Today’s L.A. Times reports that the California Science Center is being sued for cancelling the showing of a creationist film, “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.” The film, heavily touted by the Discovery Institute and featuring their work,  looks pretty dire on paper, featuring, along with creationists Stephen Meyer, Jon Wells, and Paul Nelson (the latter a young-earther), the dupes James Valentine and Simon Conway Morris (who officially came out as a creationist this year).

The suit was filed by the American Freedom Alliance, self-described as “a movement of concerned Americans advancing the values and ideals of Western civilization.”  They claim breach of contract; the California Science Center counterclaims that they weren’t allowed to vet the film’s publicity in advance.

It’s a mess, with some scientists decrying the film, while others, like Eugenie Scott, saying that the fracas surrounding the cancellation will give creationists far more publicity than simply showing it.  And of course the Discovery Institute is loving the “controversy,” claiming “viewpoint discrimination” and arguing that they’re being stifled and eXpelled, while at the same time dragging the Smithsonian into the issue.

Indeed, the cancellation seems to be based more on protests by scientists than on legal technicalities, though it may well be resolved on the technicalities.  The lesson is that scientific organizations should carefully examine the contents of films before agreeing to show them. How did this one slip under the radar?

h/t: Cathy Newman

by Matthew Cobb

In the UK, the holiday season sprawls for about 10 days (we get both the 25th and the 26th as holidays), and you soon lose track of what day it is. Although I don’t know what day it is today, I know it’s not Saturday, and that this post is inappropriate, but that will simply teach Jerry to leave me with the keys to the car.

This whatever-day-it-is felid has just been reported to the Greater Manchester Police by its owner, who dialed “999” (the UK equivalent of 911) to ask the emergency services for help with her cat. The “emergency” had been going on for two hours, and consisted of the cat playing with string.

The woman said the cat’s endless playing was “doing her head in”. The reply of the operator is not recorded. You can hear the call by clicking here at the BBC website.

Miranda Celeste Hale, an English professor and an atheist, has started a new website, Exquisite With Love, that deserves your attention.  Take a look, for example, at her latest post, “Rabbit is the Question,” a great satire of a truly dreadful piece of theologizing, “God is the Question,” written by Mark Vernon in this week’s Guardian.

Professor Thomas Koop is steamed.  A physical chemist at Bielefeld University in Germany, Koop was fed up with the incorrect depictions of “designer snowflakes” that don’t have the omnipresent six-fold symmetry (there are rare exceptions; one is shown below), and so he wrote a letter that was published in in last week’s Nature and highlighted in The Guardian. At first I thought, well, here’s a guy with too much time on his hands, but then realized that he’s making a point that simply adds to our appreciation of the natural world.

Allen Orr, my first graduate student, has now reviewed Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God for The New York Review of Books.  It’s a pretty negative piece, and in several places Orr and I have independently come up with the same criticisms (we’ve never discussed the book):

While Wright’s account of the history of the Abrahamic faiths is frequently fascinating, his attempts to explain that history using his new theory are, unfortunately, sometimes less than persuasive. Part of the problem is that Wright’s theory is so obviously incomplete. It would be absurd to deny that local conditions help shape religion, including moral doctrine. But it would be equally absurd to deny that there’s more to the story. . .

The Evolution of God ‘s shortcomings involve not only the content of its arguments but the intellectual methods that Wright uses to build his theory. Though his key claim—that people are more likely to do something when it’s in their interest—is fairly banal, it gets dressed up in the scientific-sounding language of game theory and evolutionary psychology. But it’s hard to take most of this language seriously. Where, for example, is the actual scientific evidence that people possess a mental faculty corresponding to the moral imagination? Where is the evidence that this faculty was built by natural selection or that it stopped evolving after our days on the savanna? Where is the evidence that this mental faculty is now misfiring? In each case, the answer is that the evidence is nonexistent or exceedingly dubious. Wright’s claims about the evolution of the human mind might prove right, or at least partly right, but they have little to do with real science.

Wright’s reliance on game theory and evolutionary psychology is troubling for another reason. These theories, particularly when taken together, are so pliant that they can explain almost anything. One consequence is that Wright’s readings of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, or Koran sometimes degenerate into clever attempts to explain each passage as a response to specific local circumstances.

I suppose that, after reading Orr’s piece, Wright can claim that two members of an academic lineage have simply misunderstood him in similar ways.

One plaint about an otherwise fine piece: at the end, Orr goes a bit soft on faith:

Despite these reservations, I find that I do agree with another, and important, point that Wright touches on in the course of these discussions. Man’s sense of the divine has, it seems clear, generally grown more sophisticated and abstract through time. The Logos of Philo is miles beyond the nearly demonic gods feared by primitive man. And as Wright emphasizes, there’s every reason to expect this trajectory to continue. Certainly, few thoughtful people, now or in the future, can be expected to take literally the poetic evocations of the divine found in Western scriptures.

Rather than “sophisticated,” I’d say “evasive,” for the increased “sophistication” represents only post facto adjustments of dogma as science has chipped away at the founding verities of faith.  I don’t see, either, why Philo’s Logos is “miles byond” early demonic gods. “Beyond” in what sense? Perhaps in making a virtue of empirical necessity, but certainly not in approaching the real truth about magical beings.

And I’m not so sure that only a “few thoughtful people” take literally the “poetic evocations of the divine found in Western scriptures.” Maybe only a few folks believe that Noah sailed on the Ark, but about 80% of Americans believe in Heaven, 75% in angels, and around 70% in Hell and Satan.  Academics, whose religious friends tend to be of the liberal stripe, seem blissfully unaware of how many Americans see the Bible as far more than metaphorical poetry. I invite Orr, as I have invited several other scholars who downplay America’s Biblical literalism, to accompany me any Sunday to a few tabernacles on the South Side of Chicago.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a New York Times writer produces a book, it will also be reviewed by the New York Times — and favorably.  The latest instantiation is Judith Shulevitz’s review of Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct in today’s NYT.  What “criticism” she levels is halfhearted.

I was asked to blurb this book by the publishers, but refused on the grounds that it was financially supported by the Templeton Foundation and its contents were, apparently, vetted by Templeton-selected reviewers (see the acknowledgments).

Lest you think that NYT authors always getting favorable reviews is just a happy coincidence, I have heard of at least once case in which the solicited review turned out strongly negative, so the Times rejected it and commissioned a more favorable review.

UPDATE:  The Economist heads its review of The Faith Instinct thusly: “An Evolutionary Biologist on Religion.”  Wade, of course, is a journalist, but The Economist in its wisdom apparently thinks that anyone who writes on evolution is an evolutionary biologist.

My vote for the worst idea of 2009 — at least in the “faith wars” — is that science and religion provide complementary (and equally valid) “ways of knowing.”  It’s an idea that’s been bruited about by not just the faithful, but by atheist accommodationists like those running the National Center for Science Education.

This idea is terrible because a. it’s nonsensical, b. its proponents never examine it critically, because if they did they’d see that c. it’s wrong.  It’s a mantra, a buzz-phrase.  And it reared its ugly head once more when I came to the end of Francis Collins’s The Language of God:  A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

The main point of this book is that faith and science are not inimical but mutually supportive.  And faith, says Collins, gives us truths just as valid as those gleaned from science.  Here’s a brief excerpt from his last chapter:

WHAT KIND OF FAITH?

Most of the world’s great faiths share many truths, and probably they would not have survived had that not been so. Yet there are also interesting and important differences, and each person needs to seek out his own particular path to the truth . .

Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview provides another way of finding truth.  Scientists who deny this would be well advised to consider the limits of their own tools, as nicely represented in a parable told by the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He described a man who set about to study deep-sea fish using a net that had a mesh size of three inches.  After catching many wild and wonderful creatures from the depths, the man concluded that there are no deep-sea fish that are smaller than three inches in length! If we are using the scientific net to catch our particular version of the truth, we should not be surprised that it does not catch the evidence of spirit.

Note the sneaky transition in the first passage from the “truths” of religion and a “particular path to the truth.”

It’s not clear which “truths” are shared by many faiths — Collins might point to the Golden Rule, but of course that’s a not a truth but a moral imperative — but what Collins conveniently overlooks in his book is the simple fact that many “truths” aren’t shared by the world’s great faiths.  Jesus either was or was not the son of God.  Mohamed either was or was not a divine prophet.  Either the Hindus are right, and there are many gods, or they’re wrong, and there’s either one or none. It’s either ok to stone adulterers, or it’s not.

Collins has settled on Christianity as being true (his evidence is that the Gospels’ “style and content suggests [sic] strongly that they are intended to be the record of eyewitnesses”) but doesn’t talk about the faithful, like Jews and Muslims, who don’t accept his “truth.”

You don’t have to be a genius to see, then, that religious truth is not at all equivalent to scientific truth — people agree about the latter but not the former.   Not only do all faiths conflict on their bedrock dogma, but there’s no way to settle the dispute.  Finally, science comes with built-in methods for settling its arguments; faith does not.

I would love to ask Collins, and other religious scientists, the following question: How would you know if you were wrong about the religious truths you apprehend? That’s the question they always avoid, for trying to answer it would make them look ridiculous.  They deserve not admiration but derision.

You may know this already, but some birds and sea mammals sleep with one eye open and the other closed.  During this form of sleep, called “unihemispheric slow-wave sleep” (USWS), half of the brain (the one opposite the closed eye) gets a rest while the other half remains on duty, keeping the animals safe from predators or, if they’re marine, able to keep surfacing to breathe.

I’ve just learned of a ten-year-old study in Nature by Neils Rattenborg et al. looking at USWS in mallards, who often sleep in rows.  The researchers found that birds sleeping at the end of a row engaged in USWS 31% of the time, as opposed to only 12% for ducks in the middle.  Moreover, in “edge” birds, the  eye facing away from the center of the group was open 86% of the time, as opposed to only 52% — not different from random — for “inside” birds. EEG recordings showed that this eye-closing indicated sleep on the opposite side of the brain.

What is even more amazing is a fact documented in this wonderful Radiolab program on sleep rebroadcast yesterday (do listen to it if you have a free hour): the “edge” ducks occasionally turn themselves around 180 degrees. When they do this, the new outer eye is the one that remains open.

This behavior apparently allows both sides of the brain get some sleep! (We still don’t know why sleep is biologically essential, but it is: humans and rats deprived of sleep, for instance, eventually die.)

Another cute anecdote: Rattenborg also reports that he once saw a pet cockatiel sleeping next to a mirror:  “The mirror-side eye closed as if the reflection were a pal, and the other eye stayed open.”

The biological imperative of sleep remains one of the great mysteries of science.

______________

Rattenborg, N. C., S. L. Lima, and C. J. Amlander. 1999. Half-awake to the risk of predation. Nature 397:397-398.