Axis of evil: Discovery Institute + Harun Yahya

According to yesterday’s Washington Post, there seem to be some ties forming between the Turkish creationists, headed by Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar), and the Disco ‘Tute.  This is truly an unholy alliance, reminiscent of the collaboration between fundamentalist Christians and Israeli Jews to breed a perfect red heifer, whose appearance is deemed by some essential for both rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem and the second coming of Christ.  This alliance is pretty bizarre, for both parties surely realize that though they’re united in opposing evolution, they differ in far more fundamental ways about their plans for the world.

To many Turkish scientists and educators, this [the spread of creationism] is a worrisome development. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was an advocate of science, education and, some say, even evolution. Turkish science has been especially strong in the Muslim world. If Turks close their minds to evolutionary thinking, advocates say, it won’t be long before religion and politics shut off other scientific pursuits.

To John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, however, the news could hardly be more encouraging.

“Why I’m so interested in seeing creationism succeed in Turkey is that evolution is an evil concept that has done such damage to society,” said Morris, a Christian who has led several searches for Noah’s Ark in eastern Turkey. Members of his group have addressed Turkish conferences numerous times.

The Discovery Institute of Seattle, which researches and promotes intelligent design as an alternative to creationism and evolution, also sent speakers to Turkey after being invited by the Istanbul municipal government in 2007. President Bruce Chapman said the institute helped bring Turkish evolution critic Mustafa Akyol to a 2005 Kansas school board hearing on teaching critiques of evolution.

h/t: Hempenstein

From Puebla

I’m putting up my holiday snaps from the Ciudad de Las Ideas meeting in Puebla, Mexico, which ended yesterday.  As I said, the meeting was incredibly stimulating, well organized, and very plush.  It was fun playing “intellectual” for a couple of days, but I had to miss the Big God Debate yesterday, which included Dinesh d’Souza, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Shmuley Boteach, Sam Harris, and Robert Wright.  I’m hoping for an account of this debate, which I’ll post here. In the interim, here are some candid photos.

Fig. 1.  Randy Cohen, the New York Times ethicist (l.), Barry Schwartz (r.), psychologist

Fig. 2. Frans de Waal, primatologist and popular author

Fig. 3.  Speaking truth to power.  JAC with Mario Marin, the governor of Puebla. He was accompanied by a phalanx of gun-toting guards in black, and the conference started an hour late because he hadn’t yet arrived.

Fig. 4.  Sam Harris (l.) and Andres Roemer, conference organizer (r.)

Fig. 5.  Dan and Susan Dennett.  The interviewer asked Dan one question: “Do we know what consciousness is?” Dan’s answer: “Yes, but it’s not what you think.”

Fig. 6.  Sam and Dan being lionized. All of us were constantly asked by Mexican students for autographs and photographs.

Fig. 7.  The good Rev. Robert Wright at the pulpit. We had a “talk.”

Fig. 8.  Andres Roemer (l.), Marc Hauser (c.), Lilan Hauser (r.)

Fig. 9.  Philip Zimbardo, whose theme was “evil.” Here he poses appropriately with a margarita and a plate of the local delicacies.

Fig. 10.  As Zimbardo came onstage, the strains of “Evil Ways” by Santana blasted out of the loudspeaker. He threw away his cane and proceeded to boogie to the song, enlisting the whole audience to dance along. They did.

Fig. 11.  The picture that will ruin me.  With Dinesh d’Souza. I figured that since I chided P.Z. for posing with Michael Ruse, I should give him a chance to reciprocate. Unlike Ruse, however, Dinesh seemed like a nice guy. I shook the hand that fondled Ann Coulter!

Fig. 12. I made the papers! Here I am onstage, showing speciation on my fingers.  Above is Andres with the governor.

Fig. 13.  Hitch, sporting a poppy for Armistice Day and a Mexican flag in his lapel

Fig. 14.  Each of us was assigned a host to take care of us during our visit. Fortunately, I shared Luis Ramon and his wife Barbara Arana, who also tended Philip Zimbardo.  They were wonderful folks; many thanks to them!

Fig. 15.  GOOOOOOAL!!!!!  A plate of the local speciality, mole poblano, and a dark Mexican beer. Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Fig. 16.  Beside being the gastronomic capital of Mexico, Puebla is dotted with colonial churches, many of them clad in brick and the local tiles. Here’s one.

Just a bit more on accommodationism

by Greg Mayer

Although Jerry’s a bit full up with the accommodationism issue, two recent items, by friends of WEIT, are worth noting. Ophelia Benson, well known to WEIT readers, has a piece in the Guardian,  and Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk, editors of 50 Voices of Disbelief, with Russell also being well known to WEIT readers, have a piece in the Guardian as well. (Ophelia recently tangled with the  author of the New Statesman piece that seemed to claim UK courts had declared science to be a religion.)

Caturday felid: the philosophical cat

by Greg Mayer

Peyton is a WEIT blog regular, who last appeared here in a post by Jerry. This is a picture of her taken by Jerry while visiting me in September. I put up a copy of this photo recently in Jerry’s lab, joining an illustrious group of cats that grace the wall outside his fly room.

Peyton, the philosophical cat.

Hola from Puebla

Greetings from Puebla! The meetings here are stimulating but exhausting; I went to the venue at 7:30 this morning and didn’t return until 8:30 p.m., and even so I missed the fireworks display (!). It is all very luxurious for us speakers, with chauffered limos, fancy hotel rooms, private minders to show us around, our own backstage dressing rooms (get that!), and fancy pyrotechnic digital introductions with LOUD rock music. What with all this hoopla, walking on stage makes you feel like a rock star (the audience is about 1200). I’m told that this technological hoopla resembles what happens during a TED conference.

The talks are, in the main, excellent, although a bit short at 20 minutes each! Highlights for me today were Frans de Waal on primate morality (he also showed some new footage of work on elephants, using the “marked forehead” design to show that pachyderms can recognize themselves as individuals); Jamie Whyte, a British philosopher whom I didn’t know, but who gave a fantastic talk on why we must not refrain from criticizing beliefs (including religion); Julian Baggini, author of the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Atheism; Randy Cohen (the New York Times ethicist); and Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, who also talked about his work on Abu Ghraib (he was an expert witness for one of the defendants). Marc Hauser also gave a good talk (similar to the one he gave at Chicago) about the universality of how people solve moral dilemmas, regardless of their gender, upbringing, or faith (or lack thereof). Hauser’s work really does make a good case that morality is something innate in humans: perhaps from shared evolution, but certainly not from faith.

Curiously, both Cohen, from his decade of writing The Ethicist, and Zimbardo, from his psychological experiments, arrived at the same conclusion: there are no such things as people with inherently good or bad characters: environmental circumstances can make good-intentioned people behave badly. As Zimbardo said, “There are no bad apples, just bad barrels.” Do have a look at Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment webpage: that work, done in the ’70s, is still a sine qua non in psychology texts as it raised disturbing questions about how nice people can become evil very quickly.

I was not completely convinced by this extreme environmentalism. For one thing, it’s an easy way to exculpate people who commit antisocial or criminal acts; for another, there do seem to be some people who are of inherently good character and prone to do heroic things in circumstances where others are apathetic. On the other hand, I keep thinking of Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which showed how everyday Germans, most of whom we’d consider nice, well-meaning people, became avid supporters of the Holocaust.

Robert Wright also spoke, but mostly about his theory of how increasing non-zero-sum interactions are making society better. Thankfully, he didn’t bang on about the evolution of God.

The big draw of the conference is, of course, Sunday’s debate between Schmuley Boteach, Christopher Hitchens, Dinesh D’Souza, and Sam Harris. I’m told that Wright will also participate. Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to leave before the debate, for many of us are flying out on Sunday.

The good thing about meetings this eclectic is that they make you think. You encounter new ideas and topics far removed from your everyday fare, and it’s good to get shaken out of one’s normal milieu to see what’s going on in other spheres. People whom I’ve never met (but whom I’ve admired), like de Waal, Cohen, and Zimbardo, were truly nice guys who were glad to discuss their work with me.

There’s another spate of talks tomorrow, mostly by people I don’t know, but that makes them even more intriguing.

And I’m eating well. Photos forthcoming, but let’s just say the conference organizers are putting on the culinary dog as well. I’m told that they flew two chefs over from Europe just to cook for us. Yesterday my minders took me to a swell local restaurant to sample local specialities, including mole poblano.

_________

Update: xoxox to the travelling Otter.

“Faith in science is a belief”

by Greg Mayer

There’s an article up on New Statesman, by Sholto Byrnes, announcing “It’s official: faith in science is a belief“. The sub heading says “New legal ruling places it in the same category as religion”.   It sounds like some sort of legal victory for creationists, of the kind feared by Michael Ruse: to have science in general, and evolution in particular, regarded as a faith-based enterprise on a par with creationism is a traditional goal of creationists.  As Duane Gish put it “Evolution theory is no less religious nor more scientific than creation.” But is this what has happened? In a word, no. The wording of the headline may be just clever enough to exonerate Byrnes of the charge of inaccuracy, but it’s surely misleading.

What a UK court said is

A man has been told he can take his employer to tribunal on the grounds he was unfairly dismissed because of his views on climate change….

His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”

So, what’s been ruled a “belief” is the “moral imperative” arising from climate change, and this is the “it” that’s been placed in the same category as religion. (Under, I might add, the rather odd-sounding, to a non-Britisher, “2003 religion or belief regulations.”  As an American, whose school lessons in British history tended to center on Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, and whose political forefathers rebelled to protect their rights as Englishmen, it is curious to me how few rights Englishmen seem to have these days when it comes to speaking their minds about matters scientific and religious.)

Byrnes exacerbates the misleading nature of his headline by asking

But I wonder if this ruling is quite so useful to those who look to science and rationality as guides to their lives as it might on the surface appear.

Why would he think that anyone interested in science and rationality would support such a ruling, let alone find it useful?  The underlying dispute is not about the epistemological status of science, but the sacking of an executive who objected to his employer’s environmental policies: the court ruling, as the much more accurate Independent headline had it, was about “green beliefs”. While I sympathize with the employee’s views on global warming, it seems distinctly odd to me that a court should find these views religious in nature. But in any case, the ruling is not about what the New Statesman headline suggests.

___________________

Gish, D. 1985. Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record. Creation- Life Publishers, El Cajon, CA. p. 23.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Xenu

The artist reads the blogs. .

 

 

Crybaby theists

Shoot me for backsliding.  At the National Times of Australia, Michael Brull goes after “crybaby theists,” those theists who don’t have good arguments for their beliefs and so resort to whining about atheists’ incivility and rudeness (his exemplar is Greg Craven, who published an attack on the New Atheists, also in the Times). Brull argues:

Facing a new attack with an international audience playing close attention, religions have as little rational argument in their favour as ever. There was a time when they could deal with dissent through more draconian measures: the kind that can still be practiced in, say, Saudi Arabia. Having lost the power of the gun in the West, apologists of religion have a new weapon: being offended.

Rather than confronting (say) Dawkins’ arguments with counter-arguments, people like Craven, and many others like him, instead cry out: why are you picking on us? All we want is for you to respect our beliefs. And so, the crybaby theists hide behind the demand for respect, which sounds reasonable enough. . .

. . .The bottom line is that such special pleading is a way for theists to avoid answering their critics. The cry that religious beliefs are not being treated respectfully often demonstrates incredible arrogance and hypocrisy.

Firstly, in a liberal democracy, people should adjust to the prospect of other people finding their views stupid, immoral, pernicious, or any other terrible thing. For example, consider the case of a racist. They may view others with contempt, and members of the targeted minorities might respond with contempt for the views of the racist. Should we demand that victims of racism respect the beliefs of racists? Of course not: we grant the truism that some beliefs are stupid, immoral, pernicious and other terrible things. A liberal democracy cannot function without the possibility of discussing which beliefs are good and which ones are not. Crybaby theists wish to be shielded from the normal rough and tumble of arguments about beliefs. There are people who honestly think religious belief irrational, and find aspects of organised religion troubling. If anything is outrageous, it is the arrogance of religious extremists, here and elsewhere, holding that such views should not be allowed open discussion.

And let it be noted that athiests rarely complain about the tone of theists’ arguments, which are often pretty vitriolic (c.f. Andrew Sullivan on Scientology), except to point out the hypocrisy. Nor do we request kid-glove treatment for our own atheism. We’re perfectly happy going hammer and tongs with our opponents in the marketplace of ideas:

Indeed, no atheists that I know of actually suggest that theists should “respect” their beliefs and stop arguing for theism. Atheists have simply taken up arguing their point of view: against religious belief.

Indeed, but do read both Brull and Craven’s pieces in their entirety. The striking fact about crybaby theists (and their nonbeliever counterparts, faitheists like Barbara Forrest mentioned in Dan Jones’s New Statesman piece) is that they rarely deal with the substantive arguments of atheists. No new arguments for the existence of gods have arisen in centuries, and their refutations are well known. You rarely see a crybaby theist mounting a vigorous defense of the Ontological Argument,  the Argument from Design, or the Argument from Morality. All their complaints are either about how mean we are, or that we are politically hamhanded and should stop saying that religion is irrational, or that we simply don’t understand theology in the first place. And faitheists are loath to admit that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris have adduced or reprised really substantive arguments against the existence of gods. Even though they must agree with some of these arguments (they are atheists after all!), they pass this over in silence in their rush to accuse the atheists of nastiness.

When I see this, I know that we’ve won on the substance. It’s been pointed out that the same arguments against tone were used against the civil rights movement and in-your-face gay-rights activists. (Now I know that someone is going to beef that religion is not the same thing as racism or homophobia. Granted — although all are based on irrational premises –but that’s not the point.) The “tone” card is always played by those on the losing side — those who have exhausted their supply of rational arguments.

And now for something completely salacious

I forgot to proffer this paper of the week before I left. The title alone is a classic: Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time. 2009. M. Tan, G. Jones, G. Zhu, J. Ye, T. Hong, S. Zhou, S. Zhang, and L. Zhang. PLoS One :4(10): e7595. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595. Be sure to check out the short video at the end of the paper.

You can imagine snickering that went along with writing this abstract:

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate’s penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.

Seriously, why the licking? Here are the authors’ four theories:

First, genital licking may lubricate the penis or increase penile stimulation, prolonging the duration of copulation. Prolonged copulation might assist sperm transport from the vagina to the oviduct, or stimulate secretions of the pituitary gland in the female [26] and hence increase the likelihood of fertilization. Second, prolonged copulation might be a method of mate-guarding, because the mates would normally segregate after copulation to form unisexual groups which persist throughout the non-breeding season [29]. Third, fellatio may confer bactericidal benefits and assist in the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) both to females [30]–[33], and to males that lick their own penis briefly after copulation [34]–[37]. Saliva has a protective repertoire that goes beyond antibacterial activity to include antifungal, antichlamydial, and antiviral properties as well [38]. Finally, genital licking may facilitate the detection and identification of MHC-dependent chemical cues associated with mate choice [39], [40].

The New Statesman on accommodationism

Hola from Mexico, where the Ciudad de las Ideas meeting starts tonight. Puebla is a nice town, a welcome respite from the hideous, smog-ridden sprawl of Mexico City. Volcanoes are in sight, and the city is rumored to be the gastronomic capital of Mexico, something I hope to investigate. But on to today’s post:

If anything shows that our internet debates on accommodationism have reached an impasse, it’s this curiously inconclusive article by Dan Jones at The New Statesman. There’s no attempt here to go deeper than the quotes of the participants — for example, Jones made no effort to find out if atheists have indeed been “excessively mean,” as accommodationists claim. He doesn’t press those who make this argument for examples, nor look for any himself.

Even Jones himself seems bored with the debate as he reaches the predictable non-commital and middle-of-the-road conclusion beloved by journalists:

In the meantime, there is little reason to suppose that the world will reach any meaningful consensus on the question of how best to engage the public with science in general, and evolutionary theory in particular. Perhaps, in true Darwinian fashion, those arguments and ideas best adapted to the modern world will prevail. In an era of resurgent religion, it is far from clear which approach this will be.

Those last two sentences are completely meaningless filler, designed to look clever. Dan seems like a nice guy, and is no intellectual slouch, but this one he phoned in.

And I guess I’m tired of the debates myself. I’m posting this only because I was intereviewed for the piece, as were several other participants.