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.
Okay, do I really need to say that this photograph of an American goldfinch (Spinus tristis) was taken by reader Stephen Barnard in Idaho?
I swear, these things could be used to illustrate a bird guide:
First world problem! Doesn’t Hili know that only 12 cats understand that theory?
Hili: I have a problem.
A: What’s your problem?
Hili: I do not understand the theory of relativity.
In Polish:Hili: Mam problem.
Ja: Jaki problem?
Hili: Nie rozumiem teorii względności.
It’s hard to believe that someone who was famous at age 6, and was never so renowned as when she was a child, could actually die.
Various news organizations report that Shirley Temple Black died yesterday from natural causes. Truly, I didn’t know she was still alive, but the fact that she was a child star makes her longevity seems exaggerated. (Her career began at age 3!). And I doubt, for instance, that if I asked many of my undergrads about her, few would know who she was.
I watched many of her films when I was young: they were often cloying, but there was no denying that the kid was immensely talented. As Wikipedia notes:
Most films Temple starred in were cheaply made at $200,000 or $300,000 per picture and were comedy-dramas with songs and dances added, sentimental and melodramatic situations aplenty, and little in the way of production values. Her film titles are a clue to the way she was marketed—Curly Top and Dimples, and her “little” pictures such as The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel. Temple often played a fixer-upper, a precocious Cupid, or the good fairy in these films, reuniting her estranged parents or smoothing out the wrinkles in the romances of young couples. She was very often motherless, sometimes fatherless, and sometimes an orphan confined to a dreary asylum. Elements of the traditional fairy tale were woven into her films: wholesome goodness triumphing over meanness and evil, for example, or wealth over poverty, marriage over divorce, or a booming economy over a depressed one. As Temple matured into a pre-adolescent, the formula was altered slightly to encourage her naturalness, naïveté, and tomboyishness to come forth and shine while her infant innocence, which had served her well at six but was inappropriate for her tweens (or later childhood years), was toned down.
She had a life after child stardom, but few of us knew about it, except that she was somehow involved in politics and diplomacy, and had a highly publicized bout of breast cancer in 1972: she was one of the first afflicted with this disease to speak about it openly.
And here’s how most of us will remember her. The first clip is from “Curly Top” (1935), and includes one of her most famous songs:
And her duet with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson from “The Little Colonel”, also from 1935:
by Matthew Cobb
You see?—I told you it was easy. You can see its closed eye, a horizontal slit, on the right of the oval.
Reader Joyce called my attention to Neil Genzlinger’s review in the New York Times of a t.v. show that will be shown tonight on HBO (Home Box Office). I present the review in its bizarre entirety:
“Questioning Darwin,” a documentary on Monday night on HBO, starts out with a refreshingly unusual approach to a polarizing subject, then finds a way to deepen it.
The film, by Antony Thomas, traces Charles Darwin’s personal evolution as he slowly formed his theory of evolution, fleshing out the portrait with excerpts from his writings (read by the actor Sam West). These biographical segments are juxtaposed with comments from creationist Christians, presented nonjudgmentally. Mr. Thomas for the most part lets these opposing worldviews speak for themselves.
This type of Christian, holding to a literal interpretation of the creation story and the rest of the Bible, might be expected to be camera shy, since these beliefs are so often mocked. But Mr. Thomas gets an array of them to speak forthrightly by treating them respectfully. Even viewers who feel these people are living their lives with blinders on might admire their conviction.
But the film works its way around to a weightier type of compare and contrast. Some of the creationists interviewed are undergoing personal crises that would try anyone’s faith. One family is shown reciting hymn lyrics at the bedside of a teenage girl who was severely injured in a car accident.
Darwin, too, had his trials. The film focuses in particular on the death of one of his daughters in 1851. “This was a watershed, because Darwin no longer felt it possible afterward to believe in a good, loving, Christian God,” says James Moore, author with Adrian Desmond of “Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.”
Whether either belief system offers meaningful comfort in the face of calamity is left for us to ponder.
That review suggests the film is fairly evenhanded, although I have to admit that it’s not a great review. How, for example, can evolution be called “a belief system”? And even an evolutionist like me can’t credibly claim that evolutionary biology offers meaningful comfort. Interesting employment? Yes. Truth about the diversity and change of life over time? Certainly. Awe and wonder? Yes, if you’re the type who gets that from science. But “meaningful” comfort (I guess that differs from “meaningless comfort”)? Naah.
***
Now go over to Slate and read a review of the same show by Mark Joseph, a piece called “The Cruelty of Creationism.” Reading that piece next to Genzlinger’s is a Rashomon-like experience. Here’s Joseph’s take:
. . . it’s the terror of doubt that fosters the toxic, life-negating cult of creationism.
That fear is on full display throughout HBO’s new documentary Questioning Darwin, which features a series of intimate interviews with biblical fundamentalists. Creationism, the documentary reveals, isn’t a harmless,compartmentalized fantasy. It’s a suffocating, oppressive worldview through which believers must interpret reality—and its primary target is children. For creationists, intellectual inquiry is a sin, and anyone who dares to doubt the wisdom of their doctrine invites eternal damnation. That’s the perverse brilliance of creationism, the key to its self-perpetuation: First it locks kids in the dungeon of ignorance and dogmatic fundamentalism. Then it throws away the key.
And that dungeon is much darker than most Americans realize. The creationists interviewed in Questioning Darwin—including their abominable doyen, Ken Ham, a wily businessman who is already fundraising off his ill-conceived recent debate with Bill Nye—returned again and again to the same depressing subjects. Death, suffering, pain, sorrow, disease: These, creationists inform us, are what await any skeptic, anyone who questions the word of God. Pastor Joe Coffey neatly sums up their objections to natural selection. .
And so on and so on and so on. Joseph isn’t so much reviewing the show as fulminating about creationism. And that’s fine, for his article’s title implies it’s an attack on that delusion, using the HBO show as a platform. But Joseph doesn’t say anything that we don’t know already: creationists are ignorant, they poison their children’s minds, they’re in an intellectual prison, etc. etc. Anybody who’s read an attack on creationism will know this stuff already, and that includes the readers of Slate. His review is “politically correct” to those of us who accept evolution and fight creationism, but his review also fails to live. It’s much more educational to read some thoughtful analysis of creationism, like the kind you can find in Jason Rosenhouse’s book, Among the Creationists.
While I suspect I’d agree more with Joyce than Genzlinger, who has pulled his punches in his review, I’m just bored with straight ranting against creationism. Maybe I’m too close to the topic. Or maybe I now see religion as a far more serious problem—the root cause of creationism, but of more debilitating results as well .
If I had HBO (I’m a poor cable-less boy) I’d watch the show, for it’s always interesting to see creationists display their full plumage. I’d urge readers, then, to watch it and report back here. The show, again, is on HBO, and airs tonight, Monday, at 9 pm Eastern and Pacific times, and 8 Central time. Let your kids watch it, too, and see how they react.
To continue our theme of birds defending their noms, reader Stephen Barnard sends us yet another food-related alteraction.
House Finches [Haemorhous mexicanus] are quarrelsome birds. They bully the much prettier Goldfinches and Chickadees and fight among each other. Maybe they’re pissed at having such a prosaic name.
The second shot is special, I think. The primaries are vertical to minimize drag on the upward thrust of the wing.
[From a subsequent email]: I forgot to mention that I like the peek-a-boo photo-bomb effect of the female in the first photo.
The battle against the incursions of faith is leavened by moments of delicious irony. This is one of them, related to the London School of Economics’ banning of Jesus and Mo tee-shirts. According to reader Grania, who sent the link from Politics.co.uk, there’s been yet another incident of censorship involving putative offense to religion.
Yes, students at London’s South Bank University—in particular the South Bank Atheist Society (SBAS), have had a poster removed from their stall at a fresher’s fair last week. (The Jesus and Mo incident also occurred during a fresher’s fair.) The removers were authorities of the student union, and the excuse was that the poster was “offensive to religion.”
Here’s the poster at issue:
Yes, you’ve seen it: it’s His Noodliness creating humans using His Noodly Appendage. The Union censored the Flying Spaghetti monster as being anti-religious! Do they not realize that the Church of the FSM is a religion? It’s been so recognized by several countries that allow people to wear the symbol of their religion—a strainer—on their heads in driver’s license photos.
Moreover, the Union officials were disingenuous about their actions:
Union officials at the London South Bank University removed the posters from the society’s stall overnight and then barred representatives from printing off more, citing the visibility of Adam’s genitals as offensive.
But when society members offered to blur out the genitals, they were told the problem with the poster concerned religious offence.
The stall was removed by the student union authorities the next day.
The to-and-fro verbiage:
“This silliness is unfortunately part of an on-going trend,” British Humanist Society Andrew Copson said.
“In the last few years we have seen our affiliated societies in campus after campus subjected to petty censorship in the name of ‘offence’ – often even when no offence has been caused or taken.
“Hypersensitive union officials are totally needlessly harassing students whose only desire is to get on and run totally legitimate social and political societies.”
Barbara Ahland, president of the London South Bank Students’ Union, said: “The Students Union has been made aware of an alleged incident that took place at the Refreshers’ Fayre last week. We are taking the allegation very seriously and an investigation is taking place.”
“Very seriously”? Really? They cannot tolerate a bit of gentle spoofing?
I don’t understand why this hypersensitivity is taking place in England, a country supposedly far less religious than the U.S. Were this poster displayed at a public university or in a public space in my country, its removal would be forbidden under the First Amendment. Although Britain doesn’t have a constitution mandating freedom of religion and freedom of speech (note to Brits: get one ASAP!), they are also supposed to be less protective about religion.
And you can’t blame this one on Islamic sensitivities, as it’s not explicitly anti-Muslim. Unless, that is, the meatballs contain pork.