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.
It’s Sunday, which means that John Avise has some photos of Faux Ducks—those species of waterfowl that people think are ducks but aren’t. Your job is to guess the species after looking at the photos below. You’ll find the answer, along with John’s Faux Duck Fax and a range map, below the fold. Captions are John’s; click photos to enlarge them:
In the early morning of yesterday, the Trump administration executed its 13th and last federal prisoner (three in the last week), only four days from Inauguration Day. Dustin Higgs, convicted of killing three people, was given a lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, maintaining, as he has all along, that he was innocent. Trump could have stayed the execution until Biden took over, but he’s been on a rush to kill people right up to the last minute. A note from CNN:
One-third of the justices on the Supreme Court — which has repeatedly overturned decisions by lower courts to halt executions — were appointed by Trump. The decision to allow Higgs’s execution to proceed came down to a 6-3 split, with the liberal justices opposing the move.
You can see the dissents by Breyer and Sotomayor here (h/t Ken). From Sotomayor’s dissent:
Betty White turns 99 today (see below). How will she spend her birthday? Look at this great headline from Mic (click on screenshot):
When legendary actor and comedian Betty White turns 99 on January 17, she’ll be celebrating her quarantine birthday with a pair of unconventional party guests. “What am I doing for my birthday? Feeding the two ducks who come to visit me every day,” she told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published on Thursday.
There’s no need to be alarmed: the Golden Girls star and nonagenarian hasn’t lost her marbles. “Betty has [a] beautiful backyard with a number of wild animals visiting,” a press representative told TODAYvia email back in May. “Two ducks always come by to say hello. They waddle up to her glass door and look in” — which is so wholesome and utterly delightful. Maybe she’ll feed them some fowl-friendly cake on the big day.
Now how awesome is that?
Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 395,882, an increase of about 3,300 deaths from yesterday’s figure. In two days we’ll pass 400,000 deaths: double what the most pessimistic pundits thought we’d have. The world death toll is 2,032,342, an increase of about 12,500 deaths over yesterday’s total.
Stuff that happened on January 17 includes:
1377 – Pope Gregory XI reaches Rome, after deciding to move the Papacy back to Rome from Avignon.
1773 – Captain James Cook leads the first expedition to sail south of the Antarctic Circle.
1904 – Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard receives its premiere performance at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Here’s a picture of Scott’s disconsolate team at the South Pole, having discovered that Amundsen’s team had beaten them. All of these men died attempting to return to their base:
Scott’s party at the South Pole. Left to right: Oates, Bowers, Scott, Wilson and Evans.
1920 – Alcohol Prohibition begins in the United States as the Volstead Act goes into effect.
“Totenkopfverbände” means “death’s head units,” and members of this branch of the SS, identified by wearing the insignia below on their collars, were responsible for the concentration camps:
Here’s a dramatic photo from Wikipedia captioned: “A freed Buchenwald concentration camp prisoner identifies a member of the SS camp guard.”
1945 – Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg is taken into Soviet custody while in Hungary; he is never publicly seen again.
Wallenberg, below, saved thousands of Jews from extermination by the Germans during WWII. He is thought to have died in the Lubyanks in Moscow, but why he was arrested or how he died remain mysteries:
1950 – The Great Brink’s Robbery: Eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston.
1961 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the “military–industrial complex” as well as the dangers of massive spending, especially deficit spending.
1977 – Capital punishment in the United States resumes after a ten-year hiatus, as convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by firing squad in Utah.
1991 – Gulf War: Operation Desert Storm begins early in the morning as aircraft strike positions across Iraq, it is also the first major combat sortie for the F-117. LCDR Scott Speicher’s F/A-18C Hornet from VFA-81 is shot down by a Mig-25 and is the first American casualty of the War. Iraq fires eight Scud missiles into Israel in an unsuccessful bid to provoke Israeli retaliation.
Hutchens became President of the University of Chicago at only 30, and established many of the principles on which the school rests (shakily, I’ll add). He got rid of football, fraternities, and religious organizations, and established free speech and academic freedom as some of those principles. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia:
Hutchins was notable as a defender of academic freedom. When the University was accused of fostering communism in 1935 (by Charles Rudolph Walgreen, who claimed his niece had been indoctrinated with communist ideas whilst studying there) and again in 1949, Hutchins defended the right of the University’s faculty to teach as they wished, arguing that the best way to defeat communism was through open debate and scrutiny, rather than suppression. “Hutchins stood behind his faculty and their right to teach and believe as they wished, insisting that communism could not withstand the scrutiny of public analysis and debate.”
1911 – George Stigler, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1991)
1922 – Betty White, American actress, game show panelist, television personality, and animal rights activist
Here are some of Betty White’s quips from her later television career:
Gilmore was the first person executed after a ten-year moratorium on executions. He chose the firing squad over hanging, the only two choices at the time.
Despite being born to a Jewish mother, Fisher wound up as a rabid anti-Semite and white supremacist. I didn’t know that until this morning, when I read the relevant section of his Wikipedia page. He won his World Championship before he was thirty. This photo was about ten years before that:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a sociological question:
Hili: Is there any research about the level of poverty?
A: Of course, plenty.
Hili: But I’m asking about the level of poverty of cats.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy są badania nad poziomem ubóstwa?
Ja: Oczywiście, mnóstwo.
Hili: Ale ja pytam o badania nad poziomem ubóstwa kotów.
Szaron is resting, hoping that Hili won’t chase him:
Tweets from Matthew. If you read the article, you’ll find out that forcing scientific lies on children is not limited to evangelical Christianity:
A Jewish private school in London found to be teaching creationism to its pupils has been hit with regulatory action by the Government https://t.co/SsIRDGbrtv
I’m back to reading a lot during the pandemic, as I’m simply tired of looking at the Internet as a distraction. And so I finished two books this week: one excellent and one so-so. Let’s start with the good one, which I read so long ago that it seemed new to me. Reading The Plague is especially apposite at the moment as it can be read the contest of the pandemic. Can it illuminate our current experience? The answer is yes and no.
And it was this old edition that I read (click to go to the Amazon site):
At about 280 small pages, those who shy away from big books will find this one doable. It’s one of the novels that won Camus the Nobel Prize in Literature, and deservedly so. The Plague (La Peste in the original French) is considered an “existentialist” novel, and I suppose that’s because one could construe it as the fictional story of men laboring to fight a meaningless but fatal pestilence: a bubonic plague that struck the city of Oran in Algeria in the 1940s. The protagonist, Dr. Rieux, is an atheist, and realizes the senselessness of what is happening—despite the local priest’s attempt to find meaning in the epidemic—but still labors to exhaustion, seven days a week, to help the stricken. Rieux doesn’t do this because he sees it as the “moral” thing to do, but believes that relieving suffering is an aspect of human love, the only worthwhile thing he sees in our existence.
I won’t give away the plot or the spoiler (i.e., who the narrator is), but it’s worth rereading in light of the coronavirus pandemic. There are parallels (quarantines, lots of death), but also differences (no mask wearing, even though some of the plague is pneumonic, no lockdowns of businesses, and none of the peevishness that limns our behavior). But the big parallel is humanity being at the mercy of an invisible microbe, which takes lives randomly and senselessly. If that’s existentialism, so be it.
The novel rises to a climax with the narrator’s “analysis” at the end after the plague has lifted, which contains some of the book’s best writing. My favorite bit, which I’ve mentioned before, is the ending, which is wonderful even in translation. And it’s also about the futility of fighting the plague, which, though it can be temporarily conquered, will always return:
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled.
He knew what those jubilant crowds did no know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
Lots of nice alliteration there, and the last bit, “when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city,” is sheer genius. Bane and enlightening indeed!
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I read this one on—as I recall—the recommendation of a reader here. But perhaps not. At any rate, I was drawn by the topic: Daum’s disillusionment with wokeness and her discovery of “IDW” members like John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Bret Weinstein. This is journey that many of us have taken, and I wanted to see what Daum had to say about it.
I didn’t find the book absorbing, but perhaps that’s because I already share Daum’s intellectual criticism of wokeness and had undergone the political changes that describes at length, embroidering them with details about her crumbling marriage and her disillusionment with feminism. In my view, Daum provided too little meat and tried way too hard to be clever, throwing in personal information that didn’t enhance her thesis—if she has a thesis. Daum is a big fan of Joan Didion’s writing, but doesn’t have the chops to emulate her, nor Didion’s ability to make the personal sufficiently impersonal to be interesting to the reader.
It’s a solipsistic book that I don’t think would enlighten many of us. Read it at your own peril.
What next? Below a book that came highly recommended from an expert: literary critic James Wood of the New Yorker. Having met James in Cambridge MA (he teaches at Harvard) and discussed with him the idea of whether literature was a “way of knowing” (I won’t divulge his take), I wrote him asking if I should read a copy of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch that I found in a free book box.
The Goldfinsh won the Pulitzer prize in 2014, and I was about to start it when Wood replied and said that he much preferred a wonderful 2006 novel, translated from the German by Anthea Bell in 2015, that he had extolled several years ago in The New Yorker. All for Nothing is clearly one of Wood’s favorite modern novels. He warned me not to read his review before I read the book, as he gave spoilers. So I haven’t, but will start this book today:
So that is my latest reading. Your turn: what books have you liked lately?
From My Modern Met, we have some awesome pictures of Maine Coon Cats, which are not only large, but have heads and faces that are more wolflike than catlike. Click on screen shot to see them all; I’ll show half a dozen:
They’re all photographed by one man on a mission from Ceiling Cat:
Photographer Robert Sijka took note of this majestic breed and decided to capture their big cat vibes in striking portraiture that showcases their budding beauty, from kittens to full-grown felines.
It comes as no surprise, but Sijka has two passions in life: photography and Maine Coon cats. The two, luckily, go hand in hand and are the result of a move to China he and his family made 14 years ago. “After a while,” he explains, “we started to miss the company of animals, they have always been in our lives. We fell in love with Maine Coons and my wife Izabella started a breeding program 8 years ago.”
After the first litter of kittens was born, Sijka knew they had to share the adorable creatures with the world. “I think my journey with photography started at this moment,” he recalled.“I decided that my pictures must be something special, just like Maine Coons are special. After several thousands of photos, I ended up with my current style and great pleasure from working with these amazing animals.”
It’s a challenge to photograph any animal, and cats provide an extra hurdle; they won’t sit still! Sijka has no magic formula, but rather he has two tried-and-true methods for capturing endearing images—lots of practice and much patience. There are plenty of opportunities for him to do so, especially since he and wife now have a cattery called OtiCami that houses 20 Maine Coon cats and kittens.
Sijka sells his work as prints, phone cases, blankets, and more in his online shop, the Felis Gallery.
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If you own cats, you probably already know why they “knead”, working their paws in a motion also called “making biscuits”. But Pocket has the answer according to SCIENCE (click on screenshot):
The upshot:
“This kneading, also known as ‘making bread’ or ‘making biscuits,’ is an instinctive feline behavior kittens display shortly after they’re born,” Dr. Karen Becker, a veterinarian and creator of the Healthy Pets blog, writes on her site. “The reason for the movement in kittenhood is to stimulate the flow of milk from the mother’s mammary glands.” Cats who knead in adulthood could be “showing contentment,” according to Becker, or simply marking their territory since cat’s paws contain sweat glands.
While there’s always the chance that a kitty kneading is your cat’s attempt to claim you as their own — which, of course, you are — experts say kneading is probably as tender and adorable as it looks.
“If you do have a cat who kneads their bedding, or better yet you, it’s because they’re feeling very loved and comfortable,” Katie Armour, project coordinator at MSPCA Boston Adoption Center, tells The Dodo. “You should absolutely take this as a compliment!”
From the Dodo, videos of cats making biscuits. There’s enough catpower here to feed a dozen Southerners!
So says SCIENCE! But wait—there’s more!
“It is interesting to note that cats can produce a chemical for marking between their toes (interdigital semiochemical) that they can release when they flex their toes, so your cat could also be labeling you as a safe part of their territory,” Dr. Kathryn Primm, a veterinarian at Applebrook Animal Hospital in Ooltewah, Tennessee, writes in a blog for iHeartCats.
Well, SCIENCE is just speculating here. . . .
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Finally, we have two tame lynxes that were presumably rescued and unable to return to the wild. They’re too wild to make good house cats, but they’re tame enough to pet and even rub their bellies! Notes are from YouTube:
Max Canada Lynx, the educational animal ambassador takes a moment to get some good scratchin’ before he sits down for his meal. He was born at a zoo in May 2011. Max is not domesticated but has been humanized. He still has wild tendencies. He educates the public locally on the endangered/threatened (in lower 48 states) Canada Lynx in hopes that people will be driven to conserve our environment and protect our wildlife. Technically, they are listed as “threatened” but in my state of NY they are considered “extirpated.” However, it’s legal to trap these beautiful animals in Canada and Alaska.
He is NOT declawed. During the winter he weighs 40 pounds and summer about 34. He has about 4 inches of fur in this video which makes him look fat….I mean fluffy!
This video is NOT taken in my home but where he has an indoor enclosure. This is Max’s rug with his fur, straw and other scents that he loves. He doesn’t like the vacuum. Max also has outdoor housing where he spends most of his time.
Wouldn’t you like to pet this guy? Listen to that purr!
Meet Yoki the Canadian Lynx at Big Run Wolf Ranch!
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Lagniappe: Today’s New York Times has this lovely article about a woman who relieves her pandemic-induced loneliness by fostering kitten (click on screenshot). But then they have to ruin it by dragging in social justice, for crying out loud:
It takes a certain level of privilege to foster animals at a time when many New Yorkers are struggling to take care of themselves and their families. The pandemic has underscored the vast disparities among New York’s human residents, which then trickle down to the city’s cats.
They can’t keep that stuff out of even human-interest articles on fostering cats. Well, ignore it and read the piece by clicking on the screenshot:
Reader Dave, whose photo gallery is here, sent some photos from various places, including semi-abstracts. His captions are indented, and you can click the photos to make them bigger.
It’s Caturday, January 16, 2021: National Hot and Spicy Food Day. I’m had some of these last night as a preprandial snack with leftover bubbly, which was just just the right libation. I discovered Trader Joe’s Jerk Style Plantain Chips while investigating what else I should look for up when i went to TJ’s to get my coffee beans (the cheapest source for good espresso beans in bulk). This site rated the plantain chips highly, and they were right. They are quite spicy, not too unhealthy, and only about two bucks per bag. You don’t need to eat many to get satisfied.
It’s also National Fig Newton Day, Prohibition Remembrance Day, celebrating (?) the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, Book Publishers Day, and National Religious Freedom Day. Remember that Fig Newtons were invented as a digestive aid and were named not after Isaac Newton, but after the town of Newton, Massachusetts, where they were once made. I love them (the UK equivalent is the “fig roll”). But I just learned that they are now called simply “Newtons”—not because they eliminate the fig paste, which remains in one version—but because there are other kinds of Newtons now, like strawberry. At least this isn’t duplicitious, like changing “Vanilla Wafers” to “Nilla Wafers” when they removed the vanilla:
Not duplicitousInvidious name change due to decline in quality
News of the Day:
I think everyone’s heart skipped a beat when we hard that QShaman, aka Jacob Anthony Chansley, had provide the feds with information that led them to conclude that some of the Capitol rioters were bent on immobilizing and then assassinating people in Congress. But I wondered, given the clear insanity of QShaman, how anything he said, with his marination in conspiracy theories, could be credible. It turns out that it was not. According to CNN:
Justice Department prosecutors have formally walked back their assertion in a court filing that said Capitol rioters sought to “capture and assassinate elected officials.”
A federal prosecutor in Arizona asked a magistrate judge in a hearing on Friday to strike the line in a recent court filing about defendant Jacob Anthony Chansley, a man who is alleged to have led some in the crowd in the first wave into the Capitol with a bullhorn while carrying a spear and wearing a fur headdress.
The entire line the prosecutors want to omit from their court filing is: “Strong evidence, including Chansley’s own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government.”
The New York Times reported that some chucklehead had written “Trump” on a manatee (an endangered species); at first it looked as if the word had been carved into the skin, but now it seems “Trump” was written in algae (or rather, by scraping off algae). Still, it’s illegal to touch one of these wonderful creatures. Trumpies, keep your hands off the damn manatees!
Some relevant tweets (h/t Matthew):
This is horrifying and shameful. It shouldn’t have to be said but please protect manatees & don’t use them as makeshift yard signs, for anyone or anything: https://t.co/obWNxrXDx6
Dave is correct. As Governor, I stated that the manatee was my favorite mammal. I was criticized since humans should be a governor’s top mammal. Watching what goes on in DC these days, makes me wonder. Long live the manatee! https://t.co/3JZnliY6aq
I can’t help but think, cynical as I am, that if the word written was “Biden,” people wouldn’t be so incensed. Amirite?
At last India has started inoculating its population, which is a formidable task since that involves jabs for 1.3 billion people. The first people to get their shots, on Saturday, were healthcare workers. Unfortunately, they are using two Indian-manufactured vaccines, Covishield and Covaxin, that lack any clinical evidence that they work. I hope they do! (“Puja” below is a Hindu act of worship. The doctor has had henna designs put on her hands and arms.)
Dr. Rajashree Patil at Kamala Nehru Hospital in Pune, India, survived Covid-19 in May and was excited and apprehensive to be among the first to receive a dose of Covishield, one of two vaccines made in India. https://t.co/ekK36qYoR8pic.twitter.com/UrLZ55UhOX
Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 392,529, a big increase of about 4,000 deaths from yesterday’s figure, or about 2.8 deaths per minute. In about two days we’ll pass 400,000 deaths: double what the most pessimistic pundits thought we’d have. The world death toll is 2,019,857, a big increase of about 15,400 deaths over yesterday’s total.
Stuff that happened on January 16 includes:
1412 – The Medici family is appointed official banker of the Papacy.
Here are three members of the team, Douglas Mawson, Alistair MacKay and Edgeworth David, at what they thought was the South Magnetic Pole, but they didn’t really find the spot (read about it here). At any rate, the spot does change its position over time.
1920 – The League of Nations holds its first council meeting in Paris, France.
1900 – Edith Frank, German-Dutch mother of Anne Frank (d. 1945)
1902 – Eric Liddell, Scottish runner, rugby player, and missionary (d. 1945)
You’ll remember Liddell as the “muscular Christian” depicted in the film Chariots of Fire. Here’s the real Liddell winning at the British Empire versus United States of America (Relays) meet held at Stamford Bridge, London on Sat 19 July 1924:
1910 – Dizzy Dean, American baseball player and sportscaster (d. 1974)
1933 – Susan Sontag, American novelist, essayist, and critic (d. 2004)
1948 – Ruth Reichl, American journalist and critic
1974 – Kate Moss, English model and fashion designer
1980 – Lin-Manuel Miranda, American actor, playwright, and composer
Those who hopped the twig on January 16 include:
1794 – Edward Gibbon, English historian and politician (b. 1737)
1901 – Arnold Böcklin, Swiss painter and academic (b. 1827)
Here’s Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” (Die Toteninsel), one of many of his paintings drawn from mythology:
1936 – Albert Fish, American serial killer, rapist and cannibal (b. 1870)
1942 – Carole Lombard, American actress and comedian (b. 1908).
Lombard was married to Clark Gable, and when she died in a plane crash in 1942 at only 33, Gable was inconsolable. He soon joined the Air Force, something that Lombard had repeatedly asked him to do. .
(From Wikipedia): Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and Mrs. Elizabeth Peters, mother of Carole Lombard (1939)
You remember Wyeth’s famous painting “Christina’s World,” right? Well, here’s “Christina’s Bedroom” (1947), painted a year earlier, and it has a cat in it:
2017 – Eugene Cernan, American captain, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1934)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili still dislikes Szaron (the only animals she’s ever gotten along with are d*gs):
A: What are you doing here?
Hili: I’m waiting for Szaron so I can jump on him.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Czekam na Szarona, żeby na niego skoczyć.
And we have a picture of adorable Kulka in the snow:
Caption: “And a picture of Kulka (of course, taken by Paulina).”
In Polish: I jeszcze zdjęcie Kulki (oczywiście zrobione przez Paulinę)
From Facebook:
From Su:
From Jesus of the Day. How many of us get our dreams fulfilled so easily?
Titania’s busy erasing Trump:
All records of Donald Trump’s existence must be eliminated without delay.
I shudder to think how many people have already been radicalised by watching Home Alone 2. pic.twitter.com/M5l2Rjlpmv
Right-wing pastor and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow says the final score of the college football national championship game contained a prophetic sign that Trump will remain president.. https://t.co/0W6LdAJHCUpic.twitter.com/6wFLjqbFlN
I asked my friend Andrew, who spends a lot of time in Turkey, what this crazy housing development was about. Here’s his response:
I think it was an attempt by a Turkish developer to bring in Arab money. Someone had presumably come to conclusion that the route to the Arab soul (well, wallet) is via fake mini Disney castles. Seems a good idea to me. But I seem to recall that the whole thing has been a bit of a disaster economically; either the market research on Arab preferences wasn’t entirely sound or other economic factors intervened.
There's a place in Turkey called the Burj Al Babas and it looks like someone went hog wild with copy and paste on a small castle ` pic.twitter.com/kIPJvMum6C
Oy! The digger on the Mars rover is having trouble getting soil samples. They’ll miss all that life! (not)
One phase ends, and another begins…
Last weekend, the mole made a final attempt to dig farther underground on Mars. Even with all the steps we’ve taken to #SaveTheMole, it seems there’s just not enough friction in this soil to keep it moving downward. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/ZevtiAvS36
Here’s a discussion organized by, well, I’m not sure, but you can see the announcement here. It features several people you’ve heard of, and I listened to about half of it yesterday before tasks called me away. The whole thing is 1.5 hours long, and if you click on the screenshot below, it will take you to the video on YouTube. The question at issue:
Are we watching freedom of speech slip away in service of political correctness, collective guilt and a fear of being bullied and canceled for expressing an opposing or different view?
And the YouTube notes:
The video of our first event is available for your viewing: “Are Culture Wars Co-opting the Mainstream Narrative?”
Should journalists live in fear of being canceled or bullied for expressing an opposing or different view from their colleagues? Are our media institutions being taken over by a deeply ideological “woke” cohort?
Three of our speakers, Bari Weiss, Katie Herzog and Suzanne Moore, shared deeply personal stories about this topic during our first event. They have been employed in newsrooms ranging from local newspapers to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. What they have in common is what they describe as increasing illiberal climate in newsrooms.
Our fourth speaker, Jonathan Haidt, is one of the world’s leading experts in moral psychology and he helped put all of this into a wider context.
Our Reflection Panel spoke to how their newsrooms address these challenges. In particular, they addressed the realities of managing newsrooms: e.g., trying to serve the wider audience, and the desire for more social activism in their newsrooms, especially among younger journalists. We had with us Phil Chetwynd (AFP), Mapi Mhlangu (previously eNCA) and Francesca Unsworth (BBC)
The topic will surely be of interest to many readers, so have a listen. Bari Weiss, the first panelist to speak, will get you hooked on the rest of the discussion. There is not much chaff here.
