Woo may have killed Steve Jobs

October 21, 2011 • 7:28 am

Many of us know that Steve Jobs delayed an operation for his pancreatic cancer—an unusually treatable form of that cancer that might have been cured by surgery—in favor of trying “alternative” therapy.  Today’s New York Times reports the details, gotten from a new and authorized biography of Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. The Times reports:

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Appleemployees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.

. . . Mr. Jobs put off surgery for nine months, a fact first reported in 2008 in Fortune magazine.

Friends and family, including his sister, Mona Simpson, urged Mr. Jobs to have surgery and chemotherapy, Mr. Isaacson writes. But Mr. Jobs delayed the medical treatment. His friend and mentor, Andrew Grove, the former head of Intel, who had overcome prostate cancer, told Mr. Jobs that diets and acupuncture were not a cure for his cancer. “I told him he was crazy,” he said.

Art Levinson, a member of Apple’s board and chairman of Genentech, recalled that he pleaded with Mr. Jobs and was frustrated that he could not persuade him to have surgery.

His wife, Laurene Powell, recalled those days, after the cancer diagnosis. “The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” she said. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however, Mr. Isaacson writes. “The body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued.

It’s hard to see how someone so science-oriented, so tech-y, could do something so manifestly dumb.  And he may well have paid for it with his life.  It’s a great pity.

The Times piece gives other details of Jobs’s life from Isaacson’s biography, which hasn’t yet been published.

The Inter-Faith Rag

October 21, 2011 • 5:49 am

Reader Sigmund has done some wonderful parodies at his anti-accommodationist Sneer Review website, and there’s a good one today.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember Tom Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag”, an amazingly popular parody of Catholicism from the 1960’s.  (“2, 4, 6, 8—time to transubstantiate”, etc).  Lehrer, by the way, is still alive: he’s 83, but no longer makes music.

Sigmund has written new words to the song, whose original you can hear on the site, and retitled it “The Inter-Faith Rag.”  You might want to sing along with the tune, for he’s really matched his words to Lehrer’s music. It’s a hoot.

This piece joins Sigmund’s other masterpieces, the two most notable being “Bohemian Rosenau” and “Downfall of Chris Mooney’s Uncientific America” (still my favorite; the L. A. Times editorial mentioned in the piece is here).

An EMBO report on science blogging

October 21, 2011 • 5:16 am

In the latest EMBO Reports (EMBO = European Molecular Biology Organization) there’s a piece by Howard Wolinsky, “More than a blog,” describing the new wave of blogging by scientists.  It discusses the genre, detailing all of its benefits and perils. And it quotes, among others, Rosie Redfield (exposer of the arsenic-bacteria problems), P. Z., Bora Zivkovic, “GrrlScientist” (I wish she’d give her name, as I think science bloggers shouldn’t use pseudonyms), Sean Carroll, and Professor Ceiling Cat.  At the risk of seeming self aggrandizing, I’ll append one of my quotes:

Coyne, however, does not share his interest in blogging with other senior faculty at the University of Chicago, because he does not believe they value it as a professional activity. Still, he said that he recognizes the names of famous scientists among his blog readers and argues that scientists should consider blogging to hone their writing skills. “Blogging gives you outreach potential that you really should have if you’re grant funded, and it’s fun. It opens doors for you that wouldn’t have opened if you just were in your laboratory. So I would recommend it. It takes a certain amount of guts to put yourself out there like that, but I find it immensely rewarding,” he said. In fact, Coyne has had lecture and print publishing opportunities arise from his blogs.

True, but I don’t have a “blog”!

What I meant about being “grant funded,” of course, is that if your research is underwritten by taxpayers, you incur an obligation, I think, to either explain your work to them or do something else to help them learn about science.

I believe the article is behind a paywall, but, miscreant that I am,  if you shoot me an email I’ll send you the four-page article.

And yes, I think that more scientists should have websites, and that they should put in those websites more than just posts about science.

What’s up at BioLogos?

October 21, 2011 • 5:10 am

As we approach the inevitable end of the ill-conceived BioLogos organization (I predict that the money will dry up when its Templeton funding expires in February), it behooves us to review how it has morphed into an organization that has become more and more accepting of the nonsense claims of evangelical Christianity. (Recall that its mission was to convince evangelical Christians that their fairy stories were wrong and that science was right.)

A few tidbits:

  • The Atlantic has published a profile of BioLogos president Darrel Falk, “Man of science, man of faith.” It’s pretty even-handed, including a quote by Kathryn Applegate, BioLogos program director:

We have to take away the plain reading. The idea of God literally creating is told in a way to be relevant, like a myth or legend. And if you look at it that way, you’re on a slippery slope,” Falk adds. “All it takes is being able to recognize the genre of the Scripture. The Old Testament is purely poetic: The stories are beautiful, and there’s a very specific message — Adam and Eve were alienated from God, from being naked and unashamed — but they’re still just beautiful stories.”

but also some criticism that shows why this strategy isn’t working:

BioLogos has drawn criticism from secular and religious organizations, from creationists and atheists alike. Ken Ham, a young-Earth creationist and advocate for the literal interpretation of Genesis, declared that “it is compromisers like [Francis] Collins who cause people to doubt and disbelieve the Bible — causing them to walk away from the church.” Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, says that BioLogos “wants to discredit evangelical objections to evolution and to convince the evangelical public that an acceptance of evolution is a means of furthering the gospel.” University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne called the endeavor “the latest forcible endeavor to marry science and faith.”

  • For further evidence that BioLogos will fail to convert evangelical Christians to evolution, see the piece at Creation Ministries International,  “The non-mythical Adam and Eve! Refuting errors by Francis Collins and BioLogos.” This piece purports to use science to support the idea that Adam and Eve were real people.  It all looks very impressive, but to get the presently observed distribution of genetic variation it has to assume not only Noah’s Flood, reducing the human population size to eight, but multiple Flood-like events, about which the Bible says nothing.  (They’re making stuff up again!)  It also ignores the coalescent approach used in the recent paper by Li and Durban showing that our lineage could never been smaller than about 1200 people.  The point is that when fundamentalists start supporting the Bible stories using psedudoscience—a technique that will sound convincing to Christians who aren’t trained as population geneticists—then BioLogos has no hope.
  • BioLogos has posted <a href=”http://biologos.org/blog/where-we-come-from-and-who-we-are”>a new video featuring Ard Louis, a young physicist, who pushes the idea of God-directed evolution—or at least decries the idea of purposeless evolution, which is of course the view of evolution that scientists have.  Here’s a transcript of part of the video, kindly provided by alert reader Sigmund:

“I think that what’s really happening is that Christians are hearing what non-Christians are telling them about what evolution means and they are believing it.

I think that a lot of the ‘Young-Earth’ arguments are hugely beneficial to Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying all along. They say: “See, evolution tells you that you are X,Y,Z. Evolution tells you that you don’t have any deep purpose.”

Evolution tells you that there are no Gods, and the young earth creationists agree. They say: “yes, evolution does tell you that. But evolution is wrong.”

And I think the problem with both of those viewpoints is that they basically look at something in nature and try to extract theology from it.

And both of them are doing it in a very, very poor way.

Both of them are agreeing on the fundamental premise that where we come from determines who we are.

We think that where we come from determines who we are and how we should live.

But that’s not what the Bible says: the Bible tells us that our value comes from what God thinks about us.

God determines how we should live.

God determines who we are, not by the details of how we are made.

This has a very different impact in how you understand evolution because the way it’s often taught in schools, underlying it are, are in fact, a world view or philosophical assumption that say “oh, it’s all purposeless”.  And instead of believing it they should say “No, stop!”

Well, I teach evolution in college, and though I don’t recall saying it’s “purposeless,” I do say that it’s completely caused by the disposition of randomly created genetic variation by either a deterministic process (natural selection) or a random process (genetic drift).  And I may have said that evolution is unguided, though I don’t recall. But I wouldn’t have any problem saying that, because evolution is unguided as far as we can see. That’s the whole beauty if it: the appearance of purpose and design is produced without any external purpose and design.

  • Also at BioLogos, Pastor David Swaim has published a two-part sermon, “Maker of Heaven and Earth” (part 2 here) urging reconciliation of science and faith.  But to do so, he has to say nice things about young-earth creationism:
“Science has been right about so many things, so some Christians have embraced evolution and felt forced to abandon their trust, not only in the truth of Scripture, but also in the God it describes. Other Christians, including many renowned scientists, have fought back by pointing out the many flaws in evolutionary theory and proposing alternative theories of their own. These include Young Earth Creation, which asserts that the earth was created in six days six thousand years ago, and offers thoughtful explanations to reconcile the findings of science with the words of Genesis 1.
The “many flaws in evolutionary theory”?  Which ones is he talking about? “Thoughtful explanations offered by Young Earth Creationists”??? And so we see that  to push its agenda, BioLogos must tacitly praise the nonsense of antievolutionists.
  • In part two of Swaim’s sermon, he continues his laudable assertion that Genesis isn’t a book of science (although the New Testament might be!), but what’s interesting here is a comment added by BioLogos president Darrel Falk himself.  After one commenter suggested that people should treat the Adam and Eve story as symbolic rather than literal, Falk added:

“It is important to point out that nothing that has been said (either here in this sermon, nor by being attentive to that which emerges from the scientific data) necessitates  “making Adam and Eve symbolic.”

Nothing that has emerged from the scientific data necessitates making Adam and Eve symbolic?  Here we see the real problem of BioLogos and why its stated mission is doomed.  The scientific data absolutely mandates that Adam and Eve did not exist as the sole ancestors of all humanity.  Yet when push comes to shove, Falk simply can’t bring himself to admit that all the data refuting the Adam and Eve myth—the data from archaeology, anthropology and, most important, population genetics—show that Adam and Eve did not exist.  If they are to have any meaning at all, then they must either be pure fiction, to be dismissed as a fairy tale, or transformed into a metaphor, i.e., become “symbolic”.

Recall as well that the two biggest proponents of the Adam-and-Eve-is-fiction stand, Uncle Karl Giberson and Pete Enns, have now left BioLogos.

Having failed to convert evangelicals to evolution, BioLogos must now move toward the evangelical philosophy, praising their silly Biblical myths, patting young-earth creationists on the back, and arguing that perhaps the fictions of the Bible may have some basis in fact.  In other words, to get evangelicals to embrace science, BioLogos is starting, tentatively and quietly, to embrace pseudoscience.

Dear Dr. Falk,

Could you just give up the Adam and Eve story as fiction. Please?  And while you’re at it, would it be possible to refrain from insisting that God is guiding the evolutionary process? That’s not the way we teach evolution.

Thanks,

The community of scientists

h/t: Steven, whirladervish, Sigmund

Cuttlefish camouflage

October 20, 2011 • 8:47 am

I’ve discovered science reporter Robert Krulwich’s National Public Radio website, “Krulwich wonders,” and it’s a buffet of toothsome sciencey tidbits. Here’s a nice video he posted (and narrated) about cuttlefish camouflage, and their physiological and behavioral attempts to hide in their environment.

Also, be sure to read Krulwich’s account of how the Nobel Prize medals of two German laureates—James Franck and Max von Laue—were dissolved in a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids (“aqua regia”) in Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen lab prevent them from being detected by the Nazis. It was a capital crime to take gold (and Nobel medals are 23-carat gold) out of Germany.  After the war the gold was re-precipitated and the medals re-cast.

It’s about morality, stupid: why Dawkins won’t debate William Lane Craig

October 20, 2011 • 5:47 am

Theologian William Lane Craig is a skilled debater for religion, poised and full of “sophisticated” arguments that can snow the average listener. But he’s also a nasty piece of work, most famously for justifying Biblical genocide on the grounds that “if God said it was okay, then it was okay.”

Craig’s been shuttling around the UK, noisily challenging Richard Dawkins to a debate and accusing Richard of cowardice for not facing him on the platform.  In today’s Guardian, Richard explains “Why I refuse to debate William Lane Craig.”  He starts with a LOL:

For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused, in the spirit, if not the letter, of a famous retort by the then president of the Royal Society: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine”.

But the real reason, Dawkins, explains, is Craig’s reprehensible defense of the slaughters ordered by God in the Old Testament. Never mind that they didn’t happen; Craig says that even if they did, they were perfectly moral.  Re the Israeli slaughter of Canaanites, Craig said this:

“But why take the lives of innocent children? The terrible totality of the destruction was undoubtedly related to the prohibition of assimilation to pagan nations on Israel’s part. In commanding complete destruction of the Canaanites, the Lord says, ‘You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons, or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods’ (Deut 7.3-4). […] God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. […] Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy.  Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.”

. . . “So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli [sic] soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli [sic] soldiers is disturbing.”

To which Richard dryly answers:

Oh, the poor soldiers. Let’s hope they received counselling after their traumatic experience.

Craig’s idea that whatever God orders is moral is one way to answer the Euthyphro dilemma: are things right because God orders them, or does God order them because they’re right?  Craig has always opted for the former answer, which is called the “divine command theory.”  I myself have been criticized for being philosophically naive about this dilemma.  Here’s “The Thinking Christian” (clearly an oxymoron for this blogger) taking out after me for my piece on morality in USA Today:

I understand the limitations of a short print article. You can only say so much, and it is necessary to condense a point. Still you simply cannot pretend that you have authority to use language like “simply cannot” here. You cannot honorably and in good conscience pretend that you have the last word on the subject. You cannot pretend that Christians and Jews have never noticed the Euthyphro question, or that we have never offered a theistic solution (here, for example). What does a scientist and professor have to do with pronouncing an issue like this settled: an issue that is out of your field, and on which you have not even acknowledged the ongoing conversation?

Dr. Coyne, I call you out on that.

For a good LOL, click on the link to the “theistic solution” to the Euthyphro dilemma.  Guess what it is?

Another common intrpretation of  “divine command theory” response is that God could never order or sanction any immoral act because he is a good and loving deity.  But that doesn’t solve the dilemma because then God must still conform to some extra-God notion of what we see as “good and loving.”  And besides, as Richard points out, all the evidence from the Old Testament is that God is neither good nor loving, but a capricious and malicious bully.

Qaddafi reported dead

October 20, 2011 • 5:35 am

From my CNN News alert:

Moammar Gadhafi is dead, according to reports on Arab media. CNN has not confirmed the reports.

One of the networks reporting the news was Al-Ahrar, a National Transitional Council TV station. It didn’t cite a source and the news couldn’t be independently confirmed.

The New York Times says the death was also verified by the head of Libya’s Military Council.

My guess is that he was killed rather than having committed suicide.

UPDATE: The NYT now reports that Qaddafi was indeed killed in a battle in his hometown of Surt.  There are supposedly photos of the body.


			


	



			
				
		


	

		
Israel allows formal status as “secular Jew”

	October 20, 2011 • 4:56 am

			


	

		
I repeat the old joke:


Q: What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?

A:  A Jew.


I’ve maintained before not only that many people —like myself—consider themselves to be both Jewish and nonbelievers, but also that this nonreligious but cultural status is far more pervasive among Jews than among those of other faiths.


Now that status has been given official recognition by the Israeli government.


As the American Prospect reports:


Yoram Kaniuk has won: The prominent Israeli novelist is now very officially a Jew of no religion.


Hundreds of other Israelis, inspired by his legal victory, want to follow his example and change their religious status to “none” in the country’s Population Registry, while remaining Jews by nationality in the same government database. A new verb has entered Hebrew, lehitkaniuk, to Kaniuk oneself, to legally register an internal divorce of Jewish ethnicity from Jewish religion.


. . . Kaniuk certified the change of his religious status this month, after a Tel Aviv District Court judge overruled bureaucratic objections. The writer gave two reasons for his choice: Because his wife is an American-born Christian, his daughters and his infant grandson are registered as having no religion; and besides, he “has no desire to be part of a ‘Jewish Iran,’” a phrase he did not parse but was apparently aimed at any form of state-linked religion.


The author, Gershom Gorenberg, explains the ambiguous status that nonreligious Jews have endured in the U.S.:


Those who migrated to America arrived in a country that was tolerant of religious division than ethnic separatism, Liebman explained. It’s acceptable in America for Catholics to have parochial schools, but separate schools for Italian Americans would be illegitimate. As a result, American Jews switched categories: They identify as a religion but often behave more as an ethnic group. For many, synagogue membership really means belonging to an ethnic club, and Israel functions as a replacement for the lost “old country” of Eastern Europe.


Nevertheless, anti-Semitism has been a strain in America until recently, and I think still contributes to some of the sentiment involved in the “boycott Israel” movement.  My dad wasn’t allowed to join any fraternity except the two all-Jewish fraternities existing at Penn State when he went there in 1936, and even I was called a “dirty Jew” in junior high school by a group of bullies, which involved me in one of the only two fights I’ve had in my life.


So if being Jewish is not a religion, can it be an ethnicity? I previously thought that “ethnicity” was a genetic term, referring to the group from which one descended, but I find in my dictionary that it means belonging to a “social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.” In that sense I can consider myself an ethnic Jew.


(A side note: a genetic analysis of my Y chromosome did show that my DNA on that bit is completely derived from Eastern European Jews. I had myself tested to determine if my name, “Coyne,” denoted that I was descended from the elite and priestly subgroup of Jews, the kohanim, supposedly descended from Aaron and the only ones allowed to perform special rituals in the synagogue.  When I wrote WEIT, I thought that searching for my own ancestry in this way would be a good metaphor for how evolution represents the ultimate search for ancestry.  I didn’t include that story in the book, but I did find out that I’m a garden-variety Cohan, Cohane, or whatever the name was before it was changed in America. But I am not a kohen.)


Golenberg sees the notion of an official “Jewish state”—however one defines “Jewish”—as invidious and unnecessary:


Real freedom of conscience would require the state to stop registering religious and ethnic identity. Actual separation of synagogue and state would mean abolishing the official rabbinate, enacting civil marriage, and ending government involvement in religious education. Kaniuk himself might have contributed more to understanding the confusions of Jewish identity by writing a novel than by hiring a lawyer. But to be fair, he’s 81 years old and said in his suit that he didn’t feel he had much time left to define himself as he chose.


. . . Israel doesn’t need a Palestinian stamp of approval to be a Jewish state. Nor does it need the registration system that Kaniuk used to voice his anger. It needs only a majority that considers itself Jewish in one not-quite-consistent way or another and that has the freedom to conduct a roiling, constant argument about Jewish culture. If Kaniuk’s suit reminds the rest of the tribe of how messy the issue of Jewish identity is, how unsuited it is for sharp delineations, he will have performed a service.


But do we need a “Jewish state” at all? Surely the official trappings and approval of religion should be abolished in Israel, but, as a cultural Jew, I’m not quite sure about abolishing the idea of a “Jewish state” per se, however one defines “Jew.”


Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, USA, religiosity still reigns among the Orthodox Jews: Jewish women are forced to sit in the back of a bus run and largely used by Jews, even though it’s under a New York City franchise. That’s both immoral and illegal.  Every time I find pride in being a secular Jew, it’s eroded by something like this.


h/t: Michael