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.
Today was graduation at the University of Chicago, or rather, as someone pointed out, “convocation.” Here are the students lining up to march into the venue. Fortunately, the weather was lovely, though a bit hot; they hold graduation outdoors whether it’s sunny or rainy (the stage is covered, and they provide ponchos to everyone if it rains):
The line extended across 57th Street and in front of Regenstein Library:
And a panorama, which still shows only part of the lineup:
The ceremony (it was hot and the seats in the sun were largely empty):
And the happy graduates. The first shot shows my colleague Manyuan Long (left, in pink shirt) embracing his son, who just graduated.
Congrats to all graduates; I know what a happy time this is—the successful completion of four years of hard work (more for many grad students)!
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Reza Aslan. I dislike his apologetics for and whitewashing of Islam, his osculation of all faiths and false claim that, at bottom, they’re all the same, and his flaunting of his bogus credentials that he’s a “religious scholar.” His CNN show about religion, “Believer,” which I’ve written about before (here, here, and here), hasn’t been favorably reviewed (see the recent mixed review in the New Yorker as well as the last link), and the bits I’ve seen have been dire (I haven’t watched the whole series).
“Believer” was going to go into a second season after the first six episodes, but CNN announced a few days ago that the show would be canceled. My Schadenfreude, however, has been considerably tempered by the reasons for the cancellation: not because the show was bad—though I gather it was, and the parts I saw were abysmal—but because Aslan issued a series of nasty tw**ts about Trump. As CNN itself reported:
The network said Friday that it has “decided to not move forward with production” on Aslan’s “Believer” series.
Season one of “Believer” premiered in March. Season two was announced at an event for advertisers in mid-May. Aslan’s production company had already started working on the new episodes.
But the network decided to break off the production relationship after Aslan called President Trump a piece of excrement, using an expletive, last Saturday.
. . . Aslan has been a virulent critic of Trump for some time, but this particular tweet crossed a line in the minds of some media critics. Prominent conservatives weighed in and said they wanted Aslan to be fired.
Aslan posted the tweet in reaction to Trump’s promotion of a “travel ban” in the immediate aftermath of a terror attack in London.
“I lost my cool and responded to him in a derogatory fashion. That’s not like me,” Aslan said in a statement the next day. “I should have used better language to express my shock and frustration at the president’s lack of decorum and sympathy for the victims of London. I apologize for my choice of words.”
CNN responded in a statement: “We are pleased that he has apologized for his tweets. That kind of discourse is never appropriate.”
The network’s statement also pointed out that Aslan is not a CNN employee. Unwinding the contractual relationship with Aslan’s production company apparently took several days.
CNN’s Friday statement about the cancellation of “Believer” said, “We wish Reza and his production team all the best.”
Here are the tweets at issue. I believe at least some of them have been deleted, but I can’t check because Aslan has blocked me from seeing his Twitter feed. These I got from Google image:
Now I wouldn’t have issued those tweets were I doing a show for CNN, even though I agree with Aslan’s sentiments, but he has to maintain a certain level of decorum. Even if he wanted to criticize Trump publicly, I wouldn’t have used “piece of shit,” nor will I use it on my own tweets now. Here’s his apology:
And here’s his statement that appeared his Facebook page:
That’s reasonable, but the part about “I need to honor my voice” rankles a bit since “honoring his voice” means using scatological language. I can’t imagine a public figure such as Neil deGrasse Tyson issuing tweets like that.
However, I’m not sure why someone who’s doing a CNN show has to mute their political opinions. I suppose the threats from conservatives were distressing to the network, and I guess there are journalistic considerations at issue that I don’t fully understand. Still, this amounts to a kind of censorship. Why couldn’t CNN have asked Aslan to apologize, and then let him continue the show? It may be the case that because the show didn’t get good reviews, their reason for canceling it could have been twofold.
But CNN’s statement prevents me from celebrating the cancellation of a dreadful show—not if it was done for political reasons. I thus share the sentiments of Ali Rizvi expressed below:
I'm not a fan of Reza Aslan, but I'm not a fan of his firing either: https://t.co/HWmvYNiPqE
In October, 2010 I posted the story of Kiddo the cat, a felid who nearly beat Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic. (Kiddo was on an airship, which ultimately had to ditch, but all hands and paws were rescued by the accompanying boat. Go look at that short post before you get to this update, which I hadn’t known when I wrote the earlier piece. It’s recounted by Aviation Humor (my emphasis):
In 1910 airman Walter Wellman and five companions attempted to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the airship America. He was also accompanied by his cat Kiddo. Unfortunately once they were underway Kiddo decided he was not so fond of flying and started causing trouble by meowing, crying and running around ‘like a squirrel in a cage.’ The airship America was the first aircraft to be carry radio equipment and the first engineer, Melvin Vaniman, was so annoyed by the antics of Kiddo that he was moved to make the first in-flight radio transmission to a secretary back on land.
The historic first message read:, “Roy, come and get this goddam cat!”
A plan was formed to lower the cat in a canvas bag to motorboat beneath the airship. An attempt was made, but failed because the seas were too rough for the boat to catch the bag, so it was pulled back up again and Kiddo was forced to continue the journey. Luckily Kiddo became more comfortable and settled down to become an excellent flying companion. Navigator Murray Simon wrote that he was ‘more useful than any barometer.’ And that ‘You must never cross the Atlantic in an airship without a cat.’ He slept comfortably in a lifeboat and seemed to only become agitated when he sensed there was weather trouble ahead.
Kiddo and Melvin Vaniman
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A Russian cat rescued a baby! Here’s the skinny (original story from Pravda):
A baby found abandoned in a box on a cold winter day in Russia is alive and well today – all thanks to one cat’s life-saving cuddles.
As Russian news outlet Pravda reports, the two-month-old baby boy was discovered near the dumpsters of an apartment complex in the city of Obinsk, after resident Nadezhda Makhovikova heard the desperate meowing of the building’s communal cat, Murka.
When Makhovikova arrived to investigate, she found the long-haired tabby cat cuddled alongside the helpless infant, sheltering him from the sub-freezing temperatures like she would her own kitten.
“One side [of the baby] was already hot – [the] cat warmed [him] in the few hours he spent in her box,” Makhovikova says, as translated by Google.
Here’s a video of the heroic cat, which was undoubtedly more efficacious because it was very FURRY:
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And finally, though I may have published this before, here’s a d*g trained to carry a cat home, which is the proper function of a d*g. I’m not sure what language is being spoken here, but readers will sort that out:
We continue the saga of reader Diane G.’s orphaned raccoons (see here and here for Parts I and II). Her notes are indented:
Coonlets in Sunshine
I’m really not trying to spam WEIT with these young’uns–honest! But Thursday I finally got some daylight pics, so thought I’d send those along before I quit. These were taken less than five minutes after I’d put the bird feeders back out. As you can see, they’re getting quite brazen! They took an initial run to the top of the pole (well, all but the one–Louis II?), but soon remembered I posed little threat and scurried back down to where I’d just spread some peanuts for the ground birds.
I also wanted to answer some of the questions/concerns raised in Thursday’s post which I didn’t have time to get to then.
I love what it says about people that we care so much about little critters like these. Sadly, orphan raccoons are not all that rare; just think about the adult roadkill you see if you live in raccoon country. One of the most heartbreaking sights I’ve seen was when I was driving home from an airport north of here, in the middle of the night, and came across a fresh adult roadkill with two very young babies milling around it, looking totally lost and as if they were desperately trying to wake Mom up…There was little I could do at that hour in those circumstances, and by the time I returned, the babies were gone.
This time of year the countryside is full of clumsy, ingenuous–and invariably adorable–offspring. All around our field various species of birds are feeding their fledglings–Field Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Orioles, Cardinals, Chickadees, Crows, Robins, and more; it’s also the season of the tiny, spotted fawns. Rehabilitators tend to be inundated now. The last time I was concerned about orphan raccoons, I was told that if they were on their own and seemed to be foraging successfully, the best thing to do is just let them be. Bringing them in would only further acclimate them to humans, which is decidedly not in their ultimate best interest. (Especially in farm country, where they’re frequently regarded as varmints.)
This is also the 6th day I’ve seen them, an encouraging fact in itself, especially since there’s been no attrition. Actually, probably the best thing I could do would be to turn the hose on them; try to awaken what should be a natural fear of humans and encourage them to stick to the fencerows and forests where the foraging is more natural. Of course I’m not going to do that. But neither do I want to be the one who acclimates them to humans so much that they grow up (we hope they grow up!) to be regarded as pests and face a very real threat to their existence from our species. I think I’ll start by withholding the ground peanuts (there’s still a tube feeder of peanuts on a squirrel-baffled pole the kits can’t access), keep bringing the feeders in at night, and hope for the best. (I may ultimately have to quit putting the feeders out altogether for a while–but then I’ll worry about all my bird families!)
Aside from humans (and not just humans-with-guns, but also humans-with-cars), probably their next worst enemies are coyotes. Fortunately the coyotes haven’t put in much of a presence lately. There’s no predicting how long that will last, but human-acclimated coon kits would be in greater danger from them than properly wild kits.
I suspect some of you will disagree with my reasoning here, and I would be glad to consider your input as well. Thanks very much for reading.
It’s now (in the US) Saturday, June 10, 2017: graduation day at The University of Chicago. Today the campus will be overrun with maroon-robed students and their proud parents, though I fear for the peace of my ducklings! Here’s the venue, waiting for the activities to begin (employees are wiping down the seats). The stage for dignaries, speakers, and College officials is at the far end (the bell tower of Rockefeller Chapel looms in the distance), and the quad is full of seats.
I don’t yet know who is getting honorary degrees; the University has a tradition (unique as far as I know) that only recognized scholars get those degrees, so there will be no appearances or graduation speeches by humorists, authors, politicians, cartoonists or the like. The convocation address, likewise, is always given by a member of our faculty; this year it’s Ka Yee C. Lee, professor of chemistry.
The gate in the biology area (“Hull Court”) through which the seniors will march after they’ve graduated (duck pond to the right after you pass through the gate:
It’s also National Iced Tea Day, appropriate since the temperatures today and tomorrow will be in the 90s (or mid 30s Celsius). It’s Army Day in Jordan and Navy Day in Italy.
It was not a big day in history, On June 10, 1935, Dr. Robert Smith, an alcoholic surgeon, took his last drink and, with his friend Bill Wilson, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio. On this day in 1942, the Czech village of Lidice was razed, and its inhabitants killed (men) or sent to the camps (women and children; nearly all died) in reprisal for the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich. Finally, on June 10, 1944, Joe Nuxhall took the mound to pitch part of an inning for the Cincinnati Reds, becoming, at age 15, the youngest player to ever take part in a major-leage baseball game. There was a shortage of players during the war, and Nuxhall, called in during the ninth inning to help with a 13-0 losing score against the St. Louis Cardinals, promptly yielded five more runs and was pulled from the game. He later came back to the major leagues in 1952 and pitched until 1967, when he retired and became a broadcaster.
Notables born on this day incude Hattie McDaniel (1895), Saul Bellow (1915), Judy Garland (1922), Maurice Sendak (1928), biologist E. O. Wilson (1929; he’s 88 today), and Elizabeth Hurley (1965). Those who died on this day include Antoni Gaudi (1926; hit by a trolley), Marcus Garvey (1940), Jack Johnson (1946), Spencer Tracy (1967), Ray Charles (2004) and Gordie Howe (last year).
Charles is surely most famous for singing “Georgia On My Mind,” a very great song, but it’s become a bit of a cliche, and I prefer his version of the Eddy Arnold song “You Don’t Know Me,” performed here in a lovely duet with Diana Krall:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili looks very cute as she espouses Cat Theology:
Hili: The argument from authority says that I shouldn’t go any further.
A: Whose authority?
Hili: Mine.
In Polish:
Hili: Argument autorytetu mówi, że nie powinnam iść dalej.
Ja: Czyjego autorytetu?
Hili: Mojego.
Grania found a cat/bogroll tw**t with a video; note that the paper is in the MacPherson position:
UPDATE: In a review in The American Scholar, Michael Shermer gives Sapolsky’s book a very positive review, and also has a few words of his own on free will. Shermer’s assessment:
The book is Sapolsky’s magnum opus, not just in length, scope (nearly every aspect of the human condition is considered), and depth (thousands of references document decades of research by Sapolsky and many others) but also in importance as the acclaimed scientist integrates numerous disciplines to explain both our inner demons and our better angels. It is a magnificent culmination of integrative thinking, on par with similar authoritative works, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. Its length and detail are daunting, but Sapolsky’s engaging style—honed through decades of writing editorials, review essays, and columns for The Wall Street Journal, as well as popular science books (Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, A Primate’s Memoir)—carries the reader effortlessly from one subject to the next. The work is a monumental contribution to the scientific understanding of human behavior that belongs on every bookshelf and many a course syllabus.
I guess I’d better read it now!
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Robert Sapolsky is a professor of neurology at Stanford, and is well known for his popular writing, especially on anthropology. He got a MacArthur “genius award,” and, like me, was raised Jewish, became an atheist, and got the Freedom From Religion’s “Emperor Has No Clothes Award“. I haven’t read much of his stuff but I know a lot of readers like it, because they recommend it to me all the time.
I’ve started liking him since a reader whose name I’ve forgotten (apologies) recommended that I read an interview Sapolsky had at Vox with Sean Illing, “A Stanford scientist on the biology of human evil.” The occasion was the publication of Sapolsky’s new book, Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst, which is Amazon’s #1 best seller in Biology (I haven’t read it). The interview is wide ranging, and I’ll reproduce just one bit on a topic that interests me. I’ve put asterisks on the last three sets of questions and answers, which form the crux of the discussion and clear up some common misconceptions.
Oh, and I guess he’s not a compatibilist. 🙂
Free will is an illusion
Sean Illing
Okay, but in the book you come awfully close to concluding something very different. Specifically, in your discussion of free will, you reluctantly embrace a deterministic account of human behavior. You argue that free will is, in fact, an illusion, and if that’s true, I’m not sure how “malleable” we can be.
Robert Sapolsky
If it seemed tentative, it was just because I was trying to be polite to the reader or to a certain subset of readers. If there is free will, it’s free will about all sorts of uninteresting stuff, and it’s getting cramped into tighter and increasingly boring places. It seems impossible to view the full range of influences on our behavior and conclude that there is anything like free will.
Sean Illing
That’s a bold claim…
Robert Sapolsky
You’re right. On the one hand, it seems obvious to me and to most scientists thinking about behavior that there is no free will. And yet it’s staggeringly difficult to try to begin to even imagine what a world is supposed to look like in which everybody recognizes this and accepts this.
The most obvious place to start is to approach this differently in terms of how we judge behavior. Even an extremely trivial decision like the shirt you choose to wear today, if dissected close enough, doesn’t really involve agency in the way we assume. There are millions of antecedent causes that led you to choose that shirt, and you had no control over them. So if I was to compliment you and say, “Hey, nice shirt,” that doesn’t really make any sense in that you aren’t really responsible for wearing it, at least not in the way that question implies.
Now, this is a very trivial thing and doesn’t appear to matter much, but this logic is also true for serious and consequential behaviors, and that’s where things get complicated.
*Sean Illing
If we’re just marionettes on a string and we don’t have the kind of agency that we think we have, then what sense does it make to reward or punish behavior? Doesn’t that imply some degree of freedom of action?
*Robert Sapolsky
Organisms on the average tend to increase the frequency of behaviors for which they’ve been rewarded and to do the opposite for punishment or absence of reward. That’s fine and instrumentally is going to be helpful in all sorts of circumstances. The notion of there being something virtuous about punishing a bad behavior, that’s the idea that’s got to go out the window.
I always come back to the example of epilepsy. Five hundred years ago, an epileptic seizure was a sign that you were hanging out with Satan, and the appropriate treatment for that was obvious: burning someone at the stake. This went on for hundreds of years. Now, of course, we know that such a person has got screwy potassium channels in their neurons. It’s not them; it’s a disease. It’s not a moral failing; it’s a biological phenomenon.
Now we don’t punish epileptics for their epilepsy, but if they suffer bouts frequently, we might not let them drive a car because it’s not safe. It’s not that they don’t deserve to drive a car; it’s that it’s not safe. It’s a biological thing that has to be constrained because it represents a danger.
It’s taken us 500 years or so to get to this revelation, so I don’t know how long it will take us to reach this mindset for all other sorts of behaviors, but we absolutely must get there.
*Sean Illing
So what is true for the epileptic is true for all of us all of the time? We are our brains and we had no role in the shaping of our biology or our neurology or our chemistry, and yet these are the forces that determine our behavior.
*Robert Sapolsky
That’s true, but it’s still difficult to fully grasp this. Look, I believe there is no free will whatsoever, but I can’t function that way. I get pissed off at our dog if he pees on the floor in the kitchen, even though I can easily come up with a mechanistic explanation for that.
*Sean Illing
Our entire notion of moral and legal responsibility is thrown into doubt the minute we fully embrace this truth, so I’m not sure we can really afford to own up to the implications of free will being an illusion.
*Robert Sapolsky
I think that’s mostly right. As individuals and a society, I’m not sure we’re ready to face this fact. But we could perhaps do it bits and pieces at a time.
This post is mostly for Americans. since today’s Hili dialogue showed me that we not only have a lot of British readers, but they know a lot about UK politics.
In yesterday’s British elections, the Tories failed to win a Parliamentary majority, having lost at least 12 seats. They now have 318 seats in the House of Commons: less than 49% of the 650 seats.
That presages stalemates, but Theresa May has a solution. She’s courting the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which won ten seats. Those, plus the 318 Tory seats, will give them 328 seats in total–just enough to have a majority.
But the DUP is a nasty piece of work. It was founded, for one thing, by the bigot Ian Paisley, and its goal is to keep Northern Ireland in the UK. It supported Brexit, and has a number of other odious stands, with many of its influential representatives promoting young-Earth creationism (see here, here, here, and here for documentation).
The first link documents DUP members’ opposition to gay rights and gay marriage and their opposition to abortion (a party plank). They appointed a climate change denialist as their environment minister. The DUP campaigned for Brexist. Arelene Foster. the DUP’s head, was implicated in a “cash for ash” scandal that secretly bilked the taxpayers in an energy scheme (read about it here).
Finally, there’s their views on evolution (the other links), which alone puts the party beyond the pale of rationality. (Even the Conservatives aren’t evolution denialists.) As the Independent notes:
Evolution and creationism
The party counts a number of creationists among its senior members.
DUP assembly member for West Tyrone, Thomas Buchanan, last year endorsed an event promoting creationism to be “taught in every school”.
The event included presenting “the biblical case for the sound teaching of children” that will “offer helpful practical advice on how to counter evolutionary teaching”.
DUP politician Edwin Poots has expressed his views that the planet is a “young earth” created just 4,000 years ago.
“You’re telling me that cosmic balls of dust gathered and there was an explosion. We’ve had lots of explosions in Northern Ireland and I’ve never seen anything come out of that that was good,” he told the Radio Times.
What a maroon! What we have, then, is a Conservative PM and, if DUP gets aboard, a conservative majority in Parliament, something resembling the horrible conjunction of conservative leadership we have in the U.S. I was happy when I heard that the Tories didn’t have an effective majority last night, but now it looks as if they might. And Brexit, despite its implicit rejection in the party’s loss of seats, can proceed as planned.
