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Of course science is an enemy of religion, for its method is doubt, empirical testing, and the rejection of ideas for which there’s no evidence. If religious people practiced their faith using those principles, in a very short time there would be no religion.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Jerry Coyne, Thought of the day | Leave a comment »
Phillip Pullman has a book titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Below is a video where a member of an audience points out that Christians may find that offensive.
Via Jerry Coyne.
Filed under: Religions | Tagged: Jerry Coyne, Offense, Phillip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ | 2 Comments »
Francis Collins has a new book due out soon. Jerry Coyne has already covered it more interestingly than I can here, but this quote from Collins really got me.
The conclusion is astounding: if any of these [physical constants] were to vary by even the tiniest degree, a universe capable of sustaining any imaginable form of life would be impossible.
Having just read Victor Stenger’s New Atheism, I find Collins all the more annoying for bringing up this point. The fine-tuning argument is terrible enough just for the fact that it often takes the form of “But how is everything so well adapted to life?!”, but all of its creationist forms are awful. In Collins’ version, he’s assuming that the variance would be done to only one physical constant. In reality, physical constants are almost always dependent upon each other; the changing of one would mean the changing of them all. Collins’ argument is, then, incoherent.
Filed under: News, Religions | Tagged: Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith, Francis Collins, Jerry Coyne, New Atheism, Victor Stenger | 16 Comments »
It seems that every time a creationist opens his mouth it gets shut up – not because THERE’S A BIG CRAZY CONSPIRACY!, but because creationists hate evidence, hate facts, and hate reality. Get a bunch of creationists together to make a crappy movie and the smackdowns get even better.
The latest Intelligent Design film, called ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’, attempts to examine a problem that vexed poor Charles Darwin in 1859 – the puzzle of what we now call the ‘Cambrian explosion’. As an Oxford palaeontologist who has been working on this problem since 1966, I have been asked for my opinion on the veracity of its claims. Below are outlined some of what I take to be its more laughable misunderstandings.
1. The film makes a familiar mistake. There is a misplaced fixation upon beasts of the Burgess Shale. So antiquated is this view that the screenplay for this film could have been written by teachers in 1954, or even by Mack Sennett at Keystone studios in 1912, just after the Burgess Shale biota was first reported by Walcott. It needs to be remembered that the Burgess Shale appears far too late in the fossil record to tell us much about emergence of animals. Modern data shows that the explosion of modern phyla was beginning by about 545 Ma ago, with forms like Cloudina and Sabellidites. Since the Burgess Shale is a mere 505 Ma old, this gives us palaeontologists some 40 million years to play with. What a gift!
2. A rich fossil record of early animal remains has been discovered from near the end of the Ediacaran period at about 545 Ma to the appearance of calcified trilobites and echinoderms in the Chengjiang biota, some 520 Ma ago. This transitional period, variously known as the Tommotian or Fortunian Stage, contains examples of transitional forms. For example, Halkieria and Maikhanella are probable stem group ‘molluscs’ with multi-element shells; Eccentrotheca and Camenella are taken to be stem group ‘brachiopods’ with multi-element shells. Dozens of scientists have been writing about these materials in recent years. Some 20 million years of evolution has thereby been ignored. Or censored.
3. The first great mass extinction took place about 520 million years ago, during the Botomian and Toyonian Stages – well before the Burgess Shale. A rich diversity of reef building animals disappeared forever. These included archaeocyathan sponges and many small shelly fossils. But there is no mention of this. Did the film producers suffer amnesia at this point in the story? Or did that great prankster – the Intelligent Designer – make some big mistakes? If so, why call Her intelligent?
4. The film makes another common mistake. When Darwin referred to the need for many small steps in evolution, he did not say whether these steps had to be either fast or slow. Small steps can be made very quickly indeed – as with virus evolution today.
5. The film appears to have been shot within the walls of Cambridge University UK, with interviews taking place in the Sedgwick Museum, or around colleges such as St John’s and King’s College. Some think they perceive some blue highlights around the faces here, suggesting blue-screen shots in which the Cambridge settings have been imposed later. Whether real or false, this gives to the film a wholly spurious authority; rhe impression of a forgery.
For those interested, some of these evolutionary developments can be followed in my recent book on Darwin’s Dilemma, called Darwin’s Lost World (OUP, 2009), which takes the reader back from the Burgess Shale to the earliest multicellular organisms. Research into this fascinating interval remains wide open and is only just beginning. The Cambrian explosion was a real and entirely natural event, as was the wave of extinctions that followed. What a wonderful world!
Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: Cambridge, Creationist movie, Darwin's Dilemma, Evolution, Jerry Coyne, Professor Martin Brassier | 1 Comment »
The devastating cancer spreading through the Tasmanian devil population has so far met resistance in at least one devil (Cedric), and possibly in his brother (Clinky).
Both were injected with dead tumours by scientists. Clinky produced no antibodies, but Cedric did and appears to have built-in defences against the mystery illness.
The experiments have now moved up a gear.
Researcher Alex Kriess says the pair have had live cancer cells inserted into their faces.
“They haven’t developed a tumour so far,” he said. “We injected very few cells so it might take a while until they develop anything that we can see.”
The next step is to see why Cedric may be resistant to the disease, which Jerry Coyne has deemed “can be regarded as a separate organism, genetically free to undergo independent evolution.” (The syntax is correct, but for clarity, it’s the disease that can be regarded as a separate organism.)
The most interesting aspect of all this is that Cedric comes from the side of the island not yet especially devastated by the disease. As more research is done, it will be interesting to find out if there is any sort of special history with cancer, even this specific cancer, that Cedric’s part of the island has had. That could be one driving cause behind the genetic difference to consider in addition to simple drift or geographical barriers.
Image via Jerry Coyne
Filed under: Evolution, Science | Tagged: Cedric, Clinky, Devil Facial Tumour Disease, DFTD, Evolution, Jerry Coyne, Tasmanian Devils | 1 Comment »
Are we really such a weak and cowardly race that we must concoct these silly rationalizations to avoid admitting the obvious: there doesn’t seem to be a God, or at least one who is loving and powerful? Can’t we admit that bad things are simply bad things and not some manifestation of a tortured and incomprehensible divine calculus? When will our species grow up?
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Jerry Coyne, Theodicy, Thought of the day | 1 Comment »
Apologist after apologist will claim that there is evidence for God. Ya know, if you want to find it. The reasoning for this claim is that those who have found clearly must have wanted it, otherwise they wouldn’t have found it. It’s sort of like how when you find 5 bucks on the ground. You must have wanted to for it, otherwise you would have looked right over it. In the wacky worldview of the religious, scientists don’t want to find 5 bucks.
Of course, it’s all hogwash. There are plenty of ways for science to verify or deny certain claims made by religions. Does faith healing work or is it all a load of horseshit? It isn’t too uncommon a tactic at this point for the religious to use The Ostrich Strategy (TOS). This is where they bury their heads in the sand* and ignore all the evidence against their anti-evidence faith. Jerry Coyne sums it up nicely.
Oh dear dear dear. Russell, I, and others have addressed the idea of science and the supernatural many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), dispelling the soothing idea that “science has nothing to say about the supernatural.” That is, of course, hogwash. Science has plenty to say about the Shroud of Turin, whether faith healing works, whether prayer works, whether God seems to be both beneficent and omnipotent, world without end. Science can, as we’ve repeated endlessly, address specific claims about the supernatural, though it’s impotent before the idea that behind it all is a hands-off, deistic Transcendent Force.
People who deny these facts always engage in TOS. You may say this makes them all a bunch of TOSSERS.
*Ostriches don’t actually do this. At least they don’t do it for reasons that merit the meaning of the phrase “head in the sand”. They do turn their eggs by putting their heads in the sand/ground, but they do not do it to avoid danger or ignore what they don’t like. That may well be a bad survival strategy. Though it is cute when dogs do it under the coffee table.
Filed under: Religions, Science | Tagged: Christian Science, Faith healing, Jerry Coyne, NOMA, Ostriches, The Ostrich Strategy, TOS, TOSSERS | Leave a comment »
Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne has posted one hell of a great image.
This fan of evolution is 4 years old. His mother or father writes in to say:
He can’t seem to get enough of all the pictures and diagrams in the book. He is particularly fond of the diagram near the beginning of the book that shows the evolutionary change from reptiles to dinosaurs to birds. Since I have explained the diagram to him he now goes around telling everyone that birds came from dinosaurs. You can never start teaching them science and critical thinking too early!
Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True | 2 Comments »
Once again I am following a chapter in Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True.
There is a pattern within Life that can be seen on oceanic islands. Species which are present are often endemic – only found in that one location. The species common to continents, on the other hand, are often not present on these islands.
In 1703, Alexander Selkrik was part of a plundering group that sailed to the Juan Fernandez archipelago, a few hundred miles off the coast of Chile (pretentiously pronounced “chill-a” by people not from Chile who like to pretend they’re so full of culture). He was voluntarily marooned on one of the islands (Mas a Tierra). He remained there for over four years. He hunted goats and utilized other species introduced by earlier sailors. Little did Selkrik know, his island (now named Alejandro Selkrik Island) was full of these foreign species.
On the island are five species of birds, 126 species of plants, a fur seal, and various insects which are entirely unique to the location. Equally notably, there’s a lot missing from the island. There are no native amphibians, reptiles, or mammals. Islands throughout the world show this same pattern.
Creationism wholly fails to explain the distribution of species – biogeography. It is only in the light of evolution that any logically tenable solution is found. Species are spread across the globe in patterns which follow the movements of the continents. For instance, plants which have a clear common ancestor are explained by the fact that Earth once was composed of a supercontinent known as Gondwana. It split into several sections. This divided species which had already split from one another, causing more adaptation (or extinction). One must believe in tremendous coincidences to just wave this away. That is, the evidence (the biggest foe of the creationist) says plate tectonics caused the movement of the continents which corresponds perfectly to the distribution of species. There is no other plausible explanation.
When observing the world’s biogeography, it is obvious that Australia needs some explanation. Why is it dominated by marsupial mammals while lacking so much in placenta mammals? Better yet, why is the rest of the world lacking in marsupial animals (except for the Virginia opossum)? The answer is in evolution. The animals on Australia show their common ancestry with animals elsewhere by their Class: they are mammals, just as tamarins are mammals. However, they show their divergence and evolution with key differences. Notably, the birthing process and raising of young differs drastically.
Now here’s a prediction that all this makes. Marsupials are found as early as 80 million years ago. Interestingly, they are not found at this time in Australia, but instead North America. With their evolution, they spread to South America about 40 million years ago. About 10 million years later, they’re in Australia. This means there was a connection of land from South America to Australia. The evidence bears this out. Geologists know South America was connected to Antarctica. That in turn was connected to Australia – actually, it was more like a cobble of connection; these continents were all part of Gondwana, deep in the Southern Hemisphere. So, to get from South America to Australia, marsupials must have passed over what is now Antarctica. Prediction: There should be fossils dating between 30 and 40 million years in Antarctica.
It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that, yes, there are marsupial fossils in Antarctica. And yes, they date from 35 to 40 million years in age. Again, a person has to believe in tremendous coincidence to reject this evidence. Geologists independently concluded that Gondwana existed and how it separated, and at roughly what times this all happened. Biologists then concluded that, if evolution is true, marsupial fossils must be presented in a particular location. They were right. Only in the light of evolution does this make sense.
Coyne goes on to explain islands, which I may address in the future. For now, I will leave the evidence at this point. The tremendously short attention span of people – creationists and rationalists alike – forces my hand.
Filed under: Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: Alejandro Selkrik, Alexander Selkrik, Australia, Biogeography, Chile, Continential drift, Jerry Coyne, Marsupials, Mas a Tierra, Only in the light of evolution, Plate Tectonics, Why Evolution is True | 1 Comment »
For the Sake of Science 