Browne on Darwin and friends

This is an excellent short article by Janet Browne (the Janet Browne who wrote the best biography of Darwin I’ve read, Voyaging(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Power of Place(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), both well worth reading) that discusses the reception of the theory of evolution by his contemporaries, and acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Huxley, Hooker, Gray, and Lyell. One important point is that opposition to his ideas was not driven by the crude Biblical literalism that we encounter so much today, but a more general conflict with a more enlightened religion that found no place for a personal god in a world where life was the product of rather callous and impersonal forces, and of course, with a religion that was a force for controlling people’s minds.

Scholars nowadays agree that The Descent of Man offered a far-reaching naturalistic account of human evolution but did not change many minds. The people who already accepted evolution continued to believe. Those who did not continued to disbelieve. Few readers wished to shrink the gap between mankind and animals quite so dramatically, however. If these ideas were accepted, wrote the Edinburgh Review, the constitution of society would be destroyed.

A lot of people seem to want to argue that it’s just fundamentalism that’s a problem—but that’s only one narrow aspect of the problem that’s common in the US. It was not a major issue in 19th century Britain.

(via Thoughts in a Haystack)

Religious credulity and the recent spate of godly ‘science’

I usually like Cornelia Dean’s science reporting, but this recent collection of book reviews put me off from the opening paragraph. She begins with the tired old claim that “scientists have to be brave” to embrace religion. Malarkey. I’ve never heard a scientist bring up the subject of religion, pro or con, at a scientific conference or associated informal gathering. You can be as devout as you want to be with no risk to your professional career (you may even find yourself an icon for the compatibility of science and religion!), and as for your personal life, being religious in a country in which 90% of the residents self-identify as religious, and in which religiosity has become a defining character of our political leadership, is hard to characterize as boldly bucking a trend. The rest of the review is an exercise in credulity.

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Uh-oh. Double trouble!

Ricky Santorum has us scientists down cold.

Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It’s a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals.

So, you see, scientists are amoral, with nothing to hold them back from pursuing their dreams of unbridled, raging power. I’m sure if we asked Li’l Ricky about atheists, he’d turn pale and tell us all kinds of horror stories.

Atheist scientists, of course, are absolutely the worst. Watch out—when my army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids is assembled, I won’t hesitate to use it.

Think before morphing

Oh, good. I saw this WaPo article with a morphing animation of a lemur into SJ Gould, and I was mildly appalled—it’s a very badly done gimmick that doesn’t say anything about how evolution works, and actually grossly misleads the viewer on the morphological transformations that had to have occurred. Fortunately, I don’t have to deepen my reputation as a cranky internet curmudgeon by complaining about it— Carl Zimmer has done it for me.

Transforming grid coordinates is an interesting tool in describing the transformations between forms—D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson did it well—but you need to start with forms you know are linearly related and you’ve got to define and align anatomical features very carefully. Picking random photos of various primates and blending them ain’t it.

Damn the NCCAM

Since I was just griping about the false claim that the political left is as anti-scientific as the right, I will mention one exception where I think the argument has some merit: alternative medicine. I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which had a 2005 budget of 123 million dollars—123 million dollars that was sucked away from legitimate science and placed in the hands of quacks. The latest issue of Science has two articles, pro and con, on NCCAM, and you might be able to guess where my sympathies lay.

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Ignore anything I might have ever said about Dershowitz

How could I have ever said a charitable word about Alan Dershowitz? In penance, I urge you all to read Juan Cole’s dissection of Dershowitz’s grading of civilianity, or if you’d prefer something lighter, try Kung Fu Monkey’s demolition by amusing anecdote.

If anyone were in the mood to revisit my earlier post, you could easily undermine my appreciation of Dershowitz’s argument there by pointing out that it is Alan Dershowitz talking about morality, and I would have to sheepishly admit that he has no credibility on the matter.