Nature on Templeton

February 16, 2011 • 1:20 pm

The new issue of Nature contains “Faith in Science,” a three-page article on the Templeton Foundation by M. Mitchell Waldrop (access is free).  It’s pretty good, and lays out the problems that many of us have with the Foundation’s insidious blending of science and woo.  Templeton, of course, defends its mission via spokesman and vice-president Barnaby Marsh, who once tried to persuade me to apply for their grants.  But there is significant dissent.

Here are some quotes, pro and con, from scientists and skeptics. I stand 100% by what I said:

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation “sneakier than the creationists”. Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. “It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue,” he says.

But other researchers, both with and without Templeton grants, say that they find the foundation remarkably open and non-dogmatic. “The Templeton Foundation has never in my experience pressured, suggested or hinted at any kind of ideological slant,” says Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, a magazine that debunks pseudoscience, who was hired by the foundation to edit an essay series entitled ‘Does science make belief in God obsolete?’ . .

. . .The [Templeton] prize has come in for some academic scorn. “There’s a distinct feeling in the research community that Templeton just gives the award to the most senior scientist they can find who’s willing to say something nice about religion,” says Harold Kroto, a chemist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who was co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and describes himself as a devout atheist . .

. . . Templeton’s interests gave the resulting list of grants a certain New Age quality (See ‘Top ten grants from the Templeton Foundation’). For example, in 1999 the foundation gave $4.6 million for forgiveness research at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and in 2001 it donated $8.2 million to create an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (that is, altruism and compassion) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

“A lot of money wasted on nonsensical ideas,” says Kroto. Worse, says Coyne, these projects are profoundly corrupting to science, because the money tempts researchers into wasting time and effort on topics that aren’t worth it. If someone is willing to sell out for a million dollars, he says, “Templeton is there to oblige him”. . .

. . . Today, the foundation website explicitly warns intelligent-design researchers not to bother submitting proposals: they will not be considered.
The foundation’s critics are unimpressed. Avowedly antireligious scientists such as Coyne and Kroto see the intelligent-design imbroglio as a symptom of their fundamental complaint that religion and science should not mix at all.

“Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning,” says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. “In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.” The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy. . .

John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, also had concerns when he started a Templeton-funded project in 2007. He had just published a paper with survey data showing that religious affiliation had a negative correlation with health among African-Americans — the opposite of what he assumed the foundation wanted to hear. He was bracing for a protest when someone told him to look at the foundation’s website. They had displayed his finding on the front page. “That made me relax a bit,” says Cacioppo.

Yet, even scientists who give the foundation high marks for openness often find it hard to shake their unease. Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is willing to participate in Templeton-funded events — but worries about the foundation’s emphasis on research into ‘spiritual’ matters. “The act of doing science means that you accept a purely material explanation of the Universe, that no spiritual dimension is required,” he says. . .

. . .Scientists’ discomfort with the foundation is probably inevitable in the current political climate, says Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The past 30 years have seen the growing power of the Christian religious right in the United States, the rise of radical Islam around the world, and religiously motivated terrorist attacks such as those in the United States on 11 September 2001.

Given all that, says Atran, many scientists find it almost impossible to think of religion as anything but fundamentalism at war with reason. They have a reflexive reaction against the idea, espoused by Templeton, that progress in spirituality can help to solve the problems of the world.

Well, I think that religion is fundamentally at war with reason—at least those numerous forms of religion that make untenable claims about reality.  But I don’t know any scientist who claims that all religions are fundamentalist.  And most of our reactions are not reflexive, but thoughtful.  Finally, what the bloody hell does “progress in spirituality” mean?

A new Chief Mouser on Downing Street

February 16, 2011 • 11:38 am

Brits, rest easy: after a three-year hiatus, you have a new Chief Mouser at 10 Downing Street.

It’s not widely appreciated that, since 1924, the resident cat at the Prime Minister’s house has held the unofficial title of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.  According to Wikipedia, there have been eleven of these kittehs since “Treasury Bill” took up the post under Ramsay MacDonald.  Other Chief Mousers have included Munich Mouser, Nelson, Peta, Wilberforce, Sybil, and the famous Humphrey, who served under Thatcher, Major, and Blair, and famously went missing for a while.

Between 2008 and now there was no Chief Mouser, but, as Wikipedia reports:

In January 2011, rats were seen in Downing Street, “scurrying across the steps of number 10 Downing Street for the second time during a TV news report”, according to ITN. There being no incumbent Chief Mouser at that time, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said that there were “no plans” for a cat to be brought in to tackle the problem; however the following day newspapers reported that the spokesman had said there was a “pro-cat faction” within Downing Street, leading to speculation that a replacement may indeed be brought in to deal with the problem. On 14 February 2011, it was reported that a cat called “Larry” had been brought in to address the problem. The Evening Standard reported that the cat had been selected by David Cameron and his family, from those at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.

Good on Cameron to select a stray for the job!

Here’s Larry arriving at Downing Street on Monday:

Larry inspects his new quarters:

The regal Chief Mouser—from rags to riches.

You can see more photos of Larry here.

h/t: Michael F.

UPDATE:  Coincidentally, I just received this stuffed kitteh from an alert and generous reader.  The cat’s name is Bentley, and he greatly resembles Larry:

Good, bad, and ugly

February 16, 2011 • 7:00 am

First, The bad: Vatican brother Guy Consolmagno, a Vatican astronomer much beloved of John Kw-k, spoke yesterday at Winona State University in Minnesota. His topic: “Astronomy, God, and the search for elegance.” I don’t have a transcript of his talk, but the pre-talk publicity was dire, for Consolmagno had the temerity to draw unfavorable comparisons between cats and humans:

His combined religious and scientific vocations give him the opportunity to consider “the big questions” — “the mysteries you breathe in and ponder.”

“These are human questions,” he said, pointing out that “my cat never asked these questions. My cat never wanted to look through a telescope.”

Seeking answers to questions of how the universe works and how we came to be part of it are distinctly human activities, “like doing a dance or making a painting or doing all the things that cats don’t do.”

So what? Consolmagno never wanted to catch a bird or bask in the sun on a roof.

The supposed conflict between religion and science really doesn’t exist, Consolmagno said. “Science grew out of religion.”

Historically, the church has fostered science and the academic life, he pointed out, and churchmen have been in the forefront of scientific advancement — in fact the originator of the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe was a priest [JAC: Georges Lemaitre].

“There is nothing in the Bible opposing evolution,” he pointed out, “but there is something in the Bible against astrology.” . .

. . To apply a modern reading to a 2,000 year old text “does violence to the text,” Consolmagno said, “and that’s not me saying it, it’s Augustine saying it.”

God, I am so sick of hearing about Augustine the Hippo.  And what about all those theologians who were more literalist? Why is Augustine singled out and the others ignored?  And, of course, Augustine believed in predestination, but Consolmagno conveniently omits that. But what do you expect from someone who denigrates cats in public?

The Ugly:  Deepity Chopra! On the CNN “Belief” blog, he writes “Science and religion should be friends.” Deepity isn’t worth wasting much time on (although he’s rich—a severe indictment of America), but the piece contains, besides the usual atheist-bashing, LOLz like this:

Outside the view of the general public, science has reached a critical point. The physical building blocks of the universe have gradually vanished; that is, atoms and quarks no longer seem solid at all but are actually clouds of energy, which in turn disappear into the void that seems to be the source of creation.

Was mind also born in the same place outside space and time? Is the universe conscious? Do genes depend on quantum interactions? Science aims to understand nature down to its very essence, and now these once radical questions, long dismissed as unscientific, are unavoidable.

Yep, I’m gonna get right on the question of whether genes “depend on quantum interactions.”

And, The Good: a strident atheist article at HuffPo—and not by Vic Stenger, either! It’s by Frank Schaeffer, ex-evangelical Christian and author of the book Crazy for God, and his piece is called “We need freedom from religion no just freedom of religion.”  The piece isn’t written all that well, and jumps around all over the place, but hey, it’s amazing that something like this even appears in the Religion section of the Website of Boobs and Woo:

Would the IRS give al Qaeda tax-deductable status?

Then why does the Roman Catholic Church, which has done so little to make up for the pedophilia abuses, have that status? Why do the Scientologists? Why do countless fundamentalist Protestant schools that are more like madrassas than schools as most of us understand the term? Why aren’t parents who kill their children for God not serving life sentences? If The New Yorker article is true, why aren’t the leaders of Scientology in jail? Why wasn’t Cardinal Law prosecuted?

Answer: Because of our crazy ideas about religious freedom that on so many fronts trump not just common sense but the rule of law. . .

. . . The state needs to take away tax deductible status from any religious organization where child abuse is condoned (or hidden). This stripping of tax deductible status should apply to the extremist faith healing Evangelicals and pedophile enabling Catholics and to the Scientologists as well. And child abusers should be jailed be they in robes or hiding out behind “respectable” Hollywood stars.

I must admit that I see no justification for any religion (not just the nefarious ones described by Schaeffer) to get tax-exempt status in America.

h/t: Jon

Cracking Coke

February 16, 2011 • 6:17 am

I believe it was M. F. K. Fisher, or someone of her ilk, who said that onions were so delicious that if they were expensive, people would still pay any price to get one.  I feel the same way about Coca-Cola. I grew up with it—it was the de rigueur tipple with fries and a burger—and when I had a tummy ache my mother would dose me with Coke syrup.  I don’t drink it so much these days, for the soda has been debased by substituting corn syrup for sugar (you can still get sugar-based Coke in Mexico), and there are few chances to get the best version—the one made at soda fountains. (Pity that Generation Y gets no chance to sample a fountain-made vanilla or lime Coke!)

The recipe for Coke was, of course, always secret, said to be known to only a handful of employees. Now, however, as Time magazine reveals, the recipe is apparently out.  The drink was invented in 1886 by a Civil War veteran, and purchased by drugstore owner Asa Candler a year later.   The secret recipe was always part of the mystique of Coke—but Ira Glass, host of NPR’s “This American Life,” stumbled upon the recipe by accident while researching a story.  The list of ingredients was visible in an old photograph reprinted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1979.

Here they are, should you wish to make your own:

The recipe:

Fluid extract of Coca: 3 drams USP
Citric acid: 3 oz
Caffeine: 1 oz
Sugar: 30 (unclear quantity)
Water: 2.5 gal
Lime juice: 2 pints, 1 quart
Vanilla: 1 oz
Caramel: 1.5 oz or more for color

The secret 7X flavor (use 2 oz of flavor to 5 gals syrup):
Alcohol:  8 oz [JAC: alcohol is no longer used!]
Orange oil: 20 drops
Lemon oil: 30 drops
Nutmeg oil: 10 drops
Coriander: 5 drops
Neroli: 10 drops
Cinnamon: 10 drops

“This American Life” recreated the drink from this recipe, and tasters agreed that it’s pretty close to “the real thing”.

Spokeswoman Kerry Tressler denies that “This American Life” cracked the code. Coca-Cola‘s archivist, Phil Mooney, participated in the broadcast and tasted a batch brewed according to the recipe. He said it didn’t quite replicate the soda.” ‘This American Life,’ along with many other third parties, have tried over time to crack our secret formula,” Tressler said. “At the end of the day, there is only one ‘real thing.’ “

Zuckerman, we hardly knew ye

February 15, 2011 • 11:18 am

UPDATE:  Zuckerman now claims that his piece was “tongue in cheek” and we should have realized that it was.  While I accept his explanation, I’m not so sure we should have seen through it.  It differs from a Sokal-ian hoax in that it lacks any scientific assertions that are palpable nonsense. Rather, his statements are opinions that could have been taken from any accommodationist screed. Lighthearted, yes (see points 9 and 10); funny, not so much, even in retrospect.  This parody is much funnier.

________

Phil Zuckerman is a sociologist who wrote a book I liked very much: Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. It’s an analysis of how two societies—those of Sweden and Denmark—function without religion, and how their citizens feel about faith.  More than anything, it showed that nations without religion are not only not dysfunctional, but can be even healthier than America. It’s the answer to the constant accommodationist refrain, “Religion will always be with us.”

I was thus quite chagrined to learn that Zuckerman has written a post—at HuffPo, of course—tearing apart Gnu Atheism and telling us that we’re all Doing It Rong. It’s called “The top mistakes atheists make“, and I bet you can guess many of them.  We’re all afflicted with scientism, we don’t mention the good parts of religion or the Bible, we spend too much time kvetching about god rather than improving the world, and so on ad nauseum.

Fortunately, I don’t have to waste my time critiquing this tripe, because Jason Rosenhouse has done a terrific job over at EvolutionBlog: “Nonsense from Zuckerman.”  Go read it.

I’m really sort of baffled at the vitriol that people like Zuckerman unleash at the Gnus.  Why are they always telling us how to behave?  After all, we don’t go around telling accommodationists how to behave—until, that is, they start whaling on us.

I can’t help but think that there’s some jealousy in all this.  Books by atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are best sellers, getting elebenty gazillion times the attention of books by accommodationists or faitheists. And P.Z.’s blog is the most popular in science, far outstripping the traffic going to websites run by accommodationists.  I’d like to hear readers’ theories about why Gnus are under so much attack from fellow atheists.

British GCSE biology exam: evolution FAIL

February 15, 2011 • 8:06 am

I’m not all that familiar with the complex of exams given to British students: A-levels, O-levels, and so on, but Matthew Cobb sent me a specimen of another one, a GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exam that is taken by 14- to 16-year-olds in the UK.  These exams rate people in subjects that they want to study further.  You can download a biology exam that was actually given at this link.

Let’s look at page 17.  Here’s some information to be used in a following question (click to enlarge):

Well, you can quarrel with this information if you’re picky.  Do all of these alternatives really qualify as competing “theories,” as is implied by the presentation? More important, the Intelligent Design definition implies that the Darwinian alternative claims that everything evolved “by chance.”  That’s clearly wrong, because Darwinian evolution—when natural selection is involved—involves a unique combination of chance (random mutations) and determinism (the sorting out of those mutations by differential reproduction).  The “everything happens by chance” is a canard spread by willfully ignorant creationists.

But (forgive me an Andy Rooney moment) you know what really bothers me?  It’s the question that students are given based on this information:

Now clearly the answers are, in order, C, D, B, and A, but look how those statements are phrased.  “The observation that fossils. . . appear suddenly in the rocks, with no evidence of ancestors, supports [creationism].  That is wrong on so many levels, the most serious being that that is not the way the fossils appear in the rocks.  The Cambrian explosion was not a “sudden” appearance: it lasted millions of years.  And there were creatures in the rocks before this. Granted, some groups appear without obvious prior ancestors, but that could be a matter of fossilization rather than god.  The whole question implies that the Cambrian explosion (or the sudden appearance of any new group) is evidence for creationism.  An alternative Darwinian theory is, of course, a poor fossil record combined with rapid evolutionary change!  This question is FAIL.

And so is this one: “The complicated way in which cells work can be used to support [intelligent design].”  Another fail.  Yes, cells work in a complicated fashion, and yes, we don’t yet understand how all that machinery evolved, but complication itself is no evidence for the action of a celestial being.

What IDers really maintain is that complicated features that are irreducibly complex (i.e., no adaptive intermediate stages were possible) imply the action of a designer, but of course that’s wrong too, as biologists have repeatedly pointed out.  We have no example of a feature that really is irreducibly complex and so could not have evolved by natural selection.  The IDer’s favorite example of the bacterial flagellum, for example, can plausibly be explained by normal evolutionary processes (see the Pallen and Matzke reference below).

Both of these questions give students the erroneous idea that biological phenomena observed in the real world constitute evidence for creationism.  In other words, the exam enables creationism. Can we have some biologists vet these questions, folks?

I’ll be sending this to Dawkins.

UPDATE:  This question was given in 2009.  Over at New Humanist, Paul Sims reports that the AQA, who set this exam, recognizes the problems with this question and “will be addressing the issue for any future questions.”  Apparently the 2010 exam, which you can download at Sims’s article, isn’t polluted by creationism.

________________________

Pallen, M. J. and N. J. Matzke (2006). From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella. Nature Reviews Microbiology 4(10): 784-790.

Spring footwear

February 15, 2011 • 7:20 am

The accumulated snow is melting in Chicago, and soon my car will be unfrozen.  And now that the sidewalks are free from slush and salt, I can wear these:

American alligator tail boots with soft buffalo shafts, from J. B. Hill of El Paso, Texas.  These boots were new, but I got them for only a fraction of the retail price, for they came adorned with a ranch logo (the “XXX Ranch”) and had the owner’s initials (KB) on them.  Boots with logos and initials are always bargains, since few people want them—even though the inlays are hidden under one’s pants.  Note the fancy gator collar and gator initials (KB) inlaid on the boot pulls:

Darwin Day in rural America

February 15, 2011 • 7:06 am

Last weekend, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NEScent), in Durham, North Carolina (not far from the infamous Victory Baptist Church) sent some biology Ph.D.s out to schools in rural America, teaching them about evolution for Darwin Day.  The New York Times reports that pairs of scientists went to schools in Virginia, Nebraska, Montana, and Iowa.  And it sounds as if they did a good job, although I’m curious about this:

Nineteen schools agreed to host the scientists, but negotiating the terms of the visit was sometimes a delicate process: The goal, they assured a principal who worried about their ideological agenda, was simply to tell students why science was “cool” and perhaps interest them in a career. Still, if questions about religion and science arose, they reserved the right to answer them.

I wonder if the questions came up, and what the answers were. Perhaps someone involved in this project will tell us.

Still, I was glad to hear that the students were receptive.  And P.Z. will surely like this:

Poised for conflict, the traveling scientists found mostly curiosity. “Why did Darwin say that humans evolved from monkeys?” one Virginia student asked. (He did not, the scientist said. Darwin said humans and monkeys shared a common ancestor, like all living things.)

Dr. McClain, who wrapped up his Nebraska-Montana tour at a middle school on Monday, found himself explaining how giant squid evolved.

“Smaller squids get eaten by everything,” he said. “It’s not a very good lifestyle to have.”

Shae Carter, 16, a 10th grader at Muscatine High School in Muscatine, Iowa, was pleasantly surprised by the visiting biologists who, she wrote on her blog, “told it like it is.”

When students recoiled and said “Ewww!” watching pictures of large jungle cats devouring their prey, the scientists told them: “This is what happens, people. Get professional.”

“I had imagined that these periods in the auditorium would be cold and boring,” Shae said in an interview. “But I liked it.”

I like that: “Get professional”!

h/t: Greg Mayer