In last week’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof touted the books of Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright (as well as that of his colleague Nicholas Wade) as a welcome relief, “less combative and more throughtful”, from books by the “new atheists”:

I’m hoping that the latest crop of books marks an armistice in the religious wars, a move away from both religious intolerance and irreligious intolerance. That would be a sign that perhaps we, along with God, are evolving toward a higher moral order.

In the letters section of today’s Times, Lawrence Krauss disagrees with Kristof’s mealymouthed call for some nonexistent “middle ground”:

. . .“God” has gotten more moral over time because even organized religions have been dragged forward, often kicking and screaming, by human reason, which itself has been pushed forward by our discoveries about nature — discoveries that belied obviously false notions about superiority of one race over another or the need to impose divine vengeance to respond to simple, explicable acts of nature.

While it is surely true that faith itself may exist beyond the bounds of rationality, what Mr. Kristof should be praising is reason and not faith.

If one wants to find transcendent examples of pushing reasoning to its limit and stretching language to the end of its tether, one could do worse than to read the books of my colleagues Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.

Of course the Times has to palliate such an atheistic letter, and so they’ve published another criticizing both “the fervently faithful”  and the “militant atheistic” for their lack of humility — humility that the author finds necessary for serious engagement.

I may be mistaken, but I think we’re already doing serious engagement.  It’s fatuous to think that if only both sides became more “humble,” we’d arrive at some welcome compromise.  And what would that be?  Presumably, atheists would stop their vociferous criticism of religion, while religion could continue business as usual.  In other words, the status quo.

Atheists have been “humble” for centuries (who was more humble than Spinoza?) and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. It’s that crop of new atheist books that have finally created a climate in which atheists need not feel like pariahs. Like my confrères so maligned by Kristof, I think it’s time to try Mencken’s way:

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.

I’ve had my differences with Andrew Sullivan, especially over the compatibility of science and religion, but today he gets plaudits for his post “Leaving the right” over at the Daily Dish.  In it he proffers a long list of reasons why he can no longer support conservatism.  A few of them (my emphasis):

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a “radical leftist” as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn’t leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I’m not alone.

Good for you, Mr. Sullivan!  Regarding evolution (not the largest issue on the plate), a party that doesn’t accept it as a fact is a party that can deny anything.

h/t: Greg Mayer

Why Evolution is True has been translated into several languages, and this month I received two new ones, the Spanish and Chinese versions.  Immodestly, I present them here.

The Chinese edition, which has a foreword by my Chicago colleague Manyuan Long, represented a difficult translation job.  Apparently many scientific words, including the word “evolution” itself, have no counterparts in Chinese.  This makes for some amusing reading: entire pages will be in Chinese save for one or two words with no Chinese equivalent. Here’s an example:

I’m working on getting it translated into Arabic, prompted by this report of a conference in Cairo dealing with, among other things, the woeful lack of evolution education in Egyptian schools.

UPDATE:  Polish edition (see comments):

Over at the Times Literary Supplement, an estimable organ for which I’ve written frequently, philosopher Thomas Nagel has blurbed an ID book, Discovery Institute darling Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, as one of the books of the year for 2009:

Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

“Detailed account”?? How about “religious speculation”?

Nagel is a respected philosopher who’s made big contributions to several areas of philosophy, and this is inexplicable, at least to me.  I have already called this to the attention of the TLS, just so they know.

Do any of you know of critiques of Meyer’s book written by scientists? I haven’t been able to find any on the internet, and would appreciate links.

Online here: a debate on “atheism as fundamentalism”. It’s just starting (2:15 EST), so watch now. It will go on until 4:30 EST.  Harries and Moore vs. Dawkins and Grayling:

For the first time, Intelligence Squared will be live-streaming a debate on this page:

“Atheism is the new fundamentalism”

In partnership with livestation.com, from 6.45pm (GMT) this evening, you will be able to watch online as Richard Dawkins, author of ‘The God Delusion’ and Professor A C Grayling, take on Richard Harries, the former bishop of Oxford, and Charles Moore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, at this sold-out Wellington Squared event held at Wellington College, Berkshire. It will be chaired by the Headmaster of Wellington (and political historian) Anthony Seldon.

Postmortem:  In the debate proper, I thought that Dawkins and Grayling far outshone the others (of course, I’m hardly objective here!), but Harries and Moore were quite eloquent and put on a good show.  On our side, Grayling had great things to say, especially about Stalin and Hitler as “apostles of atheism,” while Richard was more fiery.  They were a great counterpoise of the restrained but eloquent philosopher and the outspoken evolutionist.

Initial vote (online):

Atheism is the new fundamentalism.

Agree   5%

Disagree 87%

Don’t know 8%

Final vote (after the debate, online):

Agree  4%

Disagree  95%

Don’t know 1%

Initial vote (audience):

Atheism is the new fundamentalism.

Agree   24%

Disagree 48%

Don’t know 28%

Final vote (audience):

Agree  24%

Disagree  70%

Don’t know 6%

Looks like most of the minds changed came moved the “don’t know” to the “disagree” category.  A win in both audiences!

If you have 2.25 hours to spare (I don’t today, but I’ll look soon), they’ve posted the Ciudad de las Ideas religion debate, which I missed when I was in Mexico, on YouTube.

Against faith:  Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens

The faithful for faith: Shmuley Boteach, Dinesh D’Souza, Nasim Taleb

The atheist for faith:  Robert Wright.

The sound seems to be a bit muted, but it may be my computer.

Well, in your collective wisdom you’ve guessed it, as I knew you would.  These are in fact The Spandrels of San Marco (as one astute reader pointed out, they’re not really spandrels but pendentives) from the Basilica di San Marco in Venice.  I visited the building not a week ago, and was marvelling at the architecture and its fantastic mosaics.  As I was doing so, I recognized the spandrels (pendentives), each of which, as in my photograph of yesterday, contains a decoration.  And I suddenly realized, “Holy shit, these are the spandrels of San Marco!”  And so I photographed them.

They are famous for more than their mosaics: they are the ostensible topic of a famous paper by Steve Gould and Richard Lewontin (my Ph.D advisor), to wit:  Gould, S. J., and R. C. Lewontin. 1979. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm:  a critique of the adaptationist program. Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 205:581-598.  The point of the article, made in its introduction given below, was that although spandrels harbor decorations, they were not put there by the architect as a surface to be decorated. Rather, spandrels (or pendentives, excuse me), are the necessary byproduct of placing a dome on top of arches and columns.  And, like many features of organisms, spandrels are byproducts.

Gould and Lewontin pointed out that many traits of animals and plants were not the direct objects of natural selection, but reflect other processes.  For example, blood is red not because it’s adaptive for blood to be red (I suppose an ardent sociobiologist could say that the red color makes blushes evident, which conveys emotions, etc. etc., but of course moles have red blood too!), but that the color is a byproduct of selection for an oxygen-carrying molecule, hemoglobin, that just happens to be red. In other words, it’s pleiotropy: a non-adaptive byproduct of an adaptation. In section 5 of their paper, G&L list many other ways that the traits of plants and animals can be nonadaptive.

This paper is famous because the authors were famous, because it’s very well written, but most of all because it posed a direct attack on the “Panglossian paradigm”: the view that sociobiology wants to explain all traits, particularly human behaviors, as the direct products of selection.  This paper has been the subject of furious discussion and at least one book.  In my view, the paper made some valid points but went overboard in its criticism of the adaptationist program, which, after all, has produced lots of insights about evolution.  I knew Gould, who was on my thesis committee, and it always seemed like pulling teeth to get him to admit that natural selection was even a relatively important force in evolution.  If pressed, he would, but Gould always preferred (perhaps for political reasons) to emphasize the limitations of selection.  Lewontin was not nearly so extreme.

You can find the original article here or (original journal pdf) here.  It’s worth reading it if you haven’t before, even if you disagree with much of the message.

The opening is pure Gould:

The great central dome of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice presents in its mosaic design a detailed iconography expressing the mainstays of Christian faith. Three circles of figures radiate out from a central image of Christ: angels, disciples, and virtues. Each circle is divided into quadrants, even though the dome itself is radially symmetrical in structure. Each quadrant meets one of the four spandrels in the arches below the dome. Spandrels-the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angles are necessary architectural byproducts of mounting a dome on rounded arches. Each spandrel contains a design admirably fitted into its tapering space. An evangelist sits in the upper part flanked by the heavenly cities. Below, a man representing one of the four biblical rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Nile) pours water from a pitcher in the narrowing space below his feet.

(this image at http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ ~suchii/spandrel.html)

The design is so elaborate, harmonious, and purposeful that we are tempted to view it as the starting point of any analysis, as the cause in some sense of the surrounding architecture. But this would invert the proper path of analysis. The system begins with an architectural constraint: the necessary four spandrels and their tapering triangular form. They provide a space in which the mosaicists worked; they set the quadripartite symmetry of the dome above.

Such architectural constraints abound, and we find them easy to understand because we do not impose our biological biases upon them. Every fan-vaulted ceiling must have a series of open spaces along the midline of the vault, where the sides of the fans intersect between the pillars. Since the spaces must exist, they are often used for ingenious ornamental effect. In King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, for example, the spaces contain bosses alternately embellished with the Tudor rose and portcullis. In a sense, this design represents an “adaptation,” but the architectural constraint is clearly primary. The spaces arise as a necessary by-product of fan vaulting; their appropriate use is a secondary effect. Anyone who tried to argue that the structure exists be-cause the alternation of rose and portcullis makes so much sense in a Tudor chapel would be inviting the same ridicule that Voltaire heaped on Dr. Pangloss: “Things cannot be other than they are… Everything is made for the best purpose. Our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Legs were clearly intended for breeches, and we wear them.” Yet evolutionary biologists, in their tendency to focus exclusively on immediate adaptation to local conditions, do tend to ignore architectural constraints and perform just such an inversion of explanation.

Read the rest; it’s certainly one of the most important papers in modern evolutionary biology.