Category: solipsism

A thought

July 22, 2018 • 11:00 am

I’ve probably lived at least two-thirds of my life, and as I progress toward extinction I realize that while it’s easy to read books and gain scientific knowledge about the universe, one part of our cosmos is impossible to master completely: how to deal with other people. Humans are so multifarious in their behavior, so complex and so different from each other, that treating them well and with empathy demands the skill of experienced therapists but not their emotional disengagement from their patients. After all, subjectivity is part of our emotional connection with others.

I think that I’ve improved at these skills as I grow older, because they come only with experience. We see what works and what doesn’t, and form general rules that have to be modified with each person we encounter. And so, though I think I’ve largely filled the well of my knowledge about biology, I’ll never stop learning about how to deal with people.

The sad part is that because that learning comes only with long experience, you become wisest about human interactions when you reach your dotage. At that point, you’re in a race between increased understanding of human behavior and feelings on the one hand, and on the other the curmudgeonly behavior, or even senility, that comes with age. What a pity that when we finally master the skills of social interaction, we’re almost too old to use them!

 

My profile in the Chicago Maroon

February 15, 2018 • 12:45 pm

Well, I’m informed by the writer, Lee Harris, that the Chicago Maroon has just posted her profile of me, and you can see it by clicking on the screenshot below.

I suspect it will be controversial since I repeat my support of euthanasia for terminally afflicted newborns, call out the Identitarian Left for its shenanigans, and promote the idea of determinism and lack of free will. But it also has cool stuff about my lab wall (something I haven’t written about here) and about my beloved squirrels. Photos were mostly taken by Lee; the one below is for an upcoming book and was actually taken by photographer Mike Myers (I’ll ask them to correct it).

If you read it, remember that this is a transcript from a conversation, not written prose. But I’m pleased with it; it’s fair and balanced and—I hope—interesting.

And some photos with the Maroon’s caption:

My grandfather killed his cousin!

February 5, 2018 • 2:00 pm

Last week, as a result of a friend looking up my ancestry, I discovered some weird stuff in the family tree. First of all, the name “Coyne” extends back to Ireland at least as far as the early eighteenth century, back to one John W. Coyne of Galway. And it could go even farther back than that. For years I’ve been telling people that the name “Coyne” must have been changed from “Cohen” or “Cohan” in recent times to masquerade someone’s Jewishness.  Further, it’s possible that the lineage of Coynes extending down to John’s grandson Peter Coyne, wasn’t Jewish at all. My cousin Jeff reported that the marriage of Peter to Pauline Zoffer in Brooklyn in 1874, though printed as a “Jewish wedding” in the papers, was actually a mixed marriage of a Jewish woman to a non-Jewish man, which caused great consternation in the Zoffer family.

What makes this weirder is that when I got my Y chromosome tested about ten years ago to see if I was a member of the Jewish kohanim tribe, I found out that although I wasn’t a member of this elite subgroup, my Y was definitely of Eastern European Jewish origin. Since my Y must have belonged to John W. Coyne and all his Coyne-ian ancestors, including my father (the Y is transmitted as if it’s attached to the father’s last name), it’s not clear why, if Coynes from John to Peter were gentiles, my Y was Jewish. (My dad was Jewish according to Jewish law, since his mother was Jewish.) I may get a fuller DNA test in the future.

Further, I found out that my uncle Emil—my father’s sister’s husband—was not Jewish, so that was a mixed marriage, too, even though a rabbi performed the ceremony. There’s clearly been some substantial outbreeding in my family tree.

The latest tidbit, which I mentioned a few days ago, was that my father’s dad sued what looked to be one of his relatives. This is from the Pittsburgh Press on August 1, 1928:

I asked my friend, who turns out to be a crack sleuth, to find out what happened with this lawsuit. And this is what was unearthed.

First, the Cinncinnati Enquirer from August 3, 1928, reports that the extradition request was successful:

 

And this, from the Uniontown, Pennsylvania Morning Herald exactly a week later:

The upshot: my paternal grandfather sued his own cousin, and the cousin died, surely from the stress! My grandpa killed his relative!

All I can say is “Oy gewalt!”

 

Back from Greece!

February 1, 2018 • 1:30 pm

I continue to get clippings about my family (just skip this if you’re bored!). Here’s the family returning from our 2.5 years in Greece, as reported in the Evening Standard (Uniontown, Pennsylvania) on July 15, 1957. I was seven then, and if you can make out the words below, I was reported to speak fluent Greek (something that I’ve been told several times, and which I believe, for I pick it up quickly when I visit Greece).  The statements of my folks about Greece show that they enjoyed it, but were glad to get back the “old hometown”. My father was fond of such bromides.*

We had a sizeable mansion in Greece, living in the small town of Kiffisia—a suburb of Athens. (I still remember the address, 23 Pentelis Street, but when I went back some years ago the house was gone.) An Army captain could afford such luxury because everything was cheap. We had several acres of gardens, tended by two gardeners named Yiorgos and Bobby, and a maid named Despina. There were also lots of stray cats that my mother fed.

As my dad noted, he missed fresh fruit, and I remember that an orange was a hard-to-find treat, even though it was Greece. Remember, this was ten years after the end of WWII, and the country was still suffering the aftereffects of the war and occupation.  I remember having to go down to the basement every morning to fetch two big cans of milk, as we weren’t supposed to buy fresh milk.  Some of the canned stuff went to the cats.

I was able to make out the text below, but it took time. Note that I had a big grin, for these were the days before I became lugubrious.

Tomorrow: How my grandfather killed his cousin.

*Every night my father would tuck me in, and often dispensed a witticism or bromide at bedtime. I remember several; here’s one: “Jerry, I’ve only been wrong once in my life, and that was when I thought I was wrong but I wasn’t.”

A bit more on my meshugge relatives

January 31, 2018 • 9:15 am

As I wrote yesterday, I continue to find out more about my relatives on my father’s side, and whether I have any gentile genes from Ireland remains a mystery. So does the source of the name “Coyne”, which apparently goes back in that form to the early 19th century—in Ireland.

But I now have several relevant newspaper articles found by a friend who subscribes to Newspapers.com, where apparently you can find nearly any clipping. From these I discovered that my father, his father, and his father’s mother were in a car crash on the Pittsburgh-Monongahela road on August 6, 1929; my dad was 11 and sustained “head injuries”, but nobody was seriously hurt.

Here are two items of interest—to me (I promise I won’t bore you with many of these). In this one, my paternal grandfather, Joseph C. Coyne of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, seems to have sued one of his relatives (Zoffer was his mother’s maiden name) for pecuniary reasons. This clipping, from the Pittsburgh Press on August 1, 1928, will surely raise the Jewish stereotypes:

And the wedding of Aunt Mannie, my father’s sister. I remember her well. Uncle Emil, her husband, died fairly young of a heart attack, and she spent her final years in Florida—the end of the line for all Jewish people. Before that she was the secretary of the famous and racist anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Note that my dad and my future mom (Lillian Frank, not yet married to my dad) were in attendance at the wedding, and my aunt is described as “attractive daughter of Joseph Coyne”! Also, it was a Jewish wedding—I’m not sure if Uncle Emil was Jewish—and the bride didn’t wear white.  This was published in the Morning Herald of Uniontown, Pennsylvania on June 23, 1939. Both bride and groom apparently worked at Joseph Coyne’s auto parts store.

I think our family has a penchant for outbreeding. My great-grandfather Peter Coyne (who married a Jewish woman) might himself have been a goy, my uncle Bernie took a shicksa for his second wife, much to my grandmother Sadie’s chagrin, and I’ve dated only two Jewish girls my entire life. Grandmother Sadie Frank was a piece of work: when I was in high school in Virginia, and she was visiting, she once gave me $5 to take a girl to the movies. When she found out the girl wasn’t Jewish, she took the money back. I am not making this up.

Oh, here’s my grandfather’s radio store (I didn’t know he had one along with the tire store and other stores); this was in the Evening Standard of Uniontown Pennsylvania on May 2, 1929, just a few months before the stock market crash that bankrupted Joseph Coyne:

More on my ancestry: Is my name really Irish? Were my ancestors gentiles? Is my genome kosher?

January 30, 2018 • 9:00 am

Today will be a bit solipsistic; so be it.

Yesterday, after I posted a picture of my dad that I’d never seen before, some kind readers went into ancestry.com and retrieved more information about the Coyne genealogy, most of which was new to me. I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but the most interesting one is that my last name came from Ireland, and has been “Coyne” at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The big mystery is whether the Irish Coynes were Jewish or not. Some of this info came from Ancestry.com, other bits from my cousin Jeff.

A bit of background: when I wrote WEIT, I had my Y chromosome tested to see if it was from the Kohanim tribe, the priestly “caste” of Jews. I was absolutely sure that, sometime in the last century and a half, my ancestors were named Cohan or Cohen—a Jewish name—and changed it at Ellis Island to sound less Jewish.

Well, the DNA from the Y chromosome turned out not to be the characteristic Y of the Kohanim. This priestly duty is passed from father to son, and there is a characteristic kohanim Y chromosome that identifies them. Like surnames, Y chromosomes are passed from father to son, and so if I was one of the high-class Kohanim, a genetic test would tell me. (Curiously, I don’t believe in any of that religious stuff, but I wanted to find out as a way to get into evolution as the genealogy of ALL LIFE. That would be the intro to my first book, but I ditched it.) Well, it turned out I was a fake Cohen: all Kohanim are named Cohen or Cohan or Cohane, but not all Cohens and the like are Kohanim. That’s because many Jews took the name Cohen to pretend they were of that caste.  But my Y did show that I was Eastern European Jewish, which comported with what I knew of my ancestry. And it also meant that every one of my patrilineal ancestors named Coyne must also have been Jewish, because they had the Jewish Y that was passed on to me.

Here is the strange part, though: the genealogy that one of my relatives put on Ancestry.com:

More background, some of which comes from my second cousin Jeffrey Coyne: my father, and his late sister Madeline, were the products of the marriage of Joseph Coyne (who ran an auto parts store in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and was fairly well off) and a woman named Florence Bloom.  Shortly after my father was born, his mother got the Spanish flu from the great epidemic in 1918, and died. (My father never knew his mother.) His father later remarried a much younger woman, Rose Keanan, and they had a son, Jack—my father’s half brother. My father was apparently poorly treated by Rose, and he and his sister were raised largely by their grandmother Pauline.  Joseph then lost every cent he had in the 1929 stock market crash, and, after he converted to Christian Science, he and Rose moved to Miami in the early 1930s, where Joseph died of a heart attack at 57 or 58. Rose remarried five or six times, and apparently remained a “hard drinking and bitter woman.” My father and his sister stayed in Pennsylvania.

Apparently because of the abusive way his step-mother treated him, and issues around the probate process when Joseph died, my father and Jack didn’t speak for decades—until they met again when I was a postdoc in Davis, California. (Jack lived nearby in Sacramento.) About 15 years ago I was contacted by Jack’s son Jeffrey, who taught law at Duke and also did private legal work, and he furnished me with some of the family history. (I believe all the information an Ancestry.com came from him.)

My paternal grandfather Joseph was Jewish, for his mother was Jewish: Pauline Zoffer, born in 1856 in Germany. Here’s the manifest of the ship Schiller when she came to the US in 1858, arriving with her mother and brothers Solomon and Heinrich (her age is given as five, so I’m not sure about the disparity; also, I was told by Jeffrey that Pauline’s father Isadore was also on the ship , though the manifest doesn’t show that).

 

Here’s the 1920 census showing my dad’s family at that time. Pauline Zoffer, his grandmother, is listed as residing at the home, including Joseph, his son Floyd (my dad), and my aunt Madeline (my dad’s sister). Apparently Joseph hadn’t yet remarried two years after his wife died in 1918:

As the diagram at the top shows, Pauline married Peter Coyne, born in New York in 1862. There used to be an announcement online of my paternal great-grandparents’ wedding in Brooklyn, and it was a small piece titled “Jewish wedding”, announcing that Peter and Pauline were married at a synagogue.  (Sadly, that announcement is no longer there, but I remember it.) That comports with Pauline’s religion, but what about Peter’s?  Jeff tells me that their marriage “caused a rift within the Zoffer family” because Pauline married a gentile, and that would mean that my name wasn’t Jewish—wasn’t changed from “Cohen” or “Coyne”. But if that’s the case, why do I have a Y chromosome showing Eastern European Jewish ancestry. For that would mean that Peter himself was not of complete gentile ancestry, but that his Y was Eastern European Jewish. (I have his Y.)

It is a mystery. Peter’s parents were Patrick and Catherine Coyne, with Patrick born in 1823 and Catherine in 1831, both in IRELAND. And Patrick’s parents were John and Ann Coyne, both Irish, too, with John born in 1803 in Galway and Ann born in 1805 in Ireland (no city specified). My name, and my Y chromosome, goes straight back to John W. Coyne.

Already, then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the name “Coyne” was still “Coyne”, and perhaps it was never “Cohan” or a variant therefore. All this time I’ve been telling people that my name was changed from something like “Cohan,” which was simply a guess.

While there is a small Jewish community in Ireland around Galway, there are also plenty of pure Irish Coynes. So I have no idea if my name was changed from something else, was always “Coyne”, and whether “Coyne” was even a Jewish name. Was the wedding in Brooklyn a “mixed” one? Why do I have a Jewish Y chromosome if my paternal great-grandfather was a gentile?

Although I’m an atheist, according to Jewish law I’m considered Jewish since my mother (the other side of the family) was 100% Jewish: the daughter of David and Sadie Frank, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe respectively.  But the source of my name, and of my Y chromosome, remains a mystery. Was “Peter Coyne” really Jewish and pretending to be a gentile, explaining why the “mixed” marriage really wasn’t mixed, even though it’s said to have angered my great-grandmother’s relatives?

Who knows? I’ll do some more digging when I have time. And maybe I’ll take a full DNA test (only Ys and mtDNA were available ten years ago).