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.
Jabez T. Sunderland (1842-1896) was an American Unitarian minister, and a remarkably sane one. An alert reader sent me this passage from a book he wrote in 1893: The Bible, its Origin, Growth, and Character, and its Place Among the Other Sacred Books of the World. (p. 12)
The best sentence here is this: “That which really belongs to the mind of the reader is attributed to that of the writer.” That’s theology in a nutshell.
This is a picture of penguins—a huge colony of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) on South Georgia Island. It’s one of eight wonderful photographs of the species taken by Andy Rouse that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian.
The brown parts of the colony are crèches: groups of young unmolted birds that gather together and are tended by a few adults while the parents go fishing. It always amazes me that every penguin can distinguish not only its own mate, but its own chick among the huddled masses. Of course, evolution would, though kin selection, foster that ability: you don’t want to promulgate somebody else’s genes.
This could easily be captioned as a LOLpenguin:
King penguins are the world’s second largest penguin (after the emperor), weighing in at a hefty 20-30 pounds. They also have an unusually long breeding season: between 14 and 16 months from egg to fledging, so they cannot breed annually.
There are two subspecies: A. patagonicus patagonicus, whose distribution is shown in pink on the map below, and A. patagonicus halli, whose distribution is in yellow. Green areas are the breeding grounds: they don’t breed on the Antarctic mainland.
h/t: Matthew Cobb
A few days ago I posted part of a piece that geneticist George Church wrote for reddit, answering readers’ questions. In one answer Church argued that “the overlap between science and faith is vast and fertile.” I claimed that Church’s equation of scientific faith with religious faith showed “a chronic and debilitating sympathy for religion.”
Creationists at various websites brought my piece to Church’s attention, and they have jointly circulated an email—which I’m allowed to publish—in which Church expands his argument. Here’s what he says.
Thanks for bringing this sad news to my attention. Rumors of my debilitation have been greatly understated. Please feel free to reflect this discussion back to reddit, telic or whyevo. My reddit response to this complex question was a bit terse (in case no one cared), so here’s a slightly unpacked version.
(“telic” refers to Telic Thoughts, an intelligent-design website that is BFF with Church. I’m beginning to wonder if Church is an advocate of intelligent design. )
Some people feel that science and faith have nothing in common. But a considerable amount of faith drives everyday science. Examples: Some of us have intense faith that one branch of science will be more worthy of our attention than other branches. We have faith that our science will help humanity rather than hurt it. (Mountains of evidence?). Many of us developed faith in science at an early age based on trust in “evidence” in books and teachers, before we confirmed any significant part of it (empirically or theoretically).
This doesn’t help Church’s conflation of the different ways scientists and religious people construe “faith”. In the above quote he uses it in three different ways: as a “predilection” (we’re more interested in some brands of science than others), as “confidence based on evidence” (“science will help humanity rather than hurt it”), and as “trust in the pronouncements of known scientific authorities” (faith in the abilities of our teachers and scientists to know and promulgate the truth). It’s simply a canard to equate faith in the divinity of Jesus, or in the existence of God, with “faith that Mrs. Brown [my fourth-grade teacher] is telling me the truth about South America” or “faith that Richard Feynman knows what he’s talking about when he describes the two-slit expeirment.” The veracity of Mrs. Brown and Feynman can be tested by recourse to other authorities who did the relevant scientific work. The veracity of priests, the Pope, and the Bible has no independent way of being confirmed. Here Dr. Church simply avoids the criticism I made about playing fast and loose with the notion of “faith.” In fact, he continues to do it, by adding even more meanings to the word.
Frequently religion addresses scientific topics (e.g. the physics/biology of miracles, ancient gods, Galileo). Religion is not synonymous with “belief in the absence of all evidence”. Young theists respond to evidence from books, teachers and their own experiences. Mistakes are made (at both the individual and societal levels) and are eventually corrected. Science also corrects some mistakes slowly (e.g. lobotomies 26 years, bloodletting 2000 years, Galen to Harvey 1500 years). “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Ironically, Popes required more evidence than the scientists to accept the extraordinary claims of Galileo (382 years).
The only way religion corrects its mistakes is precisely the same way that science corrects its mistakes: through the accumulation of scientific evidence. That’s why there’s all this kerfuffle about Adam and Eve (why isn’t there a similar kerfuffle about Noah?). Theology has no independent way to find truth, which accounts for all the conflicting theologies that infest the world. When theology begins to correct itself based on theological rumination rather than scientific evidence or secular reason, then I’ll consider whether there might be a similarity between these “magisteria.” When religion discards the divinity of Jesus, the existence of a soul, or the existence of God based on the verdict “not proven,” then I’ll sit up and take notice.
Surely Church can’t believe that the methodology for finding “truth” is similar in faith and science! (Or maybe he does, and he’s simply more of a faith-head than I thought.) And to equate these areas because science is occasionally wrong simply shows a gross misunderstanding of the difference between our field and theology. Of course science can be, and has been wrong, but we have ways of finding that out and correcting ourselves!
And Church’s claim about Galileo is simply embarrassing. Catholics required more evidence than science because the Pope took longer to vindicate Galileo? Really? Scientists knew Galileo was right by the 1700s, based on real evidence. The Church took longer not because it was waiting for the evidence to become stronger, but because Teh Pope didn’t like to admit that the Church was wrong. Does Church understand how the Vatican operates?
If faith had no impact on our physical brain, then by what mechanisms does it impact our spoken conversations. Billions of humans (in a very real scientific sense) have faith. The overlap is vast and fertile. Scientists can, and do, study faith and religious experience with fMRI, psychosocial tests, psychoactive drugs, epidemiological studies, economic science, etc.
I really don’t know what the good geneticist is talking about here. Sure we can study religion as a sociological and neurological phenomenon, but a) that has no bearing on the truth of religious claims, and b) these scientific studies of religion are just that—scientific. Unlike religion, they don’t involve belief in the unseen and unprovable.
As we learn more about nature, for many of us, this greatly strengthens rather than lessens our awe. If we learn enough about nature to construct an evolving ecosystem on another planet (possibly discreetly nudging it occasionally), would we expect intelligent life arising on that planet to have faith in intelligent design or evolution or both? What is the “extraordinary evidence” that intelligent aliens had zero influence our own evolution?
Presumably intelligent life on another planet would have ways of detecting whether their evolution involved a combination of chance mutations, random genetic drift, and deterministic selection, or whether there were signs of intelligent tinkering with life, as ID advocates claim. If our manipulations were so subtle as to be indistinguishable from natural processes, then they wouldn’t of course be detectable. But in that case the hypothesis of human-tinkering would be unnecessary for them, just as the possibility of God-tinkering is unnecessary for us. What is the “extraordinary” evidence for Church that mutations in the DNA he studies aren’t caused from time to time by the finger of God? Or that DNA is unzipped during replication by the hands of angels?
It’s statements like the above that make me think that George Church is somewhat of a creationist, or at least sympathetic to intelligent design. If he’s not, and firmly adheres to the naturalistic theory of evolution, let him state that.
And of course our awe increases as we learn more about the Universe, and how much more bizarre it is than we ever suspected. But that is no proof of God—it’s proof that science, not religion, is the only way to uncover those awe-inspiring truths about our universe.
I don’t get a lot of pleasure out of criticizing the philosophical ruminations of a scientist as accomplished as Church. That said, nobody, however famous, is immune from criticism, particularly when they promote such foolish and embarrassing reconciliations of science and religion.
Today’s New York Times reports the death, at 89, of Rosalyn Yalow, the second woman to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology. (Yalow won in 1977; the first, Gerty Cori, got hers thirty years earlier. There have been eight female winners since Yalow). If you want to see how much tougher it was for a smart and ambitious woman to make it in science fifty or sixty years ago, read her story. Here is only one of many slights:
After she applied to Purdue University for a graduate assistantship to study physics, the university wrote back to her professor: “She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman. If you can guarantee her a job afterward, we’ll give her an assistantship.” No guarantee was possible, and the rejection hurt, Dr. Yalow told an interviewer. “They told me that as a woman, I’d never get into graduate school in physics,” she said, “so they got me a job as a secretary at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and promised that, if I were a good girl, I would take courses there.”
Yalow won for helping develop the technique of radioimmunoassay, which not only revolutionized endocrinology, but had important applications as a screen for viruses and other biomolecules. She also had a lot of trouble getting her papers published, but, in Stockholm, got a small measure of revenge:
Dr. Yalow and Dr. Berson had to delete a reference to antibodies before The Journal of Clinical Investigation accepted their paper, and Dr. Yalow did not forget the incident; she included the rejection letter as an exhibit in her Nobel lecture.
. . . Five years after she received the Nobel, Dr. Yalow spoke to a group of schoolchildren about the challenges and opportunities of a life in science. “Initially, new ideas are rejected,” she told the youngsters. “Later they become dogma, if you’re right. And if you’re really lucky you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation.”
TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE: Can you name the other eight female Nobel Laureates in medicine and physiology? I’ll put their names in a comment below, but think before you look.
I’ve been told that our discussion of science and morality at the BBC’s “Moral Maze” show is now online here. I haven’t yet listened to it, but I wasn’t all that satisfied with how things went with the panel and witnesses. There was a lot of confusion about what “science” was: most panelists assumed that this meant “brain science,” construed as sticking electrodes in our skulls or doing brain imaging. (I suppose they were influenced here by Sam Harris’s book.) There are, of course, other ways for science to inform morality, or even to see if there is a common thread underlying moral judgments, which I think is an extremely important enterprise—and a scientific one in terms of being tractable to empirical study.
I don’t think that religion should have been part of this discussion, for that’s an entirely separate issue. (But at least one panelist—Clifford Longley, I think—dealt with the Euthyphro problem by admitting that God’s dictates aren’t moral by virtue of coming from God, but that there is a “higher” source of morality.) And—to my mind the biggest problem—until the very end there was almost no discussion about where morality comes from. Surely that has to play a role in discussing science’s role in moral judgment. I was prepared to talk about a combination of evolution and reason, but that issue didn’t arise.
We can all argue about whether Jesus was a parthenogenetic being produced without physical insemination, and whether he became reanimated a few days after death, but getting direct evidence for those “miracles” is well-nigh impossible, and so we argue against them on the grounds of improbability. But there’s one bedrock of Abrahamic faith that is eminently testable by science: the claim that all humans descend from a single created pair—Adam and Eve—and that these individuals were not australopithecines or apelike ancestors, but humans in the modern sense. Absent their existence, the whole story of human sin and redemption falls to pieces.
Unfortunately, the scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible. Genetic data show no evidence of any human bottleneck as small as two people: there are simply too many different kinds of genes around for that to be true. There may have been a couple of “bottlenecks” (reduced population sizes) in the history of our species, but the smallest one not involving recent colonization is a bottleneck of roughly 10,000-15,000 individuals that occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That’s as small a population as our ancestors had, and—note—it’s not two individuals.
Further, looking at different genes, we find that they trace back to different times in our past. Mitochondrial DNA points to the genes in that organelle tracing back to a single female ancestor who lived about 140,000 years ago, but that genes on the Y chromosome trace back to one male who lived about 60,000-90,000 years ago. Further, the bulk of genes in the nucleus all trace back to different times—as far back as two million years. This shows not only that any “Adam” and “Eve” (in the sense of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA alone) must have lived thousands of years apart, but also that there simply could not have been two individuals who provided the entire genetic ancestry of modern humans. Each of our genes “coalesces” back to a different ancestor, showing that, as expected, our genetic legacy comes from many different individuals. It does not go back to just two individuals, regardless of when they lived.
These are the scientific facts. And, unlike the case of Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, we can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty.
But of course this causes much consternation for Christians—as it should for Jews, though they don’t make much noise about it. The Templeton-funded accommodationist organization BioLogos, founded by Francis Collins and dedicated to harmonizing evangelical Christianity with scientific truth, has been in a tizzy about Adam and Eve, publishing a lot of articles about how to reconcile the science with the Biblical claim that the pair was the ultimate source of human sinfulness. And that sinfulness, of course, is the reason why Jebus was so important.
A new BioLogos piece on Adam and Eve, written by president Darrel Falk, discusses the controversy and ways to harmonize these incompatible views. It uses as its starting point an interesting article in the latest Christianity Today, “The search for the historical Adam” (what about Eve?). You can access that article free online. I’d recommend reading both the 6-page Christianity Today article and Falk’s gloss on it, for both show, better than anything else, the problems that scientific data pose for Christianity—particularly American evangelical Christianity. The Christianity Today article poses the problem starkly:
So is the Adam and Eve question destined to become a groundbreaking science-and-Scripture dispute, a 21st-century equivalent of the once disturbing proof that the Earth orbits the sun? The potential is certainly there: the emerging science could be seen to challenge not only what Genesis records about the creation of humanity but the species’s unique status as bearing the “image of God,” Christian doctrine on original sin and the Fall, the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and, perhaps most significantly, Paul’s teaching that links the historical Adam with redemption through Christ (Rom.5:12-19; 1 Cor.15:20-23; and his speech in Acts 17.
Pastor Tim Keller, a participant in a BioLogos workshop on evolution and Adam and Eve held last November (!), says this:
“[Paul] most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of the biblical authority. . If Adam doesn’t exist, Paul’s whole argument—that both sin and grace work “covenantally’—falls apart. You can’t say that Paul was a ‘man of his time’ but we can accept his basic teaching about Adam. If you don’t believe what he believes about Adam, you are denying the core of Paul’s teaching.”
That, of course, is the whole problem about reinterpreting palpably literal parts of the bible as “metaphor” when science shows that they’re wrong. But given the inventiveness and deviousness of the theological mind, there is simply nothing that can’t be conveniently reinterpreted as a metaphor. I suppose that if we were to get evidence that Jesus either didn’t exist, was born after human copulation, or simply rotted in the tomb, that whole saga would also be reinterpreted as metaphor. But there are some stories so critical to Christian faith that many believers aren’t willing to see them as metaphorical. Jesus, of course, is one, but so is the tale of Adam and Eve.
The Christianity Today piece notes a couple of ways to deal with what seems to be an insuperable problem. All of them, of course, regard seeing Adam and Eve not as the literal parents of humanity, but as some kind of metaphor. Perhaps they’re just a metaphor for our inherent sinfulness (but I, for one, refuse to believe that I am just a primate born inherently sinful). Or perhaps there was a group of ancestors that could go under the metaphorical name of “Adam and Eve.” Alternatively, perhaps there was such a literal pair, but they were only the metaphorical ancestors of humanity. This last notion seems to be the position that most of BioLogos commenters have accepted. But in his piece, Falk emphasizes, once again, that the organization doesn’t have a consensus view on Adam and Eve:
The Christianity Today cover story is important because it engages the Church in one of the most important questions of all: was there a historical Adam and Eve? There has been much discussion of this point on these pages and although we strongly encourage ongoing discussion, BioLogos does not take a position on the issue.
BioLogos does not take a position? That is sheer intellectual cowardice. Of course there was no literal Adam and Eve: the genetic data show unequivocally that humanity did not descend from a single pair that lived in the genus Homo. And this organization—founded by Francis Collins, geneticist and bigwig in the Human Genome Project, won’t take that stand? I don’t know if BioLogos sees this, but this kind of equivocation on an absolute scientific fact makes the organization look ridiculous in the eyes of the rational. (I suppose accommodationist organizations like the National Center for Science Education don’t mind this inability to honestly accept modern science.)
Falk goes on to discuss the several ways to force Christian theology into the Procrustean bed of genetic facts, trying to claim that in some way Adam and Eve had a literal existence. The funniest suggestion is the “Federal Headship” model:
Although The BioLogos Forum has raised the issue and encouraged discussion, we also urge caution. The “Federal Headship” model that accepts the scientific findings while at the same time holding to the historicity of a real first couple has not yet been carefully worked out by theologians. The reason that we haven’t had many articles of that sort is because we haven’t been able to identify theologians who are looking at the question from that perspective.
What can you say to that except “LOL”? And Falk calls for the great minds of theology to work on this problem?! Elebenty! (What Falk means, of course, is he wants some slick person to make something up that allows for a historical First Couple while still accepting the genetic data):
The purpose of BioLogos is to show that there can be harmony between mainstream science and evangelical Christianity. We are in complete agreement with Richard Ostling (the author of the aforementioned article) and the Editors of Christianity Today that working through the historicity question is of the utmost importance to the Evangelical Church. Within the framework outlined above, it boils down to theology not science, and we urge the Church to reserve judgment for a while. Let’s keep both possibilities before us. Here’s hoping that some of our greatest theological minds will work on the question of what a model based on “Federal Headship” would look like. Here’s also hoping that some of our finest theologians will continue to work on how the view of a non-historical Adam would address some of the issues that puzzle and concern most evangelicals.
The last paragraph of Falk’s piece, which out of mercy I won’t quote here, is his usual lapsing into JesusSpeak.
The idea of the “greatest theological minds” working on this issue should make us laugh and cry at the same time. What a waste of human effort! But, in the end, this palaver about Adam and Eve shows the incompatibility between not only science and faith, but between BioLogos and true evangelical Christianity. No matter what those fine theological minds come up with, it will never be widely accepted among evangelical Christians. A literal Adam and Eve is an item too important to be seen as a metaphor, for it’s a bedrock of Christian faith. Falk and Collins should be ashamed of their organization’s involvement in such a stupid enterprise.
BUT. . . we can help them! Like Michael Ruse, let’s lend our brains—and our considerable expertise in theology—to this enterprise, so we can relieve these poor Christians of their burden. For an autographed paperback edition of WEIT, in one short paragraph propose your own theological solution:
What is the best way to reconcile the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with the genetic facts?
You cannot answer that these issues are irreconcilable; remember, you’re being a theologian who is trying to help the Christians, and so have to propose a solution that sounds superficially plausible. If possible, write it in theologyspeak, too, and try to give it a name as interesting as “The Federal Headship Model.” I’ll hold the contest open for a week, and then award the prize. Entries will be judged on how well they conform to modern and sophisticated theological thinking.
And is the Jesus and Mo artist hinting at John Searle’s “Chinese room” argument here?
Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse takes apart a truly dreadful PuffHo piece by David Lose, who argues that atheism is a religion. Lose makes four claims, all of them extremely stupid and easily rebutted. The dumbest one is this:
Similarly, it’s worth noting the degree to which Atheists routinely, strategically, and often vociferously position what is often described as their “secular-humanist” views against religious traditions. Read or listen to any of the celebrity Atheists of the past decade like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris and you realize that they fashion many of their arguments not against some alternative economic, political, or philosophical position but against organized religion. Religious faith is clearly their primary opponent in the contest for the intellectual allegiance of the population, which makes it hard not to conclude that they offer their views and beliefs as a viable alternative to traditional religious systems.
The other three are nearly as bad. In his critique, “Ye olde ‘Atheism is a religion’ canard,” Jason disposes once and for all with this common argument. It’s well worth reading, for we’re all going to encounter this claim if we’re at all vociferous about our nonbelief.
