The “mosque” in New York

August 15, 2010 • 6:00 am

While Gnu Atheists share certain opinions about evidence, reason, and faith, by no means do they march in intellectual lockstep.  Nowhere is this more evident than in this week’s disagreement between Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris about the proposed Islamic cultural center (which includes prayer facilities) near Ground Zero in New York City.

Over at Slate, Hitchens, while expressing reservations about the center’s proposed imam, argues that banning the center not only violates the First Amendment, but, by caving in to the wounded feelings of 9/11 survivors, “borrows straight from the playbook of Muslim cultural blackmail”.  He’s all in favor of letting it go forward.

Another of the “horsemen,” Sam Harris, isn’t so sure.  At The Daily Beast, he argues that there’s a problem—the nature of Islam:

And honest reasoning declares that there is much that is objectionable—and, frankly, terrifying—about the religion of Islam and about the state of discourse among Muslims living in the West, and it is decidedly inconvenient that discussing these facts publicly is considered a sign of “intolerance” by well-intentioned liberals, in part because such criticism resonates with the actual bigotry of not-so-well-intentioned conservatives. I can see no remedy for this, however, apart from simply ramming the crucial points home, again and again. . .

. . . Yes, it is true that the Old Testament contains even greater barbarism—but there are obvious historical and theological reasons why it inspires far less Jewish and Christian violence today. Anyone who elides these distinctions, or who acknowledges the problem of jihad and Muslim terrorism only to swiftly mention the Crusades, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the Tamil Tigers, and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, is simply not thinking honestly about the problem of Islam.

In the end, he’s ambivalent about whether the center should be built:

The claim that the events of September 11, 2001, had “nothing to do with Islam” is an abject and destabilizing lie. This murder of 3,000 innocents was viewed as a victory for the One True Faith by millions of Muslims throughout the world (even, idiotically, by those who think it was perpetrated by the Mossad). And the erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory—and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice. This may not be reason enough for the supporters of this mosque to reconsider their project. And perhaps they shouldn’t. Perhaps there is some form of Islam that could issue from this site that would be better, all things considered, than simply not building another mosque in the first place. But this leads me to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: American Muslims should be absolutely free to build a mosque two blocks from ground zero; but the ones who should do it probably wouldn’t want to.

He has some good points.  Of all the major religions, I find Islam—in its bellicosity, its subjugation of women, its reliance on texts filled with hate and horror (and yes, I know the Old Testament has its gruesome parts and vengeful God), and the desire of many adherents to install Islamic law in their countries—the most repugnant.  And I don’t see much evidence of the friendlier, kinder Islam touted by accommodationists.  Do remember that 40% of British Muslims want sharia law introduced into the UK. And where was moderate Islam nine years ago? I saw lots of worldwide celebration after September 11, but few condemnations of the perpetrators, and none from Islamic countries. (Yes, I know there must have been a few of them, but they weren’t exactly prominent.)

Americans like Obama (who, after all, can’t say otherwise) deliberately overlook the problems with Islam. One of my friends even argued that as a faith, it’s no worse than Quakerism. To somebody who thinks that, nothing more can be said.

Nevertheless, while not all faiths are equal in content, they are, and should be, equal under law.  It would simply be wrong to prohibit a mosque/cultural center from being built on private property, or to use “landmark” provisions of the law to fight it.  Freedom of religion, like freedom of speech, is a non-negotiable, bedrock principle of our country.  But I have no confidence that the center’s construction will thrill the world’s Muslims with our tolerance. That’s wishful thinking, not supported by a scintilla of evidence. If anything, I think it’s more likely that militant Islam will see it as a victory.

Do I oppose the center’s construction? No.  Do I think that building it on that site is a good idea? No.  It’s no better an idea than would be building an American cultural center near Ground Zero in Hiroshima.  It was Islam, after all, that propelled those planes into the World Trade Center nine years ago.

Caturday felids: Yodas!

August 14, 2010 • 6:47 am

What are the chances that there would be two four-eared cats, both named Yoda, in Illinois? There must be a Ceiling Cat!  Prompted by this week’s announcement of a four-eared cat in Russia (see below), I did some sleuthing and found at least two others.  But I should have realized, with the internet and people being what they are, that there would be an entire webpage on four-eared felids. In fact, there are at least two, here and here.

Here’s the first Yoda, rescued from a Chicago bar by Ted and Valerie Rock:

Yoda has a pair of small secondary ears behind the main ones. Malformations like this can, of course, be due to either a mutation or a nongenetic developmental anomaly.  The only way to distinguish these is through breeding experiments: mate Yoda to another cat and see if the trait appears in the offspring (a dominant gene) or only in later generations when the offspring are interbred (a recessive gene).  Alternatively, if one or more of Yoda’s littermates show the same anomaly, it’s almost certainly genetic.  We don’t have this information for the gray Yoda.

Curiously, while the secondary ears are shaped normally, the main ones are rounded; perhaps these are pleiotropic effects of one of the many ear mutations known to occur in cats.  Yoda’s front ears resemble those seen in the American Curl bred, which result from a single dominant mutation.

Here’s Yoda with Valerie Rock:

While there appears to be some danger of deafness involved with the appearance of double ears, Yoda’s hearing seems normal.

Here’s a video of Yoda:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.963456&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]


Here’s Yoda number two, also from Illinois, and he’s the only one that really looks like the Star Wars character.  This guy was rescued from the wild; apparently his mother and several littermates were killed by a wild animal.

Here the secondary ears also appear behind the main ones, but are reversed in direction, facing backward.  In this case the cue (either genetic or developmental) for ear development could have been reversed in an anterio-posterior direction.

You can see video of this second Yoda here.

And here’s the new one—Luntnik, who lives in a garage in Vladivostok.  Luntik’s vestigial ears are in front of the main ears, and could represent a genetic/developmental event similar to that of Yoda #1, but with a different pair of ears exerting dominance in growth.


Teh winners!

August 14, 2010 • 5:58 am

Using counts and random-number generators, I’ve determined the winners of the Cat Smackdown Vote contest. As you recall, there are two: one winner from those who voted for Maru, another from those who voted for Ceiling Cat.

And here they are.

Maru voters: The winner is Seth, who made the following comment: “Voted Maru! Ceiling cat is pretentious.”  Seth wins an autographed paperback of WEIT.

Ceiling cat voters: The winner is Kirth Gersen, who made the following comment: “Ceiling Cat is watching this contest. He watched me vote for him on the site you linked. He’s watching me post this reply. He watched me . . . well, let’s leave that out for now. I vote Ceiling Cat!”  Kirth wins an autographed (by me), mint copy of Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit, by Krista Tippett.

Winners, please contact me by email to receive your prize.

Harvard investigates Hauser

August 13, 2010 • 7:04 am

As Nicholas Wade reports in Wednesday’s New York Times, Marc Hauser,  whose work on morality we’ve discussed before, is under investigation by Harvard.  Apparently some of his work on tamarins either can’t be replicated or is not supported by videotapes and other data produced by Hauser’s lab.

These are serious charges.  Hauser’s work has been important in understanding the phylogenetics of primate behavior and cognition.  One of his papers has already been retracted, and a few others seem on the verge.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t rush to judgment before Harvard’s investigation is complete.  Remember that there are many reasons besides deliberate fraud for data to be unreliable.  There is also the matter of who is responsible, since a senior investigator, while formally responsible for the work in his lab, might not have been there to oversee every observation or data point collected by his students.  At this point we have no idea what happened.

Three personal observations:

1.  Harvard is rightly keeping its investigation under wraps until it’s complete. (Hauser is on leave for a year.)  But it is incumbent on the university to make the results public at the end.  Hauser’s own career and reputation must of course be handled with care.  But we’re talking here about a whole swath of literature on primate behavior, and scientists ultimately need to know how far to trust that swath.  There is no excuse for keeping the final report under wraps.

2.  The Schadenfreude that I’ve heard about, some of it in Wade’s report, is absolutely inexcusable.  It is shameful for scientists to cast aspersions on Hauser’s work until Harvard’s report is complete.  Even if, like Herbert Terrace, you think his conclusions have been insufficiently supported by data, you should be aware that bringing that up now feeds into accusations of fraud.  If Hauser is exonerated, such loose talk could nevertheless affect his reputation for life.  The proper response to questions about the veracity of Hauser’s work is  simply “No comment.”

3.  Finally, the superannuated Nicholas Wade, whose work has not impressed me much, should be given some other beat at the Times, or even set out to pasture.  Look how he takes Terrace’s opinion about what happened and turns it into a general indictment of primate research (my emphasis).  Yes, one has to be careful, but Wade’s repetition of this comment as reportage is simply unfair.

Dr. Hauser is a fluent and persuasive writer, and his undoing seems to have been his experiments, many of which depended on videotaping cotton-topped tamarin monkeys and noting their responses. It is easy for human observers to see the response they want and so to be fooled by the monkeys.

Dr. Terrace said there had been problems for some time with Dr. Hauser’s work.

“First there was arbitrary interpretation of the videotapes to suit the hypothesis,” he said. “The other was whether the data was real. There have been a number of papers using videotape, and all of them have to be reviewed to see if the data holds up.”

Dr. Terrace noted that it was easy for a researcher to see what he wanted in a videotaped animal’s reactions, and that independent observers must check every finding.

“Real time” selection in humans

August 13, 2010 • 6:42 am

If you want a succinct description of how scientists are finding human genes that have experienced natural selection over the past few thousand years, you could do worse than read Ann Gibbons’s three-page “news focus” in this week’s Science, “Tracing evolution’s recent fingerprints” (a bit of a mixed metaphor, that). The article is a useful summary for both biologists and laypeople, especially if you’re curious about whether we’re still evolving. (The answer, of course, is “yes.”)

Starting with recent suggestions that the EPAS1 gene could have been selected for oxygen transport in high-altitude populations, Gibbons sumarizes new statistical approaches (many of them taken here at the U of C)  to detecting selection in H. sapiens.  As you may know, these analysis have suggested that a surprisingly large fraction of our genome has been under fairly recent selection, with that selection based on adaptation to things like oxygen, diet, disease, and the like.

One of the problems of these studies, as Gibbons notes, is that statistics is not sufficient to show selection:  “Finally, few teams have been able to prove that a particular allele actually affects the function of a trait under selection.” I think it’s unwise to say that your case for selection is conclusive without showing that the genetic variants you’re studying make a physiological difference to their carriers.  And, of course, the ultimate “proof” of selection is to connect those physiological differences to reproductive output: i.e., that there really was selection.

Gibbons talks a bit about physiological studies (there aren’t many of these), but showing that genetic variants really do affect reproductive fitness is even harder.  For one thing, that selection might have occurred in our ancestors, and not be going on so much today.  Or, the selection could be very weak, and, though sufficient to cause significant evolution over centuries, might be undetectable in just one or two generations of an experiment.  Long-term cohort studies, like those of Steve Stearns and his colleagues, might be useful here, but are still limited if selection is weak.  I worry whether the new era of  bioinformatics will gull us into accepting conclusions that are based solely on statical analysis of gene-frequency data.

What the faithful call “uncivil”

August 12, 2010 • 9:18 am

The other day I heard from a friend who’s using WEIT as a text in a summer-school evolution course.  This is at a large university somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

I was told that my book was a hit “with about 95% of the students,” but that “5% thought I was an asshole.”  I was pretty chuffed, but also concerned—not such much that students called me an asshole, but about why they would see me as an asshole.  That’s a pretty personal remark, and though I can live with students not buying my evidence or arguments—after all, they’ve been propagandized with faith since they could understand English—I couldn’t see that there was anything in the book that would tar me with such an epithet.

I asked for clarification, and the teacher sent me a short explanation, including a reconstructed dialogue with a female student who was apparently horrified by one statement in the book: “If a designer did have discernible motives when creating species, one of them must surely have been to fool biologists by making organisms look as though they evolved.”  Here’s what I got:

Girl: “He doesn’t have to do that.”
Me: “Do what?”
Girl: “sound like a jerk like that.”
Me: “What do you mean?”
Girl: “He didn’t have to say that. He could have concluded differently. He didn’t need to make that joke at creationists’ expense.”
Me: “That’s pretty mild, don’t you think?”
Girl (and a minority of others): “Even if it’s mild, it’s unnecessary.”
Boy defender: “Have you seen the shit the other side says? I’d say this is a pretty innocuous response comparatively.”
Girl doesn’t back down. Insists that creationists don’t do such things.  3 or 4 other people agree with her.
(agree that you’re a fucking asshole).

This resulted in me making an entire lecture where the class was forced to examine video arguments made by famous creationists and to identify the specific fallacious arguments used. I also forced them to read Ray Comfort’s introduction to the origin.
The girl was not pleased.

When teaching evolution, especially to religious people, I’m always concerned that I might bruise their feelings or come off as arrogant or strident.  There’s a time and a place for stridency and mockery, but the classroom is not one of them.  But in this case I completely reject the notion that what I said was “assholish.”  If you believe that the world and its life was created ex nihilo by God, how can you explain why thousands of biologists have, after looking at the evidence, concluded otherwise?  My statement was simply factual: if there was a fundamentalist-style creator God, He must have created things looking as if they evolved.

There is of course a trace of satire in what I said, but what students really object to, I think, is the cognitive dissonance it creates in them.  Indeed, why would God have done that?  And what kind of God would have done that?  A duplicitous one?  And so they take their dissonance out on me.

When you can’t answer an argument, harp on the tone—or call your opponent an asshole.  To students like these, I paraphrase Roman Polanski: “It’s college, Jake!”  You have no right not to be made uncomfortable at university.

A bit more on Lucy, tools, and meat

August 12, 2010 • 6:27 am

I mentioned yesterday the new Nature paper showing evidence of tool use promoting carnivory in Australopithecus afarensis.  The evidence—ungulate bones with crush or cut marks that seem likely to have been made with stone tools—pushes back tool use in our ancestors/close relatives to 3.4 million years ago, 800,000 years earlier than we previously thought.

I’ve now gone through the paper and will clear up a few issues:

What kinds of marks were there? There were cuts, probably made by a sharpened stone used to cleave meat from the bone, and “percussion marks,” where the bone was crushed to extract the marrow.

How do we know that these are real toolmarks and not something else? Could the “cuts,” for example, be toothmarks from animal preadators and not hominins? We don’t for sure, of course, but I know that evolutionary anthropologists have spent a lot of time, including replicating the actions of hominins with stone tools, trying to distinguish between animal carnivory, natural abrasions, and real tool use.  I don’t know a lot about this, but clearly these speculations were not off the cuff.  The cuts certainly look real (see photo from yesterday)!  But of course there is some dissent: Tim White, who has worked at the site for 40 years, observes that his team has never found a stone tool and that that the authors’ “claims greatly outstrip the evidence.”

Why didn’t they find stone tools at the site? This of course is the most serious caveat.  The authors suggest that while tools were used at the site to extract meat and marrow, they were made somewhere else: a place where the right kinds of stones were numerous.  According to the paper, the fossil site was not like that:

No stone artefacts or sharp-edged stones were found in association with the bones at DIK-55. However, stone tool production and consequently archaeological accumulations are not expected at this locality given the sedimentary environment characterized by the palaeo-Awash River emptying into a nearby lake. In this relatively low-energy depositional environment, clasts suitable for stone tool production are not present (few particles larger than fine gravel, 8 mm diameter).

This, in turn, would imply that the tools were being carried about by the hominins, perhaps in anticipation of finding a kill.  Could they have been hunting instead of scavenging? If so, what were they using to kill the ungulates?

If these were toolmarks, what were the tools like? Some readers have speculated that, if the hominins simply used naturally sharp stones, we wouldn’t recognize the tools as “tools.” (This might well have been the case for blunt stones used to crush the bones for marrow.)  The Nature paper, however, refers to sharpened stones, which means that humans sharpened them and didn’t just look for naturally sharp stones. (Indeed, naturally-occurring stones sharp enough to cut meat from a bone might have been nonexistent.)  I’m not sure how evolutionary anthropologists define “tools,” but in this case I think they’re suggesting stones that were sharpened by hand.  This is also implied in their search for”stone artefacts” and “clasts suitable for stone tool production.”

Here’s a cast from what is considered an unambiguous human tool: a chopper with flakes struck off. This might have been used to take meat from bones or, alternatively, the removed flakes could have been used as knifeblades.  Or both. Worked stones like this “Oldowan” specimen, first seen about 2.5 million years ago, were the earliest known stone tools before yesterday’s announcement.