Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I have a surfeit of moggies, and will continue to supplement it so long as readers send me photos and stories of their cats. (Again, no guarantees that they’ll be posted, but I’ll try).
Reader Taryn has a cat named “Hitch” (not the only reader with a cat bearing that name), and she sends two photos and a description:
Hitch is a former feral cat who refuses to place a toe outside. He came to live with me during vet school, and has been a wonderful study partner and companion. Despite his rough past on the streets (elbow fracture, multiple scars) he is an incredibly gentle soul that chirps and purrs his way through life. When I return in the evenings, I typically find him slouched against the couch arm, snoozing away.
JAC Warning: This stuff is graphic, so if you are a d*g lover you may not want to watch.
by Greg Mayer
A video of a python disgorging a dog on a street in Bangkok is making the rounds, and has been the subject of an article in the Daily Mail.
The python appears to be a reticulated python (Python reticulatus). The video dramatically illustrates the flexibility and movability of snakes’ jaws. In most reptiles, the lower jaw articulates with the quadrate bone (q in the picture below), a firm part of the upper jaw. In snakes, the quadrate is only loosely attached to the skull, and there are other points of mobility in the skull. In the lower jaw, the anterior tooth bearing bone on each side, the dentary (d in the picture below), does not have a bony suture with its contralateral partner (as you do– feel your chin just below your lower incisors)– but only a soft tissue connection which is quite stretchable, allowing the two sides of the lower jaw to be widely separated.
The dog, of course, is quite dead, having been constricted before being swallowed. Constriction compresses the thoracic cavity, and leads to cessation of blood flow, killing the prey even before suffocation occurs. The saliva coating and compression of the dog’s body help it slide out backwards, instead of having the limbs get “stuck” somewhere in the snake’s alimentary canal.
My guess would be that the snake disgorged the prey because it was being harassed or bothered by people in the street. If it had been in the forest, it would have found a quiet nook in which to digest.
Reader Ben Goren called my attention to a strange article by Reza Aslan in last week’s Washington Post, “Five myths about Jesus.” Aslan, as you probably know, has made a cottage industry of reassuring the faithful that a) Islam isn’t such a bad religion after all, and that b) Jesus was in many ways a regular guy, a “man of his time.” (I’m clearly in the wrong business, as there seems to be an insatiable and lucrative market for this kind of stuff.)
In his latest book, Zealot, Aslan rewrites the Jesus story based, as far as I can see, completely on a revisitionist interpretation of scripture—that is, on how he interprets what really happened to Jesus (he assumes, incontrovertibly, that Jesus was a historical person). There isn’t, of course, any extra-biblical information about Jesus that has any credibility, so I see Aslan’s tale as simply cherry-picked exegesis. As you’ll see in the piece below, Aslan’s “myths” about Jesus include mundane historical matters, but completely neglect important Christian issues like the virgin birth, the Resurrection, and Jesus’s miracles.
Ben was so exercised about the Post piece that, rather than simply borrow his ideas and anger about it, I asked him to write a guest post. Here it is:
In the piece, Aslan offers five fragments of factoids about Jesus that, he argues, are myths. In brief, he claims that these bits of received wisdom about Jesus are wrong, and tells us why:
Jesus was born in Bethlehem. There are no early mentions of the Nativity; conflicting prophecies led to conflicting birth narratives; and Luke latched onto the Census of Quirinius to have Joseph return with his family to Bethlehem. Aslan doesn’t offer an opinion as to the actual birthplace.
Jesus was an only child. Dismissing the Catholic insistence on Mary’s perpetual virginity, Aslan uses the titles of “Brother” and “Sister” applied to a number of people in ancient Christian texts to claim that Jesus had at least four brothers and an unknown number of sisters.
Jesus had 12 disciples. Jesus had many disciples. The Twelve were the Apostles.
Jesus had a trial before Pontius Pilate. Pilate was too important to bother with a nobody like Jesus.
Jesus was buried in a tomb. Petty criminals were never buried in tombs.
Yet, despite taking these huge swings at foundational and cherished elements of Jesus’s life, Aslan’s tone throughout the entire piece is one of a respectful teacher looking to further understanding of an important subject. The third-person pronouns referring to Jesus are all capitalized, and the fact and significance of His life are taken as givens.
Unfortunately for Aslan, this means that he’s surely pissed off both the Christians and the rationalists, as the thousands of responses to his piece would indicate.
As a professional trumpeter, I’ve performed in and sat through countless Christmas and Easter services at denominations across the spectrum. And I can’t recall a single one that didn’t make a big deal — often, a very big deal, with song and dance numbers and communal recitations — about both the Nativity in Bethlehem (O! Little Town!) at Christmas and the Empty Tomb (He Is Ris’n!) at Easter. But for Aslan, the Nativity was something that Luke just made up to tick off a checkbox on a list of prophecies to fulfill.
And, far worse for the Christians, he suggests that Jesus’s corpse would have been left on the Cross until its bones had been picked clean by dogs and crows…and the remains then tossed onto a trash heap. This, I believe, would constitute one of the most insulting blasphemies one could possibly direct at a Christian. While he’s certainly correct that that’s not an unreasonable fate for a rebel commando, Aslan completely ignores the central claim of Christianity that Jesus was something different, something more. That same glossing over of vital tenets of Christianity can be seen in his dismissal of the Trial and of the question of Jesus’s siblings.
At the same time that Aslan takes potshots at Christian dogma for its mythical origins, he also manages to concoct quite a few of his own whoppers. At the top of the list is his claim that Jesus was essentially a nobody, a rabble-rousing schmuck not worthy of any special attention. In reality, there are no ancient sources — not a single one — that describe Jesus as someone who could be easily overlooked. Though none could agree on who or what, exactly, he was, all were unanimous in their contention that he was the most important figure of the period, if not of all time. Yes, of course, there were scenes where, for dramatic effect, it took a paragraph or three for somebody to recognize Jesus or the significance of his actions or words; but, by the end of the story Jesus was always doing something mind-blowing.
The fundamental problem for Christianity, of course, is that this larger-than-life Jesus is all that we have in scripture or the few later documents that mention Jesus—but not a single contemporary or near-contemporary source mentions even a hint of anyone who could be remotely mistaken for Jesus or of any events even vaguely recognizable as the ones he precipitated. It’s as if The War of the Worlds actually happened as Mr. Wells documented it in 1898…and yet a complete review of the archives of The Times for the period 1890 – 1910 reveals no mention of strange happenings in Woking or anywhere else.
Even worse for the Christians is the fact that similar stories were legion, but involving other figures. Justin Martyr, possibly the earliest surviving Christian apologist, devoted much of his efforts at converting Pagans to describing, in excruciating detail, how dozens of popular and well-known Pagan demigods did the exact same things as Jesus. Indeed, by the time you subtract everything from Jesus’s biography that, according to Martyr, had a Pagan precedent, there literally isn’t anything left of Jesus at all.
And that’s where Aslan does violence to rationality. For the fact is that these four myths (and one dictionary nitpick) about Jesus are but the tip of the Myth Iceberg.
The real myth about Jesus,and the only one that matters, is that he’s anything more than than a myth.
And that’s where Aslan’s accommodationism has landed him. In staking out “neutral” ground between Christians and rationalists, he’s invented for himself yet another entirely new fantasy, one which isn’t merely inconsistent with the tenets of Christian belief, but which actively contradicts the only “evidence” which would support his position if weren’t filled with horror stories about zombies with a fetish for having their intestines fondled.
JAC note: This morning there were over 5000 comments on Aslan’s piece! I haven’t looked at them, but perhaps a diligent reader can give us a precis. Nothing sells like controversy.
Even though England is more secular than the U.S., British Prime Ministers seem even keener than American Presidents to coddle religion—especially Islam—and to ascribe the malevolence of extreme Islamists to anything but religion. After last week’s horrific massacre in the Nairobi shopping mall, P.M. David Cameron said this:
‘These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion – they don’t. They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don’t represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world.’
But what kind of extremism? Whence their “warped view of the world”? And if they’re doing something in the name of Islam, then they’re certainly representing at least their own conception of Islam. How disingenuous can you get? Really, “they don’t represent Muslims anywhere in the world”?
‘The modern urban obsession with celebrity buildings and high-profile events offers too many publicity-rich targets. A World Trade Centre, a Mumbai hotel, a Boston marathon, a Nairobi shopping mall are all enticing to extremists. Defending them is near impossible. Better at least not to create them. A shopping mall not only wipes out shopping streets, it makes a perfect terrorist fortress, near impossible to assault.’
That’s right: we shouldn’t build shopping malls because they just inspire terrorism. That’s like blaming rape victims for wearing revealing clothes.
Murray tells the unpalatable truth:
I don’t think any sensible person would argue that the perpetrators represent all Muslims. But it seems strange to say that a separation of people — and massacre of them — based solely on their religious identity can be said to have nothing to do with religion.
. . .All of which suggests, for the thousandth time, that everybody is trying to avoid the point.
I can see why politicians like David Cameron want to make sure that nobody blames Muslims as a whole for attacks like this. But telling the lie that such attacks have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam does no good at all. It lets the extremists off the hook and infuriates everybody else who end up wondering why the Prime Minister cannot see what everybody else can see.
As I have said often in response to this ‘noble lie’, the only way that Islam is going to get through its current problems is if followers of the religion realise that they have to actively confront the problem. Each provision of an opt-out and excuse delays the day when the religion properly confronts itself and makes the claims of the jihadis a wholly impermissible — instead of plausible and sometimes permissible — response to the religion in whose name they act.
If a group of armed, militant Christians attacked an abortion clinic, would people blame it on the clinics? Would they go this far out of their way to claim that it had nothing to do with the Christian belief that fetuses have souls? Well, maybe, but I don’t think the excuses would be so widespread.
While religion is largely off limits, some religions are more off limits than others. And we accomplish nothing by ignoring that. In fact, it’s counterproductive to ignore it, because coddling the kind of beliefs that spawn terrorism simply allows their continued existence.
In its war against the Nigerian state, Boko Haram has singled out government institutions, especially schools, for attack. One of its tenets is that Western-style education, not based on the Koran, in conventional schools is sinful and un-Islamic; the group has burned numerous schools in Maiduguri, the largest city in the region, and in early July it attacked a government secondary school in the town of Mamudo, killing 42 people, mostly students.
Yet a civil servant named Ibrahim rushes again to excuse Islam:
Ibrahim condemned the attackers. “Nobody can explain what they want,” he said. “All of the students that died today are Muslims. No single Christian was killed. This is not a religious war. These people that perpetrated this call themselves Muslims. But this is against the teachings of Islam.”
One can certainly interpret some of the teachings of Islam as militant, even from the Qur’an. But the “teachings of Islam” also include those teachings that derive from Islam, including Boko Haram’s view that Western-style education violates their faith. Not a religious war? Is the animus between Sunnis and Shiites, which has killed hundreds of thousands, not a religious war because both groups are “Muslims”?
This type of waffling is disingenuous. We can try to stamp out Boko Haram, but until its ideology disappears, and its members stop indoctrinating their children in hatred, the match that kindles attacks like these will remain lit.
A reminder of what this kind of religious belief produces:
Rescue workers and family members attempted to identify the shrouded bodies of students killed overnight in an attack at an agricultural college in Gujba, Nigeria. (AP via the New York Times)
My taste in Beatles music runs towards the later (but not the last) albums. This one, from “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) is one of my favorites among the “earlier” Beatles. It’s hard to realize that only two years elapsed between this album and “Revolver.”
“Any Time At All” has the drive of early Beatles songs, but, to me, shows a musical inventiveness beyond the song that, said Lennon, was its model—”It Won’t Be Long.”
“Any Time at All” shows how much the Beatles learned from their hero Buddy Holly. The song has all the Holly trademarks — the jangling guitars, the openhearted generosity of the lyric, the urgent emotion in the voices. It’s a pledge of 24-hour devotion to a girl, with Lennon speaking his mind in a brash way (“Call me tonight, and I’ll come to you”) that would have made Holly proud — even though Lennon himself wasn’t thrilled with the results. (He dismissed the song as my “effort at [re]writing ‘It Won’t Be Long.'”)
It’s mostly a Lennon composition, but the middle break is by McCartney.
Well, listen to “It Won’t Be Long,” which Rolling Stone ranks far higher (#53), and see if you think it’s better than the above. IWBL was a damn good song, and R.S. touts it for its “muscular aggression. But that’s something that’s present in many early Beatles songs; what’s new is the lovely transition between the third and fourth lines of each stanza, which is better for being a bit rushed, e.g.:
If you need somebody to love,
Just look into my eyes,
I’ll be there to make you feel right. //
If you’re feeling sorry and sad,
I’d really sympathize. Don’t you be sad, just call me tonight.
Wikipedia gives a bit more on its composition; listen for the piano/guitar synchrony between McCartney and Harrison in the middle eight:
Incomplete when first brought into Abbey Road Studios on Tuesday 2 June 1964, Paul McCartney suggested an idea for the middle eight section based solely on chords, which was recorded with the intention of adding lyrics later. But by the time it was needed to be mixed, the middle eight was still without words and that is how it appears on the LP. These few notes were influential in sections of “Xanadu”, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Tonight I’m Yours”. McCartney sings the second “Anytime at all” in each chorus because Lennon couldn’t reach the notes. “Any Time at All” reprises a George Martin trick from “A Hard Day’s Night” by using a piano solo echoed lightly note-for-note on guitar by George Harrison.
By the way, the Beatles also rank, properly, as #1 in Rolling Stone‘s “Greatest [Rock] Artists of all time. Read the wonderful mini-essay on them by Elvis Costello (each artist or group is evaluated by another rocker), which includes this bit:
They were pretty much the first group to mess with the aural perspective of their recordings and have it be more than just a gimmick. Before the Beatles, you had guys in lab coats doing recording experiments in the Fifties, but you didn’t have rockers deliberately putting things out of balance, like a quiet vocal in front of a loud track on “Strawberry Fields Forever.” You can’t exaggerate the license that this gave to everyone from Motown to Jimi Hendrix.
My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera … and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be “And Your Bird Can Sing” … no, “Girl” … no, “For No One” … and so on, and so on….
Indeed. Or “Nowhere Man,” or “In My Life,” or “Eleanor Rigby,” or “I Want to Tell You,” or “Here, There, and Everywhere,” or . . .
UPDATE: Chak sent me a captioned photo that he took when I wasn’t around. In Indian homes, as in Japanese ones, you remove your shoes at the door. Indeed, I do this in my own crib to keep it clean. I was wearing my usual boots (this is a spiffy new pair of black calf boots by J. B. Hill), and here they are by the door:
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Last night reader Chak Dantuluri invited some readers and some of his science-friendly acquaintances to his house in Naperville (a Chicago suburb) to enjoy a home-cooked Indian meal and conversation about this and that (read: science, religion, atheism, free will, and so on). Also on hand were Hemant Mehta (aka “The Friendly Atheist’).
Chak’s wife, Kavita, outdid herself with the cooking, spending hours and hours preparing a stupendous feast with about two dozen courses. If you’ve ever cooked Indian food, you’ll know how time-consuming that is. It was a magnificent feed, and she didn’t stint on the spices, which I love.
Since about half the attendees were theists (of the Hindu variety), we had some interesting chats. I learned a lot about Hindu theism, which seems far more philosophical than, say, Christian theism. I don’t often get to have a back-and-forth with Hindu theists in this country!
The get-together was also a benefit for Doctors Without Borders, and those attending came up with $500 for that worthy organization.
But I mustn’t leave out the food. Below are the appetizers, including vada (the savory “donuts” to the left, pakhora (vegetable fritters, lower right), idli (lentil mini-pancakes, above the pakhoras), a wonderful spicy dish of peanuts whose name I don’t know, a chicken dish made by Chak (upper left), and one of my favorite Indian foods, a homemade coconut chutney to accompany the idlis and vadas (the bowl of yellowish stuff halfway up the right).
You’ll also recognize The Friendly Atheist at eleven o’clock. You may know that Hemant recently got married, and his new spouse is onhis right. Kavita is to his left.
And here’s the main spread, with South Indian veggie dishes to the left, and nonveggie dishes (including lamb pulao) to the right. There are chappatis (indian bread) at lower right as well. (Click to enlarge.)
Early this morning Kavita made me one of the India’s classic foods: dosas (Indian “crepes” made from lentil and rice flour), cooked in a special pan and served with coconut chutney. They’re a ubiquitous snack, especially in southern India. I had three. Here she is preparing my breakfast. Keeping the dosas mist and oiled is crucial:
And one of my dosas. The chutney is essential: you break off pieces of the crispy and savory pancake and slather them with the chutney.
Thanks to Kavita and Chak for a splendid evening. You can’t beat good conversation and good noms!
