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.
Nearly everyone knows about the Shroud of Turin, a cloth containing the images of a man, and said to be the burial cloth of Jesus. Here it is:
Dating of the cloth has established fairly convincingly that it’s a 14th century fabrication, and its weave was unknown in the first century: a twill weave that didn’t appear until after 1000 A.D. We don’t know for sure, yet, how the cloth was made, but the Vatican still exhibits it as a holy relic.
After years of work trying to replicate the colouring on the shroud, a similar image has been created by the scientists.
However, they only managed the effect by scorching equivalent linen material with high-intensity ultra violet lasers, undermining the arguments of other research, they say, which claims the Turin Shroud is a medieval hoax.
Such technology, say researchers from the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Enea), was far beyond the capability of medieval forgers, whom most experts have credited with making the famous relic.
“The results show that a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can colour a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin,” they said.
And in case there was any doubt about the preternatural degree of energy needed to make such distinct marks, the Enea report spells it out: “This degree of power cannot be reproduced by any normal UV source built to date.”
A statement by lead researcher, Dr Paolo Di Lazzaro, said: “If our results prompt a philosophical or theological debate, these conclusions we’ll leave to the experts; to each person’s own conscience,” he said.
Since there were no UV lasers in first century Palestine, the case is closed. What strikes me is the degree of certainty in these scientists, as if they’ve shown enough to close the scientific debate and open the philosophical one.
Only one doubter weighs in:
Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at Pavia University, told The Independent: “The implications are… that the image was formed by a burst of UV energy so intense it could only have been supernatural. But I don’t think they’ve done anything of the sort.”
I’ll reserve judgment until I see more than a few excitable paragraphs in a newspaper. In the meantime, consider that an image of toast was found on Jesus in 2008:
I am still getting tributes, and we’ll have them for several more days.
The first is a lovely piece of art by Mark Friedman. Biologists will recognize Darwin’s branching “tree of life” (the first one ever drawn) atop the ruined church. The “I think” (as in Darwin’s original) is apposite.
Please see attached a piece of art I created inspired by Hitch. The talent lacks, but the composition speaks for itself.
Here’s one of two cat-themed tributes we have, this one by Diane G.
From Nathan Dummett:
A bit late and far from original (a copy of a copy) here’s a couple of pics from earlier this evening, a night spent in a way Hitchens would approve.
A drawing from Ms. Simi:
With my deepest condolences to Christopher Hitchens’ family, friends and fans. Perhaps my drawing can convey the image imprinted in my mind as my tribute to him. Being an avid NPR listener, it was during my daily ritual – while getting ready for work-that I would often hear Christopher Hitchens’ voice being interviewed; but now I have sadly come to find out about the man and the face behind the voice. What a great loss!
At the behest of his wife, “Madscutter” had his picture taken as a tribute, with a link to his website. She writes:
My husband had already decided to buy a bottle of Johnnie Walker tonight in honor of Hitchens when I read your post about the memorial. He is pretty broken up about this (which is apparent in the post he made in our blog today, and even though he absolutely despises having his picture taken, he didn’t hesitate when I told him “you have to do this”.
Meteorologist here. These are indeed Kelvin-Helmholtz waves. What is happening is that the nocturnal near-surface layers (lowest 50-100m) of the atmosphere are much more stable than the layers above it in the mornings. Until the ground heats up due to daytime heating, the surface layers stay more stable than the air over it. Kelvin-Helmholtz waves occur when the wind shear between the layers destabilizes the topmost portion of that stable layer, and entrains the air into the unstable layer. What you see is stable air being lifted, cooled, and condensed so that this process becomes visible, though this commonly happens many places without being visible.
The same phenomenon occurs on other planets; here’s a photo from Wikipedia of the phenomenon on Saturn:
I love it when people like Michael Ruse and Josh Rosenau go after me, for their continued acrimony assures me that I’m on the right track. This week, in his continuing attacks on “scientism,” Ruse singles me out for being misguided about morality. And, in the process, he contradicts himself in a confusing farrago of claims.
Remember that Ruse recently pointed out three areas in which, he argued, truth claims were possible without science: mathematics, morality, and philosophical questions about the justification of ontological naturalism. Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse put the loquacious Ruse in his place, but Ruse is back again in a piece called “Scientism continued.” Here he zeroes in on morality as an area where there are objective truths.
Of course Ruse can’t leave out the obligatory critique of yours truly:
Let’s focus in on moral claims. My most doughty critic Jerry Coyne (really, I should pay him a retainer) [JAC: okay, Michael, I’ll take $50/pwn] says “while science can inform moral judgments, in the end statements about right or wrong (or, in Ruse’s case, whether one should feel ashamed of an action) are opinions, based on subjective value judgments.” And he goes on to say “I think that’s true.”
Let me say bluntly – and it really is nothing personal because if it were I would be including a lot of my fellow philosophers including some of my teachers – I think this is just plain wrong. I want to say that what Jerry Sandusky was reportedly doing to kids in the showers was morally wrong, and that this is not just an opinion or something “based on subjective value judgments.” The truth of its wrongness is as well taken as the truth of the heliocentric solar system. It’s just not an empirical claim.
Indeed, I think that Sandunsky’s action, or any sex with children, is dead wrong. But I still think that’s ultimately based on a value judgment about what is right and wrong. The ancient Greeks didn’t think it was so bad, and presumably they had their own justifications for those acts, misguided as they were. The point, though, that judging that “sex with children is morally wrong” does not ultimately rest on any objective fact about the world. It could be informed by observations that sex with children traumatizes and injures them, but one must then still have reasons for thinking that trauma and injury is always wrong. This is the problem that many had with Sam Harris’s assertion that “well being” was an objective criterion of morality. While I agree with Sam’s criterion in perhaps 98% of moral judgments, I do think that there are immoral acts that actually increase overall well being, and moral ones that decrease it.
Not long ago people thought it was fine to have slaves, subjugate women, and torture gays. Those were justified by various means as moral—most often from religious teachings. Morality changes over time, and that is exactly the point of Steve Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature. At what point do we know we’ve arrived at the “objective facts” of morality? Is killing cows for food objectively right or wrong? The reason morality changes is that values change—exactly what wouldn’t happen if there were “moral truths.”
Well, I needn’t go on saying that morality is subjective and that people who think that there are objective moral facts are wrong. Jason Rosenhouse has done this job far more thoroughly in his second takedown of Ruse’s anti-scientism at EvolutionBlog, “The basis for morality.” Jason’s response is the same as mine:
In my day-to-day life I am an unabashed moral absolutist. Some things are just right and others are just wrong, and if you disagree with my judgments than I will unleash upon you a barrage of stern looks and disapprobation. I simply regard it as obvious that people have certain obligations to one another, and I really have no desire to debate the matter.
But if you absolutely force me to defend my beliefs in terms of something simpler, it seems to me that I would have to give you some sort of standard by which I assess moral claims. I would have to say something like, “X is wrong because…” followed by some statement, probably related in some way to the consequences of X, that justifies my negative opinion of it. And at the end of the day I don’t see how you can give an absolute justification of that standard. No matter what standard I provide, I don’t see how I can reply to someone who steadfastly insists that I’m doing it wrong.
The most bizarre thing about Ruse’s essay, which Jason points out, is that the end Ruse goes off the rails and seems to admit that morality must indeed be based not on science but on subjective criteria.
A subjective value judgment is something on which decent, thoughtful people can differ. I think Grace Kelly was the most beautiful film star we saw in the philosophy of film course this last semester. Some of my students thought that Catherine Deneuve was. Who is right? Who is wrong? And what about the chap who voted for Marilyn Monroe? Decent, thoughtful people do not differ on Jerry Sandusky’s alleged actions.
But they used to differ about such actions, and “decent, thoughtful people” still differ on many moral questions: euthanasia, abortion, the use of animals as food, the age of consent for sex, and so on. If there are “moral facts” that everyone agrees on, like the egregious immorality of Sandusky’s child rape, what are the “moral facts” when substantial numbers of people disagree?
But wait! It gets worse, for Ruse imputes the “objective truth” of morality t0 Darwinian evolution:
I go rather with the late John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, thinking that natural selection put morality into place. Those proto-humans who thought and behaved morally survived and reproduced at a better rate than those that did not. (There are all sorts of good biological reasons why cooperation can be a much better strategy than just fighting all of the time.)
So what does this make of morality? Sure, it is something that is part of our psychology. Frankly, who would ever doubt that? If you like, the controversial part is that it is only part of our psychology. I think that is the world into which David Hume pushed us. But because it may be the case that we can do what we like, it doesn’t follow that we should do what we like. As evolved human beings, the rules of morality are as binding on us as if we were the children of God and He had made up the rules.
Is Ruse serious here? Certainly our instincts for morality may well have been molded in part by natural selection. But that doesn’t mean that whatever “moral” behaviors were instilled in our ancestors were objectively right! Many primates practice infanticide; chimpanzees are often murderous animals, and, as Jason points out, we’re probably genetically predisposed to xenophobia and tribalism. Are all of the “rights” and “wrongs” that evolution gave our ancestors written in stone? Of course not, because so many of them have changed in the last few centuries. And they’ve changed not because morality is a priori objective, but because people’s views of each other, and how they should treat each other, have changed.
Jason concludes:
Ruse’s essay was meant to establish that there are moral facts that we come to know by non-empirical means. If anyone thinks he has been successful in that regard please tell me about it in the comments. To the extent that I understand what he is saying, and it is frustrating that he just doesn’t seem to value clear writing these days, he has established neither that there are moral facts nor that he has some reliable, nonscientific means of determining what they are.
I agree. So chalk one up for science, and against the pejorative use of “scientism.”
Now tell me this. Ruse is seen as a serious philosopher, and I’m constantly accused of philosophical naïveté. Are Jason and I simply talking out of our nether parts because we don’t have our philosophy Ph.D.s, or can serious philosophers be legitimately criticized by tyros?
I once had dinner with Janet Browne, author of what I think is the best biography of Darwin (it’s in two volumes; do read it!), and took the opportunity to ask her a question. “If you had Darwin here at the table,” I said, “and could ask him one question, what would it be?” Janet didn’t hesitate in her answer: “I’d like to know about the missing letter from Wallace.”
She was referring to a well known incident involving a famous letter. While Darwin was slowly preparing On the Origin of Species for publication, he received, supposedly on June 18, 1858, a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. And that letter contained an essay (written in Frebruary of that year) outlining Wallace’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which of course was something Darwin had been ruminating about for years. Wallace’s piece, “On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type,” has become known as the “Ternate” essay from the Indonesian island where it was supposedly penned, and you can find it here.
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) in Singapore, 1862
Darwin was, of course, upset. He’d been mulling over his ideas, and collecting evidence to support them, for two decades, and all of a sudden some upstart naturalist had stolen his thunder. Moreover, Wallace asked Darwin to pass the essay on to the geologist Charles Lyell if he found it interesting.
What could Darwin do to preserve both his integrity and his ideas? He sent Wallace’s essay to his friends Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Hooker, who brokered a solution: Darwin would write a short precis of his own ideas, which, along with Wallace’s essay, would be presented at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London. A letter from Darwin to Hooker on June 19, 1858, shows how distraught Darwin was about the possibility that he’d lost the priority of his great ideas. He was sending Hooker his own contribution for the joint Linnean Society publication as part of the brokered solution:
My dear Hooker
I have just read your letter, & see you want papers at once. I am quite prostrated & can do nothing but I send Wallace [i.e., Wallace’s manuscript] & my abstract of abstract of letter to Asa Gray, which gives most imperfectly onlythe means of change & does not touch on reasons for believing species do change. I daresay all is too late. I hardly care about it.—
But you are too generous to sacrifice so much time & kindness.—It is most generous, most kind. I send sketch of 1844 solely that you may see by your own handwriting that you did read it.—
I really cannot bear to look at it.—Do not waste much time. It is miserable in me to care at all about priority. . .
Darwin’s cobbled-together contribution, and Wallace’s essay, were read at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, and the essays were published. That was the gentlemanly solution to a thorny problem. Darwin, of course, is now the name associated with evolution and natural selection, for Wallace did not capitalize on his ideas, while Darwin rushed The Origin into print, securing his place in history. (See Steve Jones’s essay from the 2008 Guardian, “How Darwin won the evolution race.“)
Historians, mulling over this episode, found two problems. First, the letter from Wallace to Darwin is missing among Darwin’s correspondence. Darwin slavishly saved all his correspondence, so why was this crucial document not in his collection?
Second, some historians have questioned whether Darwin really did receive the letter on June 18. Wallace had mailed some letters from Ternate on March 9, 1858, and these arrived in London on June 3. If Wallace’s letter to Darwin was in that same packet of mail, then why did it take until June 18 to reach Darwin?
Based on this, several historians have suggested that Darwin did indeed receive the letter in early June, and held onto it, not only delaying its conveyance to Lyell, but actually stealing Wallace’s ideas in the interim. While most historians pooh-pooh this idea (after all, Darwin’s correspondence and notebooks show he had had the idea of natural selection well before this), this conspiracy theory has been persistent. Indeed, Roy Davies wrote a book on it: The Darwin Conspiracy: origins of a scientific crime, and called the supposedly delayed letter “a deliberate and iniquitous case of intelletual theft, deceit, and lies perpetuated by Charles Darwin.” And several other historians have agreed, though not in such damning ways.
And that is why Janet wanted the issue of the letter cleared up.
Well, we still don’t know why it’s missing, but a new paper in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society by John van Wyhe and Kees Rookmaker, two historians of science at the National University of Singapore, make a strong case that Darwin did not hold onto Wallace’s letter, much less steal its ideas.
van Wyhe and Rookmaaker painstakingly traced the routes of steamers from Indonesia to London, and have created a plausible and unbroken chain of transmission that indeed puts the letter in Darwin’s hands on 18 June, 1858. A few excerpts from their paper:
The route taken by Wallace’s letter and essay sent to Darwin from Ternate can be reconstructed confidently, assuming that it was deposited at the Ternate post office before 25 March, when Wallace left the island for a collecting trip to New Guinea. The mail service from Ternate (April) to Down House (June) in 75 days can be described in ten stages.
I’ll spare you these, but the letter went via Surabaya, Jakarta, Singapore, Suez, Egypt, and Southampton. The postal service was far more efficient than I thought back then, and it’s always been efficient in the UK. The letter arrived in Southampton on 16 June and was at Down two days later. The authors conclude:
The transit of Wallace’s letter from Ternate to Down House took the normal period of 75 days. If Darwin told the truth, then the arrival of Wallace’s letter on 18 June should actually have a fully connecting service route all the way back to Ternate in the Dutch East Indies – something that Darwin could not have known. We have now shown this to be the case.
Therefore, contrary to the frequent assertions of conspiracy theorists, Darwin did not lie about the receipt of Wallace’s Ternate essay, and in fact sent it on to Lyell the very same day. Hence, we should restore the story of the joint announcement of the theory of evolution by natural selection from the recent version of dishonesty and conspiracy to one of those inspiring cases of cooperation in the history of science.
This, of course, doesn’t solve the problem of why Wallace’s letter is missing, but it shows (as I fully expected) that Darwin was not a plagiarist. He was subject to the normal concerns of priority that affect every scientist, but his behavior in this matter was—as in all his scientific dealings—scrupulous.
Here’s the third installment of the readers’ tributes to the life of Christopher Hitchens.
From Sigmund, who’s also put this one on his Sneer Review:
From Cameron:
“For Hitch. Not great but original and done with love.”
From Rich and Barbara Sammons:
The contagion of your insights, courage, and humor will forever energize us.
From Dermot C.
I attach a photo for your blog’s memorial of photos/drawings; you wouldn’t want a picture of a maudlin Irishman, descended , according to Chris Stringer, from the Neanderthals. So here’s a metaphorical one instead.
[I’m having trouble seeing this picture on the post; if you can’t, click on the icon in the empty box and it will show up.]
And from Rod C.:
My modest contribution…. me teaching my grandchildren about day/night, eclipses, summer/winter etc with a globe and a flashlight. I think that Hitch would agree, teaching our kids well is a worthy tribute.
Finally, here’s a link: “A modest proposal,” Stephen Fry’s suggestion, on his website, about a proper memorial for Hitch.
Dan Dennett’s “eulogy” for Hitchens, “A lessons from Hitch: When rudeness is called for,” is up at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” section. It’s about his experience with Hitch in a debate at the Ciudad de las Ideas conference in Publa, Mexico. I was that meeting, but had to leave right before the debate began. I’ll always regret that, for I missed my one chance to see Hitchens on the platform.
Dennett is known as the “nicest” of the Four Horsemen, but he sometimes regrets his lack of “rudeness” in debates. I’ll reproduce his last four paragraphs, for they ring so true:
We have all heard, endlessly, about how angry and rude the new atheists are. Take a good hard look at their work, at the books and talks by Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris, and you will find that they are more civil, less sneering, less given to name-calling than such religious apologists as Terry Eagleton or Alvin Plantinga or Leon Wieseltier. It is just that many people are shocked to see religious institutions, ideas, and spokespeople challenged as intensely as we expect banks, big pharma, and the oil industry to be challenged.
Of all the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” Hitchens was clearly the least gentle, the angriest, the one most likely to insult his interlocutor. But in my experience, he only did it when rudeness was well deserved–which is actually quite often when religion is the topic. Most spokespeople for religion expect to be treated not just with respect but with a special deference that is supposedly their due because the cause they champion is so righteous. Then they often abuse that privilege by using their time on the stage to misrepresent both their own institutions and the criticisms of them being offered.
How should one respond to such impostures? There are actually two effective methods, and I recommend both of them, depending on the circumstances: you can follow Hitch and interrupt (“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” or its equivalent). Or you can try something a little bit more diplomatic: You can call the person a faith fibber, my mock-diplomatic term for those who are liars for God. If you are sure your interlocutor is just another religious bully, go Hitch’s route: Call him a liar, and don’t stop until he stops. If you think your interlocutor may have been lured a little over the line of truth by otherwise commendable zeal, you can ask them if they aren’t indulging in a little faith fibbing. That works on occasion too.
The main point is this: Don’t let anybody play the God card in these discussions as if it were a “Get Out of Jail Free” card that excuses misrepresentation. Hitch would not hesitate to call out the pope, or Mother Teresa, or anybody else. Honor his memory by following his example.
