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.
Sadly, I’m leaving tomorrow morning to fly back to the states, but all my work got done. Though we were deplatformed by the Betabreak group at the University of Amsterdam (now bleating that they really did it for “safety reasons”), the three of us plus a moderator managed to professionally tape our discussion on the Ideological Erosion of Science in a private and “safe” location. The discussion went well, and it should be on YouTube in about a week. My talk in Tilburg seemed to go okay, too, so the formal part of my commitment has been satisfied.
Today we went around downtown, which was crazy with tourists. It was a Saturday and a lovely day, but apparently there is no time of year now when Amsterdam isn’t overflowing with tourists: American, Asian, and European. If you come, get your tickets to the Rijksmuseum, Anne Frank House, and Van Gogh Museum as early as you can—preferably a few months.
I took a bunch of photos today, including Palestinian protestors in the citty, a “hidden” Catholic church built when Amsterdam was largely Protestant, a rubber duck shop, some typical Dutch food, and other marginalia. Those will be up when I get back home, so today I’ll show photos from yesterday. Much of the day was spent creating the discussion we were supposed to have at the University of Amsterdam on the Coyne and Maroja paper.
Setting up for the videotaping (photo by David Stam, standing on left). Seated to right: Maarten Boudry, a philosopher at the University of Ghent, me, Geert Jan van’t Land, one of my hosts and the moderator, and Michael Richardson, professor of evolutionary developmental biology at the University of Leiden. Standing at right, one of Stam’s taping assistants; I don’t remember his name. Maarten was a collaborator on the only philosophy paper I’ve ever written on anything.
Below: another Stolperstein I encountered walking to an evening concert. These, you’ll recall, are placed in front of the houses of people who lived there but were taken away by the Nazis and sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. So spare a thought for Victor Romun, taken away from his house on September 25, 1943 at age 56, sent to the holding camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands and then sent to Auschwitz, where he lived only four months, dying (or murdered) on January 31 of the next year.
Yesterday evening we went to a wonderful concert at one of the world’s great venues for classical music, the famous Concertgebouw. As for the building, Wikipedia notes:
The Royal Concertgebouw (Dutch: het Koninklijk Concertgebouw, pronounced[ətˌkoːnɪŋkləkɔnˈsɛrtxəbʌu]) is a concert hall in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Dutch term “concertgebouw” translates into English as “concert building”. Its superb acoustics place it among the finest concert halls in the world, along with Boston’s Symphony Hall and the Musikverein in Vienna.
The acoustics truly were superb. We had great seats about 15 rows back in the middle of the floor, and it sounded as if we were surrounded by music.
The Concertgebouw is in the Museum Quarter, and here’s a panoramic photo of the area, showing not only the concert building, but the van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum. You’ll have to click twice and scroll to see it properly:
The concert program, which was wonderful, with Vilde Frang, a young Norwegian violinist, doing the long Shostakovich violin solo. I loved the concert even though I’m no expert in classical music.
On the way home I saw THE WORLD’S SMALLEST CAR, or at least one that appears to be. It holds only a single person, and I suppose could be seen as a covered motorcycle:
Finally, a typical Dutch food, Hagelslag, known in America as “sprinkles,” and used to top cakes and cupcakes. In the Netherlands, however, it’s a common topping for buttered toast for breakfast. Here’s what was in front of my plate. I had heard of it, so of course I tried it.
My crude translation of the Dutch, with some expert help:
“Did you know that Hagelslag is a typical bread covering in the Netherlands, and that it is not sold in other countries? And that in Belgium Hagelslag is known as ‘mouse turds’?”
I may be a bit off here, but not by far.
My morning toast with Hagelslag. It wasn’t bad at all, though I prefer jam:
As I predicted, since the encamped pro-Palestinian protestors didn’t get their way during the Encampment (no demands were met, and the tents were removed and thrown into dumpsters), they would return this weekend, which is Alumni Weekend: alums come back to relive their old days, and there are all kinds of events for them. Sure enough, the protestors returned yesterday, illegally occupying a University building, marching, and engaging in various acts of vandalism. They say they are not members of University of Chicago United for Palestine (UCUP) or Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), both organizations of students, but are a “group of young alumni.”
This is going to look bad for the University. As normal, the University is allowing legal demonstrations of free speech, but they are not arresting protestors who trespass or engage in vandalism. This lack of punishment is a recurring theme of the pro-Palestinian protests at our school, and is going to come back and bite the University on the tuchas. As I’ve said repeatedly, if there’s no punishment for legal violations or abrogation of University rules, this stuff will continue
Here’s the Chicago Maroon‘s report of the protestors’ occupation of the Institute of Politics (IOP) building, along with the paper’s real-time reports from yesterday. I’ve thrown in a few tweets and a photograph taken by a colleague.
From the Marroon: click to read:
Pro-Palestine protesters have occupied the Institute of Politics building on South Woodlawn Avenue. After a rally on the Midway, pro-Palestine protesters marched north and turned into the Institute of Politics building.
Protesters brought chairs into the building, locked doors, and spray painted security cameras as they entered the building.
They were followed by a line of marked and unmarked Chicago Police Department cars.
Chicago Police Officers and University of Chicago Police Officers were on site attempting to remove protesters from blocking the street.
A protester installed a tent in the backyard. Five UCPD officers arrived shortly after, taking away the tent materials. They were seen arguing with protesters in the backyard.
Protesters began chanting, “From the River to the Sea; Palestine will be free.”
An organizer with Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said that SJP was not involved in organizing the occupation of the IOP.
UCPD have entered the Institute of Politics, removing protesters from blocking the doors.
—Maroon Staff
May 17, 4:58 p.m.
More than a dozen protesters are exiting the IOP through the windows on the second floor.
Protesters were heard screaming in the backyard and alleyway.
UCPD officers appeared through the window after the last protester jumped out.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 5:10 p.m.
Two UCPD officers with shields entered the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, which is adjacent to the IOP.
Officers are currently stationed on all sides of the IOP backyard.
Protesters are now setting up two tents in front of the building.
From the Maroon: Protesters set up tents in front of the IOP building. (Finn Hartnett)
May 17, 5:20 p.m.
An organizer with UChicago United for Palestine said that the occupation was organized by an unaffiliated group of alumni.
UCPD officers are no longer entering the IOP. Protesters are blocking off the side entrance to the IOP using chairs from Neubauer. Two CPD officers have exited Neubauer.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 5:40 p.m.
In their Telegram channel “Disrupt U of Chicago,” organizers messaged “Bring your sleeping bag, we’re staying” at 5:11 p.m.
Six minutes later, organizers shared a statement in the channel called “Bring the Intifada Home” from “a crew of protesters holding down the Casbah of Basel Al-Araj, formerly known as the institute of politics at the university of chicago [sic].” Bassel al-Araj was a Palestinian activist, writer, and author. In 2016, he was arrested by the Palestinian Authority and charged with planning attacks against Israel. A unit of Israel’s police force killed al-Araj during a gunfight in 2017 as they attempted to enter his house.
“We’ve liberated the Institute of Politics – a breeding grounds for politicians, bureaucrats, non-profit functionaries alike to come to learn to say the right things while meting out violence and devastation on oppressed, colonized people,” the statement said.
“We target the university of chicago for both its current complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and its past: inventing neoliberal economics and enabling the Chicago Boys to be puppet masters of bloody, authoritarian rule from Pinochet’s regime in Chile and beyond, creating the first nuclear reactor, violently displacing and policing Black communities with the nation’s largest private police force of UCPD.”
A second part of the statement is titled “Statement of Principles from the Liberated Casbeh of Basel Al-Araj” and lists six points.
“We must escalate our actions against all governments, institutions and corporations who participate in, profit off of, and enable genocide,” the first point reads.
“We have nothing to gain by working with government, cops, or the administration. We do not negotiate. We do not share information about each others’ identities. We do not seek permission to act. We lean on each other – not the state in any of its forms- for radical care, safety, and support,” another point reads.
The statement does not mention points and demands that UCUP has often mentioned during past rallies, such as that the University acknowledge the bombing of Gazan universities or that it divest from companies with Israeli ties.
— Maroon Staff
The frat boys strike back again!:
May 17, 6:20 p.m.
After the Iron Key fraternity began playing U.S.-themed music, three protesters walked towards the fraternity house and began pulling flowers from the fraternity house’s front lawn. One of the protesters carried a brick from the flower bed away with them.
A significant UCPD and CPD presence remains in the area around the IOP building.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 6:12 p.m.
The Iron Key fraternity, formerly known as Delta Upsilon, has begun loudly playing the American national anthem from their fraternity house. The protesters are responding by loudly chanting “D.U., fuck you.”
Protesters have pitched four tents in front of the IOP.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 6:41 p.m.
A man who declined to identify himself alleged that a pro-Palestine protester walked onto the front lawn of the Rohr Chabad Center—located across the street from the ongoing encampment—while holding a brick.
“You walk on to [a place for] Jewish life and learning with a brick? It’s intimidating,” the man said.
The man claimed the protester “pushed a girl friend of mine” before another protester called him a “racist pussy Jew” after seeing him speaking to the police. The man is currently filing a police report with UCPD.
— Maroon Staff
More vandalism:
May 17, 7 p.m.
Two UCPD officers were briefly in foot pursuit of accused perpetrators who spray-painted “ACAB,” an acronym of the slogan “All cops are bastards,” onto the front of a UCPD segway. The officers then spoke with Iron Key brothers who witnessed the act.
UCPD officers are attempting to identify the individual responsible for the spray paint.
— Maroon Staff
(From the Maroon): Protesters spray painted the front of the UCPD vehicle. (Eli Wizevich)
A photo taken by a colleague:
Demonstrators have hung an effigy of University President Paul Alivisatos depicting blood on his hands from a tree with a noose.
Protesters are gathered in front of Neubauer chanting “No justice, no peace.” Roughly 12 CPD officers are in a line on the street in front of Neubauer.
— Maroon Staff
Effigy of President Alivisatos with bloody hands; photo and caption from The Maroon:
Protesters outside the IOP hung an effigy of University President Paul Alivisatos. (Finn Hartnett)
May 17, 8:10 p.m.
Protesters later began dismantling the barrier in the back alley themselves. Some protesters threw chairs and other furniture in the direction of UCPD officers.
Protesters are chanting, “Pigs go home” and “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?”
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 8:04 p.m.
UCPD officers have begun dismantling a barricade that protesters built in the back alley of the Institute of Politics.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 9:04 p.m.
In a message in its Telegram channel, UCUP said that some demonstrators “are preparing to stay the night” at the IOP. “There are a number of people who are going to stay and continue to hold the space,” the message reads.
They reiterated that the “UCUP are not the organizers” of the IOP occupation and thus “can’t provide more information.”
According to the message, UCUP is still planning to hold the events originally planned for Alumni Weekend.
“We will see you tomorrow at the UCUP events that were sent out earlier today,” the message ended.
— Maroon Staff
Screenshot of a tweet from Shadi Bartsch, a professor of classics here and also the widow of ex-President Bob Zimmer, a President who never would have tolerated this sort of disruption. She’s very angry!
Note the demands, especially #2. I’ll explain #5 below.
As for point #5 above, one of my colleagues consulted Wiktionary and found this meaning:
Tweets don’t seem to be embedding today, so I’ll use screenshots when there isn’t a video. But in the video tweet below, a student is upset that they’ve painted red handprints around the alumni area. Click. on the link to go to tweets.
Apparently the threat of jail brought the protestors out of the building like rodents fleeing a sinking ship. This is how deterrence–real deterrence–works:
The IOP has been renamed the “Casbah of Basel Al=Araj!! Note that “Bring the Intifada home” is an explicit call for violence, as an “infitada” is a period of violent terrorism used as resistance. Also: “we do not negotiate” and “we must escalate”. Doesn’t look good for graduation on June 1!
Click to read it, or click on the statement below the tweet:
Click to enlarge if you can’t read it:
Well, there are two more days left in Alumni Weekend, and they will be disturbed by the protesters. Yes, some of the speech will be “free” and legal, but one wonders whether the protestors think they’re advancing their cause by being so aggressive this weekend. They surely won’t affect the war in Gaza, and they’re not going to bring alumni over to their side. They are performatively acting out their anger, and at the same time trying as hard as possible to avoid arrest for acts of civil disobedience.
As for their failure of the Un iversity arrest students or give them meaningful disciplinary sanctions when violating University rules, I think it’s shameful. Will any Jewish parent send their children here?
And of course there’s graduation in about two weeks.
All went well at Tilburg University yesterday, where I talked about religion versus science. About 100 people showed up and there were no disruptions, though I was told later that there was plainclothed security in the audience. The student protests appear to be confined largely to Amsterdam.
Before I talked, I had a cup of tea for my throat (this nasty cold still hasn’t disappeared), and a Dutch donut, shown below:
Below: a photo taken by one of my hosts showing the title slide of my presentation. The talk was in English; it’s impossible for me to say much in Dutch because the damn gutteral sound is impossible for me to make, though the Hebrew or German gutterals come easy to me. Every Netherlander speaks nearly perfect English, and some classes in Amsterdam are taught entirely in English. This makes it dead easy to get around, especially if you can’t master those infernal gutterals.
The Q&A guest, local faculty Hans van Eyghen, couldn’t make it as his wife went into labor prematurely (I’m told mother and baby are fine). But that left us 15 extra minutes for student questions, and we could have had even more than half an hour for questions except another lecture was scheduled right after mine.
The talk went well, I think, and there was a full half hour of questions by students. They were good questions, too. It was a lively and inquisitive audience (some were religious), and it more than made up for the mishigas of the Betabreak organization in Amsterdam.
After the talk and a beer, my hosts took me to a fancy restaurant, theAuberge du Bonheur in Tilburg. We all chose the three-course meal from the Spring menu. Although I was told the courses were small, it was more than enough food.
The restaurant.
We walked past the assortment of cheeses while entering, and I decided that I must have some Dutch cheese at the end of dinner. (The profusion of bovids in the fields between Amsterdam and Tilburg tells you that this is dairy country.)
An amuse-bouche. I won’t be able to tell you all the ingredients of each course, as there were so many things in each course. All I can say is that there is a deft hand in the kitchen that knows well how to meld disparate flavors. This is some kind of cucumber-based soup with other stuff.
Another kind of amuse-bouche soup. Don’t ask me what it was; call the restaurant if you must know. It was terrific.
Another excellent mystery dish, with two kinds of strawberries (red and green), little white puffs of crunchy stuff, and a savory green ice cream. Again, I can’t specify what was in it, but it was very good. And isn’t it lovely?
We had a choice between lamb or fish for the “mains”, and I chose lamb, which came as a bipartite course. This is the neck, served with mashed potatoes and a gaarnish:
And the meat, served with perfectly cooked carrots and white asparagus, which I love, as well as a bit of sauce. The meat had a slathering of pesto:
A pre=dessert dessert, which I believe was strawberry ice cream on top of cooked beetroot.
The real dessert, which I skipped in favor of cheese, but was told it was very good. It was some kind of ice cream or pudding made with green apple and garnishes.
I had the cheese platter, with samples of five Dutch cheeses (the blue was made only a few km from the restaurant). The cheeses were fantastic, as they should be here, and were served with raisin-walnut bread and candied walnuts. My one quibble is that they should also have provided white bread, for you don’t want to dilute the flavor of such good cheese with a fancy fruit bread. But of course I ate everything.
We had no wine as everybody else was driving home, and, truth be told, I had no appetite for alcohol after my post-seminar beer.
I can recommend the Auberge du Bonheur highly, and if you happen to find yourself in Tilburg (unlikely given that it’s a small town there to serve the University) and have a spare 50€ or so, give it it a try. It was a great place to wind down after my talk.
Today the three of us who were deplatformed by Betabreak are going to privately record the discussion we would have had at the University of Amsterdam. It will be put on YouTube at some point, and I’ll let you know when it’s up.
I’ve been fighting a bad cold as well as dealing with the fallout from our cancellation debacle at the University of Amsterdam, so I haven’t gotten out much. This is a great pity as the weather had been good, though now it’s turned rainy.
This evening I will give a talk on science vs. religion at Tilburg University, founded as a Catholic school in 1927. Now it’s only technically Catholic, and is described by Wikipedia as “a public research university specializing in the social and behavioral sciences, economics, law, business sciences, theology and humanities. . . ”
We have had no threats of disruption (Tilburg is a few hours south of Amsterdam), so I’m not worried about that. Tomorrow Maarten Boudry and I, plus perhaps a surprise guest or two, will tape the discussion that was deplatformed at the University of Amsterdam.
At any rate, here are a few snapshots from my limited incursions in Amsterdam.
I’m surprised that this is my third visit to Amsterdam, and up to now I’d missed the “Stolpersteine” (literally, “stumbling stones”) which one encounters from time to time in the pavement in front of houses. They’re easy to miss, which is why I haven’t seen them before. Wikipedia describes them like this:
. . . . a ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Literally, it means ‘stumbling stone’ and metaphorically ‘stumbling block’.
The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate persons at the last place that they chose freely to reside, work or study (with exceptions possible on a case-by-case basis) before they fell victim to Nazi terror, forced euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of June 2023, 100,000.Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world’s largest decentralized memorial.
They mostly commemorate Jews, but are also laid for murdered Romani, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others persecuted by the Nazis. Here are three I found within two blocks from where I’m staying (there is a pair representing a man and his wife):
It says, “Here lived Elisa Frederika De Jon van Biema, born 1901, abducted 1944 to Westerbork, killed January 27, 1945, Auschwitz.” Westerbork was the infamous Dutch camp where detainees, including Anne Frank and her family, were kept until they were transferred to the concentration camps (in this case Auschwitz). Elisa was killed at 44.
Below are the stones for a Jewish man and his wife who were deported together; the man died at Westerbork and his wife at Auschwitz. Prisoners were sent to other camps, too, like Sobibór. All told, about 98,000 Jews were deported from Westerbork to the camps, and nearly all of them were immediately gassed upon arrival.
Although some people object because these small stones allow people to walk over memorials for dead Jews, I find them moving because, once you look for them, they are easy to find but distressingly common. The houses of the murdered, of course, are still there, so the memorials are ineffably evocative.
Another Jewish man and wife, arrested on April 8, 1943, and gassed at Sobibór only two weeks later.
On a lighter note, here are two pictures from the local “supermarket”, which is a market but much smaller than American supermarkets. Nevertheless, it has a huge supply of cheese, which of course is a speciality of the Netherlands. Look at all the different kinds of cheese!
If you follow this site, you know I always check out the cat food in markets, to see if there’s any local flavor to what they feed the moggies. Here there was nothing special (France has an array of gourmet-named cat foods), but they did have paté. The label reads, “complete pet food for adult cats.”
And a takeout meal last night from the local Balinese restaurant: rice, beef, chicken, eggplant, beans, and mixed veggies:
