in contrast, were less quickly drawn to negative images — and spent more time looking at positive ones. . .
As the authors concluded, “The aversive in life is more physiologically and cognitively tangible to some people and they tend to gravitate to the political right.”
Note again that this shows a difference is psychology and physiology, which could be a result rather than a cause of political attitudes. And there is no genetic analysis of the difference in attitudes.
Mooney concludes, then, that liberals are a bunch of soft-nosed tree-huggers and bunny lovers, while conservatives are alert and wary, easy to perceive threat. Where does the evolution come in? Because Mooney suggests that those differences, to the extent that they’re genetic, arose by natural selection. Not only that, but “liberal” genes are less adaptive than “conservative ones”!:
The big question lying behind all this, of course, is why some people would have stronger and quicker responses than others to that which is perceived as negative and threatening (and disgusting). Or alternatively, why some people — liberals — would be less threat aversive than others. For as the University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers note: “given the compelling evolutionary logic for organisms to be overly sensitive to aversive stimuli, it may be that those on the political left are more out of step with adaptive behaviors.”
“Compelling evolutionary logic,” of course, is not data: it’s just the perceived ability to make a convincing story. I could easily make a story about why it’s more adaptive for people to smile at bunnies than to frown at Bill Clinton: perhaps that is a byproduct of devotion to one’s children and family, which is also adaptive. The point, though, is that we have no idea a priori which sort of behavior is or was adaptive in the evolutionary sense of conferring reproductive advantage, and absolutely no data on the reproductive output of liberals versus conservatives.
And thus are we drawn to the only context in which we can make any sense of any of this — the understanding that we human primates evolved. As such, these rapid-fire responses to aversive stimuli are something we share with other animals — a core part of our life-saving biological wiring.
And apparently, they differ in strength and intensity from person to person — in turn triggering political differences in modern democracies. Who knew?
There is a thicket of problems here. If conservative genes are more adapted (presumably because they enable their bearers to recognize and respond to threats more readily), why are there so many liberal genes still around?
In other words, what explains the pervasive variation? Usually, when geneticists see substantial variation in traits, like the frequencies of alleles for loci involved in histocompatibility, and we assume that these differences do make a difference in evolutionary fitness, we seek explanations for the variation itself: why do two (or more) types persist in a population? If one type is better than the other, as Mooney suggests conservative genes are, why hasn’t that type come to nearly take over the population? Evolutionists need other explanations to explain pervasive genetic variation. Historically, these explanations involve different variants having different fitnesses (reproductive output) in different environments, or at different times. Or perhaps the variants are maintained by “frequency-dependent selection”: when one form of a gene becomes rare, it gains and advantage over the other one. “Liberal genes”, for example, could confer a reproductive advantage in a population that is largely conservative. (I see no reason why this should be so.) Finally, perhaps people carrying both types of genes (“heterozygotes”) are fitter than those carrying only one type (“homozygotes”).
The point is that one can’t just adduce “evolution” as a cause of variation, because only certain types of natural selection will maintain variation in a population. The most commonly conceived type of selection—”directional selection,” in which one type of gene causes its bearers to have more offspring than the other—leads to the elimination of variation, not its persistence. That persistence is what needs be explained under Mooney’s “evolution” hypothesis.
And of course there’s the perfectly plausible alternative that being conservative versus liberal has no significant effect on reproductive output: that is, the traits are (or were in our ancestors) evolutionarily “neutral.” In that case one need not confect any adaptive explanation. Or, “political genes” could have been subject to some sort of selection in our ancestors (not necessarily because of their effects on politics!), but selection that no longer operates. The first step in any real evolutionary study would be to assay reproductive output in modern populations of conservatives versus liberals, but of course that doesn’t address the question of why those traits evolved (if they did) in our long-dead ancestors.
In the end, Mooney draws two unwarranted conclusions from the data. The first is that the evidence for genetic/physiological differences supports the need for political tolerance between liberals and conservatives.
The Nebraska-Lincoln scientists interpret their results as a powerful argument in favor of greater political tolerance and understanding — and I agree with them. Politics isn’t war, and it isn’t zero sum. It requires negotiation and compromise. Surely our public debates should be guided by something more than threat responses and fight-or-flight.
So how do we get beyond our political biology? Well, the implication for liberals seems obvious: If they want to fare better politically, they need to learn to go against their instincts and stay focused and committed.
None of this has anything to do with genetics. You could draw identical conclusions even if the differences between conservatives and liberals were purely based on differences in their environment and social development. This is just a warm, fuzzy conclusion that is independent of science, and based purely on political observation and a desire to appear concilatory.
And I don’t necessarily agree with that conclusion, either, because compromise isn’t always warranted. Did Democrats compromise on civil rights in the Sixties, and should we compromise on gay rights now? And are liberals really less focused and committed? Maybe we are now since we have our own president, but we were pretty damn committed and focused when Obama was running against McCain. This is all typical Mooney-ism, where he, like Elaine Ecklund, draws unwarranted conclusions from scientific data. It’s opinion perfumed with the odor of science without that science really supporting it.
And, of course, the remedy is that we have to teach more evolution—Mooney’s second error.
And the lesson for conservatives? Well, here it is tougher. You see, first we’d have to get them to accept something they often view as aversive and threatening: The theory of evolution.
That assumes, of course, that evolution is responsible for differences between liberals and conservatives in the first place—a conclusion not at all supported by Mooney’s data. And even if those differences were based on evolution, what would that have to do with the political strategies we should adopt now? Neither genetic nor evolutionary differences in traits tell us whether the persistence of those traits is inevitable (a point that Steve Pinker makes eloquently in his latest book), nor how to heal those differences—if we want to.
Yes, there may be genetic differences between liberals and conservatives, but even if the heritability is around 50%, as suggested by one study cited by Mooney, that still means that the other half of the variation in political attitudes is due to variation not in genes but in environments. Why concentrate on the genes, which we can’t change, on the environments, which we can?
But in the end, evolution seems largely irrelevant here. At least in Mooney’s post, it appears to be a very fragile hook on which to hang his thesis. But we’re used to that intellectual strategy from him.
I’ll have a look at Mooney’s book when it comes out in April. But from this article—and my previous experience with many about issues like Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s book Unscientific America and the “Tom Johnson” affair at their website—I’m not hopeful. Yes, Mooney may think that Republicans need to accept evolution—and they do, like everyone else—but if Mooney thinks that’s going to breach the political gap, and if is going to throw around genetic studies to support his thesis, he’ll have to learn about evolution himself, and in a more sophisticated way.
Alert reader Sigmund has contributed a guest post showing the combination of malevolence and insanity that is “radical” Islam (though the form displayed below might not be seen as that radical). You won’t believe the weeping cleric in the video below, blubbering noisily as he calls for the death of an apostate.
Why freedom of expression for atheists is dangerous for all
by Sigmund
The issue of free speech versus blasphemy is currently subject to much debate in the atheist community. While attempts by various UK student unions to restrict the free speech of atheist groups demands a serious response, the danger faced by those who question religion in the Western world is mild compared to that faced by individuals living under theocratic governments, and none more so than those living in majority Islamic regimes. The recent arrest of Indonesian atheist Alexander Aan and the nine-month jail sentence served by Palestinian atheist Walid Husayin—both for “insulting Islam”—happened in countries on the liberal end of the Islamic religious spectrum.
In the more conservative Islamic states, things are taken altogether more seriously. It is not even necessary to declare yourself an atheist to bring down the wrath of the righteous—merely posing questions about religion can be sufficient.
One such incident currently hitting the news involves Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgiri, who is a Muslim, but one who made the fatal mistake of not showing enough deference to his religion in some Twitter posts.
According to the Saudijeans website:
“In his tweets, Kashgari imagined a conversation with the Prophet in which he said they are equal, and that although he admires many of the Prophet’s characteristics there are also others that he disliked.”
Apparently the act of not treating Muhammad as the best of all possible men in every regard is quite enough to ignite the gunpowder of Islamist fury.
“Saudi users on Twitter erupted with outrage, posting nearly 30,000 tweets on the topic in less than 24 hours. Many people believed that he insulted the Prophet by addressing him and speaking about him like that. They accused Kashgari of blasphemy, atheism and apostasy. Many said he must be punished and some said he should be killed.”
Kashgari, who had by now probably figured out where this was (be)heading, immediately deleted the contentious tweets and issued an apology, describing his messages as “feelings I erred in describing and writing, and that I ask God for forgiveness, but they don’t really represent my belief in the Prophet.”
His apology, however, was not enough for the guardians of religion. Kashgari had offended God and Muhammad and so must pay the price—and the price of apostasy is death. Kashgiri is believed to have fled Saudi Arabia in fear of his life and the Saudi authorities are facing calls to arrest and extradite him to face trial.
Here’s the Saudi version of Glenn Beck, cleric Sheik Nasser Al Omar, pleading to the Saudi king for Kashgari’s execution— and helpfully explaining why such an action is necessary.
I’ve transcribed his words about Kashgari (I hope the YouTube translation is correct – if not please let me know the correct words in the comments) and his thoughts on how and why Muslims must deal with atheists.
“Lord forgive us for the deeds of the foolish ones among us.
Those who annoy Allah and His Messenger.
Allah has cursed them in this world and in the hereafter, and has prepared for them a humiliating punishment.”
[begins to weep]
“Forgive me, O brothers” [what about sisters?]
“I am not able to lecture you today.
How can I when Allah and His Prophet are being cursed publicly.”
[more floods of tears]
“I fear that a swift punishment will be sent upon us from the complacency we’re seeing in regards to the rights of God and His Prophet”
“And as Ibn Al-Arabi [12th century Andalusian muslim scholar] said when he was told:
“we should argue with atheists through intellectual debates”
He replied: “thats a cold reaction, that should be warmed up with the heat of the sword”
That’s what Ibn Al-Arabi said back then about those atheists.
Petitions should be sent to the king and the crown prince, to associations, to the Supreme Judicial Council of the Supreme Court,
before God sends down his punishment on us.
And that will guarantee you security.
If you perform your duty be assured that Allah will spare and protect you.
I plead to the king and crown prince, God bless them, that these people are taken to the Islamic courts for punishment that would implement the Islamic ruling.
And it’s known that cursing Allah and Muhammad is apostasy (Punishable by death)
As for what has been mentioned about his repentence, which was expressed in a cold manner, with COLD words!
That is of no use to him in our judiciary system.
What’s between him and God, we are not discussing that.
And the scholars have mentioned: whosoever curses God and His Prophet should be sentenced for Apostasy, Even if he repented. “
In other words, the Sheik is saying that Allah and Muhammad are so touchy that allowing atheists to say anything critical will result in divine retribution being meted out on the population at large. Freedom of expression for atheists can only result in an inevitable bout of mass destruction by a furious deity and his intern!
Any chance of sending Karen Armstrong over to convince him of the error of his ways?
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is giving away a free DVD of its 2011 Holiday Lectures, which this year were on “Bones, stones and genes: the origin of modern humans.” The lecturers are good, solid scientists: John Shea, Sara Tischkoff, and Tim White.
You can get the DVD, available in April, by filling in a form beginning here (“click to order”), although it’s also available as a free video podcast at the same site. (I haven’t watched the talks.) There’s no down side to this one, for the HHMI is a highly reputable organization.
h/t: Chris
Today’s Doonesbury is a hoot. The man is, thank Ceiling Cat, fiercely pro-evolution. Click to enlarge!
Bonus: I got Trudeau’s permission to reproduce his famous “antibiotic resistance/creationism” cartoon (click the link!) for a book review I did for Nature, and he autographed it for me!
h/t: Wendy
