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.
We have photos from two readers today. The first is a batch from Sean Crawford, whose notes are indented:
I’ve attached some photos of the reed beds in the Norfolk Broads in England, taken from a boat. Aside from the reeds themselves, there are some swans. It’s an amazing habitat that can only be appreciated by boat.
And the swans [JAC: These look like mute swans, Cygnus olor]:
From reader Tim Anderson in Australia:
This magnificent creature is a male gang-gang cockatoo (Callocephalon fimbriatum), a relatively rare forest-dweller. Consider his magnificent topknot.
JAC: This is one of the few sexually dimorphic species of parrot. The female (below, photo from Wikipedia) lacks the bright head coloration and has a smaller crest:
It’s Thursday April 25, 2019. Posting may be light today as I have to hie downtown to the “Apple Genius Bar’ (who’s supposed to be the genius there?) to get the battery on my old—but perfectly serviceable—iPhone 5s replaced. It’s a lot cheaper than a new iPhone, and the new ones are too big to put in my pocket.
It’s National Zucchini Bread Day, a comestible I detest. Isn’t it ironic that the world’s worst vegetable is also the one that grows most prolifically? People are even forced to use it up by putting into cakes and breads! It’s also DNA Day by proclamation of Congress, celebrating the publication of Watson and Crick’s structure of “the molecule of life’ (see below).
On this day in 1792, the robber Nicolas J. Pelletier became the first person to be executed by the guillotine. Wikipedia adds to his biography, “The crowd, however, was dissatisfied with the guillotine. They felt it was too swift and ‘clinically effective’ to provide proper entertainment, as compared to previous execution methods, such as hanging, death-by-sword, or breaking at the wheel. The public even called out “Bring back our wooden gallows!” On that very same day, April 25, 1792 the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, was composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
On this day in 1859, ground was broken for the Suez Canal by engineers from France and Britain. In 1898, the U.S. declared war on Spain, formally beginning the Spanish-American War. On April 25, 1915, the Battle of Gallipoli began, with the Gallipoli peninsula invaded by troops from Britain, France, India, Newfoundland, Australia, and New Zealand. After 8 months of failure and slaughter (the latter on both sides), the Allied troops withdrew. The death toll was around 100,000.
It was on this day in 1953 that Watson and Crick published their groundbreaking paper in Nature suggesting the correct structure of DNA, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid“. The paper, the most influential in biology of the 20th century, was only a bit more than a page long. Here is most of the text:
In 1954, it was on this day that the first practical solar-energy cell was demonstrated by Bell Labs. And, on April 25, 2007, Boris Yeltsin was buried in the first Russian Orthodox funeral of a leader since that of Emperor Alexander III in 1894.
Notables born on this day include Oliver Cromwell (1599), Walter de la Mare (1873), Wolfgang Pauli (1900), Edward R. Murrow (1908), Ella Fitzgerald (1917), Al Pacino (1940), Johan Cruyff (1947), and Dinesh D’Souza, (1961).
One of the greatest soccer players of our time, Cruyff perfected the famous “Cruyff Turn,” which you can see in the highlight video below (or here), and played for Ajax and Barcelona. A heavy smoker when young (I have no idea how you can play soccer so well with that habit), he died of lung cancer at 68. You can get an idea of how good he was by watching this short video:
Those who took the Big Nap on April 25 include David Teniers the Younger (1690), William Cowper (1800), George Herriman (1944), Dexter Gordon (1990), Ginger Rogers (1995), and Bea Arthur (2009).
Herriman’s Ignatz and Krazy Kat
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor Hili refuses to do menial chores:
A: Come and help with the cleaning.
Hili: What were you smoking?
In Polish:
Ja: Chodź, pomożesz sprzątać.
Hili: Chyba coś ci zaszkodziło.
Here’s something I found on Facebook:
A tweet from reader Barry. What has this bipedal cat realized?
Tweets from Grania. This first one is fricking amazing: synthesizing speech from signals coming from brain neurons. Immensely useful, I’d say, and it works well. Have a look at the linked article, and be sure to put the sound on.
Twenty-five mice a day! (Does anybody know the species of owl?)
Here’s the close up video of two owl babies, the close one is a girl and the other is a boy, Mrs. Horvath told me they ate 25 mice a day while under their care for the past two days. pic.twitter.com/cfQlEXZTOi
A mother bear gets two distressed cubs to cross the road. Things to note:
FOUR cubs! That’s a lot; I thought the median number was about two.
Note the babies’ squalling, which is incredibly cute.
The babies appear to be following either the mother’s scent or the mother’s tracks
I love the way the mother lures the cubs: she pretends to run away so that the cubs will follow her, but then comes back when they don’t follow. She does this several times.
Cubs don’t seem to like roads.
Bears are awesome.
Credits: Occurred on April 9, 2019 / Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, USA. Credit: FB/EnteringCadesCove
The kind of negative publicity that brought down Evergreen State College is now devolving on Williams College, and I can’t say that it upsets me. Many of its students and much of the administration are trying to tiptoe around enacting a speech code that conforms to the First Amendment (it’s “hate speech” that has to go, you know); the students are calling for housing segregated by race (as well as other criteria); and some students are making ludicrous demands that the University undergo serious structural changes, threatening to take unspecified actions if the College doesn’t answer their demands by 5 p.m. Friday (these include the creation of the euphemistic “affinity housing”).
A number of articles, including ones on this site, have called attention to these shenanigans and to to the demands of aggrieved but entitled students. The media has now gotten hold of the Williams issue, though, and they’ve published several pieces that cast the College in a bad light. I’ll summarize the pieces I know of in this post; click on the screenshots to go to the pieces.
As is usual with these things (and which was the case with Evergreen State before the New York Times finally wrote about it), it’s the right-wing media that first highlights the shenanigans, for their agenda is to make liberal colleges, and thereby the Left, look bad. That’s not my agenda, though, which is to keep colleges as places where freedom of speech is sacred as a tool for learning, and to try to keep the Left from going so bonkers that it discredits itself, possibly leading to another Trump victory next year.
Here goes:
From Inside Higher Ed:
From The College Fix, a right-wing site:
. . . and another:
Oy! Breitbart:
This one will surely make Williams administrators sit up: Fox news via Project 21:
While the Fox discussion (below) starts about reparations, at 3:21 the host abruptly brings up the issue of affinity segregated housing at Williams. LaDawn Jones actually tries to defend it, saying “I see nothing wrong with exploring the ideas about what works for them [the black students].” Indeed, if you read the letter from Williams’s President Maud Mandel (see below), you’ll see that she as well seems open to the idea of segregated housing.
Below is Williams Professor Darel Paul‘s Areo piece on the excesses of Woke Williams and other similar schools. I’ve already mentioned this piece; it’s quite critical of the College:
Finally, a letter from Williams President Maud Mandel to the College has been reprinted on the site of an alum, Ephblog (for some reasons Williams students are called “Ephs”):
Make of the letter what you will. I see Mandel as the Eastern equivalent of Evergreen’s George “Invertebrate” Bridges: someone who realizes that she must cater to the students’ demands while making noises about civilized discourse for all. After all, students can make a lot of trouble for a college’s reputation, but the faculty, well, not so much. Faculty don’t march, demonstrate, or make ludicrous demands.
Mandel highlights but one instance of supposed “hate speech”: the removal of a poster advertising a panel organized by a left-wing faculty member; but Mandel ignores even worse actions taken by students against a professor who contested some of the students’ claims (the students defaced his door with odious anti-white slogans and claims that he was “killing them”). I have my doubts about whether the one instance of bigotry that Mandel mentions in her letter is even real, given the history of such crimes at Williams, which almost always have been hoaxes, and nearly all of which seem to have been perpetrated by members of the minorities that were the targets. (The results of those investigations of hoaxes, by the way, are never revealed to the students, so an atmosphere of paranoia is kept alive.)
There’s also mention of “affinity housing” in a letter that is a masterpiece of equivocation: not taking any stand but pleading for respectful discourse. Here’s a bit: (my emphasis):
The issues over which people are disagreeing right now are serious and valid. They’re also not just “Williams problems”: Campus attention to race relations is connected to national and global injustice. Conflicts over speech and speakers are roiling many schools. Work on affinity housing points to wider challenges with balancing integration and the right of free association. Tensions over how we disagree are characteristic of a societal problem with public discourse. A school like Williams absolutely should discuss these complex and important issues. When we do, conflicts will necessarily and even productively arise. Our goal shouldn’t be to avoid disagreement or dissent, but to develop ways of engaging in it without losing respect for each other as people.
I hope we can model this ideal in classrooms and dorm rooms, offices and alumni gatherings, joining in a campaign to improve our culture. Some people have expressed frustration that processes like Strategic Planning won’t make this happen quickly enough. I share the sense of urgency, but meaningful change often does take time: Time to make sure all points of view are surfaced, listened to and considered. Time to educate people on new ways of working and healthier ways of engaging with others. Time to figure out which investments will make the biggest, most sustainable impact on issues we care about. Organizations like Williams can do this deliberate work without sacrificing our ability to address more immediate challenges.
The way each of us acts affects the community as a whole. If we’re intolerant and harsh, it sets a norm for how we’ll be treated in return. To make Williams instead a place where everyone is valued, we’ll need to treat each other with respect when differences inevitably emerge. It’s up to each one of us, and all of us as a collective, to make it so.
Translation: “I’m going to give the students what they want, including segregated housing (if I can get away with it), but it will take a bit of time. In the meantime, you professors treat the Aggrieved Students well and don’t make them mad.”
If I were the Trustees and administrators of Williams, I’d take this negative publicity very seriously. After all, it’s what brought down Evergreen State.
If you don’t know what “testifying” is in an American religious context, it means telling to a bunch of people—usually in a church—how you came to Jesus (it’s a Christian practice) and how much you love the Lord. In fact, Wikipedia even has a subsection on it. But listening to such testimony quickly gets boring and repetitious. Yet, increasingly, the op-ed pages of newspapers, including good ones like the New York Times, are occupied by flat-out, old-fashioned Christian testifying or its intellectual equivalent: unexamined assertions about the truth claims of religions like Christianity.
And now the last redoubt of good American journalism besides the Times, and I’m referring to the Washington Post, has published an even more extreme op-ed, one using the burning of Notre Dame as a reason to tout Christianity very hard and mourn its disappearance. While newspapers publish a variety of pieces from various viewpoints, simple proselytizing like this should be going away; it doesn’t deserve any space in such a good newspaper.
You can read the piece by clicking on the screenshot below. The author, Mark Thiessen, is characterized by Wikipedia as “an American author, columnist, and political commentator. He writes for The Washington Post newspaper. He served as a speechwriter for United States President George W. Bush (2004–09) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001–06).”
So he’s clearly a conservative, but he’s also a staunch Christian who wants to bring God back to the West. Just as Jesus wept (the Bible’s shortest verse), so Jerry wept when he read this:
It’s a short piece. Thiessen bemoans the increasing secularism of France and Europe, which he says, correctly, is spreading to the U.S. But the burning of Notre Dame, he claims, “is an apt metaphor for the devastation of Christianity across Europe—and a warning for us in the United States.” And although he doesn’t say the fire was a sign from God, he does want us to pay attention to the spectre of secularism that is haunting the West:
France was once one of the most Catholic countries in Europe. Today, while 64 percent of French people still identify as Christian, only 5 percent attend church regularly and just 1 in 10 pray daily. The younger generation is even less attached to the faith of their fathers. According to a study by the Benedict XVI Center for Religion and Society, only 26 percent of French young adults consider themselves Christians, and 65 percent say they never pray. The same sad story is playing out across the rest of Europe. The study found only three countries — Poland, Portugal and Ireland — where more than 1 in 10 young people said they attend a religious service weekly.
The situation in the United States is somewhat better: 39 percent of Catholics and 58 percent of evangelicals attend church services once a week, and even more say they go a few times a month. But the numbers are in decline among the young as well. Only 11 percent of younger millennials are weekly churchgoers, while 16 percent more go either once or twice a month, or a few times a year. The secular tsunami that has swept Europe is making its way across the Atlantic.
I, for one, can’t get too worked up about this. In fact, I think it’s a great trend that will end a lot of divisiveness in our world.
Thiessen even goes so far as to compare secularism with totalitarianism, implying that secular morality is either nonexistent or inferior:
. . . . in the West, modern secularism is slowly accomplishing what the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century tried and failed to do: eradicate God from society. We are seeing the triumph of what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in a homily a day before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, called the “dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” On both continents, young people are putting off or forgoing marriage, and having fewer children — because a culture of self runs counter to the sacrificial love at the core of marriage and family.
Finally, Thiessen pulls out all the stops and spews his testimony all over the page. To paraphrase Hitchens, he’s like a preacher on a street corner, yelling at us and selling snake oil from a tin cup:
Today, France is in a heated debate over whether to rebuild Notre Dame as it was, or modernize it — much as the Louvre was modernized when I.M. Pei’s glass and metal pyramids were added to its classical grounds. But this is the wrong question. Yes, most of the millions who visit Notre Dame each year experience it is [sic] a museum. But it is not a museum. It is not even primarily a symbol of France. It is a house of worship. To restore it, we must restore its fundamental purpose: to bring people closer to the Almighty.
The human heart is made to love God. And as Cardinal Robert Sarah put it in an interview with Le Figaro this weekend, the fires which engulfed Notre Dame were “an appeal from God to rediscover his love.” He is right. Skilled craftsmen will soon repair the cathedral stone by stone. But, as the priest who said Easter Mass in Bordeaux told us, to truly rebuild Notre Dame requires what St. Peter called “living stones … God’s own people [who] declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:4-9).
We need more of these living stones — in France and in America, too.
My response to the last sentence is this: “No we don’t.” Lovely ancient cathedrals, yes; ancient superstitions foisted on the people, no.
It amazes me that blather like this gets published in the Washington Post. What were they thinking? All it does is use the destruction of a cathedral as a way to say that we should be mindful of the waning of Christianity. That’s not all that far from saying that the fire is God’s warning that we should stop coddling homosexuals.
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “sultan”, refers to the Sultan of Brunei’s new sharia-ish decision to allow stoning to death of gays. The strip was emailed with this message and a link to an article:
Yet again, the facts mean it is not necessary to write a joke. Just state the fact. Yes, it’s another fact joke! I just wish it was funny.
This is a pretty good strip that underlines the hypocrisy of religious fascism. And Brunei’s defense of its new laws would be funny it it weren’t so horrible. The country does really ask for “tolerance, respect, and understanding” for their barbarism! From the Guardian:
Brunei has written to the European parliament defending its decision to start imposing death by stoning as a punishment for gay sex, claiming convictions will be rare as it requires two men of “high moral standing and piety” to be witnesses.
In a four-page letter to MEPs, the kingdom’s mission to the EU called for “tolerance, respect and understanding” with regard to the country’s desire to preserve its traditional values and “family lineage”.
The new penal code, which also provides for the amputation of thieves and whipping of people wearing clothes associated with the opposite sex, was brought in on 3 April, despite international condemnation.
If convictions are that rare, and the practice denounced as barbaric by all rational people, why have it in the first place?
Since I’ve now published in Quillette, I guess I’m not only a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, but also an alt-righter and a white supremacist. Or so the Perpetually Aggrieved might say.
At any rate, if you click on the screenshot below, or go here, you’ll see my 1900-word response to John Staddon’s essay, also in Quillette, “Is secular humanism a religion?” Staddon’s piece, which was deeply flawed and misguided, answered the title question with a “yes”, but only by re-defining religion to mean “Anything that has a moral code.”
Tired of seeing everything from atheism to science to environmentalism deemed as “religions,” I wrote a critique of Staddon’s essay on this site and tweeted it to Quillette, saying that it was perhaps the worst piece ever published on their site. They invited me to respond to Staddon. After ascertaining that they offered a soupçon of dosh, I reworked my original piece for the site and published it under a declarative title:
I won’t reprise the essay here; you can go to Quillette if you want to read it. All I’ll say now is that I thought my piece was pretty uncontroversial: nobody with two neurons to rub together would see secular humanism (which is, after all, secular) as a religion. Further, Staddon himself defined religion as having three parts, and admitted that secular humanism contravened two of them that involved the supernatural and divine. Writing the essay was, to me, like shooting fish in a barrel.
But I was surprised to see the degree of pushback on Quillette: those who argued that science is religious or based on faith, those who agreed with Staddon that secular humanism is based on faith, those who claimed that environmentalism is religious, those who averred that religion is a net good for the world and atheism a net bad, and so on.
I guess I was mistaken in thinking that because Quillette‘s readers were used to more intellectual essays and less Internet acrimony, and were disaffected liberals, they would thus be pro-science and anti-religion. I was wrong. One theory (not mine) is that Quillette is read by many conservatives who delight seeing the pretensions of the Left being taken down. Indeed, several readers here have characterized Quillette as a right-wing site. Conservatives tend to be more religious than liberals, and thus a strain of conservatism might have engendered comments like these:
This first one is a partial comment which is too long to reproduce here, but the reader needs to look at Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
This is a good one: the reader not only misunderstands science, but disses scientists as having “bland and uninteresting lives.”
And with these I’ll pass on. But I’ll add that there are also some very good rebuttals of these arguments—some by readers on this site. The discussion is not as riddled with ad hominems as that on many other sites, so you might enjoy going over there and doing battle with the apologists or science-dissers.
