How can you not look at this compendium of animal weirdos? As far as I know, these are all real.  Check out the human-faced carp:

And how about that wrinkle-faced bat (Centurio senex)?

h/t: Henry Gee

It’s always worth listening to the eloquent Sam Harris. This week, along with a gaggle of luminaries like Sheryl Crow and David Byrne, he’s speaking at the TED conference in Long Beach.  His talk isn’t yet up, but here’s a nice interview with him, conducted by Patt Morrison on California Public Radio (click on “download” if the direct link doesn’t work).  His latest interest is the evolution of morality:   not just whether science can tell us how morality evolved, but whether it can give us clues to what is moral behavior.  I smell a book in the offing, along with a lot of controversy.

Two annoying Templeton-related fleas to scratch.

In case you don’t follow what’s going on over at at BioLogos, the biology website funded by The Templeton Foundation, the accommodationism continues fast and furious.  Three days ago Kenton Sparks, identified as “a professor of Biblical studies at Eastern University,” a Christian college at St. David’s Pennsylvania, wrote a BioLogos essay on “Scripture and the Problem of Science (Part 2)”.   (Perhaps not coincidentally, Eastern harbors the “Templeton Honors College,” funded by John Jr. and Josephine Templeton.)

What’s the “problem”? It’s the difficulty, for the faithful, of accepting literally the supernatural stories of the Bible (Jesus as the son of God, his resurrection, and so on), while realizing that its description of origins, and other assertions that conflict with science, aren’t to be taken literally.  Sparks’s solution: realize, as did Augustine of Hippo and Calvin, that the Bible isn’t to be read as a textbook of science:

First, regarding the scientific evidence, both Augustine and Calvin regarded the cosmos as an important source of revelation from God. Following Psalm 19, they understood that the “heavens declare the glory of God. Day by day they pour forth speech. There is no language in which their word is not heard.” When the cosmos is understood in this way—as divine speech to humanity—then it is no longer possible to characterize Christian debates about science as a conflict that pits “God’s inerrant word in Scripture” against “errant human science.” Rather, any conflict between Scripture and science should be understood as a conflict between “human interpretations of God’s word in Scripture” and “human interpretations of God’s word in nature.”

Secondly, regarding Scripture itself, although Augustine and Calvin deeply trusted the Bible as a witness to Christ and the Gospel message, they did not feel any deep need for Scripture to provide dependable insights on everything in human experience. In particular, both theologians averred that the Bible is not a science book. This is why Augustine was so comfortable reading problematic biblical texts as allegories and why Calvin was able to say, rather nonchalantly, that one could not depend on Scripture as a guide to the structure of the cosmos.

. . . I think we should follow the lead of Augustine and Calvin. It is time for the Evangelical tradition (of which I am a part) to take scientists more seriously and the Bible somewhat less seriously, with respect to Science.

What I mean is this. As a rule, God has not specially revealed in Scripture those things that human beings can figure out for ourselves. Basic facts about electricity, magnetism, gravity, quantum physics and genetics, however interesting, could not have been understood by ancient readers. On top of that, we have been able to tolerably appreciate and understand them by applying our natural, God-given intellectual gifts to a study of the cosmos that God made for us. And what we have discovered reveals a cosmos that is truly amazing and that, if anything, only points us towards the God who made it. And this, the Bible tells us, is precisely what the cosmos—the “book of nature”— was designed to do!

Is biological evolution among those things that we can discover for ourselves? And if it is, could it be that the evolutionary process, rather than pointing us away from God, might actually impress us as the work of a mighty God? That is the question that we will begin to take up in Part 3.

Once again we see that modern theology is the art of turning empirical necessities into spiritual virtues.  Except for a few dissenters like Augustine and Calvin, the bulk of Christian theology up to the rise of science in the sixteenth century involved seeing the Bible literally—in its entirety.  Six-day creation, Noah, Adam and Eve—the whole megillah.  That held for cosmology, biology, and evolution.  It was only when reason and empirical studies began to show phenomena in conflict with scripture that theologians began to realize that the Bible was not wholly inerrant.  Today, every liberal theologian realizes this, and that leads to Sparks’s problem.  The modern resolution is to take Sparks’s line that the Bible wasn’t really meant to be taken literally—except, of course, for the parts about God and Jesus. As for the rest, well, it’s just a metaphor, don’t you know?

By ignoring the many centuries in which theologians did indeed see the Bible as a textbook of science, these theologians are claiming, without saying so directly, that centuries of theology were simply dead wrong.  And wrong not because science hadn’t yet shed its light on origins, but because early theologians simply failed to grasp that the Bible wasn’t meant to be taken literally! And they point to a few people, like Augustine and Calvin, as those prescient individuals who realized this.  Now why should we hold Augustine and Calvin up for honors?  Because their theology just happened to coincide with the theology that arose centuries later, when science showed that the Bible was wrong.  They knew it in advance!

Sparks is simply saying, to all of the faithful who continue to take much of the Bible as “scientifically” true, “you’re wrong because Augustine said so.  Never mind that hundreds of theologians continued—and still continue—to see Scripture as nearly inerrant.”  This is, I think, what Dawkins means when he claims that Biblical literalists are the most honest among believers.  They don’t water down the Bible by picking and choosing what must be true versus what must be metaphor.  On what warrant can Sparks assert that the Biblical account of the origin of plants, animals, and humans is just a metaphor, but the birth of Jesus, well, that occurred via parthenogenesis?

And these people conveniently ignore the parts of Augustine’s and Calvin’s theology that are unpalatable today.  Were A&C also prescient in their adherence to predestination, the idea of an “elect” who would go to heaven while the rest of us, no matter what our good works in this life, would suffer eternal torment in hell?

Theology moves ahead not under its own steam, but by pressure from behind by science and reason. And the “progress” it achieves is not some clearer understanding of a spiritual reality, but simply a new kind of doublethink that purports to reconcile the natural with the supernatural.

****

In the February 13 New York Times, Gary Rosen, the chief external affairs officer of the John Templeton Foundation, reviews Timothy Ferris’s The Science of Liberty, a book about the supposedly crucial role of science in the rise of modern democracy.  Rosen takes issue with Ferris’s claim that science itself, with its openness to new ideas and rational method of adjudicating them, serves itself as a model of democracy:

But crucial distinctions are lost in these comparisons. The scientific community may be open to everyone, in principle, but it has steep and familiar barriers to entry, as any layperson who has tried to read the research papers at the back of journals like Nature or Science can attest. When not distorted by its own personal and political rivalries, modern science is, in the most admirable sense, an aristocracy — a selection and sorting of the best minds as they interact within institutions designed to achieve certain rarefied ends. Experiment, equality and freedom of expression are essential to this work, but it is the work of an elite community from which most people are necessarily excluded. Thankfully, participation in the everyday life of democracy does not require a Ph.D., nor are theories and ideas its basic medium.

Scientists today are understandably ­eager to shape policy debates on a number of urgent issues (like climate change, to which Ferris devotes much of his closing chapter). But they have to appreciate the many ways in which scientific discourse, even in its experimental mode, makes an awkward fit with democratic politics. Only then will they find it easier to talk to — and persuade — the rest of us.

Granted, becoming a scientist takes training and work, and granted, some scientists, like Nobel laureates, are accorded scientific deference because of their stature, and may find it easier than a graduate student to get their papers published in Nature.  But does our professional jargon and training make us an “aristocracy”, an “elite”? (Shades of Sarah Palin!)  No more so, I’d think, than any other profession that requires training and expertise, like plumbing, auto mechanics, medicine, architecture, and engineering.  Do those professions also have an “awkward fit with democratic politics”?

And what, exactly, is this “awkward fit”?  Rosen isn’t clear about this, but it appears to be the Palin-esque assertion that we aristocratic scientists turn people off with our elitism, snobbery, and in-group jargon, making us less able to communicate effectively with the “real” people.  Our realization of our fundamental elitisim, claims Rosen, will open up the floodgates, turning us all into politically effective communicators.  It would be helpful if Rosen told us what we’re supposed to do to break down these barriers, but until then it’s nothing more than blame-the-scientist framing.

Or maybe it would help to reconcile our elitist science with more democratic spirituality, the avowed goal of the Templeton Foundation?

About two weeks ago I was on Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor’s Freethought Radio network, but this week they’ve scored the Big Kahuna Atheist himself.  Here is 20-minute, two-part interview (posted, oddly, on YouTube) with Christopher Hitchens.

In a new paper, “The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or byproduct?”,  Ilkka Pyysiäinen from the University of Helsinki and Marc Hauser from Harvard discuss the evolution of religion and morality (The paper was highlighted by Philip Ball in Nature News and by P.Z. at Pharyngula.)   The paper is divided roughly into two parts:

1. A discussion about whether religion is a direct adaptation, that is, whether there are specific genes that favor belief in religion, God, the afterlife, the supernatural, and so on—or whether religion is a “byproduct,” that is, that religious beliefs grow naturally out of other evolved features of the human mind.  Pyysiäinen and Hauser favor the latter.  They seem to agree with Pascal Boyer (see his Religion Explained), that faith is an outgrowth of the natural human tendency to attribute intentionality to objects, forces of nature, and the like.

I like the “byproduct” hypothesis, if for no other reason than it’s almost self-evidently true. Surely every human behavior is in some sense a byproduct of genes that evolved for other reasons.  And if religion, like music-making, jokes, and pornography, is an outgrowth of genes that have evolved for other reasons, then we need not make up adaptive stories favoring a “religion module” in the brain.  That imposes some restraint against the injudicious production of untestable stories.

That said, I don’t see decisive evidence one way or the other.  Pascal Boyer does make an excellent case for the “byproduct” hypothesis, but it is, after all, just an argument that sounds pretty good, without conclusive data.  I’m not sure exactly what data would support one hypothesis over the other, and in the end, if you can’t settle the issue the question becomes scientifically uninteresting.

2.  A discussion about whether morality grows out of religion, whether it’s culturally inherited, but not through religious teaching, or whether it’s innate.  Here I think we can approach an answer, at least in principle.  If morality tends to be similar among people of different faiths, despite their different moral teachings (yes, they all share the golden rule, but they differ in many other teachings), or if morality is similar in atheists and the faithful, or if children brought up without religion but exposed to different cultural teachings tend to converge on the same morality, then we have some evidence of an innate “moral grammar.”  Too, as philosophers have pointed out since the time of Plato, even the faithful admit of a morality antecedent to religion: if God told you to do something immoral, you wouldn’t automatically consider it moral.

Pyysiänen and Hauser’s work, described in their paper, supports the idea that morality does not derive from religion, but may in fact be innate.  This is based on the results of “morality tests” given to people of diverse religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds. (I urge you to take one of these tests, both to provide more data and to see exactly how they come to this conclusion. You can access the test here.) Regardless of background, faith, or upbringing, people tend to answer the questions in the same way.

Now there are two problems with taking this unanimity as evidence for an evolved morality.  First, people could simply be exposed to religious morality in their societies, and their internalizing of that morality could lead to consistent answers to Hauser’s questions.  Second, uniform morality could simply be a cultural adaptation without genetic roots: people have learned over time what sort of morality leads to a harmonious society, and we’re simply inculcated from birth with that secular morality.  Philip Ball raises this point in his Nature commentary:

It’s debatable, however, whether these moral tests are probing religion or culture as a moral-forming agency, because non-believers in a predominantly religious culture are likely to acquire the moral predispositions of the majority. Western culture, say, has long been shaped by Christian morality.

This is a reasonable objection, but I think it’s belied by the data.  I urge you to take the morality test, for if you do you’ll see that the kinds of moral dilemmas embodied therein have nothing to do with the kind of morality imparted by faith, nor do they really comport with the kind of moral teachings that we get from our parents, friends, and schools.  When you take this test, you might feel, as I did, that your answers are coming out of some intangible but innate wellspring of moral views. (That, of course, is not good evidence for a genetic adaptation!)

I wrote to Pyysiäinen and Hauser about Ball’s caveat, and Ilkka answered, speaking for the both of them (quote given with permission):

As far as we are dealing with people’s intuitive judgments, it is impossible to attribute these to learned religious views. People just do not respond in accordance with religious doctrines when they have no clue about how learned religious doctrines should be applied. I think Marc’s research shows that religious doctrines can only have an effect on especially salient topics such as abortion. When religious commitments differ and people yet produce quite similar judgments, this shows that religious commitments do not have causal power with regard to moral judgment. If religious people make moral judgments similar to those of nonreligious people, then there is no reason to suppose that religion is the driving force. This means that *explicit* religious commitment is not relevant. But, as you suggest, it might still be that religion affects explicitly nonreligious people’s judgments in an implicit way. However, this, then, means that explicit religious commitment is not the crucial factor.

The next decade, I think, will see an explosion of research about whether humans have an innate “moral grammar”.   To me, it’s the most interesting part of evolutionary psychology.

But the faitheists must weigh in as well. Over at Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau tries to make a silk purse out of what, for the faithful, is a pig’s ear:

In other words, morality is independent of religion or religiosity. Religion may be a means to pass down certain cultural norms about moral behavior, but there are plenty of other ways to do the same thing. As one theologian of my acquaintance put it, there are many paths to the top of the mountain.

Theists can take comfort in that notion, secure in the thought that their god(s) shaped the world so that everyone was led to moral behavior. Atheists can take this finding as further proof against the refrain of certain religious people that erosion of religious faith will result in erosion of morality. And the rest of us can take comfort in the notion that we’re behaving well, and the reasons why we behave well aren’t that important.

Well, if there are many paths to the top of the mountain, why are the faithful defaming, fighting, and even killing each other on the way?   Let’s face it: faitheists and liberal theologians can preach until they’re blue in the face that morality wasn’t dictated by God, but was—as Robert Wright suggests—simply a happy, inevitable and foreseen result of His creation.  But that’s not what religious scriptures say, nor what a huge number of the faithful really think. It always amuses me when accommodationists, especially the atheistic ones, tell religious people what they’re supposed to believe, or where they’re supposed to find comfort.

_________

Pyysiäinen, I. and Hauser, M. 2010.  The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product? Trends in Cognitive Science, online.

To the otter:

I’ve posted twice (here and here) about the intelligent-design movie Darwin’s Dilemma, a DVD of which was sent to me by participant and young-earth creationist Paul Nelson.  When I was in the UK two weeks ago, I gave the DVD to a friend studying paleontology at Oxford University, who in turn showed it to a group of students and faculty.

As you might remember, “Darwin’s dilemma” referred to the Cambrian “explosion,” in which many extant phyla arose within a geologically brief period (around 10-15 million years) in the early Cambrian.  The film considers this sudden appearance, which it interprets not just as geologically instantaneous but chronologically instantaneous, to be evidence for intelligent design (ID) of life.  It also makes several other arguments for ID, including the supposed impossibility of acquiring new genetic information by Darwinian natural selection.

Professor Martin Brasier of Oxford kindly volunteered to write a brief response to the film.  Brasier and his students have done important work on the early Cambrian and Ediacaran fauna, and so he’s eminently qualified to judge the film. He’s also just published a popular book on early life, including the Precambrian, Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life, which is very good.

Brasier’s response to the film:

Darwin’s Dilemma

The latest Intelligent Design film, called ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’, attempts to examine a problem that vexed poor Charles Darwin in 1859 – the puzzle of what we now call the ‘Cambrian explosion’. As an Oxford palaeontologist who has been working on this problem since 1966, I have been asked for my opinion on the veracity of its claims. Below are outlined some of what I take to be its more laughable misunderstandings.

1. The film makes a familiar mistake. There is a misplaced fixation upon beasts of the Burgess Shale. So antiquated is this view that the screenplay for this film could have been written by teachers in 1954, or even by Mack Sennett at Keystone studios in 1912, just after the Burgess Shale biota was first reported by Walcott. It needs to be remembered that the Burgess Shale appears far too late in the fossil record to tell us much about emergence of animals. Modern data shows that the explosion of modern phyla was beginning by about 545 Ma ago, with forms like Cloudina and Sabellidites. Since the Burgess Shale is a mere 505 Ma old, this gives us palaeontologists some 40 million years to play with. What a gift!

2. A rich fossil record of early animal remains has been discovered from near the end of the Ediacaran period at about 545 Ma to the appearance of calcified trilobites and echinoderms in the Chengjiang biota, some 520 Ma ago. This transitional period, variously known as the Tommotian or Fortunian Stage, contains examples of transitional forms. For example, Halkieria and Maikhanella are probable stem group ‘molluscs’ with multi-element shells; Eccentrotheca and Camenella are taken to be stem group ‘brachiopods’ with multi-element shells. Dozens of scientists have been writing about these materials in recent years.  Some 20 million years of evolution has thereby been ignored. Or censored.

3. The first great mass extinction took place about 520 million years ago, during the Botomian and Toyonian Stages – well before the Burgess Shale. A rich diversity of reef building animals disappeared forever. These included archaeocyathan sponges and many small shelly fossils. But there is no mention of this. Did the film producers suffer amnesia at this point in the story? Or did that great prankster – the Intelligent Designer – make some big mistakes? If so, why call Her intelligent?

4. The film makes another common mistake. When Darwin referred to the need for many small steps in evolution, he did not say whether these steps had to be either fast or slow. Small steps can be made very quickly indeed – as with virus evolution today.

5. The film appears to have been shot within the walls of Cambridge University UK, with interviews taking place in the Sedgwick Museum, or around colleges such as St John’s and King’s College.  Some think they perceive some blue highlights around the faces here, suggesting blue-screen shots in which the Cambridge settings have been imposed later. Whether real or false, this gives to the film a wholly spurious authority; rhe impression of a forgery.

For those interested, some of these evolutionary developments can be followed in my recent book on Darwin’s Dilemma, called Darwin’s Lost World (OUP, 2009), which takes the reader back from the Burgess Shale to the earliest multicellular organisms. Research into this fascinating interval remains wide open and is only just beginning. The Cambrian explosion was a real and entirely natural event, as was the wave of extinctions that followed. What a wonderful world!

_______

Thanks to Martin for this analysis!

Some of the best kitteh animations ever have been done by the British animator Simon Tofield.  You can see all his videos over at The Official Simon’s Cat Website (they’re also on a YouTube channel).  My favorite is “Cat Man Do,” an extremely realistic depiction of a cat trying to awaken its owner.  I posted on that one a while back, but here are two new ones, plus an interview with Tofield himself. (There’s also a dog video on his site, but the less said about that the better. . .)

Here’s “Snow Business,” in which Simon’s cat encounters the white stuff for the first time:

And how could I leave this one out, since it combines two of my great loves—cats and flies? Here’s “Fly Guy”:

Finally, an interview with Tofield, in which he describes the origin and creation of the videos (and yes, he has several cats).  Note that all the kitteh sounds (very realistic) are produced by Tofield himself.

Tofield has written a Simon’s Cat book that you can buy here.

EXTRA:  The story of Caspar, the commuting cat (see Matthew’s post here), has just been bought by Simon & Schuster.