Memorial day amphibian: the axolotl

May 30, 2011 • 12:40 pm

This beast is appropriate for Memorial Day because it’s on the verge of extinction, at least in the wild.  It’s the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), now native to only a single lake near Mexico City. (It used to be in another lake as well, but that one was drained.)  Although it’s endangered in the wild, it’s bred profusely in captivity for both hobbyists and scientific research.

And it’s extremely cute.  This is a small one, and is probably a color mutant (several mutations are known in the species):

A lot of facts about the axolotl:

  • The salamanders are neotenic: that is, they become reproductive adults while retaining juvenile characteristics, notably the gills (see above) and a fin on the tail.  The axolotl is thus permanently aquatic, unlike most other salamanders, which metamorphose from gilled juveniles into a terrestrial adults.  I’ve often wondered how much genetic change was involved in the evolution of neoteny here.  Was it just one or two genes that kept the juvenile morphology but enabled reproductive maturity?  We know that you can induce axolotls to metamorphose by injecting them with thyroxine, a growth hormone, and it’s possible that the neotenic condition was produced simply by one or two evolutionary changes that inhibited production of this hormone.

Here’s a photo of a metamorphosed axolotl:

  • Axolotls are much beloved by developmental biologists for three reasons: they are easy to maintain and breed in captivity, they have large embryos that facilitate studying or teaching about development, and they have the remarkable property of being able to regenerate important body structures, including entire limbs. (Will this allow scientists, unlike God, to heal amputees?)  Click here to see a time-lapse movie of a limb regenerating, and go here to read more and see a movie about how the limbs regrow.  They also have the ability to heal wounds remarkably rapidly—sometimes within hours.  And they can regenerate large portions of the heart.  The implications for human health are profound but so far, I think, haven’t borne fruit.
  • The axolotl is the only species I know of whose common scientific name (at least in Western parlance) comes from the Aztec. (I’m sure there are others; I just don’t know of them.) One website says this:

“The name “Axolotl” comes from the Aztec language, “Nahuatl”. One of the most popular translations of the name connects the Axolotl to the god of deformations and death, Xolotl, while the most commonly accepted translation is “water-dog” (from “atl” for water, and “xolotl”, which can also mean dog).”

  • Axolotls are carnivores, can grow up to a foot long in the wild, and can live up to 15 years.

Here’s a video of scientists studying their regenerative abilities (note: there’s a small bit where the tail tip is amputated.  Note also how the researcher justify this mutilation):

The name of this animal always conjures up one of my favorite bits of doggerel, memorializing in words an experience we’ve all had. It’s by Richard Armour:

Shake and shake

The catsup bottle

First none’ll come

And then a lot’ll

Blackford: New Atheists didn’t coin “brights”

May 30, 2011 • 7:09 am

I suspect that, like me, most readers don’t like the term “bright” when it’s used to refer to atheists, humanists, or naturalists (naturalists, that is, of the Grayling rather than the biological variety).  I’m not sure that we need any new epithet, but even if we do, “bright” is simply the wrong one.  Regardless of why it was coined, it simply smacks of arrogance, of we’re-smarter-than-you-are.

Everyone thinks that the term was coined by Dan Dennett, but in a post last week at Metamagician, Brother Blackford shows that this ain’t so, nor was it meant to have supercilious implications:

The term “bright” was first employed by Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell when they launched the “Brights movement” early in 2003. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, it was actually thought up by Geisert the previous year. Be that as it may, the idea was to find a positive-sounding word for people who have a naturalistic worldview, analogous to the word “gay” for homosexuals. It is supposed to be a word with uplifting connotations, as with cheerfulness and bright colors … and thus much like “gay”.
Hence the word is supposed to be a positive label for a class of people whom Geisert and Myngell saw as despised. Geisert and Futrell have maintained that the main basis for selecting the word is its association of philosophical naturalism with the Enlightenment.
The faithful and their running dogs delight in making fun of  the term “brights” to prove the arrogance of atheists like Dawkins and Dennett, but let us not have any more accusations that those folks invented it.  Nor is it used much these days,  certainly not by any of the Four Horsemen.  I haven’t heard it in months.  The concentration on the term “brights”, of course, is just another way to avoid the substantive arguments of the Gnus.

Is the human mind like a skunk butt?

May 30, 2011 • 6:50 am

In a Philadelpha Inquirer piece on whether Catholics really accept the scientific notion of evolution, columnist Faye Flam interviewed me about the supposed evolutionary “specialness” of humans:

Many biologists are not religious, and few see any evidence that the human mind is any less a product of evolution than anything else, said Chicago’s Coyne. Other animals have traits that set them apart, he said. A skunk has a special ability to squirt a caustic-smelling chemical from its anal glands.

Our special thing, in contrast, is intelligence, he said, and it came about through the same mechanism as the skunk’s odoriferous defense.

I wasn’t really trying to be provocative here: I did have a pet skunk for several years, and it was the first thing that came to mind.  But as soon as I said this, I knew that comparing the human mind to a skunk butt would tick people off.

Sure enough, Vincent Torley at the Discovery Institute doesn’t like it at all. At the intelligent-design website Uncommon Descent, he responds to both my claim and Stephen Hawking’s recent statement about human mortality, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. ”

Torley makes three arguments:

1.  The human mind is not like a computer. Torley reprises Chris Chatham’s list of differences between computers and human minds: computers are digital, minds analogue, there’s no distinction between hardware and software in the brain, the brain is often self-repairing while computers are not, and so on. Toley concludes:

The brain-computer metaphor is, as we have seen, a very poor one; using it as a rhetorical device to take pot shots at people who believe in immortality is a cheap trick. If Professor Hawking thinks that belief in immortality is scientifically or philosophically indefensible, then he should argue his case on its own merits, instead of resorting to vulgar characterizations.

Poor Torley; he wants to believe in the afterlife so badly that he dismisses Hawking’s statement as a “rhetorical” device. In fact it is not.  Hawking’s point was not, of course, that the brain works precisely like a computer—it was that the brain is a meat machine that cranks out thoughts and emotions, and when the brain dies, so does its products.  Hawking is alluding to the very real observations that damaged minds produce damaged thoughts, that you can influence behavior and personality by material interventions in the brain, that you can eliminate consciousness with drugs and reinstate it by withholding those drugs, and to the lack of evidence for any soul or immortal component that can survive the death of the brain.  It’s completely irrelevant whether or not the brain works exactly like a computer.

2.  Human minds are totally not like skunk butts. Here Torley relies on recent biological discoveries: a paper by Dorus et al. in Cell showing that the human lineage showed accelerated evolution of genes involved in the nervous system, and a news article in Science claiming that the human lineage shows accelerated evolution not just of gene sequence, but of gene expression.

Well, so what?  The skunk’s system of chemical defense evolved by natural selection (and nobody’s yet looked at the genes involved—maybe their evolution was fast as well), and so did the human mind.  Just because genes involved in building our brain evolved rapidly compared to genes in primates or rodents is not evidence for a fundamental difference between brains and skunk butts.  Some traits evolve fast, others evolve slowly. No biggie. But Torley plumps for God here:

I would argue that these changes that have occurred in the human brain are unlikely to be natural, because of the deleterious effects of most mutations and the extensive complexity and integration of the biological systems that make up the human brain. If anything, this hyper-fast evolution should be catastrophic.  We should remember that the human brain is easily the most complex machine known to exist in the universe. If the brain’s evolution did not require intelligent guidance, then nothing did.

He’s right; nothing did.  All Torley is saying here is that brains are complex and could not have evolved by Darwinian processes—both because they are complex and because most mutations are deleterious, which would make rapid evolution of the brain “catastrophic.”

That argument is nonsense.  So long as advantageous mutations occur, regardless of their rarity, natural selection can build a complex brain without “catastrophe.” And it had about five millions years to turn a chimp-sized brain into ours.  Just looking at volume, and assuming an ancestral brain of 500 cc, a modern brain of 1200 cc, and a generation time of 20 years, that’s a change in brain volume of 0.0028 cc/generation, or an average increase of 0.00056% per generation.  Where’s the evidence that this change—at least in volume—was too fast to be caused by selection? We know that current observations of selection, such as that seen in beak size in Darwin’s finches, can be much stronger than this without catastrophic effects!  The finches, after all, are still here, and behaving like finches.

3.  The human mind cannot be the same as the human brain.  Torley leans on the work of Edward Feser here, who has argued that neurochemical activity could never result in thoughts and words that had inherent meaning:

Feser points out that our mental acts – especially our thoughts – typically possess an inherent meaning, which lies beyond themselves. However, brain processes cannot possess this kind of meaning, because physical states of affairs have no inherent meaning as such. Hence our thoughts cannot be the same as our brain processes.

I’ll leave this one to the philosophers, except to say that “meaning” seem to pose no problem, either physically or evolutionarily, to me: our brain-modules have evolved to make sense of what we take in from the environment. And that’s not unique to us: primates surely have a sense of “meaning” that they derive from information processed from the environment, and we can extend this all the way back, in ever more rudimentary form, to protozoans.  Saying that thoughts have meanings that “lie beyond themselves” simply assumes what Torley’s trying to prove.

And the lesson Torley draws from all this? You know what it is, and it shows with crystal clarity that all this intelligent-design palaver is motivated simply by a love of Jesus:

The fact that rational choices cannot be identified with, caused by or otherwise explained by material processes does not imply that we will continue to be capable of making these choices after our bodies die. But what it does show is that the death of the body, per se, does not entail the death of the human person it belongs to. We should also remember that it is in God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). If the same God who made us wishes us to survive bodily death, and wishes to keep our minds functioning after our bodies have cased to do so, then assuredly He can. And if this same God wishes us to partake of the fullness of bodily life once again by resurrecting our old bodies, in some manner which is at present incomprehensible to us, then He can do that too. This is God’s universe, not ours. He wrote the rules; our job as human beings is to discover them and to follow them, insofar as they apply to our own lives.

A star is torn

May 29, 2011 • 8:05 am

The Guardian reports evidence that a very distant star—more than 13 billion light years away—has exploded violently.  This is about a quarter of the distance between Earth and the edge of the observable universe, which is about 46 billion light years. (Go here to learn about the difference between the size of the universe and the size of the observable universe, and why—although the universe was formed about 14 billion years ago, and objects can’t move faster than the speed of light—the observable universe is nevertheless 93 billion light years in total diameter.)

The significance?

Andrew Levan, one of the scientists behind the discovery, said this blast from the past blew open a window onto the universe’s early years, showing that massive stars were already dying within the first few hundred million years of the birth of the universe.

This particular explosion wasn’t a supernova but a gamma ray burst, the name given to a short but powerful pulse of high energy radiation. Such bursts, thought to result from the collapse of massive stars into black holes, shoot jets of energy across the universe. [Read about those bursts here.]

And this is mind blowing:

Charles Meegan, a NASA researcher in gamma ray astronomy, said that a typical burst “puts out in a few seconds the same energy expended by the sun in its whole 10 billion year life span.”

Those bursts of gamma rays last only a few seconds to a few minutes, so when astronomers were told of the explosion, they had to leap from their beds to collect data on the “afterglow.” And even then it took two years to analyze that data, which, according to team leader Andrew Levan at the University of Warwick, shows “with 90 percent certainty that the gamma ray burst had been spotted between 13.11 billion and 13.16 billion light years away.”

Some colleagues are less certain.  Richard Ellis, an astronomer at Cal Tech, said, “This is plonk at the frontier, where we have very little idea what’s going on. ”

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Another study supposedly proving science/faith harmony

May 29, 2011 • 6:10 am

Well, all it really does is show that a lot of students think that science and faith are compatible, but since this paper, by Christopher P. Scheitle of Penn State, is being touted as evidence for accommodationism, we’d best have a quick look.

You may remember Scheitle: he collaborated with Elaine Ecklund on the Templeton-funded study supposedly showing that scientists were surprisingly religious; the two of them published a preliminary paper on this work in 2007. Now Scheitle has struck out on his own, banging the same old accommodationist drum—and on the same old dime.

Briefly, Scheitle analyzes data collected from 112,232 entering students at 236 American colleges.  These students were surveyed for their views on religion and spirituality.  The sample was whittled down to 10, 810 students in nine fields of study, ranging from business to biology. These students were asked various questions, but Scheitle concentrates on one:

The SHEP survey instrument included over 160 items measuring students’ views and behaviors concerning religion and spirituality. Among these was an item that asked, “for me, the relationship between science and religion is one of . . .” Possible responses were 1) conflict . . . I consider myself to be on the side of religion; 2) conflict . . . I consider myself to be on the side of science; 3) independence . . . they refer to different aspects of reality; or 4) collaboration . . . each can be used to help support the other. This question was asked of students in both waves of the survey, providing the opportunity to not only assess their view of this relationship and factors associated with that view, but also if and how their views changed during their college years.

Although 3) and 4) (“independence” and “collaboration” respectively) are different views, for reasons best known to himself Scheitle lumps them together as a single statistic: “independence or collaboration.”  I see no valid reason to conflate these views, for they represented separate items on the survey.  My guess is that this enabled the author to combine them as accommodationist views, allowing this larger statistic to be opposed to “conflict/side with religion” or “conflict/side with faith.”

There are only a few salient results:

  • Of the entering freshmen, 17% fell  into the “conflict/side with religion” category, 14% in the “conflict/side with science” category, and 69% in the “independence or collaboration” category. (Again, it seems sleazy not to separate these out.)
  • Among fields of study, students in business and education had the strongest view of conflict in general (38.9% and 41.5% respectively).  Both of these sided with religion: 23.4% of the business people and, surprisingly 35.6% of the education people, so that only 5.9% of education majors fell into the “conflict/side with science” class.  Everyone else hovered around 25-30% for the “conflict” view, though among the 29.7% of natural science majors seeing conflict, fully 20.3% sided with science.  Unsurprisingly, then, natural science students were the friendliest to science, but were about average in seeing a conflict.
  • Students at schools affiliated with a religion were, surprisingly, “less likely to hold a pro-religion conflict perspective.”  Scheitle does not add, though, that they’re no more likely to hold a pro-science conflict perspective. He offers several explanations, including the fact that religious students at secular schools feel “more threatened or under attack by science and are therefore are more likely to take on a defensive, pro-religion conflict explanation” (I call this The Mooney Hypothesis).  An alternative is that students at religious schools may be exposed more often to the “independence or collaboration” perspective.
  • Finally, the survey looked at the view of the same students during their junior year, two years later.  Some of their views changed, and how they changed is shown in the table below (click to enlarge):

You read each of the three columns (corresponding to each of the three views held by freshmen) down, so that, for example, the first column represents all those who held a “conflict/side with religion” view in their freshman year.  Of these, only 27.4% retained that view as juniors, 1.8% moved to the “conflict/side with science” class, and fully 70.8% had moved into the “independence or collaboration” category. In other words, they’d moved from being “religionists” to being “accommodationists”—if you consider that last category to represent accommodationism.  Of those initially siding with science in the conflict view, less than 1% moved over to the “conflict/side with religion” view, but nearly 46% became accommodationists.  And among freshman accommodationists, 87% remained so as juniors.

What does Scheitle conclude?  That the “conflict narrative” between science and faith isn’t borne out by the survey:

The predominant narrative surrounding the religion and science relationship has been driven by the assumption that these institutions are engaged in an unavoidable conflict resulting from their contradictory claims to truth (Evans and Evans 2008). However, the analysis conducted above found that most undergraduates, regardless of their area of study or even their religiosity, do not hold a conflict perspective. Furthermore, many more students move away from a conflict perspective to an independence/collaboration perspective than vice versa. This finding might be especially surprising since many people, especially religious families, assume that higher education has a secularizing influence on students (Smith and Snell 2009:248), which might be expected to increase perceptions of a conflict. Despite its seeming predominance, the conflict model of understanding religion and science issues does not seem to have much support within the undergraduate population. Ecklund and Park (2009) made a similar conclusion in their analysis of the views of academic scientists.

He does, however, find it “disconcerting” that science students still retain a “conflict/side with science” perspective while educators often hold a “conflict/side with religion” perspective.  He concludes: “Given that classrooms and school boards have been one of the central forums for the struggle over religion and science, this does not bode well for a reduction of those struggles.”

Indeed.  This survey is not egregious on the face of it, though I can’t understand why Scheitle didn’t separate the “independence” answers from the “collaboration” answers. Would that have somehow made the data look less congenial?  It’s hard to know.  My main reaction is not one of surprise: of course many people see science and faith as not in conflict—particularly if they’re religious or faitheist, and don’t want to be seen as Luddites.  And I’m not sure why so many students became accommodationists in their first two years in college.

But I’m not moved by these data to conclude that science and faith are not in conflict.  Surveys of people’s opinions don’t change the fundamental philosophical and methodological conflict between faith and science.

But this survey wasn’t designed to settle that issue. Nevertheless, we will see people using it to push accommodationism.  One of them has already crept from the woodwork: Matt Rossano, a psychology professor at Southeastern Louisiana University.  (We previously encountered Rossano’s fuzzy-minded accommodationism when he tried to show that science and Jesus’s resurrection were compatible). Now, at PuffHo, Rossano touts Scheitle’s results as a triumph for those seeking common ground between science and faith.

A shrill alarm cry naturally attracts attention and the few extreme voices promoting a science and religion conflict have taken full advantage of this. Seeking common ground or respecting distinct domains are not sexy, but this is where the majority of educated people are when it comes to science and religion. As the author of this survey points out, the non-conflict position firmly established among college students is only a reflection of what has already been found for most working scientists.

The majority position is not always the right one. It is not always the wrong one either. But one is justified in being wary of those who promote conflict (whether in science and religion or in politics, society, etc.) when: (a) it not obvious to most people why the conflict is necessary and (b) those promoting it have something to gain by doing so. Crass opportunism could be afoot just as easily as sincere disagreement.

Rossano has it completely wrong here.  Those of us who favor the “conflict” scenario have little to gain, personally, from taking this stand.  It’s certainly not “crass opportunism.”  I want to keep my science pure and unpolluted by woo, and to help purge the world of the evils of faith.  On the other side, religious people who promote the “conflict scenario” do so because they see science as a threat to important personal beliefs.  What they have to “gain” is simply peace of mind—misguided though they may be.  But I sympathize more with these folks than with Rossano, whose sympathy with faith has led him to take some remarkably stupid stands.

Oh, and did you guess who funded Scheitle’s work?  It’s hardly a surprise.  Here’s part of the acknowledgments:

The UCLA project, which is housed at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this article of those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

And here’s the dosh: a lot!:

“Spirituality in Higher Education: a National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose“.

$2,121,775.  Start Date: December 2002; End Date:  February 2006

This is a different grant from the one that supported Ecklund and Scheitle’s earlier work. Templeton’s sticky fingers are everywhere.

________

Scheitle, C. P.  2011.  U. S. College Students’ perception of religion and science: Conflict, collaboration, or independence? A research note.  J. Scientific Study of Religion 50:175-186. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01558.x

Atheist converts after Jesus helps his mom win lottery

May 28, 2011 • 12:51 pm

This news item from the Christian Post, which seems real (see replication here), is absolutely indistinguishable from something that could have appeared in The Onion.

Sal Bentivegna, 28, who did not previously believe in God, had sarcastically asked his mother to “ask your God for a million dollars”.

However, his mother Gloria Bentivegna, follows the Catholic faith, and staying true to her belief refused to ask God for such a thing.

Taking his joke further, Sal then prayed out aloud saying, “God, I don’t know if you’re real or not, but if you are there, please let my mother win a million dollars.”

He added, “If Jesus wants me to believe in him, that’s what he’ll do”.

The following day his mother bought a “Lotto Tree” of unscratched instant win tickets from her Church’s charity auction. Sal was then left absolutely stunned when he found out his mother had won a million.

Realizing that the odds of his mother winning were so farfetched, Sal has now become a firm believer.

He testified, “I can’t shrug off that Jesus had a hand in it.”

Okay, if Jesus wants me to believe in him, he’ll turn P.Z.’s arms and legs into tentacles. I swear I’ll believe then!