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.
Miss USA contestants were also asked to answer the question, “Should math be taught in schools?” You’ll find the answers even more appalling than for the evolution question.
Yes, yes, I know it’s a spoof—and a good one.
Faye Flam is coming into her own as the evolution-centered science columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her column, which deals largely but not wholly with human evolution, is called Planet of the Apes. And her latest piece, “Belief in evolution? It may be the wrong word” takes off from some of the answers given by Miss USA contestants when asked whether evolution should be taught in schools, especially the many responses that mentioned (either pro or con) a “belief” in evolution.
Flam interviews scientists and skeptics like Lawrence Krauss, Ted Daeschler, Michael Shermer, and Glenn Branch (deputy director of the National Center for Science Education). All of them pretty much agree that the term “belief”, while having a useful function in science, shouldn’t be applied to a concept as well established as evolution:
[Krauss]: “Science is not like religion, in that it doesn’t merely tell a story … one that one can choose to believe or not.”
Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, also disapproves of the word belief as applied to science. “You might say, ‘I believe in democracy’ or ‘I believe in gay marriage,'” said Shermer, author of the book The Believing Brain. “But it is not reasonable to say ‘I believe in evolution,’ because this would be like saying ‘I believe in gravity.'” . . .
. . . scientists tend to use the word belief to be synonymous with a suspicion, or hunch, when more definitive evidence is lacking.
A recent issue of the journal Science includes a story about a scientist who believes a virus causes mad cow disease (the orthodox view blames an infectious protein called a prion). She believes it now because she hasn’t found such a virus. If she does, its existence will no longer be a mere matter of belief.
Others use the word belief in areas where different types of measurements arrive at disparate answers, which has happened in the quest to date the split between the chimp and human lineages. A type of DNA analysis called a “molecular clock” indicates a somewhat more recent split than is shown by the fossil record. So for now, some believe the DNA and some believe the bones.
Physicist Krauss agrees that scientists tend to use belief when they lack definitive evidence – as in “do you believe black holes exist and have a singularity?”
It’s fair enough to apply the word to ideas that are still being debated within the scientific community, said Gregory Petsko, a biologist at Brandeis University. But as ideas become established, the word belief no longer applies.
“How we talk about things has a lot to do with how we think about them,” he said, “and believe is the wrong word to use in reference to evolution.”
This is one case where I think we do need to be careful of our language, for using the word “belief”, in front of those on the fence, might imply that evolution has an epistemological status similar to that of religion. And while I do use the words “belief in evolution” as shorthand with my colleagues, who know what I mean, I bite my tongue when I’m about to say that in public. My preferred phrase is that “I accept evolution.”
Anyway, kudos for Flam for using a popular newspaper column to make a serious point.
The latest New Humanist has an short article by Mano Singham that tries to untangle the confusion around the terms “atheist” and “agnostic”. As we know, one can define these terms so they become essentially equivalent, even though some people choose the “agnostic” label simply because it seems less confrontational.
Singham first looked up the definitions of the terms in the Oxford English Dictionary, and found this:
atheist: one who denies or disbelieves in the existence of a God.
agnostic: one who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing.
The problems here are obvious. For “atheist,” “denying” God is not necessarily identical to “disbelieving” in God. The former is absolute certainty, the latter allows for some hedging, i.e., “I see no reason to believe in God.” For “agnostic,” Singham says, “the definition fails to distinguish between not knowing something and there being nothing to know.” In other words, we can “know nothing” about God because either it’s logically impossible to know (i.e., the [false] claim that “you can’t prove a negative”), or because there could be evidence for God but none has appeared. The two parts of the agnostic definition—those parts separated by “and especially”—are contradictory.
These problems are why many of us see those who call themselves “agnostics” because they adhere to the “no -evidence-has-appeared” idea, but want to distinguish themselves from the nasty atheists who say the same thing, as intellectual cowards.
Singham’s solution: deep-six the term “agnostic,” and redefine “atheist” to eliminate these ambiguities:
atheist: One for whom god is an unnecessary explanatory concept.
He explains the advantages:
This definition leaves little room for agnostics because they will have to answer the question as to whether they think God is necessary as an explanatory concept for anything. If they say “no”, they are in the same camp as atheists. If they say “yes”, they are effectively religious and would be required to show where the necessity arises.
Although this sounds like a rhetorical strategy to force people to admit they’re atheists, I actually like it. It subsumes in a logical way both people like P.Z., who don’t think there can be evidence for a god because the very concept is incoherent, and people like me, who think that in principle there could be evidence for a god, but none has appeared. Likewise, it subsumes those who are certain that there is no god (#7 on the Dawkins scale) with those, like Richard himself, who are highly doubtful but not absolutely certain. And it’s not just conflation of wildly disparate views, for it separates people on a crucial axis: whether or not they think we need a god to explain and understand the world.
The only problem I see is that of pure deists, who may claim that although God isn’t needed to explain anything, he’s still up there anyway.
Today’s New York Times highlights Baba Brinkman—described as a “rap artist and Chaucer scholar”—and his new performance at the SoHo Playhouse in New York City, “The Rap Guide to Evolution.” It’s described “an hour-and-a-half lecture on Darwin and natural selection disguised as a rant on the history of rap, gangs and murder in Chicago, relations between the sexes and his own stubborn creationist cousins.”
Although the only example of lyrics given by the NYT may seem a tad sociobiological:
Don’t sleep with mean people, that’s the anthem
Please! Think about your granddaughters and grandsons
Don’t sleep with mean people, pretty or handsome
Mean people hold the gene pool for ransom,
the performance actually sounds pretty interesting. Olivia Judson praised it lavishly in her NYT column last year, calling it “brilliant” and “astonishing.”
It is also, I suspect, the only hip-hop show to talk of mitochondria, genetic drift, sexual selection or memes. For Brinkman has taken Darwin’s exhortation seriously. He is a man on a mission to spread the word about evolution — how it works, what it means for our view of the world, and why it is something to be celebrated rather than feared.
Has anyone seen it? Forget the “rock stars of evolution” nonsense; this is the kind of evolution-popularization I can get behind. But, of course, it hasn’t gone down well everywhere:
Fittingly, the show itself evolves. What was once a line about not sleeping with mean people, for example, has been expanded to a whole section. But the road has not been without bumps. Mr. Brinkman said that in Texas people walked out on a section of the rap which features a call and response of “Creationism is” — “dead wrong!”
There’s more information about Brinkman at his website. The performance runs through the summer and you can buy tickets here. If you’re in NYC and love evolution, you could do worse.
Don’t ask me why this cat has the name she does, but reader Hank (see below the photos) has submitted her along with a great story:
MidtZee Mitzvidyev – The Flying Karamazov Kitty
August 2006 – a Saturday evening, well after dark, in the high desert between Tombstone and Bisbee, Arizona.
I went outside the studio and heard a sound, which I assumed was a rattlesnake. When I returned with a flashlight, what I saw in the darkness were four green eyes. Two palm sized kittens, starving and dehydrated, so bony you could barely pet them. It’s anyone’s guess how long they had been wandering the desert, perhaps abandoned. Amazing that they survived the perils of coyotes, hawks, and owls, let alone rattlers. “Egypt” died in three days, despite the vet visit. Beetles (now MidtZee) thrived. Even as a kitten she flew across the room, banking off of objects to get to where she is going: a streak of black in the air. She generally doesn’t mind riding in the truck, and usually sleeps during the two hour trip to and from the studio, waking up for ice cream in Benson (the half way point). She is not afraid to take on a Pack Rat half her size, but usually only eats the shoulders. She is quite talkative, comes when called, and understands “Paté,” “Kibbles” and “Grass” . She is generally indifferent, but will sleep under the covers when it is cold, her nose an ice chip slinking down the side of your body. She will hog the covers.
She will favor a nesting spot for about six months, then never go there again. As a kitten she carried socks and steelwool around.
She likes to explore boxes.
I’m told she is spoiled. She knows I love her. She hates being kissed on the lips.
You may have noticed the reference to Hank’s studio. He’s a painter and a sculptor who concentrates on Mexican subjects, especially the Dia de los Muertos. Have a look at his travelblog and his gallery of photographs. He also illustrated George Schaller’s The Last Panda and several books related to the Tao Te Ching.
I like to know who my readers are, and when “Lou” sent me that picture yesterday of a caecelian trying to nom an earthworm, and added that he helped run EcoMinga, a string of biodiversity refuges in Ecuador, I looked him up. It turns out that Lou Jost is something of a biological polymath, and well worth introducing to you. Check out his website; he not only manages EcoMinga, but is an accomplished painter, photographer, research scientist, and orchid collector and identifier. In fact, he discovered the world’s smallest orchid, a so-far-unnamed species in the genus Platystele, in 2009. It’s so small that you could place twelve flowers along a one-inch line. As the Independent reports:
Lou Jost, an American botanist, found the tiny orchid by accident when he was inspecting a plant collected from the Cerro Candelaria reserve in the eastern Andes, which was created by Ecuador’s EcoMinga Foundation in partnership with the World Land Trust in Britain.
The plant is just 2.1 mm wide, and instantly supercedes the species Platystele jungermannioides as the world’s smallest orchid. The petals are so thin that they are just one cell thick and transparent.
The flower is just one of 60 new orchids and 10 other plant species that Dr Jost has discovered in the past decade. “I found it among the roots of another plant that I had collected, another small orchid which I took back to grow in my greenhouse to get it to flower,” he said of his latest discovery. “A few months later I saw that down among the roots was a tiny little plant that I realised was more interesting than the bigger orchid.
Here’s a photo by Jost: note that the orchid is against a ruler, and the lines are 1 mm apart.
Here’s a view of the previous contender, Platystele jungermannoides, now the world’s second-smallest orchid (from Orchids Wiki):
And here are two of Lou’s paintings (you can see more here; some are for sale). Here’s an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis):
and a crimson-rumped toucanet (Aulacorhynchus haematopygus):
He takes orchid and animal photographs. Here is his photo of the lovely red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) taken at La Selva, Costa Rica:
Jost notes (and this is new to me) that these frogs can change their color:
These frogs can change color, and their appearance depends on the time of day and their mood. The frog above was photographed at night, and shows its lime green night colors. The frog [below] is the same species, photographed during the day. I was lucky enough to find it clinging to a leaf along a trail.
Here’s Jost (left) presenting David Attenborough with a photograph (and the naming rights) to a new species of tree that Jost discovered on his reserve:
Anyway, if you’re a reader who studies cool animals or plants, or even average ones, feel free to send along your best photos. I can’t guarantee putting up all of them, but it would be nice to see each other’s research organisms. Anyway, kudos to Lou for helping save the rain forest and for documenting its denizens.
Matthew Cobb found this tortricid moth online at Null Hypothesis, a treasure trove of science arcana and humor. The beast is pretty unimpressive, no?
But there’s one cool thing about it: its name: Eubetia bigaulae. It’s pronounced “You betcha, by golly,” and was named by John Brown, an entomologist at the Smithsonian.
I always thought that scientists should use more imagination when naming species; it’s one of the rare bits of humor that can worm its way into the scientific literature. I’ve wished, for example that I could discover a species in a new genus that I could name Mutatis mutandis.
But Null Hypothesis also has a long list of funny but genuine species names, which include these, with the link to the details.
Know any other good ones?
We all realize that our notion of whether or not we have “free will”—and how we define it if we think we do—has huge ramifications for our ideas of moral responsibility, and therefore for how we want to legally punish offenders. If all choice is freely made, then offenders are morally culpable. If some choices are not “free”, but compelled by things like brain tumors or mental disorders, we have a different notion of responsibility, and this is recognized by laws that either exculpate such people or place them in mental hospitals or rehabilitation facilities.
Most of us agree that regardless of whether we have “free will” in the sense of being able to somehow override the dictates of our genes and environments, offenders (especially repeat offenders) somehow need to be incarcerated. Even if they can’t be rehabilitated, they must be sequestered from society for our own protection. Such incarceration can also serve an an example for others to deter them from crime: that is, we do this as an alteration of the environment that may act on the brains of other to deter them from crime.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has an article in the latest Atlantic, “The brain on trial” (free access) arguing that advances in our knowledge of how our brains work have profound implications—even beyond those I’ve mentioned above—for how we treat offenders. (The article is excerpted from his latest book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.) It’s well worth reading, for it will make you have a serious think.
Eagleman begins by describing Charles Whitman’s notorious murder of 13 people at the University of Texas in 1966. An autopsy revealed he had a brain tumor—a glioblastoma—that had affected the amygdala region of the brain, and might well have caused his unexpected rampage (he’d previously complained of headaches and sought help). Similar brain damage can cause obsession with child pornography, which is, of course, an illegal act. Ditto for “frontotemporal dementia,” a brain disease that can cause all sorts of antisocial and illegal behavior.
Drugs given to patients can also make them behave erratically: parmipexole, given to Parkinson’s patients, often turn them into compulsive gamblers, probably by acting as a dopamine analog that affects the brain’s notion of risks and rewards. Genes can also condition one toward bad behavior. Eagleman writes that:
if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.
(I must admit that I’m not familiar with these genes, but I’ll accept this for the nonce.) Should our genetic endowment, then, be considered when we’re sentenced for crimes? And it’s not just genes that can change our behavior against our “will” (if you believe in such a thing): so can environments. Things like physical abuse or neglect when young can have severe effects at a later age. Are these effects “choices” that deserve as much punishment as if there were less apparent causes for antisocial behavior?
The point Eagleman is trying to make, and one with which I agree is that all behavior is biology.
When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that we choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint, and then born into a world of circumstances that we cannot control in our most-formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment mean that all citizens—equal before the law—possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision-making. The unique patterns of neurobiology inside each of our heads cannot qualify as choices; these are the cards we’re dealt.
Because we did not choose the factors that affected the formation and structure of our brain, the concepts of free will and personal responsibility begin to sprout question marks. Is it meaningful to say that Alex made bad choices, even though his brain tumor was not his fault? Is it justifiable to say that the patients with frontotemporal dementia or Parkinson’s should be punished for their bad behavior?
It is problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone breaking the law and conclude, “Well, I wouldn’t have done that”—because if you weren’t exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, and physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable. You cannot walk a mile in his shoes.
This of course shades into notions of free will, notions that are deeply embedded in Western canons of criminal justice. Some of the rationales for imprisonment and other punishments are based on the idea that the criminal could have chosen to behave otherwise. That idea is also embodied in the lesser punishments, or different kind of punishments, given to people when we think they’ve behaved badly because their cognition is impaired.
This has always been the sticking point for philosophers and scientists alike. After all, there is no spot in the brain that is not densely interconnected with—and driven by—other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and therefore “free.” In modern science, it is difficult to find the gap into which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.
Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.
Well, may think that most people act freely, and are responsible for their choices, but how much of what we do—in particular, how many criminal acts—are caused by things that we have no real control over? As Eagleman notes, the more we learn about the brain, the more we understand the causes of behavior, and the more the idea of “choice” seems to dissolve:
Imagine a spectrum of culpability. On one end, we find people like Alex the pedophile, or a patient with frontotemporal dementia who exposes himself in public. In the eyes of the judge and jury, these are people who suffered brain damage at the hands of fate and did not choose their neural situation. On the other end of the spectrum—the blameworthy side of the “fault” line—we find the common criminal, whose brain receives little study, and about whom our current technology might be able to say little anyway. The overwhelming majority of lawbreakers are on this side of the line, because they don’t have any obvious, measurable biological problems. They are simply thought of as freely choosing actors.
Such a spectrum captures the common intuition that juries hold regarding blameworthiness. But there is a deep problem with this intuition. Technology will continue to improve, and as we grow better at measuring problems in the brain, the fault line will drift into the territory of people we currently hold fully accountable for their crimes. Problems that are now opaque will open up to examination by new techniques, and we may someday find that many types of bad behavior have a basic biological explanation—as has happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, and mania.
This of course means—and I suspect most of you agree—that how we treat lawbreakers is not a fixed thing, but must depend on social advances, not just in philosophy but in scientific understanding. So what do we do if we want law to be malleable to science? Eagleman suggests what he calls a “forward looking” approach to culpability and the law. His program includes the following:
Now these recommendations may seem naive, but remember that it’s early days yet in our understanding of the brain. What is certain is that we should not ignore advance in neuroscience, for they have ramifications for how we mete out justice, how and whether offenders can be rehabilitated (remember that they are not just offenders but human beings), and how well our society can be protected from criminal behavior. No doubt some people will poo-poo the scientific approach, particularly political conservatives. But as Eagleman concludes:
Some people wonder whether it’s unfair to take a scientific approach to sentencing—after all, where’s the humanity in that? But what’s the alternative? As it stands now, ugly people receive longer sentences than attractive people; psychiatrists have no capacity to guess which sex offenders will reoffend; and our prisons are overcrowded with drug addicts and the mentally ill, both of whom could be better helped by rehabilitation. So is current sentencing really superior to a scientifically informed approach?
I had no idea that one’s physical attractiveness determined how long one spends in prison. But of course we have the example of Lindsay Lohan. . . . .
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UPDATE: I just remembered that last September I wrote about, and criticized, Eagleman’s views on atheism and his philosophy of “possibilianism.”