I’ve had the privilege of writing a long review of two books for The Nation: Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth, and What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (“F&P-P”).  For the benefit of you, my alert and faithful readers, I asked that my piece be put online for free. And so you can find it here.  (It will be on the newsstands next week as the May 10 edition.) It’s longish, but I like it fine.

This was a tough one to write, because the Dawkins book is very good (and, thank God, doesn’t overlap mine in a serious way!), but the F&P-P book is execrable.  The thread that binds them is natural selection, and so I decided to concentrate on that.  Richard, of course, is famous largely for his lucid and lyrical expositions of selection.  In contrast, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini don’t even think that natural selection exists: their claim is that it’s both empirically insupportable and theoretically incoherent.  Some other unknown process, they claim, has produced the marvelous adaptations of plants and animals—indeed, they’re not even sure if it’s meaningful to speak of organisms as adapted.

I decided to use the review as a chance to lay out the reasons why biologists accept selection as the only plausible process that produces the appearance of “design” in organisms. (Note to Larry Moran: of course it’s not the only process that causes evolution!)

In TGSOE, Richard observes, correctly, that the idea of natural selection is the least well-supported of all the pillars of neo-Darwinism (in my view these pillars are evolution, gradual change [centuries or millenia rather than decades], common ancestry, speciation, and selection).  The “problem” of natural selection comes not from a complete lack of evidence for the process nor from any theoretical problems, but arises because, for technical reasons, evidence for selection is simply very hard to come by in existing species and nearly impossible in ancient ones.  I wanted to muster, in one place, the evidence that we do have for selection, as well as explain why the alternatives are implausible.   And of course I wanted to go after F&P-P’s ludicrous arguments against selection.  Their ignorance of how biologists and evolutionists work is amazing.

I can predict with absolute certainty that Fodor will claim that I misunderstood his and P-P’s thesis.  That, at least, is what they did in their response to Philip Kitcher and Ned Block’s devastating (and more philosophically oriented) critique of the F&P-P book that was published in The Boston Review.  Fodor has, Proteus-like, constantly shifted his position on the issue, asserting that all the critics have failed to grasp what he and Piattelli-Palmarini tried to say.  But I don’t think you need to read What Darwin Got Wrong to find out, because no matter how you interpret their words, the book is devoid of merit—except, perhaps, as a demonstration of how two smart people who accept evolution can be led astray by their rhetorical skills, ignorance, and arrogance.

This Sunday I’m travelling to Vancouver to give a science talk at UBC.  I’ll be there 2 whole days, and am looking for good restaurants in town. By “good,” I mean “Chinese”.  I cook Szechuan food myself, and am looking for the real thing, which of course can be Cantonese or other regional cuisine. (I know about Sun Sui Wah but would be glad to hear your take on the place if you’ve eaten there.)

Tomorrow (Thursday) I’m heading to Adlai Stevenson High School in the Chicago suburb of Lincolnshire, where I’ll address the students about, among other things, careers in evolutionary biology, what it’s like to be a scientist, what’s new and exciting in evolutionary biology, why I wrote my book, and opposition to evolution.  Teacher Brett Erdmann and his students have a blog on my book (this is totally student-run) on which, over the past two months, they’ve discussed WEIT and other issues about evolution.  The students have also compiled a long list of questions for my Q&A session, and they’re good ones (although not a “magnet school,” Adlai Stevenson has a great academic reputation).  Here are some questions I’ll face:

“To what extent do you view our social mores as a result of the cooperative behavior of our evolutionary ancestors?  Or are they completely separate entities altogether?”

“Why are you such a staunch atheist?  I don’t have a problem with it, but I feel it would be easier for the general public to accept evolution from someone who believes in some sort of god (Ken Miller) than someone who goes denying the existence of Him.  If you really want evolution to be taught, why don’t you lighten up a bit on your atheist rhetoric?”

Today’s New York Times science section contains an interview with physicist Sean Carroll, conducted when he went to New York to discuss his new book, From Eternity to Here, on Colbert.  I haven’t yet read it, but I certainly will, for I really want to know why time goes in only one direction.  Carroll hints at a solution in his interview, but like all good authors he doesn’t give away that solution, which appears to have something to do with entropy:

Q. YOU WRITE THAT THE NATURE OF TIME IS SUCH THAT WE CAN’T GO BACKWARD.

A. It’s likely that we can’t do time travel. But we don’t know for sure. The arrow of time comes from the increase of entropy, meaning that the universe started out organized and gets messier as time goes on. Every way in which the past is different from the future can ultimately be traced to entropy. The fact that I remember the past and not the future can be traced to the fact that the past has lower entropy. I think I can make choices that affect the future, but that I can’t make choices that affect the past is also because of entropy

Carroll is a smart and amiable guy, and gives a good interview.  There’s one place, however, where I think he misses the mark.  That’s where he discusses the effect of time’s directionality on biology, specifically ageing:

Q. THE CENTERPIECE OF THE RECENT MOVIE “BENJAMIN BUTTON” AND THE ABC TELEVISION SERIES “FLASH FORWARD” IS THE TIME TRAVEL. HOW DO YOU RATE THE SCIENCE OF THOSE ENTERTAINMENTS?

A. Well, the Benjamin Button character ages in reverse. In “Fast Forward” people glimpse the future. These are great story-telling devices.

But the writers can’t resist the temptation to bend the rules. If time travel were possible, you still wouldn’t be able to change the past — it’s already happened! Benjamin Button, he’s born old and his body grows younger. That can’t be true because being younger is a very specific state of high organization. A body accumulates various failures and signs of age because of the arrow of time.

But I don’t think that entropy (at least in bodies) is the only solution here, or even an important solution, for it’s perfectly possible for a body to be immortal, and some plants (and bdelloid rotifers, who appear to reproduce largely asexually) have approached physical immortality.  There’s far more to ageing than just “the arrow of time.” Indeed, the inexorable increase in entropy encapsulated in the second law of thermodynamics, a law that holds over the whole universe, is violated locally by two biological phenomena: development and evolution.

There are several theories of ageing.   The evolutionary “pleiotropy” theory says that it pays organisms to reproduce earlier rather than later, so genes that enhance early reproduction even if they cause later problems such as tissue senescence will often be favored.  There’s also a “physical breakdown” theory: the thousand natural shocks that flesh (or stem) is heir to will eventually wear out an organism so that it simply ceases to be.  A variant of this is the mutation-accumulation theory, in which mutations simply accumulate in the somatic (i.e., non-reproductive) tissue over time, and bad mutations that have their effects later in life will be less disadvantagous than those whose effects show up in youth.  This could lead to the accumulation of “ageing genes” and hence produce senescence—the physical breakdown of individuals as they age.

There are other theories, too, and they’re nicely summarized in the Wikipedia article on senescence. But I think none of these are solely explained by “the arrow of time” and entropy.  If organisms could simply take energy from the environment (ultimately, of course, derived from the Sun’s increasing entropy), it’s possible to repair mutations (this is already done to some extent) or fix bodily damage and prevent ageing.  Another way is to reproduce by splitting or by nonsexual reproduction (parthenogenesis), which is practiced by many organisms like the rotifers.  Indeed, the fact that an ageing organism can reproduce at all and produce new, non-senescent offspring is evidence against Carroll’s assertion.  Reproduction, sexual or otherwise, shows that it’s not entropy alone that causes ageing, for reproduction completely nullifies the ageing process, and, when an old decrepit soul like me produces a child, the increase in entropy is reversed.

Now development and reproduction, as well as evolution itself, do involve a local decrease in entropy. But this doesn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics (i.e., the law that says “entropy increases”) because that law makes a statement about the entire universe, and in that sense is still true when organisms develop or evolve.  That’s because, as we all know,  biological decreases in entropy that occur when a fertilized egg develops into a more organized adult, or when a replicating macromolecule evolves into a metazoan—come at the expense of an increased entropy of the Sun, whose energy fuels both evolution and development.  And as the sun provides energy, it becomes less ordered. Over the whole universe, there is less energy available to do work, and, in the universe as a whole, which is where the second law is meant to apply, entropy increases.

It would be perfectly possible for organisms to evolve self-repair mechanisms that would render them immortal, and many species have gone partway to this end. Salamanders, for example, have evolved the ability to regenerate limbs, and I’ve already mentioned that organisms have evolved complex ways to repair mutations.  No matter what theory of ageing you have, it could be reversed without violating the second law of thermodynamics.

This is a roundabout way of saying that ageing is more complicated than Sean lets on.  Yes, time’s arrow may be involved in any explanation for ageing (after all, mutations accumulate in one direction over time, and, Benjamin Button nonwithstanding, senescence occurs in only one direction), but I don’t think that senescence is properly explained by saying “being younger is a very specific state of high organization.”  Older organisms can produce younger ones, and that itself leads to higher organization over time.

I’m a fan of Sean’s, so this is merely a mild corrective to what I see as a misleading statement about development and, by proxy, about evolution.

In lieu of any hot evolution news, I want to recommend a book I’ve just read and a movie I’ve just seen.

I’m not a big fan of books about war, but I was mightily impressed with Anthony Beever’s The Fall of Berlin 1945.  The story of the last days of the Reich as the Red Army drove toward Berlin, it’s a masterful tale of battle, politics, and malfeasance.  If you don’t know much about the end of the war, you’ll learn a lot: the Nazis’ use of soldiers as young as 14; the incredible arrogance and obliviousness of Hitler, who still thought the war could still be won as the Russians approached the Brandenburg Gate; the terrible and unnecessary loss of civilians, considered cannon fodder by both the Russians and Germans; the pathos of Josef Goebbels and his wife, unwilling to let their six young children survive, giving them cyanide before shooting themselves. Beevers also describes the numerous rapes committed by Russian soldiers—crimes on a scale I hadn’t realized, and which were covered up by the Soviets during and after the war.  (Beevers also reports on rapes by American soldiers.) I defy you to read this book without becoming more opposed to war in general.  It was so compelling that I’ve started Beevers’ earlier book, Stalingrad: the Fateful Siege 1942-1943.

And this gets my vote for the best movie of 2009 and one of the best of the last few years: An Education. Based on a true story, directed by Lone Scherfig, and with a wonderful screenplay by author Nick Hornby, it’s a coming-of-age drama set in Twickenham, London in 1961.  Jenny, played by Carey Mulligan, is an Oxford-bound 16-year-old whose academic plans are derailed by romance with a man twice her age.  Mulligan’s performance is simply outstanding, and should have won her an Oscar; it’s far better than the winning but over-the-top “I’m-a-heroine”performance of Sandra Bullock in the manipulative Blind Side.  The other actors also turn in superb performances, particularly the “older man,” played by Peter Saarsgard, and Jenny’s parents, played by  Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour.  Emma Thompson, one of my favorites, makes a cameo appearance as Jenny’s headmistress.

Really, this is a don’t-miss film.

The existence of kopi luwak coffee has long been known to java insiders, but it’s out in the open thanks to an article in today’s New York Times.  Kopi luwak is made in southeast Asia from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, also called the “toddy cat” because of its supposed fondness for the fermented sap (“toddy”) of palm trees.  The civet is not really a cat (family Felidae), but a viverrid (family Viverridae), a group of mammals related to the mongoose.

If you’ve ever eaten a fresh-picked coffee fruit, you’ll know that the hard bean in the interior is surrounded by a sweet white flesh.  The civets eat the beans, digest the flesh, and pass the coffee beans.  This supposedly causes an intestinal fermentation of the bean that makes the coffee derived from it pick up an indescribably luscious flavor.  I wouldn’t know because I’ve never tried kopi luwak. As you might expect, given the intensive labor required of man and civet, the coffee is expensive (see here, for example, which sells it for $190/lb or $40/2 oz.; this works out to be around six dollars per cup). I once pondered splitting a pound with several of my javaphilic colleagues, but never got around to it.

When I first heard about kopi luwak around two decades ago, I learned that it was made by collecting the droppings of wild civets who frequented coffee plantations (a lot of it is still made that way).  At that time I jokingly suggested that somebody could make a lot of money by building a civet farm where captive animals could be fed coffee beans.  Now, as the Times reports, that’s being done, though the description of these places (and the picture below) makes it seem as if the civets aren’t really enjoying their captivity. It’s sad, because they not only lose their freedom but aren’t given a balanced diet.

Anyone for a crappucino?

Fig. 1 (from NYT article).  A civet farm in Sumatra, with easy access to the bean-filled droppings

I’m coyneing the term “New Creationism” to describe the body of thought that accepts Darwinian evolution but with the additional caveats that 1) it was all started by God, 2) had God-worshipping humans as its goal, and 3) that the evidence for all this is that life is complex, humans evolved, and the the “fine tuning” of physical constants of the universe testify to the great improbability of our being here—ergo God. New Creationism differs from intelligent design because it rejects God’s constant intervention in the process of evolution in favor of a Big, One-Time Intervention, and because these ideas are espoused by real scientists like Kenneth Miller and Simon Conway Morris. (Note that Miller, though, has floated the possibility that God does sometimes intervene in the physical world by manipulating electrons.)  New Creationism is bad because, while operating under the deep cover of real science, it tries to gain traction for dubious claims about the supernatural.

After today I promise that I won’t link to the nonsense at HuffPo for a while, but a new piece, “Evolution Presupposes Design, So Why the Controversy?”, by philosopher Ervin Laszlo, is too good not to mock.  It assembles a bunch of creationist and New Creationist arguments to argue that there’s really no debate about evolution versus creationism: the truth is somewhere in the middle. (I remember Dick Lewontin once writing something like, “It is an unexamined rule of intellectual life that if there are two diametrically opposed positions, the truth must be somewhere in the middle.”) Laszlo argues:

The creationist position would be the logical choice if — but only if — scientists would persist in claiming that the evolution of living species is a product of two-fold serendipity. But at the cutting edge, scientists no longer claim this. Post-Darwinian biologists recognize that the evolution of species is far more than the chance processes classical Darwinists say it is. It must be more, because the time that was available for evolution would not have been sufficient to generate the complex web of life on this planet merely by trial and error. Mathematical physicist Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probabilities and came to the conclusion that they are about the same as the probability that a hurricane blowing through a scrap-yard assembles a working airplane.

This argument, known as “Hoyle’s fallacy,” has long been discredited by evolutionary biologists on the grounds that selection does not assemble complex organisms and traits all at once from simple precursors, but builds up things gradually, with each step conferring an adaptive advantage.  This is discredited science, and Laszlo would have known it had he done a few minutes’ worth of Googling.   (HuffPo columnists don’t seem to have mastered the use of Google.)  Saying that evolution by selection operates through “trial and error” is surely misleading, for the trials are rewarded by being saved in successful genomes.  Does Laszlo not understand this? If not, he has no business writing on evolution.  If he does, he’s intellectually dishonest.  Laszlo argues that evolutionists must believe in divine intervention:

In the final count the evolution of life presupposes intelligent design. But the design it presupposes is not the design of the products of evolution; it’s the design of its preconditions. Given the right preconditions, nature comes up with the products on her own.

The debate between creationists and evolutionists would be better focused on the origins of the universe than on the origins of life. Could it be that our universe has been purposefully designed so it could give rise to the evolution of life? For creationists, this would be the logical assumption. Evolutionists could not object: evolution, being an irreversible process, must have had a beginning, and that beginning must be accounted for. And our fine-tuned universe is entirely unlikely to have come about by chance.

Ah, the Cosmological Argument meets Fine Tuning. Anyone who reads this website should be able to debunk these arguments.  If not, I’d recommend, among recent stuff, selected parts of The God Delusion, Victor Stenger’s discussions of fine-tuning, Steven Weinberg’s “A Designer Universe?”, and a short article on the Cosmological Argument that you can find here.  Now some of the scientific critiques of the “fine-tuning” argument are speculative, but the point is that if Laszlo is writing for a general audience, as he surely is at HuffPo, then intellectual honesty demands that he at least note that scientists and philosophers have answers to his criticisms. And it would be nice if he’d name some of those “cutting edge” scientists who supposedly recognize that selection and evolution cannot explain life on earth.

Here’s Laszlo’s Big Solution:

So the creationist/evolutionist controversy really is pointless. Design is a necessary assumption, because chance doesn’t explain the facts. But evolution is likewise a necessary assumption, for given the way this universe works, the evolution of complexity is a logical and by now well-documented consequence. Therefore the rational conclusion is not design or evolution. It’s design for evolution.

Well, that settles that. What he’s really saying here is this: “Evolution started off simple and now many organisms are quite complex.  Therefore God.”  And evolution is not a “necessary assumption,” it’s a scientific theory that happens to be true.   Laszlo’s compromise between evolution and design is hogwash, pure and simple. Its rests on the faulty premise that evolution and selection are demonstrably insufficient to explain life’s complexity, and the rest is pure God-of-the-gaps theology. The extent to which Laszlo’s article seems credible to the public is a measure of the damage done to science by the New Creationists.

One of the hardest things for bloggers, or professors, or, let’s face it, anyone, to do is admit that they were wrong.  But Michael Ruse, long a favorite topic of this website, has done just that.  Disturbed by the Catholic church’s strategy of trying to shut up abuse victims rather than bring their abusers to justice, he’s penned a column called “Why Richard Dawkins was Right and I Was Wrong”. Yes, it’s at Huffington Post, and yes, Ruse is still publicly licking his wounds, but you have to give the guy credit for saying he erred.  Kudos, at least for this and its last sentence:

I have long been involved in the fight against creationism and its successor, intelligent design theory. To this end, I have embraced strongly the philosophy that science and religion speak of different things — a philosophy sometimes known as neo-orthodoxy or the independence position. This means that although I have no religious beliefs whatsoever, it does not follow that I cannot respect those who do. Together, believers and non-believers can join in fighting what we both see as travesties of science properly understood and religion properly understood. For this reason I have opposed the so-called New Atheists in their scorn for all and any religious beliefs. And I might add, somewhat proudly, that I, too, had their scorn poured down on my head.

Recently, the New Atheists’ most prominent representative, Richard Dawkins, wrote a highly emotive piece for the Washington Post, in which he derided the present pope and expressed glee and satisfaction that such a person was now leading the Catholic Church. In Dawkins’s judgment, not only was this no less than the Church deserved, but such leadership could only hasten the Church’s demise. I thought at the time that Dawkins was over the top and wrong. I now think that he was right and that it was I who was wrong. Let me say at once that, unlike Dawkins, I don’t necessarily want to see this as the end of religion or even of the Catholic Church in some form. I stress that although I cannot share the beliefs of Christians, I respect them and applaud the good that is done in the name of their founder. But I do now think that as presently constituted, the Catholic Church is corrupt and should be eradicated.

Because it’s heartwarming and involves Chicago and a mystery:

New Mexico cat lost for 8 months found in Chicago—then scores free flight home.

Those nine lives really do come in handy.

A cat from New Mexico was headed home in style Saturday – some eight months after he vanished and somehow wound up 1,300 miles away in Chicago.

The lucky tabby named Charles disappeared while in the care of a babysitter.

“I found out while I was away volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, and I was so upset because I was in New Orleans so there was nothing I could do,” said owner Robin Alex, of Albuquerque.

The unlikely reunion between Alex and Charles came about when the cat with a case of wanderlust was picked up as a stray by Windy City animal control workers.

A tracking microchip embedded in Charles’ shoulder blades connected workers to Alex.

Then the stunned cat lover enjoyed the further good fortune of having an Albuquerque resident – and fellow cat owner – volunteer to pick up Charles while in Chicago for a wedding.

Lucien Sims, who also owns a tabby, got an Albuquerque company to provide a cat carrier and American Airlines waived Charles’ travel fees.

“He needs a good brushing,” said Cherie Travis, executive director of Chicago Animal Care and Control.

“He’s got a little bit of a cold – a little bit of an upper respiratory infection – but otherwise he’s in great condition.”

Fig. 1. Charles the Cat.