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.
Honey hasn’t shown up at the pond for 2.5 days, but I suspect she’s off incubating her eggs. Meanwhile, her mate Gregory Peck (aka Mallard Fillmore aka Dr. Quackenstein) spends most of his day swimming around and around the pond, often quacking. He rarely rests, and will eat only a bit when I feed him. For a while I suspected he was neurotic or even mentally ill, but I think this compulsive behavior is just his expending nervous energy while waiting for Honey’s return.
Finally, this morning I saw him resting: sleeping on the “duck ring” with one eye closed:
The whiteness in the eye is his nictitating membrane, which is how he closes his eye while sleeping:
As the weather has been warmer, the turtles have been out in force, trying to get into the sun to warm themselves. This poor guy failed to achieve purchase on Duck Island #1:
Here, from the BBC, is the story of Garfield the Ginger cat, who took up residence in a Sainsbury’s grocery store in Ely, Cambridgeshire (click on screenshot). Now he has a Facebook page and a popular book.
From the BBC:
Ginger tom Garfield took a liking to Sainsbury’s in Ely, Cambridgeshire, after the store was built on his old stomping ground.
. . . . Garfield, now 12, first started visiting the store after it was built in 2012 on a meadow opposite the flat where he lives with owner David Willers.
His favourite spot was a sofa in the Virgin travel shop in Sainsbury’s lobby, and he often tries to get into people’s cars outside the store.
Fans of the cat posted photos of him at the supermarket and at one point his owner had to ask people to stop feeding him as he was becoming fat.
A Facebook page set up with photos of the cat in the supermarket has a following of more than 5,500 fans from places as far away as the United States, Canada, Australia and Russia.
A book of his adventures and misadventures has now been written by Mr Willers with Suffolk author Cate Caruth.
The title – What’s THAT Doing There – refers to Garfield’s reaction when a fence was erected across his favourite meadow ahead of the supermarket being built.
Some drawings from the book:
The book tells how Garfield was once banned from the store for scratching a customer who became a little too familiar – and many of his other adventures.
In the book he is called Garfield Abercrombie Reginald Fergusson, but as that was “far too much like hard work… everyone just called him Garfy”.
“It is a little familiar of people,” Garfy would always think, “but I suppose I can live with it,” he says in the first chapter.
Garfield “signed” his book in Ely Library with a paw-print stamp.
It was modelled on his real paw.
And Garfield’s staff has a tattoo of the famous moggie on his leg:
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This story, also from the BBC, describes the guy who has the world’s best job, vetting cat videos for the CatVideoFest, a big movie that’s a collection of Internet cat videos. It’s received good reviews.
It so happens that the man who does the vetting is also the staff of Henri, the existentialist cat whose depressed videos became viral a few years ago.
From the BBC report:
The production is the creation of Will Braden, a 39-year-old filmmaker from Seattle, Washington.
Over the last few years, he has become king of the cat video world. He estimates that he watched about 15-17,000 last year alone.
It’s fair to say that this is not a direction Will ever thought his career would take.
His journey with cat videos started back in 2006 when he was a student at the Seattle Film Institute.
“I was supposed to do a video profile of someone and I had just procrastinated way too long,” he recalls.
Eventually his attention turned in desperation to the family pet he was looking after.
“I thought, maybe I’ll do a video profile of this cat and if I parody some of these old French New Wave films we’ve been watching and I make it funny enough, maybe they won’t notice I didn’t really follow the assignment,” Will says.
Henry, a black and white longhair tuxedo cat, became Henri le Chat Noir – a character with a parodied pretentious French persona.
The video features stoic shots of the cat and is narrated with existential musings and cutting criticism of the human world around him.
Now well into his mid-teens, he officially bid Au Revoir and retired from YouTube last year.
Cat videos remain a huge part of Will’s life. He began helping to organise the festival in 2014, and then took it alone as CatVideoFest in 2016 when the art centre stopped hosting.
Since, he’s been a one-man-band running it alone. His day job involved combing through the far corners of the internet, thousands of submissions, booking venues and handling marketing.
In 2018 he signed a nationwide distribution deal – a move that has made the festival’s ticket sales explode.
By the end of 2019 the film will have reached more than 200 theatres across the US. A chunk of proceeds from each screening is donated to a local cat shelter in every city.
Go see it: you can find out where it’s showing here. And here’s the official trailer:
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Finally, from Cole and Marmalade, we hear of a police cat in North Carolina called Sergeant Butterscotch (click on screenshot).
The good sergeant wandered into the police station a year ago and was immediately adopted, helping the officers and detectives with their paperwork:
But then he did his job as a detective!
But his secret weapon would show itself soon enough. Not only was it unexpected, it was effective at serving justice!
Shortly after he began his watch at the station, he earned a well-deserved promotion–purrmotion?
After a high-speed chase ended in the county, a suspect was brought in. The woman was eventually approached by the “fuzz’, in this case, literally. Butters confronted the woman with a sly sparkle in his eye. His methods were simple for flushing out a confession.
office, the woman reached down and picked him up.
“Awe, look at the little cat,” she reportedly exclaimed.
Butters [sic] purr motor started and the woman fell under his therapeutic spell. Sitting and calmly petting the soothing cat, the suspect eventually came to her senses. She confessed to the crime right then and there!
Sgt. Butters, as he’s called, is the official Department Food Inspector, and gets lots of visitors at the police station. Who can resist a Police Cat (or, for that matter, a Grocery Store Cat)?
Reader Barbara Wilson sent us a fine passel of bird photos as well as a few plant pix. Her captions are indented:
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata) all decked out in fresh breeding plumage, ready to wow the females. (Corvallis, Oregon, 11 April 2019)”
Chestnut-backed Chickadee (Poecile rufescens) feeding on a catkin of Hooker’s Willow (Salix hookeriana). These guys move fast and live in thickets, so I thought I’d never get a photo, but they’re also fearless (being pretty much uncatchable) so I got lots of tries. I think it was actually eating the catkin (a great source of nectar); it stayed at that catkin longer than it needed to grab one of the pollinating insects. (Lincoln City, Oregon, 6 April 2019).
Wild Turkeys(Meleagris gallopavo) have begun walking around the city, displaying in lawns and on roads. There is a down side to that, even for the turkeys. This little flock was walking aimlessly, peering at their dead fourth companion, when we drove up. We might imagine them mourning, but considering that they were still in the road where they could get squished, I think they were just confused. (Corvallis, Oregon, 8 April 2019)
Western Skunk Cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) is a lovely sign of spring in shallow wetlands of the west coast. The central spike has dozens of tiny flowers, advertised by both the yellow bract and a strong, slightly unpleasant odor that attracts beetles and flies. At the peak of bloom you can smell it as you drive by the meadows where it grows. (Lincoln City, Oregon, 7 April 2019)
Bath time for tiny birds at Luckiamute wildlife area, Polk County, Oregon, 30 March 2019. Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus), Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus), and Golden-crowned Kinglet (Regulus satrapa).
Common Raven (Corvus corax) at the beach. (Humboldt Lagoon State Park, California, 18 January 2019)
It’s the weekend, and Anna and I have named the new mallard drake “Gregory Peck” after a reader’s suggestion. It’s “Greg” for short. But I have alternative names, too: Dr. Quackenstein (because he’s constantly quacking) and Mallard Fillmore.
Oh yes: it’s April 13, 2019, and National Peach Cobbler Day, celebrating a dish best served warm with vanilla ice cream. It’s also a day proclaimed by Franklin D. Roosevelt: Jefferson’s Birthday. Christopher Hitchens was also born on this day in 1949 (the same year as I). He died eight years ago, and many of us miss him dearly.
On April 13, 1613, the Native American woman Pocahontas was captured in Passapatanzy, Virginia in an attempt ransom her for English prisoners held by her father, the chief Powhatan. The tribe anted up but the princess wasn’t returned; she married colonist John Rolfe, moved to England and then, on a voyage back to Virginia, took ill and died in 1617 at the age of 21.
On this day in 1861, after the previous day’s Confederate bombardment of the Union Army garrison on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the Fort surrendered. The Civil War was about to begin.
On April 13, 1919, exactly a hundred years ago, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place. British troops, firing on unarmed Sikhs gathered in a garden in Amritsar, India, killed at least 379 men, women, and children (the toll could have been over a thousand) and wounded at least 1200. Many (as you’ll see in the clip below) jumped in a well, where they drowned. Reginald Dyer, the British general who was convinced that the Sikhs were planning an insurrection, ordered the slaughter. Although heavily criticized, Dwyer suffered little punishment and even some reward: he was allowed to retire and presented with £26,000, a huge sum in those days. Among those who condemned Dwyer and the massacre was Winston Churchill. The brutal act caused many Indians to give up any allegiance to Britain, prompting increased Indian resistance to colonization and then to the British withdrawal 28 years later.
Here’s a reenactment of the massacre from the movie Gandhi:
On this day in 1943, according to Wikipedia, “The discovery of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war killed by Soviet forces in the Katyń Forest Massacre is announced, causing a diplomatic rift between the Polish government-in-exile in London from the Soviet Union, which denies responsibility.” That is why in Poland today is Katyn Memorial Day. Because today is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated on this day in 1943: his 200th birthday. On April 13, 1958, the American pianist Van Cliburn, only 23 years old, won the first prize at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. The Russians were chagrined because, like the 1936 Olympics, the competition was designed to demonstrate national superiority. The Russians had to ask Nikita Khrushchev for permission to give Van Cliburn the prize (Nikita said “yes”).
In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first black male to get the Best Actor Oscar; he won it for his performance in Lilies of the Field.
Notables born on this day include Catherine de’ Medici (1519), Thomas Jefferson (1743), Butch Cassidy (1866), Jacques Lacan (1901), Samuel Beckett (1906, Nobel Laureate), Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919), Jack Chick (1924), Seamus Heaney (1939, Nobel Laureate), Tony Dow (1945), and Christopher Hitchens (1949).
I met Hitchens only once. Here’s a picture I took of him in 2009 at the Ciudad de los Ideas in Puebla, Mexico. We talked only briefly as he had a smoke, mutually kvetching about Robert Wright:
Reader Chris informs me that, in honor of Hitch’s birthday, Radio 4 will present an hourlong show on the man at 2000 GMT tonight. You can listen to it live or, if it’s archived, go to this link below (click on screenshot):
Those who joined the Choir Invisible on April 13 include Diamond Jim Brady (1917), Wallace Stegner (1993), Muriel Spark (2006), and John Archibald Wheeler (2008).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains Hili’s latest utterance:
This is a play on a Polish expression: to daydream in Polish is “to dream about blue almonds”. I have no idea about the origins of this strange expression but when Hili says that she is dreaming about blue mice our Polish readers will understand immediately what she is talking about. Not so those poor people lacking a good knowledge of Polish.
A: Are you asleep?
Hili: Yes, I’m dreaming about blue mice.
In Polish:
A: Śpisz?
Hili: Tak, śnię o niebieskich myszkach.
Tweets from Grania. In the first, Dawkins proves to be wrong, as the comments show (I’ll give a few):
Tweets from Matthew. First: OMG, a weevil mimics a fly, and we don’t know why:
O.m.g guys. This fly mimicking weevil is so. So. Cool. I'm not sure if it's Timorus sarcophagoides or something related. Found in the jungle of Mompiche Ecuador.
Apparently some flies are are distasteful which might be why the weevil is mimicking it. It even moved like a fly! pic.twitter.com/UQGsTTkGOi
Gil Wizen thinks that, unlike Nany Miorelli, it’s not a case of Batesian mimicry in which a tasty weevil gains protection by mimicking a distasteful fly, but of Müllerian mimicry, in which both fly and weevil are distasteful and each gains advantages by resembling the other one:
Great find. I believe the assumption for those fly-mimicking weevils is that it's müllerian mimicry, not batesian. See the last two paragraphs of the discussion herehttps://t.co/Y8WU77fego
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 7, 2019
A little known but endearing cat, (Prionailurus planiceps). It’s endangered, with fewer than 2,500 individuals left in the wild. Hi, flat-headed cat—and good luck!
Say “hi” to the flat-headed cat! It's native to parts of Malaysia, Thailand, Borneo, & Sumatra & lives in tropical forest or wetland habitats. Well-suited for a semi-aquatic lifestyle, it has large, sharp molars that assist in grabbing slippery prey, like fish & frogs. pic.twitter.com/ThQhiXE8s4
— American Museum of Natural History (@AMNH) April 8, 2019
About a year ago I put up a post listing what I saw as the four best songs by the Beach Boys, though some readers responded that they couldn’t stand the group. While I agree that many of their songs are forgettable, I still maintain that they made some very great rock music, and that Brian Wilson was a melodic genius.
Reader Bryan found my old post, and updated it by giving me the link to a video in which a young musician analyzes four great songs that had subtle but wonderful key changes. That video is at the bottom, and if you’re musically inclined, you’ll want to watch it.
The four songs are Uptown Girl, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,We’ve Only Just Begun, and this one: one of my favorite Beach Boy Songs from the Pet Sounds album. It’s called God Only Knows, but as a grammar stickler, I’d say it should have been called “Only God Knows.” But that wouldn’t have scanned very well, would it?
The song was co-written with Tony Asher, who co-wrote two other great songs on that album: Caroline, No and Wouldn’t it Be Nice? You can hear the original recorded version, which had multiple overdubs, here.
Here’s Wilson performing it in London in 2002, 36 years after it was released (he wasn’t the lead vocal on the recorded version). After all his travails, he’s still great onstage:
From Wikipedia:
Asher denied that the song alluded to suicide. He describes his interpretation:
This is the one [song] that I thought would be a hit record because it was so incredibly beautiful. I was concerned that maybe the lyrics weren’t up to the same level as the music; how many love songs start off with the line, “I may not always love you”? I liked that twist, and fought to start the song that way. Working with Brian, I didn’t have a whole lot of fighting to do, but I was certainly willing to fight to the end for that. … “God Only Knows” is, to me, one of the great songs of our time. I mean the great songs. Not because I wrote the lyrics, but because it is an amazing piece of music that we were able to write a very compelling lyric to. It’s the simplicity—the inference that “I am who I am because of you”—that makes it very personal and tender.
Here’s a very early live version:
More from Wikipedia:
The instrumental section of the song was recorded on March 10, 1966, at United Western Recorders, Hollywood, California, with the session engineered by Chuck Britz and produced by Brian Wilson. The instrumental part of the song took 20 takes to achieve what is the master take of the song. Present on the day of the instrumental recording was Carl on twelve-string guitar among other session musicians collectively known as The Wrecking Crew. A strip of masking tape was placed over the strings of a piano while the bottoms of two plastic orange juice bottles were used for percussion.
According to Brian, many of the musicians who were present at the “God Only Knows” sessions claim that those sessions were some of “the most magical, beautiful musical experiences they’ve ever heard”. He added that there were 23 musicians present during the “God Only Knows” sessions, though only 16 are credited as being present on the actual take that was used for the final song. At the time, 23 musicians was an astounding number of musicians for a pop record. All the musicians played simultaneously, creating “a rich, heavenly blanket of music”. A string section was overdubbed thereafter.
I found this short video of Brian Wilson with George Martin (the “fifth Beatle”) talking about Wilson’s music, including God Only Knows. (Martin goes into the mixing room with Wilson and “deconstructs” the song.)I couldn’t resist showing two of the greatest rock-music arrangers of our time:
And the analysis: God Only Knows is the last song discussed. The analysis is complex, and one wonders if Wilson and Asher had an intuitive understanding of music to produce this complexity, or could really write and analyze in this way. (Paul McCartney, for instance, never could read music.)
Finally, there are two 8-minute series of outtakes from the recording process that are fascinating to hear: Part 1 and Part 2.
Just a short but heartening report from Humanists UK, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below. (The pdf of the report—just an Excel file—can be downloaded here.) The take-home message is that the decline in religiosity in Britain is becoming precipitous, though Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, have increased—but not nearly enough to offset the decline in the majority faith of Christianity:
From the report:
The number of people in Britain who say they have no religion has increased by a staggering 46% over the past seven years, making non-religious people the fastest growing group in the country, according to new figures released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).
The data from the ONS, taken from the Annual Population Survey, show the number of non-religious people has increased by nearly a half since 2011 to 39%, with nearly 8 million more people now saying they have no religion.
. . . The results also showed a 15% decline in the number of people who say they are Christian (all denominations). People who said they were Muslim grew by 22%, Jewish 17% and Hindu 13%.
This continues the trend of secularization of the West, though Muslims are bucking that trend, both because they have a fair number of kids and also because of the opprobrium attending leaving the faith. The trend also parallels the finding in the US that “nones” (those who declare no formal religion, but can still believe in God or be “spiritual”) is the fastest-growing category of “faith”.
Humanists UK does note, however, that the question used to estimate religion is biased towards overestimating it, a conclusion that comes from a survey that asks a different—and more revealing—question:
But Humanists UK also raised concerns about the leading question used in the survey which asked ‘What is your religion?’ It has been advocating for the Census question and other survey questions on religion and belief to change to ‘What is your religion, if any?’, as the existing question tends to overestimate religious belief, acting as a measure of weak cultural ties rather than religious belief. The British Social Attitudes Survey, which uses a two-part question, estimates that 52% of British people have no religion.
Good news, I’d say, though Humanists UK still note the prevalence of faith schools (often state supported) and—something I didn’t know—”26 voting places for Church of England in Parliament.” SERIOUSLY?
I make my prediction again, though I won’t be around to test it: in 200 years religion will have largely disappeared from the West, church attendance will be minuscule, and the remaining religionists, including the Vatican, will be selling off their assets and scrabbling furiously to retain believers.
“Deadnaming” is the use of the pre-transformation name of someone who has transitioned between genders. So, for example, referring to “Bruce Jenner” in an article about “Caitlyn Jenner” is a case of deadnaming.
My view on this practice is that it’s respectful to use the name a person chooses after they’ve transitioned, but it’s not an egregious sin to use their former name if it’s relevant. In some articles about Caitlyn Jenner it might be, for example when you’re giving biographical details about her. If you’re going to note that Jenner is a trans woman, which is usually fine if it adds information, why is it horrible to say that Jenner was formerly the decathlon champion Bruce Jenner? In fact, that’s what Wikipedia does. It gives her bio article the title of her present name, but also gives the birth name:
And since being trans is an integral part of the identity of many trans people—something that they themselves mention—I don’t see much wrong with using the former name as an indication of that. What I see as demeaning is referring to the person solelyby their former name without any indication that it’s been changed, which denies or mocks their own choice. Yet there are few sins worse than deadnaming in the Authoritarian Left community.
HuffPo (of course), also sees deadnaming as a horrible thing to do under any circumstances, and in this article about Chelsea Manning gives us a little lecture about deadnaming. It doesn’t help that it was Fox News that performed the despiséd act (click on screenshot):
Here’s the sin:
Fox News correspondent Greg Palkot referred to Chelsea Manning twice on Thursday by the name the convicted government leaker and transgender activist used prior to her gender confirmation.
Fox correspondent Greg Palkot deadnames Chelsea Manning for the second time in an hour. pic.twitter.com/lY5XDcSdkq
To be fair, the correspondent, referring to Manning in both instances, says “at that time Bradley Manning”, meaning that Chelsea Manning went by another name during the Wikileaks fracas. Indeed, the Wikipedia article on Manning gives her birth name:
It’s not irrelevant to the story that Chelsea Manning was once Bradley Manning, as the news back then used the name, and if you want to find out what Manning did when he identified as male, you have to Google the former name. Also, Manning didn’t announce her gender preference until 2013, several years after she leaked information as an identified-as-male soldier in the U.S. Army. In other words, the crimes for which she was convicted and imprisoned (and now she’s back in jail) were committed when she used another name and served as a male soldier.
HuffPo can’t resist giving us a little lecture at the end of what is supposedly a news piece, mostly about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks:
Deadnaming is problematic because it can feel invalidating and disrespectful to the person it’s being done to, according to Pink News.
“Essentially, it highlights that they’re not supported in their transition process, whether it’s before, during or after,” says the publication, which stresses that many people don’t realize the “depth of emotion” linked to a trans person’s identity.
Twitter banned deadnaming in 2018.
“We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” Twitter said in a revised iteration of its hateful conduct policy.
As Parker Molloy wrote in The New York Times, Twitter’s move “represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur.”
To make sure you never deadname a trans person, ask the person what they would like to be called, refer to them by their new name even when they’re not nearby, and correct others who deadname.
It seems to me that there shouldn’t be a blanket ban on deadnaming so long as you identify the person’s present name along with the past one, and have a good reason for using the former name. It is not “erasing” somebody, as the New York Times article argues, to say that they have transitioned and once went by another name. It’s not erasing Muhammad Ali to say that he once was known as Cassius Clay.
What constitutes “erasure” is to use a person’s pre-transition name alone, or to use the present one in a mocking fashion. And, I suppose, it’s bad form to use a former name if someone has transitioned and wants to keep it a secret. But that isn’t the case for most transsexual people—as far as I know.
