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.
Until now I wasn’t aware that this prize existed, but WEIT has made the longlist of 12 finalists, which will be pruned to an unspecified number on August 24 with the winner announced Oct. 21. It’s £10,000: not a Templetonian sum, but certainly nothing to sniff at.
Stiff competition, including my old pal Steve Jones, who won in 1994.
Monday’s HuffPo contains a mildly enlightening interview with Christopher Hitchens on his new memoir, “Christopher Hitchens on ‘Hitch-22’: Memoir was ‘fantastically difficult’ to write.” One anecdote new to me:
Hitchens [sic] real turn began with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He initially feared an overreaction among conservatives, “an orgiastic flag-waving unanimity,” and instead came to despise the response of the left, the suggestion that Americans deserved the attacks because of sins committed abroad, or the theories – urged by Vidal among others – that the Bush administration itself was behind them.
The camel’s back broke at the Telluride Film Festival in the fall of 2002. Michael Moore, set to release his antigun documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” was interviewed on stage by Hitchens in front of a seemingly like-minded audience. Few minds, however, are like Hitchens’. They discussed the war in Afghanistan, opposed by Moore, supported by Hitchens. When Moore expressed doubts that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, Hitchens asked Moore if he considered bin Laden’s guilt an “open question.”
Moore answered: “Until anyone is convicted of any crime, no matter how horrific the crime, they are innocent until proven guilty.”
“And the whole audience roared into applause,” recalls Hitchens, who soon quit his longtime position as a columnist for the liberal weekly The Nation. “That was the moment I thought, `I’m out of here. I’m not part of this crowd.'”
(Hitchens wrote a Slate piece about this episode and Moore’s movie Farenheit 9/11.)
The interview contains a Freudian typo:
“I think that it (the fatwa) was very important to Christopher in his thinking and in his politics,” Rushdie says. “And so he became very exorcised and therefore very available to me during that time. It certainly brought us much closer together.”
The Jesus and Mo artist links this week’s strip to Mary Midgley’s dreadful column* in the June 12 Guardian, “The abuses of science”.
(The best defense of Midgley’s piece I’ve heard is this: “Well, she’s 91. What do you expect?”)
You know who’s gonna win, but oh, the delight of the combat. Last week the Prince of Wales gave a silly speech in which he blamed science (and Galileo!) on the “mechanistic viewpoint” that is sucking the very soul form humanity. His remedy? Religion, of course—and mentions Islam very favorably. Prince Charles has of course been a sucker for many forms of woo, including homeopathy, but this talk was about as dumb as anything he’s ever said (in public, that is).
I didn’t want to post on HRH’s talk, but Hitchens did on Slate:
None of this might matter very much, until you notice the venue at which Charles delivered his farrago of nonsense. It was unleashed upon an audience at the Center for Islamic Studies at Oxford University, an institution of which he is the patron. Nor is this his only foray into Islamophilia. Together with the Saudi royal family, he supported the mosque in North London that acted as host and incubator to Richard “Shoe Bomber” Reid, the hook-handed Abu Hamza al-Masri, and several other unsavory customers. The prince’s official job description as king will be “defender of the faith,” which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire. . .
So this is where all the vapid talk about the “soul” of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The “vacuum” will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.
Karl Giberson, a professor at Eastern Nazarene College and Vice-President of the organization BioLogos, has written some of the lamest critiques of New Atheism I’ve ever read. Perhaps the most embarrassing was an op-ed in USA Today called “Atheists, it’s time to play well with others,” in which he famously called criticizing religion a “profoundly un-American” activity.
Now, after an email exchange with Dan Dennett, Giberson has written an apologia of sorts on HuffPo: “The temptation of faith fibbing for Jesus.” Dennett accused Giberson of being a “faith” fibber, that is, someone who “[pollutes] the media with their misrepresentation of New Atheism.”
In his new piece, Giberson basically admits that he is indeed a faith fibber. First he notes something that accommodationists and faitheists always seem to miss: in their use of rhetoric and ad hominem arguments, religious people are no less strident or nasty than New Atheists. (Indeed, if you look at the extremes of both camps, I’d give the prize to the faithful.):
Dennett’s charge, and a subsequent civil email exchange with him, got me thinking about the discourse on religious belief that currently heats up the blogosphere. As I reflect on the various exchanges, I see no evidence that religious believers are standing on any higher moral ground. The vilification of the New Atheists is accompanied by caricature, hyperbole, misprepresentation and a distinct lack of charity.
On the Answers in Genesis site, to take one example, Ken Ham published a report about the atheist that Christians love to hate entitled “Dawkins Ranting in Oklahoma.” The audience was described as “mind-numbed robots,” and Dawkins’ ideas were sarcastically dismissed as communications from “an extraterrestrial.” Anti-evolutionary religion sites across the Internet make similar claims. But not all the charged-up rhetoric is on the lowbrow backwaters of the Internet. A passage from the 2007 book “Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion,” compares Richard Dawkins to a “museum piece that becomes ever more interesting because, while everything else moves forward and changes, it remains the same.”
It would be really nice to hear, when accommodationists are excoriating the NA’s for stridency, a few shots fired at the faithful, too. But that happens all too rarely.
And, in a remarkable admission, Giberson says that he was one of the “faith fibbers for Jesus”:
Alas, I have to confess to having authored the museum metaphor. It was a cheap shot and, while hardly the cheapest of all possible shots, it was probably about as cheap as could reasonably sail past the staid editors at the venerable Oxford University Press. Certainly my co-author, the late Father Mariano Artigas, would have objected to anything less charitable.
I have to confess that the temptation to ridicule one’s debating opponents is all but unbearable, especially when playing street hockey on the Internet, where one must shout to be heard. In the past few months I have tried hard to come up with clever rhetorical attacks on Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and countless others whose ideas I was supposedly challenging. PZ once wrote the following about me, which I thought was pretty clever: “I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter, and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth.” Of course, I responded to his evangelistic assault on me by calling him “Rev. Myers” in an essay on Salon.com. And so it goes. (I recommend against verbal swordfights with PZ Myers — you can’t win.)
But back to my point: Christians have rules, which presumably are still in force on the Internet: One of the best known is “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” And yet the rule that many Christians seem to follow when they lay their hands on their keyboards is quite different: “Ridicule your enemies; misrepresent those who hate you; caricature and malign those that mistreat you.”
Or, as Daniel Dennett would put it, “Be a faith-fibber for Jesus.”
Confession, they say, is good for the soul. So Dan, I was a faith fibber. Sorry about that.
Sweet! In my own posts and articles about Giberson, I’ve tried to avoid personal insults and misrepresentation, and it’s nice that he’s decided to reciprocate.
A stunning re-creation of the goals in the England vs. USA match (since when did goalies wear caps?):
And, of course, yesterday’s remarkable goal that brought underdog Paraguay a 1-1 tie with Italy.
by Greg Mayer
In a post a couple of months ago, Matthew took note of the tenth anniversary of the completion of the draft human genome, noting that Nature had published a retrospective. Matthew rightfully took issue with the dreadful “blueprint” metaphor for the genome, but also concisely noted the meager medical results:
…despite all the hype, the contribution of the genome to human health has been pretty negligible. In other words, from a purely medical point of view, there isn’t much to celebrate.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Nicholas Wade provides a journalistic analysis, and confirms that the results so far are disappointing. Money quote:
…the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.
This does not come as much of a surprise when you realize that most diseases are not genetically caused (in any straightforward reading of the word caused); that even when there is a genetic basis, the genetics are apt to be complex; and that even when simple, identification of a gene does not lead readily to a cure. These issues were raised most presciently by Dick Lewontin, especially in an essay-review (subscription required) he wrote for The New York Review of Books in 1992. Dick decried scientists’ selling the genome project to governments on the basis of its health benefits, while in fact the project would primarily advance disciplinary (and, in some cases, financial) interests. Endorsing Dick’s genetic arguments, I wrote the following in 2000, at the time of the announcement by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair:
Few diseases are caused by a “gene.” Most diseases, in fact, are caused by the invasion of the body by another organism (bacteria, viruses, protozoa). Our susceptibility and resistance to disease may often have a genetic basis, but these too are usually the result of multiple genes in interaction with the environment. Even when a disease does have a singular genetic cause, finding the gene does not necessarily lead easily to treatment or prevention (e.g. cystic fibrosis).
Last year, over at Mermaid’s Tale (in a post I noted here at WEIT), Ken Weiss put it succinctly (he also discusses Wade’s new NYT article here):
…most common diseases have little to do with genetic variation in any sensible way.
The genome project has provided much useful scientific information. As Wade notes, “For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another.” But that’s not why the project was done. Bill Clinton said it would lead to treatments for “most, if not all, human diseases”; Francis Collins said we’d have genetic diagnosis of diseases within ten years. The genome project’s architects oversold it’s medical (not to mention philosophical) benefits, and now scientists (or at least genome scientists) will lose credibility because of it. Harold Varmus is quoted by Wade as saying “Genomics is a way to do science, not medicine.” If only that had been said louder, and earlier, and by more people.
[PZ and some others are taking Wade to task for saying “humans… [are] higher on the evolutionary scale”. While this is an inopportune use of the scala naturae, it’s part of one paragraph (which does make the interesting point that genome size, as measured by number of protein coding genes, does not vary very widely among metazoans), and does not detract at all from the main thrust of the article.]
Short take: if you aren’t an admirer of Hitchens, or don’t follow him as a detractor, this is probably not worth reading. If you follow him, by all means read it, but save your money by taking it out of the library.
After the sapience and wit of God is Not Great, I found Hitch-22 a bit of a letdown. True, this memoir has its good bits, most notably the chapter on the Rushdie affair, but it also falls into the inevitable trap of autobiography: the desire to rationalize bad decisions and embellish one’s life.
You will find, for instance, a long and unconvincing justification for Hitchens’s support of the Iraq invasion. You will read of innumerable occasions when, Hitchens modestly admits, one or another of his acquaintances dedicated a novel or poem to him. (This may reflect what he admits as his besetting flaw: insecurity.) There are many paeans to his BFF Martin Amis, and yet barely a mention of Hitchens’s wife and children. The highly-praised chapter his mother and her suicide in Athens I found rather lifeless; although—like all of Hitchens’s prose—it didn’t fail to be interesting, it did fail to live. Ditto on his chapter about his father, whom he dubs (because of his career in the Navy) “the Commander.” I’m not sure whether this reflects the distance between parents and children mediated by the boarding-school experience, but in the end one gets the impression that Hitchens is much more comfortable discussing ideas than people.
Perhaps I’m being unfair here. Besides his discussion of the Rushdie fatwa and the many cowards in high places who failed to come to Rushdie’s defense (or blamed the fatwa on his own writings), he has good tidbits on Susan Sontag, on his youthful experience in a Cuban labor camp, on his interview with Oswald Mosley, and on the many pompous twits he encountered on his way from Oxford to Fleet Street.
If I could sum up the book in one sentence, I suppose it would be: you had to have been there.
After this mild letdown, I wondered if, agreeing with much of his politics (save the Iraq business), I had overrated Hitchens’s writing. I’ve read most of what he’s written—the Orwell book, the Clinton book, the Mother Teresa book, at least two volumes of his essays, and of course God is Not Great, and remembered superb prose and incisive arguments. I therefore borrowed the last book from my host’s library and dipped back into it. And, lo, there was the Hitchens of yore: witty, intelligent, funny, and thoughtful.
Those who dismiss God is Not Great as a strident and humorless jeremiad are wrong. None of the faithful who have counterattacked—not Terry Eagleton, not John Haught, not Karen Armstrong—have produced a book with a tenth of Hitchens’s wit or writing ability. It is not Hitchens but his fleas who are strident and humorless. I invite you to reread this book (and of course to read it for the first time if you haven’t already), and if you don’t find it a good read, and a provocation to thought, then there is no hope for you. It’s my firm conviction that many of Hitchens’s critics, save those who rightly argue against his stance on Iraq, are motivated largely by his eloquence and wit, qualities which they lack but would dearly like to have.