(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 behavior 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!  Buyt 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.

Here’s Esther’s description, which I reproduce (along with the drawing) with her permission:

Generating an illustrated history of evolutionary biology was an idea partially inspired by the caricatures of James Gillray. The British artist’s work served to illustrate the political and social scenes of the late 18th century, and was interspersed throughout the Harvard summer school course, taught by Andrew Berry, for which this image was created. Starting from the Greek philosophers who first observed and consequently attempted to explain the world around them, the tree winds it way down to Darwin, the “father of evolution”, and Wallace, his widely unknown counterpart who seems to have lost out  in evolution’s custody battle (Google this man). It would,however, be false to say that the image was not in any way spawned by the thought: “Hmmm. I’d really rather not write a history paper.”

Click to enlarge.  It repays long study, for every detail in this drawing is meaningful.  If you pull the picture onto your desktop, you’ll see that you can zoom in on it considerably without loss of detail, as you’ll get a 10.6 megabyte image.
Thanks to Esther and Andrew for alerting me to this, and allowing me to reproduce it.

There are several species of dormouse, found mostly in Europe, but the famous one is the hazel dormouse  (Muscardinus avellanarius), a nocturnal rodent named after its favorite food, hazelnuts. They hibernate underground through the winter (the specimen above is undoubtedly one of these), and are protected throughout Europe: their numbers are declining because of habitat loss.

A dormouse website shows the characteristic sign of their presence:

Dormice like to eat hazelnuts and if you examine a hazelnut shell it is possible to tell for certain whether it has been eaten by a dormouse.  Look at the picture of the hazelnuts [below]. Both have been eaten by Dormice. The characteristics are a neat smooth circular cut to the inside of the opening and tiny radiating teeth marks on the outside. Woodmice also like hazelnuts and eat them in a similar way but the inside of the cut shell is not smooth as woodmice gnaw across the cut. Squirrels just crack the nuts open with their powerful jaws.

So remember, a smooth circular cut with tiny radiating teeth marks is the sign of the Dormouse!

And, of course, we have the world’s most famous dormouse, the always-sleeping rodent from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Here the dormouse is sleeping at tea next to the Mad Hatter. Eventually the Hatter and the March Hare wake him up by putting his head into the teapot.

You can adopt a dormouse for only twenty pounds, and receive a personalized adoption certificate as well as a soft toy dormouse.

h/t: Matthew Cobb via Christina Purcell

As the National Center for Science Education reports, such a bill has just passed an Indiana state senate committee:

Indiana’s Senate Bill 89, which if enacted would allow local school districts to “require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science,” was passed by the Senate Committee on Education and Career Development on January 25, 2012. . .

. . . Testimony against the bill stressed the unconstitutionality of teaching creation science, established by the Supreme Court in 1987. Among those testifying against the bill were John Staver, professor of chemistry and science education at Purdue University; Chuck Little, executive director of the Indiana Urban Schools Association; David Sklar, the Director of Government Relations for the Jewish Community Relations Council; the Reverend Charles Allen, a chaplain for Grace Unlimited, a campus ministry in the Indianapolis area; and Reba Boyd Wooden, executive director of the Indiana Center for Inquiry.

Note who voted for and against the bill (in America “D” stands for Democrat and “R” for Republican):

The vote was 8-2, with the bill’s sponsor and committee chair Dennis Kruse (R-District 14), Carlin Yoder (R-District 12), Jim Banks (R-District 17), Jim Buck (R-District 17), Luke Kenley (R-District 20), Jean Leising (R-District 42), Scott Schneider (R-District 30), and Frank Mrvan Jr. (D-District 1) voting for and Earline S. Rogers (D-District 3) and Tim Skinner (D-District 38) voting against the bill.

As usual, it’s the damn Republicans behind this stuff.

 Here’s what State Senate Bill 89,says:

    A BILL FOR AN ACT to amend the Indiana Code concerning education.

SOURCE: IC 20-30-6-18; (12)IN0089.1.1. –>     SECTION 1. IC 20-30-6-18 IS ADDED TO THE INDIANA CODE AS A NEW SECTION TO READ AS FOLLOWS [EFFECTIVE JULY 1, 2012]:

Sec. 18. The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.

Of course to become law, the bill has to pass the State Senate, then the state House of Representatives, and then be signed into law by the governor.  As the Indiana ACLU notes, the bill is unconstitutional on its face: teaching of creationism in public schools was rejected on freedom-of-religion grounds by the U. S. Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard.

Given all this, the bill is likely to be stopped at some point short of becoming law. But I want to say for the gazillionth time that we wouldn’t be facing these brushfires if there were no religion.  If we didn’t have goddy creation myths, why would anyone oppose the teaching of evolution?

_____________

Alain de Botton, whom we’ve encountered before, is rapidly becoming an embarrassment to atheism.  First he wants us to adopt many of the ritualistic trappings of religion, and now he wants to erect a £ 1,000,000 pound tower to atheism in London.  Apparently he’s already raised half the money for this project. The Guardian reports:

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a “new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’s “aggressive” and “destructive” approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, De Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

“Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha, but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. “That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens atheism has become known as a destructive force. But there are lots of people who don’t believe but aren’t aggressive towards religions.”

What a stupid waste of money!  Richard has responded:

Dawkins criticised the project on Thursday, indicating the money was being misspent and that a temple of atheism was a contradiction in terms.

“Atheists don’t need temples,” the author of The God Delusion said. “I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, sceptical critical thinking.”

In the article, various people weigh in on the boondoggle, with some humanists predictably objecting to a memorial to what is, after all, an absence of belief. Curiously, at least one wooly-brained priest is in favor of the tower:

Another Anglican, the Rev George Pitcher, a priest at St Bride’s, Fleet Street, and a former adviser to the archbishop of Canterbury, “rejoiced” in the idea. “He is referring to a sense of human transcendence, that there is something more than our visceral existence,” Pitcher said.

“Building a monument acknowledges that we are more than dust. Whether we come at that through secular means or a religious narrative, it is the same game.

“This is a more constructive atheism than Dawkins, who is about the destruction of ideas rather than contributing new ones.”

It’s just like a priest to try to claim an atheist monument for God!  And really, more constructive than Dawkins?  Dawkins has converted dozens of believers to rationality and naturalism, and I see that as quite constructive.  After all, as Steve Gould always said, the destruction of bad ideas (he was referring to science) is a contribution just as real as the vetting of new ideas.  And Dawkins has certainly made far more of a contribution to understanding nature than any priest—much less the Anglican faith as a whole—has done.  One would have to be a moron to think that an atheist temple could convert anyone to disbelief.

The design of the temple is trite beyond belief:

Each centimetre of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet. The exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.

Given that humans aren’t the apex of evolution, I favor the Natural-History-Museum solution of Steve Rose, who shows, in another Guardian piece, how silly the atheist tower is

What De Botton seems to be preaching is his own rather narrow definition of atheism, with its own unified philosophy, set of rules and even architectural brand identity. It feels rather like, er, a religion.

To answer De Botton’s original question, atheists do have their own versions of great churches and cathedrals. If the antithesis of religion is scientific rationalism, then surely its temples are the British Library, the Millau Viaduct and the Large Hadron Collider? If it’s about glorifying creation, then why not the Natural History Museum or the Eden Project? What about the Tate Modern? Or Wembley Stadium? Or the O2? Or the Westfield shopping centre? Perhaps non-believers should decide for themselves what a temple of atheism should be.