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.
Today the New Yorker Festival announced its program, which you can see here. It takes place in Manhattan, of course, and from Friday, October 10 through Sunday, October 12. As always, there are tons of things to see. And, I get to be in it, in a LOLzy program of debate—to wit:
I will of course be wearing my Hili shirt.
This will be about the most fun thing I’ve done in years, though I’m not yet sure what I’ll say in defense of cats (reader suggestions welcome, though I want my talk to be lighthearted and infused with some biology and evolution).
If you click on the screenshot below, you can go to the “buy tickets” site; these go on sale at 11 a.m. Sept. 11 and are available for exactly 24 hours. I suppose they’re anticipating a sellout crowd, which is nice.
But this:
What? The cats can’t be there to see their great victory? For we will win! I am really looking forward to it, and to meeting those great people with whom I’ll debate.
I get tickets to some other events, too, so it will be extra fun. Stephen Sondheim is talking, as are Neil Young (I really want to see that!), Larry David, Lena Dunham,, Julianna Marguiles, Randy Newman, Roz Chast, and Jeff Goldblum. So much to do, and so little time!
Any suggestions appreciated, for it for the Great Cause.
The author and her rather chunky cat. (Her current cat is named Cherie.)
Note to readers: Many people send photos without telling me how they’d like to be credited. From now on, I will use your entire name unless told otherwise, only because I think people should get full credit for their work. So, when submitting pictures, tell me which name you’d like me to use. And don’t forget to include the Latin binomial of the plant or animal so that I don’ t have to look it up, as well as the location and, if you wish, circumstances and photo equipment used. Oh, and if you want to put in a brief note about the organism’s biology, I wouldn’t say no. But that’s not essential.
Heres’a British bird from Mal Morrison. Look at that lovely tail!
A picture of A Eurasian Magpie (Pica pica). They are quite common in the UK but I like this one because it shows the iridescence of the long tail, which is only evident in the right light.
There’s quite a lot of folklore attached to Magpies and seeing a solitary bird is supposed to be bad luck whereas seeing a pair will ‘bring you joy’. It’s also long been accepted that Magpies are attracted to bright and sparkling objects, like jewellery, and will take these and secrete them in their nests. The latter has been challenged recently by a study done by Exeter University.
The bird pictured here was one of a pair which were savaging in a back yard. It was about to perch on the wooden fence and eat whatever it has in its beak.
Some birds from reader Ed Kroc in Vancouver:
The smallest resident peep, the Least Sandpiper (Calidris minutilla). This individual was alone in Stanley Park, feeding alongside the lagoon. They may be the most diminutive of the local sandpipers, but least sandpipers are also the boldest. They are alone as often as they flock with other pipers, and are not easily intimidated by humans, walking right in front of your feet to feed if you stand still enough (well, they usually keep about half a metre of distance). This shot shows just how small these guys are: that’s a typical-sized crow feather he/she is stepping around. This particular piper seemed smaller than average even – I would estimate nomore than 10 cm from tip to tail.
A different gull for your consideration: the medium-sized Ring-billed Gull (Larus delawarensis). These gulls are migratory, but you can usually find some around the area if you look hard enough (these two were taking a rest in Stanley Park). Juveniles tend to hang around one area more than adults do. This is one of the few North American gull species that is common across the continent, south of the Arctic Circle, even far away from water. The first photo is a portrait of a one-year-old ring-billed gull. The plumage is speckled and soft.
The second photo shows an adult in breeding colours. The iris always stays yellow in adults, but the eye ring is only bright red during the breeding season.
The Pelagic Cormorant (Phalacrocorax pelagicus) is a regular resident of the Vancouver area. In the first photo, a juvenile basks in the late day sun, panting from the heat.
A nearby adult is pictured in the next photo, with wing outstretched and beak agape, as if he/she was lecturing on something essential. I like how the light in these photos captures the different plumages of the juvenile and the adult. The colour of the water in the backgrounds has not been artificially altered: there was a massive red algae bloom on the Burrard Inlet during one of our heat waves this summer. It filled the inlet with so much red that the city was constantly fielding calls from concerned residents and tourists thinking an oil spill had occurred, or that a whale had been killed and was bleeding out somewhere. But nope, just algae.
78 years ago today, the last thylacine, or “Tasmanian tiger”, died in a zoo. It was a carnivorous marsupial (one of only two marsupial species in which both sexes had pouches), and you can read all about it at The Thylacine Museum. There’s also some photos and information on Wikipedia, including this:
The thylacine had become extremely rare or extinct on the Australian mainland before British settlement of the continent, but it survived on the island of Tasmania along with several other endemic species, including theTasmanian devil. Intensive hunting encouraged by bounties is generally blamed for its extinction, but other contributing factors may have been disease, the introduction of dogs, and human encroachment into its habitat. Despite its official classification as extinct, sightings are still reported, though none have been conclusively proven.
Surviving evidence suggests that it was a relatively shy, nocturnal creature with the general appearance of a medium-to-large-size dog, except for its stiff tail and abdominal pouch (which was reminiscent of a kangaroo) and a series of dark transverse stripes that radiated from the top of its back (making it look a bit like a tiger).
His (or her, as we’re unsure of the sex) name was Benjamin, and, remarkably, there’s a bit of video to show us what the species looked like.
Some sightings of thylacines are still reported (but unconfirmed), and there’s a $250,000 reward for good evidence that the species still exists. I strongly doubt it, so let us mourn the loss of Benjamin as we mourned the loss of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died on Sept. 1, 1914.
Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has posted a stunning video of a volcano exploding, and gives some background. The eruption was of Mount Tavurvur on the island of New Britain in Papua, New Guinea, and it occurred on August 29th. It was captured on video by Phil McNamara, and is now on YouTube.
Phil’s take:
Holy yikes! The video was taken by Phil McNamara, and posted on his wife Linda’s Facebook page. The volcano has been pretty active historically and has caused a lot of damage; it’s killed many people, and buried the nearby town of Rabaul in ash in 1994. Rabual used to be the provincial capital of the island of New Britain, but after that eruption the capital was moved to another location.
This eruption was smaller in comparison, but holy cow. It was still amazing. In the video you can see lava blasting upward hundreds of meters, falling apparently slowly due to distance. Given the timing delay of the shock wave — 13 seconds or so — so the folks on the boat were just over 4 km away (2.5 miles).
You can see the shock wave traveling down the volcano slope at 00:13, and then ramming the air above the volcano a few seconds later. The sudden compression condensed the water vapor in the air, so you can see ephemeral clouds forming in a rough circle above the explosion. I looked carefully but saw no sign of it traveling across the water.
When you watch the video, enlarge it to full screen for maximum effect.
This video was posted two days ago, and already has more than 3 million views. No surprise!
Here are before and after photos from NASA’s Earth Observatory website: notice all the green that has disappeared. The site also gives a lot more information about the eruption.
At the regional Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) convention in Raleigh, North Carolina in early May, Bart Ehrman received the Emperor Has No Clothes Award for plain speaking about religion, one of which resides in my office as well. I was thus especially interested to see what he said in his acceptance speech, as I am not completely down with his views on atheism and agnosticism, or with his almost cocky assurance that there was a historical figure on which the myth of a divine Jesus was based.
And, sure enough, in the talk below, which is largely about his new book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, I was intermittently peeved. In general, the talk was good, and I like hearing from an “agnostic” Biblical scholar who can tell us his view on how historical and psychological forces turned a renegade preacher into a God figure. But Ehrman also seemed he seemed a bit preening and arrogant in the talk, seeing himself as someone superior to both the religious and the atheists. And the last bit of the talk, in the Q&A, will certainly re-ignite our debate about Jesus’s historicity. (After this I’m not going to post on that for a while.)
Here’s the hourlong talk and Q&A:
And here are a few of my impressionistic notes:
One of the bits that bothered me (and perhaps I’m being overly petulant) is Ehrman’s distinction between “agnostics” and “atheists,” with the former saying they don’t know, while the latter say they don’t believe. Since Ehrman claims that he neither believes nor knows, but prefers to see himself as a “scholar emphasizing knowledge”, he says he’s an “agnostic.” I wonder if he’s also an agnostic about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, or the Tooth Fairy. From what he says, I suspect he has as little belief in a God or a divine Jesus as he does in Nessie. But I doubt that Ehrman would call himself an agnostic about Nessie.
I also suspect his self-characterization is also a bit self-serving, because saying he’s an “atheist” would alienate much of his constituency: those who buy his books, many of whom are believers. “Agnostic” is a far safer term. But in fact, all scientists are agnostic about all knowledge if you take Ehrman’s “scholarly” tack seriously. I would have to say, for instance, that I’m an agnostic about evolution, because I don’t know it’s true with absolute certainty. But I’m as certain that evolution is true as I am that there’s no God. (NOTE TO CREATIONISTS: those who take the next-to-last sentence out of context to imply that I have serious doubts about evolution, read this comment below.)
Ehrman clearly accepts the existence of historical Jesus, but says he didn’t think Jesus thought he was God because neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke say that. The Jesus-as-God part was added by John, and Ehrman argues that Jesus would have been stunned to hear that he was God.
Ehrman further notes that “Faith is not a matter of smarts,” for “smart people” (his wife is an example) can be religious. He sees only fundamentalists as stupid, and decries both religious and atheistic fundamentalists, the latter apparently on the grounds that they “don’t have enough ‘mental'” and are harsh and overbearing. Here Ehrman shows signs of the xkcd Syndrome. So Ehrman rejects fundamentalists, but, as I always say, every believer is a fundamentalist (or a literalist) about something. Why reject Genesis but accept the Resurrection? Is that a lot better than buying the whole hog?
Ehrman repeatedly says throughout his talk that he is not trying to convert people to nonbelief, but merely to educate them so they can have a basis for deciding what they believe or don’t. That’s fine, but he says it so often that he starts sounding smug and arrogant. Ironically, he then takes it upon himself to tell people how to sway believers toward nonbelief: you do it not by using “hate or harsh, browbeating rhetoric,” but through love. Apparently we atheists always use hate. But Ehrman’s advice on how to convert the faithful conflicts with his claim that “If we don’t want religion forced on us, then we should not cynically or hypocritically force our atheism on others.” I don’t quite get that, for if we think (as does Ehrman) that religion does bad stuff, what’s wrong with trying to eradicate it? Granted, I wouldn’t require or ask others to do so, but I think that doing so effectively is a good thing for this world.
Finally, Ehrman raises the old idea that nonbelievers won’t make headway unless we “replace the good that religion does in the world” with some secular alternative. He asserts that a leading goal of humanist organizations should be to provide the same social goods as does religion.
What he doesn’t seem to realize is that these statements completely undercut the very organization, the FFRF, that is giving him this award. While the FFRF does try to keep religion out of the public sphere, there’s no doubt that it works actively against religion, what with its many atheist billboards and “you-can-be-good-without-God” campaigns. And the FFRF is not, in general, in the business of providing secular alternatives to religion.
The first listener’s question, at 51:15, is about the existence of a historical Jesus. Ehrman says this is “an issue for scholars of antiquity”. Hie evidence for Jesus in the talk is simply that no such scholars doubt that a historical Jesus existed. He admits that that is not really evidence, but says that there is plenty of evidence in his books for a Jesus-figure, and if you want to claim otherwise, you have to muster some “evidence.” I would have thought that what we need to do to doubt Jesus’s existence is emphasize the lack of evidence, and critically examine the evidence that is offered. And that in fact is what the “mythicists” are doing.
Ehrman claims, and I quote, the evidence for a historical Jesus is “abundantly attested in early and independent sources.” He says (and I’m not sure who he’s referring to) “One author knew Jesus’s brother and his closest disciple Peter.” I am not sure what the “independent sources” are, but as far as I know there are not abundant and independent sources. Finally, Ehrman ticked me off by saying, “Atheists have done themselves a disservice by jumping on the bandwagon of mythicism. . . It makes you look foolish to the outside world.”
Too bloody bad! What we want is evidence for a historical Jesus, and we suspect that many Biblical scholars tout a historical Jesus because to question that would deeply offend many believers, even if we didn’t see Jesus as divine. I haven’t come down completely on one side or the other, but I must say that I don’t see the “abundant and independent sources” that Ehrman claims. Until I do, I will continue to be a historical-Jesus agnostic, and if that makes me look foolish, so be it. There’s been no smoking gun for me supporting a historical Jesus, unlike the genuinely abundant and independent evidence for someone like Julius Caesar.
Finally, Ehrman did a short interview during the convention, which I present below but haven’t had time to watch. The notes on YouTube say this:
Bart provided Scott Burdick an opportunity for a short interview about his personal beliefs and religious experiences. Recorded at the FFRF (Freedom From Religion’s) Raleigh Regional Convention 2014 conference held in the Sheraton Raleigh Hotel, Raleigh N.C. on May 2-3, 2014. The interview will be part of FFRF and the Dawkins Foundation’s Openly Secular coalition campaign. Presented by Triangle Freethought Society.
When I was chilling in Poland a while back, I was interviewed by two members of the Polish Rationalist Society (PSR). Kaja Bryx, who helped organized my “lecture tour” a year ago, did the interviewing, while the filming was done by her partner Jacek Tabisz, the president of the PSR. It’s an 18.5-minute interview, and in it I talk about some of the stuff that’s going to appear in the Albatross. Notice too the beautiful Hili shirt I’m wearing. Also, I made a funneh in response to the first question.
The interview took place on a lovely morning in Andrzej’s and Malgorzata’s front garden. Kaja introduces it in Polish (I’m called “Jerrego”), and the rest is in English. There will eventually be Polish subtitles.
