As the Portuguese say, “Bom dia em um dia de corcunda”, for it’s Wednesday November 10, 2021: National Vanilla Cupcake Day, celebrating the blandest cake I can think of.
It’s also Sesame Street Day (the program debuted on November 10, 1969), Area Code Day, World Science Day for Peace and Development, United States Marine Corps birthday, and World Keratoconus Day.
News of the Day:
*The New York Times reports that 13 of Trump’s former senior staff, including Jared Kushner (his son-in-law) and a former chief of staff stand accused of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits all government employees save the President and Vice President from engaging in partisan political activities. The violations at issue are more serious than minor transgressions that often occur, for the Trumpish ones involve accusations that there was collusion to engage in political activities to contest the election during the final days of the administration, in the knowledge that the government wouldn’t have time to investigate their activities.
Henry Kerner, who heads the Office of Special Counsel, made the assertion in a withering report that followed a nearly yearlong investigation into “myriad” violations of the law, known as the Hatch Act.
“Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law,” the report concluded.
Violations of the Hatch Act are not uncommon for any presidential administration. In October, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, apologized after an outside group accused her of violating the law by commenting in the White House press room on the pending governor’s race in Virginia.
But the Kerner report describes something more rare: a concerted, willful effort to violate the law by the most senior officials in the White House. The Washington Post disclosed the report’s release earlier on Tuesday.
Unfortunately, although these people committed illegal acts, they won’t be charges because it was up to President Trump to discipline them. What a world!
*Speaking of Trump, yesterday’s Washington Post had this clickbait headline, and of course I bit (click on screenshot):
This was an eighth-grade teacher (her students about 14 years old) in a California middle school. The teacher’s words were recorded. Get a load of what she “taught”:
The Anacapa Middle School teacher on Oct. 18 delivered several conservative talking points to her students, including on vaccines.
“If you have a baby in the hospital, they don’t want to give it back if you’re not vaccinated. This is a complete power control threat,” the teacher said in the recording, echoing debunked anti-vaccine talking points that went viral. A New York hospital announced in September that it would stop delivering babies because several employees quit instead of getting vaccinated, which led people to falsely claim online that unvaccinated parents wouldn’t be permitted to bring home their newborns, USA Today reports.
The teacher was also recorded making unproven claims about President Biden’s son, claiming Hunter Biden “was doing deals with China and Ukraine and all these places where he was funneling in money illegally.” Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation, though he maintains his innocence.
More broadly, the history teacher warned of general government overreach.
“People need to wake up and see the government has way too much power right now,” she told her students.
Now that is a good reason for students to have phones that can record classes.
*The NYT also has an article on the “new un-woke university”, the University of Austin, whose advisory board comprises many prominent people. Its founding was announced on Bari Weiss’s Substack site in a piece by Pano Kanelos, the former President of St. John’s College: “We can’t wait till universities to fix themselves. So we’re starting a new one.” Here’s the tweet announcing it:
A new university dedicated to the pursuit of truth. pic.twitter.com/8mQRFPK53B
— The University of Austin (UATX) (@uaustinorg) November 8, 2021
A fair number of readers told me about this and probably expected me to weigh in. But I can’t, not at any length, as I don’t have much of an opinion. The concept behind it is good: absolute freedom of speech and no university indoctrination, with discussion of many controversial ideas. But whether it will materialize I have no idea, for I doubt that many of the busy founders will teach courses there (Steve Pinker, an advisor, has already said he wouldn’t), classes will have to be online if they’re having all the über-professors that they tout, the college doesn’t yet grant degrees, and it hasn’t been accredited. I’ll just wait and see how it shakes out.
*If you’re looking for something to read, the Wall Street Journal has a list of 12 books that it reviewed highly in October. They include McWhorter’s new book (this is the WSJ, after all), a new biography of E. O. WIlson (Scientist) by Richard Rhodes, a biography of B. B. King, another of Robert E. Lee, and The Baseball 100, a subjective ranking of the game’s greatest players by Joe Posnanski. (My late friend Kenny always insisted that Babe Ruth was the greatest player of all time, but Posnanski’s rating puts Willie Mays at the top.)
*Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 756,951, an increase of 1,251 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 5,082,839, an increase of about 8,900 over yesterday’s total.
Stuff that happened on November 10 includes:
- 1775 – The United States Marine Corps is founded at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia by Samuel Nicholas. [see above]
- 1793 – A Goddess of Reason is proclaimed by the French Convention at the suggestion of Pierre Gaspard Chaumette.
- 1871 – Henry Morton Stanley locates missing explorer and missionary, Dr David Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, famously greeting him with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”.
But as Wikipedia notes, this greeting may well have been a post facto fabrication.
Stanley:
Livingston:
A reconstruction of the famous meeting:
- 1951 – With the rollout of the North American Numbering Plan, direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States.
- 1958 – The Hope Diamond is donated to the Smithsonian Institution by New York diamond merchant Harry Winston.
This rare blue diamond, found in India, is 45.52 carats, and you can see it in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, D. C. Here it is, surrounded by mundane colorless diamonds:
- 1975 – The 729-foot-long freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks during a storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew on board.
Here’s the ship in 1971, four years before its sinking. As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most.
Memorialized in a Gordon Lightfoot song:
- 1983 – Bill Gates introduces Windows 1.0.
- 1989 – Germans begin to tear down the Berlin Wall.
The Wall begins to fall.
Notables born on this day include:
- 1483 – Martin Luther, German monk and priest, leader of the Protestant Reformation (d. 1546)
Luther was a rabid anti-Semite, as the quote from Wikipedia below shows. Because of this, he, and the entire religion he founded, should be canceled.
Tovia Singer, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, remarking about Luther’s attitude toward Jews, put it thusly: “Among all the Church Fathers and Reformers, there was no mouth more vile, no tongue that uttered more vulgar curses against the Children of Israel than this founder of the Reformation.”
- 1759 – Friedrich Schiller, German poet, playwright, and historian (d. 1805)
- 1871 – Winston Churchill, American author and painter (d. 1947)
Ooops; I didn’t read ‘American author and painter’ so I assumed that this was THE Winston Churchill, who did paint as PM. Anyway, here’s a work by the REAL Churchill: the British one, and as you can see, he wasn’t a bad painter. He was a good bricklayer, too.
- 1949 – Ann Reinking, American actress, dancer, and choreographer (d. 2020)
Reinking, a collaborator with Bob Fosse, choreographed the musical “Chicago” and played Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival. Here she is singing and dancing “Me and My Baby”.
Those who said their last farewells on November 10 include:
- 1891 – Arthur Rimbaud, French poet and educator (b. 1854)
- 1938 – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkish field marshal and statesman, 1st President of Turkey (b. 1881)
What a Turk! He’s one of my heroes, for he secularized and modernized Turkey. Here’s the great reformer “introducing the new Turkish alphabet (the old one was written in Arabic script) to the people of Kayseri on 20 September 1928.” Sadly,Erdoğan is undoing a lot of the secularization.
- 1982 – Leonid Brezhnev, Ukrainian-Russian general and politician, 4th Head of State of the Soviet Union (b. 1906)
- 2001 – Ken Kesey, American novelist, essayist, and poet (b. 1935)
Kesey is the “missing link” between the beats and the hippies. Here he is discussing his life and his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Charlie Rose in 1992.
- 2007 – Norman Mailer, American novelist and essayist (b. 1923)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili discusses her main interest:
A: What are you thinking about?Hili: I’m wondering what you are going to take out of the refrigerator?
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?Hili: Zastanawiam się, co wyjmiesz z lodówki.
Szaron and Kulka having a rest on the windowsill (note Szaron’s blanket):
From Facebook, and ’tis true:
From Barry:
From Bruce:
This has me stymied: Yesterday my website got a lovely and unexpected endorsement from Richard Dawkins. Seeing that, Hemant Mehta made a rude and misleading comment. Why I’m surprised is that I thought I was friends with Hemant, have never done anything (that I know of) to offend him, and I thought he was the FRIENDLY Atheist! I won’t reply on Twitter as I don’t get into Twitter fights, but I have to say that I found this hurtful.
Coyne’s website just reposts everything written on anti-“woke” Substacks. https://t.co/2r3u6tfZxz
— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) November 9, 2021
From God (he forgot to mention the anteater):
I was high when I created the platypus.
— God (@god) September 21, 2021
From Ricky Gervais. I hate to inject a note of negativity into this love-fest, but Ricky apparently hasn’t read Wilson’s frequent and erroneous attacks on kin selection. In every other respect Ed is a brilliant scientist and writer, but he’s gone off the scientific rails a bit in the last decade.
He does have a nice face.
As twitter descends more and more into a nasty cesspool of negativity, vitriol, and tribalism, I think we should try to say one nice thing per day about someone. I'll start. I love Edward O. Wilson. He is a brilliant scientist and has a nice face. pic.twitter.com/xFIAB4e1mS
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) November 9, 2021
From the Auschwitz Memorial:
9 November 1935 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Johnny van Voolen, was born in Haarlem.
In September 1943 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber after the selection. pic.twitter.com/iqVrdaNGlK
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) November 9, 2021
Tweets from Matthew. Here is paradise on Earth!
Lap full of duckings. Trying to keep them warm while they dry. pic.twitter.com/kiLHUBGC6M
— diva ex machina (@diva_ex_machina) November 9, 2021
What did the common ancestor look like, though?
All organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor. pic.twitter.com/5O4BRJbZFO
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) November 9, 2021
I could answer this guy’s question. (By the way, that wouldn’t be me. . . )
Made a meme for the taxonomists😉 pic.twitter.com/BWGDgF3IkV
— Jente Ottenburghs | Avian Hybrids (@Jente_O) September 29, 2021
All is well in Dodo World:
Hidden camera catches mama leopard who's so excited to be reuniting with her babies 💞 @WildlifeSOS pic.twitter.com/xRLVUu6zVz
— The Dodo (@dodo) September 23, 2021
This is a swimming and leaping PIG! I’m not sure about the ethics of this. . . .
Look at the amount of air Swifty gets with that first leap. Unreal pic.twitter.com/2h3ozPFMTh
— Nooruddean (@BeardedGenius) September 16, 2021
“Author and painter”? That’s how Wikipedia characterizes him! But he did paint a lot to relax, and he wasn’t a bad painter for a Prime Minister. Here’s his “Studio Still Life”, from about 1930” – it’s a different Winston Churchill!
There are two others, although they are both related to the wartime British PM: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(disambiguation)#Other_people
And above it even says “American author and painter”. One might have varying opinions about Churchill, but he was certainly British.
Two anecdotes:
Woman to Churchill: Sir, if I were married to you, I would poison your tea.
Churchill to woman: Madam, if I were married to you, I should drink it.
Churchill correcting a young speech writer: We are not fighting with the Germans. One fights either for them or against them.
Winnie’s mother was born in New York, of course.
The woman in that anecdote was Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in Britain. There’s another anecdote involving an exchange with Churchill. She accused him of being drunk, to which he is reputed to have replied: “And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.”
Towards the end of World War 2, Astor accused Allied soldiers fighting in the Italian campaign of being “D-Day dodgers”. In response, a song was composed, to the tune of “Lili Marlene”, by a British army major who was fighting in Italy. The final verse runs like this:
If you look around the mountains in the mud and rain
You’ll find scattered crosses, some which bear no name
Heart break and toil and suffering gone
The boys beneath them slumber on
For they’re the D-Day Dodgers
Who stayed in Italy.
Churchill was wrong there – with can mean “together with” as well as “against.”
I think that that’s the point: it is not clear.
Oh no. I better fix that. Thanks!
It’s fixed now, but only people who look on their computers will see the correction. These errors cannot be corrected when you get notifications by email.
[Raises hand gingerly] The painting is by the famous Winston, not his American namesake. The clue is in the caption: “National Trust, Chartwell”. Chartwell was Churchill’s country residence, in Kent. After his death in 1965, his widow gave the house to the National Trust, and it’s open to visitors.
Oy! I’ll have to change it again. Thanks.
The British guy used the name “Winston S. [for Spenser] Churchill” on his writings, so he wouldn’t be confused with the Yank.
Indeed – at the time they reached that agreement the US author was the more famous of the two: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_(novelist)#The_British_statesman
In your stuff that happened today section, you forgot
This is especially important because it explains why the only edible bagels in the USA (perhaps in the World if my experiences of bagels in London mean anything) are made in New York and not New Amsterdam.
Also, Swifty clearly dislikes swimming given that he jumped more than half way across the trough of water.
🙂
Hemant has gone full woke. Therefore many of your posts offend him.
it’s possibly also because you’re still supporting Richard Dawkins, who’s become the latest antichrist in the ideology wars. did you see the ‘analysis’ of the picture of Dawkins in front of the Da Vinci wings drawing? Lots of condemnation of ‘Dawkins as Jesus’ over-analysis and psychological projection.
In brief, the friend of Mehta’s enemy is now Mehta’s enemy. Which means it’s yet another site/blog i’m going to have to reconsider spending my clicks on.
That picture was grossly misinterpreted: it’s a ad-type photo for his new book on flight.
As i say, massively over-misinterpreted. But, i think i was Richelieu who said ‘Give me six lines by the most upright man alive, and i can find something in them to hang him’
I am somewhat surprised that Dr. Coyne is surprised. We talked about the Friendly Atheist here in the recent past. Such a snarky (and untrue) comment is the logical continuation of where he was going for a long time.
If there was discussion about Mehta’s transformation here, I either missed it or forgot about it. I truly was surprised: it came out of left field.
What a shame–“friendly” indeed. I used to enjoy listening to his podcast; but when it became more and more focused on woke issues rather than critical thinking, I had to stop. Apparently, he’s in the camp of “If You’re Not With Us, You’re Against Us”. Too bad.
He’s been following in Peezus’ footsteps for years, and will end up in the same completely irrelevant place. A pity, as either one of them could have continued respectably but instead they caught galloping wokeness.
PZ was definitely an “early-adopter” of wokeism. And he ran his blog like the woke would like to run society: Authoritarian dictatorship. The “comments section” very rapidly slumped into a cesspool of ritualized humiliations.
It was under this post: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/04/13/the-friendly-atheist-is-not-so-friendly-damns-richard-dawkins-as-transphobic-for-equating-transexualism-with-transracialism/
I also commented, but I was not alone. And the post itself shows he already went after Dawkins. Your conflict with somebody who is onboard of the woke “transphobe” accusations was inevitable.
And I can repeat what I wrote there. Years back I was regular reader of his blog, but I dropped it a while ago, because it slowly but steadily worsened. It is unfortunate, because I liked his writings at some point, so this is a loss for me too.
I left that website years ago because of the toxic wokeness over there.
I think it’s two things: frustration that Jerry seems only to post instances of left-wing intolerance and not, for example, TPA encouraging students to report their professors to watch lists or JD Vance saying professors are the enemy.
The second is the way the term ‘woke’ has had such scope creep lately, as per Jerry’s post the other day. The same way “CRT” has been changed to mean “history that makes some white people feel uncomfortable,” a lot of folks on the right use ‘woke’ to mean ‘anyone vaguely aware of any social issues other than communism and socialism, whatever they are.’ It’s made a lot of people focus on the 5% they disagree about, rather than the 95%.
I have explained why I focus on left-wing versus right wing intolerance. You don’t seem to have grasped that, but constantly kvetch about my focus. I’m not going to change my focus because of comments like yours and Hemant’s.
I know I sound like a mother of teenagers (and I am) when I say this, but in this case I think it’s 100 percent true: he’s just jealous. What other possible reason could Mehta have for posting that? It’s so petty and absurd and anyone who reads the Why Evolution Is True posts can see for themselves that it’s not true. Some people can’t stand for other people to be complimented and admired. If I were Mehta I would be embarrassed to have shown how little I was by posting that. It just makes him look bad.
It is petty and absurd but as has been pointed out he’s gone fully woke and fully woke-folk see the world in binary terms. No critic of woke-ness can be tolerated.
GB: Glad to see you commenting. Just yesterday it occurred to me that I didn’t think I had seen you commenting for a long time (could be my misconception), and I worried that you might be unwell.
Probably you were vacationing somewhere warm and sunny! 🙂
No sun and warmth, sadly. The gloom of winter is threatening.
I decided to pull back in my involvement here and in social media a bit, finding myself too involved with things on-line. I’ve been reading most posts but just refraining from engaging so much in comment threads. Screens and keyboards, I found, had become too big a part of my life.
I admire the effort (<-not a sarcastic remark – it'd be funny though). too have tried curbing my internet stuff – mostly here. It is not easy. Interestingly, it started about 1-2 months before Bill Maher's "your phone is making you an asshole" editorial.
Sadly, I’m currently up to about 30 comments on the recent footwear thread. Time for a phone diet.
#metoo
I could cope when it was two or three posts a day, & was on a pc I could look at lunch etc, but five today & me on a phone is too much to keep up with.
The sheer daily volume of good stuff that Jerry posts and writes is on its own simply staggering. I could not manage it on my days off, let alone 7 days a week.
Yes, I agree. I’ve started reading it in the morning even before I listen to the news, because I know I’m going to enjoy his take on things, and I know I’m going to learn something. Another thing, Dr. Coyne is fair and quite even-handed. I suppose that’s a threat to people who are (as was pointed out above) the sorts of thinkers who have to be for/against or black/white; his more subtle and nuanced way of measuring things and discussing them is so different from that that I wonder if it’s a kind of existential threat to the for/against people.
Any book on baseball that does not rank Babe Ruth on top has to be suspect. Just as any book on history that does not put Lincoln at the top would be the same.
Currently the ball is in the attorney generals court and the house committee is waiting.
I feel you might have missed out a qualification there. I’ve read a number of books on history that make no mention of Lincoln at all. For example: Tom Holland’s Rubicon is excellent without even touching on the subject of Lincoln or American presidents at all, in fact.
The posting statement referencing baseball was about ranking. My comment on that was another often ranked group….presidents. Sorry I. did not make that clear. I too have read a few books on history that said not a word about Lincoln.
Lincoln? How many homers did he hit? And could he run, field, throw, hit for average, and hit for power like the “Say Hey” Kid, Willie Mays? 🙂
Mays was a very good baseball player – one of the best. But just like all the other greats, against Babe Ruth?? How many world series did Babe win. I believe it was 7. How many for Mays – 1.
On the theme of presidents and baseball, my father once met the great pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. He asked him “What was it like pitching against Babe Ruth?” Cleveland scoffed “I could have struck out Ruth sitting in a rocking chair.” When my father laughed, Alexander said “Check out the record books! You’ll see.” My father did and realized Alexander was telling the truth.
I saw one of those “I bet he’s thinking about another woman” memes the other day, and the man was thinking, “I wonder how long it takes a Giraffe to throw up?” Now I wonder that, too.
The question I would ask is “can they throw up at all?” I remember watching a dissection of a giraffe on Channel 4 once which went into great detail on the adaptions that allow a giraffe to pump its blood so far uphill and also not to have its legs ballooning with blood (essentuially, its skin has evolved into a kind of g-suit).
Anyway, I’ve just checked on Wikipedia and, as ruminants, of course giraffes can throw up. They have to, in fact.
They probably can’t do it without lowering their heads though. Just one more thing that makes us superior. 😉
You can find videos online where you can see the bolus of cud going up the long neck, and then the giraffe starts to chew. After a bit, they stop chewing and send the bolus back down.
My first reaction to this was we need to increase teacher pay. Make the positions competitive. But, I suppose cell phone recordings in classrooms is a much more feasible, grass roots solution to the problem.
The ELCA’s okay. Missouri Synod…not so much.
But that opinion (of mine) is based on current policies, not Luther. Was your last comment tongue in cheek sarcasm and I just didn’t pick up on it? Lutheranism being to Luther what Evolution is to Darwin, the Bill of Rights is to Madison, etc., it’s a subtle but clever point to apply the woke overreaction of “if the founder had bad thoughts, the ideas must go” to it.
… and don’t get me started on Wisconsin Synod … even worse!
“we need to increase teacher pay. Make the positions competitive.”
Michelle Rhee offered D.C. public school teachers six figure salaries if they relinquish tenure.
The teachers’ union – for collective bargaining – refused to vote on it.
Read The Bee Eater, or simply watch Waiting for Superman.
As a follow up, read The Smartest Kids in the World – And How They Got That way by Amanda Ripley to learn which countries regard teaching as prestigious and require substantial academic training for it, and also the countries in which the society organizes itself to promote the life of the family, with fewer school hours (but maybe not South Korea). Spoiler alert : the United States is not one of them.
small correction : I recall a story about France but it might have been in The Collapse of Parenting by Leonard Sax.
On the subject of good bagels, when I visit Chicago I always stop by New York Bagel and Bialy on Touhy Avenue and get some proper bagels. Their salt bagels are perfect.
Yes, it was sarcastic, of course. And your last sentence is exactly what I meant.
Thumbs up. 🙂
“Goddess of Reason” – sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Thank you for for posting Gordon Lightfoot. One of my favorite songs.
Me too; but definitely a “love-it or hate-it” kind of song!
Anybody hates that song, all I can say is “Fellas, it’s been good to know ya.” 🙂
😀
I seriously had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from going to Hemant’s twitter feed and recommending that he autofornicate using fistfuls of rolled up Dendrocnide moroides, since he obviously doesn’t have enough to keep him occupied. What a petty performance.
Sent me off to Google you did. And, ouch! That may just be worse than a rusty porcupine!
And his (Wilson’s) voice! On par with David Attenborough – in fact, they ought to make a show together!
Jerry:
I linked to the articles before, but what is your take on these ant megacolonies where the ants have low levels of kinship but cooperate very successfully, in a seeming group selection scenario.
The question becomes more interesting because humans have basically adopted insect hive social patterns, and you have stuff like the number of British volunteers in WWI which probably doesn’t make sense in terms of kinship selection. [If it is simply a function of propaganda, how stupid are people that you can persuade them to risk their lives for something that serves no evolutionary purpose, why would an evolutionary process of selection permit such a thing?]
I’ll ask my friend who is an entomologist and a great expert on ants. Watch this space.
I did, but he answered about the Argentine ant, which forms “supercolonies” in California. In that case, the whole population is descended from a few individuals that probably were immigrants that landed in New Orleans, and there is very little variation in the proximate cue that ants use to recognize members of different colonies: their “smell” that comes from their cuticular hydrocarbons. Those vary among most ant colonies, which of course leads them to recognize nestmates vs. strangers, producing “ant wars”. In this case, though, the hydrocarbon genes are basicall the same among all ants in supercolonies, so they act as if they’re nestmates. To support this, in Argentina, where they came from, there is much more variation among hydrocarbons from different places, and they do not form supercolonies. I’m not sure if this recognition mechanism has been studied in other supercolony-forming ants.
As for war as being a form of group selection in humans, I would strongly take issue with that and say that it’s a form of tribalism that may rest on our FEELING of being part of a group that could have evolved millions of years ago. But that’s not group selection, and I don’t want to get further into that discussion.
This exhausts my knowledge (actually, my friend’s knowledge) about supercolonies, so if you want more answers you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Yes, obviously in the super colonies, everyone has to have the same bunch of genes for the chemical smell (because if you don’t you get killed), but the ants are not significantly related to each other (at least according the study below), e.g. low levels of kinship, yet you have a very successful adaptation.
You could imagine a society where everyone had red hair, and probably had the same genes for hair color (especially if non-red heads were killed at birth), but they wouldn’t necessarily be kin. If a socially cohesive group of red heads could form a larger group than everyone else and benefit from economies of scale, then that might provide an advantage over smaller groups based in kinship.
It doesn’t make any sense to me that humans could form complex societies that transcend kinship groups if such groups couldn’t outcompete smaller groups bound by kinship. [That doesn’t mean I’m not wrong.]
Further, studies from the Faroes Island DNA demonstrate you have Y chromosomes overwhelmingly from Vikings/Scandinavian populations and X chromosomes from Celtic populations, and it suggests some kind of significant change in population structure, and it is hard to rule out aggression given what we know about Vikings:
https://www.nature.com/articles/5201578
For the British volunteers, one can get some insight by watching They Shall Not Grow Old , which is scripted from interviews by British soldiers. It’s an amazing movie. From that admittedly small sample one can learn that they had no idea what they were getting into other than that it was going to be a great adventure.
I will watch this space for the ant question, but on humans it’s worth pointing out that militaries go to a lot of trouble to inculate kin-like feelings into their soldiers. Shared training and experience, teamwork, literal ‘band of brothers’ rhetoric, and the like. Moreover, one good hypothesis is that the feelings/instincts supporting kin selection are “sloppy” (think duck imprinting on other animals. Now think about how in small hunter-gatherer troops, are the groups “my kin” and “the people I interact with daily” so different that we would form an evoloutionalry adaptation to tell them apart?).
Both of these factors could contribute to humans treating non-kin as kin – i.e. altruism.
I could also mention Mark Moffett’s book, The Human Swarm, which deals with human beings ability to form large non-kinship based groups which other apes cannot accomplish, but insects can. However, the book, while interesting, is mostly a speculative narrative and probably lacking in sufficient rigor for this site. [Not that I mind the knives coming out, but there is no way I can articulately respond or defend against highly trained natural scientists coming at me with specifics who know their field.]
Here is one ant study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4964563/
Here a journalistic article with citations:
https://the-gist.org/2020/03/colony-structure-and-global-spread-of-the-argentine-ant/
🐾🐾
Sorry; but, the title. What the fluff???
I’m stealing the “What is a species?” meme for one of my classes! We just discussed various species concepts and their shortcomings, and the meme is perfect.
“How do you breathe through that little thing?”
The elephant is looking at the man’s nose,, right? Right?
No – his npeis
If I translate that as “spine” does it make me a doctor?
Yes – a urologist
Oh joy :o( I should have been careful about what I wished for.
Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985, not ’83. It was a fairly blatant ripoff of the Mac OS released in ’84, but somehow Apple lost the lawsuit. Perhaps because Mac OS was copied from Xerox Parc, although with permission.
Our host said Bill Gates “introduced” Windows 1.0 in ’83. He probably did talk about it back then so perhaps “announced” would have been a better word.
I totally disagree that Windows was a ripoff of Mac OS. Both were the result of obvious trends of the day. Everyone knew that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were the future. They had already been around for a long time by 1983. All we had to do was wait until personal computers got powerful enough to handle them and sufficient customer demand could be generated.
I worked for one of many companies working on graphical user interfaces for Computer-Aided-Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM). I joined the company straight out of college in the summer of 1974. Virtually everyone working with computers back then knew something about GUIs. I was lucky to be able to work with them.
Evans and Sutherland
Silicon Graphics
Just naming companies here that come to mind
Tektronix made many of the cheap vector screens we used. I remember the Tektronix 4014 (introduced in 1975 according to Wikipedia) as our workhorse screen for several years. E&S and SG were primary display makers for high-end vector displays but many more companies made raster displays that are more like the ones we use today. Although it was certainly not a GUI OS, I remember working for Forth, Inc. around 1979. It’s boss, Chuck Moore, created a simulation of the Battle of Midway that ran on an DEC LSI-11 that fit in two suitcases and had only 8k of RAM. The screen was a raster display made by Aydin Controls.
Yep, I remember Tektronix well.
MS DOS was copied, too if I recall correctly.
MSDOS was purchased from Seattle Computer Products, if memory serves, not copied illegally. Gates and his mom did pull a fast one on SCP and IBM though. They pretended to IBM that they made MSDOS and didn’t tell SCP about the IBM opportunity. Of course, that’s all legal as far as I know as no fraud was involved. Knowledge is money!
The Kerner report from the Office of Special Counsel on Trump officials’ violations of the Hatch Act reads: “The cumulative effect of these repeated and public violations was to undermine public confidence in the non-partisan operation of government.” Really? Quel dommage!
A new university backed by the odious Peter Thiel does not appeal to me.
Is that the dude who plans to live forever by drinking the blood of virgins or something? [I paraphrase slightly ;o) ]
For legal reasons, I should probably add that he denies it, naturally: “Billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel denies being a vampire” https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/peter-thiel-vampire-donald-trump-life-extension-blood-transfusion-ambrosia-palantir-a8614061.html
Whatever reasonably makes Thiel odious, I trust that it does not include Thiel’s secretly – apparently a sin in the eyes of the righteous NY Times – underwriting the cost of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the odious media outfit Gawker. Reading Times articles about the matter, it was obvious that the Times was miffed about Thiel doing so. I don’t know of the Times editorially supporting Gawker, perhaps because it was an odious outfit. Perhaps one should give the (newly-reconstituted?) Gawker and New York Times a quitclaim deed to our (? – I’m not sure what possessive pronoun to use) lives so that it might dictate how we spend our money and otherwise conduct our lives.
The map fails to reflect the California bagel—essentially a round piece of Wonderbread with a whole in the middle—which are in a class of their own. Also, the only bialys I have found are…wait for it…cheese covered.
Bailys are hard to find here but, luckily, I have a place within a mile of where I live in Long Beach, CA that makes them. And they aren’t covered in cheese! They’re not the best I’ve ever had but pretty good.