More academic madness: Published feminist analysis of squirrel diets and reproduction shows that squirrels, like marginalized human groups, are otherized, gendered, and fat-shamed

May 8, 2017 • 11:00 am

I’ve written about dumb papers connecting Halloween pumpkins and Pilates with racism, and about how “feminist glaciology” could expel patriarchy from geology, but the paper I’m about to highlight takes the cake.

First, two preliminary comments:

1.) I have never been so ashamed to be an academic, and

2.) This paper is the kind of “scholarship” that is making university studies of feminism—and of much of the humanities—look ridiculous. This kind of work should be criticized and mocked not just by feminists themselves, but by biologists and academics of all stripes. It shows the enormous waste of time and intellectual energy that have resulted from the incursion of postmodern thought into humanities departments.

There. . . I feel better now. On to this paper, published in a recent issue of Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. Get the link by clicking on the title screenshot; it should be free if you have the free and legal “Unpaywall” app.

The author is described in the paper (I’ve added the link) this way

Teresa Lloro-Bidart is an assistant professor in the Liberal Studies Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She uses feminist posthumanist theories and perspectives from political ecology to study human-animal relationships, especially those developed in educational spaces.

Here is the abstract, packed to the gills with postmodern and obscurantist jargon. Read it!

Now, what is Lloro-Bidart’s argument? To paraphrase Mencken reviewing Thorstein Veblen, “What is the sweating professor trying to say?”  As far I understand it, here’s her argument, starting with some squirrel biology:

  • Around 1900, the eastern fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) was deliberately introduced to Southern California as a pet, and then the animals were released and thrived in the wild, particularly in urban areas.
  • They may have competed with, and partly displaced, the native squirrel, the western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus), although the fox squirrel, which is more omnivorous, does better in urban areas.
  • The fox squirrel is also partly carnivorous, eating baby birds, bird eggs, and even rabbits.
  • The fox squirrel has two litters per year, the gray squirrel only one.

From these bald facts, Lloro-Bidart did “field work,” combing magazines and newspapers for mentions of the squirrels. She also studied and conversed with others at what she says is her “current fieldwork site, an urban community garden in the greater Los Angeles area.” From these researches, whose conclusions were of course in no way predetermined (LOL), Lloro-Bidart concludes the following:

  • The Fox squirrel has been “otherized” on account of its diet. I quote the author:

“As Bourdieu emphasizes in Distinction and feminist geographer Guthman elaborates on in her research on the alternative food movement in CA, eating is not simply a physiological requirement, but a performance that reflects taste, gender, race, culture, and class position. Depending on the cultural circumstances, those who do not eat ‘properly’ sometimes become the target of racialized discourses  DuPuis elaborates on the second point by highlighting how the complex relationship between food and the body is deeply intertwined with the history of American political reform.

. . . Those otherized as improper eaters for a variety of reasons – the impure – frequently become the target of various gendered, racialized and/or neoliberal discourses and policies to alter their eating habits – supposedly for their own, society’s, and sometimes animals’ wellbeing.”

They’re squirrels, for crying out loud, not humans! The analogy is forced to a predetermined conclusion.

  • The Fox Squirrel has also been otherized and gendered because it reproduces more often than the gray squirrel. It is also fat-shamed. I quote the author:

“These connections between the eastern fox squirrel’s eating of ‘everything’ and the fecundity of the [nonnative] squirrel resonate with what Subramaniam calls the ‘oversexed female’ narrative, where ‘[f]oreign women are typically associated with superfertility – reproduction gone amuck’. While not every article discussing the eastern fox squirrel’s eating of ‘everything’ also raised issues about reproduction, several did – and often concomitantly, suggesting the willingness of the eastern fox squirrel to eat everything is connected to the fecundity of the female. .

“Although none of these statements directly holds female squirrels accountable for these eating practices, they are gendered by implication: female squirrel bodies are those that physiologically deliver litters twice per year (not males), individualizing their bodies as the units of reproduction; in population ecology the term ‘fecundity’ refers to the ‘maximum potential reproductive output of an individual (usually female)…and feminist scholarship has demonstrated that ‘reproduction’ and ‘procreation’ are frequently [and negatively] associated with the human female body, which is constructed as closer to nature.

“While feminist scholarship has examined and critiqued how female animal bodies are uniquely enrolled in industrial farming (e.g. they produce milk for dairy production and, as a result, nursing mothers are separated from their young), feminist research on exotic/invasive species has only minimally considered the manifestation of more implicit gendered reproductive narratives, including how they are discursively connected to eating practices.

“Thus interpreted, these narratives intimate that eating and female fecundity are indeed intertwined, as the foreign squirrel is ultimately successful because she will eat everything, including bird eggs, baby animals, and trash in order to reproduce and outcompete the natives. Not unlike the discourses pervading the literature on feral cats, which suggest that withholding food from female cats is a desirable strategy for decreasing reproductive success, or new research in fat studies that unpacks how fat mothers unfairly shoulder blame for the obesity epidemic as what they eat literally becomes what their children will eat and become these statements, contextualized within the articles in which they appear, discursively perpetuate the notion that eastern fox squirrels are what they eat, i.e. inappropriate squirrel subjects like the inappropriate foods they choose to dine on in southern CA. As feminist food studies scholar Cooks highlights, the metaphor of food as body ‘individualizes the body as the unit of consumption’ and ‘prescribe[s] gender identities via what and how we eat’  Although the female squirrel is not overtly named in these articles, her body and identity thus become gendered as she consumes (eating everything) and reproduces improperly (delivering two litters per year).”

So here we have an intersectional feminist analysis of eating, reproduction, speciesism, racism, and marginalization. The paper goes on like this for 17 pages, and I was much relieved to reach the end.

But to what end was also this tortured analysis? As best I can make it out, it’s to show that we need to de-otherize squirrels and free the Fox Squirrel from its marginalization, allowing all squirrels, regardless of diet, reproduction, and habits, to live in harmony. In other words, Lloro-Bidart is calling for Social Justice for Squirrels. I conclude that from this passage:

These questions have important implications: Instead of characterizing eastern fox squirrels as nest robbers and trash eaters as specific detrimental meanings are attached to the foods they eat (and what their bodies do with these foods, such as deposit scat and plant trees or produce ‘too many offspring’), they demand a reconstitution of human interpretations of these squirrel-food becomings not in speciesist or gendered terms, but through an opening up of the category ‘squirrel’ so that many kinds of squirrels – and other beings – can flourish in suburban/urban spaces.

Of course, “opening up” categories like “squirrel”, and calling for harmonious squirrel diversity, neglect the possibility of invasive species destroying natives, as is happening in New Zealand, where “opening up the category of ‘vertebrate'” could lead to the extirpation of that land’s birdlife, or opening up the category of “plant” could destroy much of the native flora. Not all plants and animals can or should live in harmony.

But Lloro-Bidart is pretty sure she’s on the right track, because she talked with one of her enlightened friends at her “field site” (the communal garden) and that friend didn’t otherize the fox squirrels:

“To provide an example of what this flourishing might actually entail, I briefly turn to my current fieldwork site, an urban community garden in the greater Los Angeles area. This garden, like many suburban/urban spaces in the area, now supports a small eastern fox squirrel population that drops in from utility lines to feed on fruit trees. At the time of the informal conversation depicted below, the Garden Director, Isabel, resided in a suburban neighborhood approximately 5 miles from the garden. We had already discussed the garden’s squirrels several times – and also chatted about many other creatures, including Isabel’s rescue rabbits and pitbull and the resident garden birds who planted sunflowers every year. Prior to leaving this day, Isabel lamented about moving (she was going to miss her backyard western scrub jays, Aphelocoma californica), and animatedly told me about an encounter she had witnessed between a western scrub jay and an eastern fox squirrel in her backyard,

Fieldnote excerpt: April 2016

As I’m getting ready to leave the garden, Isabel and I end up chatting about squirrels. Since I have been enmeshed in doing analysis for my squirrel research project, Isabel’s story began to sound very familiar. She had apparently witnessed, for the first time, a scrub jay chase an eastern fox squirrel away from what she was sure was the scrub jay’s nest given that scrub jays nest every year in the bottlebrush plants that line her yard. Excitedly, she shared that she couldn’t believe that the bird was so relentlessly pursuing the squirrel.

“In contrast to the characterization of eastern fox squirrels as ‘nest robbers’ in the popular press, Isabel was not at all disgusted with the squirrel’s actions. Instead, she appeared entertained by the encounter and was quite surprised that a bird would so aggressively defend her/his nest from a squirrel. While in this case the eastern fox squirrel did not appear to actually make off with an egg or nestling, and if s/he had this might have changed the story Isabel told, her retelling of this encounter suggests a willingness to capture and grapple with animal agency (both eastern fox squirrel and scrub jay) – and her own.”

Good Lord! What is this doing in an academic paper? More important, what is that paper doing in an academic journal? And is that journal really producing useful scholarship? (I couldn’t bear to look.)

I needn’t rant much about the enormous waste of time this paper involved, and the enormous waste of paper (or electrons) its publication entailed, for the paper discredits itself. But of course this is the stuff that many professors in the humanities—deeply infected with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and other “posts”—are expected to extrude: bad ideas couched in unreadable prose.  This paper rates up there with the whiteness of pumpkins and the racism of Pilates as one of the most ridiculous academic exercises of our era.

I close with the author’s amusing “acknowledgement” section. Look at the last sentence—squirrel lived experience! (That’s opposed to squirrel non-lived experience, of course.):

Now I have some experts in my building: the Eastern Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) that I interact with daily. I showed Lloro-Bidart’s paper to one of them, who looked at it al fresco, but then, horrified by accusations of otherizing and fat-shaming, she retreated in disgust. Here’s the sequence of photos:

What is this? I was looking for nuts.

 

This looks nutty. . .
Oh noes! I am otherized!

Thank God I was a scientist and didn’t have to deal with this stuff in the humanities. (I hasten to add that, of course, not all university humanities work is like this!)

 

An evolutionary biologist misrepresents sexual selection in The New York Times

May 8, 2017 • 9:00 am

Friday’s New York Times contained an article on sexual selection in birds (link and title in the picture below) by Richard O. Prum, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Prum has a new book out, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us, which I intend to read. For now, though, he’s given us a take in the Times which is both erroneous and confusing, for it misrepresents sexual selection, natural selection, and modern evolutionary theory.

Here’s the Amazon summary of the book, which explains how Prum is trying to revive Darwin’s theory of sexual selection—a theory, which, by the way, has not been forgotten, but either refined with additional assumptions or discarded outright because Darwin didn’t know genetics or had no evidence to support his views:

In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin’s theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature?

Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin’s own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival [JAC: We’ve known this for a long time: it’s reproduction, not survival, that is impelling the evolution of these male traits.] To explain this, he dusts off Darwin’s long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change.

It’s true that Darwin was the first person to ponder sexual dimorphism—the extraordinary difference in ornamentation, weapons, and behaviors between the sexes—and to speculate about its causes. He suggested “sexual selection”, and gave two hypotheses about how it worked.

The first, which Darwin called “the law of battle,” was correct: males are larger and have weapons or features that enable them to compete for females, as when elephant seals or elk fight it out for mates. The ultimate cause of this difference, which I’ve described before, is the difference in gamete size between the sexes (sperm vs eggs), which ultimately leads to females being a scarce resource for which males have to compete. I won’t describe it further; you can consult a good evolution textbook, such as Futuyma and Kirkpatrick (it shows some examples of sexually selected traits on the cover below), or read the Wikipedia article on sexual selection, which is okay but not great. Lots of experiments and observations confirm that males do fight over females, and the weapons and their size make a difference. (Males also compete for females after fertilization: the so called “gamete competition.” One example is in damselflies, in which a male, before inseminating a female, will use a scoop on his penis to remove the sperm of the previous male. The selective advantages of having such a device are obvious.)

This book isn’t cheap, but if you can have only one evolution textbook, this is the one to get.

Darwin’s second theory, however, was largely wrong, as it was based on females preferring certain traits of males because of their appeal to the females’ aesthetic sense. Here are the two theories given by Darwin in his 1871 book, The descent of man and selection in relation to sex.

“The sexual struggle is of two kinds: in the one it is between the individuals of the same sex, generally the males, in order to drive away or kill their rivals, the females remaining passive; while in the other, the struggle is likewise between the individuals of the same sex, in order to excite or charm those of the opposite sex, generally the females, which no longer remain passive, but select the more agreeable partners.”

The problem here is that it takes the aesthetic sense of females as a given rather than something that can itself be the product of evolution. And of course it implies abilities not present in many species, like flies, who surely don’t have “aesthetic senses”. While Darwin’s “aesthetic” theory can be modified to take into account pre-existing female preferences that are either evolved or the byproduct of some other evolved trait (Ronald Fisher was responsible for this advance), in itself it doesn’t explain much. Darwin was correct, though, that female preferences can cause males to evolve traits that hurt the males’ survival (as in the elaborate tails of peacocks), so long as the males’ loss in “fitness” due to survival costs is more than compensated by their gain in fitness due to females mating more often with males having exaggerated calls, behaviors, or ornaments.

The mechanisms of sexual selection and causes for female preference still remain mysteries, for there are many reasons why females can prefer the traits of males that make them so bizarre—traits like the plumes, ornaments, and behaviors of the New Guinea birds of paradise. And distinguishing among these hypotheses—which include the “runaway hypothesis”, direct benefits models, handicap models, sensory bias models (a refinement of Darwin’s ideas), “good genes” models, and so on—is difficult, especially because they can work in tandem. To see the hypotheses for the evolution of female preference (which Darwin took as a given) and the difficulty of testing them, have a look at this 2009 PNAS paper by Jones and Ratterman. The paper shows this table listing the varieties of ways that female preferences for male traits can evolve:

In his New York Times piece, Prum ignores most of these, claiming that sexual selection is not a form of natural selection, does not lead to adaptation, and leads to “maladaptive decadence.”

Here’s an example. After describing the elaborate display of the male club-winged manakin, which lures females by rubbing together its wing feathers (a trait that has caused the evolution of thick, flight-impeding wing bones, and whose results can be seen in the video at bottom), Prum says this:

This [manakin song] is an evolutionary innovation — a whole new way to sing. But the evolutionary mechanism behind this novelty is not adaptation by natural selection, in which only those who survive pass on their genes, allowing the species to become better adapted to its environment over time. Rather, it is sexual selection by mate choice, in which individuals pass on their genes only if they’re chosen as mates.

It’s hard to make THREE errors in two short sentences, especially when the writer is an evolutionary biologist writing about evolution, but that’s what Prum has done. Here are the errors:

1.) Sexual selection is a subset of natural selection: the consistent differential reproduction of genes based on their advantage in replication. Sexual and natural selection are not two distinct processes. Here’s Futuyma’s definitions from the 3rd edition of his textbook.

“Natural selection” is defined as “The differential survival and/or reproduction of classes of entities that differ in one or more characteristics.”

“Sexual selection” is defined as “differential reproduction as a result of variation in the ability to obtain mates.” These definitions, which are held by nearly all evolutionists, clearly show that sexual selection is a subset of natural selection, the subset affecting traits involved in mate competition. Prum’s claim that the two processes are distinct is confusing and wrong.

2.)  Prum conceives of natural selection as only differential survival, whereas it’s differential reproduction that is key. Differences in survival produce selection only if they’re associated with differential reproduction. (They often are.)

3.) Neither natural nor sexual selection necessarily leads to an improvement in “species becoming better adapted to their environments over time”.  Selection most often operates on genes that affect the reproductive output of their carriers, but that needn’t improve the adaptation of a species to its environment. For example, a mutation that increases the number of a bird’s offspring, but has no other effect, will simply increase the number of young birds in the population, which isn’t an improvement in adapting to the environment. In fact, this could ultimately lead to a depletion of food that could drive a population extinct. Likewise, the mechanism of “meiotic drive”, in which one mutant gene simply kills the other genetic variants during gamete formation, is a form of natural selection that can and probably has driven populations extinct.  Throughout the article, Prum seems to conflate adaptation (a phenomenon of genes and individuals) with the survival of a species or its adaptation to the exigent environment. While this can happen, it’s not a necessary connection.

Those sentences would surely mislead a reader who wasn’t acquainted with evolutionary biology.

I could go on, but I’ll give just one more example of misleading prose in Prum’s short piece:

Of course, females do not harm their own survival by choosing males with attractive songs; the costs are deferred to their sons and daughters. Although their daughters will inherit more awkward wing bones, their sons will inherit sexually attractive songs, resulting in more grandchildren.

In the absence of direct costs to the choosers, the population will not be saved by natural selection. Because the cost is deferred, the whole population can ease further and further into maladaptive dysfunction, generation by generation.

Evolved decadence may turn out to be common.

. . . The wing songs of the club-winged manakin teach us that adaptation by natural selection does not control everything that happens in evolution. Some of the evolutionary consequences of sexual desire may not be adaptive. Rather, they can be truly decadent. Despite the ubiquity of natural selection, organisms are not always getting better at surviving. Natural selection is not the only source of design in nature.

This is deeply misleading, and not just by confusing reproductive “fitness” with survival alone. Deferring the “cost” of choosing a clumsy-flying male by one generation doesn’t throw the population into a death spiral. In that next generation, if the cost of female choice outweighs the benefits of choosing those males, females will evolve in the reverse direction, choosing males that can fly better. There is no inherent force in sexual selection that will lead both males and females to evolve beyond their fitness optima. And if natural selection (including sexual selection) isn’t the only source of design in nature, what is? How does “decadence” produce design?

I hope Prum’s book is better than this excerpt. I showed his NYT piece to another evolutionist, who allowed that it was  profoundly confusing. But the average reader, not deeply acquainted with sexual selection theory, will think that Prum has hit on some new principle of evolution. And in that way his article does the reader a disservice, for what he says is a mixture of stuff that evolutionary biologists already know, confusing and misleading characterizations of selection, and a neglect of competing and unresolved explanations for female choice—explanations that haven’t all been examined in manakins.

As lagniappe, here’s a club-winged manakin singing with its wings:

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 8, 2017 • 7:30 am

I have a comfortable backlog of photos, but please keep them coming in—I can never have too many. Today we have an unusual contribution documenting ancient human activity in Africa. The photos come from Richard Bond, and his notes are indented:

I have wavered for a couple of years over whether these photographs would interest you, but in view of the recent stir about possible humans beings in North America 130K years ago, I thought that I might as well submit them. The photographs are of an excavation site at Olorgesailie in the eastern Rift Valley in Kenya that has yielded a huge number of stone tools. The site was occupied for possibly as long as a million years until about 200K years ago, almost certainly by Homo erectus.

Entrance to the site is through a tiny but excellent museum. This has examples of stone tools that one may actually handle: photos #1 & #1b. The hand axe in #1 is dated at 780K years old.

Photo #2 shows the first humanoid fossil found at the site. The source of the rock for most of the tools was Mount Olorgesailie, a now-extinct volcano shown in photo #3.

The shallow depression in the foreground used to be a lake. (Sorry about the haze; this appears to be a feature of the Rift Valley during the burst of very hot weather just before the end of the dry season.) The area used to be very volcanically active. Photo #4 was taken a little south of Olorgesailie while flying on an earlier visit to the Masai Mara, and, despite the haze, shows clearly several extinct volcanos.

Photo #5 shows an igneous dyke: note the erosion of the softer sedimentary rock that covered and preserved the site.The tools were first discovered spewing from erosion channels.

Photos #6 & #7 show some of these tools, laid out more or less to represent them as they were discovered.

Photo #8 shows a current excavation; the darker bands across the middle are ash from two of the many eruptions that allow accurate dating of the finds.

Photo #9 gives an idea of the depth of the erosion that exposed the tools, and photo #9b is one example of the many animal fossils found on the site.

One curious aspect is that obsidian tools (now in the Nairobi National Museum) have been found, despite the nearest source of obsidian being 50 km away. This might imply some sort of trading structure based around Olorgesailie.

I have visited many historical sites from the mundane to the spectacular, but this is my favourite. I actually became quite emotional in a couple of places, most unlike me. When I visited in 2013, I was shown round by the curator, a charming, softly spoken man who would dearly like more visitors. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get there. For a start, few Kenyans know about it, and it took a most helpful porter at the Panafric (my favourite Nairobi hotel) about half an hour to find a taxi driver who would take me. Although it is just off the direct Nairobi-Magadi road, the bus takes an alternative route that passes through more villages. (I would not risk the dreaded matatus even though they are better than they used to be.) Taxi (not cheap for one person!) or hire car are the only real options. I did not begrudge the expense, because the drive itself is fascinating, not least for the spectacular views of the Rift Valley. My driver had never known about the place previously, and from his comments on our return drive he was considering the possibilities for lucrative future business, so perhaps by now the Panafric might lay on much cheaper trips by minvan. Incidentally, like most Kenyan taxi drivers, mine was excellent company, very informative, and spoke fluent English.

Monday: Hili dialogue

May 8, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s May 8, 2017, a dreary Monday. There is some good news, though: Macron beat Le Pen by a substantial margin, defeating the Right and ensuring, at least for a time, that the European Union will remain. It was doomed without France.

More good news: the subscribers to this site (WordPress hasn’t yet realized it’s not a “blog”) are inching up toward 50,000, at which point I can die a happy man. (Note Satan’s number). You don’t want me to die unhappy, do you?

Everything that happened on this day was actually listed in yesterday’s post, an egregious error that I will attribute to the post being written (as usual) before 5 am. My apologies. But today is National Coconut Cream Pie Day, undoubtedly due to the machinations of Big Coconut.

All I’ll add is something I heard on the news yesterday: due to high housing costs in San Francisco, a family of four in that city making $105,000 per year is considered “low income”, a level $40,000 higher than in Chicago. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I’m not sure whether Hili, up in the trees in the orchard, is checking the cherry blossoms or checking the birds. But the weather so far predicts Many Pies for Me!

A: What are you watching so carefully?
Hili: I’m checking whether the flowers are already pollinated.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Sprawdzam, czy te kwiaty są już zapylone.
And here’s a tweet showing sandwiches for sale in London 45 years ago (the year after I graduated from college). I always thought that someone could get rich in Britain by selling big, heavily stuffed submarine sandwiches (like Subway, but better). Why do the Brits consider a sandwich to be two slices of bread with a 2 mm thick filling? That’s not a meal! And sometimes they even put “sweetcorn” on them. Corn—on a sandwich!

And the obligatory kitten tw**t, much needed on Monday:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/861537670886981632

Deceptive science reporting by Newsweek

May 7, 2017 • 3:45 pm

Look at this tweet from Newsweek:

https://twitter.com/Newsweek/status/861244266697437184

Now read the damn article: it doesn’t say that they found ANY “signs of life” on the moon Enceladus, It is possible that life could evolve or exist there, but there’s no evidence for that. In fact, the article itself undercuts the tweet. After describing the well known plumes of water and gas that spew from that moon, the article notes that some of the gas is hydrogen. And then:

The team of researchers behind the Cassini mission examined all the possible explanations for what could be generating such large quantities of hydrogen gas. Only one withstood the calculations: hydrothermal vents. Lunine and his co-authors on the Science study reporting the analysis believe that ocean water is reacting with rocks in hydrothermal vents on the seafloor to actively produce hydrogen.

Finding newly manufactured hydrogen on Enceladus is significant because the element can support life.

. . . After months of ruling out alternatives, the researchers came to the only conclusion that made sense: The ocean is making hydrogen. Ocean water reacting with minerals in hydrothermal vents is generating the element, an ecosystem found on Earth. “It has all the requirements for life,” says McKay, who was not involved with the new study. “It’s similar to Earth in ways you might not expect from a tiny little moon in the outer solar system,” says study co-author Kelly Miller, who studies planetary formation at Southwest Research Institute.

Note that habitable is not the same as inhabited.

Pity that whoever wrote the tweet didn’t seem to grasp the last sentence. What a pile of bullpucky!

 

Ceiling Raccoon!!

May 7, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Reader Taskin sent me a link to a piece at the Toronto Star that describes the appearance of a rival to Ceiling Cat: a celestial procyonid that is Ceiling Raccoon. The story, called “Raccoon makes appearance at Pearson Airport baggage claim“, describes a baby Procyon lotor that peered down from above the Pearson airport’s baggage claim:

A rebellious raccoon showed up to greet new arrivals at Toronto Pearson International Airport Friday, delighting travelers and inspiring jokes about Toronto’s unofficial mascot.

A video of the critter, posted to Twitter by Cameron Graham, shows the raccoon peeking out from the ceiling to look at the passengers below. Graham said he was waiting to greet his wife, who was coming home from a trip to Edmonton, when the little head popped out of a gap in tiles in the ceiling.

“There he was, having a good gander at everyone,” Graham said.

Who is the right god?  Ceiling Raccoon:

Or Ceiling Cat?

And will this lead to war?

I think they trapped the raccoon, but there’s no report on its health.

Finally, the piece gives several tw**ts, but the best is by the airport’s Vice President:

Preliminary report: Was the March for Science successful?

May 7, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Although I didn’t feel compelled to participate in the March for Science on April 22, I still hoped it would change the minds of science denialists and perhaps spur further and ongoing action.  There were more than 600 marches and estimates of between 300,000 and 500,000 participants worldwide. As far as what’s still happening, each week the organization provides a daily list of things you can do (this week’s is here); so far they amount to a list of science advocacy societies to join (and groups supporting marginalized people), petitions to sign, and the addresses of politicians you can contact. But realizing the ultimate aim—to keep science in the forefront during the new administration, and ensure that funding isn’t cut and scientific reports by the government aren’t censored or suppressed—won’t be clear for a long time.

So it’s too early to tell if the march achieved any aims beyond allowing people to express their sentiments. But is there any way to tell? Reader Loren called my attention to a May 2 piece in the New York Times attempting to do just that: “How marching for science risks politicizing it“. The author is Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, and here are a few excerpts:

Before the recent March for Science, scholars and journalists debated the likely effect of the protest: Would it defend science against politicization or unnecessarily polarize the public on the value of the scientific enterprise?

Some early evidence suggests the march may have widened the divide among liberals and conservatives in their views of scientists but not, crucially, toward the research they conduct.

Nyhan shows that while confidence in science among both liberals and conservatives has always been robust in America, the question many had was whether that confidence could be eroded by the March portraying science (not deliberately) as a liberal pursuit. Again, we don’t know, but there’s at least one survey, tentative as it is, showing that polarization in attitudes towards scientists themselves increased after the March. There is no link to the survey cited, so it’s unclear how significant are the differences in attitudes before versus after the March.

. . . Some preliminary evidence is available from Matthew P. Motta, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota who tracked opinions toward scientists and scientific research among a sample of survey respondents recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workplace. Though these participants are not representative of the general public, we can still conduct a valid test for polarization by comparing how the views of liberals and conservatives in the sample changed from before the march to afterward. (Eight in 10 respondents reported having heard at least something about it, including approximately one in two who said they heard a “moderate amount” or a “great deal.”)

Between the Wednesday before the march (April 19) and the Monday and Tuesday afterward (April 24-25), liberals and conservatives in the survey panel moved further apart in how warmly they felt toward scientists. Specifically, liberals reported somewhat warmer feelings toward scientists (up to 86 from 82 on a 0-to-100 feeling thermometer scale) while the feelings of conservatives toward scientists became somewhat less warm (down to 67 from 70).

The liberal-conservative gap in agreement with the statement that “Scientists care less about solving important problems than their own personal gain” also widened significantly — conservative agreement increased to 32 percent, up from 22 percent, whereas liberal agreement fell to 8 percent from 11 percent.

However, no corresponding increase in polarization was observed on the statements that “Most scientific research is politically motivated” and “You simply can’t trust most scientific research.” On the latter question, for instance, agreement did not change significantly among conservatives (22 percent agreed before the march compared with 21 percent afterward) or liberals (6 percent agreed before the march; 3 percent did afterward). This finding suggests that the polarizing response that the march elicited toward scientists did not spill over into views of the research they conduct.

So there’s a difference in how attitudes changed towards researchers themselves versus the research they conducted. Why is that? Motta has one explanation:

Mr. Motta cites the emphasis on the marchers in news coverage as a potential explanation for these findings. In an email, he writes that “the ‘public face’ of the march appears to be the protesters; the clever signs they came up with, dressing as dinosaurs, etc.” This focus on the scientists who participated, he writes, “put a human face on science, which might be why it led to polarization with respect to attitudes about people, but not necessarily their research” — a topic that received less attention.

These findings should be evaluated in future studies, but they suggest another way in which science can become politicized — not by challenging the findings of a field of research, but by portraying the people who do science as political. In this sense, the march and events like it could paradoxically make scientists a more inviting target for future attacks.

In the end, of course, we’d like to know whether the March had a long-term versus only this unsatisfactory short-term influence on public attitudes towards science. As there wasn’t really a control—a world in which there were no Marches—it would be hard to tell, as other factors will undoubtedly come into play as politics moves on and Trump and the Republicans engage in more shenanigans. One suggestion is simply to look at the funding for science: how much money the Congress approves for the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. That funding has been decreasing for some time. Since Congress is mostly Republican, a change in sentiments should be reflected in a rise in the budgets. But that’s unlikely given Trump’s budget appropriating more money for defense, and perhaps for that accursed Wall.

When the dust settles, I don’t see a clear way to determine if the March achieved its aims.