Open thread: Kathy Griffin resorts to the Old White Guys canard

June 3, 2017 • 10:00 am

by Grania

I think by now everybody is familiar with the event of the week where comedian Kathy Griffin decided that holding a prop of a bloody severed head of Donald Trump was a fine moment of political commentary and comedy.

Regardless of political persuasion, people generally reacted with distaste and revulsion, the image perhaps a little too close a reminder of the mindless savagery of ISIS and those of a similar ilk, and CNN fired her within 24 hours.

I find it hard to believe that she did not think that people would react to her stunt with outrage or distaste. If a right-wing comedian (is there such a thing in the US?) had done the same with a severed prop head of Barack Obama there would have been nation-wide outrage and op eds about systemic racism, charges of white supremacy and doubtless, demands that the perpetrator lose their job. That’s guaranteed. After all, there are plenty of people on the political left calling for professor Bret Weinstein to lose his job on charges of imaginary racism.

At her most recent appearance with her lawyer Lisa Bloom, Kathy Griffin broke down but maintained that she was the one being bullied and that she was being silenced by a bunch of old white guys.

In my opinion, if your very public behaviour is such that your employer no longer wishes to tolerate you, that is not censorship. Griffin does feminism no favour at all when she tries to absolve herself of the consequences of her actions and blame it all on the patriarchy.  At least Milo Yiannopoulos had sufficient dignity to apologise and move on when he found he had trespassed over the bounds of what his employer was prepared to tolerate.

Is Kathy Griffin the perpetrator or the victim?

Caturday felid trifecta: Simon’s Cat: “Off to the vet”; Porter the Toronto Police Marine Cat; Otter and Bengal cat pals

June 3, 2017 • 9:30 am

There’s a new “full length” color film of Simon’s Cat called “Off to the Vet”. Somehow I’ve seen a bit of this, but I can’t remember where, and it’s no longer on the Internet. It was hilarious. At any rate, there are several “making of” videos featuring Simon Tofield and his assistants. Here are three: one featuring a preview of the longer video, another (featuring Nicky Trevarrow of Cats Protection) telling you how to take your cat to the vet, and the third shows how the sound effects are made (nearly all by Simon himself). Here’s some information about the longer video (I don’t know how long it is):

Watch this preview to get a sneaky look at our first full colour film that features Simon, the cat and of course the internet’s cutest animated kitten in a series of cat fails and funny gags for the first time in a special length of 12 minutes.

FAQs:

Q. Why isn’t ‘Off to the Vet’ available in full on YouTube?
A. ‘Off to the Vet’ film production and crowdfunding campaign was a huge undertaking for the Simon’s Cat Team. Our hope is to produce more long form, full colour content for our fans but without having to turn to them through crowdfunding again. The film was completed in 2015 and submitted it to a selection of international film festivals over the following months. During this time it was exclusively available to all funders that contributed via our private production blog. The feedback we have received from our funders has been overwhelming positive and we hope they are extremely proud of making the film a possibility. If you are a funder and have any questions regarding the campaign please contact us at igg@simonscat.com

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It’s appropriate, since I’m now in Toronto, to report (via the Toronto Star) that the Toronto Police Marine Unit has a new mascot (read “boss”) named Porter;

Meet Porter, a green-eyed black feline who began prowling the unit’s docks on the Toronto Harbour last September. Or, as Const. Rick Gomez, his black shirt covered in cat hair, calls him: Honorary Officer-in-Charge.

“He’s more of a boss than a colleague,” says Crewhand Steve Bode, a civilian who works at the unit, and who is known as the cat whisperer by the officers.

And although housing is hard to come by, and expensive in Toronto, Porter has a rather enviable room complete with blue paint, and his name tacked to the entrance, Porter’s Cat House, should anyone be in doubt. His blue and white polka-dotted water bowl sits by the entrance, and his brown, soft bed sits atop the house.

Here’s his house (all photos from the Star by Hina Alam); it is silly, though, as Porter can’t read!

It’s his house — he can have his bed wherever he likes it.

In early September, the unit rescued a “wet, cold, shivering, and frightened” cat near Billy Bishop Airport. When he was found, Porter had health issues, and was undernourished, says Const. Rich Baker, a community service officer with the unit. Notices were put up about him but no one came for Porter, so the unit officially adopted him.

Porter with Constable Rick Gomez. The cat does not look happy.

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And here’s an adorable short video of an otter and a Bengal cat (my future breed of cat):

BONUS FELID: Over at her website A Classicist Writes, reader Laurie’s new post “. . . On London. A thunderstorm. And a cat.”, features several photos of one of several cats named Jerry Coyne. This one is a tuxedo cat:

(Laurie’s caption): “The lovely Jerry Coyne”

 

h/t: Taskin

Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 3, 2017 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning everyone!

It’s a Saturday, so we are going to content ourselves with two songs from birthday girl Suzi Quatro (1950) Stumblin’ In and Can The Can.

Hili is lost in thought again.

Hili: Malgorzata and I are brainstorming.
A: What about?
Hili: She about one thing and I about another.

In Polish:

Hili: Zastanawiamy się z Małgorzatą…
Ja: Nad czym?
Hili: Ona nad jednym, a ja nad drugim.

And she’s not the only felid with a cunning plan today.

Leon: I went into hiding here otherwise they would find some work for me.

And because you can never have too many cats; here’s a tweet that Jerry found hilarious:

https://twitter.com/AndyCole84/status/870756118493937664

And last, an educational lagniappe on the mating rituals of the damselfly comes from Matthew Cobb on Twitter. He explains:

The male is the one on the left, holding the female behind the head. There’s a lot of sperm scraping going on in their bits.

Cue “specially shaped penis” at 2:21

H/t: Charleen

I got poutine!

June 2, 2017 • 5:26 pm

Thanks to Larry Moran, I found poutine–right across the street from my hotel. It’s the first food I had all day, and boy, was it good! (This one had short ribs added to the fries, cheese curds, and gravy.) That’s a margarita in front of me: cultural appropriation!

Photo by Larry:

Heather Hastie on Trump and the Paris Accord

June 2, 2017 • 12:30 pm

I’ve kvetched a bit about Trump’s stupid decision to remove the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, but, over at Heather Hastie’s site, she’s produced a much better critique: “Trump has exceeded himself in stupidity.” It starts this way and then gets into the nitty-gritty:

The recent meeting of the G7 in Sicily saw Donald Trump lose what little respect other world leaders had left for him. Today’s announcement that he was withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Accord was in effect his confirmation that he was resigning as world leader.

Go read the rest for yourself.

I apologize to the rest of the world for what America did in November.

A new paper defends the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis against the buzzword purveyors

June 2, 2017 • 11:45 am

There’s a movement afoot by money-hungry but misguided scientists to claim that the Modern Synthesis (MS) of evolutionary biology is fatally flawed. (Many of these researchers are funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which recently handed out $11 million dollars for work on this fruitless endeavor.)

According to the critics, the areas that supposedly have inflicted mortal wounds on the MS are niche construction, evolutionary developmental biology (“evo devo”), developmental plasticity, and, above all, epigenetics—the idea that evolutionary adaptation can be fueled by changes in the genome produced not by mutation altering the sequence of basis in the DNA, but alterations in the genome induced by the environment itself, like changes in the histone scaffolding of DNA or methylation of the DNA bases.

I’ve discussed these so-called fatal flaws before (e.g., here) and find them grossly overblown. They either limn phenomena that already fit comfortably within the MS, or propose scenarios that, while logically plausible, are supported by almost no evidence.

One of the latter is epigenetics, about which I hear incessantly. Does the environment actually induce changes in DNA methylation that can be the basis of adaptive change? The evidence for that is virtually nonexistent, for those changes usually disappear after one or a few generations, and thus cannot be the permanent heritable variation required for long-term adaptation.

This issue was recently discussed at length in a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, “The sources of adaptive evolution” (reference below; download not free but some judicious inquiry might yield a pdf). The paper was written by my good friends Deborah Charlesworth, Nick Barton, and Brian Charlesworth (the Charlesworths were colleagues in Chicago until deciding to return to the UK). The paper, which considers the evidence for epigenetic bases of adaptation, is written very clearly, a refreshing change from the postmodernist babble I’ve been inflicting on you lately.

The paper’s verdict: there’s little evidence for environmentally induced DNA or histone alterations that can fuel adaptive evolution, and the MS remains on solid footing. A few words from their conclusions (I’ve omitted the references, and the bolded bit is my doing):

Genetic studies of adaptive phenotypes have yielded several further important conclusions. First, there are now many examples of phenotypic differences within and between species whose genetic control maps to a small region, but with multiple nucleotide differences within the region being causally involved. This supports Darwin’s and Fisher’s view that adaptive phenotypes are usually built up by a series of relatively small changes, which has been challenged by proponents of the EES.

Second, phenotypes that show plastic responses to environmental conditions also often show considerable genetic variation in these responses, and DNA sequence variants associated with these heritable differences have been identified, supporting the view that plasticity has evolved in a neo-Darwinian fashion. For example, vernalization responses in flowering plants involve a period of exposure to cold that is required for seed germination. (This was the basis for the notorious Lamarckian theories of T. D. Lysenko, which seriously damaged Soviet agriculture.) Vernalization is under the control of a complex epigenetic regulatory system, which is reset each generation. Natural vernalization response differences are controlled by DNA sequence variation in cis-acting regulatory sequences.

In contrast with the rigorous empirical evidence for the role of DNA sequence variants in adaptive evolution that we have outlined, there is currently little evidence for effects of epigenetic changes, although more data are required. Recent claims for such effects have been based on evidence that changes affecting the methylome are more numerous than some types of sequence variants in evolving lineages of Darwin’s finches and darter fish. Such comparisons, however, provide no evidence that the epigenetic variants in question had any role in phenotypic evolution.

The paper also considers the notion of “directed mutation” or “adaptive mutation”, a truly non-MS concept, but finds virtually no evidence for such nonrandom changes in DNA.  Other topics discussed (and critiqued) are “evolvability” and non-genetic “adaptive plasticity” as a basis for evolution.

It’s a good paper, even if it does buttress the status quo!

h/t: Bruce

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Charlesworth, D., N. H. Barton, and B. Charlesworth. 2017. The sources of adaptive variation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284.DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.2864