Quote of the day

June 11, 2009 • 8:02 am

“Many well-educated, secular people have learned to fear the suffering of their less educated, less socially advantaged neighbors. It seems to me that such fear is often confused with compassion. The conviction that there are no easy remedies for social inequality has led many of us to conclude that it may be best for the great masses of humanity to be kept sequestered in a blissful, sanctum sanctorum of wishful thinking. Many atheist scientists believe that, while they can get along just fine without an imaginary friend, most human beings will always need to delude themselves about God. Inevitably, people holding this opinion fail to notice how condescending, unimaginative, and pessimistic a view this is of the rest of humanity — and of generations to come.”

–Sam Harris

More on Mooney and accommodationism (with a note on Rosenhouse)

June 10, 2009 • 2:01 pm

Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse has again taken on Chris Mooney’s critique of accommodationism.   Jason has done such a good job that I have little to add.  However, lest Mooney accuse me of hiding behind Rosenhouse, or of avoiding debate, let me briefly respond.

Mooney’s latest beef is that I have somehow confused methodological naturalism (the use of naturalistic techniques in investigating questions about the world) with philosophical naturalism (the view that there is nothing beyond nature).  Because of my supposed confusion, says Mooney, my claim that religion and science are incompatible is flatly wrong.

I don’t get it. To channel the captain in Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to communicate. I clearly set out what I thought about this issue in my article in The New Republic, and Rosenhouse, who has apparently read that article, gets it right.  Mooney, who also says he has read the article, gets it wrong.

I am a methodological naturalist, but I don’t think that all supernatural claims defy scientific analysis.  Moreover, I don’t see that the methodological/philosophical distinction has a lot to do with the dissonance between faith and science.  The real dissonance, as I have repeatedly emphasized, is between the scientific acceptance of only those claims adjudicated by empirical investigation, and the religious acceptance of “truth” claims that are discovered by revelation (or instruction by one’s parents) and are unfalsifiable.  These are two fundamentally different and incompatible ways of ascertaining “truth.” In fact, I don’t see that religion has any way at all of ascertaining “truth,” since its claims cannot be falsified.  The fact that the major “truths” of different religions are in permanent and irresolvable conflict testifies to this difference between science and faith.

o.k.  Let’s go over what Mooney claimed.  He relies heavily on Rob Pennock’s superb book Tower of Babel when claiming that science cannot test the supernatural.

The Jerry Coyne debate reached temporary hiatus late last week with Coyne invoking Rosenhouse to defend himself against my charge that he has violated the methodological vs. philosophical naturalism distinction. Coyne doesn’t appear to think he commits this foul; and yet he writes in The New Republic, in a line not quoted by Rosenhouse, that “supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science.”

Say what?

If you accept the MN/PN distinction as I have outlined it, or as Robert Pennock does in Tower of Babel, it is hard see how one can claim this. As Pennock writes:

The first and most basic characteristic of supernatural agents and powers, of course, is that they are above and beyond the natural world and its agents and powers. Indeed, this is the very definition of the term. They are not constrained by natural laws…. (p. 289)

And again:

Experimentation requires observation and control of the variables. We confirm causal laws by performing controlled experiments in which the hypothesized independent variable is made to vary while all other factors are held constant so that we can observe the effect on the dependent variable. But we have no control over supernatural entities or forces; hence these cannot be scientifically studied. (p. 292)

It is hard to see how Coyne thinks he can include supernatural phenomena within the purview of science without directly addressing the whole MN/PN matter, and indeed, wholly rejecting the MN/PN distinction as outlined by someone like Pennock. Let’s face it: “supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science” is a pretty extraordinary assertion. Indeed, as far as I can tell it is a contradiction in terms.

Yet in what I have read so far (I have not read his book, so it may be there), Coyne doesn’t directly address the MN/PN matter. Certainly, given that he is dealing with these topics in some detail in the lengthy New Republic article, that would have been an ideal place to take on this philosophical point. But it isn’t there.

Let’s remember why this is important. I have argued that science and religion are at least theoretically reconcilable due to the MN/PN distinction. You can accept all the realities that science reveals through MN, and yet also have supernatural beliefs (not PN), so long as you don’t confuse the two.

This debate about PN vs MN didn’t really interest me.  What did interest me was the notion about whether claims about the supernatural can be tested with science.  And some of them can. The crucial passages of my piece (recognized by Jason but not Mooney) are these:

Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature. There was a time when God was a part of science. Newton thought that his research on physics helped clarify God’s celestial plan. So did Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised our current scheme for organizing species. But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea “God did it” has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it. . .

. . .In a common error, Giberson confuses the strategic materialism of science with an absolute commitment to a philosophy of materialism. He claims that “if the face of Jesus appeared on Mount Rushmore with God’s name signed underneath, geologists would still have to explain this curious phenomenon as an improbable byproduct of erosion and tectonics.” Nonsense. There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.

What is so hard to grasp about all this?  Clearly some claims about the supernatural  can be tested (and rejected) by science.  One deals with the efficacy of prayer.  People claim that God answers prayers.  This can be, and has been, tested by scientific studies of the efficacy of prayer.  These studies have failed to show any effect. Now you can argue about whether those studies were done properly, but the fact is that they can be.  And, as noted above, there are other ways to scientifically document supernatural phenomena. One that Jason mentions is observing a talking Mount Rushmore.

Does anybody doubt that some claims about the supernatural can be tested with science? Mooney seems to doubt this.

Well, maybe you can claim that any phenomenon amenable to scientific study must by definition not be supernatural.   This is a philosophical/semantic argument that I don’t want to get into.  It doesn’t seem important.  Clearly, the claim that prayer works (or that moral people get cancer less often than immoral people) is a claim that science can study.  Clearly, the claim that the Shroud of Turin was Jesus’s burial cloth can be investigated scientifically.  Clearly, the claim that some religious icons weep blood, water, or milk, can be studied scientifically.  And believe me, if the Shroud of Turin were shown to have been made around 30 AD, religious people would have trumpeted it to the skies.  When it was shown to be a forgery, the faithful claimed that their faith didn’t depend on such claims. Ditto with the efficacy of prayer. Does anybody doubt that if the intercessory study had shown a significant effect of prayer, it would have been trumpeted from pulpits the following Sunday?

And despite my admiration for Pennock’s book, which I still think is the best analysis of intelligent-design creationism around, I think he’s dead wrong when he says, “But we have no control over supernatural entities or forces; hence these cannot be scientifically studied.” Just because we can’t control God and how he responds to prayer doesn’t mean that we can’t study whether prayer works.

Mooney ends his piece in this way:

I will add that I am not a philosopher, and without having read and studied Pennock, probably wouldn’t wade into these waters. But at the same time, it seems to me that MN/PN is a pretty basic distinction, as are the definitions of “natural” and “supernatural.” Furthermore, I suspect most scientists would agree that their work and their methodology does not allow them to make claims about alleged supernatural agents.

I will make this claim about supernatural agents based on scientific methodology: prayer doesn’t help cardiac patients recover faster.  I will also claim, based on observations of the world, that if a god exists, he is not simultaneously omniscient, omnipotent, and beneficent.

I reiterate: the incompatibility between faith and science rests on how they determine “truth.”  To quote from my New Republic article:

In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin’s colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that “science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species. Since no such facts have ever appeared, we continue to accept evolution as true. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer. There is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations. Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God’s existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it. And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is, as Giberson asserts, good, loving, and just? If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will.

Let me pose this question to Mr. Mooney.  The “truth” claims of many faiths are flatly incompatible.  Christians, for example, believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of God.  Muslims claim that this is not only untrue, but that anyone who believes it will burn in hell.  At most, only one of these claims can be true. Who is right? How do you decide?  And whatever method you use (whether you were born in Kansas or Kabul; whether you get a personal revelation), doesn’t it differ from the way that science finds out things?

Shoot me now: Coca Cola is an official partner of the Creation Museum

June 10, 2009 • 11:06 am

Well, I’ve officially sworn off Coca Cola.  Thank to P.Z. on Pharyngula, I’ve discovered that Kentucky’s Creation Museum is  partnered with Coca-Cola. From the museum’s website:

When you visit Noah’s Cafe you will notice that our deck is adorned with colorful bright red umbrellas courtesy of our Coke corporate partners.

The Creation Museum and Coke have been partners officially since April even though Coke has been on site for years.

Some fun facts to know are that Noah’s Café is 2nd in Coke sales for the area, next to the Cincinnati airport. Regular and Diet Coke are the most popular flavors here and guests prefer fountain drinks (60%) to bottled products (40%). Because of their popularity Coke will be installing a second machine to handle the high demand for fountain drinks. As you travel thru the museum experience you will end up in the Palm Plaza.

Here you can rest and enjoy a variety of Gold Peak ice teas as well as speciality drinks like Coke Blak and Godiva Belgian Blends while sitting among the palm trees. At the museum you can feed both mind and body while enjoying a fun day with family and friends.

What people won’t do for a buck! I’ve tried to find an email address for complaining to Coca Cola, but to no avail. Maybe an alert reader can help. In the meantime, make mine Pepsi.

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“Ignorance goes better with Coke!”

New work on an ancient mammal

June 9, 2009 • 5:39 am

With her usual journalistic panache, Natalie Angier reports today in the New York Times on new work on the echidna, otherwise known as the spiny anteater (there are four species in the genera Zaglossus and Tachyglossus). The species is bizarre because, like the platypus, it is one of the two groups of mammals that lay eggs — the monotremes.  And, like the  platypus, echidnas are found in Australia, but also in New Guinea. They are toothless, and, unlike other mammals except the platypus, the females produce milk not through teats, but through a hairy patch on the belly from which milk is lapped up by the young (this may represent the primitive state of mammary glands from which modern breasts evolved).  Unlike other mammals (but like birds), they have a single hole for excretion, sex, and egg-laying: the cloaca.

A paper by Muse Opiang in the Journal of Mammalogy reports on the long-beaked echidna from New Guinea, Zaglossus bartoni.  Several individuals were captured (no easy feat for these reclusive beasts: it took 500 man-hours just to find the first one!) and radiotracked to determine home range size.  Although the results — that home range size is variable among individuals, ranging from about 10 to 170 hectares (0.1 to 1.7 square kilometers) — aren’t terribly exciting to the nonbiologist, they are valuable in contributing to our knowledge of this rare animal.   Angier livens things up by telling the tale behind the paper:

Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna, or Zaglossus bartoni, which are found only in the tropical rain forests of New Guinea and a scattering of adjacent islands. He had seen them once or twice in captivity and in photographs — plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them. He knew that the mosaic effect was no mere sight gag: as one of just three surviving types of the group of primitive egg-laying mammals called monotremes, the long-beaked echidna is a genuine living link between reptiles and birds on one branch, and more familiar placental mammals like ourselves on the next. . .

.. . . Reproductively, monotremes are like a VCR-DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology in transition. They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.

Monotreme sex determination also holds its allure. In most mammals, a single set of XX chromosomes signifies a girl, a set of XY specifies a boy. For reasons that remain mysterious, monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike. Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.

When I was a graduate student, I had the good fortune to encounter one of these creatures — an adult named Francis who lived in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.  I used to walk downstairs to pet it on the non-spiny parts,  and found, as Angier notes, that it was a friendly and peaceful beast.

Enrich your world by reading Angier’s article!

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baby echidna

Damn!  P.Z. has posted a cat again! I see him a cat and raise him a panda:

panda

Scientists again see natural selection in real time

June 8, 2009 • 3:32 pm

In WEIT, I describe several studies showing that natural selection can change species over periods shorter than a human lifetime.  These studies have been important in convincing skeptics (although not creationists, who will never be convinced) that natural selection is more than just a speculation, but a force that can really mold animal behaviors, appearances, and reproductive traits in real time.  The most famous of these, of course, is the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant on a species of Darwin’s finch.  Their work showed that individuals’ beak and body characteristics could change over a single generation when an El Niño event changed the finch’s food.  (See The Beak of the Finch, by Jon Weiner, for a popular account of the Grants’ work.)

Now a group of researchers from Canada and the US have reported natural selection acting in guppies, molding their reproductive behavior over a period of only 8 years: roughly 13-26 guppy generations.  This work is based on the observation that in Trinidad, the common guppy (Poecilia reticulata) lives in streams both above and below waterfalls.  The guppy’s downstream predators cannot migrate past the waterfall barriers, so upstream guppies experience different environments from downstream guppies. In other words, downstream populations have to deal with much stronger predation.

This leads to some evolutionary predictions.  The body of evolutionary theory called “life history theory” predicts that when an animal species experiences higher predation, it should evolve a different reproductive strategy.  In short, guppies harassed by predators should reproduce earlier than un-predated guppies, for the greater your chance of being chomped, the less likely you are to leave offspring if you delay reproduction. Second, fish that experience less predation should produce larger embryos, since they have the luxury of delaying reproduction and because larger embryos make the newly hatched fish more competitive.  Finally, low-predation fish should have fewer offspring in each bout of reproduction, for it is to their advantage to spread their given lifetime allotment of reproductive effort over a longer time.

In 1996, some of these authors introduced guppies from downstream, high-predation populations into uninhabited upstream, above-waterfall areas. Eight years later, in 2004, they took samples from both ancestral and derived populations to see if any differences in life history had evolved.  And they did — in the predicted direction.  Upstream guppies had fewer but larger embryos than downstream guppies, as well as a small reproductive allotment (egg mass as a proportion of body mass).  Mark-recapture experiments on adults also showed that, when tested in the upstream environment, upstream-evolved guppies had higher survival than their downstream ancestors.

The analysis is arcane, but the results are clear:  guppies have changed their life histories in an adaptive way in only eight years.  This certainly reflects the action of natural selection, since previous studies have found similar results for life history, and also for color. (Guppies introduced to a low-predation regime evolve brighter colors in males; brightly colored males are favored everywhere by sexual selection but become disadvantageous in high-predator environments since they are more likely to be spotted and eaten.)

In toto, the guppy work is as powerful a body of evidence for selection, if not more so, than the work on finches.  This is not to denigrate the finch study, which is brilliant.  That work, however, was an uncontrolled “natural experiment” that affected two characters (bill and body size), while the guppy work has involved many groups of investigators doing controlled introductions — and all finding the predicted evolutionary changes in many characters.  Birds, of course, are more charismatic, but the humble guppy has a lot to show us about evolution.

___________

S. P. Gordon et al. 2009.  Adaptive changes in life history and survival following a new guppy introduction.  The American Naturalist, Volume 174, pp. 34-45.

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Transitional fossils

June 7, 2009 • 10:02 am

The latest issue of the free online journal, Evolution: Education & Outreach, highlights transitional fossils.  There are several good articles here: I especially liked Jenny Clack’s piece on the fish-to-reptile transition, which is now documented by many more fossils than just the famous Tiktaalik, and Thewissen et al.’s article on the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals. The articles have nice figures for teaching purposes. This is a great journal for laypeople and scientists alike to keep up with education in evolutionary biology, and it’s free.

Now. . . “Erratic Synapse” vs. Mooney

June 6, 2009 • 8:50 am

I am so glad I don’t have to do the work that others are doing for me.  Over at The Daily Kos, blogger “Erratic Synapse” takes on Chris Mooney’s accommodationism.  A sample:

. . . The whole notion that religion is a private matter is horseshit. It has always been horseshit. If religion were a private matter that didn’t enter the political arena, we wouldn’t be debating a wide variety of topics such as gay marriage, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, teaching the theory of evolution in public school science classrooms, etc. The dominant religion in the United States, Christianity, was never designed for the purpose of respecting religious freedom, which is why it incurs so much in so many areas. It is fantastic that religious moderates have respected religious freedom and church-state separation, but I see that more a consequence of their adoption of social liberalism as a political philosophy (though some will justify this position with, perhaps, the teachings of Jesus, but then claim that religious freedom is a tenet supported by the Bible in general). .

. . . we’re the ones who need an exercise in “humility?” The fact that we’re willing to have reasonable and rational discussion on the subject of God makes us arrogant? We’re the ones who are arrogant when contrasted with religious moderates such as Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, who declare that there are limits to what they’ll allow science to speak on when it comes to their personal faith?

Homeopathy killed a little girl

June 6, 2009 • 7:36 am

Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait discusses the court conviction of two Australian parents whose nine-month-old daughter died of eczema — yes, eczema! — because they treated the infant with homeopathy, refusing to seek medical treatment until it was too late.  When are people going to realize that drugs that contain only water, and no curative substances, are just placebos?  For a scientific report on homeopathy that finds it of no effectiveness, go here.

The court heard the couple took Gloria to various health professionals, but while they abandoned each conventional medication she was prescribed within a short time of starting it, they solidly pursued homeopathic remedies.

The Crown said these did not work, and all the while Gloria’s tiny body required more nutrition than her mother’s milk could provide, and her immune system became ever more depleted.

By the time she died, she was the weight of an average three-month-old, her body was covered with angry blotches and her once black hair had turned completely white.

Gloria had developed eczema when she was four months old, a condition she probably inherited from her mother, which flared and subsided throughout the rest of her short life.

But the couple, who were raised and educated in India where homeopathy is accepted as equivalent to conventional medicine, were steadfast to their homeopathic remedies and ignored completely or quickly discarded other treatment.