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.
The final three are swallows: Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor, two photos) and a Violet-green Swallow (Tachycineta thalassina). They feed over the creek in large numbers when there’s an insect emergence (midges in this case). They’re fast and erratic in flight and difficult to photograph. I also see other swallow species: Barn swallows, Cliff Swallows, and Northern Rough-winged Swallows.
I’m amazed at how quickly the weeks whiz by: soon graduation will take place at most American colleges, and things will become quiet. (The University of Chicago is on the quarter system and so our graduation is late: exams begin June 8, and graduation is a week later. On the other hand, classes usually start in early October.)
The last two days have been chilly and rainy, and while today will also be on the chilly side (high of 47° F or 8° C), we’ll have no rain. Tomorrow a warm spell begins. Here’s a photo I took of downtown Chicago the day before yesterday, with the low clouds hiding much of the skyscrapers:
On May 3, 1715, there was a total solar eclipse across northern Europe and Asia, and it’s a sign of how advanced astronomy was then that Edmond Halley predicted its onset to within four minutes. On this day in 1848, according to Wikipedia, “The boar-crested Anglo-Saxon Benty Grange helmet [was] discovered in a barrow on the Benty Grange farm in Derbyshire.” Here’s the description, and I’ve put photographs of the original (on a stand) and a reconstruction below:
The most striking feature of the helmet is the boar at its apex; this pagan symbol faces towards a Christian cross on the nasal in a display of syncretism. This is representative of 7th-century England when Christian missionaries were slowly converting Anglo-Saxons away from traditional Germanic mythology. The helmet seems to exhibit a stronger preference toward paganism, with a large boar and a small cross. The cross may have been added for talismanic effect, the help of any god being welcome on the battlefield. The boar atop the crest was likewise associated with protection and suggests a time when boar-crested helmets may have been common, as do the helmet from Wollaston and the Guilden Morden boar. The contemporary epic Beowulf mentions such helmets five times and speaks of the strength of men “when the hefted sword, its hammered edge and gleaming blade slathered in blood, razes the sturdy boar-ridge off a helmet.”
The original with iron framework and bits of horn plates; the leather has since decayed:
Reconstruction:
On this day in 1913, the first full-length Indian feature film was released: Raja Harishchandra. It marked the beginning of the Indian film industry, and already you can see some signs of Bollywood below, in particular the interpolation of songs, the dancing and the style of singing:
Here’s the full movie if you’re so inclined (the quality is pretty poor):
On May 3, 1921, the Government of Ireland Act 1920 was passed, which recognized the division of Ireland into Northern and Southern parts. In 1948, in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme court rules that local laws could not ban the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities. In 1957, Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, decided to move the team to Los Angeles.
On May 3, 1960, the musical The Fantasticks opened in Greenwich Village in New York City, and ran for 42 years straight, making it the longest-running musical of all time. (My favorite song from that musical is here.) On this day in 1963, the Birmingham, Alabama police decided to battle civil rights demonstrators with fire hoses and vicious d*gs: a horrible display of violence that, since it was filmed, galvanized the civil rights movement. Here are some scenes from that day:
Finally, according to Wikipedia, it was on this day in 1978 that “The first unsolicited bulk commercial email (which would later become known as “spam“) [was] sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.”
Notables born on this day include Jacob Riis (1849), Vita Volterra (1860), Golda Meir (1898), Bing Crosby (1903), Pete Seeger (1919), Steven Weinberg (1933), and Christina Hendricks (1975).
Those who crossed the Rainbow Bridge on May 3 include Jerzy Kosiński (1991), Wally Schirra (2007), and Gary Becker (2014).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili once again thinks that she’s the Fulcrum of the World:
A: What are you doing up there?
Hili: I’m guarding the world’s order.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz pod sufitem?
Hili: Czuwam nad porządkiem świata.
A cartoon from Facebook. I’ll never recover from Gary Larson’s retirement from cartooning. Why can’t he just put out one every few weeks or so? What a loss of talent!
Another from Facebook:
Here’s my bff, the newly shaved Pi in his box:
From reader David:
Reader Barry calls our attention to the claws of this caracal:
From reader Nilou. I think this picture is photoshopped, but there are real X-ray very similar to this (see them here).
Kiwis lay the largest egg in relation to their body size of any species of bird in the world. It can weigh as much as 450 g: if we compare that proportion to humans, it would mean giving birth to a fully grown 4 year old kid https://t.co/XvvKvWR6hkpic.twitter.com/hx23ZH0JpE
Tweets from Grania. This one, from astronaut Christina Koch in the ISS, shows our beloved Great Lakes:
Waving to the mitten! Greetings to my friends and family in Michigan. The Great Lakes are as stunning from space as they are in person. pic.twitter.com/NELuPGchid
On this special day, let us once again remember and be grateful for this video of a dog owner pretending to collapse to test his Dachshund's reaction… pic.twitter.com/mJzJ7OpBuW
A woman and her tortoise: faithful friends for, yes, 57 years. The gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) is a denizen of the southeastern U.S., and is famous for being long-lived: they can live 40-60 years in the wild and up to 90 in captivity the video says 100). It looks like George, then, might outlive his owner Gina Smith.
What a pampered tortoise: he gets strawberries and kiwis for Christmas! Watch the video: it’s adorable.
There are two things that most of us have learned about religion and morality:
1.) People don’t really get their morality from religion—or at least most of it. That is, people don’t judge what is moral versus immoral behavior solely from the dictates of their faith, but rather from extra-Biblical sources that are antecedent to God’s wishes. There are of course exceptions: Christians often oppose abortion because they think fetuses have souls, and pious Muslims decree that homosexuality is a capital offense and women must be covered. But as Plato realized millennia ago in the Euthyphro Argument, most things are deemed “moral” or “immoral” not because they comport with the wishes of a deity, but because they comport with some extra-theistic versions of morality. If God, for instance, said that killing innocent people was good, not many folks would agree. (William Lane Craig is an exception, and he’s signed on to one version of that.) That’s because they think there are non-religious reasons to prohibit killing. All thoughtful morality is secular morality.
2.) When people say they get their morality from religion, they’re often picking and choosing from scripture, again taking those things that comport with a non-religious view of right versus wrong. That’s why most Christians reject the dictates of the Old Testament (approving of killing kids who curse their parents, as well as those who engage in homosexual acts or gather sticks on the Sabbath) in favor of the more comfortable statements from Jesus or the Ten Commandments. Nearly all adherents to every Abrahamic faith chooses those aspects of scripture that conform to their own notions of right and wrong—those notions that derive from #1 above.
And so Kate Cohen, an atheist writer, takes religious politicians to task in her excellent Washington Post article (click on screenshot), pointing out the flaws of bragging that your political views are good because they align with religion:
Although we’re well aware of how Republicans use scripture to support political issues like anti-abortion bills and a brake on stem-cell research, I hadn’t realized that so many Democratic candidates also claimed their politics were grounded in faith. (Of course, very few politicians are open atheists, but at least Democratic believers, who presumably support the First Amendment, don’t have to flaunt their religion).
An excerpt from Cohen’s piece:
I’m an atheist. I have bemoaned the fact that my country’s motto is “In God We Trust,” that elected officials are sworn in on holy books, legislative sessions begin in prayer, and big political speeches seem predestined to end with the phrase “God Bless America.” I think religion and government should be kept far apart. But if I ruled out all the self-proclaimed Christians in the race, I would lose a lot of great candidates. Cory Booker told a CNN town hall that “Christ is the center of my life”; Kamala D. Harris announced her candidacy “with faith in God”; Elizabeth Warren taught Sunday school and quotes the Gospel of Matthew.
That [Pete] Buttigieg is a Christian doesn’t concern me. But he’s not just a Christian; he also publicly advocates a reemergence of a “religious left.” He argues that Democrats should not be afraid to use religious traditions “as a way of calling us to higher values.” As he told Bill Maher, “When I go to church, what I hear a lot about is protecting the downtrodden, and standing up for the immigrant and being skeptical of authority sometimes and making sure you look after the poor and the prisoner.”
He told The Post that he wants to “remind people of faith why the same things that are being preached on Sunday apply to the policies that we’re making on Monday morning.” In other words, use religion as a tool for political persuasion.
It’s time to stop pandering to the faithful by parading how your beliefs support your politics. The reasons why can be seen in #1 and #2 above: your morals are antecedent to scripture, and if you buttress your liberal principles with faith, then you are susceptible to conservatives who buttress their more repugnant views with faith. After all, you can find any morality you like in the Bible. And even the Qur’an, filled as it is with hatred and xenophobia, can also be parsed as a “document of peace.”
It’s so refreshing to read stuff like this:
Here’s the thing: People bring their morality to their religious texts; they don’t get their morality from them. After all, how does Buttigieg decide what’s important in the Bible and what should be ignored, underplayed or dismissed as vestiges from another era? What does he measure each message against? His own innate sense of morality.
When Buttigieg argues that Democrats should be able to use religious traditions “as a way of calling us to higher values,” he means “higher” as in lofty. He’s not saying those values — compassion, justice, humility — are higher than the traditions themselves. But they are. Because those religious traditions also include the “values” of exclusion, patriarchy and tribalism. And, yes, even the “value” of homophobia.
The higher values that Buttigieg embraces — values I, an atheist, share — exist not because of religion but independent of it. Can he find Christian tenets to express those values? Sure. Could that help him urge “people of faith” to move their politics “in a certain direction”? Maybe.
In the second sentence above, Cohen distills the Euthyphro argument for the layperson. Kudos to her, and to the Post for publishing something by—horrors!—an open atheist.
Just don’t ask me how to pronounce “Buttigieg”. I can spell it but I can’t say it, and I’ve NEVER heard it pronounced on television.
Not long ago I wrote about how both a group of students and the student newspaper at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts are pushing to get “affinity housing” for students (a euphemism for segregated housing). The activist students, grouped together under the rubric of CARENow, have an Instagram site with many of their thoughts and demands. On that site, as well as at this link, appears a list of demands from CARENow addressed to the Trustees of the College (there is also a letter to the President of Williams, Maud Mandel, demanding her response by tomorrow at 5 p.m.)
One of the demands is for segregated housing: housing segregated not just by race, but by sexuality and other “minority characteristics”:
3. Improve community spaces and establish affinity housing for Black, queer, and all other minoritized students.
“Minoritized” is a new word that was coined to emphasize deliberate oppression rather than numerical minority status.
This is not just housing by choice, which Williams students are apparently already allowed to do after their first year, when they can live with whom they want. Rather, the students are apparently asking for university-mandated sequestration of entire buildings or sections of buildings for minority groups. In other words, segregation. No straight people allowed here, no white people allowed there, no non-Asian people allowed over there. This is what liberals have been fighting against for years, but apparently segregation is back again, and now appeals to the Left.
As I’ve said before, Williams’s President appears to share many of the characteristics of Evergreen State’s compliant president, George “Invertebrate” Williams. Mandel has said that she will respond to the student’s demand s by the deadline, and apparently she’s already been discussing them with CARENow, including the odious “affinity housing”. On the Instagram site, that group reports (below) that “the administration expressed general support for affinity housing and together we came up with a pilot program for affinity housing that was feasible given the avenues of change at the college.”
So the Williams administration is in favor of affinity housing. Apparently the faculty has no say in this kind of decision, but unless somebody acts now, it seems to me inevitable that Williams will soon return to the bad old days of segregation. Of course, if white people, or straight people, requested affinity housing, that would be horrible, something denigrated across the board—and rightly so. It only appears okay when minorities demand to be segregated, for the very same reason that Woke Students say that minorities cannot be racist.
But it is still wrong, and inimical to the purpose of a college, to balkanize its students into identity groups that are given space to live together and exclude others. For reasons I described in this post, which mentions research showing that separation is not the best way to make disparate groups empathize with one another, it’s not good for colleges to allow (much less provide) segregated housing on campuses.
Intelligent Design (ID) advocate David Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jew, spends a lot of time attacking me on the Discovery Institute Website Evolution News. It’s almost an obsessive animus, for he regularly trawls this site looking for ammunition. But I pay little attention to the man.
First of all, his criticisms of me have nothing to do with science, but are recycled tropes about how horrible atheism is. That’s because Klinghoffer and his ID cronies have no scientific ammunition against evolution, and so are reduced to ad hominems about evolutionists or criticisms of unbelief or moans about the destructive effects of accepting evolution. He also beefs endlessly about my “tone”. Sorry, but Liars for Moses—or Jesus—don’t deserve respect. Klinghoffer is irrelevant in any serious scientific discourse.
In the end, it’s almost amusing how desperate people like Klinghoffer have become. It’s now twenty years after the ID “Wedge Document” was leaked, with its timeline proposing that within two decades they would make ID and anti-materialism the dominant paradigm in science. Ultimately, their goal was to bring Jesus into the public schools, although I suppose that even Orthodox Jews like Klinghoffer can piggyback on Christianity. But they’ve failed at both endeavors, and so are reduced to flailing about in their pages.
Here’s one example (click on screenshot). It’s a very short read:
Klinghoffer quotes author and radio host Eric Metaxas, who himself appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, where Metaxas said this:
Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it. But what we does is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”
Klinghoffer adds:
Ugly indeed. To which Carlson agreed:
But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.
And so to the question that Klinghoffer thinks will flummox and destroy Darwinists (my emphasis)
Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?” It’s a good question to ask the next Darwinist with whom you have the opportunity to chat. Or the next theistic Darwin-appeaser who soothes us with the assurance that there is nothing terribly corrosive about the evolutionary perspective.
This is bizarre, and the rebuttals come easily to mind. The idea that being an atheist turns you into an amoral hedonist, too self-absorbed to even have children, is ridiculous. Nonbelievers may have fewer kids than, say, Mormons or Orthodox Jews, but it is the custom of those faiths to propagate. Nearly all of my atheist friends have kids.
Beyond that, the article is circular in its implicit assumption that because true meaning and purpose can come only from accepting God (and presumably following God’s Plan), then without God you are without purpose. And this is somehow supposed to be a reason for us to accept God, even though he doesn’t show himself these days.
And that’s a crock. In one of the most popular threads that ever appeared on this site, “What’s your meaning and purpose?“, I asked nonbelieving readers to tell me what they considered the purpose and meaning of their own existence. Almost all respondents (there were 373) found their meaning and purpose in their jobs, their avocations, their children, and so on, and not in worshiping a fictitious deity. The “Darwinian Perspective,” or at least the atheistic one, hadn’t at all proved terribly corrosive. Indeed, people found it liberating.
The idea that without God life has no meaning is patronizing, bogus, and wrong, and refuted by simply looking at the many atheists (or atheistic areas like Scandinavia) for which lack of meaning and purpose is not an issue.
Worse, Klinghoffer, Metaxas, and Carlson’s views boil down to something like this: “Believe in a god, even if there’s no evidence for one, because without it life has no meaning.”
But can you really force yourself to accept fiction solely on the grounds that it gives you a purpose? I can’t, and I doubt that most readers can. You’re either brainwashed from the get-go, and thereby get an automatic meaning, or you accept that there’s no evidence for a God and come to terms with it—just as we come to terms with our own mortality. As Plato recognized in the Euthyphro Dilemma, people really do get their morality (in Plato’s case, “piety”) not from God’s dictates but rather from non-goddy considerations—in other words, secular considerations.
This is why I find Klinghoffer and his ilk so ridiculous. They’re supposed to be supporting Intelligent Design, but since they can’t do that, they blather on about how Darwinism and atheism turn adherents into selfish, amoral nihilists. But there’s as little evidence for that as there is for ID itself.
It’s Thursday, May 2, 2019, and once again I must to go downtown this morning to have my iPhone battery installed. After making an appointment a week ago for an iPhone 5s battery replacement, I showed up downtown to find that they didn’t have the battery. Oy! They now have it. Ergo, I’ll be out of action much of the morning, and posting may be light. As always, I do my best.
On May 2, 1536, Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, was arrested on charges of treason, incest, and adultery. She was beheaded only 17 days later. On this day in 1559, John Knox, back from exile in Scotland, became the leader of the Scottish Reformation. Exactly nine years later, Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped from Loch Leven Castle to England. She was never to regain her throne, and was executed in 1567.
On this day in 1611, the King James version of the Bible was first published in London. Then we skip ahead several centuries: to May 2, 1945, when the fall of Berlin was announced by the Soviets.
On this day in 1952, the first regular jet airline service began, with the De Havilland Comet 1 making its maiden flight from London to Johannesburg. The jet had first been flown in a test three years earlier. Here’s the test plane:
On May 2, 1955, Tennessee Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his superb play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Here’s a scene from the movie, with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor as Brick and Maggie the Cat. What a handsome couple, but they fought like, well, cats and d*gs.
On this day in 2000, Bill Clinton announced that GPS technology and access would be made accessible to the public and not just the military, for which it was designed.
Finally, on this day in 2011, according to Wikipedia, “Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI’s most wanted man, is killed by the United States special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.” But yesterday the same announcement appeared on Wikipedia for May 1, 2011: “War on Terror: Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is shot and killed by U.S. Navy seals.” Which is it?
Notables born on this day include Catherine the Great of Russia (1729), Hedda Hopper (1885), Manfred von Richthofen (1892), Benjamin Spock (1903), Satyajit Ray (1921), Englebert Humperdinck (1936), and David Beckham (1975). Here are some goals from Beckham at the height of his career:
Those who passed away on on May 2 include J. Edgar Hoover (1972), Lynn Redgrave (2010), and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (2014).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej claims Hili’s tail shows that she’s assertive, but I thought a vertical tail was a sign of happiness:
Hili: I’m a very assertive cat.
A: I can see that.
Hili: How?
A: By your tail.
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem bardzo asertywnym kotem.
Ja: To widać.
Hili: Po czym?
Ja: Po ogonie.
From Facebook, a woke d*g is expelled:
Two tweets from Heather Hastie. I share her love of kakapos:
Once #kakapo chicks reach ~65 days of age they receive their first eryispelas vaccination. Erysipelas is a bacterial disease which killed 3 juvenile #kakaop in 2004 pic.twitter.com/gxYQ7x37rd
Tweets from Matthew. This first one is the first tweet in a very long thread about geese and ducks hatching at the National Geographic Building in Washington D.C., and how the staff leads them to water. Watch as many of them as you can:
