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.
My big talk at Texas State went well, despite the attempt of several befuddled creationists to question my evidence (they also tore down the flyers announcing my talk). There were about 300 people in the audience, and they seemed mostly on the side of evolution and rationality. And they bought 100 copies of WEIT!
The student paper at Texas State starts its report on my talk like this:
Jerry Coyne told a packed Alkek Teaching Theater Tuesday he could prove humans evolved from monkeys.
A bit sensationalistic, no? Well, I didn’t “prove” that humans descended from monkeys; I adduced evidence that we share a common ancestor with modern apes and monkeys.
Nor did I say anything like this:
Coyne said people of religious faith do not have an open mind to the concept of evolution.
What I did say is that when Americans were polled about what they would do if a fact of science were to contravene their faith, 64% of them said they’d reject the fact in favor of their faith.
Infinitely depressed at the thought of the National Academy of Sciences serving as the venue for the Templeton Prize, I sought refuge in biology: in particular, the always-adorable kakapo (Strigops habroptila). Hailing from New Zealand, this is the world’s only flightless parrot, and Douglas Adams described it thusly:
It is an exceptionally fat bird (a good-sized adult weighs roughly two or three kilograms) and its wings are just about good enough to waggle about a bit if it thinks it’s going to trip over. But flying is completely out of the question.
Strangely, not only has it forgotten how to fly, it also seems to have forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Legend has it that a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.
Kakapos are highly endangered, with only about 60 remaining in the wild (read about them here), and they’ve been transferred to two islands to remove them from introduced predators, like cats, who can easily catch these tubby, flightless birds. (Remember that they evolved flightlessness when New Zealand was free from predators.)
So, here’s a randy male kakapo (“Sirocco”: there are so few that they’ve all been named) mistaking a photographer—zoologist Mark Carwardine—for another kakapo. Stephen Fry stands by and describes the unholy act. This is from the wonderful BBC film, “Last chance to see.”
h/t: The grad students at Texas State, who brought this video to my attention.
In his weekly Slate column, Hitch insists that the Catholic child abusers be prosecuted:
Almost every week, I go and debate with spokesmen of religious faith. Invariably and without exception, they inform me that without a belief in supernatural authority I would have no basis for my morality. Yet here is an ancient Christian church that deals in awful certainties when it comes to outright condemnation of sins like divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality between consenting adults. For these offenses there is no forgiveness, and moral absolutism is invoked. Yet let the subject be the rape and torture of defenseless children, and at once every kind of wiggle room and excuse-making is invoked. What can one say of a church that finds so much latitude for a crime so ghastly that no morally normal person can even think of it without shuddering? . . .
. . . Meanwhile, we should register the fact that the church can find ample room in its confessionals and its palaces for those who commit the most evil offense of all. Whether prosecuted or not, they stand condemned. But prosecution must follow, or else we admit that there are men and institutions that are above and beyond our laws.
I haven’t been following the websites this week, but have Catholic bloggers like Andrew Sullivan—or for that matter those ScienceBlogs writers who profess both Catholicism and concern for social justice—said anything about this scandal?
What a matchup! One one side, defending the proposition that “God has a future” is writer/philosopher Jean Houston and Woo-Meister Deepak Chopra. On the other, Michael Shermer and Sam Harris. It’s a Nightline “Face-Off.” Although the first video looks to be a bit over eight minutes long, it actually continues on to give the whole segment.
I can’t watch because I’m in San Marcos, Texas, about to give a general talk on evolution (and why religion is responsible for its rejection in America). And me without a Kevlar vest . . . .
A recent article in Time looks at various examples of alleged animal suicide, taking as its starting point the recent distressing film about Japanese slaughter of dolphins, The Cove. Animal-rights activist Richard O’Barry, who features in The Cove, is convinced that animals can commit suicide, having allegedly seen Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, sink to the bottom of her tank and stop breathing.
To take the discussion onto a rather more rigorous level, the article references a recent piece by a colleague of mine, Dr Duncan Wilson from the University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Together with Edmund Ramsden from Exeter, Duncan has just published an article in the history of science magazine Endeavour (subscription required – NB this link has now been fixed), looking at how animal “suicide” has been interpreted through the ages.
Drs Ramsden and Wilson go back to Aristotle’s story of a stallion that threw itself over a cliff when it realised it had inadvertently mated with its mother (this seems rather unlikely, in my opinion), but concentrate on 19th century views of animal suicide, and convincingly show that accounts of animal suicide reflect the values of the society in which they are recounted. In particular, during the 19th century, “Humane groups such as the Royal Society for Protection of Animals (RSPCA) seized upon popular accounts to claim that animals shared with humans the capacities for grief, love, despair – and, moreover, that they possessed enough intelligence to plan and execute their own deaths.”
A series of cunning experiments were carried out as part of the growing debate over the nature of animal behaviour – are animals conscious, or is their behaviour “instinctive”? The paragraph on scorpions is worth citing:
“Romanes relayed several accounts where scorpions had killed themselves after being ringed with fire, but noted cautiously, ‘such a remarkable fact unquestionably demands further corroboration before we accept it unreservedly.’ E. Ray Lankester, professor of zoology at University College, London, took up the challenge and, reporting to the Linnaean Society late in 1882, claimed that he had observed a scorpion repeatedly trying to strike itself after he administered chloroform into its glass container. This he believed to ‘throw light on the old tradition’, and tended ‘to confirm its accuracy.’ In 1883, Morgan endeavoured to dispel this belief. He designed a set of experiments ‘sufficiently barbarous…to induce any scorpion who had the slightest suicidal tendency to find relief in self-destruction.’
He surrounded them with fire, condensed sunbeams on their backs, heated them in a bottle, burned them with phosphoric acid, treated them with electric shocks and subjected them to ‘general and exasperating courses of worry.’ Though he witnessed scorpions striking at their backs, this, Morgan explained, was an instinctive attempt to remove irritation. Those who ignored or rejected this fact were ‘not accustomed to accurate observation.’ In 1887, Alfred Bourne provided further evidence that questioned ‘the phenomenon so graphically delineated by Byron’. Scorpions, he claimed, were immune to their own venom.”
The point of Ramsden and Wilson’s article is to show how attitudes to animal suicide have changed over time, and have been shaped by the overall views of any given society: “Through shifting archetypes of animal suicide, we can trace the history of perspectives on self-destruction – we see the victim and hero of ancient philosophy and romanticism, the martyr or sinner of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the automaton and the neurotic, lost amongst the masses of modernity. When scientists, philosophers, writers or theologians have reflected upon the nature of suicide, they have, persistently, reflected on the natural world.”
So where does that leave one of the real, solid examples of animal “suicide” – the worker bee stinging a perceived threat, but dying in the process? The bee’s sting is famously barbed, and as the bee tries to fly away, it pulls out its innards, including the venom gland which not only continues to pulse venom down the sting, but also releases alarm pheromones which attract other bees. The downside is that the bee dies. This video shows the process, and how to get a sting out (it takes an awful lot to provoke the poor bee into stinging…):
The explanation for this behaviour is that the bee is protecting its hive, and thereby its genes. Worker bees are generally sterile (though they can produce male eggs under certain circumstances), so the only way it can make a genetic contribution to the next generation is by helping the hive, with which it shares a high proportion of its genes. From a gene’s eye view, this is not suicide at all, but merely the death of one carrier of those genes, to preserve the life of many more carriers.
So – apart from the examples of social insects, DO animals commit suicide?
Last Wednesday, the National Museum of Natural History (known to biologists as the USNM, the initials of its former name and still the identifying code on its specimen tags and labels) opened its newest permanent exhibit, the Hall of Human Origins.
I was at the USNM much of last week, mostly doing research in the collections and meeting with colleagues, but I always like to take a look at the exhibits, and I’d in part planned my visit to be able to catch the opening on the last day of my visit. Unfortunately, it turns out the exhibit was only open from 12-3, the rest of the day being reserved for media and VIPs, so when I went to see it a bit after 3 all I could see was one skull through a crack in a barrier. I’m planning another go at it this summer, but some of the original specimens, loaned by foreign museums for the opening, are likely to have been replaced by casts by then.
Edward Rothstein, the New York Times’ museum reviewer, whose reviews I always find interesting, did get to see it. He gives it a mixed review. A hall worth “repeated, close viewing” suggests an exhibit rich in the diversity and number of its specimens, a characteristic of the “cabinet” style in museum exhibits, but he laments the poor execution of the computers and touch screens of the “interactive” style:
The hall bears repeated, close viewing, though children will also find amusements here, including the opportunity to come face to face with floor-level bronze models of their ancestors. But the two computer simulations at the exhibition’s end — one a simplified Sims-type game of cultural and environmental choice, the other a cartoonish vision of possible future evolutionary change — should be far more subtle. More wall text summarizing themes would have also helped: too much is left to the text of touch screens, buried inside menus of choices.
He also raises an issue that concerned me when the opening was announced last fall: that the exhibit might adopt some theological viewpoint:
There are times too when it seems as if the Smithsonian has almost gone too far in humanizing evolution, as if it were answering those who, on religious grounds, object to the evolutionary universe and its inhuman brutality. (A touch-screen F.A.Q. suggests simply that such visitors use the show to “explore new scientific findings and decide how these findings complement their ideas about the natural world.”)
At any rate, the exhibition’s focus doesn’t really give us a feel for the daring of the evolutionary vision, which is a tale not of progress but of accident, frightening in the moment, fortuitous only in retrospect.
At the exhibit website, I found the page for the Broader Social Impacts Committee. The committee consists of 14 people, all but one of whom are identified by their religion (including one “Humanist”). This is a rather odd composition and set of descriptors for a group concerned with broader social impacts– no historians, sociologists, political scientists. But as the website makes clear, the charge of the committee is to deal with religious issues. The following statement from the website, while straightforward in acknowledging the diversity of views, seems to prefer the last view (“interaction or engagement”), but its not clear to me what exactly this view entails:
There are a number of different approaches to the science-religion relationship. One approach is to see science and religion as separate domains that ask different questions focusing on separate interests in human life – for example, about the natural world in science and about God in religion. This approach depends on respecting and maintaining the distinctions but can sometimes overlook the ways in which scientific interpretations may have an effect on religious beliefs. Conflict is seen to arise when efforts are made to eliminate the separation that the first approach assumes. The strongest conflicts develop when either science or religion asserts a standard of truth to which the other must adhere or otherwise be dismissed. An alternative approach sees interaction or engagement as positive. Engagement takes many forms, including personal efforts by individuals to integrate scientific and religious understandings, statements by religious organizations that affirm and even celebrate the scientific findings, and constructive interactions between theologians and scientists seeking common ground, respect, and shared insight into how the science of human evolution contributes to an awareness of what it means to be human.
My full opinion will have to wait till I get to see the exhibit myself. One thing I’m looking forward to are the new reconstructions. John Gurche, the renowned scientific artist, has made a set of incredibly detailed life reconstructions for the exhibit (seen here; check out the rest of his website for more paintings and sculptures), and Smithsonian Magazine has had two pieces on them.
Edward Rothstein’s final word:
But the retrospective vistas provided here are, nevertheless, compelling and illuminating. This was conceived as a permanent exhibition, meant to serve a generation of visitors, but it was also designed to be easily adaptable to the pressures of scientific advances and visitor tastes. The evolution continues.
A set of skull images released by the USNM.
(PS: On the way in to the museum that morning, Greenpeace protesters, dressed like law enforcement agents from the “Climate Crimes” unit, handed me a flyer denouncing David Koch, who contributed most of the funding for the hall (and whose name is on it). More on this angle at the Wonk Room and USA Today.)
UPDATE: I’m asking everyone to guess this year’s Templeton recipient, even if other people have guessed the same person. I’d like to know how close we come to the actual recipient. And be serious!
UPDATE 2. Richard Dawkins has a brief commentary on this incident here. He mentions someone I’d forgotten about: Simon Conway “Humans-are-Inevitable” Morris.
In its continuing drive to buy itself scientific respectability, the Templeton Foundation is going to announce the annual winner of its 1.5-million-dollar Templeton prize this Thursday. And guess where?
You guessed it: at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C.!
Yes, the National Academy has apparently rented the Foundation their hall so that, amidst the trappings of America’s most distinguished body of scientists, The Templeton Foundation can fete the person who most successfully conflated Science and Woo in the last few years. The invitation is below.
This is an outrage, of course, and shame on the National Academy for its implicit endorsement of religion. If they say, “Well, we rent our space to anybody,” then I look forward to seeing an adult film festival at the NAS.
I’m guessing that this year’s winner, based on the location, will be Francis Collins. Dear readers, do post your guess, and we’ll see how close we get. Runners-up may be Kenneth Miller, Karen Armstrong, John Haught, and Robert Wright. But choose your favorite! One choice per person. And remember, according to the Foundation’s guidelines, “IF YOU GUESS THE WINNER, YOU CAN’T TELL ANYONE!” (What the hell does that mean?)
_______________
Templeton Prize Invitation
Dear Colleague,
Your presence is requested to join the Templeton Prize judges and the John Templeton Foundation Board of Trustees to celebrate the announcement of the 2010 Templeton Prize Laureate in Washington, DC on Thursday, March 25, 2010.
Please join the formal Templeton Prize Press Conference in the Lecture Room of the National Academy of Sciences building, 2100 C Street, North West, Washington, DC at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 25. We would be grateful for your reply by Tuesday March 23, 2010, please email RSVP@templetonprize.org. When you RSVP you will receive a confirmation response acknowledging receipt and providing details on entry into the event.
If you are unable to join us at the National Academy of Sciences, please register to watch the live webcast of the event at 11:00 a.m. EDT, by clicking here.
IF YOU GUESS THE WINNER, PLEASE HONOR A STRICT EMBARGO (YOU CAN’T TELL ANYONE) UNTIL 11:00 A.M. ON THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 2010.
The Templeton Prize (www.templetonprize.org) was established in 1972 by Sir John Templeton. The Prize has been awarded to physicists, biologists, theologians, ministers, philanthropists, writers, and reformers for work that has ranged from the creation of new religious orders and social movements to humanistic scholarship and research about the origins of the universe.
Sam’s long-awaited TED video (23 minutes), on his idea that science can actually tell us what is moral, is just up here. A book is coming out in a few months. I haven’t yet seen this video, as I’m giving a talk in Texas in an hour, but for sure this is going to be really, really controversial.
