Michael Ruse’s WhingeFest: atheists very, very bad for evolution

August 14, 2009 • 9:21 am

As the the season of atheist-bashing proceeds, faitheist Michael Ruse continues to whine about us on — of all places — the religious “Science and the Sacred” website, a venue for “leaders of the BioLogos Foundation.”  Ruse’s article is called “Why I think the new atheists are a disaster,” and you could write it with your eyes closed.  It’s full of the usual accusations, including Ruse’s speciality: the claim that atheists are as big a disaster for the pro-evolution movement as are fundamentalist creationists:

. . Secondly, I think that the new atheists are doing terrible political damage to the cause of Creationism fighting. Americans are religious people. You may not like this fact. But they are. Not all are fanatics. Survey after survey shows that most American Christians (and Jews and others) fall in the middle on social issues like abortion and gay marriage as well as on science. They want to be science-friendly, although it is certainly true that many have been seduced by the Creationists. We evolutionists have got to speak to these people. We have got to show them that Darwinism is their friend not their enemy. We have got to get them onside when it comes to science in the classroom. And criticizing good men like Francis Collins, accusing them of fanaticism, is just not going to do the job. Nor is criticizing everyone, like me, who wants to build a bridge to believers – not accepting the beliefs, but willing to respect someone who does have them. For myself, I would like America to have a healthcare system like Canada – government run, compulsory, universal. It is cheaper and better. But I engage with those who want free enterprise to be involved in the business. Likewise I engage with believers – I don’t accept their beliefs but I respect their right to have them.

Most importantly, the new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of the schools. The First Amendment does not ban the teaching of bad science in publicly funded schools. It bans the teaching of religion. That is why it is crucial to argue that Creationism, including its side kick IDT, is religion and not just bad science. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If teaching “God exists” is teaching religion – and it is – then why is teaching “God does not exist” not teaching religion? Obviously it is teaching religion. But if science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment. Perhaps indeed teaching Darwinism is implicitly teaching atheism. This is the claim of the new atheists. If this is so, then we shall have to live with it and rethink our strategy about Creationism and the schools. The point is however that the new atheists have lamentably failed to prove their point, and excoriating people like me who show the failure is (again) not very helpful.

I think that P. Z. Myers and his crew are as disastrous to the evolution side – and people like me need to say this – as Ben Stein is disastrous to the Creationism side – and the Creationists should have had the guts to say so. I have written elsewhere that The God Delusion makes me ashamed to be an atheist. Let me say that again. Let me say also that I am proud to be the focus of the invective of the new atheists. They are a disaster and I want to be on the front line of those who say so.

In the immortal words of Clara Peller, “Where’s the beef?” Where is the evidence that vocal atheists are setting back the cause of evolution? This is only an opinion, and no better than the opinion that by pushing back the influence of religion, the new atheists are actually promoting the acceptance of evolution. I agree with P.Z. Myers that we should “let a thousand critics blossom,” with each of us supporting evolution in the way we know best.

And Ruse, who seems to pride himself on his sophisticated knowledge of theology, runs completely aground when he equates teaching Darwinism with teaching atheism.  I don’t know of a single evolutionist who teaches atheism in their classrooms, or who even says in the classroom that Darwinism is tantamount to atheism. Show me, Dr. Ruse, one atheist who violates freedom of religion by saying, “God does not exist” in the public school (or even the university) classroom.   Yes, teaching evolution may have the side result of eroding some peoples’ faith, but, as I’ve pointed out before, the erosion of faith can occur in the geology classroom, the astronomy classroom, the ethics classroom, and even in the theology classroom! (How many believers have lost their faith when learning about how the Bible was actually put together?) As the respect for rational discourse increases, as it should with a good education, the respect for religion will erode.  But that doesn’t mean that a good education violates the First Amendment.

Behind all this, I think, is Ruse’s anger at having been attacked by atheists, something he makes pretty clear in the article:

I am not a devout Christian, yet if anything, the things said against me are worse. Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, likens me to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler at Munich. Jerry Coyne reviewed one of my books (Can a Darwinian be a Christian?) using the Orwellian quote that only an intellectual could believe the nonsense I believe in. And non-stop blogger P. Z. Myers has referred to be as a “clueless gobshite.” This invective is all because, although I am not a believer, I do not think that all believers are evil or stupid, and because I do not think that science and religion have to clash. (Of course some science and religion clashes. That is the whole point of the Darwinism-Creationism debate. The matter is whether all science and religion clash, something I deny strongly.)

Ruse also goes after Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and other new atheists for their lame and unsophisticated arguments against religion.  This is again standard fare, but if there’s a better theological argument for the existence of God than has been criticized by these people, I don’t know it.  For someone who touts his sophistication in theology and philosophy, Ruse shows himself appallingly dense about the relationship between teaching evolution, teaching atheism, and the First Amendment.  And it’s sad that a philosopher with any pretension to intellectual rigor must consort with the mushbrained BioLogos Foundation.

NOTE:  As the evisceration of Ruse proceeds at the Science and the Sacred website as well as at RichardDawkins.net, I want to highlight one comment made by “Mr. Forrest” (comment 45 on the Dawkins.net thread), especially the part in bold (my emphasis).  As Mr. Forrest notes, the ontological argument, which Ruse sees as badly treated by Dawkins, is just plain stupid.

Holy crap… the ontological argument is the one that goes approximately:

1. I can imagine a perfect God
2. One of the attributes of perfection is existence

Therefore:
God exists.

I just vaguely remeber this one from religious studies. Apart from being WILDLY idiosyncratic AND a logical and empirical train-wreck, I would like to challenge the theists to come up with a specific morally perfect god and have them answer a couple of moral dillemas. Then we’ll see how “perfect” their god is.

Oh and the article was fucking awful. I think its insulting in the extreme to presume that people are incapable of having a discussion in frank terms.
Calling the new atheists violent or strident serves EXACTLY the same function as calling an african-american “uppity”. We’re standing up for our views and being really insanely polite about it considering the effects of religion.

Do we really need million man marches, riots, decades of civil rights activism etc. to be granted the right to speak our minds?

Yale University Press refuses to show Muhammad cartoons in a book about them

August 14, 2009 • 6:49 am

As most of us remember, in 2005 there was a huge furor when a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published twelve cartoons showing the Islamic prophet Muhammad, some of the images fairly innocuous, others using Muhammad to make a critical statement about Islam. (The most famous of the latter depicted Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb.)   Much of the Muslim world objected to showing an image of the prophet — which some of the faithful interpret as forbidden by the Qur’an — and to the perceived insult to faith conveyed by some of the cartoons. This led to to rioting throughout the Muslim world, and to the deaths of over 200 people.

Now, as reported by Wednesday’s New York Times, Yale University Press is publishing a book about these cartoons, The Cartoons that Shook the World, but will not show the cartoons in that book. (Other images of Muhammad that apparently do not depict him as a harbinger of violence were also kept from inclusion.)

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

Gratuitous?  In a book about them?  I cannot imagine a book about the history of racist political cartoons in America, for instance, that wouldn’t show some of these cartoons.  And I have often seen images of anti-Semitic cartoons in discussions about the Nazi persecution of Jews (see here, for example).

According to the Times, images of Muhammad have been published before without causing problems:

Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.

The controversy, then, seems to be less about showing the prophet himself than about inciting disturbance by publishing cartoons that criticize Islam.  But it is bizarre to have an academic discussion about these images without showing them, especially when the Press tells readers that (wink wink) you can easily find the images elsewhere.


You can see the article about them in Wikipedia here, and the 12 Danish images here.  There are lots of comments about this decision on Richard Dawkins’s website (h/t: Dawkins webmaster).

How the tapir got his spots III

August 13, 2009 • 12:49 pm

by Greg Mayer

The two great classes of phenomena that Darwin set out to explain were those of adaptation– the fit between an organism’s features (structure, behavior, etc.) and its conditions of existence; and unity of type — the similarities of basic structure among organisms in diverse conditions of existence (e.g., the one bone-two bones-many bones pattern of tetrapod forelimbs, whether they be burrowers, swimmers, climbers, runners, etc.). The unified explanation that Darwin provided for these phenomena was descent with modification: the similarities were due to inheritance from a common ancestor (i.e. descent), while adaptation arose from the process of modification (i.e. natural selection).

The methods of studying adaptation are thus crucial for biology.  How can we tell what (if anything) the spots of the baby tapir are adaptive for?

There are three basic ways of studying adaptation, in the sense of determining what a trait is an adaptation to. The first is engineering: does the feature conform to what we would expect if it is performing some adaptive function?  Study of hydrodynamics enables us to understand the shapes of the bodies, flippers, and fins in fish, dolphins, icthyosaurs, etc. as adaptations to movement within a fluid environment.  The dorsal fin of an ichthyosaur, for example, stabilizes the reptile in its forward movement through water, preventing unwanted roll (for recent discussions of ichthyosaur aquatic adaptations, see here, here, and here). For another example of the engineering approach, see Richard Dawkins’ delightful account of bat sonar in chap. 2 of The Blind Watchmaker.

Second, there is the method of correlation (also called the comparative method): does the feature evolve repeatedly in particular environmental circumstances? Thus even if we were wholly ignorant of hydrodynamics, the repeated evolution of dorsal fins in aquatic fish, reptiles, and mammals provides evidence that dorsal fins are adaptations to an aquatic existence.

250px-Tigershark3800px-Ickthyosaur_MNHOrca_dorsalfin_NOAA

Third, we can study the effects on survival and reproduction of variations in the trait of interest.  This can be done either by altering the features of the character experimentally (as in this neat experiment on sexual selection in widowbirds) or by studying naturally occurring variants (as was done with peppered moths by  H.B.D. Kettlewell).

The evidence for the adaptiveness of spotting/striping in mammals is primarily of the first sort (Hugh B. Cott, in his classic Adaptive Coloration in Animals, has a lot about optical principles, and what makes things hard to see), the second sort (pacas, bongos, deer, tapirs all have spots and/or stripes [and note that pacas are rodents, and that tapirs, which are perissodactyls, are not at all closely related to the artiodactyl deer and bongo, so it would be hard to argue it’s a retained ancestral feature]), and very little of the third sort– no one’s painted baby tapirs’ spots over to see what happens to them (at least as far as I know). I’ll touch on all three sorts as they relate to tapirs in later posts.

(For other examples of camouflage, see Matthew Cobb’s earlier post on the subject.)

Mooney and Kirshenbaum self-destruct at last

August 11, 2009 • 11:25 am

After this post, I’m not going to be writing about these two any more; I’ve had my say about their book, and I’ve watched in disgust as they engaged in frenzied and nearly duplicitous self-promotion while ignoring or distorting reasonable criticisms of their book.  I’ve also seen them move from wanting my take on Unscientific America, saying that they thought it would be “balanced and fair,” to then dismissing my critical opinion on the grounds that I’m a biased “new atheist.”  I’m sorry, but my opinion was indeed balanced and fair: Unscientific America is simply a bad book, shallow, unreflective, and not worth buying or reading.

And now Mooney and Kirshenbaum have published an equally shallow and unreflective editorial in the L. A. Times. It’s a rambling, confused piece, accusing the new atheists of hurting science literacy, implying that Richard Dawkins has, in the main, impeded the acceptance of evolution, and even invoking the ghost of Charles Darwin against us. (Why are we supposed to worship everything that Darwin ever said? He was a man, not a god.)

I’m not going to dissect their piece in detail: as usual, P.Z. at Pharyngula has beaten me to the punch, and I have little to add to his lucubrations.  And the crowd here should be well familiar with M&K’s arguments.  I just want to say two things:

1.  The “new atheists” have been on the scene for exactly five years, beginning with Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, published in 2004.  But American’s attitudes to evolution have been relatively unchanged (with 40+% denying it) for twenty-five years.  This means two things:

a.  American illiteracy about evolutionary biology cannot have been due to criticism of religion by the “new atheists.”

b.  The dominant strategy of scientific organizations engaged in fighting creationism over the past twenty-five years has been accommodationism: coddling or refusing to criticize religious people for fear of alienating those of the faithful who support evolution. This has been combined with incessant claims that science and religion are perfectly compatible.   This strategy has not worked.

2.    M&K have repeatedly noted that religious people have a problem with evolution because of religion, and yet they bray incessantly that religion is not the problem: it’s those pesky new atheists.  Here is what they say about my criticisms of the National Center for Science Education’s (NCSE) “Faith Project”:

In this, Coyne is once again following the lead of Dawkins, who in “The God Delusion” denounces the NCSE as part of the “Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists,” those equivocators who defend the science but refuse to engage with what the New Atheists perceive as the real root of the problem — namely, religious belief.

And of course they claim that such criticisms are mistaken and counterproductive.

So I will say this to Mooney and Kirshenbaum one last time, without hope that they’ll absorb it or even respond to it:  the strategy you suggest has not worked. We’ve been making nice with religion for decades, and America remains as “unscientific” as ever. We don’t just perceive religion as the root of the problem, it IS the root of the problem.  Even you, Mooney and Kirshenbaum, must admit that. And many of us feel that Americans won’t begin to accept evolution — or indeed, become more rational about many scientific issues, including stem-cell research and global warming — until they abandon the anti-rational habits of religion.  The “new atheists” are against religion because it is inimical to rational thought.

UPDATE:   Greg Fish and Jason Rosenhouse have just posted good critiques of M&K’s editorial.

The origins of morality

August 10, 2009 • 4:06 pm

by Greg Mayer

One of the curious things in Francis Collins’ The Language of God is his claim that there are no, or scarcely any, antecedents of moral behavior in animals.  He writes (p. 23):

As best I can tell, this law [the “Moral Law” or “‘the law of right behavior'”] appears to apply peculiarly to human beings. Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species’ behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness.

Quite aside from the all too frequent times when human beings’ behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness (see any newspaper), a point made by, among others, Sam Harris, the statement is jarring to anyone at all acquainted with the behavior of vertebrate animals, especially a phylogenetically diverse group of them. The incipient stages of the development of the moral sense, and the gradations in the complexity of familial and social behavior in animals, have long been known and documented (see, e.g. Darwin’s accounts in Expression of the Emotions and Descent of Man), but they’re also pretty evident to anyone who’s owned a dog. Indeed, among my earliest contributions to the WEIT blog was an application of Steve Pinker’s “rudimentary moral sentiments” to my cat, Peyton.

Classic Christian theologians might also be surprised by Collins’ claim. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his account of natural law, wrote

Because in man there is first of all an inclination to good in accordance with the nature which he has in common with all substances…  Secondly, there is in man an inclination to things that pertain to him more specially, according to that nature which he has in common with other animals: and in virtue of this inclination, those things are said to belong to the natural law, “which nature has taught to all animals…” [emphases added]

And, just to make it clear, St. Thomas views these shared inclinations as good things.

I bring this up because while in Costa Rica earlier this summer, I read Frans de Waal‘s Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. In the book, de Waal makes a convincing case for a wide assortment of moral and pre-moral sentiments in non-human animals, especially primates.  There is in fact every indication of a wide range of such sentiments in animals, ranging from tender parental care in crocodilians and birds, to a sense of fairness in chimps. Jerry earlier posted about some of de Waal’s work, and a quote from him (i.e. de Waal) in an article in the Telegraph, states it nicely:

I am not arguing that non-human primates are moral beings but there is enough evidence for the following of social rules to agree that some of the stepping stones towards human morality can be found in other animals.

Insightful rooks

August 9, 2009 • 11:40 am

by Greg Mayer

Matthew Cobb, my fellow guest blogger, has called my attention to a recent paper in Current Biology (abstract only) by Christopher Bird (yes, that’s his name) and Nathan Emery on the behavior of rooks (Corvus frugilegus) that was covered by the BBC and the Times. There’s also a video on the Current Biology website (both this and the BBC video are behaving badly, but the Times‘ is working for me).

A rook on Dartmoor, from Wikipedia
A rook on Dartmoor, from Wikipedia

What Bird and Emery have shown is that rooks will add stones to a tube of water, raising the water level, so they can reach the water to drink it. As many have noted, this corresponds quite closely to Aesop’s fable of the crow and the pitcher. This shows a remarkable cognitive ability, which seems actually insightful.  Crows and their relatives, especially ravens, have been the subject of much recent research showing that they have quite impressive intelligences.  The work of Bernd Heinrich (see, for example, his Mind of the Raven) is especially notable.

I should note here that unlike America, which has one common species of crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos; link is from a great site maintained by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology), Britain has several species of crows, including the rook, the jackdaw, and the chough (the latter not actually very common, but I like the sound of its name; links from another great site from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds— h/t to Matthew). Several species also occur in Greece, so Aesop’s fable may have applied to rooks. Ravens are basically large-bodied crows; the common raven, Corvus corax, is found throughout much of the northern hemisphere.

Caturday felid

August 8, 2009 • 7:51 am

by Greg Mayer

Having been thinking about the taxonomic distribution and adaptive significance (if any) of spots and stripes, I recalled that my cat, Peyton (see here and here), had some pattern elements quite reminiscent of tigers (beyond being a tiger tabby– the “tiger” stripes of tabby cats are not very like the stripes of tigers).  So I went to the Racine Zoo to look at the tiger.

The particular pattern element that seemed tiger-like was the striping on the inside of her legs, which is not well seen on the tiger here. I was more intrigued by the fact that along the back, some of the stripes of the tiger form rosette-like ovals (rosettes are found in leopards, jaguars, and young lions), which can be seen in this photo (blurred by the glass keeping me and the tiger separated).

Siberian tiger at Racine Zoo; note oval markings