Tag: New York Times

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.

Did cooking fuel human evolution?

April 21, 2009 • 7:41 am

In today’s New York Times, primatologist Richard Wrangham (at Harvard) is interviewed about his controversial theory of human evolution.  Wrangham posits that the invention of cooking food over fire, rather than eating it raw, was the important impetus for the evolution of many hominin traits, including big brains, upright posture, etc.  The theory is apparently about to appear in a new book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.”wrangham_

While I don’t find this theory extremely convincing — for one thing, there is no evidence for the use of fire before H. erectus (about 1.5 mya), which was already well advanced in bipedality and big brains.  Still, Wrangham is a smart guy and the short interview is well worth reading (including his account of how he ate like a chimp, including raw monkey).

Domestication of horses: a New York Times editorial

March 18, 2009 • 8:08 am

Today’s New York Times has an odd opinion piece which begins, correctly, with the recent discovery that horses were domesticated about a thousand years earlier than previously suspected, since findings of pottery containing traces of horse milk from 3500 B.C., as well as horse skeletons from Asia, suggest (see original paper in Science magazine) that the inhabitants of central Asia had modified the skeleton of wild horses through domestication, making it less robust, and also were using mare’s milk as food. Preumptive bit wear on the ancient horses’ teeth also suggest domestication. All well and good, and an excellent example of forensic archaeology. However, the Times goes on to say this:

This discovery pushes back the date for a hugely important technological change in human existence. But it’s also a reminder that domestication isn’t just the conquering of one species by another. It’s the willing collaboration between two species, a sharing of benefits. There is something in the equine nature — genetic or social — that allowed it to partner with humans, just as there was in the character of dogs.

Well, of course there was something in the nature of horses that enabled them (unlike many other wild animals) to be successfully domesticated. But what on earth suggests that the domestication was “willing” and a “collaboration”? What do the horses get out of it? Maybe some food, but to me it looks more like animal slavery–indeed “the conquering of one species by another.” Let’s not kid ourselves.