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.
Good news!: there’s a new translation of Why Evolution is True. Up to now it’s appeared in the following languages (besides English, of course):
Italian
Spanish
Turkish
Korean
Finnish
Portuguese
Japanese
Chinese
Hebrew
Polish, and
Arabic (workin’ on it).
I proudly introduce the latest language translation:
LOLCAT!
Here’s the cover of the new edition:
h/t: Miranda Hale
The 30th Anniversary Free Inquiry conference in Los Angeles is sold out, but no worries, mate: much of the good stuff will be live-streamed here.
The fun starts today with The Big Smackdown (“Science and religion: confrontation or accommodation?”) from 2-5 p.m (PDT), featuring P. Z. Myers, Chris Mooney, Eugenie Scott, Jennifer Michael Hecht, and Victor Stenger.
Another smackdown occurs Saturday, 7:30-9:30 pm (PDT): Sam Harris and Robert Wright fight to the death (“Where should seculars stand today and tomorrow on questions of religion and belief?”).
Big fun!!!
This study has been online for more than a year, but it’s just been touted in two places: in an article at HuffPo by Ph.D. candidate Amarnath Amarasingham, and as a link at Templeton’s Big Questions Online site. Why the attention? Because the study, published in Sociology of Religion by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University, supposedly shows that American professors are nowhere near as Godless as people think. That seems to hearten people who worry that American higher education is infested with nefarious atheists. Remember Elaine Ecklund’s palpable relief at her supposed demonstration that American scientists are also more religious than people think?
Actually, neither the authors nor Amarasingham (nor Ecklund, in her study) know what people think about the atheism of the professoriat. They cite no surveys of this nor give any data themselves. They merely assert that Americans think that professors are all raving atheists. And the data show that that’s not the case, though professors prove to be far less religious than the public at large.
The Gross and Simmons study has a long and boring introduction about the incursion of religion in American universities and of secularism in the faculty. And their study has a curious motivation: not to find out the degree of atheism among professors, but to show that it’s not pervasive.
Our aim in undertaking this largely descriptive endeavor is precisely to cast doubt on assumptions of faculty atheism, not because we ourselves have any interest in advancing a religious agenda, but because such assumptions have kept a range of important sociological questions—about the processes and mechanisms responsible for the distribution of religious views in academe, as well as about the potential consequences of religiosity for teaching, research, and other faculty attitudes—from being given the attention they deserve.
That’s just weird: no real science paper would have as its aim to demonstrate a certain phenomenon. Presumably studies like this are supposed to find the truth, not “cast doubt.” Well, maybe the authors are just guilty of hamhanded writing. What did they find? They surveyed 1417 professors at American colleges and universities (including junior colleges), sampling from a wide swath of disciplines. Here’s a precis:
I’m not sure how much succor these data can provide to those who worry about the incursion of atheism into universities. Yes, about half the professors are still religious—though not among scientists—but who ever thought that we were all atheists?
Nevertheless, Gross and Simmons, in their discussion, are clearly heartened by the results, and just as clearly wanted to find a pro-religion result. What kind of “objective” study is that? They note at the end:
Whatever the outcome of these and other lines of future investigation, we have shown that religious believers are more common in the ranks of the American faculty than many strands of social-scientific analysis—and much popular discourse—would suggest.
And, at HuffPo, Amarasingham also breathes a sigh of relief:
What all of these data make clear, and future studies are sure to further complicate, is that the simplistic association of “intelligent” with “atheist” is not backed by the evidence. “Our findings call into question the long-standing idea among theorists and sociologists of knowledge that intellectuals, broadly construed, comprise an ideologically cohesive group in society and tend naturally to be antagonistic toward religion,” write Gross and Simmons. The idea that “the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tension with a religious worldview, is plainly wrong.” In contrast, the evidence seems to suggest that instead of leaving religion behind, the intelligentsia, like the rest of society, rationally wrestle with ideas, scientific and religious, and attempt to find answers to the big questions that plague us all.
Never mind the three-times-greater irreligiosity among faculty than among the public, never mind the correlation of atheism and agnosticism with the quality of the institution: the faitheists and accommodationists can always spin the data to their liking so long as the correlation isn’t perfect and 100% of professors aren’t atheists. So much for the “science” of sociology!
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Gross, N. and S. Simmons. 2009. The religiosity of American college and university professors. Sociology of Religion 70:101-129. doi:10.1093/socrel/srp026
Both Greg and P.Z. Myers have noted, in conjunction with others, that there may be an insidious connection between climate-change denialist David Koch, who largely funded the Smithsonian’s new human evolution exhibit, and the contents of the exhibit itself. (Greg doesn’t buy it.) After I learned that Koch was a denialist, I drew a connection between one or two of the displays I saw and Koch’s views. And according to Climate Progress, I missed other exhibits showing how wonderful climate change was for our evolution.
Before I read about this kerfuffle, I was going to put up these pictures as examples of some of the wonky views on evolution on offer in the exhibit, but now I see that they may have a more insidious meaning.
At the exhibit, I noted that there was considerable unfounded speculation about the influence of climate change on evolution. Here’s a display suggesting—and there is NO evidence for this—that adaptation to changing climate was a major force propelling the evolutionary increase in human brain size. Note, at the lower right, the two graphs showing a “coordinated” increase of human brain size with increasing variability of climate (click the picture to enlarge and read the captions). Note also that as the fluctuations in temperature increased, the average temperature also decreased, so there’s no way, at least from these data, to separate brain evolution from average temperature versus erratic temperature. And of course there are tons of other hypotheses, not connected with climate, to explain why our brains got bigger.
This display, while not as scientifically unfounded as the one above, is still speculative, without any indication that there’s no solid proof that human body morphology reflects adaptation to climate. It’s a good guess, but we don’t know for sure and, at any rate, since the theme of the exhibit is “how do we know what we know?”, the curators should have injected a cautionary note about the conclusion:
Smithsonian, j’accuse! Get your curators in there and expunge all the questionable “science” tying our evolution to climate change. And call a spade a spade: if something is just a hypothesis, label it as such rather than implying it’s settled fact.
by Greg Mayer
PZ noted my and Jerry’s pieces on the new Hall of Human Origins at the USNM, and one of his commenters, DavidCOG, points to this piece at Climate Progress (based in part on Jane Mayer’s (no relation) New Yorker article on the Koch brothers), which in turn points to a couple of items at Think Progress, and this by Matt Yglesias (among others). In summary, these pieces detect a much more sinister motivation for Koch’s funding of the exhibit, flowing from his global warming denialism. As I’d noted in the comments on my piece, there is material about climate change in the exhibit, but nothing I regarded as untoward. The scale of climate change discussed in the exhibit– tens of thousands to millions of years– doesn’t seem relevant to the decade to century scale of current warming. And, there is, as far as I saw, no discussion of current warming in the exhibit.
Perhaps Koch wanted the point made that climate does change, and that this influenced human evolution– that’s true of course– and he hoped that, by non sequitur, visitors would conclude that recent rapid climate change is nothing to worry about. But that is a non sequitur, and a fairly subtle one at that, so I’m not sure he’s getting his money’s worth. I’ll let Climate Progress make the argument for its view in their video.
PZ has now commented directly on the issue.
This is a long post, but if you’re interested in strategies for combatting religion, you might find it valuable—not for my lucubrations, but for a thoughtful discussion between two prominent atheists and philosophers, Philip Kitcher and Daniel Dennett.
I’m a big fan of Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia who’s also something of a polymath (he teaches courses on Joyce and has written an introduction to Finnegan’s Wake). He’s also written groundbreaking critiques of creationism (Abusing Science) and of evolutionary psychology (Vaulting Ambition). Philip and Ned Block were valuable allies in the attacks on Jerry Fodor’s and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s anti-natural-selection nonsense. And I enjoyed (and blurbed) Kitcher’s most recent philosophy book, Living with Darwin, a trenchant critique of intelligent design. In that book’s last chapter, Kitcher warns against too-strident critiques of religion, arguing that faith provides a lot of social benefits to people, and that replacing faith means finding a humanism that dispenses those benefits. That seemed reasonable to me.
But in “Militant modern atheism” Kitcher’s new piece in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, he’s taken his criticism of atheism a bit further (access is free, and you can download a pdf). His main point is that New Atheists, while attacking the truth claims of religion and demanding that the faithful adduce evidence, are completely ignoring what may be the most important aspects of faith: its function as a form of social glue and as a community that meets a human need for participation and interaction.
Kitcher distinguishes what he calls the “belief model”—the form of faith that is initially built on truth claims about God, Jesus, Mohamed and the like—from three other forms of what he calls the “orientation” model: the forms of faith that begin with a person identifying secular goals and beliefs that he shares with others, and then choosing a faith that properly frames these goals. Kitcher calls the three religious forms of the orientation model the mythically self conscious, the doctrinally-entangled, and the doctrinally-indefinite. I’ll leave you to read about their differences in his article.
Kitcher contends that New Atheists, by concentrating solely on the “belief model,” don’t realize that adherents to the other three models don’t care that much about specific truth claims of faith. Therefore, the Gnus are attacking faith at a place where it’s not that vulnerable. As he says, “Nobody who reflects on what sociologists have to say about the ways in which people become attracted to particular religions will suppose that the spread of a creed has much to do with its truth.”
Kitcher concludes that for most people the benefits of faith outweigh any problems of believing in falsehoods:
. . . it is a fallacy to think that, for any religious person who currently fits the orientation model, that person can attain a cognitively superior position by rejecting the beliefs militant modern atheists discern as false. The cognitive gains can simply be outweighed by other forms of psychological and social loss.
He seems to think that its social benefits portend that religion will be with us forever, or at least until atheists find a way to associate those same benefits with humanism. And he takes prominent Gnus like Dennett and Dawkins to task for suggesting that the contemplation of science and the universe can provide psychic benefits that can replace religion. After quoting Dawkins on the wonders of science, Kitcher notes:
There is much to agree with in these passages, but they seduce readers—and Dawkins and Dennett too, I suspect, into thinking that anyone can orient a worthwhile life, one that will survive reflective probing, on the basis of contemplation of the cosmos as the sciences have revealed it.
Ouch! Well, I’m not sure whether Richard and Dan would agree that they’ve prescribed a diet of science to replace a gluttony on Jesus, but never mind.
My own comments on Kitcher’s piece (Dennett’s much longer take is posted below) are these:
Despite their disagreements, Kitcher, Dennett, and Dawkins agree on much. They all agree, for instance, that the “belief model” of religion is not only untenable but absolutely vulnerable to scientific attacks on religious truth claims. And they agree that indoctrinating children with religious dogma is a terrible thing to do.
Dennett, whose ideas are a major issue in Kitcher’s piece, has written a response to it. Although this will ultimately appear elsewhere online, Dan has kindly given me permission to post it here. It’s longer than our usual posts but well worth reading. (Quotes in italics below are from Kitcher’s article.)
I went to some lengths in Breaking the Spell to distinguish two spells one might consider breaking: the taboo against looking “too closely” at religion, holding it up to the same harsh light of rational probing to which we subject all other important phenomena, and the spell of religion itself. In my book I declared my intent to break the first spell and my agnosticism about the wisdom of breaking the second—citing the very considerations that Kitcher advances more positively. Kitcher ignores my distinction but in fact is in nearly perfect harmony with my positions on them. His essay is an example of breaking the first spell: he writes with unflinching candor about the shaky status of any religion adopted on what he calls the belief model, and uses that spell-broken perspective to look hard at the prospects for keeping the second spell unbroken, by relying on what he calls the orientation model, supposing that this is perhaps the only surviving mode of religion that can provide the benefits he wants to preserve, which may just be a necessity of meaningful life for many people. As I noted in my book, there is a reasonable fear that breaking the first spell will inevitably break the second as well, which fear is the (obligatorily) tacit standard justification for not breaking the first. Kitcher vividly illustrates that problem in his essay, trying to walk the tightrope without falling into patronizing on one side or uneasy complicity with unacceptable nonsense on the other.
The point of Kitcher’s introduction of the orientation model is to give him a way of reversing—most of the time—the otherwise standard dependence of serious commitments and aspirations on grounded beliefs. The orientation-type religionists put commitments first, as the fundamental landmarks of their lives, and let the expression of (what take the place of) grounds for these commitments wander somewhat opportunistically between “mythically self-conscious” metaphor at one pole and “doctrinal “entanglement” (flirting with the belief model) at the other, with convenient vagueness in the middle. (The “doctrinally indefinite” folks “take refuge in language that is resonant and opaque, metaphorical and poetic, and deny that they can do any better at explaining the beliefs they profess.”) Whatever floats your boat, as one says. And indeed, if maintaining a religious orientation is the only way for you to have a meaningful life, you should rely on whatever floats your boat. But then it will just make matters harder for you if you have to confront Kitcher’s trio. Tell me, sir, have you decided to go with mythic self-consciousness, doctrinal entanglement, or doctrinal indefiniteness? Don’t ask! Don’t tell! That’s why many think the first spell should not be broken, but Kitcher and I have both ignored that admonition.
Kitcher is at pains to express his defense of these delicate options sympathetically:
I’ll suggest that doctrinal indefiniteness can be a reasonable expression of epistemic modesty, and that even doctrinal entanglement can be justified when it is the only way of preserving, in the socio-cultural environment available, a reflectively stable orientation. (p6)
but a somewhat less diplomatic version hovers in the background: kid yourself if you have to. And, I am happy to say, Kitcher firmly draws the line at letting any of these options abrogate a commitment to reason when deciding ethical matters.
Someone who makes decisions affecting the lives of others is ethically required to rely on those propositions best supported by the evidence.
In a felicitous phrase he notes that “there ought to be no ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’,” but then just what is the positive role of Abraham as a “knight of faith” supposed to be, when he so clearly violates this principle? Kitcher says that Abraham’s “sort of trust is not legitimate”—you can’t put it much plainer than that—but how, then, does Kitcher find a way of endorsing Abraham’s (mythical) story as any sort of talisman for a meaningful life?
Kitcher sketches a speculative account of the evolution of religious phenomena that is, as he says, an alternative to my own speculative conjecture—it sees the predominance of religion as explained by its being (socially) adaptive, not a byproduct of other evolutionary selection pressures—but he then draws a misleading contrast:
If you start with the thought that the predominance of religion in human societies is to be explained by a cognitive deficiency, you will tend [my italics] to see your campaign for the eradication of myths in terms of a return to intellectual health. . . . By contrast, if you suppose that the social factors towards which I have gestured have played a non-trivial role in the spread of the world’s religions, you will wonder [my italics] if there are psychological and social needs that the simple abandonment of religion will leave unfulfilled. (p9)
There may be such a tendency, pulling in opposite directions, but Darwin long ago showed us that it should be resisted.
It is in perfect accordance with the scheme of nature, as worked out by natural selection, that matter excreted to free the system from superfluous or injurious substances should be utilized for [other] highly useful purposes. (On the Various Contrivances by which Orchids. . . . 1862, p266—quoted in DDI, p461)
So Kitcher’s wonder is just as available to me, and, similarly, however socially adaptive religious phenomena may have been in the past, their utility may have expired. It is simply a mistake—but a very common one—to seek a theory of the evolution of religious phenomena that would provide some imagined warrant for your view of the value of religion today. I worked hard to keep these issues distinct in my book, and Kitcher should acknowledge that his preferred speculation is logically independent of the main point for which he is arguing: that religion is valuable today, all things considered.
It may well be. I find his most compelling point to be his observation that Dawkins and I should not extrapolate glibly from our own immense good fortune to find ourselves in a position not only to understand and appreciate the glories of the scientific world view but to have the thrill—no other word will suffice—of playing significant roles in the spreading of this vision.
. . . the vast majority will never be able to recognize themselves as important participants in any impressive joint enterprise that contributes to knowledge and enlightenment. (p11)
I discuss this in Breaking the Spell (pp286-92), where I note that religion has the unparalleled capacity to give people a chance to be, in Kitcher’s good phrase, important participants in the world they were born into. But as I go on to discuss there, nobody has yet estimated what price we should be prepared to pay—in xenophobia, violence, the glorification of unreason, the spreading of patent falsehood—for that wonderful sense of importance religion gives to many people who would otherwise lead lives without drama, without a point. Kitcher wants to preserve religions (at least for the foreseeable future, I gather) but I think it would be better to work constructively on secular institutions that can provide alternative structures of meaning for everyone. Still, we might accomplish this most practically by encouraging existing religious institutions to evolve into . . . . former religions. Some have already done so, but they are not yet competing very well in the marketplace of allegiances. Who knows what the near future will bring? Religions have changed more in the last century than in the last millennium, and perhaps they will change more in the next decade than in that last century.
Kitcher and I agree on so much. We agree that “Public reason must the thoroughly secular” (p12) We agree that the belief model of religion is indefensible. We agree that the first spell must be broken—we have both broken it. We differ, apparently, only in our assessment of how to ease the people of the 21st century into a more reasonable and socially benign form of orientation. But even here, I think, we should both admit that we haven’t figured that out yet.
The readers have again drawn a blank in our guess-the-Nobel contest, as Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936), whom nobody named, just nabbed the Literature prize. Curiously, a friend in Boston just recommended him to me as the best modern writer from Latin America. I confess that I haven’t read him.
I was kind of hoping that Salman Rushdie would take it, for he surely deserves it—and it would really tick off his religious opponents. My American wild-card favorite was Cormac McCarthy, but I don’t think he’ll see the Prize in his lifetime. (He also deserves it.)
by Greg Mayer
Matthew recently asked if there is life on Gliese 581g— a newly discovered Earth-like (in some ways) planet (I’m tempted to say “class M planet“). There’s also the question of if there is life in the Solar System (Earth doesn’t count)– on Europa, or Mars, or Enceladus, say. On the same trip that I got to see the Hall of Human Origins at the USNM, I also visited the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, and got to see the candidate planets and moons up close and personal. There I saw the exhibit “Beyond: Visions of Our Solar System“, a series of exquisite photographs compiled by Michael Benson.
Compiled from the photographic results of what is now several decades of interplanetary probes and Earth satellites, the exhibit includes images of all the planets, the Sun, many moons, and a number of asteroids (a catalogue, with images, is available on Benson’s website, as is a wonderful set of wide angle views of the exhibit hall). The exhibit is, in a word, magnificent. The large format prints, placed on the walls without intervening cases, allows the visitor to examine every detail of the photos.
The detail and high resolution turn the planets from objects of astronomy– moving points of light– to objects of geology, and even hydrology– out wash plains and hills, volcanoes and glaciers. They’re not quite objects of biology yet. We, or our machines, will have to investigate on the surface more closely to see if that’s the case. Here are a few more of the over 100 images.
I can recommend this exhibit without reservation. It will be at Air & Space till next May. A companion volume of exquisite photos, Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (Abrams, New York, 2003) is available. (The exhibit contains newer photos, as well as ones from the book, some as recent as 2009.)
