A new review (and critique) of Richard Prum’s book on sexual selection

Why Evolution Is True

I’ve now read Richard O. Prum’s new book, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (I’d highlighted the work earlier in my critique of his NY Times article about the book). Click on the screenshot to go to the book’s Amazon site. (Prum is a professor of ornithology, ecology, and evolution at Yale.)

The review I want to highlight was published in the journal Animal Behaviour, but I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I want to give my own brief take on the book.

The Evolution of Beauty is in fact a mixed bag, but for me the problems outweigh the good parts. First, though, what’s good, and a bit of background.

Prum’s purpose is to explicate a theory of sexual selection that was suggested by geneticist Ronald Fisher eighty years ago and was elaborated much more recently…

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Sing like you mean it! – the Linguistics of Tonal Languages

Utopia, you are standing in it!

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John McCain died

Why Evolution Is True

This happened faster than I expected. Wasn’t it just two days ago that Senator McCain announced that he was abjuring all further treatment for his brain cancer? But what treatment would they have been giving him when he was so close to death, save morphine? But here’s the new CNN announcement (click on screenshot to read the article):

Yes, I know he was conservative, and yes, I disagreed with many of his policies. But as I’ve said before, there was a fundamental decency in the man—a decency hard to detect in today’s Republican congresspeople, who seem not only robotic but positively nasty.

CNN quotes McCain from a memoir he published in May, and he surely knew then he was on his way out:

“It’s been quite a ride. I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make peace,” McCain wrote. “I’ve lived very well and…

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Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing @ the Barbican Gallery

Books & Boots

To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, potentially unattainable…

This is a major retrospective of one of the best known documentary photographers of the 20th century, the American Dorothea Lange. It brings together 300 objects, from hundreds of vintage prints and original book publications through to ephemera, field notes, letters. It also includes a documentary film interview with her made towards the end of her life.

Rarely has an artist or photographer been so overshadowed by one work, Lange’s super-famous portrait of a Migrant Mother which has come to symbolise the suffering of America’s Mid-western farmers, forced to abandon their land due to bank foreclosures and catastrophic environmental collapse.

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

But the exhibition goes out of its way to present this period of Lange’s work in the broader, and more varied context of her…

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Readers’ wildlife photos

Why Evolution Is True

Reader Rik Gern sent a number of photos of opening sunflowers, and they’re lovely. I have too many to post here, but will spread them out over the next few weeks. Here are his notes:

 Here are some pictures for consideration in your Readers Wildlife Pictures collection.

This is more like mildlife than wildlife; these are common sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) that pop up in my back yard every year. I decided to do a series of “portraits” of the flower heads as they transitioned from tight buds to flowers to dried out husks.  I love the fact that something as common as a weed can provide so much beauty, and all for free; all you have to spend is a little time to observe and appreciate.

The pictures were taken with a Canon SD PowerShot 400 and processed in Photoshop CS6.

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A sign of the racism that persists in America

Why Evolution Is True

The story of Emmett Till, a 14-year old black boy from Chicago who was lynched in 1955, is a shameful chapter in American history. Many of you know about it, but I’ll briefly give the salient facts. Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when the white wife of a local grocery-store owner told locals that Till had entered the store and whistled at her, flirted with her, and grabbed her. (Details vary, and she admitted later that she made at least part of the story up. It may be entirely fabricated.)

Flirting with a white woman was effectively a capital crime in the South at that time, and two white men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, abducted Till, beat him severely, shot him, and then tossed his body, weighted down with a fan, into the Tallahatchie River. His disfigured corpse was recovered three days later and returned to…

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Ten words in the English language that mean one thing but also mean the exact opposite

Utopia, you are standing in it!

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Hayek v. Rawls on Social Justice: Correcting the False Narrative

Uneasy Money

Matt Yglesias, citing an article (“John Rawls, Socialist?“) by Ed Quish in the Jacobin arguing that Rawls, in his later years, drifted from his welfare-state liberalism to democratic socialism, tweeted a little while ago

I would say that rather than a “reticent” socialist, late Rawls was expressing tension between the socialist implications of the Restatement and the decentralizing implications of Political Liberalism and the somewhat fuzzy property-owning democracy is an attempt at a synthesis. https://t.co/CzgPzsPrHU

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 22, 2018

I’m an admirer of, but no expert on, Rawls, so I won’t weigh in on where to pigeon-hole Rawls on the ideological spectrum. In general, I think such pigeon-holing is as likely to mislead as to clarify because it tends to obscure the individuality of the individual or thinker being pigeon-hold. Rawls was above all a Rawlsian and to reduce his complex and nuanced philosophy to…

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32-year study: Australian students become less creationist and more accepting of evolution, almost certainly because of growing secularism

Why Evolution Is True

This new study at Evolution: Education and Outreach (reference below, free access and free pdf here) reports the results of 32 annual surveys of first-year biology students in at The University of New South Wales (UNSW). Unlike the data from the U.S., which I’ll discuss briefly below, the Aussie data show a tremendous and salubrious change over this period: both creationism and “theistic evolution” (evolution tweaked or guided by God) dropped markedly, while purely materialistic evolution—the “theory” I taught in my classes—has more than doubled in acceptance.

The authors asked the students (average number 530 per year) to tick one of four boxes on a piece of paper, and drop it anonymously in a box as they left the classroom. The questions were designed to mimic those used in the U.S. Gallup polls over the last 35 years, and refer specifically not to evolution in general, but to human evolution. This…

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Teleogical views predict not just creationism, but conspiracy theories

Why Evolution Is True

I’ll be brief here because the paper itself, just published in Current Biology (reference below, access free, pdf here) is short: just over a page of text.

After finding evidence in a small survey (N = 157) that teleology  (“the tendency to ascribe function and final cause to nonintentional natural facts and events”) was significantly (albeit moderately) correlated with belief in conspiracy theories, the authors used a much larger French sample (N = 1252) to see if teleological views were correlated with both creationism and conspiracy-theory views. They used two types of teleology, and one or both were correlated with both belief in creationism and conspiracies (my emphases in all below).

Following Kaiser-Guttman criteria (eigenvalues > 1), we retained a two-factor solution. We called the first factor ‘animism’, as it clusters measures involving attribution of consciousness and agency to nonliving entities. The second factor, ‘finalism’, tapped instead into…

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