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.
By “Jeffy Joe” on a post on The Great Spirituality Debate over at Butterflies and Wheels:
The spirituality of science: “Look at that King Bird-of-paradise. Breathtaking!”
The spirituality of religion: “Look at that King Bird-of-paradise. Breathtaking! I know the One who painted it. I know how He thinks. He doesn’t think we should let gays get married”
Here’s another prize-winning and LOLzy scientific paper. This one, from The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, was sent to me by pinch-blogger Greg Mayer with the comment:
Here’s a paper that surpasses ‘Nobody’s perfect’. It’s one of my all time favorites. The economy of expression is breathtaking. If brevity is the soul of wit, this is the wittiest paper ever.
(Click to enlarge; the pdf is free online here.)
George Orwell wrote two good food/drink related essays, “In defense of English cooking,” (1945) and “A nice cup of tea” (1946). Both are short (they first appeared in newspapers), highly opinionated, and well worth reading.
You don’t have to live long in the UK to know that the Brits—or at least many Brits—take their tea seriously. I remember one complaining that he had been served “shamrock tea” (tea made from the equivalent of three leaves), and another telling me that he liked his tea “so strong that you could trot a mouse on it.”
In his weekly essay at Slate, Christopher Hitchens, who’s still going strong, weighs in with “How to make a decent cup of tea.” He pretty much concurs with Orwell but gets in a few (well deserved) swipes at how Americans proffer this beverage.
Hitchens recounts an incident in which John Lennon informs Yoko Ono that, when making tea with a tea bag, you must first fill the cup with hot water and only then add the tea bag. Hitch is appalled:
I simply hate to think of the harm that might result from this. It is already virtually impossible in the United States, unless you undertake the job yourself, to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to. It’s quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate. The drink itself is then best thrown away, though if swallowed, it will have about the same effect on morale as a reading of the memoirs of President James Earl Carter.
I can’t abide tea bags unless they contain herbal tea. When I must brew a single cup I use one of these infusers from Upton Tea company:
Yes, I know it’s not as good as leaves in a pot, but at least I can use decent loose tea.
A nice cup of tea without a biscuit or two is woefully lacking, like a pastrami sandwich without mustard. The combination of tea and biscuit is the subject of one of my favorite food-related sites: A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down. Its strength is the presentation (and its ratings) of British biscuits (“cookies” to Americans) in all their glory. Orwell mentioned the superiority of British biscuits in his essay (my emphasis):
First of all, kippers, Yorkshire pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and crumpets. Then a list of puddings that would be interminable if I gave it in full: I will pick out for special mention Christmas pudding, treacle tart and apple dumplings. Then an almost equally long list of cakes: for instance, dark plum cake (such as you used to get at Buzzard’s before the war), short-bread and saffron buns. Also innumerable kinds of biscuit, which exist, of course, elsewhere, but are generally admitted to be better and crisper in England.
When I visit the UK I cram down as many biscuits as I can; they really are better there. My favorites include Boasters, fig rolls, biscuits containing pieces of candied ginger, and Garibaldis, sometimes known as “squashed fly biscuits” for their flattened raisins:
McVities Boasters, containing raisins and big hunks of chocolate, are impossibly luxurious. Even I can’t eat more than a couple:
The combination of fig and flaky covering, as seen in America’s Fig Newton (named after Newton, Massachusetts) is inspired. But Brits do it better in their “fig rolls,” made by many companies. The pastry covering is better, and also thicker. Its a substantial biscuit. And some versions have the fig completely enclosed with pastry. Here’s a typical fig roll from the UK:
But my absolute favorite, the King of the Biscuit, is McVities chocolate digestive biscuits (dark chocolate, please). Oh, for four or five of these right now:
They’re ideal for dunking in coffee or tea, which softens the crunch a bit and slightly melts the chocolate.
Over at Wired, Brian Romans noted what he considers the best scientific comment-and-reply sequence ever published. Well, I’m not sure it’s the best, but it’s certainly the most honest!
Here’s part of the critique of a paper published in The Journal of Geology in 1963:
It is obvious that this error in presenting sedimentation rates has no effect whatever on the ages given in the paper. Therefore, the main body of the paper and the conclusions reached by Rosholt et al. require no modification.
And here’s the authors’ reply:
Only once in my life do I remember a biologist admitting he screwed up in a paper. That was my advisor, Dick Lewontin, in response to a pretty severe criticism of a paper that he wrote with Jesse Kraukauer. I can’t remember the details, but I’m sure at least a few others have admitted error when called out in a journal. The custom, of course, despite the idea that scientists freely and willingly admit error, is to dig in your heels! After all, we’re human. If you know of any stories to the contrary, post them below.
h/t: Ed Yong for the “tweet”
UPDATE: I remember now that Steve Gould Richard Dawkins,* in one of his essays books, recounts the story of one of his professors who, after hearing his own pet theory demolished in a lecture, announced to the audience that his theory was indeed wrong and then shook the hand of his opponent, congratulating him for having shown him the light.
*I was WRONG! LOL!
Philosopher Keith Parsons, from the University of Houston, has given up doing philosophy of religion. According to Julia Galef, writing at Religious Dispatches, Parsons found the case for God to be insupportable. As Parsons wrote on the website The Secular Outpost:
I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest… I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.
Parsons later said he regretted using the word “fraud,” but of course the case for God is a fraud. He just can’t say that publicly. But, as Galef reports:
Parsons’ background in the sciences (he obtained his doctorate in the history and philosophy of science at University of Pittsburgh) made him wary of unfettered reasoning. “There’s so little empirical grounding and constraint in philosophy. Even in paleontology, a so-called soft science, the bones are there,” Parsons says. “You can go measure them, look at them. You can’t say anything the bones won’t let you say.”
Parsons did the right thing. Biblical scholarship is one thing, for it’s interesting and useful to dissect the human origins of religious myths. Religious philosophy: not so gud, akshually. Like many universities, mine has a divinity school whose faculty engages in both activities. I’ve always found it interesting that “elite” universities have schools and faculties devoted, at least in part, to rationalizing the existence of a fictitious being.
h/t: Brother Russell Blackford
This entry comes from reader “daveau”. The story is lovely and the photo priceless:
While we have many, many winsome photos of our cats, this is one of our favorites. It was taken in February 1998, on one of those strange 70ish degree days in Chicago (NW side). This is the first time that we let the grrrls out in the back yard. We propped open the door, and they must have stood there for quite a while, since we had time to get a camera and snap a photo. We caught them right before they headed down the steps to a brave new world. Bryxie (L) was a 5 month old British Shorthair, and Keeshu, a Birman, was almost a year. The curiosity and apprehension in their faces (yes, I’m anthropomorphising) is absolutely priceless.
Our sweet little Bryxie Pye died earlier this year from HCM, but she spent many happy years predating in the back yard. Keeshu is 13 now, and is still an adventure cat.
Yesterday daveau sent me an image of Keeshu, now 13. She’s apparently acquired laser eyes:
If any astronomical photo is gonna make you go all “spiritual”, this is the one. It was taken by Thierry Legault during the partial solar eclipse on Jan. 4, and shows not only the sun and moon, but a space vehicle. Here’s how Thierry describes it on his webpage:
Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS), taken from the area of Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman on January 4th 2011 at 9:09 UT, during the partial solar eclipse. Takahashi FSQ-106ED refractor on EM-10 mount, Canon 5D mark II. 1/5000s exposure at 100 iso.
Transit forecast calculated by www.calsky.com (many thanks to Arnold Barmettler for his help).Transit duration: 0.86s. ISS distance to observer: 510 km. Speed in orbit: 7.8km/s (28000 km/h or 17000 mph).
(Definitely click on image to enlarge):
Note that Thierry had less than one second to snap this photo before the ISS went out of range!
You can see other fantastic pictures of the ISS docking with the space shuttle Atlantis here, as well as a one-second video of that transit across the Sun’s face, showing how precise Legault had to be to get these shots. Do go to that link; you won’t regret it. There are other great photos on his web page, Astrophotography.
Legault is an engineer and astronomy buff who lives outside Paris. Here he is with his gear, poised for that shot:
h/t to Thierry for permission to put up this photo, and to Matthew Cobb for calling it to my attention.
UPDATE: Phil Plait talks more about the photo on Bad Astronomy.
UPDATES: I now have Mooney’s whole article, and reader stvs has published it below in a comment. It’s even worse than I thought, with Mooney dragooning both Darwin and E. O. Wilson as models of “spiritual” scientists. There is absolutely no doubt, unless you’re obtuse, that the purpose of Mooney’s piece is to show the commonality of scientists and religious people—as both are “spiritual”—and thereby make common cause of the two magisteria. Just look at the title of the piece: “The born-again scientist: spirituality comes to the lab.”
What a smarmy and intellectually dishonest piece of accommodationist tripe, relying as it does on conflating two completely disparate notions of “spirituality”! Can we agree, then, that when we get all emotional about a piece of music or a novel or a nebula, or experience wonder at the products of natural selection—that we give these emotions a name different from “sprituality”? That just confuses the diverse meanings of the term (which was Mooney’s intent) and gives ammunition to acoommodationists.
Over at Pharyngula you can read P. Z.’s take on Mooney’s article.
Meanwhile, after the negative reaction Mooney has added this comment to his post:
Wow my Playboy piece is becoming quite the Rorschach. I may have to say more about this.
Please, Chris, spare us. It’s just like the lad to avoid substantive discussion by simply characterizing his posts as “Rorschach tests“ of where his readers stand.
I must say, the intellectual dishonesty and relentless self promotion of the site and the authors’ books, combined with Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s tendency to ban readers who disagree with them even mildly, have really hurt The Intersection. Comments have fallen to only one or two (sometimes none) per post. Do the authors even realize why this has happened? The only time there are more than a couple of comments is when Mooney engages in atheist-baiting; and so, I expect, we’ll see more of that.
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Oh dear God, the lad has no sense of decency, at long last. Over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney touts a piece he wrote for the latest Playboy, and provides an excerpt. Characteristically, he’s flogging “spirituality” as a framing device to show that religion and science have stuff in common after all. The excerpt:
But can scientists who say they are awestruck by nature and moved by their research really relate to more traditional religious experiences, a la those reported by saints? Aren’t “awe” and “wonder” nondescript notions that add emotional embroidery to the brute facts of the universe? Perhaps not. Feelings of awe, wonder and mystery recur in the context of human quests for deeper understanding or revelation. In his 1917 work The Idea of the Holy, German theologian Rudolph Otto singled out a sense of awe as a key characteristic of our encounters with what he termed the “numinous”–an overwhelming power or presence beyond ourselves.
Science can unleash this feeling too. Just sit in a darkened room and look at nebulae pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, as University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank describes doing in his book The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate. “Scientists are not the only ones who catch their collective breath before these pictures,” he writes. “The momentary hush and the gasp that follow are involuntary.”
A love of nebulae, ergo Jesus. Perhaps a reader with access to Playboy (and who will admit it) can flesh out the rest of this piece, which according to Mooney appears on p. 168 of the January, 2011 issue.
For the nonce, this seems just another cheap attempt of Mooney to show that science and faith must be compatible companions, since they both seek the numinous.
2011 has barely begun, but this brand of intellectual dishonesty is already upon us.