Rationally Speaking

My colleague at the University of California-Irvine, Francisco Ayala, has been interviewed recently by the New York Times about his views on science and religion. Ayala is particularly suitable for the task, being a former Dominican priest and one of the world’s best known evolutionary biologists. I happen to agree with much of what Ayala said in the interview, but of course I will be focusing here on where I depart from his positions.

Here we go again, just this morning the Florida House of Representatives passed a bill that directs teachers to engage in “critical analysis” of evolution in public schools. The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican Alan Hays of Umatilla, says that evolution “has holes in it,” and that “no one has any record -- no fossils have been found.” That will come as a big shock to the thousands of natural history museums around the world, displaying hundreds of thousands of fossils.

Maybe I’ve had elevators on my mind because the one in our building has gone through endless repairs of late, none of which apparently improved its speed or reliability. Or perhaps you simply cannot live in New York City without taking into account elevators as a major component of your life. But then my wife pointed out to me this snippet from an article published recently in The New Yorker (every self-respecting newyorker reads The New Yorker while in the subway):

I have taken issue before (here and here) with the writings of Stanley Fish in the New York Times, and I’m about to do it again. Fish is a professor of law at Florida State University, and often writes reasonably on a variety of topics in the NYT, but there is a streak of deconstruction running through some of his columns, that brings him to espouse pretty questionable positions when it comes to science, religion or philosophy.

Skeptic Society’s mastermind and author Michael Shermer is about to release a review of the latest nonsense entry in the evolution-creation wars: Ben Stein’s movie entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”

Common sense says that we are happier when we get more money to spend on ourselves. At least, that’s what passes for commonsense in modern capitalistic societies, from the United States to China.  Indeed, when Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and at Harvard Business School asked a bunch of their students (the usual subjects in social science studies), that’s exactly what they found: students thought they would be happier getting $20 than $5, and that they would be happier spending the money on themselves than on others. Turns out, the students were spectacularly wrong.Research over the past several years has steadily contradicted the capitalistic assumption about human nature. For instance, it is well known that there is only a weak correlation between income level and self-reported happiness across the globe, with the relationship plateauing (meaning that additional money does not increase happiness) at surprisingly low levels of income. And yet, people keep playing the lottery, or its white collar equivalent, the stock market. Why?

If one didn’t wish to do something productive with one’s life, creationists would be a perennial source of amusement.

Florida creationists, in this particular case. A new set of science standards has just been approved by the Board of Education of the orange juice and hanging chads State, and both sides are claiming victory, according to an article in Science dated 4 March 2008.

How can that be?

The news keeps coming in, and examples of how real science works (as opposed to make believe creationism or so-called intelligent design) are beginning to get so numerous that it is hard to imagine people capable of reading newspaper articles are still capable of denying evolution.

Last month, for instance, a spectacular discovery was published in Nature magazine, a finding that has resolved a long-standing question about the evolution of bats. Darwin listed the problem as one of the great mysteries of evolution he was not able to address in “The Origin of Species”: how did bats originate from terrestrial ancestors?

The modern version of the conundrum hinged, until last month, on whether flight or echolocation (the amazing ability of bats to generate a sonar-like pulse to orient themselves and locate preys) came first. For decades biologists have been arguing in favor of either the flight-first or the echolocation-first hypothesis.