Pollock’s article, “Some observations on the ‘free will wars’” does deserve a brief response.  He is defending compatibilism, the view that free will is compatible with the physical determinism of the universe. Given my view that “free will” involves the ability, at any given moment, to freely choose between two or more alternative decisions, I see free will as incompatible with physical determinism, which mandates that only one choice is possible: the one conditioned by your genes, environment, and personal history. Pollock sees this incompatibilism as incoherent:

. . . many see incompatibilist determinism a la Jerry Coyne as either “reductionism gone mad,” or, putting a positive spin on it, the logical consequence of reductionism applied to human brains.

 I confess myself perplexed by this, because it seems to me that the  intuitions driving incompatibilism stem from absent or insufficiently applied reductionism.

Now consider this passage from Jerry Coyne’s USA Today article:

The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re  characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws  of physics. Most people find that idea intolerable, so powerful is our  illusion that we really do make choices. (my emphasis).

But um, Jerry, we do actually make choices, right? Don’t we? I mean, not in some amazingly deep philosophically or morally fraught sense of choice, as in “But did Hitler really have a choice to not be a monster?”, but in a basic, boring, everyday sense, as in “Do you want Froot Loops or  muesli?” Surely you talk this way too, when you go home?

I think Jerry would concede that we do make such choices, but insist that they aren’t “real” choices. Well, what is a “real” choice as distinct  from an unreal one? Like in the case of magic, it would appear that  according to Jerry and other incompatibilists, “real choice” refers to  the choices that are not real (i.e., don’t actually happen because they  require supernatural powers), while the choice that is real — that can,  y’know, actually be done — is not. real. choice.

And yet I would bet a large sum of money that Jerry et al. are perfectly  willing to use the language of choice in their daily lives, as soon as  they’ve forgotten about the day’s blogo-philosophizing. This is not just because choice is a powerful illusion (which would presumbably [sic] be their preferred rationalization) — it’s because the concept of “choice” cuts  reality at the joints. Choice is one of the most important things that  the human brain does; arguably, the brain’s ability to model the world  and choose from alternative actions IS its survival value.

A good reductionist would look at this incredibly useful concept of  “choice” and then try to figure out how it fits into the determined physical universe. Eventually, they would conclude that choice is a physical process like eating or breathing or thinking.

The Vimeo site notes that “This video is a collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty. All timelapses were shot on the Canon 5D Mark II with a variety of Canon L and Zeiss CP.2 Lenses.”

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Though his choice of music is pretty conventional—Schubert, Bach, Strauss (but also some Indonesian stuff)—the interview is fascinating, with many insights into Attenborough’s life, work, and travel.  The guy is 85 years old and is still going strong. And I’m extremely jealous, for I’d love to have his job.

Attenborough and I do share one thing, though:

But despite his extraordinary travels, there is one part of the globe that’s eluded him. As a young man and a keen rock-climber, he yearned to conquer the highest peak in the world. “I won’t make it now – I won’t make it to base camp now – but as a teenager, I thought that the only thing a red-blooded Englishman really should do was to climb Everest.”

That, too, was my ambition, and I got so far as to walk to Everest base camp—twice.  The Khumbu Valley is, I think, the most beautiful place in the world, but, alas, I’m too old to go clambering about  on the mountains.

Professor Ceiling Cat deems this the most beautiful place in the world

(Photo by Tim Laman, courtesy of National Geographic; click to enlarge.)

Albinism, seen in many species of animals, results from the inability to synthesize the pigment melanin.

(Video credit: Fabio Governato et al./U. of Washington/NASA Advanced Supercomputing.)

Mergers of galaxies are common in their evolution. This movie shows the evolution of a galaxy with similar mass to our own Milky Way, commencing shortly after the Big Bang. The simulation is in a fully cosmological setting, according to our knowledge of Big Bang cosmology. This particular galaxy has a rich merging history, including a major merger at redshift of ~1, i.e. at a time when the Universe was almost half its current age. A large disk reforms from gas left over after the merger, and from subsequent gaseous accretion.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that Ethan Siegel, creator of Starts with a Bang, presents this simulation to tout a worthy project: The Charity Engine, in which you can donate some of your own computer’s time to help perform scientific calculations like those involved in the galaxy simulation—and help good charities at the same time.

h/t: Michael

This stance seems strange given that Sheldrake was trained in botany and biochemistry at  Harvard and Cambridge, but lately he seems more into woo:

While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor and Academic Director of the Holistic Thinking Program at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut.

I don’t know of Sheldrake or his books, which include Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, but I suspect that my readers do. Nor have I read his latest, but it gets encomiums from both Vernon and Midgley.

Midgley’s review first. She gives her own views before launching into her review:

We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings – and indeed other animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.

You know where she’s going here: straight into the bosom of Jesus:

Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don’t suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modern physics, where matter is dynamic.

First of all, materialism is not a “faith,” it’s a working principle (appropriately turned into a supporting worldview) that the only way we progress in understanding the universe is through assuming that matter and energy are all there is. Call philosophical materialism an “ideology,” if you will, but it’s by no means a “faith,” for that “ideology” has made enormous progress in understanding our universe.  There is plenty of evidence for the efficacy of materialism as a “way of knowing,” and no such evidence for faith. Faith is an ideology that doesn’t answer any questions. And yes, science does have the authority to pronounce on the evidence for God, and certainly has the authority to investigate the claims of alternative medicine.

Further, everything we know about how the “active wholes” of humans and animals work has been achieved through the naturalistic methods of science. Where, Dr. Midgley, is the evidence for a “soul”?

Finally, since when has science been based on “static materialism”? What does that mean, anyway: that we assume things don’t move? Surely she realizes, even in her dotage, that every advance in modern physics has also come from materialism. There’s no invocation of God in quantum mechanics. Yes, it’s weird, but nobody (or at least nobody who’s sane) sees quantum entanglement as evidence for God.

The problem comes when Sheldrake has to propose an alternative paradigm.  And it’s not heartening:

Sheldrake’s proposal that we should think of natural regularities as habits rather than as laws is not just an arbitrary fantasy. It is a new analogy, brought in to correct what he sees as a chronic exaggeration of regularity in current science. He shows how carefully research conventions are tailored to smooth out the data, obscuring wide variations by averaging many results, and, in general, how readily scientists accept results that fit in with their conception of eternal laws.

Habits? Really? The speed of light and the inverse-square laws are “habits”? Does she—and Sheldrake—really think that physical laws are conspiracies constructed by scientists to hide the messiness of real data? Has she not considered that it may be the data themselves that are messy—that there are always errors in measurement—rather than the underlying principles? If what Sheldrake says is true, we’d never be able to get people to the Moon.

Clearly, Sheldrake’s thesis has been enormously influenced by his pathbreaking work on dogs expecting their owners to come home:

Whether or no we want to follow Sheldrake’s further speculations on topics such as morphic resonance, his insistence on the need to attend to possible wider ways of thinking is surely right. And he has been applying it lately in fields that might get him an even wider public. He has been making claims about two forms of perception that are widely reported to work but which mechanists hold to be impossible: a person’s sense of being looked at by somebody behind them, and the power of animals – dogs, say – to anticipate their owners’ return. Do these things really happen?

Sheldrake handles his enquiries soberly. People and animals do, it seems, quite often perform these unexpected feats, and some of them regularly perform them much better than others, which is perhaps not surprising. He simply concludes that we need to think much harder about such things.

What she means, of course, is that these aren’t materialistic phenomena, but somehow reflect the hand of Baby Jesus. But I’m dumbfounded. Why do these behaviors defy materialism? Dogs can learn lots of things: the sound of cars and can openers, what the sight of a leash means, and many other things.  Why shouldn’t they be able to sense the passage of time, and anticipate their owners’ return? And of course we’re evolved to be wary, and so can often sense that someone is looking at us when we can’t see them, especially if there are people around.  Sometimes, of course, that feeling might be wrong, but it’s better to have it misfire than not to have it at all, because when an enemy or a predator is around, it’s better to err on the side of caution. I’m a mechanist, and I don’t deem these two behaviors impossible (Midgley says that Richard Dawkins and Lewis Wolpert are two of the miscreants who unfairly attack Sheldrake’s work.)

But enough. Ever since Midgley mounted an attack on The Selfish Gene that was as ascerbic as it was misguided, we know she’s a bit mush-brained on the issue of evolution.

Things are just as bad with Mark Vernon’s review, “It’s time for science to move on from materialism.”   Here, for example, is how both Sheldrake and Vernon (an ex Anglican priest), make a hash of protein evolution and structure—if that’s what this is about, since it’s hard to tell.

This is designed to account for, say, the enormously complex structure of proteins. A conventional approach, which might be described as bottom-up, has protein molecules “exploring” all possible patterns until settling on one with a minimum energy. This explanation works well for simple molecules, like carbon dioxide. However, proteins are large and complicated. As Sheldrake notes: “It would take a small protein about 10²⁶ years to do this, far longer than the age of the universe.”

As a result, some scientists are proposing top-down, holistic explanations. Sheldrake’s particular proposal is that such self-organising systems exist in fields of memory or habit. These contain the information required to make the structure.

Fearlessly, he extends the speculation to embrace a range of phenomena that many people experience. Telephone telepathy is one, when you are thinking about someone just as they phone. Or the sense of being stared at. The idea, roughly, is that our intentions can be communicated across mental fields that are like morphogenetic fields. They connect us – though in the modern world, with its ideological and technological distractions, we are not very good at noticing them.

At least Vernon doesn’t mention the dogs!  But the idea of physical laws as “memory and habit”, though dumb, don’t even give credibility to views like telepathy.  Further, science doesn’t dismiss these phenomena a priori: we doubt them on two grounds:  1) there is no evidence for them, and 2) we know of no physical mechanism to communicate telepathically. Indeed, Vernon notes that absence of evidence:

Whether or not his own theories will stand the test of time is another question. In a paper published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in November 2011, Fraser Watts examines them at face value and, broadly, finds them suggestive but wanting. For example, Sheldrake conceives of mental fields via the analogy of an amoeba: as an amoeba extends its pseudopodia and touches the environment around it, similarly telepathy and the like would be the result of “mental pseudopodia” extended into the world around us.

This shows two things. First, despite the assertion of accommodationists, science can investigate the supernatural, and those claims have come up empty.  Second, Vernon himself shows that the way to test those theories is using the naturalism-based methods of science.  Claims about real phenomena in the world, whether they be about telepathy or the existence of a god who interacts with the universe, are not recalcitrant to the methods of science.

Sadly for Vernon and Midgley, they have no examples showing that science is impotent at investigating real phenomena in the world.  They decry materialism and naturalism simply because they don’t like it.  It doesn’t support their beliefs in the supernatural, so they simply criticize the methods of science.  But science is the only way to determine if such phenomena really exist.

You can’t believe in something simply because it makes you feel better, and that is the overarching tenet of New Atheism.  When we were young, we had no problem discarding the idea of Santa Claus because there was an alternative and naturalistic explanation for the mysterious appearance of presents on Christmas morn.  Yet Midgley and Vernon still cling to the idea of a Super-Santa—someone who makes them feel good not just on Christmas Day, but every day of the year.  It’s time to put away that childish thing, too.  If they really wanted to use their imaginations in a productive way, they might ponder the methods science could use to determine how dogs know when their owners are coming home.

The 18 lawgivers looking down on the justices are divided into two friezes of ivory-colored, Spanish marble. On the south wall, to the right of incoming visitors, are figures from the pre-Christian era — Menes, Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus, Solon, Draco, Confucius and Octavian (Caesar Augustus). On the north wall to the left are lawmakers of the Christian era — Napoleon Bonaparte, Marshall, William Blackstone, Hugo Grotius, Louis IX, King John, Charlemagne, Muhammad and Justinian.

Muhammad?  Yes, and here’s his figure in the frieze:

But as you probably know, depiction of the Prophet is a severe violation of the hadith, the post-Qur’anic interpretation of Mohamed’s sayings that is to the Qur’an what the Talmud is to the Torah in Jews.  Many Muslims, and nearly all Sunni Muslims, take severe offense at such violations as a sign of idolatry. You won’t see pictures of Muhammed in any mosques.

So of course there were complains by Muslims.  Cowed, the court responded (also reported by the above link) thusly (also noting as well the aversion of Muslims to depictions of the Prophet):

After last year’s controversy about the image of Muhammad, the Supreme Court included this explanation in tourist materials: “The figure is a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor to honor Muhammad, and it bears no resemblance to Muhammad.”

Over at Sneer Review, reader Sigmund gives the only possible response:

How do they know that?

Three of Robbins’s indictments:

• Instead we live in a bizarre place where it seems almost every half-baked opinion – no matter how stupid or irresponsible – must be broadcast to the world as valid and equal. In this polluted environment, attitudes to things like ‘facts’, ‘evidence’ and ‘science’ range from indifference to open hostility, as Adam Rutherford discovered when he made the mistake of appearing on Today recently. . .

Rutherford’s experience with John Humphrys was little better (audio). Every question was designed to put the guests on the defensive or to create conflict, and even reasonable points were phrased in an aggressive manner. Hasn’t science lost its romance? Isn’t this all a waste of money? Don’t you wish you got some of the money that CERN gets? When his guests provided answers, such as Rutherford’s neat explanation of the economic benefits of investing in scientific research, they aroused an “mm” or were ignored. Worse, Humphrys seemed almost proud of his own ignorance of the subject; it’s hard to imagine a presenter treating economics or the arts in a similar manner.

• The BBC Trust’s 2011 report on science found that only about an eighth of broadcast news items about research included the voice of an independent expert in the field, not involved with the research in question (see Alice Bell’s blog for some interesting coverage of that report).

And this is a depressing one:

• When scientists are allowed to get clever, TV producers are forced to go to absurd lengths to compensate. Witness Cox’s recent ‘Night with the stars’, in which Cox was allowed to explain aspects of quantum theory on condition that various comedians and celebrities were brought on to act dumb and reassure the audience that nobody really understands this stuff. It was fun I admit, but if the BBC filmed a lecture about the life and works of Dostoevsky, do you really think they’d have a succession of celebrities coming on stage to look bewildered by the clever man’s long words?

I don’t watch the BBC, but perhaps some UK readers can weigh in about whether Robbins’s complaint is justified.

h/t: Tom C.

And now we can look forward to a season of breeding.  Let’s hope the parents both survive this year, and that the chicks won’t have to be taken in for rearing.

You can find the EagleCam here; bookmark it if you want to see the fun.  The moderated discussion, where you can find out what’s been happening, is to the right of the video.  The cam is down right now, but should be fixed soon.

Bonus video: Eagle pwns tabby.  From YouTube; the owner apparently lives in Alaska. It’s the same person who posted the video in comment #6 below.

It was Thanksgiving morning and I noticed about 20 eagles fighting over some slab of food. This eagle won the fight and went on the hill next to my house to eat his food. Next thing I know 2 of my cats are up on the hill checking out this eagle. I tried to call them in the house but they wouldn’t listen to me. I wasn’t too worried about the eagle attacking the cats because that eagle was too into that slab of food. So I got out my video camera and took this video. When Suitcase got so close that eagle could have tore Suitcase up but instead just gave him a slap with his wing. The eagles here are not really aggressive to the cats here.