Well, he’s ready to admit that Islam, at least, makes people do bad things.  Here’s Sullivan’s post on the Northwest plane bomber:

A classic Jihadist profile:

He is the son of the recently retired Chairman of First Bank of Nigeria, Dr. Umaru Abdul Mutallab. The Al-Qaida-linked Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab is an engineering student at University College London.  Saharareporters sources have revealed that prior to his sojourn in the UK, Farouk had studied at the prestigious British School of Lome, Togo. Where he passed his International Bacchalaureates Diploma before moving to UCL.

It sure isn’t poverty that forces these loons to do what they do. It’s religion.

Now maybe Sullivan will ponder the influence of religion on the Catholic loons: those who consign us to Hell for being Jews or for having the wrong kind of sex, those who prefer death from AIDS to condom use, those who cover up child abuse in the “interests” of the Church. 

Over at the London Review of Books, Steven Shapin, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, analyzes the past year of Darwin festivities, mentioning several books along the way and taking a swipe at adaptationism:

‘Adaptationists’ take it as securely established that organic change proceeds through the natural selection of individual traits, each of which improves the organism’s reproductive chances, that each trait’s evolutionary end-point represents an optimum, and that no other process is needed for an evolutionary lineage to move along through time. But adaptationism has distinguished critics within biology departments – Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and the late Stephen Jay Gould among them – and they have argued that there is a difference between asserting adaptation as a possible means of getting smoothly from evolutionary point A to point B and establishing that this is in fact how organic change has occurred. Maybe there are developmental constraints on how traits change, and change with respect to other traits; maybe some traits are accidental by-products of changes in other traits; maybe evolutionary change is in fact discontinuous; maybe there is a dialectical causal relationship between organisms and the environmental niches to which they ‘adapt’; maybe processes other than adaptation are at work but we just don’t know much about them yet. The adaptationist camp includes Dawkins, Dennett and Pinker – some of the most enthusiastic Darwin Year celebrants. Adaptationists tend to give spectators a misleading picture of the scientific state of play, while at the same time laying claim to a founding father who in fact had reservations about the power and sufficiency of natural selection. There is a struggle among scientists for Darwin’s soul. It is understandable that modern evolutionists should configure history as best suits present purposes, but truth in advertising should be part of the exercise.

This piece is both long and pretty lame, and one gets the idea that Shapin hasn’t really digested the subject — or couldn’t think of  anything new to say about it — and is just phoning in his piece.  But he’s way off the mark in implying that adaptationism is “false advertising.”  Yes, there are constraints on selection and evolution, and yes, some evolutionary psychologists have gone overboard in imputing every human behavior to natural selection on our ancestors.  But perhaps the good Dr. Shapin, head humming with fancy new biology terms like “developmental constraints,” “pleiotropy,” and “niche construction,” would like to suggest something other than natural selection that could explain the wings of birds, the fins of fish, the spines of cacti, and so on.  Prediction: he can’t.

It’s a common ploy to tout the impotence of natural selection by throwing around buzzwords like “modularity,” “genetic assimilation,” and so on.  Philosopher Jerry Fodor did just this in his 2007 attack on natural selection, also published in the LRB.  Look for a book-length sequel in 2010.

They’re talking about the Freedom from Religion’s sign at the Illinois state capitol’s Christmas display.

Atheists should shut up at Christmas and, by the way, the rest of the time too, because this country was explicitly founded on a belief in God, and talking about atheism doesn’t really fall under the rubric of free speech . . .

If you haven’t read this short tale yet, I’m jealous, for you’ll have your first encounter with Truman Capote’s remarkable evocation of his childhood (better to buy it than read it online).  For me, this is the finest of all Christmas stories.  Capote is underrated as a prose stylist, and here he’s at his best. If you don’t have a tear in your eye at the end, you’re simply not human.

The story (first published in Mademoiselle in 1956) was made into a splendid t.v. drama ten years later, starring Geraldine Page as Aunt Sook and with narration by Capote himself. It won tons of awards.  Here’s the first part, and you’ll find the other five on YouTube:

The Conservation Report has a really nice collection of photos of camouflaged animals (and one of plants: the stoneplant Lithops).  These, too, are great for teaching, or just marvelling at how, in the case of camouflage, evolution can achieve something like optimal design. (Some day I’m going to write a piece about how close organisms  actually get to optimal design when you have an objective criterion for what is optimal.  Camouflage is one case, sex ratio another.)

Here are a few examples:

h/t: blueollie

Neil Shubin and his estimable artist, Kalliopi Monoyios (who also illustrated WEIT), have made available sets of Powerpoint slides from Your Inner Fish.  All are welcome to use them.

Tiktaalik, of course, features prominently.  Many of these are great for teaching about evolution and the nature of transitional forms; you can find them here.

It’ll be out Jan. 22, but I already have a box of copies (i.e., more contests to come!).  You can order it for the unbeatable price of $10.80 at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  For a measly pair of fins, you can arm yourself with all the evidence you need to beat back creationists.

What other book is endorsed not only by all New Atheists everywhere, but also by the Christian Science Monitor and Wall Street Journal?  And just today it was chosen by Xu Xing in Nature as  a favorite science book of 2009.

Jerry Coyne has long been one of the world’s most skillful defenders of evolutionary science in the face of religious obscurantism. In Why Evolution is True, he has produced an indispensable book: the single, accessible volume that makes the case for evolution. But Coyne has delivered much more than the latest volley in our “culture war”; he has given us an utterly fascinating, lucid, and beautifully written account of our place in the natural world. If you want to better understand your kinship with the rest of life, this book is the place to start.

— Sam Harris, founder of the Reason Project and author of the New York Times best sellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation

Scientists don’t use the word ‘true’ lightly, but in this lively and engrossing book, Jerry Coyne shows why biologists are happy to use it when it comes to evolution. Evolution is ‘true’ not because the experts say it is, nor because some world view demands it, but because the evidence overwhelmingly supports it. There are many superb books on evolution, but this one is superb in a new way — it explains out the latest evidence for evolution lucidly, thoroughly, and with devastating effectiveness.

— Steven Pinker, Harvard University, and author of “The Stuff of Thought:  Language as a Window into Human Nature”

Evolution is the foundation of modern biology, and in ‘Why Evolution Is True,’ Jerry Coyne masterfully explains why. From the vast trove of evidence of evolution scientists have gathered, Coyne has carefully selected some of the most striking examples and explained them with equal parts grace and authority.”

–Carl Zimmer, author of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life

Its ignorant opponents like to say that the process of evolution by natural selection is “only a theory”. (That’s how they prove their ignorance.) Jerry Coyne shows with elegance and rigor that it is a hypothesis that meets and withstands all tests, and strengthens itself as a theory thereby. One could almost say that it had the distinct merit of being true.

— Christopher Hitchens

For anyone who wishes a clear, well-written explanation of evolution by one of the foremost scientists working on the subject, Why Evolution is True should be your choice.

— E. O. Wilson

I once wrote that anybody who didn’t believe in evolution must be stupid, insane or ignorant, and I was then careful to add that ignorance is no crime. I should now update my statement. Anybody who doesn’t believe in evolution is stupid, insane, or hasn’t read Jerry Coyne. I defy any reasonable person to read this marvellous book and still take seriously the ‘breathtaking inanity’ that is intelligent design ‘theory’ or its country cousin, young earth creationism. . . Outstandingly good. . Coyne’s knowledge of evolutionary biology is prodigious, his deployment of it as masterful as his touch is light.

— Richard Dawkins

[Coyne] make an unassailable case.

— The New York Times

Coyne’s book is the best general explication of evolution that I know of and deserves its success as a bestseller.

— Richard Lewontin, The New York Review of Books

Coyne is as graceful a stylist and as clear a scientific explainer as Darwin himself (no mean feat). . .one of the best single-volume introductions to evolutionary theory ever.

— Wired

The joy [Coyne] takes in his work is evident on every page, whether he’s offering a bone-buy-bone analysis of how dinosaurs evolved into birds or describing how docile Japanese honeybees have come up with their particularlyl incendiary defense against maurauding giant hornets.

— San Francisco Chronicle