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.
The last day of October, Botany Pond, the University of Chicago:
Metamorphosis, by Wallace Stevens
Yillow, yillow, yillow,
Old worm, my pretty quirk,
How the wind spells out
Sep – tem – ber. . . .Summer is in bones.
Cock-robin’s at Caracas.
Make o, make o, make o,
Oto – otu – bre.And the rude leaves fall.
The rain falls. The sky
Falls and lies with the worms.
The street lampsAre those that have been hanged,
Dangling in an illogical
To and to and fro
Fro Niz – nil – imbo.
Matthew Cobb pointed me to an interesting site for picking up tips on books. It’s called Five Books, and the schtick is this: an expert in a field is asked to choose five books on a topic related to her work. An interview goes with the recommendations. (Don’t be put off by this week’s New-Agey home page.)
Science, especially biology, is not this site’s strong suit, but you can still find Walter Isaacson on “Einstein” Lewis Wolpert on “Science” , David Brooks on “Neuroscience“, Steven Gubser on “String Theory,” and Jeremy Mynott on “Birdwatching.” I was pleased to see that Mynott’s first choice was one of the books I recommended so highly here: The Peregrine, by J. A. Baker. He says this about it:
This book caught my imagination when I first read it, which was in the late 1960s. It’s a book about one man’s obsession with a particular bird. He was fascinated with a peregrine that he found locally, and he stalked it for a whole year. He tried to follow it in all its movements and get the bird used to him so that he could approach it more closely than a peregrine would normally allow. It’s the story of this pursuit of the bird and how he came to feel a kind of affinity with it, and how he uses the bird as a symbol for the things he feels, or wants to feel, about the natural world. The writing in the book is really rather extraordinary – it’s a very lyrical, very elevated kind of prose that could completely fail, or become too lush or rich or something. He just about teeters on the brink the whole time, and you think, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s overdone it now!’ and then he gets away with it. I think it’s a magnificent piece of writing that I find very moving.
Spot on!
But who said we always have to read about science? Mary Warnock has some interesting recommendations for “Godless Morality,” and for footy you can find Rob Hughes on “Football” and Simon Kuper on “The Best Football Books in English“. Madhur Jaffrey selects five “Wonderful Cookbooks” while David Bellos chooses “Great French Novels” (en français). Finally (and I’ve omitted tons of categories), Allen MacDuffie has eight selections for “The Comic Novel.”
If you’re casting about for something to read, you could do worse than start here.
A respected peer-reviewed journal in psychology, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is about to publish a paper that presents scientific evidence for precognition. The paper, by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, is called “Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect,” and you can download a preprint on his webpage. I’ve scanned the paper only briefly, and am posting about it in hopes that some of you will read it carefully and provide analyses, either here or elsewhere.
The paper purports to show that a choice that you make in a computer test can be influenced by stimuli you receive after you’ve already made the choice. This implies you have some way, consciously or unconsciously, of detecting things that haven’t yet happened. In an article in Psychology Today, “Have scientists finally discovered evidence for psychic phenomena?“, psychologist Melissa Burkley at Oklahoma State University summarizes two of Bem’s studies:
However, Bem’s studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology – studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times – and simply reversed their chronological order.
For example, we all know that rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall? In one of the studies, college students were given a list of words and after reading the list, were given a surprise recall test to see how many words they remembered. Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words on the list as practice words and the participants were asked to retype them several times. The results of the study showed that the students were better at recalling the words on the surprise recall test that they were later given, at random, to practice. According to Bem, practicing the words after the test somehow allowed the participants to “reach back in time to facilitate recall.”
In another study, Bem examined whether the well-known priming effect could also be reversed. In a typical priming study, people are shown a photo and they have to quickly indicate if the photo represents a negative or positive image. If the photo is of a cuddly kitten, you press the “positive” button and if the photo is of maggots on rotting meat, you press the “negative” button. A wealth of research has examined how subliminal priming can speed up your ability to categorize these photos. Subliminal priming occurs when a word is flashed on the computer screen so quickly that your conscious brain doesn’t recognize what you saw, but your nonconscious brain does. So you just see a flash, and if I asked you to tell me what you saw, you wouldn’t be able to. But deep down, your nonconscious brain saw the word and processed it. In priming studies, we consistently find that people who are primed with a word consistent with the valence of the photo will categorize it quicker. So if I quickly flash the word “happy” before the kitten picture, you will click the “positive” button even quicker, but if I instead flash the word “ugly” before it, you will take longer to respond. This is because priming you with the word “happy” gets your mind ready to see happy things.
In Bem’s retroactive priming study, he simply reversed the time sequence on this effect by flashing the primed word after the person categorized the photo. So I show you the kitten picture, you pick whether it is positive or negative, and then I randomly choose to prime you with a good or bad word. The results showed that people were quicker at categorizing photos when it was followed by a consistent prime. So not only will you categorize the kitten quicker when it is preceded by a good word, you will also categorize it quicker when it is followed by a good word. It was as if, while participants were categorizing the photo, their brain knew what word was coming next and this facilitated their decision.
There are at least four explanations for these results:
1. They’re real: we have previously unsuspected abilities to detect the future.
2. They’re fraudulent: Bem rigged the experiment or made up the data. I’m assuming this isn’t the case.
3. They’re wrong because of some flaw in the experiment (or in the computer programs) that made these results artifactual.
4. The results are statistical outliers that got published simply because they represent one of those cases in which we reject the null hypothesis (i.e., the hypothesis that we have no ability to predict the future), even though it’s true. This is called a “type one error” in statistics. When experimental results give such an error of 5% or less (i.e., exceed the “significance threshold”), scientists do reject the null hypothesis and claim that something else is going on (in this case, that there’s precognition). But with a threshhold of 5%, you’ll make a mistake one time in twenty. (That’s the basis of the old science joke, “95% of your experiments fail; the other 5% you publish in Nature.”)
So maybe Bem’s results represent type I errors. This is the conclusion of Psychology Today blogger Daniel R. Hawes. And indeed, the probability values in Bem’s experiments aren’t all that tiny (see his Table 7): several of them are between 1% and the critical 5% threshold. But—assuming Bem published all of his studies, and didn’t leave out the ones that didn’t show precognition—they’re consistent: the effects (though very small, about a 3% increase in “hits” over what’s expected by chance), are always in the same direction. Even though the “precognition effects” aren’t large, this consistency demands explanation.
But before we have explanation, we must have replication. Now that this result is in the open, it’s up to other scientists to see if similar studies give similar results. Only then should we start worrying about the possibility of unknown “powers.”
In a comment on the Psychology Today article, hokum-debunker James Randi has challenged Bem to meet his conditions for demonstrating paranormal phenomena, a demonstration that comes with a million-dollar prize. Randi:
I find this to be a very interesting reader response. After the usual magnificently uninformed comments: “Time is strange, gravity doesn’t make sense, and matter is mostly empty space. There is no such thing as time. Everything, what we call past, present and future, is happening in the Now” we find far more cogent remarks, along with the suggestion that author Bem should go for my Foundation’s million-dollar prize. Of course he should, but he won’t. We’ve made him the offer, many others have, as well, but he chooses to ignore it. It’s there, it’s real, the grubbies constantly claim it doesn’t exist, but it persists. Dr. Bem, give us a call. Accept the challenge, under your conditions, thoroughly fair, proper, definitive, observed and controlled, and you don’t have to invest a penny. Isn’t that attractive to you? And just think of the book sales along with the currency. Yes, a million US dollars still buys a lot… Make us all happy, won’t you?
Hello…? Dr. Bem? You there…?
Do read the paper first if you want to take apart the study.
It’s “Layla,” of course, Eric Clapton’s dithyramb for Patti Boyd Harrison, the wife of his friend George Harrison. It’s the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail. Clapton eventually won her, but the romance was short lived. So sad.
As we all agree, the Beatles were the greatest rock group ever, but they never produced a rocker like this one. And here’s the best live performance on the interwebz, from a Madison Square Garden concert in 1999 (there used to be a better one, but YouTube removed it). The solo that begins at 2:57 shows why Clapton deserves his mythic status. (I don’t like the slow second half.)
And here’s a performance from (I estimate) 20 years earlier. As Clapton aged, his live performances of Layla became slower and more expansive:
When Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and their autotuned ilk are tiny footnotes (if that) in the history of rock, they’ll still be playing Clapton on the oldies stations.
As always, you are free to disparage this one and substitute your own, but please—no Rolling Stones.
Fig. 1. Layla.
UPDATE: This just in from a Friend of the Website (used with permission):
I am watching the guitar solo now. London subways were once covered with graffiti “Clapton is God,” an affirmation that both New Atheists and Theists not overly concerned about blasphemy can jointly celebrate.
Uncle Karl
Okay, he’s “Uncle Karl” again. I’m not holding my breath until Albert Mohler chimes in.
I love the sound of a catfight in the morning, especially when it involves two Christians hissing and spitting over whose theology is better. Over at The Christian Post, Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, religious macher, and flat-out evolution denier, takes on Karl Giberson’s accommodationist theology in “Science trumps the Bible?” Mohler is clearly cheesed off by Giberson’s (and his organization BioLogos‘s) assertion that theology like Mohler’s, which sees the Bible as the literal word of god, is primitive and unsophisticated.
Coyne argues that religious ideas are ancient and resistant to correction, and he identifies science as the only qualified correction. Giberson rejects Coyne’s argument that religious beliefs are a fossilized set of ideas that reluctantly give way to scientific advance. Giberson retorts that religious beliefs change from within religious communities and that scientific advances often refute previously held scientific opinion.
At this point, Giberson’s argument gets really interesting—and really dangerous. “I am happy to concede that science does indeed trump religious truth about the natural world,” Giberson writes. “Galileo and Darwin showed this only too clearly, even if it is completely lost on Ken Ham and Al Mohler.”
Well count me in as being lost to the assertion that science trumps the Bible “about the natural world” or about anything else. In his original response to Jerry Coyne, Giberson made the argument in more striking words: “Empirical science does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Darwin showed only too clearly.” That statement, with its reference to “revealed truth,” is even more shocking than the first.
In the economy of a few words, Giberson throws the Bible under the scientific bus. We should be thankful that his argument is so clear, for it puts the case for theistic evolution in its proper light—as a direct attack upon biblical authority.
Now it’s not all beer and skittles getting praised by a fundamentalist evolution-denier. Accommodationists like to use this stuff to show that atheists, in their dogmatism, resemble religious fundamentalists. We’re both so strident and inflexible, don’t you know, that clearly the right strategy must be somewhere in the Mooneyian middle. But such a claim misses the huge difference between Mohler and those atheists who embrace science.
Mohler argues that science and faith are compatible using a circular sleight of hand: he takes real science to be that which is compatible with the Bible. If what we know about evolution contradicts a literal reading of Genesis, then into the dustbin with it. Science is simply overlooking, or missing, the evidence for an instantaneous creation, Adam and Eve, and the great flood. In contrast, I and others argue that science and faith are incompatible because of their disparate methods of studying reality, and that religion is at bottom incapable of giving us a handle on reality. Evolution is clearly true, and Mohler and his minions are blinded by their faith.
But so is Giberson. Where Mohler and I agree is this: Giberson isn’t all that convincing when he claims that his own liberal and theistic faith is theologically purer than Mohler’s Baptism. Yes, people like Giberson are more likely to be our allies in getting creationism out of the public-school science classes, and that’s good. But in their worship of a god for which there’s no evidence, their insistence on miracles like the Resurrection, and their endless and amusing attempts to comport science with the Bible (as in their wrangles about the meaning of Adam and Eve), Giberson and Mohler are much of a muchness. As P.Z. Myers said, “Note to BioLogos: squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.”
And don’t you just love stuff like this?:
In Giberson’s view, anyone who holds to the truthfulness and historical character of these biblical texts is simply intellectually backwards and unsophisticated. I can only wonder if the parents who send their offspring to Eastern Nazarene College have any understanding of what is taught there—and with such boldness and audacity.
In the last article in his series, Giberson makes the argument that the Christian faith “is rooted in unique historical events that were recorded by the early church as they tried to make sense of their encounters with the risen Christ.” Is that the sum and substance of Professor Giberson’s view of biblical inspiration—that the Bible is the record of the early church’s attempt to “make sense” of Christ and “unique historical events”?
We do know this: Professor Giberson asserts that to believe in the truthfulness and historicity of the entire Bible is to paddle in an “intellectual backwater.” Christians committed to biblical authority should ponder that statement deeply, even as they keep paddling.
The hardest task for acccommodationists isn’t to reconcile the atheists and the liberally religious. It’s their crazy and futile attempt to accommodate a faith that embraces science with the faith of people like Mohler. All the respectful and humble dialogue in the world won’t move them an inch, for they’re not nearly as clueless as Giberson thinks.
p.s. If you need more evidence for the futility of BioLogos’s “dialogue” with fundamentalists, check out the report at The Panda’s Thumb about how Darrel Falk, BioLogos president, had agreed to participate in a “Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science” conference with the fundies, hoping to achieve some sort of rapprochement about science. I warned him about this, but Falk argued back that science would surely win when put side by side with Biblical literalism. And he got pwned, of course. The whole thing was a set-up designed to discredit science. (To Falk’s credit, he didn’t participate in what would have been a catfight.) See also Steve Matheson’s post for more on BioLogos and the myth of Christian unity.
Three videos for the holiday. First, big cats play with pumpkins:
A cat dressed up like a banana split noms a banana:
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And a cat is scared by his owner’s cat costume:
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Somebody asked whether Economy Candy sold Bazooka bubble gum. Well, yes it does, but I can go it one better. Courtesy of an Israeli friend, I have this:
And, just for this post, I opened it up to reveal the funny:
Perhaps a Hebrew-speaking reader can give us a translation.
Poor Vic Stenger—the sole strident atheist at HuffPo. His columns (the latest is “Why religion should be confronted“) are always buried in the bowels of the Religion section. And for good reason, too:
In America “people of faith” are treated with great deference. They are assumed to be persons of the highest moral standards–exemplars of goodness, kindness, and charity. But why should that be? How does faith qualify a person for such high esteem? After all, faith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence and even in light of contrary evidence. How can such a frame of mind be expected to result in any special insight? How foolish it is to build a society based on faith. And how foolish we are to respect the beliefs of people of faith.
I highly recommend Stenger’s latest book, The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.