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.
Matthew Cobb sent me this YouTube video, which is described as follows:
Tel-Aviv University demos quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field.
The explanation is above my pay grade, but the video is cool. I’m counting on some physics-friendly readers to explain it.
I don’t believe in the supernatural or true miracles, of course, but there are a few things that move me deeply and produce great wonderment when I ponder them:
This last wonder, of course, is not mine alone. In our era Richard Dawkins expressed it most eloquently, but it all began with Darwin:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
It’s only when you stop and think about the path from stardust to evolution that you realizing how stupendous it all is. That’s not proof of God of course, because we understand that whole process as a purely materialistic one produced by the laws of physics. But it’s fantastic nonetheless.
Well, the conservative Krauthammer usually gets most stuff wrong, but he’s especially annoying in his new Washington Post column, “Gone in 60 nanoseconds.”
It’s all about the faster-than-light neutrinos discovered recently at CERN. Krauthammer, trying to be funny (I think), starts his column by claiming that this is an apocalyptic discovery.
The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.
I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.
This is of course an exciting finding, one that could possibly revise all of 20th century physics. The likelihood is, though, that’s it’s wrong, and even the scientists who found this have strong doubts about its veracity and have called for replication. In a move that would do credit to a creationist, though, Krauthammer uses this doubt as an attack on scientists themselves—that our doubt comes not from the confidence that has accrued, though experiment and observation, to Einstein’s theory, but from scientists’ dogged refusal to even consider that relativity might be wrong, leading to their conclusion that the experiment itself must be wrong.
The implications of such a discovery are so mind-boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Something must have been wrong — some faulty measurement, some overlooked contaminant — to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.
And that’s the problem. It has to be impossible because, if not, if that did happen on this Orient Express hurtling between Switzerland and Italy, then everything we know about the universe is wrong. [JAC: not everything, of course. Stellar evolution, classical mechanics, and much of cosmology and quantum mechanics would still be ok.]
. . . This will not just overthrow physics. Astronomy and cosmology measure time and distance in the universe on the assumption of light speed as the cosmic limit. Their foundations will shake as well.
It cannot be. Yet, this is not a couple of guys in a garage peddling cold fusion. This is no crank wheeling a perpetual motion machine into the patent office. These are the best researchers in the world using the finest measuring instruments, having subjected their data to the highest levels of scrutiny, including six months of cross-checking by 160 scientists from 11 countries.
But there must be some error. Because otherwise everything changes. We shall need a new physics. A new cosmology. New understandings of past and future, of cause and effect. Then shortly and surely, new theologies.
Why? Because we can’t have neutrinos getting kicked out of taverns they have not yet entered.
This all sounds good to the non-scientist, and yes, we scientists suspect that something was wrong with the CERN experiment, but Krauthammer is right for the wrong reasons. We are doubtful not because we desperately need to cling to a paradigm that has seemed successful, but simply because overthrowing such a paradigm requires very strong evidence. Scientists love findings that overturn what we thought we knew, for that opens up whole new areas of research and understanding. It’s what keeps us interested in the world. But before we put what we thought we knew into the dustbin, we must be very careful.
Krauthammer’s editorial, which sounds so reasonable, actually profoundly mischaracterizes the nature of science. And I think he’s saying these things because he’s trying to diss scientists as adherents to a form of faith. Ten to one he’s either religious or an accommodationist. (I’m just guessing here; I have no idea.)
At 9 a.m. today London time, BBC Radio Four had a 45-minute discussion of science and religion with Richard Dawkins, physicist Lisa Randall, and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. You can hear the whole program archived here, or, if you’re in the UK, hear it rebroadcast tonight at 21:30 London time.
The program’s blurb is this:
Andrew Marr discusses the wonders of the universe with Lisa Randall, Richard Dawkins and the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The cosmologist Professor Randall looks at the how the latest developments in physics have the potential to alter radically our view of the world around us, and our place within it. Richard Dawkins explores the beauty and magic of scientific reality, from rainbows and shooting starts, to our genetic ancestors, and believes the facts far exceed the stories of ancient myth. Jonathan Sacks rejects the false dichotomy of science and religion, and argues that faith has a complementary role to play in the understanding of the human condition.
I listened to the whole thing, and found it moderately interesting. Dawkins’s views (and Randall’s too, I believe) are pretty well known, but I was curious to see how a “progressive” rabbi dealt with the issue.
The most striking thing—something I find increasingly common among “sophisticated” theologians—is Sacks’s complete refusal to tell the audience what he believed, what kind of God he envisioned. He argues instead about the consequences of a world without God. Sacks claimed that such a world would not only be meaningless, but in it we would treat persons as things. (Yeah, just like they do in Denmark and Sweden!)
He also claimed, bizarrely, that the decline of ancient Greece can be attributed to its reliance on pre-Enlightenment values and the absence of religion, claiming that it might not have fallen had the people believed in the supernatural. (I wonder, then, what Apollo, Zeus, and Athena were.)
Rabbi Sacks also brought up, inevitably, the accusation of scientism—that the wonder and beauty we feel at the world cannot be explained by science. Richard and Lisa pulled him up short here, saying that perhaps those emotions might one day be explained by science, but at any rate cannot be used as evidence for God. At one point Lisa politely asked the Rabbi to stop using the adjective “cold” when he uttered the phrase “cold logic.”
Three deepities from the good Rabbi:
The “religion” section of PuffHo reports the release of a new evolution-friendly film, “No dinosaurs in Heaven.” The theme sounds good:
The film, “No Dinosaurs in Heaven,” follows Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, down the Colorado River as she refutes creationist theories that the Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old and shows evidence of the biblical flood.
It also charts the story of its director, Greta Schiller, as she studies to become a science teacher and is assigned a biology professor who refuses to teach evolution because of his religious beliefs.
But two things took the wind out of my sails. One was this statement by the director:
“I made the film to convey three major ideas,” Schiller said. The most important, she said, is “that science is a way to understand the natural world and is not inherently in conflict with a belief in God.”
Must they always try to sell evolution by showing that it’s down with Jesus? And what does not “inherently in conflict with a belief in God” mean? Doesn’t that depend on what kind of faith you hold?
And the other is a dreadful video clip inserted at the end of the PuffHo piece, which shows physicist, priest, and Templeton Prize winner John Polkinghorne pontificating about science and religion. I hope to God that this isn’t from the film! Perhaps PuffHo just added it at the end of the piece to show the amiability of science and faith. Nevertheless, the director’s “major idea” of showing how science comports with religion presages some dire accommodationism in “No dinosaurs in Heaven.”
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Philosopher Julian Baggini, an atheist who has long been a strong critic of New Atheism (e.g., here), has a new column in Friday’s Guardian that’s actually pretty good: “Religion’s truce with science can’t hold”.
In Baggini’s view, the Gouldian NOMA-esque distinction between science and faith—that science answers the “how” questions and religion the “why” questions—is untenable, for religion obstinately refuses to stop claiming how things happen:
Many “why” questions are really “how” questions in disguise. For instance, if you ask: “Why does water boil at 100C?” what you are really asking is: “What are the processes that explain it has this boiling point?” – which is a question of how.
Critically, however, scientific “why” questions do not imply any agency – deliberate action – and hence no intention. We can ask why the dinosaurs died out, why smoking causes cancer and so on without implying any intentions. In the theistic context, however, “why” is usually what I call “agency-why”: it’s an explanation involving causation with intention.
So not only do the hows and whys get mixed up, religion can end up smuggling in a non-scientific agency-why where it doesn’t belong.
This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.
This, of course, is just another take on something many of us have long maintained: any theistic religion—that is, one that posits a God who is active in the universe—must perforce make claims that can in principle be empirically examined or tested. And that is a “how” question. On the level ground where science and faith must compete to answer such questions, religion always loses, and always will. Theologians instinctively recognize the empirical primacy of science over faith, and they hate it. That’s why people like John Haught use a variety of ploys—like saying that scientists rely on “faith”—to try to drag science down to the level of religion. They love to define terms like “truth,” “faith,” and “evidence” in ways that are not used by scientists—or anyone other than theologians, for that matter.
At any rate, Baggini’s ending is very good, though I have one quibble:
The religious believer could bite the bullet, accept that religion does make some empirical claims, and then defend their compatibility with science one by one. But the fact that two beliefs are compatible with each other is the most minimal test of their reasonableness imaginable. All sorts of outlandish beliefs – that the Apollo moon landings never happened, for instance – are compatible with science, but that hardly makes them credible. What really counts, what should really make the difference between assent and rejection of an empirical claim, is not whether it is compatible with science, but whether an evidence-led, rational examination of a view supports it better than competing alternatives.
So the fact that science is compatible with religion turns out to be a comforting red herring.
The less comfortable wet fish slapped around the face is that how easily science and religion can rub on together depends very much on what kind of religion we’re talking about. If it is a kind that seeks to explain the hows of the universe, or ends up doing so by stealth, then it is competing with science. In such contests science always wins, hands down, and the only way out is to claim a priority for faith over evidence, or the Bible over the lab. If it is of a kind that doesn’t attempt to explain the hows of the universe, then it has to be very careful not to make any claims that end up doing just that. Only then can the science v religion debate move on, free from the illusion that it rests on one question with one answer.
In other words, in Baggini’s view the debate can’t move on unless religious people all become deists. That, of course, won’t happen soon. And even then, the incompatibility will remain between a worldview based on evidence and one that posits a hands-off deity for which there is not only no evidence, but for which there can be no evidence. One might as well posit that your car is really being powered by invisible hamsters. That’s a matter not up for debate, either.
We should just give up the pretense that any “debate” between science and religion can be meaningful.
h/t: Eric MacDonald
This is definitely a piece worth reading: in yesterday’s Guardian, John Naughton summarized not only the thesis of Steve Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of our Nature, but also conducted an insightful interview with the author.
Not surprisingly, most of the major reviews have been positive, save that of the miscreant John Gray, who faults Pinker for attributing society’s decline in violence to the Enlightenment. (In his review in Prospect, Gray argued that Pinker not only was guilty of misusing statistics and data, but also neglected some thinkers, like Marx and Lenin, who could be considered part of an extended Enlightenment.)
Anyway, the two best parts of the article are the interview and a Pinkerian table of the worst atrocities in history, with human deaths converted to 20th-century equivalents. It turns out that history’s worst massacre was the eighth-century An Lushan Revolt in China, which cost 36 million lives. In modern equivalents (I presume this is calculated based on the proportion of the world’s population that was decimated), that’s 429 million deaths! In contrast, World War II, #9 on the atrocity scale, took 55 million lives.
Number two is the Mongol Conquest, with a loss of 40 million lives (278 million in modern equivalents). You’ll want to look over the list of the top 21 episodes, which will surprise you.
I won’t give away what Steve says in the interview, but two things impressed me. First, he wrote the book in only 14 months (it’s 700+ pages long). Second, he wrote it on a punishing schedule:
I spent a bit more than a year doing nothing but reading, to educate myself in fields I was not trained in – mainly criminology, history and international relations. The writing took 14 very intensive months. I had a sabbatical from Harvard, moved to our house in Cape Cod, and worked on it day and night seven days a week, taking time out only to exercise and spend time with my wife, novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.
How can you not admire his diligence? I now have a copy of the book, and will read it for sure.
h/t: Chris
“Thoroughbred” refers to a special breed of horses developed three centuries ago in England, and widely used in America for racing. One of the premier places to watch them, and perhaps one of the most beautiful, is at Keeneland. Opened 75 years ago right outside Lexington, Kentucky (making it convenient for me to visit last Wednesday), it’s a lovely track set among lush, white-fenced horse pastures where the animals are bred and trained.
Only Thoroughbreds race at Keeneland, and there are only two racing seasons per year: April and October. Fortunately, I was there during one of them, and my hosts at the University kindly used their influence to get me not only a special lunch in the clubhouse overlooking the track, but a box seat in the Gaines Family box. (“Gaines” was a famous brand of dog food, and how the family became wealthy. I believe the company is defunct, and the family is involved in breeding and racing horses.)
Lunch was preceded in the clubhouse (paid for by a kindly donor) along with five “Gaines fellows”, undergrads chosen by the Gaines Center to undergo a special training program including local outreach, lots of exposure to the arts, and a long senior thesis.
Coats and ties only here, and though it was raining, and the coat of the fellow to my left was soaked, they made him wear it anyway! I’m hefting a shot of bourbon, de rigueur for a pre-race tipple.
Luncheon was a good slice of Kentucky gentility:
. . . .and was ended by pecan pie à la mode, prepared in a skillet and liberally doused with whipped cream (note to health-concerned readers: this was not my dessert):
Before each race, the horses for that race are brought out into the “paddock”, a grassy area where they are paraded around so those who wager on the races can get a good look at them. (I think it also warms them up a bit and calms them down.) They are beautiful animals, with glossy, muscled flesh and very thin legs (more on that below). They are racing machines, artificially selected for one thing only: to run fast. Look how thin the legs and ankles of this beast are:
The saddles are put on in the paddock, and then the horses are moved to an adjacent plot of grass where they’re quickly mounted by the jockeys.
Jockeys, of course, are small guys: you don’t want a lot of weight on a horse that needs to run fast to win. Here’s one “jock”:
Here’s our box. If you click to enlarge, you’ll see that it’s owned by the Gaines family. The track, a mile and 1/16 long, is in the background. The stands are built only along the “home stretch” flanking the finish line.
Before the race the horses parade up and down the track, probably an additional form of warm-up. Each horse has a “guide” horse to calm it and lead it to the starting gate. They’re also trotted around a bit.
Very quickly, the horses are stuffed into the mobile starting gate, one by one, and the gates closed. Once they’re all in, a bell rings and they’re off!
These things can cover ground fast: they run about 35-40 miles per hour, which may be close to the maximum attainable for one of these beasts, since times haven’t improved over the last few decades. (In contrast, humans can attain only about 27 miles per hour over very short distances.)
Here’s a finish: the white post takes a photo to determine the winner in a close race. A video board showing the race, from start to finish (since you can’t see the horses on the far side of the track), is behind the post.
VIDEO! Here’s the finish of the sixth race. This is the first video I’ve ever taken and posted!
After the race horses return to the track entry, cooling down. The jockeys dismount and the saddles are taken off. I was interested to see that during the race, the jockeys never actually sit on the horse; they “stand” in the saddle.
The track is not dirt, but is an artificial composite material that looks like shredded plastic or rubber. It’s dragged smooth by tractors after each race.
Thoroughbreds have health issues, particularly orthopedic ones. A huge, muscular animal runs on very thin legs and ankles, and this causes fractures. Sadly, one horse broke its leg near the finish. The authorities clearly knew what to do: a man was on the spot in seconds, lifting the injured leg to prevent further damage:
Animal-rights groups have denounced the high rate of injury among Thoroughbreds. A damaged leg is a very serious injury; as Wikipedia notes:
The level of treatment given to injured Thoroughbreds is often more intensive than for horses of lesser financial value but also controversial, due in part to the significant challenges in treating broken bones and other major leg injuries. Leg injuries that are not immediately fatal still may be life-threatening because a horse’s weight must be distributed evenly on all four legs to prevent circulatory problems, laminitis, and other infections. If a horse loses the use of one leg temporarily, there is the risk that other legs will break down during the recovery period because they are carrying an abnormal weight load. While horses periodically lie down for brief periods of time, a horse cannot remain lying in the equivalent of a human’s “bed rest” because of the risk of developing sores, internal damage, and congestion.
A “horse ambulance” quickly arrived, with two men holding a large canvas cover on two poles. At first I thought this was some kind of stretcher, but I later realized that horses can sometimes be euthanized on the track if the injury is too severe, and I suspect the cover is to shield that operation from the spectators:
This was terribly sad, especially given the statistics that 10% of all Thoroughbreds suffer an orthopedic injury during their racing lives. Fortunately, this horse wasn’t killed in situ, but put into the “equine ambulance” and driven away. I wonder if it survived.
Despite the sadness, it was interesting to see a slice of life that was completely new to me. Thanks to the people at the Gaines Foundation, Robert Rabel, a board member, and the Gaines family for making our visit possible.