A trainer was killed by an orca at Sea World in Orlando. This sort of thing, while tragic, is also inevitable if humans interact closely with wild predators who are displayed for public entertainment.

There are several reasons commonly given for confining animals in zoos and aquariums:

1.  Education of the public, not only teaching them about animals but also promoting conservation.

2.  Scientific research on the biology of captive animals, sometimes with an eye to helping save them in the wild.

3.  Breeding endangered animals so they can be reintroduced into the wild.

4.  Providing the last refuge for a species that will inevitably go extinct.

5.  Entertainment for the public, which makes profits for the exhibitors.

Not all of these reasons should be accepted uncritically.  How many of the public really learn a lot about biology, as opposed to being entertained, by going to a zoo? And does that knowledge translate into new impetus for conservation in the wild?

And how much do we really learn about the behavior of wild animals from studying them in captivity?  Maybe some, but most captive species are not being studied in this way, and even those studies often concentrate on zoo-related questions: what kind of diet keeps a captive animal in good condition?  In a hilarious essay on zoos, H. L. Mencken made this point:

A college professor studying the habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to specimens in zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable for hours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages.

Against these benefits, even if real and not the product of zoo hype, we should weigh the misery and unhappiness of captive animals, especially those animals that, we think, are capable of conscious suffering.  To me, at least, this is a serious factor.  What gives humans the right to extract an animal from its environment—an environment to which it is adapted and in which it presumably knows how to make a living—and turn it into a sort of sideshow exhibit?  This becomes especially serious when the animals, like elephants and lions, are social, and can’t be kept in captivity with a decent-sized social group. Mencken again:

Of the abominable cruelties practised in zoos it is unnecessary to make mention. Even assuming that all the keepers are men of delicate natures and ardent zoophiles (which is about as safe as assuming that the keepers of a prison are all sentimentalists, and weep for the sorrows of their charges), it must be plain that the work they do involves an endless war upon the native instincts of the animals, and that they must thus inflict the most abominable tortures every day. What could be a sadder sight than a tiger in a cage, save it be a forest monkey climbing despairingly up a barked stump, or an eagle chained to its roost? How can man be benefitted and made better by robbing the seal of its arctic ice, the hippopotamus of its soft wallow, the buffalo of its open range, the lion of its kingship, the birds of their air?

And if your response is that, well, animals don’t look as if they’re suffering, I’d say that in some cases they do. In my lifetime of visiting zoos and aquariums, I’ve seen tons of repetitive, to-and-fro movement in cages and tanks, movement that is usually seen by biologists as pathological.  I once saw a seal doing this in a small pool in Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. I complained to the management, but they acted as if I were nuts.  And if Martian zoologists were to observe the behavior of inmates of a Federal prison, they might well conclude that those inmates were happy, well taken care of, and, indeed, might really prefer to be in the prison rather than outside.

Like inmates, captive animals don’t get that choice. They’re lifers.

Oh, and on the downside there is also the mortality of humans who tend these animals. We saw what happened at Sea World, and that beast had already killed two people.   Until some zoos started adopting a “no contact with the animals” policy for large, unpredictable mammals, the most dangerous job in America was that of an elephant keeper.

As a biologist who cares about animal well being, I rank the motives above, in decreasing order of importance, 3, (4, 1), 2, 5.

And here is my opinion:  the “benefits” of keeping some mammals in captivity are outweighed by the suffering that captivity imposes on those mammals.   (And yes, I know that many zoo animals, like orcas and lions, are bred in captivity, but that doesn’t solve the problem of putting a genome evolved to live in natural environments into what is, in effect, an animal prison.) Let’s stop putting orcas, dolphins, elephants, rhinos, hippos, giraffes, lions, chimps and the like on public display.  If the public wants to see them, isn’t it better to see them behaving naturally, in videos shot in the wild?

The most disgusting form of mammal captivity is the kind conducted by organizations like Sea World.  In the interests of filling their coffers, they put marine mammals, evolved to range for hundreds of miles across open waters, into confined spaces.  Worse—they teach them tricks and make people pay to see those tricks. (An adult ticket to Sea World in Orlando costs $78.95!)  They may pay lip service to conservation, or education, but let’s face it: they’re there to make money.  What other point is there to making animals do tricks before large paying audiences?  If you want to engage the animals, there are other ways.

Humans were once displayed in zoos, but thankfully that practice has stopped.  Humans from other nations and cultures are not entertainment.  Neither are lions, elephants, orcas, and dolphins. Those who keep and display such animals for profit are contemptible.

Here, in an interview in Australia, philosopher Michael Ruse makes his recurrent claim that Richard Dawkins has very little comprehension of the theology he attacked in The God Delusion.

Ruse on the First Cause argument:

“You know, and I know, that Christians (St. Augustine, certainly St. Thomas) spent a hell of a lot of time—I mean, they knew this—what they were trying to do, was articulate a notion of God who would be First Cause: you know, the whole notion of a Satiety Aseity, God as a Necessary Being.  You know, God’s essence is His existence.”

. . . Christians have got some grown-up responses to these sorts of things, and I think that Dawkins does a serious disservice to the cause of nonbelief by not being prepared to take seriously the kinds of things that believers believe in.”

Well, as many have pointed out, I’m neither a philosopher nor a theologian, but these highly sophisticated defenses of the First Cause Argument seem to me merely intellectualized versions of the assertion, “My kind of God did too exist forever!” Perhaps real philosopher/theologians like Eric MacDonald can weigh in here.

Anyway, here, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum, are some of the things that Americans do believe (proportion of respondents who accept the notions):

Bible as the word of God:  63%

Bible as the literal word of God: 33%

Life after death:  74%

Heaven:  74%

Hell:  59%

Miracles:  79%

Angels and demons:  68%

Own religion is the one truth path that can lead to eternal life:  24%

Many religions can lead to eternal life:  74%

Even though Collins is now director of the National Institutes of Health, the love of Jesus is still welling up inside him like an oil well that can’t be capped.  He’s now emitted another gusher.

I was under the impression that when Collins came aboard as NIH director, he was going to give up the public religious proselytizing, or at least his penchant for telling everyone the Good News: science proves the existence of God.  I was wrong.

Collins has just issued a new edited volume, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith (HarperCollins, release date Mar. 2).

Here’s the publisher’s description:

“Is there a God?” is the most central and profound question that humans ask. With the New Atheists gaining a loud voice in today’s world, it is time to revisit the long-standing intellectual tradition on the side of faith. Francis Collins, New York Times bestselling author of The Language of God and renowned physician and geneticist, defends the reason for faith in this provocative collection. Collins is our guide as he takes us through the writings of many of the world’s greatest thinkers — philosophers, preachers, poets, scientists — both past and present, including such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and Augustine, and unexpected voices such as John Locke and Dorothy Sayers. Despite the doubts of a cynical world, this essential companion proves once and for all the rationality of faith. . .

Francis Collins, New York Times bestselling author of The Language of God and renowned physician and geneticist, defends the reason for faith in this provocative collection. Collins is our guide as he takes us through the writings of many of the world’s greatest thinkers — philosophers, preachers, poets, scientists — both past and present, including such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and Augustine, and unexpected voices such as John Locke and Dorothy Sayers. Despite the doubts of a cynical world, this essential companion proves once and for all the rationality of faith.

It’s a bit disconcerting to hear that he’s going to prove, through the lucubrations of C. S. Lewis (!) and others, that faith is rational. This implies that we faithless are the irrational ones, but also that Collins continues to blur the line between science and faith.  Well, this all might be publisher’s hype, but it isn’t.  It continues in Collins’s introduction, which you can read here:

Faith and reason are not, as many seem to be arguing today, mutually exclusive.  They never have been.  The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  Evidence! Down through the centuries, humanity’s greatest minds have developed interesting and compelling arguments abouth faith, based on moral philosophy, arguments about nature, and examination of sacred texts.  But outside of limited academic circles, these deeper perspectives are not heard from much these days. The goal of this anthology is to present some of these points of view, to spur on a more nuanced and intellectually rich discussion of the most profound questions that humanity asks: Is there a God? If so, what is God like? Does God care about me? And what, if anything, is the meaning of life?

Uh oh.  “Evidence”, with an exclamation mark!  What is the evidence?

As I began to absorb the arguments [of C. S. Lewis!],  the door to the possibility of God began to open, and as it did I began to see that the signposts had been around me all along.

Some of the evidence derived from nature itself. As a scientist, I was then and am now deeply invested in the idea that nature is ordered, and that science can discover it. But it never occurred to me to ask why order exists.  Going even deeper, I had never really considered the most profound philosophical question of all—why is there something instead of nothing. And if there are realities called matter and energy that behave in certain ways, what about those mathematical equations I had been so in love with as a student of quantum mechanics—why should they work at all? What, to use Nobel Laureate Wigner’s classic phrase, accounts for the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”? Could this be a pointer toward a mathematical mind behind the universe?

And then there was the Big Bang. . . .

If you’ve read Collins’s The Language of God, you already know where he’s going.

To posit a creator that is also part of nature provides no solution. Instead, one seems obligated [my emphasis] to yield to the logic of the cosmological argument (called Kalam by Islamic scholars) that there was a First Cause, a supernatural Creator outside of the laws of nature, and outside of time and space.

Yes, it’s all scientific, folks.  Logic and scientific evidence says that we must—we must—accept a supernatural creator.

The rest follows predictably.  Collins brings up the “fine-tuning” of the universe (“The conclusion is astounding: if any of these [physical constants] were to vary by even the tiniest degree, a universe capable of sustaining any imaginable form of life would be impossible.”)

God of the gaps!  Fine-tuning, therefore Jesus.  Collins is not a man who can live with doubt, with the idea that perhaps there is some deeper physical theory (or, indeed, the possibility of multiple universes) that might explain this “fine-tuning.”

And of course, we can get more scientific evidence for God from “The Moral Law”:

When we break this Moral Law. . .we make excuses, only further demonstrating that we feel bound by the law in our dealings with others. How can this be accounted for? If God actually exists, and has an interest in humans—a unique species with gifts of consciousness, intelligence, and free will—wouldn’t the existence of this law, written on all our hearts, be an interesting signpost toward a holy and personal God?

“Interesting signpost”? What he means, of course, is “EVIDENCE”!

Responding to the argument that morality could have evolved, since we see apparent rudiments of morality in our primate relatives, Collins simply asserts that evolution couldn’t lead us to admire altruists, or to perform altruistic acts ourselves.  Well, maybe, but reciprocal altruism could have evolved in small groups of interacting hominids. And there are many people, including myself, who think that morality comes from a combination of an evolved mentality and a non-evolved, social extension of that mentality to other people—indeed, to other species. (That’s the point of Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle.)  Collins claims that the New Atheists haven’t dealt with the subtleties of theology, but he surely has not dealt with the multifarious arguments for the secular development of morality.  And while he claims he’s “not arguing that the existence of the Moral Law somehow proves God’s existence,” that’s disingenuous.  He is, and he has done.

For myself, the arguments from the nature of the universe and the existence of the Moral Law led me, with considerable initial resistance, to a serious consideration of the possibility of a God who not only wound up the clock but who also has an enduring interest in a relationship with humans.

Enough is enough.  Collins is director of the NIH, and is using his office to argue publicly that scientific evidence—the Big Bang, the “Moral Law” and so forth—points to the existence of a God.  That is blurring the lines between faith and science: exactly what I hoped he would not do when he took his new job.

And to those who say that he has the right to publish this sort of stuff, well, yes he does.  He has the legal right.  But it’s not judicious to argue publicly, as the most important scientist in the US, that there is scientific evidence for God.  Imagine, for example, the outcry that would ensue if Collins were an atheist and, as NIH director, published a collection of atheistic essays along the lines of Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, but also arguing that scientific evidence proved that there was no God.  He would, of course, promptly be canned as NIH director.

Or imagine if Collins were a Scientologist, arguing that the evidence pointed to the existence of Xenu and ancient “body-thetans” that still plague humans today. Or a Muslim, arguing that evidence pointed to the existence of Allah, and of Mohamed as his divine prophet.  Or if he published a book showing how scientific evidence pointed to the efficacy of astrology, or witchcraft.  People would think he was nuts.

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition.  He’s the chief government scientist, but he won’t stop conflating science and faith.  He had his chance, and he blew it.  He should step down.

So you’re a widely-read website and decide to get someone to interview Jerry Fodor about his latest book (with Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini), What Darwin Got Wrong. Do you get somebody with some training in evolutionary biology? Or philosophy? Or, better yet, both?

Naah, you get someone like this:

. . . an associate editor at Salon. He previously worked at Men’s Vogue and attended NYU’s MA Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. His reporting has appeared in the Village Voice and City Limits, among other publications. He currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mix an interviewer’s ignorance of the field with a loudmouthed and wrongheaded author, determined to make a big noise, and what do you get? This kind of puffery:

[Reviewer]: As you explain in the book, one of the problems with Darwinism is that Darwin is inventing explanations for something that happened long ago, over a long period of time. Isn’t that similar to creationism?

[Fodor]: Creationism isn’t the only doctrine that’s heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin a web, you could tell a story of why spinning a web was good in the context of evolution. That is why you should be as suspicious of Darwinism as of creationism. They have spurious consequence in common. And that should be enough to make you worry about either account.

Oh dear.  A reviewer worth his salt would know that evolutionary biology isn’t just about “making explanations” for something that happened long ago, over a long period of time.  It’s also about testing those explanations, as well as seeing what is happening now and trying to understand why. (One example: changes in beak morphology in the medium ground finch of the Galápagos.) Given the potential of Fodor’s pronouncements to damage evolutionary biology, it’s distressing that Salon couldn’t come up with someone that could at least ask informed questions.  Que sera, sera. .

And about those spiders. On p. 91 of What Darwin Got Wrong we read this:

“Such cases of elaborate innate behavioral programs (spider webs, bee foraging as we saw above, and many more) cannot be accounted for by means of optimizing physico-chemical or geometric factors.  But they can hardly be accounted for by gradualistic adaptation either. It’s fair to acknowledge that, although we bet that some naturalistic explanation will one day be found, we have no such explanation at present. And if we insist that natural selection is the only way to try, we will never have one.”

It’s clear that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini haven’t spent even a tiny bit of time learning about the evolution of spider webs.  A few minutes of searching on the web (e.g., here or here) and on PubMed, and a few phone calls to spider biologists, turned up dozens of papers suggesting entirely plausible explanations for the evolution of webs—explanations based on systematics, morphology, anatomy, chemistry, and natural history.  Some primitive spiders—”primitive” based on morphology and fossils—use silk to line their burrows.  Other spiders build funnel webs on the ground. Is it so hard to see how selection could produce orb-weaving? It’s dead easy to do for spider webs what Darwin did for the complex eye.

I’m not saying that that’s the only explanation, but it’s certainly a credible one, and one that, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini, is a well-known staple of the spider literature.

Maybe before a couple of philosophers go after a theory that has stood up for 150 years, they should learn a little biology.

Fig. 1.  Silk-lined burrow of a tarantula.  Besides keeping the nest tidy and comfortable, the silk sends vibrations from passing prey down to the spider.

Fig. 2.  A funnel web (Australia)

h/t: Lylebot

As I predicted*, creationists are all over Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini’s new book, What Darwin Got Wrong, like a cheap suit.  If you want to see the Discovery Institute’s prize loons—David Berlinski, Jonathan Wells, Stephen Meyers, and Michael Behe—falling over each other to praise F&P-P’s misguided attack on evolution, go here.

Let’s hope that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini get spooked at finding themselves in such unsavory company, and rebuff the Discovery Institute’s endorsement. I’m not holding my breath.

*You don’t need many neurons to make this prediction.

The latest issue of The Boston Review contains a long and thorough critique of Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini’s new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Summary: F&P-P don’t come off well:

We admire the work that both Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have produced over many decades. We regret that two such distinguished authors have decided to publish a book so cavalier in its treatment of a serious science, so full of apparently scholarly discussions that rest on mistakes and confusions—and so predictably ripe for making mischief.

Lest Fodor (or those who like this execrable volume) complain that criticisms of the book are based on misunderstandings of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini’s message, or on an ignorance of philosophy in general, be advised that the authors are two superb philosophers of science/mind, Philip Kitcher of Columbia University and Ned Block of NYU.

I’m champing at the bit to have my say in this slug-fest, but it won’t be published for a while.

Yesterday I asked people to guess the author of a couple of paragraphs about reconciling science with Christian scripture.  Here are the guesses: as of 10:30 CST, Feb. 21

a. a sociologist   7

b. a liberal, non-literalist theologian   8

c. a creationist   15

d. an atheist scientist   9

e. a non-theological religious scholar 10

f. none of the above   4

The answer is . . .

c!

It’s a creationist.

To be specific, young-earth creationist Paul Nelson.

The quote is from a defense of YEC: Paul Nelson and John Mark Reynolds, “Young earth creationism.”  pp. 39-73 in Three Views on Creation and Evolution, edited by J. P. Moreland and John Mark Reynolds.  1999, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Reynolds is a professor of philosophy at the creationist Biola University).

Fooled most of you!  Creationist” garnered most of the single-item guesses, but still only 28% of them.  One prescient soul, though, did guess Paul Nelson.

Why did I give this quote?  Obviously, one reason was to provide support (this time from a creationist) for the assertion that, until the rise of science, Christians in general had a far more literalistic view of the Bible than they do today, taking stories like that of Noah and the Flood, and of Adam and Eve, as plain fact.  Lots of accommodationists still disagree, touting Augustine and the like (and forgetting about the millions of medieval Christians—and modern Americans—who accepted Hell as real). But there are other reasons.  The quote shows how more fundamentalist Christians are at odds with believers who reject Biblical “facts” when they don’t comport with science.  Here’s part of what Nelson said again:

“To a secular person, Noah’s disappearance looks very convenient. If a Bible story contains details that are contrary to science, then the Bible story is ‘myth.’  If the Bible story is fortunate enough to be unverifiable, like that of Abraham, it is allowed to function as history.”

This shows starkly the intellectually vacuous position of claiming that what is so obviously a Biblical “truth” is really metaphor if it conflicts with science, while the scientifically unverifiable (but also scientifically improbable) parts of the Bible, like the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, are allowed to stand as true.  Even Nelson, young-earth creationist though he is, can see through this ruse. And this sense he, and his literalist compadres, are more intellectually honest than are accommodationists.  At least they don’t pick and choose.  (Please don’t remind me here that some parts of the Bible are clearly metaphor.  Of course they are, but those parts aren’t Genesis or the Flood story.)

Finally, it stuck me, while reading this piece, that when Nelson is talking about this incompatibility, he often sounds like an atheist (that similarity is what gave rise to the guessing-game). Both atheists and fundamentalists agree that it’s a “serious move” for the church to start winnowing “truth” from “metaphor” in the Bible, especially when the “metaphor” reads like truth.  Liberal theologians, by and large, are uncomfortable with admitting this, and prefer to argue that the whole history of Christianity is one of seeing the Bible largely as a metaphor, a gigantic lesson in ethics and salvation couched in stories that were obviously intended as fiction.

At any rate, Nelson has his own problems.  The article, as well as his other writings, are pervaded by his realization that the young-earth position simply doesn’t stack up with the facts of geology.  Here’s what he says elsewhere in the article:

“Young earth creationism, therefore, need not embrace a dogmatic or static biblical hermeneutic. It must be willing to change and admit error.  Presently, we can admit that as recent creationists we are defending a very natural biblical account, at the cost of abandoning a very plausible scientific picture of an ‘old’ cosmos. But over the long term, this is not a tenable position.  In our opinion, old earth creationism combines a less natural textual reading with a much more plausible scientific vision.  They have many fewer ‘problems of science.’ At the moment, this would seem to be the more rational position to adopt.

Recent creationism must develop better scientific accounts if it is to remain viable against old earth creationism. On the other hand, the reading of Scripture (e.g., a real Flood, meaningful genealogies, an actual dividing of languages) is so natural that it seems worth saving.  Since we believe recent creation cosmologies are improving, we are encouraged to continue the effort.”

In the main, Nelson admits that his reasons for accepting a young earth are thological, not scientific. And he recognizes that this creates big problems.

Nelson is wrong on the facts, of course, but I’m not going to bash him further here, for he has his own cross to bear—the real age of the earth—and he shows a form of intellectual honesty absent in accommodationists and liberal theologians, many of whom who adhere to this:

h/t: John Danley and Lori Ann Parker for the photo of the Charles Fillmore quote, taken in Franklin, Tennessee.

It was an intelligent recall.

“From time to time God reviews his creations (products), and he may decide to recall some of them after the review, which causes that particular creation (species) to go extinct. It’s tough, but it’s God’s will.” declared leading creationist Rich Hawkins, hoping that the theory will put an end to all kinds of speculations going on over dinosaur extinction.

h/t: erv