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.
As E. O. Wilson died yesterday, I thought today would be an appropriate day to post photos of ants, his favorite research subject. Fortunately, reader Tony Eales from Queensland sent a batch of ant photos recently (there are two ant-mimicking spiders as well), and here they are. The captions and ID’s are Tony’s, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:
I don’t know about other places in the world, but the leaf litter in Australia is the kingdom of ants. No matter where I go there are probably two or more Polyrhachis species, Iridomyrmex and Crematogaster everywhere you look along with tiny Pheidole sp. and even smaller species, orders of magnitude tinier than the large Polyrharchis.
It takes a little courage to lie down among all these ants crawling everywhere but none of the species above have ever caused me more than a mild inconvenience (as long as you aren’t near an Iridomyrmex purpureus nest. They don’t have a sting but the ants are large, their colonies are huge and they swarm aggressively)
However, you do need to watch out for Bull Ants.
In the course of testing the pain induced by hymenopteran stings for his famous Sting Pain Index, Justin Schmidt tried a few species ofMyrmecia AKA Bull Ants. He gave the ratings as follows
Myrmecia simillma – 1.5 – Intense, ripping, and sharp. The dog’s tooth found its mark.
Myrmecia gulosa – 1.5 – A sneaky, unassuming ache. Like a brightly colored LEGO, charming till it’s lodged in the arch of your foot in the dark.
Myrmecia rufinodis – 1.5 – Shockingly sharp. A scalpel just lanced your palm.
Myrmecia pilosula – 2 – The oven mitt had a hole in it when you pulled the cookies out of the oven. (of note, M. pilosula is the only ant species recorded to have killed humans)
All of these species are southeastern species and do not occur where I am. However, I have no desire to test the species living in my state of Queensland and see how they rate.
Happily, Myrmecia are never the most common species where I am, and in most open forest environments, they are quite rare.
I did come across a newly mated queen Myrmecia queenslandicaexcavating its first nesting chamber:
These ants are prized by ant keepers but I left her to her task. The only queens I collect are ones that have found themselves in a poor environment like indoors.
It can often be difficult to tell if a given individual is a queen. With Myrmecia the best way to tell is to look for wing scars on the back.
While these large Myrmecia are rare, the species I am most cautious about are ridiculously common. Rhytidoponera metallica are, in the area I live, the most widespread and common species. They are in every well curated lawn and every forest floor, every area of disturbed bare earth and every remote national park. The only place I don’t see them is coastal dunes and closed rainforest.
Schmidt also tested these ants
Rhytidoponera metallica – 2 – Deceptively painful. Like biting into a green bell pepper to find it is a habanero chili.
They aren’t particularly aggressive but being small and ubiquitous it is easy get one trapped between your toes or in your clothes or inadvertently sit on a nest.
They are very pretty ants up close, though:
There are several species of velvet ant (wingless female wasps in the family Mutilidae) that appear to be mimicking R. metallica. Since mutilids have their own fearsome reputation for stinging, I presume this is a case of Müllerian mimicry.
Well, for many it’s back to work today on December 27, 2021, the third day of Coynezaa (on this day my true love gave to me three matzo balls). It’s National Fruitcake Day, honoring the single fruitcake that is continually regifted around the West.
Wine of the Day: This 2018 cava (the Spanish equivalent of Champagne, and made the same way) is produced by the family of my ex-postdoc (now a professor), and that’s how I was introduced to the wine. I had it with Christmas dinner: roast Chicken, rice, and yams.
If you’re tired of paying $40 and up for French champagne, consider a good Spanish cava like this one. I believe I paid just a tad more than $20 for it, and it was a terrific bargain. It’s very dry, a pigeon-eye red color, with with lots of bubbles and toasty as well as tasty, I swore I could taste some red fruit in there, though it may have been a color-inspired illusion. Llopart is a reliable name in cava, and produces several different types. I believe I’ve tried them all over the years, including the top of the line Ex Vite that you can’t get in the U.S. If you see this rosé for around $20, snap up a couple bottles and put them in the fridge.
If you want a cheap(ish) but excellent bubbly, and can’t get Llopart, try Roederer Estate Brut from California, which runs abut $25.
*I’ve lost track of how many Covid-19 “surges” we’ve had since I first heard about the virus, but, if you’re in the U.S., you’ll know we’re in the midst of another one (see below). Anthony Fauci says “things will be much better in January,” but how does he know?
*Over at the Washington Post, Dave Barry reviews the year of 2021, first overall and then month by month—all in inimitable Barry style:
. . The spotlight now shifts to incoming president Joe Biden, who takes the oath of office in front of a festive throng of 25,000 National Guard troops. The national healing begins quickly as Americans, exhausted from years of division and strife, join together in exchanging memes of Bernie Sanders attending the inauguration wearing distinctive mittens and the facial expression of a man having his prostate examined by a hostile sea urchin.
. . . On the wokeness front, Dr. Seuss joins the lengthening list of individuals who are deemed to be Problematic, which also includes George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Pepe LePew and Mr. Potato Head. Also people are starting to take a hard look at the Very Hungry Caterpillar, and if you have to ask why YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
*And once again, the Sunday NYT features a sermonette by Tish Harrison Warren, the Anglican priest whom the Paper of Record has chosen to hector us about Jesus. In yesterday’s column, “How Christmas Changed Everything“, Rev. Warren says that all of us in the West—even the Jews—are saturated in Christian values:
But if you live in the West, the claims of Christmas have profoundly shaped your life and view of the world. You don’t have to believe in Jesus or even think about him for that to be true. The West is “so saturated in Christian assumptions that it is almost impossible to remove ourselves from them,” said Tom Holland, a British historian and author of “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.” He continued, “We tend to take for granted that the lowest of the lowest do have dignity.”
These same radical ideas reverberate down through the centuries. They eventually motivated the invention of hospitals, mass education, and widespread literacy. They inspired those whoopposed slavery and influenced the contemporary idea of universal human rights. Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, said, “The ultimate ground of all our freedom is the Christian doctrine of the absolute inviolability of the human person.” In different ways over time, the belief in the dignity of even the weakest in society flowed from people meditating on this same shocking story that the church tells at Christmastime today.
But then she says this:
The development of the idea of universal dignity could be understood as a result of an invisible hand guiding societies toward “progress” or even as a series of random accidents. A.C. Grayling, a British philosopher, argues that seeds of this concept can be found in the thoughts of Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius. Scholars like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Israel trace the origin of human rights to the enlightenment era.
But at the end she still touts God/Jesus as the Fount of Morality. When will she stop this blathering, all founded on claims that aren’t true? When will the NYT say, “Okay, Tish—enough.”
*I did not know this, but in September the Center for Inquiry announced that the 2021 Richard Dawkins Award has been given to Tim Minchin. However, the video of the presentation, which includes a 90-minute conversation between Richard and Minchin (moderated by David Cowan) was just posted a week ago. I’ve put the video with the award and conversation below. From CFI:
In the 350-year-old Sheldonian Theatre, designed by the famed British architect Christopher Wren, musician, composer, comedian, actor and writer, Tim Minchin, received the 2021 Richard Dawkins Award before a sold-out crowd on October 10th, 2021.
Richard Dawkins gave a soaring and touchingly personal tribute to the awardee, calling him “a staunch upholder of rationalism, secularism, and scientific skepticism.”
In introducing the event, Robyn Blumner, CFI’s CEO, said that Tim is this year’s awardee because “Number one, the award criteria fits him to a ‘T,’ and number two, because he’s so freakin’ awesome.”
David Cowan, a CFI board member and Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur, masterfully moderated a lively 90-minute conversation between Richard and Tim, after sharing that he is a major fanboy of Tim’s and doing an on-stage selfie with him.
*I miss the reclusive Michiko Kakutani, the chief book critic of the New York Times who departed in 2017. Her critiques were always incisive, even when I disagreed with them.I don’t know why she left, but she’s back with a literary retrospective and memoriam that is excellent: “Didion’s prophetic eye on America.” Of all the obits I’ve read about Joan Didion, who died this week, this is by far the best at pinpointing the power of her prose.
Didion’s utterly distinctive writing style — distinguished by its spareness, its surgical precision, its almost staccato yet incantatory rhythms — was also a tool for containing her often harrowing subject matter, be it her own experiences of loss and grief, reportorial assignments involving murder or war, or the melodramatic situations that the heroines in her novels so often faced. She had an eye for the prophetic detail and telling gesture, an ear for the line of overheard dialogue that might reveal all.
Didion prized control — getting the details correct in a story, making sure a recipe turned out exactly right — because she often felt it was elusive in her life as someone who suffered from migraines and Parkinson’s and morning dread. “You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle,” she wrote. She described herself as “a sleepwalker,” “alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot,” the coyotes by the interstate, the snakes in the playpen.
The Beagle was a small ship: 90 feet from stem to stern and 25 feet across. Here’s a cross-section. I’ve circled the Captain’s cabin (Darwin, contrary to popular belief, was not the ship’s naturalist, but was hired to keep Captain Robert Fitzroy (a depressive) company. Darwin would dine with Fitzroy in FitzRoy’s cabin (circled at right), but then repair to his room at upper left, which had his cot. Darwin was seasick when afloat, and spent as much time as he could ashore.
1845 – Ether anesthetic is used for childbirth for the first time by Dr. Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia.
1927 – Kern and Hammerstein’s musical play Show Boat, considered to be the first true American musical play, opens at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Broadway.
Here’s my favorite song from the 1936 movie, “Old Man River,” sung by the inimitable Paul Robson. Imagine: two Jews wrote a song about the travails of a black stevedore. (There was another movie version, in 1951, with Ava Gardner.) Note that he uses the word “darkies” for blacks—a word expunged in later versions.
Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV, surely painted from life:
1834 – Charles Lamb, English essayist and poet (b. 1775)
1923 – Gustave Eiffel, French architect and engineer, co-designed the Eiffel Tower (b. 1832)
1938 – Calvin Bridges, American geneticist and academic (b. 1889)
Bridges, a student of academic great grandfather T. H. Morgan, was himself a crack Drosophila geneticist as well as a ladies’ man, for he was very handsome:
1938 – Osip Mandelstam, Polish-Russian poet and critic (b. 1891)
1950 – Max Beckmann, German-American painter and sculptor (b. 1884)
I was always sweet on Bhutto, but she was assassinated, which was practically inevitable. She was known to her friends as “Pinky” because she was an unusually pink baby.
2015 – Meadowlark Lemon, American basketball player and minister (b. 1932)
2016 – Carrie Fisher, American actress, screenwriter, author, producer, and speaker (b. 1956)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are plotting how to get food.
Szaron: We have to discuss.
Hili: There is nothing to discuss. We have to meow until they come and give us what we want.
Szaron: Musimy się naradzić.
Hili: Nie ma nad czym debatować, trzeba tak długo miauczeć, aż przyjdą i dadzą nam to, co chcemy.
From Pyers, the biggest spoiler of all time (yes, I know that it was intended to foreshadow the Crucifixion):
The painting is Adoration of the Magi (center panel of St. Columba Altarpiece, painted in 1455 by Rogier van der Weyden:
From Ricky Gervais, touting his third season of his series After Life. I really like the show, though some are less keen on it. And. . . it has Diane Morgan!
#AfterLife is officially the most watched British comedy of the decade with a viewership of nearly 100 million. Season 3 launches Jan 14. pic.twitter.com/ctL729lgEl
On Christmas Day, in millions of homes all over Japan, people are eating KFC. Marketing has them convinced that this is an American custom. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/JmPdSFTIFZ
— TimTheEnchanter 🏳️🌈🏴☠️⚛️💉💉💉✊🏼 (@TimTheGodmocker) December 25, 2021
Speaking of fast food, Bette Midler decries the perfidies of capitalism:
Matthew sent me a tweet this morning saying that Edward O. Wilson, known to all of us as “Ed”, died yesterday at at 92. He died at the same age as my mentor—Ed’s nemesis Dick Lewontin—as both were born in 1929. There’s a short obituary by Carl Zimmer that you can read at the NYT link below (click on screenshot); there will be a longer one for sure as Carl fleshes it out.
As usual, I’ll leave the details of his career and accomplishments to the formal obituaries and to Wikipedia (look at his list of books!), except to say that Ed was a polymath who was a Harvard professor for 46 years before retiring. And he was working tirelessly up to his death, just like his colleague Ernst Mayr (who died at 100).
Ed’s lab occupied the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) Laboratories at Harvard, while Lewontin’s lab, where I worked, was one floor below. But they might as well have been light years apart, for Lewontin intensely disliked Ed, and the feeling was mutual. (Ed had less rancor, he was more or less blindsided when Lewontin and Steve Gould—who worked in the adjacent main MCZ—began attacking him as a reactionary biological determinist after Ed published his landmark book, Sociobiology.)In fact, Ed originally helped recruit Dick to Harvard from the University of Chicago; but that didn’t make Lewontin temper his reaction when the Great Sociobiology Wars began.
But I did not share Dick’s dislike of Ed. If you knew Ed as a person—and I knew him as an acquaintance—you simply could not dislike him. (Dick and Steve’s animus was based purely on politics.). Ed was mild-mannered, gentle, and helpful: I’ve written before about how he got me into Harvard as a graduate student in a single day, an act of generosity I’ll never forget. I also taught two semesters of Bio 1 (introductory biology) under Ed, and was great friends with some of the people in his lab. The result was that I spent a fair amount of time on the fourth floor, but never in my six years at Harvard did I see Ed on the third floor—our floor.
Only one time I know of was he even near Lewontin. That’s when I was waiting with Dick for the elevator to the third floor, and Ed strode into the building and joined us in the elevator. The tension immediately became thick and palpable. It was a silent and uncomfortable ride up three floors; not a word was exchanged between the two Harvard professors, not even “hello”.
In his later years, Ed became wedded to the idea of group selection, and wrote several books and papers touting it as an explanation for eusociality in insects like ants and bees (communal living with a queen and sterile workers), as well as for many traits in humans. This was unfortunate, as this view was almost surely wrong, but Ed clung to it tenaciously. It was, I think, his only big misstep in a sterling career. Sadly, I had to review one of his books on group selection and panned it.
When I interviewed Dick a few years ago about his own career, he had nothing nice to say about Wilson; in fact, that was the one time he made me turn the tape off, and you can imagine what he said during the hiatus, though I’m not at liberty to divulge it. But Dick also mourned the loss of the great evolutionary biologists who reigned when he was a student: people like Ernst Mayr, Al Roemer, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Dick said, “There are no great ones left. Where are the great ones?”
He was wrong. Ed was one of the great ones. Evolutionary biology, ant biology, and conservation biology will be poorer for his absence. And he was a terrific guy—rare for someone who was so famous. Just ask people who knew him.
Here are two photos I took of Ed at a lunch at Naomi Pierce’s and Andrew Berry’s house in Cambridge on October 5, 2007. This was during was a symposium at Harvard, though I don’t remember what it was about.
Several readers sent me a link to this post by Patrick Casey on the Heterodox Academy blogs because I’m mentioned in it (and in good company too!). It’s an example of what historians of religion (who are often religious) write about all the time. Casey, like other accommodationists, most notably Ronald Numbers, maintains that:
1.) Religion and science are not continually at war with one another (a view called the “conflict hypothesis”), and
2.) The Galileo affair was not an example of the conflict hypothesis. A “nuanced” and complete analysis shows, says Casey, that other factors were involved, including history and philosophy. This stance is often used to tout accommodationism: the view that science and religion are actually compatible. And it’s often held by people who want to make nice to religion.
I didn’t know of the author, Patrick J. Casey, but he is an assistant professor of philosophy at Holy Family University, a private Roman Catholic University in Philadelphia. I can’t find him in the faculty directory, but I won’t worry about that; and I have no idea whether, even though he teaches at a religious school, he’s religious. But I won’t psychologize his motivations, I’ll just mention his arguments.
Now I don’t embrace the “simplistic” conflict hypothesis, characterized as arguing that science is continuously at war with religion(see below). Some people like Andrew Dickson and William Draper at the turn of the 20th century did pretty much embrace the “conflict hypothesis,” and I discuss this in Chapter 1 of Faith Versus Fact (p. 5):
The truth lies between Draper and White on one hand and their critics on the other. While it’s undeniable that religion was important in opposing some scientific advances like the theory of evolution and the use of anesthesia, others, like smallpox vaccination, were both opposed and promoted on biblical grounds. On the other hand, it’s a self-serving distortion to say that religion was not an important issue in the persecutions of Galileo and John Scopes. Nevertheless, since not all religions are opposed to science, and much science is accepted by believers, the view that science and faith are perpetually locked in battle is untrue. If that’s how one sees the “conflict thesis,” then that hypothesis is wrong.
But my view is not that religion and science have always been implacable enemies, with the former always hindering the latter. Instead, I see them as making overlapping claims, each arguing that they can identify truths about the universe. As I’ll show in the next chapter, the incompatibility rests on differences in the methodology and philosophy used in determining those truths, and in the outcomes of their searches. In their eagerness to debunk the claims of Draper and White, their critics missed the underlying theme of both books: the failure of religion to find truth about anything—be it gods themselves or more worldly matters like the causes of disease.
My own view, which I’ll summarize in one sentence (read Faith Versus Fact if you want the whole megillah) is this: science and religion both claim that they involve “ways of knowing about the universe”, but while the methods of science really do enable us to understand the universe, the “ways of knowing” of religion (faith, authority, scripture, revelation, etc.) are not reliable guides to truth. If they were, all religions would converge on the same truth claims, which is palpably untrue.
Note that I do not claim that religion is the same thing as science, for it includes things like morality and worship and divinity. The Bible is not a “textbook of science.” But all religions do make firm claims about what’s true, and these truth claims, insofar as they’re not based on actual evidence, contravene the methods of science. That’s why science converges on what we think is real (and can use to make correct predictions), while religions haven’t converged one iota. (Compare the truth claims of Hinduism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Scientology, cargo cults, and so on.) Nor do I claim that religion has always been opposed to science, is always in conflict with science, that religionists can’t accept modern science, or all all scientists are or must be atheists.
So when Casey says that I am one of the promulgators of the “conflict hypothesis”, as below, he’s just wrong. Is he familiar with my writings? I’ve put the statement in bold below because I’m chuffed to be lumped together with such thoughtful men.
But simplistic narratives like the conflict thesis aren’t innocuous — they can warp our understanding of history (for example, here and here the historians of science Stephen Snobelen and Seb Falk address the myth of the “Medieval Gap,” which is grounded in the conflict thesis, as promulgated by writers like Carl Sagan, Jerry Coyne, and A.C. Grayling).
Nor do I think that Sagan promulgated the simplistic narrative of the “conflict thesis”, and I’m not sure that Grayling ever did (he’s too smart to think that). For this is how Casey defines the “conflict thesis”:
Yet anecdotes about religion suppressing science are part of a broader cultural narrative of conflict where science and religion have been locked in a zero-sum struggle — when science advances, religion is forced to beat a hasty retreat. This view of the historical relationship between science and religion is called “the conflict thesis” (see here, here, here).
Note that all of these videos were made by believers, including the DoSER wing of the AAAS (Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion), headed by evangelical Christian Jennifer Wiseman and designed to “to facilitate communication between scientific and religious communities.”
Now, the argument by Casey is that the Galileo affair involves politics and philosophy and religion, and is not as simple as the Pope accepting a Biblically-based geocentric solar system, Galileo touting a heliocentric one, and Galileo going on trial for contradicting the Bible and then being sentenced to lifelong house arrest. Galileo was not tortured, but none of us believe that anyway; he was threatened with torture if he didn’t recant. And of course Galileo insulted the pope by putting the geocentric arguments in the mouth of a character called Simplicio, which surely pissed off the Pope.
Here’s the most important “nuance” that Casey adds to the argument
The Pope was a better scientist than Galileo, for he realized that there were arguments against Galileo’s hypothesis, and he just wanted Galileo to do good science and not assert he had “proof” of heliocentrism.
I quote Dr. Casey (my emphasis):
In addition to a reasonable desire to keep with the Church’s previous ruling, the pope had a fairly sophisticated philosophical justification for his instruction — one that foreshadows what is now called “the underdetermination thesis” in the philosophy of science. The pope argued that whatever evidence Galileo may have had for heliocentrism, it couldn’t amount to a demonstration or proof of its physical truth, since it is possible for God to bring about whatever was observed through means other than heliocentrism. At the time, an obvious example would have been Tycho Brahe’s geo-heliocentric system, which readily accounted for Galileo’s new observational evidence without needing the objectionable hypothesis of a moving Earth.
In taking this position, the pope was standing in a long tradition in natural philosophy that maintained that the job of astronomers was not to determine what the world was physically like but only to provide useful models for predicting the motions of planets. Stated charitably, the pope was instructing Galileo not to go beyond his evidence.
I love that last sentence: it’s more than charitable; it borders on dissimulation. And it’s FUNNY. And the tradition that astronomers are just supposed to make models and not find truth has long fallen by the wayside.
But Casey goes on.
Unfortunately, when Galileo published his Dialogue, he argued adamantly for the physical truth of heliocentrism, “clearly, though not explicitly” (in the words of Peter Machamer and David Marshall Miller), while sometimes making his opponents seem like idiots. To make matters worse, Galileo foolishly put the pope’s argument about the difficulty of ascertaining final scientific truth into the mouth of a character called Simplicio, which many have taken to be an insult to the pope. The pope was enraged by Galileo’s apparent deceit in defending the physical truth of heliocentrism as an established matter of fact, and Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial.
But Casey does admit that there was a conflict between Catholicism and Galileo’s arguments:
Is that not a conflict between science and religion? Galileo argued for a physical truth that the Pope didn’t want to hear, ergo he was found guilty.
Casey’s last resort is to deny that the conflict hypothesis predicts eternal enmity and war between religion and science. But that’s a straw man:
Third, and most important, even if this were a clear case of conflict, one incident wouldn’t by itself justify the grand cultural narrative of inexorable conflict between science and religion. Historians of the era have repeatedly pointed out that the Galileo affair was not representative of the norm.
But in the last 80 years or so, nobody said that this kind of conflict was the “norm”. Rather, people like Sagan and I argue that the method of finding truth in science is incompatible with the method of finding “truth” in religion, and this occasionally leads to clashes. The church doesn’t argue against the existence of electrons, or claim that benzene doesn’t have six carbon atoms, or argue against most of science in general, because most of science isn’t relevant to the Bible.
But there’s one important part that is: the story of creation. In particular, the first two chapters of Genesis, which 40% of Americans take literally—with another 33% thinking that God guided evolution. (Total percentage of those thinking God helped create life: 73%.) Only a measly 22% of Americans accept naturalistic evolution (including of humans) the way that we teach it in college. That’s about one in five.
And all modern creationism is, at bottom, rooted in religion: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, as well as other creationist faiths, including Hindusim. There is no creationist or Intelligent Design organization that is not based on religion. And I know of only a single creationist who isn’t religious—David Berlinski (and I have my suspicions about him). Is this not, then, a palpable conflict between science and religion? Of course it is! I look forward to Dr. Casey’s explanation of why the battle between creationism and evolution in American is much more nuanced than the simplistic narrative that evolution contradicts the Qur’an or the Old Testament.
Why do people like Casey feel compelled to repeat the same old narrative about Galileo? Well, they’re partly right: more than science is involved and lots of misconceptions (e.g., the Church tortured Galileo) litter the field. But I also think that this kind of accommodationism often comes from religious people who admire science, and fear that the “conflict hypothesis” will drive people out of religion since they feel they’re being forced to choose between science and religion.
That’s not the way it works, though.
If you talk to former creationists who became atheists because of science, it’s not because a scientist told them that “they had to choose.” No, you hear that they were curious about science and evolution in particular (often because the subjects were banned), and learned about it. They finally realized that evolution is true and Genesis is false, and, like Samson, this brought down the edifice of their faith. Plus they realized that there’s simply no good evidence for God—far less evidence than we have for the existence of atoms or the fact that infectious diseases are caused by microbes.
I’m sure that historians have pondered the first question at length, but I haven’t read their lucubrations. According to Wikipedia, the first definitive use of the wheel on transportation was in Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C. We don’t know how many times it was invented independently, but probably more than once (see below):
So, my first question is this: Why was the wheel not devised in the New World? The Americas had plenty of civilizations, including many Native American groups, and the Aztecs, Incas, and Maya as well as many other groups, but none of them had the wheel, with one exception (see below). Why? Further, the Diquis culture had stone spheres beginning about 300 A.D., so they certainly knew that something round could roll. But this wasn’t adapted for carts or other rolling entities. Yet the Incas are said to have used wooden rollers to roll large stones for their walls and cities. Why no wheels, then?
According to The Straight Dope (I just looked this up), there was one exception:
The wheel evidently was familiar to the ancient Mexicans, the only known instance of its having been invented independently of the Sumerian version. Unfortunately, it apparently never occurred to anyone at the time that wheels had any practical application, and their use was confined to little clay gadgets that are thought to be either toys or cult objects.
That link also gives you an explanation that Cecil Adams considers definitive, but I don’t know. See for yourself. I am guessing that Jared Diamond pondered this question in Guns, Germs, and Steel but I read it so long ago I can’t recall. Go to the link, read “the” answer to my question above, and see if you agree with Cecil.
My second question is this: How did our ancestors keep their fingernails and toenails at reasonable length?
I thought of this question while clipping my nails the other day, and thought, “Scissors and nail clippers, and even steel knives were not invented in fairly late in human history. But yet our ancestors did without them for millions of years. How did they keep their nails short?
Now you might say, “They didn’t need to: their nails wore down from hunting, gathering, and walking barefoot.” But I am not sure this is the case. How would walking barefoot wear down your toenails? And we know that, at least in modern society, if you don’t trim your fingernails and toenails, they get ungodly long (see below). Did the ancients use flint? And what did they do before they had flint implements? Or did they bite their fingernails?
Now we could surely answer this question by observing what hunter-gatherers do, if anything, to keep their nails short. But I am not going to look it up; I’d rather have readers speculate or, if they know the answer, tell me.
Below: a video showing what happens if you don’t trim your nails: here’s a man who didn’t trim the nails on one hand for 66 years. (He explains why.) He has, on that hand, the longest known fingernails in history.
Of course he had to cut his nails on his right hand so he could do stuff (and I’m betting he’s a rightie). Nobody would marry him, and you can imagine the trouble he had just living from day to day. It’s all in the video
Today is Sunday (Boxing Day), and that means that we get bird photos from biologist John Avise. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
Hummingbirds
More than 300 species of hummingbirds reside in the Americas (mostly in South and Central America), the only place in the world where these animals are native. And who doesn’t love these tiny avian jewels? Here in California we are blessed with several hummingbird species; these are the primary subject of this week’s post. This contrasts with the situation in the Eastern half of the United States, where only one hummingbird species (the Ruby-throated) normally breeds. My pictures of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird were taken in Michigan; I took all of the other photos near my home in Southern California.
Greetings on Sunday, December 26, 2021, the second day of Coynezaa and, of course, National Candy Cane Day. These confections are much of a muchness, with one exception: King Leo® Peppermint Sticks. These are packed with peppermint flavor and aren’t much softer than the usual canes, so you can either suck or chew the Leo Sticks. They’re head and shoulders above the others, and come packed in a lovely old-fashioned tin (they were created in 1901):
If you’re a peppermint fan, try a tin; you won’t be sorry, believe me. You can buy them on Amazon.
The statement did not mention a cause of death. Archbishop Tutu had fought an on-and-off battle with prostate cancer since 1997.
As leader of the South African Council of Churches and later as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Archbishop Tutu led the church to the forefront of Black South Africans’ decades-long struggle for freedom. His voice was a powerful force for nonviolence in the anti-apartheid movement, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
When that movement triumphed in the early 1990s, he prodded the country toward a new relationship between its white and Black citizens, and, as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he gathered testimony documenting the viciousness of apartheid.
*I hope you were up early enough (in America, at least) to see the launch of the James Webb space telescope, an amazing fold-out device that will land in an orbit around the Sun a million miles from Earth.
Below is a video the successful separation of the folded-up scope from its booster, taken by a camera on the booster. We will not see it again, but fingers crossed that it works well and helps us learns amazing new things.
As I say below, what amazes me the most is that all this technology and material was wrested from the Earth and its atmosphere. Maybe that’s what Gregory Robinson meant in the first sentence below:
“The world gave us this telescope and we’re handing it back to the world today,” said Gregory Robinson, the Webb telescope’s program director, during a post-launch news conference in French Guiana.
The telescope, named for the NASA administrator who led the space agency through the early years of the Apollo program, is designed to see farther in space and further back in time than the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope. Its primary light gathering mirror is 21 feet across, about three times bigger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive.
The Webb’s mission is to seek out the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies, which appeared 13.7 billion years ago, burning their way out of a fog leftover from the Big Bang (which occurred 13.8 billion years ago).
Here it is: humanity’s final look at @NASAWebb as it heads into deep space to answer our biggest questions. Alone in the vastness of space, Webb will soon begin an approximately two-week process to deploy its antennas, mirrors, and sunshield. #UnfoldTheUniversepic.twitter.com/DErMXJhNQd
To me this is the biggest story of the day, but it gets below-the-fold treatment in media like the NYT. It’s SCIENCE, Jake!
*The NASA launch was somewhat marred by a celebratory speech by NASA administrator Bill Nelson, who blathered on and, at the end, made some religious remarks about Jesus, God, and the Star of Bethlehem. His sermon begins at 2:00:39 in the official NASA video below, with the goddy stuff intruding at 2:02:45. He says that the telescope is going to visualize “the handiwork of God,” mentions Psalm 19, ending with “God bless you, and God bless planet Earth.” This guy is a government official and doesn’t know about the separation of Church and Space!
*At first I thought this Washington Post headline (below)was overblown, but, after reading the piece, there’s something to it. (Click on screenshot to read). It turns out that Bing Crosby’s classic rendition of “White Christmas” (the best-selling song of all time (100 million records sold), was first presented live on the radio on Christmas Day, 1941—less then three weeks after Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the American war against Japan.
For the many young men away at war, the song hit home. The early days of World War II were not good for the United States. Beginning with Pearl Harbor, the country suffered a string of defeats in the first few months of combat. Morale was low, and people needed something to hold onto. “White Christmas” and “Holiday Inn” became a lifeline for many Americans — especially overseas servicemen who heard it played on the Armed Services Radio Network.
But what’s odd about this is that the archetypal Christmas song was composed by Irving Berlin, who was Jewish—the son of a rabbi.
“White Christmas” was the brainchild of one on America’s greatest songwriters. Born Israel Beilin in western Siberia in 1888, Irving Berlin grew up on the mean streets of the Lower East Side of New York City. As a child, this son of an Orthodox rabbi [JAC note: Wikipedia says his dad was a cantor, not a rabbi.] learned about Christmas from an equally poor Irish Catholic family, the O’Haras. Young Izzy, as his childhood companions called him, was welcomed into their home, where they introduced him to what could best be described as a Charlie Brown tree. It left a lasting impression.
“This was my first sight of a Christmas tree,” Berlin told The Washington Post in 1954. “The O’Haras were very poor and later, as I grew used to their annual tree, I realized they had to buy one with broken branches and small height, but to me that first tree seemed to tower to heaven.”
Later, after incredible success as a writer of the American songbook, Berlin turned his attention back to those days to compose “White Christmas.” According to Kaplan, he probably tinkered with the idea for years before inspiration struck in early January 1940, when he said to his secretary, “I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.”
Berlin later said he intended to use “White Christmas” in a revue he planned to produce, but then decided to hold it for the movie “Holiday Inn,” which starred Crosby and Fred Astaire. That film, about a couple of country inn owners who put on musicals for each holiday, spawned several Berlin hits, including “Easter Parade,” “Happy Holiday” and “Be Careful, It’s My Heart.”
“White Christmas” was aded to “Holiday Inn”, and the rest was history. Try to listen to this as if you’ve never heard it before; it’s a great song:
“White Christmas” won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1942.
Israel Beilin as a soldier in 1918. He lived to be 101.
*This is what we’ve come to, at least in the Wall Street Journal. Food and now drink are not pleasures, but medicine. Click on the screenshot if you want wines without alcohol:
*Reader Geoff sent in a link to a short BBC article and a 3-minute video of Polly Verity, a Welsh woman who does the most extraordinary paper folding. It’s not like classical origami, but what she creates is stunning. Cliick on the screenshot below (showing one of her works) to go to the article and video. (Her website is here, and you can buy her artwork. Another video is here.)
This is why George Washington crossed the Delaware with his men on Christmas Day.
1799 – Henry Lee III’s eulogy to George Washington in congress declares him as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen”. (This is not to be confused with Washington’s funeral on December 18.)
1825 – Advocates of liberalism in Russia rise up against Czar Nicholas I but are suppressed in the Decembrist revolt in Saint Petersburg.
The crime? Killing settlers. Here’s a photo of the hanging, still the largest number of people executed in one day, and a partial list of the hanged below that. They designed a special scaffold to hang all 38 at once. 4,000 people showed up to watch.
After the execution, it was discovered that two men had been mistakenly hanged. The Minnesota Historical Society reports that “Wicaƞḣpi Wastedaƞpi (We-chank-wash-ta-don-pee), who went by the common name of Caske (meaning first-born son), reportedly stepped forward when the name ‘Caske’ was called, and was then separated for execution from the other prisoners. The other, Wasicuƞ, was a young white man who had been adopted by the Dakota at an early age. Wasicuƞ had been acquitted.”
1871 – Thespis, the first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, debuts. It does modestly well, but the two would not collaborate again for four years and the score has been lost.
Here are the pair, who won the Nobel Prize for their discovery in 1903. The family itself won five Nobel Prizes, as their daughter and son-in-law each won one (shared) and Marie won yet another. I believe this is the most Nobels garnered by a single family.
My late friend Kenny King regarded the Bambino as the best player in the history of baseball, as he was a great pitcher as well as a great slugger. Here he is starting his career in school:
(From Wikipedia): Ruth (top row, center) at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1912
1941 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day in the United States.
Patton died in an automobile accident in December 1945. Paralyzed from the neck down, he lived for two weeks before he died, saying, “This is a hell of a way to die.” Here’s his simple grave in Luxembourg City:
1963 – The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” are released in the United States, marking the beginning of Beatlemania on an international level.
1966 – The first Kwanzaa is celebrated by Maulana Karenga, the chair of Black Studies at California State University, Long Beach.
Like mine, this is a recent holiday, with considerable overlap of the times.
1991 – The Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union meets and formally dissolves the Soviet Union, ending the Cold War.
Notables born on this day include:
1780 – Mary Somerville, Scottish mathematician, astronomer, and author (d. 1872)
Somerville and Caroline Herschel were the first women elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. An early portrait of Somerville, after whom Somerville College in Oxford is named:
Painting of Mary Somerville by Thomas Phillips (1834)
She’s also on the Scottish £10 polymer note:
1791 – Charles Babbage, English mathematician and engineer, invented the Difference engine
1872 – Norman Angell, English journalist, academic, and politician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1967)
1939 – Phil Spector, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2021)/
Convicted of murder, Spector died in prison in January of this year. Below: Spector in court with a dreadful wig, and his mug shot:
1956 – David Sedaris, American comedian, author, and radio host
Those who bit the dust on December 26 include:
1530 – Babur, Mughal emperor (b. 1483)
1890 – Heinrich Schliemann, German-Italian archaeologist and author (b. 1822)
Schliemann excavated (badly) the ruins of what seems to be Troy, giving some credibility to Homer’s writings. Here’s his wife Sophia wearing some of the treasures they found at “Troy”:
Remington was famous for his Western art depicting cowboys and Native Americans. Here’s one of his paintings, “The Flight”:
1968 – Weegee, Ukrainian-American photographer and journalist (b. 1898)
Born Arthur Feilig, Weegee specialized in photos of NYC’s Lower East Side, specializing in murders, accidents, bizarre things, and everyday life of which the photo below is an example. He must have used a flash to get it. . .
1974 – Jack Benny, American comedian, vaudevillian, actor, and violinist (b. 1894)
1996 – JonBenét Ramsey, American child beauty queen and prominent unsolved murder victim (b. 1990)
2006 – Gerald Ford, American commander, lawyer, and politician, 38th President of the United States (b. 1913)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a bit of fun with Szaron. (there are two photos in this dialogue):
Hili: I will jump on him in a moment.
A: It’s not funny.
Hili: It depends on one’s viewpoint.
Hili’s target:
In Polish
Hili: Zaraz na niego skoczę.
Ja: To nie jest śmieszne.
Hili: Jak dla kogo.
Below: a cat footprint on the stairs leading to Andrzej’s and Malgorzata’s house. As Malgorzata relates,
This morning we went out and found this footprint on the first step.There were no more footprints. Andrzej’s caption is “This step and no more. Too cold.”
Clearly one of the three cats gave up on going out!
From Bruce:
From Jesus of the Day. Can you spot the cat? (Click photo to enlarge.) It’s easy for some (but not for me). Answer is below the fold at the bottom of this post.
I was SO thrilled to see the rocket lift off successfully, and so far all has gone well. It still stuns me to realize that every bit of this rocket and the technology needed to forge it was created out of things taken from material pried from the Earth and its atmosphere. The takeoff:
The moment we've all been waiting for… you can now watch again and again as many times as you want! 🤩🚀
From Simon, who says, “This is a bit like using rope circles to trap cats!” I’m not sure what the arthropods are. Sound up if you want to hear the animals scream (in human voices. I’m not quite why this is like a thesis proposal. . . .
— George The Stourbridge Junction Station Cat (@TheStourbridge) December 25, 2021
This commercial is pretty good, but isn’t nearly as good as The Cat Herders!
The French title of "March of the Penguins" was "March of the Emperor," which led to perhaps my favorite commercial of all time. If you've never seen it, I am begging you: do yourself the kindness of watching this glorious piece of advertising: pic.twitter.com/KD3UWvizad
A batty Christmas! But it’s a sad Christmas without Statler, the aged fruit bat, who died this year.
Merry Christmas from the bats! 🦇
On Holidays, all caretakers and a couple volunteers will come in to help get the bats taken care of. We work together to get everything cleaned up for them so we can all enjoy our day. We have just finished up! 🎄 pic.twitter.com/CLRVC1eNkb
