Breakfast: Banff

May 15, 2011 • 7:29 am

Today’s the last day of the Ecology and Evolution meetings.  Here’s breakfast at the conference. First, sunrise (from my window):

Breakfast is “all you care to eat”, and it’s good.  I eschew the “cooked British breakfast”, which includes baked beans (something that always amazes Americans) in favor of waffles or pancakes with homemade blueberry topping, perhaps a morsel of ham, and a bowl of fruit.

Last night was dinner with fellow speakers at the Balkan Restaurant, a Greek place on Banff Avenue. It’s gotten good reviews, but I found it adequate and not outstanding.  The company, however, was good.  And a few doors down is the awesome Welch’s Candy Store, into which I made a preliminary foray.

Look at all that candy! Today I’ll return with some loonies, and am contemplating purchase of horehound drops, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid, a stick of Brighton Rock, and perhaps a few chocolate bars for the road.

Hitchens reviews a WWI book

May 15, 2011 • 6:03 am

In today’s New York Times, Christopher Hitchens reviews To End All Wars, a new book about World War I by Adam Hochschild.  He calls it “a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.” I’ll be reading it for sure.

The book, and Hitchens, dwell on the horrible loss of life—a sacrifice to no good end.  (Remember that at the battle of the Somme, nearly 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day alone, and total casualties, killed and wounded, were around 1,100,000.) Indeed, Hitchens claims that the entry of America in the late stages of the conflicts forced a peace that was so harsh for Germany that it gave rise to Naziism.

Ruthless as they were in the killing of others, the generals were also shockingly profligate and callous when it came to their “own.” In some especially revolting passages, we find Gen. Sir Douglas Haig and his arrogant subordinate Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson actually complaining when British casualties were too low, and exulting — presumably because enemy losses were deemed comparable — when they moved into the tens of thousands. What this meant in cold terms was the destruction of whole regiments, often comprising (as in the cases of Newfoundland and Ulster) entire communities back home who had volunteered as a body and stayed together in arms. They vanished, in clouds of poison gas, hails of steel splinters and great lakes of sucking mud. Or lay in lines, reminding all observers of mown-down corn, along the barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements against which they had been thrown. Like me, Hochschild has visited the mass graves and their markers, which still lie along the fields of northern France and Belgium, and been overwhelmed by what Wilfred Owen starkly and simply called “the pity of War.” (Owen was to die pointlessly as the guns were falling silent: his mother received the telegram as the church bells were ringing to celebrate the armistice — or better in retrospect to say “fragile cease-fire.”)

While I’m on the Great War, as they called it, I’d highly recommend a trilogy of novels about that conflict and its psychological effects on British soldiers: The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker.  This series, a combination of fact and fiction, is, I think, one of the best English-language novels of the last fifty years. The last volume, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995.

Do recommend any war books—fact or fiction—that you’ve liked. I’ve previously recommended Anthony Beever’s The Fall of Berlin and The Fall of Stalingrad: 1942-1943. 

Development is epigenetic

May 14, 2011 • 10:21 am

by Greg Mayer

One of the points I stress to students in my evolution class is that development is epigenetic: organisms develop from a less differentiated state to a more differentiated state. In modern terms, genes, the intraembryonic environment, and the extraembryonic environment interact to produce the organism through a sequence of stages going from an undeveloped to a mature state. The general point (though not the part about genes) has been known for a couple of centuries, so it might seem it wouldn’t be necessary to emphasize it, but the alternative view of development– preformationism— has a surprising hold on people’s minds. Preformationism maintains that development is essentially growth: there is in the germ cells a differentiated organism, which grows or unfolds during the course of development.

A homunculus inside a sperm, by Nicolaas Hartsoeker, 1695. This is not how development works.

Preformationism, though wrong, is frequently reinforced by the common (though badly mistaken) practice of referring to DNA or the genome as a “blueprint” for the organism. It is of course no such thing. A blueprint is a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object. There is, in a blueprint, a scaled representation of all the parts of the object. We can tell, for example, that the window on the second floor is 4 m above and 2m to the left of the door. There is nothing like that in your DNA: there isn’t a gene for your left eye, which is a scaled distance away from the gene for your right eye. Your DNA (and your development) is much more akin to a recipe. In a raisin cake recipe, there isn’t a line in the recipe that says place a raisin 2 cm in from the upper left hand corner (there would be, if we had a blueprint for the cake). Rather, if you combine the right ingredients, in the right sequence, in the right environment, the result is a cake with raisins distributed through it at a certain density.

Richard Dawkins expounds the recipe analogy in The Blind Watchmaker (1986, pp. 295-296):

A recipe in a cookery book is not, in any sense, a blueprint for the cake that will finally emerge from the oven…. a recipe is not a scale model, not a description of a finished cake, not in any sense a point-for-point representation. It is a set of instructions which, if obeyed in the right order, will result in a cake.

Now, we don’t yet understand everything, or even most things, about how animals develop from fertilized eggs. Nevertheless, the indications are very strong that the genes are much more like a recipe than like a blueprint. Indeed, the recipe analogy is really rather a good one, while the blueprint analogy, although it is often unthinkingly used in elementary textbooks, especially recent ones, is wrong in almost every particular. Embryonic development is a process. It is an orderly sequence of events, like the procedure for making a cake…

The genes, taken together, can be seen as a set of instructions for carrying out a process, just as the words of a recipe, taken together, are a set of instructions for carrying out a process.

The reason this is important for students of evolution is that most of evolution is the modification of pre-existing structures, and these structures arise in the organism via a process of epigenetic development. Thus, most of evolution is the modification of pre-existing developmental programs.  Evolution doesn’t swap out one adult structure for another, but rather alters developmental programs, which results in differences in adults.  To understand phenotypic evolution, we must understand the variations which alterations of the developmental program can give rise to, their natures, and frequency. These studies are the domain of what has come to be called “evo-devo“. (From the evidence of at least vertebrate paleontology [this, this, and this], we can expand the generalization and say that most of evolution is the gradual, adaptive, modification of pre-existing developmental programs.)

I’ll finish this post with three brief observations. First, doesn’t it seem strange that the man who has provided the most compelling way of seeing the complex and interactive nature of development has been so frequently assailed for being reductionist and atomistic? Second, the fact that certain genes that have a major effect on development (Hox genes) are arranged along chromosomes in antero-posterior order of their influence on the developing body, while not preformationist, is nonetheless an intriguing and unexpected correspondence of the spatial arrangement of the body and the genes. And third, I’m using epigenetic in the original embryological/morphological sense, from which C.H. Waddington derived the term “epigenetics” in 1942, and not the recent odd usage, in which epigenetic means ‘heritable variation not associated with nucleic acid variation’ or, even more oddly, “all the weird and wonderful things that can’t be explained by genetics“; the hijacking of the word, and the conflation of the pseudo-neologism with Waddington’s ideas, have been nicely explicated in a paper by David Haig. Epigenesis is too useful a concept to lose the word for it.

____________________________________________________________

Dawkins, R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton, N.Y.

Haig, D. 2004. The (dual) origin of epigenetics. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 69:1-4.

Banff: Science noms

May 14, 2011 • 5:19 am

The food at scientific meetings is usually dreadful, and I often escape to some good nearby restaurant.  That’s not necessary at these meetings, for the comestibles are good and laid on in quantity.  There’s everything a vegetarian or meatitarian could want, all served buffet style.  For lunch yesterday I had roast leg of lamb with real mashed potatoes and vegetables. I could have had fish or pasta, or all of the above.

There is an ample salad bar—three of them, actually, each with a different array of greens and toppings:

And everyone’s favorite: the dessert bar.  Pecan pie, chocolate cake, cheesecake, ice cream, lemon bars, custard— all you can eat. (Note: the Brits say “all you care to eat” when touting buffets. That’s a telling cultural difference that bespeaks American gluttony and British reserve.)

With such largesse it’s hard to be abstemious, or keep to a diet.

I’ll have a window seat, please, so I can watch the Rockies as I dine:

I ‘ll have more to say on the science stuff later; today’s the big all-day speciation symposium (I speak last, at 4 p.m.).

One thing that distinguishes science from humanities talks is that we’re all expected to speak without notes.  That gives the talks a livelier and more extemporaneous air than talks in the humanities and social sciences, which are often read from a manuscript.  For the life of me I don’t understand why academics do that.  Reading from a piece of paper is boring, there is no engagement with the audience, and all too often written prose doesn’t translate well to the spoken word.  Let us have no more reading of papers in academia!

Caturday felids: kittens behaving badly

May 14, 2011 • 4:44 am

Alert reader Steve sent me this short video showing a small kitten getting the heebie-jeebies over a tennis ball:

And here’s a Russian kitteh who’s guarding a cigarette with his life (my translator website says that the Russian means “How to break tomcat to smoke?”):

New Oxford study: religion pervasive, ergo impossible to eradicate

May 13, 2011 • 2:26 pm

I haven’t yet read this study, but it’s just come out and is being publicized all over the place. It’s an Oxford University Study on the pervasiveness of religious belief.  As CNN reports:

Religion comes naturally, even instinctively, to human beings, a massive new study of cultures all around the world suggests.

“We tend to see purpose in the world,” Oxford University professor Roger Trigg said Thursday. “We see agency. We think that something is there even if you can’t see it. … All this tends to build up to a religious way of thinking.”

Trigg is co-director of the three-year Oxford-based project, which incorporated more than 40 different studies by dozens of researchers looking at countries from China to Poland and the United States to Micronesia.

Studies around the world came up with similar findings, including widespread belief in some kind of afterlife and an instinctive tendency to suggest that natural phenomena happen for a purpose.

“Children in particular found it very easy to think in religious ways,” such as believing in God’s omniscience, said Trigg. But adults also jumped first for explanations that implied an unseen agent at work in the world, the study found.

Well, that’s not a huge surprise, is it? And, as Trigg noted, it says nothing about whether or not there really are gods.  It speaks to me only of human credulity—a credulity easily understood as a result of wish-thinking, fear of death, and the need to see agency in a cruel and chaotic world.

And children find it easy to think in religious ways? Children are especially credulous, and have probably evolved to be that way, for they have to absorb knowledge from their parents.  But they’re no more credulous about God than they are about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  There’s nothing special about children “being able to think in religious ways.” It’s indoctrination, pure and simple!

But look how the results of this study are characterized by Trigg (via CNN; I quote in extenso):

Famed secularist Richard “Dawkins would accept our findings and say we’ve got to grow out of it,” Trigg argued.

But people of faith could argue that the universality of religious sentiment serves God’s purpose, the philosophy professor said.

“Religious people would say, ‘If there is a God, then … he would have given us inclinations to look for him,'” Trigg said.

The blockbuster study may not take a stance on the existence of God, but it has profound implications for religious freedom, Trigg contends.

“If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests,” Trigg said.

“There is quite a drive to think that religion is private,” he said, arguing that such a belief is wrong. “It isn’t just a quirky interest of a few, it’s basic human nature.”

“This shows that it’s much more universal, prevalent, and deep-rooted. It’s got to be reckoned with. You can’t just pretend it isn’t there,” he said.

And the Oxford study, known as the Cognition, Religion and Theology Project, strongly implies that religion will not wither away, he said.

“The secularization thesis of the 1960s – I think that was hopeless,” Trigg concluded.

That’s hogwash.  As we can see from the tremendous secularization of the world over the past few centuries, especially in Europe, it is not impossible for religion to wither.  The pervasiveness of a belief gives no warrant that that belief will be with us forever. Look how pervasive, only a century ago, was the idea that women were second-class citizens. This was true in nearly every society.  Ditto for gays and ethnic minorities.  And look how attitudes have changed!  Granted, women, for instance, still get the short end of the stick, but in many parts of the world they’re much better off.  Most of us now realize that people should be treated as equals, regardless of gender, color, and sexual orientation.  That would have been inconceivable a few hundred years ago.

Let’s just tinker a bit with Trigg’s statement:

“If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature as the idea that women are inferior, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests,” Trigg said. . “The female-equality hypothesis of the 1960s—I think that is hopeless.”

The rush to derive religion-friendly conclusions from this kind of data reminds me of Elaine Ecklund and her hopeless quest to prove that scientists are really way more religious than they seem.  Like Trigg, she draws conclusions that extend far beyond the data.

Now, guess who funded Trigg and Barrett’s religion study at Oxford? They were given 1.9 million pounds for it.

I’ll give you one try, and if you can’t get it in one guess, you haven’t been reading this website.

Go here.

Yes, that particular organization paid two million pounds to find out the obvious: religion is pervasive. But what it was really buying was the researchers’ claim that pervasiveness implies permanence—and perhaps correctness.

____

For more on the antiscience agenda of the Templeton Foundation, see Salty Current‘s post.

h/t: Miranda “Holy Rabbit” Hale

The path to atheism

May 13, 2011 • 9:30 am

In response to my post about the nebulous theodicy of Jeffrey Small, I have an email from a reader who is allowing me to post this without revealing his/her name.

In a recent post on your website (“Moar Theodicy”), you closed by writing:

“The only good thing about this palaver concerning the impotent “power of being” is that, for many, it’s the first step to abandoning God completely.”

I’d just like to say that I am living proof of this statement.

I was raised by very devout Christian parents (of the non-fundamentalist United Methodist persuasion), and proudly(!) considered myself a Christian without ever pausing to ask, “Why?”. My path to atheism began when more liberal-minded, but still religious, friends in college asserted that Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection were not true. My parents and preachers had certainly never said anything about that possibility! I soon discovered books by John Shelby Spong, who espoused the “God as ground of all being” theology. This was a view of “faith” that my increasingly scientific mind could still cling to without imploding … as long as I didn’t think about it too deeply. Truth be told, it was a short hop from there to Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, though it took me several years to get there (during which time I really wasn’t thinking about religion much at all; I was simply tired of the subject). Now, in my mid 40s, I consider myself an atheist; it just makes the most sense.

So yes, “this palaver concerning the impotent “power of being”” can, indeed, be a stepping-stone to “abandoning God completely.” For this sample of one, at least.

There’s just one thing to add to this: it testifies to the power of Gnu Atheism, instantiated by The God Delusion, to, by striking the coup de grace, convert the faithful to nonbelief.  Many other such emails show that with the rejection of superstition came an increased acceptance of evolution.

What we have here, along with the hundreds of emails that Richard Dawkins has received (some of which appear in his “Converts’ Corner“) and the dozens I have gotten along the same lines, is evidence.  In cases like this, the plural of anecdotes is data.

Now if accommodation is so effective at turning the faithful to evolution, as Chris Mooney and others maintain, where are the hundreds of emails and letters from the faithful thanking Mooney, Josh Rosenau, the people of BioLogos, and their accommodationist confrères for—by showing that science and faith are compatible—helping them accept evolution at last?  I’m not aware of a single such piece of testimony.  All we have is the discredited fictions of Walter Smith, aka “Tom Johnson.”

And even if there are one or two such letters, they stand in opposition to the massive amount of personal testimony of the effectiveness of New Atheists in turning the faithful away from superstition and towards rationalism and science.

As far as I can see, we’ve already won.

_________

Update:  I’m not claiming that New Atheism is essential for converting the faithful, which of course is a ludicrous idea.  Nor am I claiming that it’s even decisive: that without Gnu “stridency,” all the other factors wouldn’t work.  My claim is more modest: that without N.A., there would be substantially fewer people abandoning religion and embracing rationality and evolution. All those emails are testimony to that.  And I’m aware of virtually no testimony supporting the effectiveness of accommodationism in bringing people to evolution.

As several readers pointed out, correctly, I’ve conflated some claims here.  One claim, which was the topic of the email, is the ability of in-your-face atheism to make converts.  That is indubitably true.  The other claim, made by accommodationists, is that atheist scientists are ineffective at “converting” people to evolution because their atheism turns people off.  I would contend that there’s plenty of evidence against this claim, in the form of personal testimony, and none in favor of it.  The third claim (the one I make here), is that I’ve seen no evidence that accommodationism—in the form of arguing that science and faith are compatible—has turned large numbers of evolution-denying religious people into evolution accepters.  I’m sure there must be some evidence on this point, but it hasn’t been publicized.

The final claim, for which there’s no telling evidence one way or the other, is that accommodationism has a better effect in bringing people to rationality and science than does the promotion of science by atheists.  But if you look at the strong negative correlation between the religiosity of countries and their acceptance of Darwinism, it seems clear that the real block to acceptance of evolution in America is our country’s pervasive religiosity.  (The US is highly religious and low on evolution, and this correlation holds across 34 countries.)

In the long run, I think, the way to get rid of creationism is not to show the faithful that religion and evolution are compatible—for that tactic doesn’t seem to have budged creationism in America over the past three decades—but to loosen the grip of religion on America: the goal of the Gnus.  Creationism is but a symptom of a pervasive disease that has many other, and worse, symptoms: religion.

Finally, when I say “we’ve won,” I mean that I believe an irreversible trend toward secularization has been set in motion, and it’s a trend toward less religion.  This, of course, will take considerable time. But when America becomes more secular, acceptance of evolution will follow, as the night the day.

Is it really a man in a suit?

May 13, 2011 • 8:52 am

by Matthew Cobb

There are some fantastic photos of gorillas by professional wildlife photographer Andy Rouse that you can see here. Here’s just one example, a male silverback. As always when I see a gorilla, I have the strong impression that I’m really looking at a human in a gorilla suit.

© Andy Rouse

h/t Jackie Caine’s FB page.