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.
Betty White was one of those people who seemed immortal, but, alas, it proved not to be. In fact I found out about that she died yesterday in a tweet from God:
The Golden Girl was 99, and it was less than three weeks from her 100th birthday on January 17. The cause of death hasn’t been reported.
A statement from her agent and friend::
“Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever,” Witjas said. “I will miss her terribly and so will the animal world that she loved so much. I don’t think Betty ever feared passing because she always wanted to be with her most beloved husband Allen Ludden. She believed she would be with him again.”
And from CNN:
But starting with her performance as acerbic kitchen diva Sue Ann Nivens on the 1970s sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — beginning when she was 51 — White developed a knack for portraying the apparently pure-hearted elder, full of Midwestern sincerity, who had a randy inner life. In doing so, she created a new generation of fans, a base that only grew larger as she entered her 90s.
She was the sexually experienced, if otherwise naïve, Rose Nylund on “The Golden Girls.”
White also played a flinty and sometimes violent secretary on “Boston Legal.” She had a guest spot on “The Simpsons,” hosted “Saturday Night Live” — the oldest person ever to do so — and even appeared in a self-mocking ad for Snickers candy bars.
Through it all, she took her success — if not her work — lightly.
“I’m having the time of my life, and the fact that I’m still working — how lucky can you get?” she told the Huffington Post in 2012.
In Matt Taibbi’s latest piece on Substack (click below for free access, but subscribe if you read often), he’s worried that the Democrats aren’t really parsing what happened when a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, defeated Democratic incumbent Terry McAuliffe in the recent race. A lot of it was about schooling, and about McAuliffe’s comment that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” which apparently drove a lot of voters towards Youngkin. Taibbi sees this gaffe as on par with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment during her run against Trump, and thinks that Democrats are dismissing McAuliffe’s statement as one that simply appeals to racists.
Taibbi, on the other hand, thinks there’s more to it than that, and Dems should be thinking hard about education. 23 Democrats are planning not to run for re-election in Congress next year, and that’s a big worry.
Click the screenshot to read (if you’re paywalled, try a judicious inquiry):
Once again this falls in the category of words and actions that make Democrats look like elitists in the eyes of Middle America, and there’s something to that. The dismissal of parents’ concerns is exemplified, says Taibbi, by recent words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, head of the NYT’s 1619 Project:
On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”
Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”
Even odder were her next comments, regarding McAuliffe’s infamous line about parents. About this, Hannah-Jones said:
We send our kids to school because we want our kids to be taught by people with expertise in the subject area… When the governor, or the candidate, said he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just a fact.
In the wake of McAuliffe’s loss, the “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” line was universally tabbed a “gaffe” by media. I described it in the recent “Loudoun County: A Culture War in Four Acts” series in TK as the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun, but this was actually behind the news cycle. Yahoo! said the “gaffe precipitated the Democrat’s slide in the polls,” while the Daily Beast’s blunter headline was, “Terry McAuliffe’s White-Guy Confidence Just Fucked the Dems.”
If Hannah-Jones abjures expertise in educaiton, why is she trying hard to foist the message of the 1619 Project on American secondary schools? She’s being disingenuous.
What’s happened, says Taibbi is that Dems are fobbing off McAuliffe’s loss as on racist parents who don’t want their kids to learn about Critical Race Theory, and those Democrats who still adhere to mantra “defer to the experts” that they use, usually justifiably, for science. But it didn’t work for economics or foreign policy, and, says Taibbi, is certainly doomed to fail when it comes to education:
But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.
Implying the opposite is a political error of almost mathematically inexpressible enormity. This is being done as part of a poisonous rhetorical two-step. First, Democrats across the country have instituted radical policy changes, mainly in an effort to address socioeconomic and racial disparities. These included eliminating standardized testing to the University of California system, doing away with gifted programs (and rejecting the concept of gifted children in general), replacing courses like calculus with data science or statistics to make advancement easier, and pushing a series of near-parodical ideas with the aid of hundreds of millions of dollars from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that include things like denouncing emphasis on “getting the right answer” or “independent practice over teamwork” as white supremacy.
When criticism ensued, pundits first denied as myth all rumors of radical change, then denounced complaining parents as belligerent racists unfit to decide what should be taught to their children, all while reaffirming the justice of leaving such matters to the education “experts” who’d spent the last decade-plus doing things like legislating grades out of existence. This “parents should leave ruining education to us” approach cost McAuliffe Virginia, because it dovetailed with what parents had long been seeing and hearing on the ground.
So, he says, it’s not merely resistance to teaching Critical Race Theory in schools. All of us hear constantly about the trend to lower school standards in the name of equity, and if you care about your kids’ education, that rankles, especially if you want your kid to excel. I’ll give just one more quote:
The complaints of most Loudoun parents I spoke with about curriculum were usually double-edged. The first thing that drove many crazy was the recognition that whatever their kids were learning in school, it was less and less the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Kids were coming home showing weird deficiencies in obvious areas of need, forcing parents, and especially working mothers, to devote long evening hours to catching their kids up on things like spelling and multiplication tables. “I grew up laughing at the idea of homeschooling. I thought that was an idea for religious kooks,” one mother told me. “But after a while, I caught myself thinking, ‘I’m doing all the teaching anyway, why not just cut out the middleman?’”
Parents talked incessantly about the lowering of standards in Loudoun, whether it was the dropping of midterms and finals in 2015, or the school’s new “Retake Policy,” which not only set an arbitrary floor of 50% on all “summative assessments” (the word “test” has been mostly out of use for at least a decade there, apparently because it puts too much pressure on students), but automatically allowed students to retake tests if they scored below 80%. The rule also required teachers to accept a humorous euphemism called “late-work.”
School bureaucrats are motivated in almost every case to not only avoid giving bad grades, but to pre-empt efforts to track children as ahead or behind by slotting them in certain classes. In a phenomenon replicated in other parts of the country, kids in Loudoun take the same math classes all the way through their junior years in high school, when they’re finally allowed to take advanced courses. As a result, students who are ready for calculus sit in the same classrooms as students still struggling with pre-algebra, putting teachers in a nearly impossible bind — how do you design “summatives” for kids on such different levels? — and all but guaranteeing that the bulk of kids don’t learn much, or near enough.
Some version of this dysfunction story is going on in districts all over the country. If you drill down into reasons, they usually come down to local bureaucrats discovering that lowering standards and eliminating measurable forms of achievement works as a short-term political solution on a variety of fronts, from equity politics to dealing with parent groups, teachers’ unions, and public and private funding sources.
Those who lower standards never admit what their real reasons are, but you’d have to be without neurons not to know the real reason.
I think all of us who mourn the lowering of standards will understand that: it’s not just about CRT, but about all the changes being made for one reason only, to ensure “equity” in achievement and representation. Middle America, apparently, isn’t as woke as Upper (Middle) Class America, and they want their children challenged to achieve. Eliminating SATs, homework, tracking, and so on, will, assets Taibbi, help “Bring back Trump”, for it tells worried parents that the message of the Democrats is “we know how to raise your kids better than you.”
I am no pundit, but at least this makes sense. And I’m sure James Carville would agree.
Reader Debra, in a comment on a recent post about the UN’s ongoing anti-Israel resolution, called attention to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s “Islamophobia Resolution,” which you can read about in the ABC News, the conservative site The Daily Caller, or the The Elder of Ziyon.
But you’ll want to see the latest version of the bill itself, here, or as a pdf by clicking on the screenshot of the latest version below. This bill was approved by the House of Representatives in a strict party-line vote of 219-212 last Tuesday.
A few words before we get to the bill itself. I will pull no punches in saying that I believe Omar is both an Islamist and an anti-Semite, though I have more confidence in the latter than in the former. Regardless, both she and Rashida Tlaib seem determined to use their power in Congress to promote Islam in America and prevent its criticism. I think that this bill is part of that effort, and you can see its purpose under the words “A BILL” above: to establish a special Office in the U.S. State Department to monitor and report on incidents of “Islamophobia” outside the U.S. (it would never get passed if it incorporated America, but, as we’ll see, it might well do that).
I also think the bill is misguided, ambiguous, pushes a form of blasphemy law (though probably not in the U.S.), and would be unconstitutional in America because it privileges one religion—Islam—over all others. We need no such bills: no “anti-Semitism department” bills, not “anti-Christian department” bills, no “anti-Hindu department” bills, and so on. Imagine what would happen if we had a surfeit of such bills. India would be the subject of many reports by the Islamophobia and Hinduphobia departments, every Arab country would be the subject of innumerable reports of anti-Semitism from the “Judeophobia Department”, and so on. So my first objection is that this bill is a big waste of time, accomplishing little but serveing Omar’s political ambitions. I suspect the Democratic approval was a kneejerk reaction to soothe Omar (the Progressive Left is pro-Islam and anti-“Zionism”).
In fact, several sources say that the bill is Omar’s personal reaction to being denigrated unfairly by the even more odious Lauren “Glock-Packing Mama” Boebert, who has repeatedly denigrated Omar as a “terrorist” and a member of the “jihad squad.” Here’s a CNN report on Boebert’s statements:
Boebert is bigoted, unhinged, and “Muslimophobic”. A congresswoman should not be talking this way about a colleague. She may well be punished by the Congress for her statements by being removed from committees, and I hope to Ceiling Cat that she won’t be re-elected.
Apparently Boebert tried to call Omar to apologize, but Omar hung up on her, which I probably would have done as well. Nevertheless, I have to add that Boebert did nothing illegal by her remarks about Omar; her speech is protected by the First Amendment. What she said was unwise and bigoted.
But in response, Omar wrote and sponsored the bill above, and the Dems in Congress, eager to parade their virtue, approved it. That was unwise, because it opens a Pandora’s box of religions and ethnicities competing to get their own “x-phobia offices” established in the Department of State.
One of the biggest problems of the bill is that it doesn’t define “Islamophobia,” which is something it absolutely has to do. At the end we see its latest construal of Islamophobia, which has problems. We’ll get to in a second.
The bill establishes an office in the State Department headed by a “special envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia”. The Office will do this:
So, as you see, it monitors acts of Islamophobia only outside the U.S., and prepares an annual report about what the office uncovers. There is no requirement to monitor any other international acts of religious hatred. (Can you imagine the infinite number of acts that could be reported on anti-Semitic activities of the governments of Arab States? Hatred of Jews is part of the government media in many places.) This wouldn’t fly if it included the U.S., for it would be a very clear violation of the First Amendment, for its language, as we’ll see, could act to suppress free speech as well as singling out one religion for special protection from criticism and reporting above all others.
But the following stipulation worries me because of that:
It seems to bring the Islamoph0bia issue to American organizations like CAIR, who could then use their broadly construed definitions of “Islamophobia”—definitions which often include criticism of Islam—to bear on foreign countries, indicting them for what Americans consider free speech.
Now, what constitutes “Islamophobia”? We can tell only by the things that are supposed to be reported. This is from the bill:
Of course acts of physical violence against Muslims should be condemned, but to be considered “Islamophobic” they have to be perpetrated because the victim is a Muslim. Physical violence against anybody in the U.S. is illegal, but if it’s perpetrated because of the victim’s religion, it is also a “hate crime.” (I’m not sure where I come down on whether “hate crimes” should incur extra penalties.) Thus the bill should state that the physical violence should be based on religion.
Acts of vandalism against mosques are prima facie acts of anti-Muslim activity and are properly reported.
What bothers me most about this bill, both in terms of the international community and the U.S., is not the violence, but the requirement to report “instances of propaganda in government and nongovernment media that incite such acts, and statements and actions relating thereto.” As we know, some Muslims are easily driven to violence if they perceive an insult (“propaganda”) against Islam. That’s why a fatwa was pronounced on Salman Rushdie, why 12 people were killed in the Charlie Hebdo acts, why Theo van Gogh was murdered (and Ayaan Hirsi Ali requires around-the-clock protection), and why the Danish cartoons satirizing Muhammad resulted in widespread violence, including murder. Those could all have been construed as “incitement” to violence, and thereby excused—as they have been for some.
And what about internecine intolerance among Muslims? Is the violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims to be considered violence perpetuated because of the victim’s religion? Such violence is a regular occurrence in the Middle East, and results from warring sects within Islam.
Is it a reportable offense to criticize the tenets of Islam, like the forced veiling and covering of women, their oppression in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, their own state-run propaganda against Jews, and so on? These are valid criticisms of Islam, some Muslims and Muslim states, but do they fall under “Islamophobia” in this bill? We don’t know.
For, in the end, unlike anti-Semitism, “Islamophobia” is a recently confected term whose purpose, I believe, is primarily to prevent criticism of Islam. Yes, criticisms of Muslims because they are Muslim are rightfully criticized as bigotry, but remember that the word is “Islamophobia,” not “Muslimophobia”.
That brings me to why Omar confected this bill. Why should we care if it applies only to other countries? We should care because the bill, which requires public reporting, has the potential to chill criticism of Islam in other countries, and we should try, I think, to export our First Amendment rights to countries which don’t have such laws. Also, Omar’s bill constitutes a sort of “blasphemy law”, which could chill speech in other countries. (I believe Israel is one of Omar’s prime targets of this bill. Imagine if the bill was about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism together!).
Finally, it has the potential to chill speech against Islam in America, for if we’re holding other countries to standards that we don’t hold ourselves—for we are free to criticize Islam or any other faith whenever we want—the U.S.might be pressured to consider some kind of blasphemy regulations. Shouldn’t we be held to the standards that Omar’s bill is trying to enforce on other countries? What Omar is trying to do, in the end, is to prevent, worldwide, criticism of her own faith. And that’s not a good basis for a bill.
The bill will now head to the Senate, where I hope it will be tabled or voted down. It is, as they say, a “problematic” piece of legislation.
Please send in your photos. Tomorrow’s a holiday and you’ll probably be hung over, so it might be good to quietly put together a good batch of pictures. Thanks, and Happy New Year!
Let’s finish off 2021 by finishing off Athayde Tonhasca’s two-part series on a tour of Scotland. (Part 1 is here.) The captions are his, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
Hi Jerry. As the tank is draining, please consider a cultural/historical tour of Scotland.
Edinburgh Castle, which was besieged 23 times, captured by English invaders more than once and retaken by the Scots. It’s hard to comprehend how such a place could be conquered without treachery or starving the defenders. This photo was taken during the firing of the One o’clock Gun, which has happened daily since 1861. The shot fired by the original 18-pound gun would be heard for miles, allowing sailors to adjust and reset their chronometers. The One o’clock Gun was an alternative to the Calton Hill Royal Observatory’s time ball, which was dropped at 13:00 h daily but often could not be seen by the sailors because of the fog. But why 13:00 h? Astronomers were usually busy with observations at noon, so the following hour was a convenient option.
A view of Edinburgh with the port area of Leith in the background. Leith was Darwin’s playground. He came to Edinburgh at the age of 16 with his elder brother Erasmus to study medicine, but young Charles hated it. Instead of dedicating himself to his studies, he spent most of his time collecting specimens along the shores of the river Forth. In her monumental 2-volume biography (Charles Darwin: Voyaging,, and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place), Janet Browne discussed how important Leith was for Darwin’s scientific maturity.
Statue of philosopher, historian, economist and Edinburgh’s native David Hume on the Royal Mile. In a development that would amuse, frustrate or perhaps enrage Hume, rubbing the big toe of his right foot is considered good juju: the act supposedly transfers wisdom and insights to the faithful (indeed, toe-rubbers could use a dose of wisdom). But neither Hume’s magic powers nor his position as one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment cut the mustard with the Latter-day Puritans (aka Church of Woke) who came to dominate Scotland’s political and cultural scenes. They demand the statue’s removal because Hume’s views on race are not quite up to scratch with today’s standards. The craven administrators of the University of Edinburgh already caved in: they renamed Hume Tower “40 George Square”.
A barometer mounted on a 1790 tower in Stonehaven (near Aberdeen). The barometer, dated 1852, was of immense benefit to local fishermen. Barometers were enthusiastically promoted by Captain Robert FitzRoy, skipper of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage, and a pioneer of meteorology. Fitzroy is one the least celebrated great British scientists, and a lot of drivel has been written about him. He was a troubled soul (he killed himself, just like the previous captain of the Beagle), but Darwin may not have completed his voyage under a less skillful commander. John and Mary Gribbin co-wrote an authoritative biography of this great man. This Thing of Darkness, by the late Harry Thompson, is a captivating and historically accurate fictional narrative of Fitzroy’s life.
The River Tay and Birnam Wood of Macbeth fame: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him.” General Macbeth understood this prophecy to mean that he would not be overthrown unless the Birnam trees moved on their own to his castle in Dunsinane. So understandably, he felt smug about it. But Macbeth was caught with his pants down when his castle was attacked by an army camouflaged with tree branches cut from Birnam Wood. Shakespeare may have never been to Scotland, so today Macbeth would bring the Bard the charge of cultural appropriation.
Caber tossing during the Highland Games held at Dunkeld, near the village of Birnam. ‘Caber’ is a tapered pole about 6-m long and weighing up to 68 kg. The athlete’s objective is to toss the caber head over heels, so that it falls on a straight line from him.Highland games are held all over Scotland during spring and summer, and they involve stone-throwing, straw-tossing, bagpipe playing, dancing, and other Braveheart activities. Canadians have a huge presence.’
JAC: I put in a video of a caber-tossing contest so you can see how it looks:
Opening ceremonies of the Dunkeld Highland Games.
Scurdie Ness Lighthouse, located at the treacherous mouth of the River South Esk, near Montrose.The lighthouse was built by brothers David and Thomas Stevenson, who designed over 30 lighthouses around Scotland, including the spectacular Bell Rock lighthouse (worth checking it out). Their nephew, Robert Louis Stevenson, supposedly was inspired by his uncles’ lighthouses to write Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
A vitral in Perth depicting Scots (kitted in red-on-yellow Rampant Lion vest and banner) and Englishmen (rallying around the yellow-on-red Three Lions banner) engaged in the long-standing tradition of mutual slaughtering. These sporting events came to an end with The Acts of Union of 1706, which created one of the world’s most enduring and successful political associations (Ireland came into the fold in 1801). The Union Jack echoes the unification by combining the English St George’s Cross, the Scottish Saint Andrew’s Cross, and the Irish Saint Patrick’s Cross. Wales is not represented because it was legally part of England since its annexation in 1282.
Good morning on the last day of a bad year: Friday, December 31, 2021: National Vinegar Day. Why is the last day of the year Vinegar Day? Well, I suppose the whole year left a sour taste in our mouths.
Google has an animated Doodle for New Year’s Eve; click on it to see where it goes:
News of the Day:
* Covid-19 is headlining all the news these days, so you probably know that today’s U.S. daily total of new virus cases, averaged over a week, is the highest yet: 265,427 cases a day on average, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s a million new cases every 4 days or so. However, hospitalizations are not rising nearly as fast:
The seven-day average of hospitalizations, though increasing, is below both the pandemic peak of 137,510 on Jan. 10, 2021, and the smaller peak of 102,967 on Sept. 4, 2021, during the Delta surge.
This is probably because a substantial number of infections are breakthrough infections, and because omicron seems increasingly less dangerous than the previously-prevalent Delta variant. The latter view is supported by South Africa just reporting that it’s passed its four surge of the virus, but with very few deaths.
“The speed with which the Omicron-driven fourth wave rose, peaked and then declined has been staggering,” said Fareed Abdullah of the South African Medical Research Council. “Peak in four weeks and precipitous decline in another two. This Omicron wave is over in the city of Tshwane. It was a flash flood more than a wave.” The rise in deaths over the period was small, and in the last week, officials said, “marginal.”
Some scientists were quick to forecast the same pattern elsewhere.
“We’ll be in for a tough January, as cases will keep going up and peak, and then fall fast,” said Ali Mokdad, a University of Washington epidemiologist who is a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist. While cases will still overwhelm hospitals, he said, he expects that the proportion of hospitalized cases will be lower than in earlier waves.
*This was on the NBC Evening News last night, and now is in the Guardian. At a Florida zoo, cops had to kill a tiger that had grabbed a man’s arm that, against all rules, he stuck into the tiger enclosure after hours. What a moron! And it was a rare subspecies of tiger, too:
Authorities in the US have shot and killed a critically endangered tiger after it bit the arm of a man who entered an unauthorized area of the tiger’s enclosure in a Florida zoo.
The man, who is in his 20s and worked for an external cleaning service at the Naples zoo in Florida, suffered serious injuries after an eight-year old Malayan tiger named Eko bit him, authorities said on Wednesday.
“Preliminary information indicates that the man was either petting or feeding the animal, both of which are unauthorized and dangerous activities,” the Collier county sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post.
It added that the third-party cleaning service which the man worked for is only responsible for cleaning restrooms and the gift shop, not the animal enclosures.
“Initial reports indicate that the tiger grabbed the man’s arm and pulled it into the enclosure after the man traversed an initial fence barrier and put his arm through the fencing of the tiger enclosure,” the statement said.
The animal, named Eko, was a Malayan tiger, a critically endangered subspecies of Panthera tigris that is native to the Malaysian peninsula. Only 80-120 mature individuals are estimated to survive in the wild. When I think about the cops killing this animal because it had hold of the man’s arm, I wonder if it was necessary to kill the animal to make it let go. Would a shot fired in the air scare it away? Or a shot in the leg? Is death always to be the fate of such animals when weighed against the loss of part of arm? I hope the man is arrested and fined (or his company fined) a substantial amount of money.
This seems unconstitutional to me, and Ken’s link says that the parents are targeting LGBTQ+ books. To give any parent the right to get a book heaved out of the library is a violation of the First Amendment, it seems to me. And, in a short time, most of the books will be removed, because, you know, every book will offend at least one parent.
*Re yesterday’s woeful op-ed in Scientific American calling E. O. Wilson (and others, notably Gregor Mendel) “racists”, the editors of the magazine should be rethinking that article after seeing these tweets:
The Editor of Scientific American thinks the hit piece on Wilson is “insightful”. Does she even know what “insight” means? Does she perhaps thinks it’s racist to talk about slavery in ants? Or to mention that some ants are black? The article makes no more sense than this.
*I urged Jean, one of the members of Team Duck, visit the “Make Way for Ducklings” monument on the Boston Common; she did and look what she found: ducks and ducklings in winter wear! Yarn-bombed! (Photos by Jean):
Here’s Owen. He was a good paleontologist (and coined the word “Dinosauria”), but he never signed on to Darwin’s theory of evolution. He looks mean, too:
1857 – Queen Victoria chooses Ottawa, then a small logging town, as the capital of the Province of Canada.
Here’s a video of Edison talking about his light bulb. I had no idea he’d been filmed—with sound!
1907 – The first New Year’s Eve celebration is held in Times Square (then known as Longacre Square) in Manhattan.
1955 – General Motors becomes the first U.S. corporation to make over US$1 billion in a year.
1992 – Czechoslovakia is peacefully dissolved in what is dubbed by media as the Velvet Divorce, resulting in the creation of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
1999 – The first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, resigns from office, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the acting President and successor.
Here’s roughly where the canal runs (I haven’t figure out how to draw wiggly lines on a jpg), shown on a satellite image
2000 – The last day of the 20th Century and 2nd Millennium.
Remember when we all worried that our computers would go bonkers because they couldn’t handle the date?
2019 – The World Health Organization is informed of cases of pneumonia with an unknown cause, detected in Wuhan. This later turned out to be COVID-19, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020 – The World Health Organization’s issues its first emergency use validation for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Notables born on this day include:
1491 – Jacques Cartier, French navigator and explorer (d. 1557)
1869 – Henri Matisse, French painter and sculptor (d. 1954)
Matisse loved kitties and often painted them. Here he is with a moggy and his “Girl on Red Couch With Cat” (1938):
1908 – Simon Wiesenthal, Ukrainian-Austrian Nazi hunter and author (d. 2005)
1917 – Wilfrid Noyce, English mountaineer and author (d. 1962)
1930 – Odetta, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actress (d. 2008)
Here’s a scene from one of my favorite movies, “The Remains of the Day,” in which Hopkins, a butler, discusse with the housekeeper (Emma Thompson) s a “racy book” that she found in his room. They fancy each other, but nothing ever happens. That, in fact, is one of the points of the movie. Two great actors!
Sarah Miles became famous from the 1970 movie, “Ryan’s Daughter”, for which she was nominated for an Oscar (she didn’t win). Here she is being shamed by the townspeople after it was revealed that she’d had an affair with a soldier.
1943 – John Denver, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (d. 1997)
1943 – Ben Kingsley, English actor
1948 – Donna Summer, American singer-songwriter (d. 2012)
1977 – Donald Trump Jr., American businessman and son of U.S. President Donald Trump
Those whose eyes closed forever on December 31 include:
1384 – John Wycliffe, English philosopher, theologian, and translator (b. 1331)
1691 – Robert Boyle, Anglo-Irish chemist and physicist (b. 1627)
1972 – Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rican-American baseball player and Marine (b. 1934)
Here’s Clemente’s home run in the seventh game of the 1971 World Series, in which his Pirates won 2-0 over the Orioles. He was a very great player, and a generous one: he died at only 36 when a plane he’d chartered to bring relief supplies to earthquake stricken Nicaragua crashed. I saw this homer live on television.
1985 – Ricky Nelson, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (b. 1940)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, soon it will be New Year’s Eve, and the cats get scared by the firecrackers and fireworks. Hili seeks consolation in Andrzej’s lap:
Hili: Will there be fireworks today?
A: Unfortunately, yes.
Hili: So I will wait them out here.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy dziś będą fajerwerki?
Ja: Niestety, tak.
Hili: To ja je tu przeczekam.
And Here’s is a picture of baby Kulka taken by Paulina but with Andrzej’s text. Kulka’s worried too!
“Two days ago Paulina documented the fact that there was snow. Today it’s no longer there and Kulka wishes for herself and others not too much noise.”
In Polish: “Paulina dwa dni temu udokumentowała fakt, że śnieg był. Dziś go juś nie ma, a Kulka życzy sobie i innym, żeby nie było za dużo huku.”
Elzbieta sent photos of Leon and Mitek with a caption:
Caption: The cats send their regards. (In Polish: Koty pozdrawiaja.)
LEON!MIETEK
From Bruce, a cat barista:
From Karl:
From Doc Bill. I love this contest!
And I couldn’t resist linking to this video from FB. Click on the link in the last sentence, and put the sound up!
From Simon: Videos of an amazing case of mimicry and how it works:
In the Zagros mountains of Iran, perfectly blended into the gypsum and limestone rocks is a snakes entire body
but the tip of its tail which resembles a spider, luring insectivorous birds within a striking range. This is the spider-tailed horned viper 1/ pic.twitter.com/VKZKLtckZI
From Ginger K.: Do look at the linked article, too.
Scientists have discovered at least 16 species of ultra-black fish, each equipped with specialised skin that allows them to evade detection while hunting or hiding in the dark. Their skin can absorb 99.95% of all photons [read more: https://t.co/AE04tQD88k] pic.twitter.com/aG1jSBPvcm
Bruce Lyon brought this short video to my attention. How does a nocturnal mammal get about with her young?
The video asks why they do this? Well, it’s clear that it keeps the family together, and here’s one explanation:
Shrews are highly territorial animals and only socialise with one another in the mating season. Females have three or four litters of 5-7 young between May and September. Females are promiscuous and a litter may have two or three different fathers. Young shrews are occasionally observed following their mother in a ‘caravan’. Each shrew grasps the base of the tail of the preceding shrew so that the mother runs along with a line of young trailing behind. This behaviour is often associated with disturbance of the nest and may also be used to encourage the young to explore their environment.
How much exploring can you do when your nose is up your sister’s butt? Can you think of any other reasons?
Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist.
It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” I usually don’t question someone because of their credentials, but this piece is so stupid, so arrantly ignorant of Wilson’s work, that I can attribute its content only to a combination of ignorance (perhaps deliberate) or a woke desire to take down someone as a racist who wasn’t a racist. Or both.
In fact, the piece below could have been written by any social-justice ideologue, for its real aim is more than smearing Wilson; it;s also to change the nature of science. Read on.
Once again, the magazine evinces a ridiculous wokeness; how could its editor, Laura Helmuth, allow this to be published? I recommend your reading it; it’s short and also free (click on the screenshot):
I could rant forever about the ignorance of this woman, but will try to refrain. Note the links above that say “discrimination” and “racism”. But nowhere in the article does she give one iota of evidence that Wilson was a racist. Yes, he was a biological determinist—and not a pure biological determinist, for he wrote books about the influence of culture and genetics—but I never heard him say or write anything to indicate that he was biased against members of other groups. (The author, Monica R. McLemore, is black.) Not all people who claim that genes have a role in human behavior are racists, you know. And if you claim that genes don’t have any influence in modern behavior, which was Wilson’s point in writing the last chapter of Sociobiology, then you’re ignorant and wrong. .
If Wilson was a racist, shouldn’t McLemore should have adduced evidence for that? I see none. I see stuff that she considers to be evidence, but it’s not at all convincing.
Here’s her sole evidence that Wilson was “problematic” and that he was a racist:
His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms. Finding out that Wilson thought this way was a huge disappointment, because I had enjoyed his novel Anthill, which was published much later and written for the public.
I suggest you read the last chapter of Sociobiology: it merely speculates about how human evolution could have influenced many modern human behaviors and traits, including sociality, altruism, aesthetics, and morality. There’s nothing I could find in that chapter suggesting that Wilson is a racist, or that he thinks that differences between races that have promoted racism are determined by genes. The word “race,” in fact, doesn’t even appear in the index.
Yes, Wilson was a biological determinist to some degree about animal and human behavior, but we all should be! After all, why should humans be the sole species whose behavior isn’t affected by their evolution? But to repeat myself: thinking that differences between people or even groups could have a genetic component is not the same thing as racism, which is based on hierarchies and bigotry. Now, Wilson might have been accused of racism by people like my own Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin (I don’t know about that, though), but they never adduced evidence for that. Nor does McLemore. For reasons best known to herself, she’s just terribly eager to brand a famous scientist as a bigot.
More “evidence”:
Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.
We’ve talked about most of these people before, and yes, they had ideas that today would be considered racist, but Darwin was also an abolitionist. And MENDEL, for crying out loud? Find me one piece of Mendel’s writings that suggest that the good friar was a racist! Were green peas considered superior to yellow peas? Here we have McLemore simply making stuff up: throwing Mendel’s discoveries of inheritance into the pot with the other accused “racists.” This is dreadful scholarship, almost humorous in its ignorant assertions.
But wait! There’s more!
Even modern geneticists and genome scientists struggle with inherent racism in the way they gather and analyze data. In his memoir A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, geneticist J. Craig Venter writes, “The complex provenance of ideas means their origin is often open to interpretation.”
I will pass on, as that sentence has nothing to do with racism and proves nothing.
One more bit of “evidence” that Wilson and his “problematic” peers were racist:
First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against. The fact that we don’t adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, particularly in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical underpinnings of a superior subject and an inferior one. Commenting on COVID and vaccine acceptance in an interview with PBS NewsHour, recently retired director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins pointed out, “You know, maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior.”
What this has to do with Wilson, much less Galton, Darwin, Pearson, and Mendel, eludes me. In fact, the paragraph makes almost no sense to me. McLemore, it seems, is a Pecksniff for Racism, trying to find it in everything that exists, including the famous normal distribution itself.
On Twitter, one reader asked McLemore why she didn’t actually quote any of Wilson’s words to show his racism, and she gives the answer of a person who didn’t do her homework, turning a necessity (her laziness or ideological zeal) into a virtue:
I purposively didn’t quote his work so you could read it for yourself. I talked about citational practices and why they matter. My method matched my critique. His work should speak for itself and others can interpret it, thanks for supporting my point. https://t.co/vcIzj6yAfA
McLemore goes on, implying again and again that various factors imply Wilson was racist, but it’s all nonsense:
Second, the application of the scientific method matters: what works for ants and other nonhuman species is not always relevant for health and/or human outcomes.
Yes—but so what?
Lastly, examining nurture versus nature without any attention to externalities, such as opportunities and potential (financial structures, religiosity, community resources and other societal structures), that deeply influence human existence and experiences is both a crude and cruel lens. This dispassionate query will lead to individualistic notions of the value and meaning of human lives while, as a society, our collective fates are inextricably linked.
Externalities, Dr. McLemore, are environments, or “nurture”! Again, we get a paragraph that basically says nothing.
McLemore then gives three ways to help us evaluate “problematic” scientists, including turning the enterprise into a Mandela initiative:
First, truth and reconciliation are necessary in the scientific record, including attention to citational practices when using or reporting on problematic work.
. . . Second, diversifying the scientific workforce is crucial not only to asking new types of research questions and unlocking new discoveries but also to conducting better science. Other scholars have pointed out that feminist standpoint theory is helpful in understanding white empiricism and who is eligible to be a worthy observer of the human condition and our world. We can apply the same approach to scientific research.
. . . Finally, we need new methods. One of the many gifts of the Human Genome Project was the creativity it spawned beyond revealing the secrets of the genome, such as new rules about public availability and use of data.
I really can’t go on, except to add two things. First, McLemore herself is being unscientific in accusing “problematic” Ed Wilson of racism without mentioning one bit of evidence. And MENDEL??? There is no scholarship involved in this piece, and, in the end defaming Wilson seems like merely an excuse for McLemore to vent her ill-considered antiracist views of science on the readers of Scientific American.
Finally, the really problematic people today are not Ed Wilson; they are people like McLemore herself, who simply ignores evidence, makes misleading statements about scientists, and accuses science of being structurally racist in a way for which only she knows the cure. It is people like her who are not only defacing and distorting history, but trying to change the face of science from being a set of tools to investigate nature into a set of ideological practices to achieve Social Justice.
I haven’t yet investigated the Twittersphere, but reader Paul directed me to this thread, which contains many more takes on this article. Almost none of them are good. Here are just a few. Khan, author of the first two tweets, is a geneticist.
Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson https://t.co/uyZGm8k0RI WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS THIS??????? wilson invented behavior genetics in the 70s? gregor mendel was a racist? what the fuck is "white empiricism"?
That @sciam published this nonsense not only suggests institutional capture but is embarrassing to me. We run @AreoMagazine on $3k a month, all in. And yet we manage to vet & copyedit pieces. I'm betting Scientific American has a larger budget. 😉https://t.co/KkYl7KmRLd
Scientific American smears a deceased Harvard professor who found that genetics is relevant for understanding human societies. This is forbidden by the anti-scientific and anti-american ideology of the post-modern left. https://t.co/MFf23eZ0z9
If you still subscribe to Scientific American, you’d better have a damn good reason why. It’s too late to urge editor Laura Helmuth to change the tone of the magazine, for it’s clearly the tone she wants: less science, more wokeness.
