Where are all the dead gods?

August 22, 2011 • 9:40 am

<rant>

In a very famous essay, “Graveyard of the gods,” H. L. Mencken made a huge list of deities that are no longer worshiped, including Osiris, Diana, Cronos, Elim, Astarte, Huitzilopochtli, and so on. It’s a very short piece and well worth reading since it’s often cited.  Mencken was an atheist, so his point was obvious:

All these were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute. . . ask the rector to lend you any good book on comparative religion; you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity—gods of  civilized peoples—worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal.

And all are dead.

This is a problem for theologians, for what if this graveyard is to be the fate of Jesus, Yahweh, and Allah?  And of course, the existence of thousands of different deities in currently active religions is also a problem—that is, if you’re one of those modern and “sophisticated” theologians unwilling to claim that your god and religion are right and everyone else’s is wrong.

We’ve dealt with this before, though only with John Hick’s insane speculations about how he thinks that all non-Christians—Muslims, Azetcs, Hindus, and the like—will ultimately get a chance to become Christian.  But many sophisticated theologians won’t even go that far, and are unwilling to assert that, in the end, their faith is right, even though it’s the one they’ve chosen to practice.

John Haught is one of the really sophisticated ones (don’t worry, I’m nearly done with him)—a Catholic who refuses to say that non-Catholics were wrong, much less bound for Hell.  So how does he justify not only the disparity among faiths in their gods and beliefs, but also the huge graveyard of dead gods?  This way, in his book Deeper than Darwin (pp. 136-141):

If God does exist, it would not be surprising that the divine depth would insinuate itself into human consciousness by a kind of informational feedback. . .

. . . In addition to all the genetic and evolutionary causes that Darwinians are conditioned to look for, religions are simultaneously information systems attempting to adjust to the negative feedback emanating from the inexhaustible depth toward which they are oriented, but to the bottom of which they can never conclusively arrive.  Because of its own boundlessness, an infinite depth could never be adequately represented by any particular set of symbolic portrayals.  There would always and forever be a distance between the ultimate depth of the universe on the one hand, and the finite religious systems that seek to model and codify it on the other. . .

. . . the eventual death of various gods, then, is not inevitably a signal of religion’s silliness but perhaps an indication of the inexhaustible depth to which religions seek to adapt—without ever completely succeeding. Religions, understood as evolutionary information systems striving to adapt (always inconclusively) to an infinite depth, would possess, by virtue of a kind of negative feedback, an iconoclastic impulse that at least occasionally urges us to discard all our god-images as inappropriate. . .

. . . The evolutionary information systems perspective, however, allows us to conclude that the births and deaths of gods recounted by Mencken are just what we should expect if the universe is grounded in the inexhaustible dimension of depth that religions refer to by the name “God” or by countless other designations of ultimacy.

In other words, religion is like a thermostat that never gets the temperature right. Isn’t it convenient, once again, that what we see is precisely what we expect? And what exactly is the “negative feedback” we get from the Inexhaustible Depths that tells us that the Abrahamic gods are better than the Greek ones?

Try telling the exponents of those other faiths, Dr. Haught, that their beliefs are merely an erroneous stab at the truth, and that belief in Jesus may not bring salvation. After all, he’s just one of those “inadequate symbolic portrayals” that will eventually go down the tubes.

I can’t believe that smart people get paid real money to crank out stuff like this.

</rant>

An online variorum of Darwin’s Origin

August 22, 2011 • 7:51 am

Alert reader Stephen called my attention to this cool “infographic” of Darwin’s Origin of Species.  As you may know, Darwin’s masterpiece went through six editions, with some of the changes being quite profound.  If you want to see where and which changes were made, go to Ben Fry’s “On the origin of species: the preservation of favored traces,” and let it load (it takes some time).  The changes between editions are color coded, and you can find them by zeroing in on bits with the cursor. Have a gander:

Alternatively, you can go to the Variorum site at Darwin Online, and see the changes in each page for each edition, clicking on the year to see the changes.

Finally, if you’re a dinosaur like me who prefers to hold actual paper in the hands, Morse Peckham has edited a very nice variorum book that is easy to use (I have it).

William Lane Craig goes after me for ignorance of religion and science

August 22, 2011 • 6:23 am

An alert reader brought to my attention a 13-minute video that Baptist theologian and debater William Lane Craig—known for his approval of Biblically-based genocide—made in response to my piece in USA Today arguing that science and faith aren’t compatible.  Craig has two main responses: first, that I don’t understand religion, and second, that science, like religion, is based on faith.  He also faults me for tone, saying that my piece is imbued with a “bitterness and anger” toward religion that he finds puzzling.  I contend that my piece is neither bitter nor angry, and that I have plenty of reasons to oppose religion so my behavior is hardly puzzling.

Here’s Craig’s response:

His main points are these:

  • I conflate religion and faith, which are really different things.  He defines “religion” as “a body of doctrine and practice that has to do with God,” and sees faith as “trust or commitment in something.”  Because we can have faith in stuff other than God, I shouldn’t be using the terms interchangeably.  Granted, one can have “faith” (which I define as “belief without evidence”) in stuff other than God—like homeopathy. But it’s clear in my piece that I was using “faith” as a synonym for religion, so his complaint is irrelevant.
  • He argues that the purpose of religion is not “an explanatory enterprise,” but rather mainly a “prescriptive” enterprise: one that tells us how to live and behave.  That, of course, is bogus.  Theologians have always argued that the purpose of religion is to give us answers to the “Big Questions” about life, and that’s explanatory. Here, for example, is Catholic theologian John Haught, from his book Deeper than Darwin (p. 133; we’ll hear a bit about Haught this week because I’ll soon be sharing a platform with him, and have been reading him as an exemplar of “sophisticated theology”):

“What’s going on in the universe? Is there any point to it all? Why are we here? How should we live? Does God exist? Where did the universe come from? Why does anything exist at all? Why is there so much suffering? Why do we die? Do we live on after death? How can we find release from suffering and sadness? What can we hope for?”.  . “It is the main business of religion to answer the big questions.”

I would argue, of course, that although theology asks the big questions, it has no way of answering them—or at least determining answers that are correct.

So yes, I think most theologians, save Craig, think that religion’s main value is to explain why we’re here and what our “purpose” is.  Those are explanations, not prescriptions. I would not for a minute, however, deny religion’s prescriptive (moral) function, though I’d maintain that insofar as morality comes from religion, it’s either based at bottom on secular reason or (as in Craig’s own justifications for Old Testament genocide) pernicious.

  • In an unintentionally humorous assertion, which really shows that Craig doesn’t understand science, he claims (4:55) that religion has made inestimably important contributions to science. These include “the plan of salvation” and “how to find eternal life”.  It gives us a “moral code” for living.  What these have to do with science escapes me.  He also claims that the framework of modern science originated in religion (especially Christianity), for religion produced the notion of a world  separate from God and subject to rational investigation.  That’s a common claim, but I don’t think the advance of science had anything to do with its being pushed by Christianity. It’s based on simple human curiosity, and would have arisen whether or not the Church was around.  Further, the Church has often discouraged rational investigations of the world if they threaten scripture; evolution is but one example.
  • While I argue that faith is “belief without warrant,” Craig says this is simply not true, for many faiths are based on historically verifiable events.  Christianity, for example, is rooted, says Craig, “in events that actually happened, people that actually lived, things that actually went on.”  And he says that religion can come within the purview of the historian, and that “Professor Coyne” maintains that as well.  What I have maintained is that certain claims that accompany belief in a theistic God can be tested, like the efficacy of prayer.  Further, some of the miracle claims of the Bible are either palpably false, like the Adam and Eve story, or so improbable that, using Hume’s criterion, they’re almost certainly made up (e.g., the Resurrection).  But certainly the major events of the life of Jesus, like the virgin birth and Resurrection (some would even say Jesus’s existence) don’t pass any credible scientific test, since they are documented in only one book that is known to be largely fictitious.  Nevertheless, Craig argues that we have tons of evidence for the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and those come from the very credible Gospels.
  • Craig argues that science itself is permeated with assumptions about the world that cannot be scientifically justified, but are based on faith.  One of these is the validity of inductive reasoning: “Just because A has always been followed by B every time in the past is no proof at all that  A will be followed by B tomorrow.”  To suppose the latter requires faith.  I wonder if Craig worries every time he gets on an airplane, or whether the sun might not rise tomorrow.  What he doesn’t seem to realize is that the assumption that things will operate in the future as they have in the past has always worked (as Hawking says, “Science wins because it works”), and so the assumptions are not mere faith; they are justified by their results. If the assumption wasn’t justified, for example, we couldn’t send people to the Moon.

Craig cites three other articles of faith accepted by scientists, articles that can’t be proven:

  1. We assume that the velocity of light is constant in a one way direction, but all we can measure is the round-trip velocity of light. Therefore, light could go out at one speed and come back at another, with the round trip velocity always being the same. I would find it extraordinary if this were true.  The assumption of constancy is based on parsimony, and to me doesn’t seem equivalent to believing in the Resurrection, for which there’s no parsimony explanation, but simply tons of counterevidence that dead people don’t come back to life.
  2. Another article of scientific faith is the assumption that there is indeed a real external world that can be described accurately by our senses.  We could, after all, be brains in vats, or creatures in some giant simulation run by aliens.  This is a very common tactic used by the faithful equate science and religion; Haught also makes this claim.  My answer is that every bit of evidence shows that we have evolved to detect realities in an external world, and those senses help us survive. This argues for the reality of an external world that is at least somewhat accurately perceived by our senses, and other of other creatures.  After all, if we don’t run when we think we perceive a large, angry felid coming toward us, we will perceive that we get eaten.  As Dan Dennett argues, “such an appeal to the power of information-gathering organs would be in danger of vicious circularity were it not for the striking confirmations of these achievements of natural selection using independent engineering measures.  The acuity of vision in the eagle and hearing in the owl, the discriminatory power of electric eels and echolocating bats, and many other cognitive talents in humans and other species have all been objectively measured, for instance.”
  3. Finally, Craig argues last-Thursday-ism: that it’s an article of scientific faith that the world has had a real past that we can discover, rather than having been created only five minutes ago with all of our memories of our lives, and knowledge of the past, created as well.  I have two counters here.  First, even if that’s true, we can still find out stuff about how things work now from using information about that supposedly fictitious past, and make verifiable and verified predictions based on that information, so in some sense it doesn’t really matter.  Second, for a religious person like Craig to believe this entails not only the notion of a deceptive God, but also one who created the illusion of Jesus and the events of the Bible for reasons that we can’t fathom.

Clearly we’re going to hear more about science’s reliance on philosophical naturalism as being an “article of faith” equivalent to belief in the divinity of Jesus.  This is an increasingly popular argument among both religious people and accommodationists, so I’d like to hear readers’ responses.

A book you’ll want to buy—and give

August 21, 2011 • 11:35 am

Almost a year ago to the day I began a week-long series of posts on the peregrine falcon. I was inspired to do that by reading The Peregrine, an account by John A. Baker of a year he spent watching peregrines hunt in Essex.  I said at the time that it was among the best nature books I ever read.  Let me revise that judgment: it is the best nature book I’ve ever read.  And you’ll want to read it, too, if you have any interest in nature, or birds, or simply in beautiful prose. I gave a sample of Baker’s prose in each of the posts I made during Peregrine Week.  Do have a look; I know of no naturalist or scientist who writes better

The book has been hard to find: it was long out of print but was republished in 2004 as a New York Review of Books Classic.  Baker had one other book, The Hill of Summer, which is out of print (it’s not even in my university library), and which I’m almost afraid to read for fear it could never come close to the quality of The Peregrine.  The Hill of Summer appears to be a more general treatment of Essex and natural history.  Baker also had one published essay, “On the Essex Coast,” which appeared in RSPB Birds in 1971.  I haven’t read that one, either.

I’m really  pleased, then, to see that all of Baker’s published and unpublished writings—including his diary—plus some biographical information (I could never find out much about him) has been compiled and will be issued by HarperCollins in one volume on September 1: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker.

You can buy it on Amazon here, and also read a fair bit about Baker’s life by clicking on the book cover.

Trust me, you can’t make a better investment for $13.57.  It’s also a perfect gift for nature lovers; I’ve given out several copies of The Peregrine myself, and, without exception, the recipients have loved it.

h/t: Todd

Note to readers

August 21, 2011 • 10:42 am

There are fairly frequent complaints here about the inability of readers to preview their comments before they’re posted.  I sympathize with this (I’m exempt, of course, because I can edit my own posts and comments), but I’m sorry to say that this stricture is not my own: WordPress simply doesn’t allow readers the option of previews or post-comment editing.

That said, I can edit readers’ comments.  if you’ve made some egregious error, forgotten to close your italics using HTML tags, or wish to make an important change in something you’ve said, just shoot me an email (you can find my work email simply by Googling my name and the name of my university) and ask me to make the change. I’ll be glad to accommodate, and have done so a fair number of times.

Is “epigenetics” a revolution in evolution?

August 21, 2011 • 7:23 am

One often hears the suggestion that the neo-Darwinian view of evolution is on the skids, and that that view will be completely changed—if not overturned—by new biological ideas like modularity, genetic assimilation, evolvability, and epigenetics.  Epigenetics in particular (I’ll define it in a moment) has been especially touted as a concept that will revolutionize evolutionary biology.

Call me an old fogey, but I think the idea of epigenetics as a Darwin-destroyer is completely bogus.  Although certain discoveries in that area are interesting, and have certainly expanded our notion about how genes work, there is not the slightest evidence that the findings of epigenetics will dispel the main ideas of neo-Darwinism, which include the ideas of evolutionary change via natural selection and genetic drift, the randomness of mutations, the ideas of speciation and common descent, and the gene-centered view of evolution.  I’ve explained my views on epigenetics as a revolution in several previous posts, for example here, here, here, and here, but, like the Lernean Hydra, each time you cut off a head of the epigenetic beast, it grows another one.

The latest head appeared in Friday’s Guardian, in a book review written by Peter Forbes; the book is The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey, and Forbes sees the book as tremendously important, implying that is part of a scientific revolution and explicitly saying that it’s a book that would “make Darwin swoon.”  I haven’t read the book, and although it might make Darwin swoon if the old git were to be resurrected, the discoveries of genetics and the mechanism of inheritance itself would make him swoon far more readily.  And I know scientific revolutions; scientific revolutions are friends of mine; and believe me, epigenetics is no scientific revolution.

So what is epigenetics? The term is actually used in two different ways.  When I was younger, it simply meant “developmental genetics,” that is, the study of the way the DNA code of genes is translated into the bodies and physiologies of organisms.  That, of course, was a tremendously important and exciting area, and still is. It involves understanding how genes are turned on and off in different tissues and cells, how different genes interact with each other, and how the products of a one-dimensional sequence of information can build a three-dimensional body.  This study has segued into the new field of “evo devo,” which tries to understand the evolutionary basis of developmental genetics.  “Evo devo” itself has, of course, led to its own important discoveries, like the presence and conservation of homeobox genes, the use of the same genes over and over again in forming similar but non-homologous traits (e.g., PAX6 in the formation of fly eyes and vertebrate eyes), and the linear arrangement of genes in some organisms (e.g., Drosophila) that correspond to the linear arrangement of body parts they affect.

So developmental genetics, and evo devo, are fascinating areas that produce a stream of surprising discoveries. But they’ve done nothing to alter the going paradigm of neo-Darwinian evolution. It is telling that, for example, Sean Carroll, a famous practitioner of “evo devo” and a popular writer, is a firm adherent to neo-Darwinism.  What we learn from these areas is precisely how evolution has acted to sculpt bodies, but it still does so using randomly-generated genetic variation and good old natural selection (and yes, Larry Moran, genetic drift also plays a role). Gene regulation itself is a phenomenon molded by natural selection, and how genes are turned on and off is itself a phenomenon residing in the genes: in the genes that make the DNA or proteins that regulate other genes, and in the many ways that genes evolve (through, for example, the evolution of regulatory regions), to respond to internal “environmental” influences.

The second meaning of “epigenetics” is more recent, and involves actual changes in the DNA itself that are not based on mutational changes in nucleotides, but in environmental modifications of nucleotides—things like methylation of nucleotide bases or  changes in DNA-associated proteins like histones—that can temporarily modify genes and affect their actions.  I say “temporarily,” because such environmental modification of DNA, while it can be adaptive, is not usually passed on from one generation to the next.  For example, we get our genes in pairs—one from mom and one from dad—but they can be differentially “marked” (the technical term is “imprinted”) during the formation of sperm and eggs, and so the copy from dad can act differently from the copy coming from mom.  This imprinting is probably due to natural selection: scientists like David Haig have argued that the different and conflicting “interests” of paternal versus maternal genes has, through natural selection, molded the way they are imprinted, allowing them to act in different ways in the embryo. But an “imprinted” gene is reset each generation: the imprinting disappears and has to re-form depending on which sex the gene is in.

As I have argued before, however, imprinting of genes, although a novel and recently-discovered phenomenon, is not a “revolution” in how we view evolution: it is an embellishment that doesn’t overturn the main ideas of neo-Darwinism.  And many of the phenomena subsumed by this modern notion of “epigenetics” still evolved by natural selection. Imprinting, after all, is based on changes in DNA that somehow render paternal DNA more (or less) susceptible to modification than maternal DNA.  Imprinting has evolved by changes in DNA, even though the modifications of DNA it causes are environmental.

In his review of Carey’s book, Forbes, a science writer, concentrates on the second, “revolutionary” sense of epigenetics:

Genes don’t just issue instructions: they respond to messages coming from other genes, from hormones and from nutritional cues and learning. Much epigenetics revolves around nutrition. If we drink a lot of alcohol an enzyme that metabolises it becomes more active – “upregulated” in the jargon. And similar mechanisms apply to much of our behaviour. The methods by which genes makes these responses often involve very small chemical modifications (usually the addition of a tiny methyl group to one base of DNA). It is almost certain that memory – a classic nurture problem: we learn something and it becomes biologically encoded – involves epigenetics. Once made, epigenetic changes can be very long lasting, which is how our long-term memory is possible.

Why is this “revolutionary?” Because some of the inherited changes of genes appear to be “Lamarckian,” that is, they aren’t really changes in DNA sequence itself, but environmental modifications of DNA that can be passed from one generation to the next.  And if such “nongenetic,” environmentally-acquired inheritance were common, that would be a revolution in the way we think about evolution.

So what’s the evidence for this “revolutionary” notion? Forbes simply offers up the same tired old anecdotes I’ve addressed before:

So far, this is instructive and highly promising for medical research, but epigenetics finally reaches that “everything you’ve been told is wrong” moment when it claims that some epigenetic changes are so long-lasting they cover several generations: they can be inherited. This flouts one of biology’s most cherished dogmas – taught to all students – namely that changes acquired during life cannot be passed on – the heresy of Lamarckism.

But the evidence that this can occur in some cases appears to be growing. There are lab experiments with mice and rats in which epigenetic effects on coat colour and obesity can be inherited. More suggestive evidence comes from a vast, unwitting and cruel experiment played out in the second world war. In 1944, during the last months of the war, a Nazi blockade followed by an exceedingly harsh winter led to mass starvation in Holland. This had a huge effect on babies born at the time, and the effects of poor nutrition on the foetus seem to have persisted through subsequent generations.

Well, I won’t flog poor Mr. Forbes with the fact that these are only a few trivial examples of the phenomenon, examples that don’t appear to have any evolutionary importance.  Nor will I flog him with the fact that when we can dissect the genetic basis of real adaptations in real organisms, they invariably turn out to rest on changes in DNA sequence, not in environmental and non-DNA-based modifications of nucleotides.  Here’s what I said in an earlier post about Oliver Burkeman’s claims that epigenetics has profound implications for evolution (like Forbes, Burkeman is a science journalist):

All I can say to this is: “Profound implications my tuchus!” There are a handful of examples showing that environmentally-induced changes can be passed from one generation to the next.  In nearly all of these examples, the changes disappear after one or two generations, so they couldn’t effect permanent evolutionary change.  The proponents of epigenesis as an important factor in evolution, like Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, always wind up talking about the same tired old examples, like cases of coat color change in mice and flower pattern in toadflax.  I am not aware of a single case in which an adaptive change in an organism—or any change that has been fixed in a species—rests on inheritance that is not based on changes in the DNA. (For a refutation of the pro-epigenesis arguments that Jablonka and Lamb make in their 2005 book, see Haig [2007].)

Moreover, some examples of “nongenetic” inheritance that do have adaptive significance, such as differential methylation of paternal versus maternal chromosomes, ultimately rest on changes in DNA that promote that differential methylation. And this “inheritance” lasts only one generation, for the methylation profile is reset in each sex every generation.

In contrast to the very few cases of one- or two-generation inheritance that cause nonadaptive changes in the phenotype stands the very, very large number of studies in which inherited changes within and among species map to the DNA.  These include every case of evolutionary response to artificial or human-generated selection, adaptive changes within species (e.g., spiny-ness in sticklebacks), and differences among species in both morphology (e.g., the color differences in fruit flies I study) and reproductive barriers (the many mapping studies of “hybrid sterility” and “hybrid inviability” genes). Burkeman, of course, doesn’t mention these cases: it would ruin his nice story.

If we look just at studies of the inheritance of organismal  changes that have evolved over time (and many of these would have detected profound epigenetic effects), the score would be something like this:  DNA  757, Epigenesis 0. (I’m just making these numbers up, of course, to make a point.)  If we look at all “inherited changes”, regardless of their evolutionary importance, we would have a handful of epigenetic changes versus literally thousands of DNA-based changes.  So how can Burkeman say that epigenesis will profoundly revise our view of evolution?

So, Mr. Forbes, our “cherished dogma” of non-Lamarckian inheritance still holds strong, and you’ve done your readers a disservice by implying otherwise.  Lamarckism is not a “heresy,” but simply a hypothesis that hasn’t held up, despite legions of evolution-revolutionaries who argue that it flushes neo-Darwinism down the toilet.  If “epigenetics” in the second sense is so important in evolution, let us have a list of, say, a hundred adaptations of organisms that evolved in this Larmackian way as opposed to the old, boring, neo-Darwinian way involving inherited changes in DNA sequence.

Forbes can’t produce such a list, because there’s not one.  In fact, I can’t think of a single entry for that list.

Science journalists—meh.  They’re always trying to argue that Darwin was wrong and that evolution is about to undergo a Kuhnian revolutionary paradigm.  But what they really want is readership, and you don’t get readers by writing that the conventional wisdom happens to be correct.

Scientific images: beautiful, important, and/or iconic (add and vote):

August 21, 2011 • 5:06 am

Over at Quora, you can see about eighty of what the authors consider the “most important, iconic, and/or beautiful scientific images,” and vote for your favorites.  You can even add your own favorite images, and see how they fare.

It’s hard to choose, but I suppose mine would be this one: the very first phylogenetic tree of organisms, sketched by Darwin in one of his famous notebooks (this page was on display at the traveling Darwin exhibit several years ago):

I love the “I think” note at the upper left.  This is really the very first branching diagram ever made, suggesting that all of life might be interrelated, and so it’s of enormous importance in the history of thought.

But there are many others, and among those it’s hard to choose. Here are a few more.  Go over and vote!

Amazingly, fractals happen in nature as well. Romanesco Broccoli is famous for its natural occurring fractal pattern, and it’s actually edible!

Here are some of the images that aren’t necessarily the most beautiful, but they’re ones I find most moving.

A solar eclipse, seen from behind Saturn by the Cassini probe:

One of Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction patterns, which showed to the trained eye that DNA was a double helix:

Humans on the moon.  I remember the first moonwalk on July 21, 1969.  I was going over to a friend’s house to see it on television, and I was late. I rushed through the door just at the moment when Neil Armstrong descended the ladder of Apollo 11 and, for the first time in our history, a human foot touched another planet.  Armstrong, of course, said these famous lines: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  We’ve now become so jaded about these things that it’s hard to envision the bone-shaking thrill that we all experienced then.  The photo below is, of course, from a later moonwalk:

Earthrise!

And this one I like because it’s so cool: it’s a jet at the moment of breaking the sound barrier:

They also show this image of a “Solvay conference” in physics, which is one of my favorite pictures of scientists.  The participants aren’t identified, but Iconic Images tells you who they are (see below photo).  Perhaps no other photograph contains so much human brainpower! (Click to enlarge).

In 1911, Ernest Solvay, the Belgian chemist and industrialist founded Conseil Solvay, the world’s first physics conference. Initially aimed at solving problems in physics and chemistry, the conferences are held every three years.

The above group photo was taken at the end of the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference. The tensions were high: Einstein sparred with Heisenberg over the latter’s Uncertainty Principle. The attendees disagreed on the Copenhagen interpretation of atom, was promoted by a faction led by Niels Bohr, and opposed by more conservative faction lead by Albert Einstein. By the end of the conference, Bohr’s faction had prevailed.

First Row (l to r): Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Pierre Langevin, Charles Eugene Guye, C. T. R. Wilson, Owen W. Richardson

Second Row (l to r): Peter Debye, Martin Knudson, W. Lawrence Bragg, Hans Kramer, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr

Third Row (l to r): Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Edouard Herzen,Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrodinger, Jules-Emile Vershaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Leon Brillouin.

Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners.

Port-a-confessionals

August 20, 2011 • 10:04 am

From the freethinker Magazine, we find that 200 portable, open-air confessionals have been set up in Madrid’s Retiro Park in honor of the Pope’s visit. I wonder if they’ll be used during the abortion holiday, when the Pope has granted a week of easy absolution for that mortal sin.

As the article documents, many Spanish are angry because the Pope’s visit will cost around 70 million dollars, most of it footed by pilgrims or Spanish businesses. But think how many lives that money could save if spent wisely in, say, Africa.  And there will be other costs, too:

But critics are calling the claims ridiculous. Father Rodríguez [a Spanish priest who works among the poor] and others who signed the 10-page petition say the costs are always fuzzy when the Pope swans to town. They suspect that the cost of extra security, of collecting trash and of stress on health systems will add up to millions for taxpayers. For one thing, the pilgrims have been granted an 80 percent discount on public transportation, which some find particularly galling because subway fares just went up by 50 percent.

There are also reports that Spain is blocking public access to social media sites that could be used to plan counter-Pope demonstrations.