St. Petersburg: The Zoological Museum

August 15, 2011 • 5:53 am

Very close to the State University of Saint Petersburg, where we had our meetings a while back, stands the Zoological Museum, or, to use its full name, the Zoological Museum of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.   Entry is a bit pricey, but we were treated to a free visit by the wonderful organizers of our conference.  I was keen to visit because the museum has the only stuffed and mounted adult mammoth in the world, and, according to Wikipedia, it’s also one of the ten largest natural history museums in the world.  The museum’s own site notes that it has over 17 million specimens, of which about half a million are on display.  And yes, the museum is huge, and there’s a lot to see.

The museum was begun from specimens collected by Peter the Great, and its formal inception was in 1724.  As you enter the museum, you see on your left three of Peter’s own specimens, and I’m told that these represent his pets—two dogs and a horse—stuffed and mounted.  Those of you who can read Russian might tell us whether the sign verifies this (click once to make large, twice to make real large).  The taxidermy leaves a bit to be desired:

A bit further in are three cetacean skeletons hanging from the ceiling (I don’t have notes on what they are), and each has one of my favorite bits of evidence for evolution: the vestigial pelvis.  I managed to get all three vestigial pelvises (pelvi?) in one shot, so here is ineluctable proof of common descent:

Much of the collection consists of stuffed and mounted animals. It was, of course, the custom in 17th and 18th century zoology to simply kill everything and bring it back from foreign places.  What is striking about the Russian museum is how many things were killed en masse and exhibited together, including bunches of penguins and baby felids! Fortunately, sensibilities have changed.

I transliterated the animal below from Cyrillic as “leopard” (actually “gepard”), but the species name on the case and the animals’ appearance show clearly that these are cheetahs.  I guess the Russian word for “cheetah” is “gepard.”

Kitteh carnage is rampant, and sad:

Of course the highlight of the museum is its unique collection of mammoth fossils and subfossils. (“Subfossils” are old remains of animals and plants that have not been fully fossilized—that is, in which the hard parts haven’t yet been replaced by minerals.These contain organic material.) Several of the mammoths were famously preserved with flesh and hair largely intact because their remains were entombed in permafrost.  And it is a true fact that mammoth flesh was served as canapés at a dinner at the Explorer’s Club in New York in 1951 (see footnote 3 in WEIT).

This is the world’s only stuffed and mounted adult mammoth—mounted in the position in which it was found:


There were several species of mammoth, all in the genus Mammuthus.  Wikipedia gives the animal’s etymology: “The word mammoth comes from the Russian мамонт (mamont),  probably in turn from the Vogul (Mansi) language, mang ont, meaning ‘earth horn.'”  The first remains date to about 5 million years ago, and mammoths lived right into historical times: a population in Alaska went extinct only about 4,000 years ago. The animals are notable for their dense coat of fur (DNA sequencing of “color” genes has suggested that some of them may have been blonde, since they carried mutant genes identical to those causing light hair in humans and other mammals). The reasons for their extinction is unclear: it may have been hunting by humans, climatic change, disease, or, more likely, a combination of several factors.

My Russian colleagues pointed out with much merriment that the mammoth’s penis was also preserved, and a large one it is, too! It’s the big flat thing sticking out below:

There are several well-preserved baby mammoths as well, one completely covered with hair:

The tusks of the mammoth skeleton were so long that I couldn’t get them in the picture:

Mammoth teeth are amazing, clearly adapted for a herbivorous diet, and one that required grinding. These guys ate more than just leaves: probably grass, which is a tough thing to eat since it contains a lot of silicon that wears down teeth.

The Illinois State Museum says this about the teeth (mammoth fossils are also found in the midwestern U.S.):

The teeth of mammoths are quite distinctive. They are composed of a set of compressed enamel plates that are held together with cementum. These cemented plates make a very tall, strong, and wear-resistant tooth. After a tooth erupts from the gum cavity, the mammoth uses it in grinding coarse vegetation like grass. This use causes the tooth to develop a flat top with low enamel ridges where the plates have been worn.

The tall structure of these hypsodont (shallow-rooted) teeth make them very resistant to wear. [JAC: horse teeth are also hypsodont.] This is important because mammoths are thought to have been primarily grass-eaters. Grass is a very hard material to eat. It has small pieces of silica (a glass-like substance) in its leaves. These pieces of silica act like sandpaper grit and would wear away a less resistant tooth very quickly.

If you’re feeling flush, you can buy woolly mammoth teeth (and other remains) here.

The museum also has the preserved head of a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), another hairy Eurasian species that went extinct in historical times, in this case about ten thousand years ago:

And, just to bring us back to living species, here’s a photograph of a hooded crow (Corvus cornix) that I took at the Peterhof.  In central Europe they form a hybrid zone with the carrion crow (Corvus corone), whose range is in the more western parts of Europe. I remember when the two species were considered just two “races” (or “subspecies”) of a single species, but that’s changed in the last few decades.

What a lovely bird this is! (I know it’s a common bird to many Europeans, but it’s not a sight I’m used to):

Quote of the week: sophisticated evolutionary theology

August 14, 2011 • 3:38 pm

If I have to suffer though theological works that aim to reconcile faith and evolution, you, my faithful readers, must suffer along with me (that sounds like a proper theological sentence, doesn’t it?). Here’s a sophisticated argument from Making Sense of Evolution, by Catholic theologian John Haught (p. 142).

Here he’s talking about that old blowhard Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “synthesis” of Catholicism and evolution.  Haught’s main point is that scientific materialism is not only a faith in itself (we have to have “faith” that our senses tell us anything real about the world), but also is impotent before the Big Questions of meaning, purpose, and morality:

The prevalent materialism among evolutionists since the time of Darwin declares that nothing deeper than the surface commotion of mindless material is taking place as the universe moves from its early elemental multiplicity to the recent emergence of minds and morality.  However, as Teilhard insists, one would have to be deliberately blind and almost willfully unempirical to view evolution as no more than this.  A wider (dramatic) vision allows one to see that in evolution the universe has always aimed to become more. It has never ceased being restless for increasing complexity, consciousness, freedom, and intense beauty. The evidence is all around us.  Indeed, our own existence and remarkable capacity for thought, freedom, creativity and goodness is information enough that the universe has become more over the course of time.

Yes, that’s a conscious, striving, aiming universe there. It’s a universe that wants stuff, like more complexity, consciousness, and beauty. It’s a universe also known as God. So much for those of us who are deliberately blind and willfully unempirical.

Do you know what it’s like to read 140 pages of this and, glancing ahead, realize with a sinking heart that you still have to endure ten more pages? Pages have never been so long!

An intriguing new book

August 14, 2011 • 8:26 am

In today’s New York Times, David Albert reviews a new book by David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. (Deutsch, as you may know, is a physicist famous for his work on quantum computing.)  Deutsch’s thesis appears to be that the adoption of the scientific method—which I take from the review’s context to mean rational exploration of the universe using empirical techniques—was the most transformative thing in the history of universe.  Yes, that sounds a bit overblown, but Albert’s review is so positive that the book may well merit a look:

David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.

It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of this guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts of ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a fraud, or a joke, or madness. But Deutsch (who is famous, among other reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his head. He writes as if what he is giving us amounts to a tight, grand, cumulative system of ideas — something of almost mathematical rigor — but the reader will do much better to approach this book with the assurance that nothing like that actually turns out to be the case. I like to think of it as more akin to great, wide, learned, meandering conversation — something that belongs to the genre of, say, Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” — never dull, often startling and fantastic and beautiful, often at odds with itself, sometimes distasteful, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes (even, maybe, secondarily) true.

Albert also claims that “a lot of the meat of this book is in its digressions,” and many of these, it appears, involve the units of culture that Dawkins dubbed “memes.” That worries me a bit, as I’m no big fan of the meme concept (you can download my review of Blackmore’s The Meme Machine here).

But Albert’s review is by no means uniformly positive: he takes Deutsch to task for uncritical use of memes, and for making, in some places, “explicit and outrageous falsehoods”:

Deutsch insists again and again, for example, that the only explanation we have for the observed behaviors of subatomic particles is a famous idea of Hugh Everett’s to the effect that the universe of our experience is one of an infinite and endlessly branching collection of similar universes — and that what resistance there is to this idea is attributable to the influence of this or that fancy, misguided philosophical critique of good, solid, old-­fashioned realistic attitudes toward what scientific theories have to tell us about the world. This is simply, wildly, wrong. Most of the good, solid, old-fashioned scientific realists who take an interest in questions of the foundations of physics — like me, for example — are deeply skeptical of Everett’s picture. And that’s because there are good reasons to be worried that Everett’s picture cannot, in fact, explain those behaviors at all — and because there are other, much more reasonable-­looking proposals on the table, that apparently can.

The subatomic particle relationship to multiverses is beyond me, but Albert is an expert on quantum mechanics.  And Albert doesn’t mention any other “outrageous falsehoods.”

I don’t suppose I’ll be reading this book, if for no other reason that I have a gazillion others in my queue, and I’m not exactly a fan of those books that take the entire world of ideas as their remit (I disliked, for instance, Gödel, Escher, Bach). Still, I encourage readers who buy this book to report back.  It’s already ranked #122 on Amazon.

St. Petersburg: architecture

August 14, 2011 • 6:10 am

My brain hurts from reading theology, and I’m also engaged in another brain-using activity, so I’ll delay any substantive posting for a day or so. In the meantime, I’ll continue my series on St. Petersburg. (I have a lot more to show!).  Today I’ll put up some of the architecture, leaving the Hermitage and its wonderful art for later this week.

But here is the State Hermitage Museum, occupying several palaces in the main square of St. Petersburg. (The tsars would often build palaces for their favorite nobles and sycophants).  The museum dates from 1764 and holds collections originating with Catherine the Great, who used it to store her enormous collection of art. This collection was eventually shown to the public when the building opened as a museum a century later.  It is the largest art museum in the world if one considers the number of its holdings, and I’ve never seen a better art museum. (I”ll show some of the paintings and interiors this week).

The Hermitage occupies six buildings that adjoin; four of them, including the Winter Palace, are open to the public.  The picture above is of the Winter Palace, which was the residence of the tsars from 1728 until 1917, when the last Romanovs were deposed during the revolution and, a year later, murdered by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg.  The building was occupied by several of the governments that ensued after the October revolution.

Here’s the complex of buildings that include the Winter Palace; this shot is taken from across the Neva river:

The Winter Palace and other buildings stand in a monumental square, the Dvortsvoaya Place, or Palace square; it’s the heart of historic St. Petersburg. The first shot is of the Winter Palace from across the square; the second of the square itself from the third floor of the Winter Palace:


Here’s one of the Hermitage gates, showing the double-headed eagle that was the symbol of the Romanov dynasty:

Here is another palace, the famous Marble Palace built between 1768 and 1785 by architect Antonio Rinaldi. It’s said to use 36 different kinds of marble, all integrated into a harmonious structure.  It was a gift to a nobleman, Grigory Orlov, from Catherine the Great, and now houses a branch of the Russian State Museum. The statue of Alexander III has been the butt of jokes for its corpulent horse and rider.  When asked about it, sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy said, “I don’t care about politics. I simply depicted one animal on another.”  (As with all pictures, click to enlarge, and click this one twice to see how unconventional the statue is.)

The Peterhof is Peter the Great’s summer palace, residing on the Gulf of Finland 45 minutes by hydrofoil from St. Petersburg.  Begun in 1714 (the grounds include several buildings), it’s an amazing place, more to be seen from the outside, which includes its incredible gravity-fed fountains, than from the inside, which is only partly renovated:

The view from the Peterhof down to the water is splendid and imposing; visitors were obviously meant to be impressed:

The fountains are amazing. They’re turned on promptly at 11 a.m., accompanied by loud patriotic music. This is the famous “cascade”:

Russian churches, with their onion-shaped domes, are justly famous.  One of the best is the gruesomely named Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg. It was built between 1883 and 1907, and modelled in part on the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square. It is so named because it was built to commemorate the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, who was killed by terrorists on the spot in 1881. Inside the church is a jasper canopy above the spot where the tsar died.

It’s very elaborate inside. It was originally meant only as a private venue for mourning, but was opened to the people by the Bolsheviks. It underwent an elaborate restoration from 1970-1997:

Finally, two other buildings. One of my favorites is the Art Nouveau Singer Building, built in 1904 by, yes, the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which had a branch in the city.  It also housed the American consulate before the First World War, and is now a bookstore:

St. Petersburg is occasionally marred by dreadful examples of Soviet-era architecture, severe and fascistic. The Finland Station is one of these; here’s another:


To me St. Petersburg resembles a cross between Amsterdam and Venice, situated as it is on islands and dissected by canals.  A typical view from the historic area:

And wandering around, one constantly gets a frisson of pleasure from details like this:

Do go if you get a chance; it’s one of the loveliest cities I’ve ever seen.

Big Love

August 13, 2011 • 11:59 am

Nope, not the television show. It’s Lindsey Buckingham doing his own composition, and he sure can make a lot of noise with just a microphone and an acoustic guitar. I like this version far better than the one by Fleetwood Mac on Tango in the Night. I’ve always thought that Buckingham was underrated as a guitar player.

MacDonald takes down Feser’s theology

August 13, 2011 • 7:15 am

Edward Feser, a Catholic philosopher at Pasadena City College, is notorious on this website for touting the Cosmological Argument for God’s existence (short explanation: every contingent thing has a “cause”; the universe is contingent; therefore the universe has a cause; therefore God). He’s equally notorious for claiming that one can’t truly understand this compelling argument without reading at least six books and seven articles, two of which of course, are by Feser himself.  (Go here, here, and here to see Jason Rosenhouse’s refutation of Feser’s arguments.)

If you’re not reading Choice in Dying, Eric MacDonald’s site, you should be. He is a serious man, a former Anglican priest, who knows his theological onions and makes serious arguments against the fatuity of theologians like Feser.  This week Eric has a two-parter on Feser—not about the Cosmological Argument, but about Feser’s book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism.

Eric’s first post, “History is not an argument,” deals with several issues, including Feser’s strident and militant anti-atheism, which seems to exceed in vitriol anything produced by the supposedly vicious Gnu atheists. A specimen of Feser’s prose:

One is almost tempted to think that Dawkins’s research for the philosophical chapters of his book consisted entirely of a quick thumbing through of Philosophy for Dummies.  Almost, except for this: Though I haven’t read Philosophy for Dummies, I would not want to insult its author, Thomas Morris, who is a very capable philosopher indeed. . . [76-77]

I don’t care so much about that brand of mockery except that it’s hypocritical to indict the Gnu Atheists without also mentioning stuff like this. More disturbing is Feser’s obsession with the “natural law” of Catholicism, especially when it comes to sex.  Feser sees “natural law” for sex as based on the “final cause” of sex, which, of course, is procreation.  Feser’s prose borders on the salacious here, as if he’s licking his mental lips:

If we consider the structure of the sexual organs and the sexual act as a process beginning with arousal and ending in orgasm, it is clear that its biological function, its final cause, is to get semen into the vagina. That is why the penis and vagina are shaped the way they are, why the vagina secretes lubrication during sexual arousal, and so forth … The point of the process is not just to get semen out of the male, but also into the female, and into one place in the female in particular. [144]

Any form of intercourse that doesn’t aim at procreation is thus immoral:

It cannot possibly be good for us to use them in any other way, whether an individual person thinks it is or not. [145]

This is one example of the immorality of Catholicism. God gave us sex, so the argument goes, to have children, not pleasure.  To subvert that God-given purpose by using contraception is a sin.  Of course, contraception via the rhythm method (now called “natural family planning“) is fine, because you’re not putting an artificial barrier between egg and sperm.  Why this is more moral than contraception has always escaped me. In either case a “potential life” is thwarted, in one case by a chemical or a barrier of latex,  in the other case by having sex when a conjunction between sperm and egg is impossible.  Perhaps the distinction is based on some moral difference between passive abstinence and active intervention, but that makes no sense to me.

Yes, orgasms and sexual pleasure are there to promote the production of offspring, but they were vouchsafed for us not by God but by evolution.  And we regularly subvert evolutionary-derived pleasures.  The love of fats and sweets probably evolved to make us seek out scarce and valuable commodities on the savanna; now we subvert them by going to McDonald’s or Baskin-Robbins.  God knows why our neuronal network evolved in a way that makes us love music, but I’m pretty sure that, despite the assertions of some evolutionary psychologists, it wasn’t directly adaptive.  We now subvert the evolutionary genesis of that network by making music and going to concerts.

The point is that unless you adhere to the outdated dictum of an Iron age book—or, rather, to the living fossils who interpret it—it’s not obvious why it’s immoral for consenting adults to use their evolved pleasure centers to enjoy each other’s company.  There is no “natural law” beyond the ambiguous and confused musings not of God, but of a bunch of old celibates. And if there is “natural law” based on the Bible, does it also tell us that sometimes genocide and stoning are okay? Who determines what part of the Bible is “moral law,” and what part can be happily ignored?

Eric’s second piece, “Argumentum ad verecundiam” (the “argument from authority”) takes on the Catholic Church’s touting of authority—in particular the philosophy of Aquinas—as the arbiter of morality. Here’s an amazing statement by Feser:

… very likely only on the classical Western philosophical-cum-religious worldview that we can make sense of reason and morality. The truth is precisely the opposite of what secularism claims: Only a (certain kind of) religious view of the world is rational, morally responsible, and sane; and an irreligious worldview is accordingly deeply irrational, immoral, and indeed insane. [5-6]

Eric goes on to recount the immorality that has occurred in the guise of Catholic authority, including child abuse and the prohibition of abortion that, in some cases, results in the death of both mother and child.  Some might take issue with MacDonald’s comparison of church policy to Himmler’s rationalization of killing Jews (do watch Eric’s clip of Himmler’s speech: it will raise the hair on your head), but he has a point:

Someone will tell me that this is an outrageous comparison, but I am not so sure. Of course the scale of the horror is not so great, but is the injustice and the horror any less because it happens only to a few? And when does a few become many? Is it outrageous to suggest that there is a resemblance between, on the one hand, a church that would condemn a 9-year-old girl to remain pregnant with twins, raped by her step-father, and excommunicate peremptorily those who took part in the abortion, and, on the other, the callousness of men who steeled themselves to act without mercy to fellow human beings, as the Nazis did? Perhaps nothing will ever equal the horror of the Holocaust — hopefully it will not – but the resemblance does not consist in equality of horror, but in a disregard for the humanity of others in response to the dictates of a belief in some “ideal” tomorrow, some “obvious” truth. Consider the outrageousness of the excommunication of the nun in Phoenix, Arizona, because she approved, in a Catholic hospital, the abortion of a woman whose pregnancy would have led both to the woman’s death, already the mother of children, as well as to the death of the foetus she was carrying. Is it outrageous to suggest that this is evidence of a callous disregard for human rights and dignity, based on Catholic “morality”? Himmler at least had enough sense to know that what the Nazis were doing was morally disreputable, and could never be spoken of, yet the man who stands behind these acts of Christian inhumanity, as well as many many more, is widely regarded with adulation little short of the kind of worship offered by Catholics to the God they believe in.

MacDonald is a treasure, worth dozens of Fesers, and it’s great that he’s using his enormous acumen against religion.