New York Times: Haiti and theodicy

January 24, 2010 • 7:07 pm

An op-ed in today’s New York Times by, of all people, our old friend James Wood,  discusses the problems with using natural disasters as a springboard for ruminating about God’s nature.  It’s pretty sensible, even flirting with atheism:

Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

One plaint:  why does Wood think that an appeal to God makes “theological sense” if He is so uncaring/malevolent to allow an earthquake to occur in the first place? (Note that earlier in the piece he also says that “The only people who would seem to have the right to invoke God at the moment are the Haitians themselves, who beseech his help amidst dreadful pain.”)

Holiday snaps: giant tortoise!

January 24, 2010 • 10:35 am

The islands of the Galápagos are supposedly named after their most famous endemic animal, the giant tortoise (“Galapagos” is Spanish for “tortoise”, and may derive from the Spanish word for saddle, derived from the shape of their shells.) While some zoologists recognize as many as 15 species, the current consensus is that there is only one —Geochelone nigra— with several subspecies. These differ among islands in several traits, most notably shell shape.  Several of the subspecies are extinct, and one is represented by a single surviving animal, the famous “Lonesome George” (see below).  All the subspecies (or species) descend from a single colonization of the archipelago by one ancestor a few million years ago.

A big male tortoise can weigh more than 500 pounds, and the animals clearly live a long time: some estimates are 150 years or more, giving rise to the possibility that some living tortoises were alive when Darwin wrote The Origin. In fact, one tortoise in an Australian zoo, Harriet, was originally, and probably incorrectly, thought to have been collected by Darwin himself.  Harriet died in 2006 at the presumed age of 175 years.

DNA-based dating from Jeffrey Powell’s lab at Yale puts the age of the original colonization between 3 and 2 million years ago. That lab also determined that the closest living relative of the Galápagos animals is the much smaller (8″) chaco tortoise of South America (Geochelone chilensis), with the ancestor making its way to the islands across 600 km of water.

Islands with lush vegetation harbor animals with shallow domed shells (see Santa Cruz tortoise below), but the drier islands have animals with “saddle-backed” shells (see Lonesome George below), which enables them to stretch out their necks and browse on taller plants, notably the cacti such as Opuntia that attain tree-like heights on the islands.  The tortoises are completely herbivorous.

Tortoise in the wild (well, on a farm in Santa Cruz island where they roam freely); this beast shows the dome-shaped shell characteristic of wetter islands with lush ground vegetation:

Fig. 1.  Santa Cruz (Indefatigable) Island tortoise, G. n. porteri (Rothschild, 1903)

One tortoise showed a bizarre behavior that was explained to us by our naturalist, and is also described in Wikipedia:

Tortoises have a classic example of a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with some species of Galápagos finch. The finch hops in front of the tortoise to show that it is ready and the tortoise then raises itself up high on its legs and stretches out its neck so that the bird can pick off ticks that are hidden in the folds of the skin (especially on the rear legs, cloacal opening, neck, and skin between plastron and carapace), thus freeing the tortoise from harmful parasites and providing the finch with an easy meal. Other birds, including Galápagos Hawk and flycatchers, use tortoises as observation posts from which to sight their prey.

To wit:

Fig. 2.  Clean me!

We were told that we might be able to elicit this behavior by moving an index finger up and down in front of the tortoise, but that didn’t work. Whether this behavior is evolved or learned is an interesting question.

Rescue of endangered subspecies is carried out by breeding at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz island.  Here the adults are mated to produce eggs, and young animals are brought up (separated by subspecies) in enclosures, safe from predation by dogs and other feral animals. The adults have no known predators, either natural or introduced.  Let me revise that: their most serious predator is Homo sapiens. Humans have driven at least four subspecies to extinction. It’s appalling to read the chronicles of early sailors, who simply took dozens of these animals aboard as a living food source.  In Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin claims that some ships left the islands with as many as 700 animals!

As is well known, Darwin botched his collections of these animals, taking only a few shells and a handful of living animals. He didn’t follow up suggestions by others that each island had its own morphologically distinguishable population of tortoises.

Fig 3.   Lunchtime at the Charles Darwin research station. This individual (whose subspecies I didn’t record) has the flaring, saddle-shaped shell characteristic of tortoises from dry islands.

At the Charles Darwin Research station on Santa Cruz lives the most famous last-individual-of-the-group animal in the world, Lonesome George.  Collected in the early 1970s, George is the last remaining individual of the Pinta Island subspecies, G. nigra abingdoni.  He’s currently confined (see below) with two females of the Isabel island subspecies in a desperate attempt to bring back his kind.  The females have produced several clutches of eggs, but none have hatched (I was told that another batch is incubating now.)

Fig. 4.  Lonesome George (left) and a would-be bride.

Fig. 5. Nice perch if you can get it. The endemic Galápagos lava lizard Tropidurus albemarlensis atop a tortoise.

Fig. 6.  Channelling the inner reptile (h/t: Otter).

Note that there’s one other archipelago-bound giant tortoise, the Aldabra Giant tortoise that lives on three Indian Ocean islands in the Seychelles. (Its population, around 150,000 animals, is far more numerous than that of the Galápagos tortoise, whose total population is around 10,000.) Although the Aldabra species is placed in the same genus as the Galápagos tortoise, G. gigantea, it’s not a close relative, and is often given the name Aldabrachelys gigantea, which appears to be taxonomically invalid.

It’s hard not to feel affection for this gentle, lumbering giant who doesn’t harm another creature but is so beleaguered itself.  Kudos to the scientists and conservationists of the Galápagos who have brought the giant tortoise back from extinction.

________________________________

For more information:

Caccone, A. G. Gentile, J.P. Gibbs, T.H. Fritts, H.L. Snell, J. Betts and J.R. Powell. 2002.  Phylogeography and history of giant Galápagos tortoises. Evolution 56 :2052–2066. Full Text via CrossRef

Caccone, A. G., J. P. Gibbs, V. Ketmaier, E. Suatoni, and J. R. Powell. 1999.  Origin and evolutionary relationships of giant Galapagos tortoises.  Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. 96:13223-13228 (link here).

Powell, J. and A. Caccone. 2006. Quick guide:  Giant tortoises.   Current Biology 16:R144-R145

Sulloway, F.  2009.  Tantalizing tortoises and the Darwin-Galápagos legend. Journal of the History of Biology 42:3-31 (link here).

Darwin on tortoises (from the Beagle journal):

The inhabitants believe that these animals are absolutely deaf; certainly they do not overhear a person walking close behind them. I was always amused when overtaking one of these great monsters, as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound, as if struck dead. I frequently got on their backs, and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away; — but I found it very difficult to keep my balance. The flesh of this animal is largely employed, both fresh and salted; and a beautifully clear oil is prepared from the fat. When a tortoise is caught, the man makes a slit in the skin near its tail, so as to see inside its body, whether the fat under the dorsal plate is thick. If it is not, the animal is liberated and it is said to recover soon from this strange operation. In order to secure the tortoise, it is not sufficient to turn them like turtle, for they are often able to get on their legs again.

The chaco tortoise, closest living relative of the Galápagos giants:

Holiday snaps

January 23, 2010 • 12:10 pm

The courtship of the blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii) is a droll dance, involving with slapping of turqoise feet on the ground, that never fails to charm visitors to the Galápagos.   This bird is not endemic to the archipelago but is one of its iconic animals.  The male birds are highly sexed, and I saw many of them performing courtship dances when no female was in sight; these involve foot-slapping, brandishing of pebbles and twigs, and the climactic raising of head, tail and wings displayed below (they also utter a strange whistling cry).  The female, who has an egg, isn’t interested.

That photo was mine, but here’s someone else’s video from YouTube.  Ignore the cheesy music, and note how the booby’s walk resembles that of Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp.

Big debate!

January 23, 2010 • 11:46 am

This promises to be good:  in one corner the New Atheist tag team of Michael Shermer and Sam Harris, in the other the New Ager tag team of Deepak Chopra* and Jean Houston. Topic:  Does God have a future?  Here’s the link.  If you’re going to be near Pasadena on that day, get yourself over there; tickets are free, and it will be broadcast on ABC’s Nightline.

*I hadn’t realized that Chopra adhered to a form of intelligent design, and is a severe critic of modern evolutionnary theory.

Does insecurity promote faith?

January 23, 2010 • 10:59 am

Most wealthy countries in the world, including Japan and much of Western Europe, are not particularly religious, with fewer than 25% of their citizens professing belief in God.   The United States is a notable exception.  Although it has high per capita income, it also has high religiosity — around 60% of us believe in God.  Sociologists have produced a lot of theories about why America is an outlier in this respect, but several recent studies are converging on an answer:  insecurity.

I found the latest of these, by medical writer Tomas Rees (author of the blog Epiphenom), described the latest New Humanist.  Unfortunately, Rees’s article is not one of the pieces posted online, but you can find his original article, published in The Journal of Religion and Society, here (click on the lick at the upper right of the page). Rees also has a blog post on the topic here.

What Rees did, to make a long story short, was to calculate (using the Gini statistic) the degree of income inequality among citizens in each of  67 countries and then correlate that with his index of religiosity, which Rees took as the frequency of daily prayer not involving prayers uttered in church.   Here’s the correlation he got among fifty-odd of those countries:

Fig. 1 from Rees paper.  Correlation between the mean frequency of prayer and income inequality (the mean of the log Gini index for the period 1971-1996).

What does this mean?  Rees interprets this as showing that religiosity is higher in those countries whose inhabitants are less secure.  He takes income inequality as the measure of security.  Is he justified in doing this? Well, his assessment of other classic factors used by sociologists to show societal insecurity (life expectancy, infant morality, homicide, perception of corruption) shows that most of these correlate strongly with income inequality (three factors show a weaker correlation: “prevalence of curable STDs,” “child well being,” and “non-vehicle property crime.”  He can thus use income inequality as a proxy for these other factors.  He also ran multiple-regression analyses to try to eliminate spurious correlations.

Average well being, as indicated by per capita gross domestic product, was also negatively correlated with religiosity, but in multivariate models was not as strong as income inequality itself in explaining religiosity. Most notably, while the US was an outlier in the religiosity/average income correlation, it was not in the religiosity/income inequality correlation. (See Fig. 1 above).

Conclusion?  Rees submits that there is a causal relationship between national insecurity (as indexed by income inequality) and religiosity.   But what causes what?  Rees chews on two explanations:

One possibility that cannot be excluded on the basis of available evidence is that religiosity, or some component part of it, directly or indirectly worsens these key aspects of personal insecurity. Such effects could be case specific and need not be a consequence of religion in its broadest sense.  . .

You could think of reasons for this.  For example, a certain religious political party (say, Republicans) could foster government policies that make people less secure (say, opposition to universal health care).

The other reason sounds a bit more plausible to me:

The alternative possibility, that religiosity is not a cause but a consequence of personal insecurity, appears plausible. Indeed, this may also help explain the inverse correlation between per capita GDP and religiosity observed in this study and in previous studies. The link between modernization and secularization, as measured by personal religiosity, is likely to be at least in part driven by the fact that people in wealthier nations lead more secure
lives.

And, of course, causality could run both ways, with the factors interacting to cause a growing spiral of increased religiosity and insecurity.

Here’s Rees’s conclusion:

In conclusion, the current analysis ties together and explains two apparent paradoxes.  First, the observation that modernization, in terms of average material wealth, appears linked to secularization in some countries but not others. The key to this paradox is that it is not simply average wealth, but also the distribution of wealth and the degree to which wealth is used to improve average personal security, which in large part determines religiosity. Second, the observation that religion, although generally believed to have a pro-socializing effect on the individual level, is associated on the macro level with societal ill health. This is most likely because personal religiosity is in part a response to adverse social environments, but that aggregate religiosity does not significantly ameliorate them.

Rees’s results are not a one-off: he cites several earlier studies supporting, at least, the correlation between religiosity and indices of insecurity. There’s also an important study, conducted in 2009 by Gregory Paul, that apparently shows the same result.

Paul constructed what he called a “successful societies” scale, incorporating many of the same factors Rees used, as well as others (his 25 factors included prevalance of homicides and suicides, life expectancy, duration of marriage, measurements of life satisfaction, indices of corruption and so on).  He showed that, among 17 developed Western countries, and Japan, there was a strong negative correlation between societal health and religiosity; in other words, less successful societies were more religious. Here’s Paul’s plot, with the countries labelled as initials (“U” = US, “J” = Japan, “H” = Holland, “T” = Italy, “N” = Norway, and so on).

Fig. 2. (Fig. 25 from Greg Paul’s paper).  Correlation among nations between belief in God and ranking on “successful societies scale”

And again, we’re not sure how the causality runs here, but I suspect that insecurity does promote religiosity to some extent.  Note that this doesn’t necessarily refute other explanations, such as Pacal Boyer’s, for the fact of religiosity. It merely explains some of the variance in religiosity.

What can we say about all this?  Well, I’m not staking my life on these results, but I find them intriguing. (See some criticism by Susan Blackmore here.) Nevertheless, Rees and Paul may be onto something.  And if they’re right, even in part, then we atheists have a bigger task than simply trying to dispel the influence of religion on people.  For to do that, we may have to work for better and more just societies.  But isn’t that, in the end, a nobler goal?

________

Rees, T. J.  2009.  Is personal insecurity a cause of cross-national differences in the intensity of religious belief?  J. Religion and Society 11:1-24

Paul, G. 2009. The chronic depedence of popular religiosity upon dysfunctional psychosociological conditions. Evol. Psychol. 7:398-441.

Earlier paper by Gregory Paul (online):  Paul, G. 2005.  Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies.  J. Religion and Society 7  (link here).

Pseudoscience– banned in Britain

January 22, 2010 • 3:24 pm

by Greg Mayer

A while back, I posted on the shocking use of high priced, English-made dowsing rods by Iraqi security services to detect explosives, dowsing rods being a notorious and well-debunked form of pseudoscience. Use of these devices not only wastes tens of millions of dollars, but costs lives (see the original NY Times article). Well, I’m happy to report that the BBC has reported that the UK government is banning the export of these devices.

Sidney Alford, a leading explosives expert who advises all branches of the military, told Newsnight the sale of the ADE-651 [what the company calls the dowsing rod] was “absolutely immoral”.

“It could result in people being killed in the dozens, if not hundreds,” he said. [Sadly, it already has.]

The BBC went on to report not only the the government action (spurred in part by recent successful bombings in Iraq), but also some analyses of the devices.

Claims of such almost magical technical abilities would almost be comic, if the potential consequences were not so serious.

Newsnight obtained a set of cards [the part alleged by the manufacturer to be sensitive to various substances] for the ADE-651 and took them to Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory where Dr Markus Kuhn dissected a card supposed to detect TNT.

It contained nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.

Dr Kuhn said it was “impossible” that it could detect anything at all and that the card had “absolutely nothing to do with the detection of TNT”.

Do go to the BBC site to see the video of Dr. Kuhn analyzing the card.