When it comes to better understanding the behavior and emotions of animals, who should be the gatekeepers of knowledge? Is it scientists alone, those formally trained to observe animals in the wild or in captivity? Or should “regular people” who keenly attend to how animals act and feel also be trusted as contributors to knowledge about our fellow species on Earth?
In his new book, The Animal Manifesto, Marc Bekoff takes a bold stand on these questions. “Science,” he writes, “is catching up with what many lay observers already know from living with animals every day.” As a scientist and a person, Bekoff has spent many hours observing wolves, dogs, and other animals; he lives in Colorado in an area frequented by red foxes, mountain lions, and the occasional black bear.
Animals are sentient, feeling creatures, Bekoff says—no surprise to many of us animal people. Bekoff wrote once about the magpies he witnessed gathering around one of their own who had just died. These birds touched the dead body and flew off
to collect grass that they then laid at the corpse. Into Bekoff’s mailbox flew stories from people who had seen similar rituals in crows and ravens as well as magpies. “These stories,” he notes, “even from nonresearchers, are indeed data, and they challenge science to prove or disprove them.”
Scattered through the book are animal stories sent to Bekoff by animal lovers. I resonate with this approach. In my book Being With Animals, I report stories from my friend Nuala Galbari about her life with the injured crow Reggie. From Galbari’s stories, I learned about Reggie’s intelligence and emotion—she knows birds like I know apes—and I trust them.
What risks may accrue to admitting nonscientists into the sacred arena of data collection? Not necessarily what you might think: Bekoff, like Jane Goodall, the famed chimpanzee researcher, has no fear of anthropomorphism; when done carefully, it can aid rather than retard the understanding of animals.
Still, can everyone be a credible source? I’d have to say no. I’m often shocked when I replay videotapes of gorilla gestural interactions, only to realize that, watching them in real time, I completely missed significant movements. Through rigorous methodologies, and substantive checks and balances, science heads inexorably toward self-correction; if we are to rely on individual voices from outside science, we must find a way to fold them into that dynamic self-corrective process.
Once in a while, Bekoff goes too far himself in interpreting animal behavior. To say that Alex, the famous African gray parrot, “mastered” English surely cannot be right, and how literal should we take a passage such as this one: “Surely, a dolphin, a raven, and a human don’t look the same, move the same, or perhaps even think the same, but these differences are minor compared to what these animals share.”
These are only quibbles; I recommend The Animal Manifesto enthusiastically. Bekoff effectively urges all of us to increase our compassion footprint: We may eat less meat (or none), tell children that eating a burger means eating a cow, support only the very best zoos, and speak up for animals whenever and wherever abuse occurs.
Best of all is Bekoff’s continual optimism, his insistence that “we are wired to be good, we are wired to be kind, and we are wired to be compassionate”. When reading his chapter “Our World is not Compassionate to Animals,” a vivid log of cruelty to animals, I clung to his optimism as to a life raft. In the end, I conclude Bekoff is right: We have no choice but to believe we can turn things around.
If we gaze at animals together, and share stories, we can help animals as the result of our newfound knowledge. “Every individual action shines a light,” Bekoff notes, “whether it’s motivated by a desire to change society or simply to fix one injustice in the life of one animal.”

Holding young-Earth views may not significantly impede a student’s ability to learn facts about evolutionary theory. Thus, although it is not the role of biology instructors to engage in political or religious proselytizing, there remains the possibility of changing what students know about evolution via academic instruction.

“Halal” normally means “Islamically permissible”; it’s an adjective that can apply to anything on which the Islamic law (Shari`ah) has some prescription. Nowadays, and especially when used in English, it refers to Islamic dietary rules, particularly the requirement that animals be slaughtered, in the name of Allah, for their meat to be lawfully consumed. In recent years, and especially with the appearance of mad-cow disease, some Muslim jurists added emphasis on the way the animals are fed.
This has not created any difficulty in traditional Muslim lands, where industrial meat production and packing is still not mechanized enough for such rules to pose problems. In the West, however, slaughtering has largely disappeared from the mainstream market, and the meat production process disturbs many people (Muslims and non-Muslims—see the enlightening but depressing documentary Food, Inc.).
This has opened up a huge area of discussion on various issues: (a) Why are Muslims required to slaughter animals to begin with? (b) What can science and technology tell us on this? (c) To what extent can the rules be relaxed a bit? (d) What roles do religion (jurisprudence), sociology (immigration), and politics (acceptance of religious vs. secular regulations) play in this?
To the delight of some industrialists and conservative religious leaders, and to the horror of some right-wing politicians, the halal market has exploded in the West in the past decade or so. And when the fast-food chain Quick decided to open “halal branches” in some Muslim-dominated neighborhoods in France, a strongly polarized reaction occurred: applause from the Islamic corner and boos and panic from the right-wing corner, which saw this (purely commercial) decision as a sign that the Islamic tsunami was beginning.
Regarding the Islamic tradition’s requirement that the name of Allah be proclaimed at the moment of slaughtering, some of the more moderate scholars (e.g., Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi) have stated that making that pronouncement just before eating the meat is equally valid. Al-Qaradawi also argues (and offers Quranic justifications) that the meat provided by Christians and Jews is lawful for consumption by Muslims, though others have argued strongly that the original permission assumed that Christians and Jews slaughtered their animals.
Furthermore, Muslims—especially in the West—have started to ask about the lawfulness of using new techniques, such as anesthetizing animals or stunning them by electric shocks before the slaughter, both of which have been deemed acceptable or even advisable (by Al-Qaradawi and the Islamic Fiqh Council of the Muslim World League, respectively) in order to minimize the animal’s suffering during the slaughter, as long as those techniques do not end up killing the animal.
Muslim literalists (e.g., the famous Pakistani scholar Al-Mawdudi), however, have made it an absolute must for animals to be slaughtered (in the Islamic way) for their meat to be halal for consumption.
Now, not only have some modernist Muslims started to challenge that general agreement on the religious necessity of animal slaughter, but some are also doing it on scientific grounds. For example, Haoues Seniguer has argued that one of the main reasons for the Islamic rules (prohibition of the consumption of blood and of any animal still containing blood, i.e., killed by a blow, as well as the requirement of slaughtering, i.e., draining of blood) is the attempt to get rid of all bacteria and viruses in the animal. This higher goal, he goes on, could not be explained to people at the time of Prophet Muhammad, but that was the principle behind the divine rule (although the prophet obviously could not understand the scientific reasons behind it).
Now, says Seniguer, we can achieve the same goals with more sophisticated and efficient techniques, so that the meat bought at the supermarket is at least as good, if not healthier, than the meat of an animal killed in the traditional way. (When writing that, Seniguer had not watched Food, Inc.!)
Similarly, Imam Tareq Oubrou asks: Why does Islam refuse the consumption of meat that has not been cleansed of its blood? His answer: Precisely because the blood contains unhealthy germs. Therefore, if one is assured that a butcher is honest and has followed hygienic rules producing the same result (as the Islamic objectives), then the meat should be acceptable.
It should be noted, however, that Muslim jurists insist that the main argument for slaughtering is not medical but rather theological, namely that the taking of an animal’s life must be done in the name of Allah, whether that is done by slaughtering (the method prescribed by the prophet) or by shots (bullets or arrows). The counterargument is that the taking of the lives of fish (big or small) is exempted from both the rules of slaughter and the uttering of God’s name at the time of killing.
Meanwhile, the Muslim communities and politicians in Europe are having a tug-of-war over this issue, and the market is making a killing, with halal products (even lipstick) and services (halal restaurants) everywhere now.
I find this issue very interesting, both because it raises theological and scientific issues and arguments and because it illustrates the current cultural crossroads the Islamic culture is at: between literalism and higher-objective reasoning.

Green burial techniques are a more recent phenomena, one in which a family chooses to return a loved one’s body to the earth in an environmentally sensitive fashion. Do green graves change the way we mourn? That question assumes that mourning takes the same form for everyone. Yet, we now know that there is no single way to mourn. Some funerals are deeply sad events that focus on the loss; others are joyous celebrations of the life of the departed. Research provides little support for the notion that there is a “right” or “wrong” way to respond to significant losses. There are only different ways.

In all cases, the choice of how to deal with the body of the deceased is intricately tied to the religious or philosophical perspective of the bereaved. In fact, burial decisions may assist the survivors in finding meaning in their loss. Undoubtedly, the individual who chooses to bury a loved one in a green grave has selected an option that is consistent with his or her worldview and life philosophy. It is important that outsiders respect this choice and recognize that this option is not for everyone. The family that selects this path may do so because it helps them make sense of their loved one’s death. Ultimately, such a choice is likely to help them adapt to their loss.

Roxane Cohen Silver is a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

“Doomsday” Global Seed Vault Hits 500,000 Deposits
“Reaching the half million mark brings mixed emotions because while it shows that the vault at Svalbard is now the gold standard for diversity, it comes at a time when our agriculture systems are really sitting on a knife’s edge,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which partners with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden in operating the vault. Fowler added, “If crops and agriculture don’t adapt to climate change, neither will humanity.” (Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience)

What Makes Superheroes Compelling?
We resonate with the themes in the stories, with the dilemmas and problems that superheroes face, and we aspire to their noble impulses and heroic acts. We identify—or would like to identify—with them (although sometimes we may identify with the villains). Superheroes are models for us, and they are modeled after us. (Robin Rosenberg, The Superheroes, Psychology Today)

Morality in Manga
Divisions can be found in genre manga, from manga which celebrate sentimentality and human compassion to manga which present the readers, and characters, with terrible moral choices. These grim-and-gritty seinen (adult) manga have roughly the same relation to normal shonen (boys’) manga as revisionist superhero comics, such as Watchmen, do to normal superhero comics. (Jason Thompson, io9)

Debate Over Social Studies Standards Continues in Texas
Republicans on the State Board of Education soundly rejected a Democratic-backed proposal that would have required Texas students to be taught the reasons behind the prohibition of a state religion in the Bill of Rights. The contentious decision in curriculum standards for U.S. government classes appeared to signal the unhappiness of several board members with court rulings that have affirmed the separation of church and state—including a longtime ban on school-sponsored prayer. (Terrence Stutz, The Dallas Morning News)

Global Atheist Convention Brings Together Nonbelievers in Melbourne
There is a determination to avoid what one session calls Atheistic Fundamentalism, says our correspondent. Participants will be urged to avoid “missionary zeal” in their determination to promote their nonreligious message to the world. (BBC News)

“In God We Trust” and “Under God”
An appellate court has upheld references to God on U.S. currency and in the Pledge of Allegiance, rejecting arguments they violate the constitutional separation of church and state. (Terence Chea, Associated Press)

Chopra and Houston contend the universe is proof that there is intelligence at the heart of creation and that a person needs to look beyond what can be seen and touched while Shermer and Harris advocate that science and biology can explain what is happening to people when they pray, meditate, and believe in God and that evolution can explain why our beliefs developed.

From Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and creator of Closer To Truth:

Extra dimensions seem the stuff of science fiction. We’re familiar with three dimensions—length, width, height. But what about other dimensions? What could that mean? What would they be like? And, anyway, why would we care?
What about the fourth dimension—time? Not as metaphor but as fact. Now, some speak of 10 or 11 dimensions, a factor in string theory, as the foundation of the cosmos. Is deep reality so strange?
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, who is passionate about origins, explains how this counterintuitive idea developed. “The idea of extra dimensions has been around for a long time in different contexts,” he says, “partly because people crave an ‘unknown universe’ in one form or another.”
Consider the origin of time as a fourth dimension, which was Einstein’s great intuition in his special theory of relativity (needed in order to maintain the speed of light as a constant, even when light sources are moving relative to one another).
“If you think of the world as four-dimensional—time being the extra dimension,” Krauss says, “then space and time become personal in that when I’m moving with respect to you, what I’m really kind of doing is rotating in this four-dimensional space, so my space is your time and your time is my space. So time is like an extra dimension, not exactly like space—but suddenly [with Einstein’s relativity], we live in this four-dimensional universe.”
Einstein’s radical insight enabled other scientists to wonder what else might be lurking within the foundations of the forces of reality.
Physicist Michio Kaku explains that “in three dimensions, there’s not enough room to account for all the laws of physics. But when you go into hyperspace, then the laws of physics fit together beautifully, like a jigsaw puzzle.” Kaku explains that “there are certain ‘magic’ numbers in mathematics, numbers which have spectacular properties. A 13-dimensional universe or a 15-dimensional universe would be unstable. Particles would prefer to collapse down to 10 or 11 dimensions because the mathematics shows these are the most stable and self-consistent.”
Where are these higher dimensions? “Look at smoke,” Kaku says. “Smoke permeates throughout a room in three dimensions, but smoke never disappears. Smoke never floats off into the fourth dimension. Therefore, a fourth, fifth, sixth dimension has to be smaller than smoke. Atoms, too, don’t suddenly drift away into hyperspace. Therefore, these higher dimensions have to be smaller than an atom, or else our universe would drift away.” But gravity, Kaku adds, might “ooze, escape, into these higher dimensions, and that could explain why gravity is so weak.”
Nobel laureate David Gross explains that even though extra dimensions had been contemplated before string theory, “one of the surprising things that came out of string theory was that we had to have more than the three spatial dimensions that we see around us. And, of course, since we don’t see these extra dimensions, either they have to be very small or (as was discovered more recently) there could be large extra dimensions in what are called warped geometries. The stuff of which we’re made could be stuck in the three dimensions that are visible.”
Particle theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed says that “other dimensions are curled up into a very small size. The usual analogy is like looking at a garden hose from very, very far away. The hose looks like a line, but as you get closer, you see it has a little thickness, a little circle there, with a finite size.” (The term of art is “compactified.”) “And so if you went around this other dimension, you would very rapidly come back to the same place,” Arkani-Hamed explains.
“Branes are a crucial part of this picture,” he adds, referring to the so-called “branes” of cosmology, where our whole three-dimensional universe could be floating in some fourth-dimensional or nth-dimensional space. “There are many different scenarios now which exploit branes and extra dimensions to do interesting things; they have experimental consequences, so they will live or die on a near-term timescale.”
Ten or 11 dimensions of space and time, all but our common three dimensions astonishingly tiny. Speculation, yes, but based on good theory. And they may explain the inexplicable—like why gravity is so incredibly weak compared with other forces like electromagnetism.
I’m almost getting this … but then lose it again. So how is it that extra dimensions, fiendishly complicated, make the world simpler?
Juan Maldacena, an unassuming “string theory rock star,” says that “we know that these extra dimensions are not infinitely big and equal to the other three dimensions because we know we are not moving in the extra dimensions. But the question is whether elementary particles can in some sense move in the extra dimensions. The idea is that perhaps the laws of physics are simpler when we add extra dimensions because some of the complications we see in the laws of physics in our three dimensions are due to the fact that the same particles are doing different things in these extra dimensions.”
Simpler? It seems more complicated! “Yes,” Maldacena agrees, “it does seem more complicated, but in a way it is simpler … because the idea is that you have simpler laws in extra dimensions [e.g., unifying fundamental forces, particularly gravity with electromagnetism] that rise to more complicated laws in our common dimensions. So, that’s the beauty, if you will, of extra dimensions.”
The point is that extra dimensions reduce the complexities of our three-dimensional world by explaining and unifying laws in those extra dimensions. Extra dimensions make the laws of physics simpler. What a realization!
But there’s sharp disagreement: Some scientists reject extra dimensions.
Mathematician Roger Penrose says, “I just don’t think these extra dimensions are stable. They will just collapse.” He adds, “Maybe these string theories’ ideas can have value in theories which don’t require extra dimensions.”
It’s the great human quest: To dig up the foundational structures of mass and energy, space and time. The drive is for simplicity: to explain how the world works concisely and elegantly. (When theories are complicated, then there is likely another theory, simpler and thus deeper.)
And simplicity, when it’s found, is breathtaking. That’s the magnetic appeal of extra dimensions. To show how the “atomic zoo” of what seem to be very different particles are really different manifestations of the same, singular “atomic animal.”
Unity from diversity. The wonder of it all. But do extra dimensions really exist? Either way, the exhilaration of exploration brings us closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, David Gross, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Juan Maldacena, and Roger Penrose in “Are There Extra Dimensions?”—the sixth episode in the new season of the Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (45th in total).
The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Thursday, participants will discuss the current episode.

P.S. Click here to visit our Closer to Truth archive.

Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.