Dennis Overbye on faith vs. science

June 2, 2009 • 5:31 am

A curious but very good piece in the New York Times today:  a review of the movie “Angels & Demons” by the science writer Dennis Overbye.   Overbye takes to task the popular attitude that scientists are geekish upstarts who think they have the truth but don’t:

This may seem like a happy ending. Faith and science reconciled or at least holding their fire in the face of mystery. But for me that moment ruined what had otherwise been a pleasant two hours on a rainy afternoon. It crystallized what is wrong with the entire way that popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.

These smart alecks who know how to split atoms and splice genes need to be put in their place by older steadier hands.

It was as if the priest had patted Einstein on the head and chuckled, “Never mind, Sonny, some day you’ll understand.” . . . .

. . . But I can’t help being bugged by that warm, fuzzy moment at the end, that figurative pat on the head. After all is said and done, it seems to imply, having faith is just a little bit better than being smart. . . .

. . . And they are still patting us on the head.

Why should wisdom and comfort inhabit a clerical collar instead of a lab coat? Perhaps because religion seems to offer consolations that science doesn’t.

The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said that what gives great leaders power is the ability to comfort others in the face of death. But the iconic achievement of modern physics is the atomic bomb, death incarnate.

Moreover, since the time of Galileo scientists have bent over backward to restrain their own metaphysical rhetoric for fear of stepping on religious toes. Indeed, many of them were devout believers convinced they were exploring the mind of God. Stephen Jay Gould, the late paleontologist and author, famously referred to science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.”

The lament, voiced often in the movie and even more in the book, is that science, with its endlessly nibbling doubts, has drained the world of wonder and meaning, depriving humans of, among other things, a moral compass.

The church advertises strength through certitude, but starting from the same collection of fables, commandments and aphorisms — love thy neighbor; thou shalt not kill; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth — the religions of the world have reached an alarmingly diverse set of conclusions about what behaviors, like gay marriage, are right and wrong.

If science drains the world of certainty, maybe that is invigorating as well as appropriate. The cardinal is free to revel in the assurance of his absolutes, while Tom Hanks and I can be braced by the challenge of being our own cosmologists, creating our own meanings.

Meanwhile, America is not so young and innocent anymore, and science has its own traditions and, yes, wisdoms, stretching back to antiquity.

In science the ends are justified by the means — what questions we ask and how we ask them — and the meaning of the quest is derived not from answers but from the process by which they are found: curiosity, doubt, humility, tolerance.

Those fatherly pats on the head sound comforting, but as an answer to life’s struggles and quests, they lack something.

To me, this piece is one more sign that it is no longer off limits for the public media to criticize religion or its ludicrous claim that it has possession of the “truth”.  (The NYT has had a curious attitude to the faith and science debate. Their editorial pages often publish accommodationist or even intelligent-design tripe, like pieces by Michael Behe and Cardinal Schönborn. On the other hand, their science staff is resolutely pro-science and pro-evolution.  Go figure.)

Thanks to Lawrence Krauss for calling this to my attention.

Tiller murderer caught

June 1, 2009 • 9:22 am

The Kansas police made short work of this crime; they’ve apprehended the guy who is alleged to have killed abortion doctor George Tiller. (No surprise since alert churchgoers wrote down the car’s license plate number.)  The story is reported in the New York Times today, along with this bone-chilling statement:

Scott Roeder, 51, of Merriam, Kan., whom authorities have described as a suspect in Sunday’s fatal shooting here of George Tiller, the doctor who had been a focal point for abortion opponents for decades, was once a subscriber and occasional contributor to a newsletter, Prayer and Action News, said to Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines who runs the newsletter. Mr. Leach said he and Mr. Roeder had met once, and Mr. Roeder had described similar views to his own. Of Dr. Tiller’s death, Mr. Leach said, “To call this a crime is too simplistic,” adding, “There is Christian scripture that would support this.”

I wasn’t aware that Christian scripture had anything to say about this; but at any rate we can be thankful that secular law trumps Christian scripture in Kansas.

(Thanks to Tom, whose post brought this to my attention.)

Abortion doctor killed in Kansas

May 31, 2009 • 1:21 pm

The latest news flash is that Dr. George Tiller, a well known abortion-providing doctor in Kansas, has been shot and killed — while going to church, of all places.

Media reports said the suspected killer fled the scene in a blue Taurus. Police described him as a white male in his 50s or 60s.

Tiller has been among the few U.S. physicians performing late-term abortion, making him a favored target of anti-abortion protesters. He testified that he and his family have suffered years of harassment and threats. His clinic was the site of the 1991 “Summer of Mercy” protests marked by mass demonstrations and arrests. His clinic was bombed in 1985, and an abortion opponent shot him in both arms in 1993.  Tiller’s clinic also provided group and individual counseling, as well as chaplain and funeral services for people who were grieving.

Operation Rescue, which ran a “Tiller Watch” on its website (subsite now taken down!), and has targeted him for action for twenty years,  issued a statement:

“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.”

This reminds me of Captain Renault’s tongue-in-cheek statement in Casablanca, “I’m shocked — shocked — to find out that gambling is going on here.”  Operation Rescue has had a long history of tacitly condoning or excusing vigilante action, and once had the slogan “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.” Tiller’s murder is the forseeable result of targeting him on the website.

Operation Rescue’s statement is equally offensive in claiming that Tiller’s family will be able to find comfort and healing only in Jesus Christ.  That’s baloney.  Plenty of people find comfort and healing through their family, friends, and so on.  One might indeed speculate that someone’s faith in Jesus Christ is what lead to Tiller’s murder in the first place.
There is plenty of room for reasoned disagreement about the morality of abortion, but there is no room for settling these disagreements through murder.

Note: I have received several posts approving of Tiller’s murder and expressing desires that he rot in hell. I will not post these here, nor any other post that countenances murder. I have never before received such hate-filled posts. Draw your own conclusions about where they came from.

Did cooking make us human?

May 30, 2009 • 2:06 pm

Well, everybody’s looking for what propelled us from our common ancestor with chimps to the wonderful species we are today. If it’s not genes, it’s culture.  Today’s NYT discusses Richard Wrangham’s new theory (previously mentioned on this website) about how the taming of fire and its use to cook food were crucial events in making our species what it is today.  I am skeptical (I’ve seen many of these theories come and go), but still looking forward to reading Wrangham’s. new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human.

Creationists sabotage WEIT in bookstores!

May 30, 2009 • 8:23 am

Over on the blog Science-based Parenting, a reader of WEIT reports finding a creationist bookmark inserted into the copy he bought.  Apparently a creationist group is visiting bookstores and placing into the “bad books” bookmarks bearing a Bible verse and the caricature of a celebrity.  Well, at least my dollar bill bore the likeness of Dustin Hoffman, one of my favorite actors.  And if my book can’t hold its own against a random Bible verse, I’m in trouble.

A gene for human speech?

May 30, 2009 • 8:16 am

In yesterday’s New York Times, Nicholas Wade reports new research on the FOXP2 gene (see original Cell paper by Enard et al. here).   If you’ve read WEIT, you’ll remember that I discuss FOXP2 as one of those potential genes that “makes us human.”  In other words, evolutionary change at this gene was supposed to have been involved in one of the key traits — speech –that distinguish us from other primates.   This supposition is based on some genetic and developmental observations:

1.  When mutated, FOXP2 causes both speech and speech comprehension difficulties in humans,

2.  The gene has evolved very quickly on the “human” side of our lineage since we split from the chimp lineage (and very slowly among mammals in general), leading researchers to suppose that natural selection for its effect on speech caused the rapid evolution, and

3.  When FOXP2 is mutated in mice, the young mouse pups have trouble making ultrasonic squeaks (a way of communicating with their mother). These squeaks were taken to be homologous with human speech.

However, I’ve been pretty cautious about considering FOXP2 a “human-ness” gene, for there is a lot of wishful thinking in this are.  We (and especially journalists!) are just so eager to find those genes that differentiate us from our “lower” relatives.  The new paper describes research designed to address this question.

What Enard et al. did was to change the sequence of the FOXP2 gene in mice so that it produced a protein having the same two amino acids that differentiate chimps from humans (there is also one amino acid difference between mice and chimps, so the “human” gene in mice actually was not exactly identical to the real human gene).  They then looked at the behavior, brains, and bodies of mice who had two copies of the “human” allele compared to mice having their own “mouse” allele.   The major effects of this genetic engineering were the following:

1.  The human gene reduced the “exploratory behavior” of mice,

2. The human gene increased the length of brain dendrites (inter-nerve-cell connections) in mice compared to those in carriers of the “mouse” allele, and

3.  Mice “pups” with the human gene produced ultrasonic “squeak calls” that had a significantly lower frequency (i.e., vibrations per second) than those produced by mice with the normal mouse allele.

From this the authors conclude that this transgenic experiment sheds light on the evolution of speech and language in humans.  It’s this conclusion (and the transgenic manipulation itself, which is the first time that an evolutionary hypothesis has been studied by changing a mouse protein to a human protein) that gave the authors such publicity, and got their work promoted in the Times.   But, as in the case of the darwinius primate fossil, I think the results are overblown.

All the authors have shown is that putting the human copy of a gene into a mouse changes the structure of the mouse brain and changes the squeaks of babies (what about the adult squeaks, by the way? Why weren’t they studied?).  While this is consistent with a role of FOXP2 in the evolution of human speech, it’s not very impressive.  FOXP2 is active in many tissues, and these effects could be merely pathologies.

Of course the definitive experiment, swapping a human or chimp gene with the copy from the other species, and observing the result, is unethical.

At any rate, I don’t think we’re much closer to finding “humanness” genes than we were before.  Indeed, there may be many, many genes that differentiate us from chimps (see WEIT for an estimate); and if the effet of each gene is very small, we won’t readily find those elusive “humanness”” genes.

The lesson is caveat emptor, at least when it comes to reading about science in the newspapers.

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Enard et al. (2009).  A humanized version of FOXP2 affects cortico-basal ganglia circuits in mice.  Cell 137:961-971.