Penn Jillette’s anti-faith op-ed: bracing but unrealistic

October 2, 2011 • 4:06 pm

Today’s Los Angeles Times has an anti-religion op-ed by our favorite libertarian atheist magician, Penn Jillette.  In “Politics and the bugnut Christians,” he goes after the evangelical Republican candidates:

I’ve used pornographic images, obscenity and poetry to try to make even the most doubtful blush, but I’ve never come close to Bachmann’s insult to the gentle, honest faithful when she said the suffering and casualties of natural disasters were her God’s message to wayward politicians. What she said was disgusting and not generally Christian at all. But her blasphemous message was delivered on the news as just that.

Bachmann was a longtime member of the Salem Lutheran Church, a small denomination that has some odd teachings. But even in the broadest definition of Lutherans, there are only about 13.5 million, and that’s not enough to elect you president. Now Bachmann has moved to Eagle Brook, an evangelical church, but even if she wins all the evangelical vote, that gives her only 26.3% of the American people. With those percentages, you need to shut up about religion. You need me on board to show that you won’t sell out all the others.

I’m not so sure about that. Remember that G. W. Bush didn’t shut up about religion, and he won handily.  Jillette’s ending is heartwarming, but rings hollow:

Atheists are growing way fast, from under 2% to about 8% just in this century. If you throw in self-labeled agnostics and those who identify as not religious, you’re getting up to around 20%. Evangelicals are about 26%, Catholics about 23%, Jews, 1.7%, Mormons also 1.7% — if you start breaking Christians up into their smaller groups, nonbelievers come close to being the dominant religion, if you can call no religion a religion, like calling not collecting stamps a hobby.

Let’s just hope our politicians keep expanding the group of people they want to serve. Rather than embracing Christian as the magic word of politics, we can move on to the truly magical word: American. And maybe we can even go a step further and make the magic word “humanity.”

Yes, but remember that all those religious groups, theists and deists alike, unite in their opposition to nonbelief. Atheists are still the most reviled group, total non-starters when it comes to a presidential candidacy.  True, we’re growing, but a recent Gallup poll shows this percentage of Americans who would NOT vote for a presidential candiate of these persuasions:

Catholic  4%

Black  5%

Jewish  7%

Female  11%

Mormon  12%

Hispanic  24%

Married for the third time  30%

72 years old   42%

Hispanic  43%

Atheist  53%

Not in my lifetime.

A remarkable case of mimicry: beetles as a venereal disease of bees

October 2, 2011 • 10:01 am

I apologize in advance for putting up an ARKive video that is self-starting (they all are from that site), but thank Ceiling Cat it is relatively silent.  And it’s worth the watch.

I learned about this phenomenon from reading The Folly of Fools, Bob Trivers’s new book on deceit and self-deception, and have read the paper in Nature (reference below) that describes it. It’s a case in which a group of larval beetles work together to imitate a bee, fooling a real male bee into copulating with the mass of larvae, who then are transferred to female bees via real bee-to-bee copulation, and then taken to the female’s nest, where they spend the next stage of their life.

According to the paper by Hafernik and Saul-Gershenz, the larvae of the blister beetle Meloe franciscanus emerge from the sand in the Mojave Desert and immediately aggregate, crawling as a mass onto vegetation.  They then form a bee-sized ball that “responded to outside stimuli, such as nearby movements, by waving their front legs or by contracting as a unit.”

You can see all this on the video below.

This moving ball of blister beetles beckons to male bees, who think it’s a female and try to copulate with it.  That’s also on the video.  The researchers watched 42 bees of the species Habropoda pallida approach the mass (this is a species of “solitary bee,” that is, they don’t nest communally, but a single female builds her own nest in the ground or in vegetation, and provisions the offspring with pollen rather than nectar.) All of these 42 bees were male.  Nine of them tried to copulate with the mass, and when that happens a bunch of of beetle larvae climb onto the bee, temporarily debilitating it (see below).

The male bee falls to the ground and then grooms off most of the larvae—but he can’t remove the ones on his ventral service. (This is also true in the Drosophila I work with: when I dust them with fluorescent powder, they can groom all of it off except for some on their ventral side of the thorax.)

Now the male bee has a beetley venereal disease; in fact, every male has it: all the male bees that the authors sampled in one year carried beetle larvae.

The next problem is getting the larvae to females so they can be deposited in the nest.  That’s essential because the beetle larvae eat the pollen that the female stores for her offspring.  But transfer of larvae from males to females is easy: it happens during copulation.  The author saw lots of females with beetles on their dorsal (top) surface, where they’d be transferred during mating, and witnessed at least one actual transfer during bee copulation.

The authors are careful to frame their hypothesis tentatively, which is of course that the beetle larvae have evolved a social behavior that helps them achieve the next stage of their life cycle: eating pollen in a bee’s nest. To that end, their behavior has evolved to make them aggregate and move as a unit.  Genes that mandate this behavior would, of course, be advantageouos.  This was (at least in 2000) the first known case of cooperative behavior in blister beetles, and the first known case of any cooperative behavior among individuals associated with mimicry.   The authors also suggest that pheromone mimicry might be involved, since the bees appear to be interested in individual beetles before they form aggregations. Perhaps the beetle larvae (like some bee-fooling orchids) produce pheromones resembling those of female bees.

Note, too, that not all of the beetle larvae make it onto the bee (see comments below); many may die of dehydration. But note that they’re all brothers and sisters, and thus share many of their genes. You can thus see the communal behavior as the result of kin selection: you may die, but the genes for that behavior are present in your siblings who ride off on the male bee.

With that long introduction, showing once again the power of natural selection to create amazing forms of mimicry, I present the film that shows the whole ball of wax; the photography is remarkable:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1004573&w=425&h=350&fv=fms_url%3Dvideo.arkive.org%26video_url%3D86%2F8629E228-24FD-4480-AF49-B32912E37FF4%2FPresentation.Streams%2FPresentationFlash]

And here’s a figure from the Nature paper showing a). an aggregation of beetle larvae on a twig (aggregations have a mean number of 549 larvae), b) A male bee with a bunch of beetle larvae on its ventral surface, and c) A female bee, presumably having mated with a beetle-laden male, showing the larvae on its dorsal surface.

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Hafernik, J. and L. Saul-Gershenz. 2000.  Beetle larvae cooperate to mimic bees.  Nature 405:35.

Denmark: you can be good without fat

October 2, 2011 • 5:37 am

Okay, Denmark and Sweden are two societies that I admire, two reasons being that they have copious social services to support their citizens, and they’re a largely godless society (these two facts that may not be unconnected; see Phil Zuckerman’s study of these two countries, Society without God.)  But now Denmark has gone too far with its social nanny-ing, for they’re about to tax fatty foods.  According to the BBC:

Denmark has introduced what is believed to be the world’s first fat tax – a surcharge on foods that are high in saturated fat.

Butter, milk, cheese, pizza, meat, oil and processed food are now subject to the tax if they contain more than 2.3% saturated fat.

But that’s not the end:

Danish officials say they hope the new tax will help limit the population’s intake of fatty foods.

However, some scientists think saturated fat may be the wrong target.

They say salt, sugar and refined carbohydrates are more detrimental to health and should be tackled instead.

Yes, this is what we in America have to look forward to: taxes on salt, fat, bread, and sugar.  (Do remember that it was the British tax on salt in India that inspired its citizens to revolt and led the British to leave.)

Once you start taxing things that are bad for you, just because they’re bad for you, there’s no end to it.

h/t: otter

Kentucky newspaper gives biased account of our upcoming debate on religion

October 2, 2011 • 5:06 am

Question:  you’re a local newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky, and you want to describe an upcoming debate on “Religion in the 21st Century”—a debate that will feature at least three speakers who are anti-religious—but you don’t want to offend your religious readers. (Kentucky is one of the more religious states in America.)

Answer: You pick out one theologian and one critic of religion, and show that they both agree on one thing: the Bible can’t be taken literally.

That, at least, is what the “culture critic” of the Lexington, Kentucky newspaper, the Herald-Leader, did when describing our upcoming debates on Oct 10-12 at the University of Kentucky. (schedule below).  Bart Ehrman, agnostic and critic of the Bible and the story of Jesus, will square off against David Hunter (“Are Faith and History Compatible?”) and on the last night I’ll be up against Catholic theologian John Haught in a debate on “Science and Religion: Are they Compatible?” (guess which side I’ll be taking?).

What does writer  Rich Copley say about this?  He interviewed Ehrman and Haught, who apparently agree on a few things, one being that the Bible is “misused”.

Ehrman and Haught acknowledge that religion is a huge topic in contemporary culture, though it is not a terribly edifying conversation, particularly when it comes to history or religion.

“It’s a mixture of poor science education and poor religious education,” says Haught, a senior fellow in science and religion at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

Ehrman observes, “There are real culture wars going on in America. You have the conservative movement and the emergence of a new atheism and humanism.”

A lot of that, both argue, goes back to a misuse of the Bible as an authoritative text on history and science.

Putting aside the fact that Copley devotes 50% more words to Haught’s views than to Ehrman’s, it would have been nice of him to quote the “opponents” of Haught and Erhman rather than just try to point out the two guys’ common ground.  Those opponents, of course, are David Hunter and I.

I don’t really mind being ignored here, but what I can’t stand is Haught’s views going unopposed, especially his oh-so-sophisticated but insupportable view that the Bible is not “a textbook of science”.  This kind of stuff is really starting to tick me off:

“The point of Scripture is transformation to an authentic existence,” says Haught, an author of several books including last year’s Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life (Westminster John Knox Press, $20). “But there is this assumption that sacred texts inspired allegedly by God should give you reliable scientific information.”

That, he said, is not the Bible’s purpose. But that assumption leads to heated conflicts and ultimately distrust between the scientific and religious communities. The results can be seen in things like the Creation Museum in Petersburg, which Haught has visited and says gives the biblical Creation story “a degree of scientific reliability.”

Maybe that’s the point of scripture to Haught, but it’s not the point of scripture to the vast majority of believers in America, who take much of the bible literally. Remember that 78% of American believe in angels, 81% in heaven, and 70% in hell and in Satan.  For millennia the Bible has been taught as containing literal truths about what happened among our ancestors. That has changed—but mostly among more “sophisticated” believers—and largely because science has showed that many Bible stories are bunk.  Now theologians regroup with their talk of “metaphor”. But who the deuce does Haught think he is to tell everyone what the “point” of scripture is? Does he have a pipeline to God?

He goes on:

Haught says scientists have also misused the Bible, saying that “because it doesn’t deliver scientific information, they reject it all.”

He says that understanding that science is science and that the Bible is a religious text has been essential to his own faith journey.

“Truth cannot contradict truth,” he says. “Science and faith respond to different questions.”

When Haught and his fellow accommodationists assert that “the Bible doesn’t deliver scientific information” or “the Bible is not a textbook of science,” what they really mean, but dare not say, is this: “The Bible is not true.” Or, more precisely, they mean, “Most of the Bible isn’t true, but some of it is, and I’m the one who gets to decide which bits are true.”

Give me an honest fundamentalist, who takes everything literally, rather than a weaselly accommodationist who picks and chooses what’s true without any rational criteria.  After all, most of these Bible-is-not-science types do see Jesus as a divine being, born of a virgin, crucified, and revived roughly three days later. That story is not up for grabs, nor is the existence of a divine Father in heaven.  (If you’ve any doubts, read the Nicene Creed, which is loaded with statements about empirical truth and which, presumably, Haught recites when he goes to church.)  After all, if you’re really sophisticated, you can see God as a metaphor, too: as a mere word that encapsulates the awe we feel when we contemplate the universe and how science has helped us understand it.

And “truth cannot contradict truth”?  Give me a break. As interpreted by Haught, that statement is a pure tautology, because “truth” in the Bible is defined as “that metaphorical interpretation which cannot contradict science.” Up until a few years ago, the literal existence of Adam and Eve was accepted by many as “truth.”  Now that “truth” is known to contradict the scientific truth that the human population size never bottlenecked at anywhere near two individuals.  So the theological sausage grinder extrudes new “truth”, including the idea that Adam and Eve were the two out of many people whom God designated to form the “federal headship” of humanity.  Such is the instantly malleable nature of religious “truth.”

_______

Here’s the schedule if you’re anywhere around Lexington on Oct. 10-12

“Are Faith and History Compatible?” Bart Ehrman, department of religious studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and David G. Hunter, department of modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures, University of Kentucky. 6 p.m. Oct. 10. Singletary Center for the Arts recital hall, 405 Rose St.

“The Compassionate Community: How Universal Ecumenical Values Can Strengthen Politics and Policy,” Jonathan Miller, lawyer and author of The Compassionate Community and TheRecoveringPolitician.com. “Islam and the Relation of Religion to State,” Ihsan Bagby, department of modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures, UK. 6 p.m. Oct. 11. Singletary Center for the Arts recital hall.

“Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?” Jerry Coyne, department of ecology and evolution, University of Chicago; and John Haught, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University. 6 p.m. Oct. 12. UK Student Center Worsham Theater.

Keep your fork—there’s pie!!!

October 1, 2011 • 10:05 am

The title of this post comes from a famous—and probably apocryphal—anecdote about the Duke of Edinburgh and pie. It’s on a page of pie quotes hosted by the subject of this post: the Hoosier Mama Pie Company in my own town of Chicago.

There is a story about the Duke of Edinburough [sic], the Queen’s husband, visiting a small town in northern Canada. During the royal visit he had lunch at the local diner. He was accompanied by his entourage and members of the local and national press who crowded into the adjacent booths and tables. It is easy to imagine the attention lavished on a British Monarch dining at the local establishment. Of course all eyes were on the royal booth when the restaurant’s proprietress came to the table to clear the plates and while gently lifting it from his plate, smiled warmly, and advised “Keep your fork Duke, there’s pie.”

True or not, pie is sublime.  And when uppity furriners claim that America has made no contribution to world cuisine, I reply with a withering one-word retort: “pie”.  (If asked for two, I’d add “barbecue”.)  Filled with applies, cherries, pecans, chocolate cream, lemon meringue, key lime custard, or—my favorite—strawberries, and topped with ice cream or whipped cream, or even desnuda, pie is surely one of the gustatory glories of the world.

American pie is gutsy, unlike the tasty but insubstantial tartes of France.   No other country has anything like it, save for the savory pies of Britain.  Even our northern neighbor, Canada, has debased the genre, producing the odious flipper pie, made with seal flippers (one of these disgusting foodstuffs appears in the movie of the Annie Proulx book, The Shipping News).

So yesterday, when my friend Miranda Hale, Gender Traitor and Known Enemy of the Catholic Church, had a birthday, she asked for pie rather than cake.  A wise decision!  Sadly, her parents got her a store-bought peach pie, which by all accounts was tasty, but rather sad compared to what I’m about to describe:

Miranda and her birthday pie

But merely hearing about pie made me salivate. So, when I went to the western store on Chicago Avenue this morning to get new heel caps put on some cowboy boots, I realized that the Hoosier Mama pie company was only a block away.  The place has been open for only a few years, but is already a legend among Chicago food cognoscenti.  All the pies are handmade, containing only the finest ingredients, and assembled by a dedicated team of women.  The store recently received a “great neighborhood restaurant award” from the most discriminating of Chicago food websites, the LTH Forum.

Their pies are not cheap (they run about $20 per pie, or $4/slice), but are very highly reputed.  So reputed, in fact, that when I stopped by their small storefront shortly after 9 a.m., there were people already lined up for whole pies, and others sitting at the few tables nomming pie and coffee for breakfast (there are few better breakfasts, by the way, than a piece of pie and a cup of coffee). Note the dog on the sidewalk, who clearly wants pie. . .

A small sample of their offerings was on display in front, and the listing of all available pies on a blackboard hanging from the ceiling (as always, click to enlarge):

But an even tastier display comprises the racks of pies cooling behind the counter.

Note that these pies look handcrafted, and they are.   This is, I believe, one of the owners (I can’t recall her name), making the next batch:

What to buy? I didn’t want to make a pig of myself, but I did want to try more than one item.  I settled on two slices: a Hoosier sugar cream pie and a caramel cream with banana (recommended by the cashier). Sugar cream pie, a Midwestern speciality, is the essence of simplicity, for the filling contains only sugar, cream, and butter. You’d think it would be cloying, but it’s not—it’s sublime, rich and creamy with a slight butterscotch/crème brûlée tang. It would make the perfect breakfast pie.

When I ordered my pies, the server simply took two whole pies from the rack and cut my slices out of them. Here she is with the sugar cream:

Here’s my haul.

I’ve already nommed the sugar cream pie, which was fantastic, and I’m saving the other for tomorrow (I didn’t remove it from its container as it seemed rather fragile).

What’s your favorite pie? Along with strawberry (a rare find), I love good pecan pie (with the nuts throughout the filling, not just as a chintzy layer on top), cherry pie, blueberry pie, Key lime pie (but only if made with genuine Key limes), sour cream-raisin pie, and pear pie with cream cheese.  Whatever you like, be sure to

2011 Ig Nobel prize: beetles bonk stubbies

October 1, 2011 • 8:37 am

On Thursday the 2011 Ig Nobel prizes (given yearly at a ceremony at Harvard) were awarded for humorous and improbable achievements in research: you can see the list of winners here, many with links to their papers.  One of the Biology prizes went to Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for a 1983 paper (reference below, link here ) on mistaken copulatory behavior in a beetle.  The Australian buprestid beetle, Julodimorpha bakewelli, was seen trying to copulate with “stubbies,” short Australian beer bottles.

The paper is funny, but does make a serious biological point: males are often indiscriminate in their copulations since sperm is cheap and the payoff (a conspecific mating) is large.  In my lab, for examples, male fruit flies will try to copulate with other males, dead females, or even pieces of lint.

From the paper:

On 2 occasions a flying male was observed to descend to a stubbie and attempt to copulate (Fig. 1).  A search was made for other stubbies in the area and 2 others with associated beetles were located. The males were either at the side or “mounted” on top of the bottle with genitalia everted and attempting to insert the aedeagus [the penis]. Only 1 stubbie without a beetle was located.  A short experiment was conducted in which 4 stubbies were placed on the ground in an open area. Within 30 min 2 of the bottles had attracted beetles. In total, 6 male beetles were observed to mount stubbies. . .

The stubbies were apparently acting as “supernormal releasers” (Alcock 1975) of male copulation attempts in that they resemble large females.  The shiny brown color of the glass is similar to the shiny yellow-brown elytra of J. bakewelli (a discarded wine bottle of a different color brown held no attraction.) In addition, rows of regularly, spaced, small tubercles around the base of the bottles reflect light in a similar way to punctuations on the elytra of the beetle. . . These observations bear our predictions from sexual selection theory that males of a species with low male parental investment should be indiscriminate in mating relative to females (Daly and Wilson 1978).

I love the last sentence about beetle conservation:

Lastly, a comment should be made about the fact that improperly disposed of beer bottles not only present a physical and “visual” hazard in the environment, but could also potentially cause great interference with the mating system of a beetle species.

Check out the other Ig Nobel prizes.  Here are a couple of good ones:

PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: Anna Wilkinson (of the UK),Natalie Sebanz (of THE NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber (of AUSTRIA) for their study “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.”  REFERENCE: ‘No Evidence Of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise Geochelone carbonaria,” Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl, Ludwig Huber, Current Zoology, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011. pp. 477-84.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. REFERENCE: US patent application 2010/0308995 A1. Filing date: Feb 5, 2009.

PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank. REFERENCE: VIDEO and OFFICIAL CITY INFO. [JAC: be sure to watch the video!]

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REFERENCE: Gwynne, D. T. and D. C. F. Rentz, 1983. “Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera),” Journal of the Australian Entomological Society, vol. 22, , no. 1, 1983, pp. 79-80.

October has come again

October 1, 2011 • 3:51 am

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) is an acquired taste.  Most cognoscenti of literature scorn him for overwriting, and yes, he had a heavy hand with the pencil (he wrote in pencil on yellow legal pads, often—because he was so tall—on top of his refrigerator).  I do love much of his writing, though, and when he was “on,” he perfectly captured the feel, look, and smell of America.  William Faulkner rated Wolfe as the best writer of his generation (and remember, that includes, among Americans, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Faulkner himself).

Look Homeward, Angel is an American classic, and at least two excerpts from his books, chapters called “I have a thing to tell you” (about Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany) and “The child by tiger” (about a black man in the South who can no longer stand his degradation) are among the most moving things I’ve read in English.

Wolfe died at only 38, the victim of tuberculosis that spread to his brain.

This passage about October, which I’ve posted before but is also appropriate today, is from Of Time and the River:

Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands.  The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.  Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big that you cannot say that the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails, just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up; the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling upon you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun so that you cannot say where that sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves. . .

October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run.  The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.

The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all:  the sweat, the labor, and the plow is over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf, smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.

Wolfe with some of his manuscripts. He’d deliver them in crates like this to his editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, and the two of them would then have epic battles about cutting the material down to book size.