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.
I am running out of photos, so please send in any good ones you have. Thanks!
Today’s batch is from reader Ken Phelps, whose IDs are indented. There are several photos and then a salacious video of otters at the bottom. Click the photos to enlarge them.
The first shot is a Vanilla Leaf plant(Achlys triphylla) grimly hanging on to life last October.
The deer photos were taken in July some years ago. It was lounging on the unmanicured mossy rock on which our bedroom is perched. It was watchful but unperturbed. The shot labeled Deer Pose was taken through the bedroom French door. A slight reflection gave it a slightly gauzy boudoir look.
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A close look at the petals of a very yellow flower whose identity I do not recall.
Four mushrooms crowded together:
Ice on a gravelly puddle. Good for a bit of pareidolia:
More in the pareidolia vein. Knobbly ice forming on a rocky outcrop, converted to a B&W negative image. A lot of faces, many of them canine, hidden in there:
Not wildlife, but our older dog Dixie trying to look sorry about making, and then rooting about in, a mudhole in the garden
And listen to the noise of these mating otters! (Sound up!)
Here is a link to a video I took of a pair of river otters engaging in what I assume is conjugal bliss. Filmed while we were moored at the wharf at Newcastle Island, Nanaimo, British Columbia.
As you’re digesting this Eastern weekend, how about putting some wildlife photos together for this feature?
Today we have some coyote videos from Kathy Mechling and a few Easter flowers from Patricia Morris. Their captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
First, the wild d*gs (coyotes) from Kathy. Sound up!
Some of our more charismatic neighbors here in the Illinois Valley in SW. Oregon.
First: find both coyotes:
Second: the second coyote is a little more obvious:
The reveal. She was curled up there all along:
Lagniappe: the pair harmonizing with distant fire engines:
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As I don’t know from flowers, readers will have to identify them for themselves. These were sent on March 21:
It might be hard to believe amidst a blizzard but spring is coming. Just a few domestic flowers from central coast California to prove my point and cheer your day.
I’ve dissected many crazy papers over the years—just to show what passes for “scholarship” in some of the humanities. Yes, of course there’s good scholarship there, too, but I have a feeling that in STEM you won’t find anything as inconclusive or incoherently written as this paper (h/t: Luana for finding it). And nearly all science papers at least reveal a tentative fact or two about nature. In contrast, many “studies” papers like this one seem like wheel spinning, and are baffling. They seem to be vehicles not for finding knowledge, but getting tenure and promotions. If there is a contribution to human knowledge from this effort, I can’t find it. This one was published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies.
You can read the paper by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.
I scanned it once and then read it more carefully a second time, and I swear I still can’t figure out what it’s trying to say. Some AI analysis given below didn’t help much.. Not only is the paper’s thesis obscure, but it is written so poorly, and with the use of so many jargon words (“attending to,” “becomings,” “intersectional ecoqueer feminist perspective,” “disrupt normative ideas,” etc), that it would kill George Orwell if he wasn’t already dead.
The paper notes that Dr. Diamond-Lenow “(she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at SUNY Oneonta,” but on the list of faculty in that department I cannot find her.
Knock yourself out (and you will):
Below is the abstract, and I hope you can get something out of it. All I can remember is that lesbians seem to have a special relationship with dogs (and machines like iPhones), and this tells us something about the “the rich complexity of dyke culture and its processes of continually processing and becoming.” (“Becoming” is a favorite word in the paper, and “dyke” is a word used by Diamond-Lenow). And the author decries the misuse of dogs as tools of racism, white supremacy, and militarism.
Abstract:
This article offers a queer lesbian feminist analysis attuned to lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities. Specifically, the article places queer and lesbian ecofeminism in conversation with Donna Haraway’s work on the cyborg and companion species to theorize the interconnected queer becomings of people, nature, animals, and machines amidst ecologies of love and violence in the 2020s. It takes two key case studies as the focus for analysis: first, the state instrumentalization of dogs and robot dogs for racialized and imperial violence, and second, quotidian queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings. In the first, the article traces how dogs are weaponized as tools of state violence and proposes a queer lesbian feminist critique of white supremacy and militarization that can also extend to a critique of the violence committed through and toward the dogs. In the second, the article analyzes how, within lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies, dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings. The entanglements of violence and love in these queer dog relationalities provide insights into the complexities of queer and lesbian feminist worldbuilding. Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics can help theorize the potentials and challenges of these interspecies entanglements.
Some dog-dissing from the paper, giving a flavor of its content:
As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).
Historically, dogs have been tools of settler colonialism and enslavement mediating racialized naturecultures (Johnson, Citation 2009, Boisseron, Citation 2018). They are also instrumentalized for racialized securitization in policing, border patrol, and carceral systems—they are in this sense, part of the violent cyborg offspring Haraway discusses. Police have long used dogs to intimidate and attack marginalized communities, as seen in numerous documented incidents: during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963; against anti-police violence protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 (Wall, Citation 2016); against Indigenous activists opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016 (Democracy Now!, Citation 2016); during Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore and elsewhere (The Marshall Project, Citation 2020); and most recently, in 2024, against student protests over the genocide in Gaza on college and university campuses (Most, Citation 2024).
Look! Dogs are also vehicles for racial criminalization!
. . . . As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).
And military dogs are tools of sexualized colonization and dehumanization!:
In the military, dogs are used as cyborg weapons, used to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), patrol bases, police detainees, and target enemies. They played key roles in U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 (Bumiller, Citation2011) and ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019 (Rogers, Citation2019). Dogs were also involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004 (Schmitt, Citation2006). These deployments reflect a logic of heteronormative nationalism and sexualized colonization, dehumanizing Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern men within necropolitical formations of war (Diamond-Lenow, Citation2020).
There are lots of neologisms like “natureculture”. But here is the paper’s conclusion:
The article thus contributes a queer trans feminist perspective on human-dog becomings to queer ecological critique, highlighting the significance of lesbian queer feminism in analyzing more-than-human relationalities, particularly with dogs.
For some reason the last three words make me laugh out loud.
At any rate, Luana found a site where you can enter the URL of an article like this one, and it will give you both an AI summary and a podcast. I haven’t tried it, but you can if you wish. At any rate, when she put in the URL of this paper, here’s what AI spit out. I must say that it merely reiterates the paper’s language in a way that a cheating student might copy, but doesn’t shed much further light on this black hole of scholarship:
What is the central focus of this article?
This article centers on the interconnectedness of queer (specifically lesbian, non-binary, and trans) identities, human-animal (primarily canine) relationships, and technology (drawing on cyborg theory) within contexts of both affection and oppression. It aims to analyze how these entanglements contribute to the formation of queer worlds and how they are shaped by and respond to societal structures of power, particularly white supremacy and militarization.
How does the article connect queer ecofeminism with cyborg and companion species theories?
The article brings queer and lesbian ecofeminist perspectives into dialogue with Donna Haraway’s concepts of the cyborg (as a hybrid of machine and organism challenging traditional boundaries) and companion species (highlighting the co-evolution and interdependence of humans and domesticated animals). By doing so, it seeks to understand how the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs, in their technologically mediated and ecologically situated contexts, challenge and redefine categories of nature, culture, human, and animal.
What are the two main case studies used in the article’s analysis?
The article examines two primary case studies: firstly, the ways in which dogs, including robotic dogs, are utilized and instrumentalized by the state for purposes of racialized and imperial violence. Secondly, it analyzes the everyday intimacies and relational experiences between queer (lesbian, non-binary, and trans) individuals and their dogs, focusing on how these relationships contribute to the articulation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship.
How does the article critique the state’s use of dogs and robot dogs?
The article offers a queer lesbian feminist critique of the state’s deployment of dogs and robot dogs, particularly in the context of racialized and imperial violence. It argues that this instrumentalization of canines as tools of militarization and control is intertwined with white supremacist ideologies and inflicts violence not only on targeted human populations but also through and toward the dogs themselves. The critique aims to expose the underlying power structures and ethical implications of such practices.
In what ways do dogs contribute to the lives and identities of queer individuals, according to the article?
The article suggests that dogs play a significant role in the lives of lesbian, non-binary, and trans individuals, contributing to the formation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship structures. Through intimate relationships with dogs, queer individuals can articulate and experience their identities in ways that challenge normative understandings of these categories. These interspecies bonds help in the creation of queer social worlds and facilitate unique forms of becoming.
What does the article mean by “queer canine becomings”?
“Queer canine becomings” refers to the ongoing and mutual shaping of identities and ways of being that occur within the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs. It emphasizes that these relationships are not static but rather involve processes of co-creation and transformation. The “queer” aspect highlights how these becomings often challenge and expand conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and species boundaries.
How do love and violence intertwine in the queer dog relationalities discussed in the article?
The article posits that queer-dog relationships exist within “ecologies of love and violence.” This means that these intimate bonds are not immune to broader societal forces of oppression and violence. The article explores how the potential for both deep affection and the awareness of systemic violence against both queer individuals and animals shape these interspecies connections, offering insights into the complexities of queer feminist worldbuilding in a non-ideal world.
What is the significance of lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics in understanding these interspecies entanglements?
Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics, as proposed in the article, provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the potentials and challenges inherent in the entanglements of queer identities, dogs, and technology. This perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of how power operates within these relationships, how boundaries are blurred and renegotiated, and how new forms of resistance and world-making can emerge from these complex interspecies intimacies in the face of both love and violence.
This may be the wackiest paper I’ve ever covered here, though it has had some tough competition.
Basically, the professor’s argument seems to boil down to this: Dogs provide a positive relational experience for many LGBTQ people. However, the government also uses dogs and robo-dogs, or cyborgs, to commit unjust violence against marginalized people. Therefore, the relationships between dogs and humans are complex.
LOL! But although that seems satirical, it also seems accurate.
Here’s a 45-minute BBC podcast of The Infinite Monkey Cage featuring physicist Brian Cox and comedian/actor Robin Ince, joined by others, arguing about the relative merits of cats and d*gs. Here’s the BBC summary.
Brian Cox and Robin Ince sniff and paw their way through the evidence to put to rest the age-old debate of whether cats are better than dogs. They’re joined by TV dragon and dog devotee Deborah Meaden, comedian and cat compadre David Baddiel, evolutionary scientist Ben Garrod and veterinarian Jess French. They learn how the domestication of our four-legged companions by humans has had a profound impact on their physiology, temperament and methods of communication. They debate which species is the most intelligent and skilled and try to lay to rest the most important question of all – which one really loves you?
Click on the title below to access the podcast.
Veterinarian Jess French is, in my view, the most eloquent exponent for cats, which, of course, is the best of the two species. The voice vote at the beginning shows, as it did during our Cat-vs-D*g debate for the New Yorker, that the audience is biased towards cats, for people want to be constantly loved by an animal.
But Listen to Jess French at 7:01, giving the reason she favors cats, which comports with my own view. Dogs are obsequious, while cats decide when to spend time with you—and that is more like what humans do. (French is also a television presenter and a well known author of children’s books on nature and animals).There is plenty of biology (and some evolution) involved, but of course it being the Monkey Cage, there’s plenty of humor as well.
In the end the participants have to choose. One person equivocates, one votes for cats, and one points out that cat owners don’t live as long as d*g owners. But a voice vote again is for d*gs, which is sad. In the end, they talk about their favorite other species, and you’ll want to hear French talk about the scariest animals she’s ever treated.
It’s a good episode and well worth listening to for a Saturday morning laugh-and-learn
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From ScienceAlert we have a story and a video about two lion brothers, one with a missing leg, crossing a crocodile- and hippo-infested river in Uganda. Click the headline to see, and there’s a video below:
Excerpts:
A pair of lion brothers have been captured on video taking a death-defying 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) swim across a Ugandan river packed with predators – a sign of increasing human-caused pressures forcing animals to take more risks.
The brothers, Jacob and Tibu, crossed the Kazinga Channel at night. It’s the first visually documented long-distance swim for African lions (Panthera leo), and it involved a couple of false starts.
Researchers recorded potential predators possibly trailing the lion duo before they successfully made it across. In collaboration with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the international team tracked their movements using heat-detecting drone cameras.
“Lions are known to hunt both crocodiles and hippos on occasion, but when in water they themselves become vulnerable,” the researchers write in their published paper.
“River crossings in Africa come with considerable risk of injury, or even death, from encounters with the much larger Nile crocodile or hippopotamus.”
The video (there is not much video of the swim, so watch carefully near the end):
They made it! A bit more:
“The fact that he and his brother Tibu have managed to survive as long as they have in a national park that has experienced significant human pressures and high poaching rates is a feat in itself,” Braczkowski adds.
The reason for Jacob and Tibu’s adventure? Most likely, finding females to mate with. However, this is less a story of romantic courage, and more a sobering tale about a lion population that has been decimated by poaching and expanding human activity across Queen Elizabeth National Park.
“Our science has shown this population has nearly halved in just five years,” says Braczkowski.
Indeed, there is a road bridge that the lions could’ve used more safely – but conservationists think that the presence of people on and around the bridge, which is currently being guarded by the Uganda Peoples’ Defense Force, would’ve put the brothers off using it.
Instead, researchers have observed lions choose the far-riskier, croc- and hippo-infested lake channel crossing six times.
. . . “Competition for lionesses in the park is fierce and they lost a fight for female affection in the hours leading up to the swim, so it’s likely the duo mounted the risky journey to get to the females on the other side of the channel,” says Braczkowski.
ListVerse gives 10 heartwarming and “scientific” stories about cats, many accompanied by videos. Click below to read, and I’ll show a few of the videos:
A contraceptive vaccine for feral cats, easier than trapping and neutering:
Cats sitting in squares:
Exceptional visual perception and brain wiring are why cats love sitting in 2D squares or other shapes, even if those shapes are incomplete (i.e., four cut-outs placed apart from each other in the shape of a square).
The fact that these appear to create an enclosed form is the Kanizsa square illusion, exploiting our brain’s tendency to fill the gaps and see contours that aren’t there. The same thing occurs in the cat’s mind, meaning your kitty will likely love a flat, incomplete square as much (or almost as much) as a fresh, cozy box.
If you have a cat, you may have noticed that they have whiskers on their legs. But what are whiskers for?
Cats don’t just have whiskers on the whiskers part of their bodies. They also have whiskers on the non-whiskers part of their bodies, including the back of their legs. These are called carpal vibrissae because carpus means wrist, and vibrissae is the fancy Latin scientific word for whiskers, or technically nose hairs.
Like the whiskers around their snouts, these vibrissae aren’t just to tickle you; they’re sensory organs used for sensing a cat’s surroundings. They can detect tiny movements, such as air pressure changes and the surrounding environment, to help cats navigate their world and achieve their superb feline agility. By using these wrist whiskers, as it were, cats can feel surfaces and objects, giving them better spatial awareness, environmental orientation, and hunting skills.
And a new breed of cat with unusual fur:
The universe released a new cat type, recently described by science, in May 2024. This rare, domestic Finnish feline has a novel coat pattern called “salmiak,” and it’s kind of a cookies-and-cream vibe. People in Finland began noticing the pattern emerging around 2007, noting that instead of conventional tuxedos, these black-and-whites rocked a color gradation, like a sprinkling of salt and pepper. The ombré effect occurs as the fur grows lighter from root to tip, from black to white.
To make it official, scientists identified the genetic mechanics in the journal Animal Genetics as “a 95-kb deletion downstream of the KIT gene.” Ah, of course, that makes so much sense! In more understandable terms, a missing piece of DNA leads to the “salmiak” coat type, named after a popular type of Finnish salty licorice. Because Finnish people love licorice for some reason. But they love cats, too, so it evens out
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Lagniappe: Cats in a Japanese cat cafe react to a 2018 earthquake. I’m betting they started reacting before humans detected the quake, and they flee quickly.
Welcome to Sunday, July 9, 2023, and National Sugar Cookie Day. They’re best when made with cinnamon and brown sugar, and this subspecies is called “snickerdoodles”.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the July 9 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The AP reports that one of the “Manson Girls”, Leslie Van Houten, might be freed very soon. If you have a good memory, you’ll remember that there were four: Van Houten, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins (I can still remember them). Squeaky was released on parole after 34 years in jail for pointing a gun at President Gerald Ford. Krenwinkel, who participated in several murders, has been in prison since 1971: the longest-incarcerated woman in America. She has a parole hearing this November. Susan Atkins, also convicted of murder, died of brain cancer in prison in 2009 after 38 years in jail. As for Van Houten, also convicted for murder, she may be set free:
California’s governor announced Friday that he won’t ask the state Supreme Court to block parole for Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten, paving the way for her release after serving 53 years in prison for two infamous murders.
In a brief statement, the governor’s office said it was unlikely that the state’s high court would consider an appeal of a lower court ruling that Van Houten should be released.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is disappointed, the statement said.
Newsom had previously overturned a parole board’s recommendation for release in 2021, but apparently the California Supreme Court can overrule the Governor’s decision
Van Houten, now in her 70s, is serving a life sentence for helping Manson and other followers in the 1969 killings of Leno LaBianca, a grocer in Los Angeles, and his wife, Rosemary.
Van Houten could be freed in about two weeks after the parole board reviews her record and processes paperwork for her release from the California Institution for Women in Corona, her attorney Nancy Tetreault said.
She was recommended for parole five times since 2016 but Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown rejected all those recommendations.
However, a state appeals court ruled in May that Van Houten should be released, noting what it called her “extraordinary rehabilitative efforts, insight, remorse, realistic parole plans, support from family and friends” and favorable behavior reports while in prison.
“She’s thrilled and she’s overwhelmed,” Tetreault said.
“She’s just grateful that people are recognizing that she’s not the same person that she was when she committed the murders,” she said.
After she’s released, Van Houten will spend about a year in a halfway house, learning basic life skills such as how to go to the grocery and get a debit card, Tetreault said.
“She’s been in prison for 53 years. … She just needs to learn how to use an ATM machine, let alone a cell phone, let alone a computer,” her attorney said.
Van Houten and other Manson followers killed the LaBiancas in their home in August 1969, smearing their blood on the walls after. Van Houten later described holding Rosemary LaBianca down with a pillowcase over her head as others stabbed her, before herself stabbing the woman more than a dozen times.
Smiling at the trial. The AP caption is “From left: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, walk to court to appear for their roles in the 1969 cult killings of seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, in Los Angeles, Calif.”
*It’s a slow news day, but perhaps you’ll be interested in the NYT’s report (and the paper) on the first beetle ever discovered missing its elytra (the hard wing covers of a beetle that makes them tough. You can find the paper free by clicking on the screenshot of its title:
The insect in the small specimen collection of Lund University in Sweden looked out of place.
“OK, this is a prank,” Vinicius Ferreira, an insect taxonomist and evolutionary biologist, said to himself. “It’s a joke.”
The beetle — only one-tenth of an inch and found in 1991 in Oaxaca, Mexico, among leaf litter of a pine and oak forest floor at an elevation of more than 9,500 feet by the naturalist Richard Baranowski — was most definitely a male. But it was missing one of the animal’s defining characteristics: the tough forewing casing known to scientists as the elytra.
After careful analysis, Dr. Ferreira described the insect this month in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society as a previously unknown but “extraordinary” elytra-less species of beetle: Xenomorphon baranowskii.
“Boom. We found this really weird animal. The ‘alien’ beetle,” Dr. Ferreira said, selecting a name that honored Dr. Baranwoski and also called to mind the “Alien” of his favorite sci-fi movie franchise.
Wing loss has been seen in several beetle species, as well as loss of the elytra in females. But this male (only one specimen has been described) is the first to lack both wings and elytra. A photo is below: the scale shows how small it is.
(From the paper): Xenomorphon baranowskii. A, C, D, dry specimen. B, E–G, photographed in glycerin. A, dorsal view. B, ventral view. C, detail of head in dorsal view. D, thorax in dorsal view. E, detail of mouthparts. F, detail of male terminalia in ventral view. G, male genitalia in dorsal, lateral and ventral view.
Xenomorphon is the first anelytrous adult male beetle to be discovered. At first thought to be a damaged specimen, a thorough examination of its morphology indicated that it was, indeed, an individual that naturally did not have either wings or elytra, which is evidenced by the lack of a scutellar shield and other commonly found features present in the alinotum (Fig. 2A); in fact, the alinotum of the specimen fully resembles that of the larvae of other elateroid beetles (see Costa et al. 1988; Ferreira and Ivie 2022). The new genus displays a similar condition to that found in some ‘larviform females’, having a remarkable morphological similarity to females of Lampyris noctiluca Linnaeus, 1758 (Lampyridae) (Novak 2017, Keller 2022), the common glow-worm of Europe, for example.
This male shows a paedomorphic condition, in which the junvenile morphology of the individual persists into adult life. The authors note that there may be advantages of losing wings and elytra at high altitudes, like being less likely to be blown away by the wind. But the males also sacrifice their ability to find females. All in all, we don’t know why these males have lost their wings and elytras, but first we need to find more than one male to be sure this is a general condition. And, as the authors say, “Further studies are needed for a definitive answer to explain the loss of elytra of Xenomorphon.”
*Here’s a headline from Newsweek, courtesy of Luana. Click to read; I’ll quote a bit below. It’s funny because Ben & Jerry’s are always proclaiming that they occupy the moral high ground. Not this time!
An Indigenous tribe descended from the Native American nation that originally controlled the land in Vermont the Ben & Jerry’s headquarters is located on would be interested in taking it back, its chief has said, after the company publicly called for “stolen” lands to be returned.
Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation—one of four descended from the Abenaki that are recognized in Vermont—told Newsweek it was “always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands,” but that the company had yet to approach them.
It comes after the ice cream company was questioned as to when it would give up its Burlington, Vermont, headquarters—which sits on a vast swathe of U.S. territory that was under the auspices of the Abenaki people before colonization.
“The U.S. was founded on stolen Indigenous land,” the company said in a statement ahead of Independence Day. “This year, let’s commit to returning it.”
If they did, I think this would be a real first for American companies and universities, and others would be pressured to follow.
Maps show that the Abenaki—a confederacy of several tribes who united against encroachment from a rival tribal confederacy—controlled an area that stretched from the northern border of Massachusetts in the south to New Brunswick, Canada, in the north, and from the St. Lawrence River in the west to the East Coast.
This would put Ben & Jerry’s headquarters, located in a business park in southern Burlington, within the western portion of this historic territory—though it does not sit in any modern-day tribal lands.
“We are always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands throughout our traditional territories and providing opportunities to uplift our communities,” Stevens said when asked about whether the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe would want to see the property handed over to Indigenous people.
While the chief said that the tribe “has not been approached in regards to any land back opportunities from Ben & Jerry’s,” he added: “If and when we are approached, many conversations and discussions will need to take place to determine the best path forward for all involved.”
Unfortunately, Ben & Jerry’s have no comment about the situation. Let’s see if they put their factory where their mouth is.
*We’re told that this week had some of the hottest days on record, or even in many thousands of years, but since records have been kept for only about two centuries or so, you might have asked yourself, “How can they make such a statement”? The Washington Post gives us some clues.
In recent days, as the Earth has reached its highest average temperatures in recorded history, scientists have made a bolder claim: It may well be warmer than any time in the last 125,000 years.
Tracing climatic fluctuations back centuries and millennia is less simple and precise than checking records from satellites or thermometers. It involves poring through everything from ancient diaries to lake bed sediments to tree trunk rings.
But the observations are enough to make paleoclimatologists, who study the Earth’s climate history, confident that the current decade of warming is exceptional relative to any period since before the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago.
Our understanding of conditions so long ago is far less detailed than modern climate data, meaning it’s impossible to prove how hot it might have gotten on any given day so many thousands of years ago. Still, the Earth history gleaned from fossils and ice cores shows the recent heat would have been all but impossible over most of those millennia.
“There’s no way to drop one hot day into the middle of the ice age,” Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, said.
. . .If any a single day in the past 100,000 or 125,000 years could have been as hot as the Earth this week, scientists said it could only have occurred about 6,000 years ago. At that time, the planet had warmed with the end of the last ice age, and a period of global cooling began that would continue until the Industrial Revolution.
Scientists are confident that, apart from the global warming of recent decades, it was Earth’s warmest period in the past 100,000 years. They estimate that temperatures averaged somewhere between 0.2 degrees Celsius and 1 degree Celsius (0.36 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than they were from 1850-1900.
. . .That assessment states with “medium confidence” that temperatures from 2011-2020 exceed those of any multi-century period of warmth over the past 125,000 years.
Further, there is no evidence anywhere in scientists’ understanding of Earth’s history of warming that occurred nearly as rapidly as the ongoing spike in temperatures, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases.
If a hotter day happened on Earth anytime in the past, Alley said, it was the result of natural processes.
“The current rise is not natural, but caused by us,” he said.
*From Greg:
The New York Times‘ fondness for woo continues to grow: a big homepage article today declares that Uri Geller has “emerged the victor“. The evidence for this: Geller is rich and has opened a museum about himself; an Australian has written a coffee table book about him; and he has outlived his critic James Randi (who was 18 years older than Geller, and died in 2020 at the age of 92). And besides, what harm can there be in cultivating the habits of mind that allow people to believe in telekinesis? The Times used to be a little less credulous about such things, and the harm they can cause.
The article is in the “Business” section, so I guess how much money you have is the right way to judge who ‘wins’. But there’s nary a mention of the size of Randi’s estate– how can we be sure who really won?
From the NYT:
It’s a fortune he might have never earned, he said, without a group of highly agitated critics. Mr. Geller was long shadowed by a handful of professional magicians appalled that someone was fobbing off what they said were expertly finessed magic tricks as acts of telekinesis. Like well-matched heavyweights, they pummeled one another in the ’70s and ’80s in televised contests that elevated them all.
Mr. Geller ultimately emerged the victor in this war, and proof of his triumph is now on display in the museum: a coffee-table book titled “Bend It Like Geller,” which was written by the Australian magician Ben Harris and published in May.
The victor? The VICTOR? The NYT then admits that Geller wasn’t really banding spoons or was psychic; it was all trickery:
And the point is that Mr. Geller is an entertainer, one who’d figured out that challenging our relationship to the truth, and daring us to doubt our eyes, can inspire a kind of wonder, if performed convincingly enough. Mr. Geller’s bent spoons are, in a sense, the analog precursors of digital deep fakes — images, videos and sounds, reconfigured through software, so that anyone can be made to say or do anything.
And get a load of this:
If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this “if” — he is the author of a benign charade, which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. Small wonder that the anti-Geller brigade has laid down its arms and led a rapprochement with the working professionals of magic. He is a reminder that people thrill at the sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled. And now that fakery is routinely weaponized online, Mr. Geller’s claims to superpowers seem almost innocent.
No civility and fairness don’t demand the “if”—the possibility that he really was bending spoons with his brain. His followers now more or less admit it, and magicians like Randi could do it regularly. By saying that Geller “won”, and putting in that “if”, the NYT is once again pandering to woo. And if it wasn’t woo, but just magic, then Geller lost and Randi won. Oh, and the NYT also lost.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are discussing demeanor and philosophy:
Szaron: Nothing induces me to be optimistic.
Hili: You can always choose a stoic calm.
In Polish:
Szaron: Nic mnie nie skłania do optymizmu.
Hili: Zawsze można wybrać stoicki spokój.
And a nine-year-old dialogue with Hili and her late friend Cyrus the d*g:
Hili: And a cat will lead you.
Cyrus: If you keep talking so much, I will bite your tail.
in Polish:
Hili: I kot będzie cię prowadzić…
Cyrus: Jak będziesz tyle gadać to ugryzę cię w ogon.
From Masih, a brave Iranian woman, of which there are many:
For women, singing is forbidden in Iran. This woman is bravely singing in one of Esfahan’s most historical mosques. When the security agent tried to stop her, she resisted and continued. Brave Iranian women like her will some day bring down this most anti-woman regime. pic.twitter.com/NvSgQqIFND
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) July 9, 2023
From Dr. Cobb. First, a NYT article about the Nazi destruction of a synagogue:
Pieces of Munich Synagogue, Destroyed on Hitler’s Orders, Found in River https://t.co/j3zjLdjuOC extraordinary and haunting – one of the fragments has the Hebrew 10 commandments that synagogues often display.
— marshall country mart (@marshallvore) July 6, 2023
A sad note: Michael Ashburner, a great Drosophila geneticist, just died. I knew him slightly: a terrific guy. But he smoked like a chimney, and that did him in.
I am incredibly sad to say that Michael Ashburner passed away last night after a long illness. A giant of fly genetics and biology he was also very influential in the development of bioinformatics. I will be eternally grateful for the kindness and support he showed me. RIP
— Steven Russell @SteveRuss@mstdn.social (@sr120) July 7, 2023
As I head out for Poland, I leave you with a video of the late Zeus, THE WORLD’S TALLEST D*G. Zeus was a Great Dane in every sense of the word, and he has his own Wikipedia page, which says this:
Standing on his hind legs, Zeus stretched 7 feet 5 inches (2.26 meters), and when measured in October 2011, Zeus was 3 feet 8 inches (1.12 meters) from his foot to his withers.
But it also says that Zeus died in 2014 at the age of six. Big dogs tend to die young, and I’m not sure why that is. Chihuahuas, on the other hand (and I’ll stifle myself here), seem to live forever.
Anyway, enjoy a big d*g! If you’re a canid lover, be sure to check out Wikipedia’s “List of individual dogs.” Zeus actually seems to be the tallest d*g of all time, beating out “Giant George” by an inch.
This is both a speculative theory and a speculative explanation, but it came to me when I was preparing today’s “Caturday felid” post. Whenever I see a photo of an artist with a pet, it’s almost always a cat (very often a Siamese cat as well). In contrast, whenever I see an actor with a pet, it’s very likely to be a d*g. I can think of tons of artists (I mean those who paint, photograph, or draw) who had cats, artists like Klimt, Matisse, Warhol, Picasso, O’Keeffe, Warhol, and so on.
And my feeling is that actors have dogs more often than do artists. I can’t name many, but here are a few. I don’t think this is due to confirmation bias. Cat photos do tend to stick in my mind, but it’s irrelevant whether the cat is with an actor or artist.
Yes, there are artists who had dog and actors who have cats, but I’m making a statistical argument here. You could do a 2 X 2 table with the cells labeled “cats” and “dogs” at the top and “artists” and “actors” on the side. To do this right, you’d have to get several people to make a big list of actors and artists, not knowing about their pets, and then look up whether they had cats, dogs, or both. My guess is that artists would be significantly more cat-heavy than are actors, and you could test this association with a Fisher’s Exact test. (I suppose some people have both, so you’d have to add another cell and do a 2 X 3 chi-squared test.)
I have predicted this in the absence of known data, but here is my theory for such an association if it exists.
Here it comes: I am about to expound my theory.
My theory, which is mine, is that artists have cats because they admire their grace and beauty, which art is largely about. Cats are, in a way, living sculptures.
Actors, on the other hand, live for approbation and immediate and constant love. You can get that kind of affection from dogs, but not from cats, who are more aloof. If you want someone to tell you how great you are all the time, you’ll want a dog. If you want to simply admire the beautify of an animal, then a cat is where you should go.
This immediately suggests that politicians, who want obsequious followers, would in general have dogs more often than cats. I don’t know if Trump has a pet, but if he does, you know it would be a dog. Wikipedia’s list of “Presidential Pets”, which you should look at, suggests that, in general, I am correct. (Some presidents had pretty weird pets that were neither cats nor dogs.)
And that is my theory, which is mine. You may attack it if you will, and you’re welcome to do so in the comments. But you can’t refute it merely with anecdotes: by citing actors whom you know have cats and artists who have dogs. We are looking for a large-scale statistical association to test my theory, which happens to be mine.
I have no theory about musicians, except that I know Taylor Swift has several cats—the only thing I like about her. Oh, and Freddy Mercury had cats, too. If musicians tended to have cats more than dogs, though, that would refute the psychological underpinnings of my theory, for musicians, even more than actors, need immediate love. Actors often do their work onscreen where the love comes later, at the box office, but performing artists crave immediate gratification in the form of cheers and applause.
I was brought up imbued with science, so I’ll be glad to be tested, and will freely admit it if the data show I’m wrong.
