Coultergate gets more confusing

April 27, 2017 • 11:30 am

When liberals don’t take up the cudgels for free speech, even for odious conservatives like Ann Coulter, we abandon one of our main principles. We also allow conservatives to criticize us as censors, and for them to take the First Amendment moral high ground.  And that’s exactly what’s happening at Berkeley, thanks to the Regressive and Censorious Left.

(Let me assert, though I shouldn’t even have to, that I despise Coulter’s views; see here for proof.)

Ann Coulter was invited to speak at the University of California by the College Republicans. The College canceled her talk because of fears of violence, and offered an alternative date–a date when no students would be in class. That’s unacceptable, and an attempt to stifle her, even if it is to avoid violence. If we cave to those who demand censorship because they fear violence not incited directly by a speaker, then we are allowing the “heckler’s veto”, and every opponent of a speaker’s views will learn to threaten violence. Regardless of how odious a speaker seems, we cannot allow that to happen. Free speech is a principle that cannot be overturned except in the most extreme circumstances, and that’s what the U.S. courts have ruled.

Yesterday the College Republicans rescinded Coulter’s invitation (not a great invitation to begin with) because of those fears of violence, and the Young America’s Foundation, which was defending her, pulled out for the same reason. And so Coulter was forced to cancel her talk.

Note that the Left is largely responsible for this, for they are the ones threatening violence, and the ones who caused that violence when Milo Yiannopoulos was supposed to speak at Berkeley. And the Left is largely responsible for all the de-platforming and rescinded invitations to speak at American Colleges in the last five years. We do ourselves no favors by being so censorious, by threatening violence, or, as two misguided professors just did, by defending the right to censor “hate speech.”

Saying that Coulter is vacuous and hateful is no justification for censorship, as many people are seen that way, and who is to decide which speech is allowable? Were I to criticize the tenets of Islam at London University, I would be censored by the Muslim students, yet I think my arguments are reasonable. The students would call my words hateful and vacuous, as they did when attacking the invitation to Britain’s Ambassador to Israel. Who gets to decide? Nobody, and that’s what the First Amendment is about.

Thus, as we see in two new pieces, the New York Time‘s “In Ann Coulter’s speech battle, signs that conservatives are emboldened“, and lawyer Marc Randazza’s CNN article, “Dear Berkeley: Even Ann Coulter deserves free speech” that a few enlightened liberals are defending Coulter’s right to speak, much as they despise her. Those include not only Randazza, but Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders. As Randazza says:

While all this was going on [the “shutting down” of speakers like Charles Murray, Ben Shapiro, and Milo Yiannopoulos], where was the traditionally-free-speech-friendly moderate Left? The prevailing view was, “If you didn’t say offensive things, you wouldn’t be attacked.” Shame on the Left for tacitly condoning this culture of violent suppression of views it disagrees with.

And praise to Maher and Sanders for standing up against it. I question whether Coulter would do the same for them, but that is not the yardstick by which we measure our commitment to freedom of speech. Standing up for the rights of those who would not do it for us demonstrates your commitment to liberty. We don’t need a First Amendment for speech that neither challenges, nor offends. We need it as a good in itself. And, sometimes that very challenging and offensive speech fosters growth.

. . . When anyone tries to shut down speech with violence, all decent Americans should band together against the violence, regardless of their political “tribe.” Does Berkeley stand for freedom of expression, or is it so captivated by its infectious one-party rule that it cannot possibly stand up for expression that challenges its liberal sensibilities?

Coulter has a right to her views. Just as important, we all have a right to hear her speak.

Those who disagree have a right to oppose her, but to use violence cuts against the principles that our entire Constitution rests upon. The First Amendment stands for principles like those articulated in the case, New York Times v. Sullivan: “Debate on public issues … [should be] … uninhibited, robust, and wide open.”

You may think Coulter’s speech is offensive. I certainly do. I think she is a mental midget and an intellectual snake oil salesman. I do wish she would shut up, dry up, and blow away. But even so, I am outraged that her political discussion must go through an on-again, off-again process because either violent thugs control the streets or effete and weak university presidents and the City of Berkeley lack the spine to defend the First Amendment.

The New York Times piece shows that conservatives, emboldened by how craven the Regressive Leftist opponents of free speech look, are deliberately inviting provocateurs to speak, and they’re even suing Berkeley. And the Left looks bad. Is this what we want? I don’t think so.

Just let the damn conservatives speak! What have you got to lose, really? And if you oppose them, use counterspeech, also a traditional tool of the Left.

If you don’t buy what I’ve said above, listen to this famous defense of free speech by the late and sorely missed Christopher Hitchens:

h/t: Grania

Templeton abandons pretense of rationality, awards Templeton Prize to Alvin Plantinga, intelligent-design advocate

April 27, 2017 • 9:30 am

Reader Mark called my attention to the fact that John Templeton Foundation (JTF) has bestowed its annual Templeton Prize on someone who’s not only a deeply misguided religious philosopher, but also has promoted intelligent design and criticized naturalism. Yes, it’s Alvin Plantinga, an 84-year-old emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and also a professor at Calvin College (he’s a Calvinist of sorts).  I’ve written about Plantinga and his claims a lot on this site (go here to see what I’ve said): his main schtick is to claim that it’s not irrational to believe in God; that therefore it’s rational to believe in God; that the existence of God is a “basic belief” that doesn’t require empirical justification; that such belief comes from a divinely installed sensus divinitatis that allows us to detect truth; that because the truth-detector has to come from God, what it finds, like scientific “truths”, is incompatible with pure naturalism; that evolution was guided by GOD AND SATAN; that the God who installed our sensus is none other than Plantinga’s Christian God (surprise!); and that the presence of atheists, Hindus, Jews, and the majority of people with “false beliefs” simply had broken sensuses, which were due to, yes, the actions of SATAN!

Indeed, Plantinga does believe in the Hornéd One. Here’s a quote from his 2011 book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, explaining why there is undeserved evil in the world (my emphasis):

But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain. (Some may snort with disdain at this suggestion; it is none the worse for that.)

Yes it is the worse for that, for where’s the evidence for Satan? That’s some scholarly theodicy, no? And for such lucubrations, Plantinga got £1.1 million—more than a Nobel Prizewinner.

If you think I’m making up my claims about Plantinga’s views, read some of my posts on Plantinga’s claims or the section about his views in my book Faith Versus Fact (pp. 148-149 and 177-183. For a better refutation of the views that earned Plantinga his $1.4 million dollar prize, read pp. 22-73 of an underappreciated scholarly book attacking theism, The Non-Existence of God by Nicholas Everitt, who simply demolishes Plantinga’s piffle. (By the way, have theists read Everitt’s book? If not, then they’ve neglected some of The Best Arguments for Atheism.)

All of this casts doubts on Templeton’s claim to be increasingly down with science, for, after all, Plantinga is pretty much an intelligent design creationist. Although he’s waffled on this a bit in the past, he seems to have settled on ID creationism. I’ll quote Michael Ruse from The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2011, and, having read Plantinga’s book, I concur with Michael:

Now, Plantinga has given us a full-length treatment of his views on science and its relationship to religion. I can only say that either he has changed his mind in the last year [when said he didn’t dismiss Darwinism] or, shall we say, he was not being entirely forthcoming. There is a chapter of the book on Intelligent Design Theory and I challenge any independent person to read it and not conclude that Plantinga accepts this theory over modern evolutionary theory, especially the dominant modern Darwinian evolutionary theory. But read the chapter yourself if you have doubts about what I claim. Make your own judgment.

Remember, Ruse is usually soft on theists.

You can read Maarten Boudry’s review of Plantinga’s book here, a review that severely faults Plantinga for his “philosophical trickery” and his flawed arguments for God-guided evolution.

If you want to be charitable, you could argue that Plantinga adheres to a form of theistic evolution, in which God created and directed the process, but that’s still a form of theistic creationism, and of course there’s no scientific evidence for it (and there is evidence against it, like the randomness of mutation and the extinction of most species [or is that due to SATAN?]), so Templeton has put their imprimatur on an explicit denier of science. But even if you leave aside ID, Plantinga’s arguments that you can prove the existence of the Christian God through philosophy alone are wrong, an attempt that smacks of the Ontological Argument. You simply cannot establish the existence of a theistic entity through thought alone.

Here’s the announcement of Plantinga’s Big Prize from the National Catholic Reporter (click on screenshot to to go the piece), which parrots the JTF’s own announcement (right below it):

But it gets worse: here’s part of the JTF’s announcement (my emphasis):

WEST CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa. – Alvin Plantinga, an American scholar whose rigorous writings over a half century have made theism – the belief in a divine reality or god – a serious option within academic philosophy, was announced today as the 2017 Templeton Prize Laureate.

Plantinga’s pioneering work began in the late 1950s, a time when academic philosophers generally rejected religiously informed philosophy. In his early books, however, Plantinga considered a variety of arguments for the existence of God in ways that put theistic belief back on the philosophical agenda.

Plantinga’s 1984 paper, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” challenged Christian philosophers to let their religious commitments shape their academic agenda and to pursue rigorous work based on a specifically Christian philosophical vision. At the same time, he was developing an account of knowledge, most fully expressed in the “Warrant Trilogy” published by Oxford University Press (1993 and 2000), making the case that religious beliefs are proper starting points for human reasoning and do not have to be defended or justified based on other beliefs. These arguments have now influenced three generations of professional philosophers.

Indeed, more than 50 years after this remarkable journey began, university philosophy departments around the world now include thousands of professors who bring their religious commitments to bear on their work, including Buddhist, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers.

“Sometimes ideas come along that revolutionize the way we think, and those who create such breakthrough discoveries are the people we honor with the Templeton Prize,” said Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation, which awards the Prize. “Alvin Plantinga recognized that not only did religious belief not conflict with serious philosophical work, but that it could make crucial contributions to addressing perennial problems in philosophy.”

Note the claim (mostly false) that Plantinga’s work has inspired serious philosophers to “bring their religious commitments to bear on their work”. That is, he’s given them a license to engage in confirmation bias: justifying post facto what they already believe and want to be true. That’s hardly a good way to do philosophy, but of course it’s the way philosophers of religion proceed.

Now if Plantinga were that influential, why are 62% of philosophers atheists—a frequency at least ten times higher than the general public as a whole? (Plantinga claims that the reason is that atheistic philosophers don’t want to believe in God rather than having good rational reasons for their nonbelief.)

Larry Moran at Sandwalk has written a number of critiques of Plantinga and his views on evolution, and you can see a list here. Here are two videos of Plantinga explaining his Prize-winning views. In the first, he emphasizes why, he thinks, you can’t believe in both naturalism and evolution. That’s because, as I said, Alvin can’t imagine how humans can have reliable mental faculties without God, and without those faculties you can neither accept science as a valid method of inquiry nor rely on its conclusions. Ergo, if you accept what science has found, you’re tacitly accepting the Christian God.

Plantinga, of course, neglects the possibility evolution could have given us the ability to draw rational conclusions from data, simply as a survival tool.

Here’s his argument for God as a “basic belief”, which boils down to this: “it seems to be right.” Now that’s powerful philosophy, philosophy based on his gut. I urge you to watch this to see what he thinks.

Below is a partial list of scholars—natural scientists, social scientists, and philosophers and historians of science—whose endeavors have been supported by the JTF. (You can see the full list here; there are hundreds of them.) I’ve listed names only of people I’ve heard of—and remember, I’m just a biologist.

These are good scientists and scholars, by and large, but they take money from an organization that promotes religion, natural theology, and antievolution. I ask them this with all due respect: do you really want to take money from a Foundation that’s devoted to watering down science with superstition?

I believe most or all of these people are holders or beneficiaries of current grants. There are many more who held JTF grants in the past.

Brian Greene and Tracy Day (World Science Festival)
David Sloan Wilson
Martin Nowak
David Albert
Max Tegmark
Kevin Laland
Alexander Vilenkin
Lee Smolin
Carlo Rovelli
Elaine Ecklund
Robert Pennock
Simon Conway Morris
Andrew Whiten
Niles Eldredge
Jon Entine
Paul Bloom
Marcus Feldman
Jennifer Wiseman (head of the AAAS DoSER project)
Scott Edwards
Robert Wright
Jeremy England
Gunter Wagner
Tanya Luhrmann

Apropos, here’s a tw**t from Dan Dennett:

h/t: John O.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 27, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader John Conoboy went to Africa and photographed some birds. Weird birds. Here are his photos, with his notes indented:

We saw a lot of birds. Here are a few pics of my favorites.

First is the Kori Bustard (Ardeotis kori struthiunculus). These were  pretty common and although they are the largest flying bird in Africa,  they were always on the ground. Males display by puffing up their necks  (gular pouches) creating a large white throat balloon. This guy seems to  be slightly puffed up, but he is not going to get the girls like this.

There was a tree near our camp in the Serengeti that was a roosting spot for Marabou Storks (Leptoptilos crumeniferus). Every night we were treated to this lovely view. Joe Dickinson had a nice shot of a Marabou in his Africa photos.  Folks can check out his photo and see why this bird is listed as one of ugly five you see on a safari. Personally, I did not find any of the animals we saw as ugly.

Next is a Grey Crowned Crane (Balearica regulorum). It is listed as endangered.

Finally, my favorite bird, the Secretary Bird (Sagittarius serpentarius). The Secretary Bird struts along and periodically stomps on its prey and after eating moves on to find something else. It is great fun to watch them. Like the bustard, they can fly but we always saw them on the ground.

Here’s one of them stomping a venomous snake to death. Be sure to watch the last half of the video, which shows how much force this bird can impart in its stomps:

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

April 27, 2017 • 6:30 am

Happy Thursday, April 27, 2017: National Prime Rib Day (make mine rare!). In South Africa it’s Freedom Day, commemorating the first elections after apartheid ended, held on April 27, 1994. And reader Dom just informed me that it’s World Tapir Day, which it indeed is. There are four species! Here’s a question: why the odd coloration of both adult and baby Malayan tapirs (Tapirus indicus), and why the developmental change? Baby looks like a watermelon, adults have a black-and-white pandalike pattern:

On this day in 1667, the blind and penurious John Milton sold the rights of Paradise Lost for just £10. And on April 27, 1945, Benito Mussolini was captured trying to escape in disguise, soon to be shot and his corpse suspended upside down tied to a lamppost. Finally, three years ago Popes John XXIII and John Paul II were canonized on the same day.

Notables born on this day include Edward Gibbon (1737), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759), Ulysses S. Grant (1822), Walter Lantz (1899), Coretta Scott King (1927), and Arielle Dombasle (1953). Those who died on this day include Ferdinand Magellan (1521) and Edward R. Murrow (1965). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili appear to share a tender moment, but it’s deceptive:

A: What are you looking for?
Hili: Your wallet was here somewhere.
In Polish:
Ja: I czego tam szukasz?
Hili: Tu gdzieś był twój portfel.

Gus took the tape test to see if he’d sit in a square on the floor made of tape, but failed. As his staff tells us:

Here’s a Gus pic. I tried the tape thing, but Gus was too suspicious and chose to sit on my books and  look warily at the tape instead. Oh well.

And up in Wroclawek, Leon is cracking jokes:

Leon: Is watering place an equivalent of a cafe?

Finally, lagnaippe from reader Pyers:

 

Breaking science news: humans in North America 130,000 years ago?

April 26, 2017 • 2:15 pm

I’ll just put this up here without analysis, as I haven’t yet read the paper. But it’s big news if true. A new a new report Nature by Holen et al. (reference below; free access) claims to have found human tools associated with crushed and cracked mastodon bones at a site in southern California, with the date a full 130,000 years ago! 

Conventional wisdom puts the arrival of humans in North America about 15,000-20,000 years ago, coming from Siberia across the Bering Strait. These hominins are nearly ten times older, and well older than those individuals who left Africa about 60.000 years ago to colonize the globe.

Who were these hominins? Were they a species that went extinct? Or is it a mistake? If this is true, it’s a remarkable and game-changing discovery.  Have a look at the paper, below, but first here’s Nature’s video:

And here are some of the tools:

a–d, Anvil (CM-281). a, Upper surface. Boxes indicate images magnified in b–d; dashed rectangle, magnified in b, small dashed square, magnified in c and solid square, magnified in d. b, Cortex removal and impact marks (arrows). c, Striations (arrows) on the highest upper cortical surface ridge. d, Striations (diagonal arrows) and impact marks with step terminations characteristic of hammer blows (vertical arrows). e–i, Hammerstone (CM-383). e, Impact marks. The box indicates the magnified images in g and h. f, Upper smoothed surface. g, Deep cracks and impact scars (arrows). h, Impact scars from g, showing results of three discrete hammerstone blows on an anvil (arrows). The large flake scar (central arrow) has a clear point of impact with radiating fissures. The small scar (right arrow) has a negative impact cone and associated scars and fissures preserved beneath a layer of caliche. i, Striations (arrows) and abrasive polish on upper cortical surface (near black North arrow in f). Scale bars, 5 cm (a), 2 cm (b, g, h), 1 mm (c, i), 2 mm (d), 10 cm (e, f).

____________________

Holen, S. R., T. A. Deméré, D. C. Fisher, R. Fullagar, J. B. Paces, G. T. Jefferson, J. M. Beeton, R. A. Cerutti, A. N. Rountrey, L. Vescera, and K. A. Holen. 2017. A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA. Nature 544:479-483.

 

 

British academics and students call for censorship of Israeli ambassador because his appearance could upset students

April 26, 2017 • 1:30 pm

I’ll be brief, as this is all too familiar. According to the Guardian and the Elder of Ziyon sites, students and professors at a British university have their knickers in knots because two student groups invited Mark Regev, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, to speak.  His crime? Being the ambassador to Israel, of course, which, seen as an “apartheid regime”, cannot be allowed to have its views expressed anywhere, even through an official ambassador. The objections? Based on the mental damage Regev’s words may do to listeners, making his invitation a “deliberate provocation.” Lordy!

The objecting college is the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, part of the University of London and an institution that is diehard pro-Palestine and anti-Israeli. The groups inviting him were the SOAS Jewish and United Nations societies. The Guardian reports (my emphasis):

Students and academics at Soas University of London have said a visit by the Israeli ambassador Mark Regev this week could lead to serious tension and substantial distress on the campus.

Regev has been invited by two student societies to speak about the Middle East and prospects for peace on Thursday, but his visit has been criticised as provocative by other staff and students who are planning a protest.

More than 150 academics from Soas and other UK universities, plus 40 student societies at the university, have written to the Soas director Valerie Amos urging her to intervene to stop the meeting on Thursday at which Regev is due to speak.

A letter signed by more than 100 Soas staff says: “We fear that if this provocative event proceeds as planned, it will cause substantial distress and harm to many of our students and staff who are, have been or will be affected by the actions of what a recent UN report refers to as the Israeli ‘apartheid regime’.

“The event could further cause serious tension on campus and result in a charged atmosphere that will be detrimental to the wellbeing of all faculty, staff and students.”

This is an excuse we’re hearing increasingly often: “This person cannot speak because it will cause riots and also the words will injure our mental health.” These Regressives have learned well from the Muslim playbook. But wait! There’s more:

The students’ union challenged the university authorities over the staging of the event, raising concerns about possible safety and security risks posed by the ambassador’s visit and “the inability of students and staff – in particular Palestinian students – to participate openly in the debate, because of possible repercussions on their ability to enter Israel/Palestine”.

Soas, which is one of the world’s leading institutions for the study of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, has often been the focus of coverage of the sometimes fraught debate surrounding Israeli-Palestinian politics on university campuses. As a result, the small minority of Jewish students at Soas have complained of feeling uncomfortable on campus and unable to express themselves.

A statement posted on Facebook by the Soas students’ union said: “We stand with the Soas community in expressing our concern at Mark Regev’s presence on campus, and in rejecting the idea that our spaces of learning should serve as avenues for officials to put forward state propaganda.”

For crying out loud–state propaganda? Maybe Regev will give official government views, or maybe not, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that academics are baying for censorship on extremely stupid grounds. These objecting students have every right in the world to stage their own protests and to give counter-speeches or write critical articles, but that’s not enough. For them, nobody associated with the Israeli government, or expressing a pro-Israel position, must be allowed to poison the minds of students! I wonder what all these academics are afraid of. I think they are either afraid that Negev may actually persuade someone, but more likely they just are using this an an excuse to shut down views they don’t like.

To its credit, SOAS is standing firm, refusing to de-platform Regev.

One more bit: the “free speech but. . . ” argument:

Eighteen Palestinian students at Soas have written to Amos expressing their concerns. “The environment that Mr Regev would create on our campus for the event is unsafe for us as Palestinian students, many of whom have suffered directly at the hands of the Israeli security services,” they said.

A letter from 50 academics from other institutions across the UK agreed that everyone benefited from an open debate where Israel’s policies could be heard and challenged, but added: “There are two factors that make the projected meeting an exception to this rule, however. The first is that the format of this meeting does not permit Regev’s case, such as it is, to be subjected to any scrutiny.

“More importantly, there is Regev himself. He is the official representative of a government that is in violation of countless United Nations resolutions, and which routinely and for 50 years has denied human rights, including that of national self-determination, to the Palestinians.”

If these students really think that Israeli security will be taking names at the meeting, and preventing them from returning to Palestine (I doubt that they can, though I doubt even more that Israeli security services will be there), they just shouldn’t go. But these students have already signed the letter and so their opposition is already public! As for the lack of debate, there is a discussion with a professor from Queen Mary University AND there will be questions from the audience! What more do these clowns want?

What they want, clearly, is for the opposing voices to be silenced, and it’s sad that British academics are going the route of their American colleagues (see previous post). As for the second part, many of these objectors want to do away with the state of Israel (an open secret of the BDS movement), which is just as odious. And of course Palestine denies human rights to women, gays, and apostates, none of which are demonized in Israel, many of whose citizens are women, gays, and atheists!

Finally, Elders of Ziyon notes this (their emphasis):

A letter signed by more than 100 Soas staff says: “We fear that if this provocative event proceeds as planned, it will cause substantial distress and harm to many of our students and staff who are, have been or will be affected by the actions of what a recent UN report refers to as the Israeli ‘apartheid regime’.

“The event could further cause serious tension on campus and result in a charged atmosphere that will be detrimental to the wellbeing of all faculty, staff and students.”

This is not a spoof. This is not satire. This is seriously what supposed academics are claiming will be the outcome of an Israeli representative speaking on campus, a single Zionist speech among the hundreds of anti-Zionist talks, activities, lectures  and boycotts that infest SOAS every year.

The students’ union challenged the university authorities over the staging of the event, raising concerns about possible safety and security risks posed by the ambassador’s visit and “the inability of students and staff – in particular Palestinian students – to participate openly in the debate, because of possible repercussions on their ability to enter Israel/Palestine”.

Apparently Israel is completely unaware of the anti-Israel activities they do the other 364 days of the year, but they will have Mossad operatives taking names on the day of the Regev speech just looking for excuses to ban Palestinians from coming home.

Prof Jonathan Rosenhead, one of the organisers of the academics’ protest letter to Lady Amos, said: “Holding this meeting at Soas, where staff and students have voted overwhelmingly in support of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and in support of Palestinian rights, seems like a deliberate provocation.”

Calling for the destruction of Israel isn’t a provocation. Holding a speech defending it is.

Another professor calls for censoring speakers

April 26, 2017 • 11:15 am

At the end of yesterday’s piece about a professor calling for censorship of speech that “dehumanizes people,” I predicted that we’re going to see more academics calling for censorship of invited speakers. After all, most professors are Leftists, some are Regressive Leftists, some Regressive Leftists (especially in universities) favor censorship, ergo you’ll probably find professors who favor censorship. This syllogism is mine and belongs to me. So did my prediction.

Well. after I wrote a draft of yesterday’s piece, reader Rodney called my attention to a new piece in the New Republic: “Why colleges have a right to reject hateful speakers like Ann Coulter“. And it fulfills my prediction, with a college English professor calling for censorship.

The piece is by Aaron R. Hanlon, identified as “Assistant Professor of English at Colby College and advisor for Georgetown University’s MLA/Mellon Foundation ‘Connected Academics’ project.” And in his essay Hanlon argues that we should censor some speakers simply because there’s not enough time to hear everybody, and so we must choose judiciously. Who shall we choose? The speakers that should be censored are, of course, the ones that Hanlon considers to be purveyors of “hate” speech, like Coulter.  He doesn’t say who should make the decision, but argues that because speakers are chosen by clubs or subgroups within a university, that somehow makes their de-platforming or disinvitation not censorship:

Rejecting campus speakers is not an assault on free speech. Rather, like so many other decisions made every day by college students, teachers, and administrators, it’s a value judgment.

. . . But to understand these disinvitation attempts, we need to understand the unglamorous process by which speakers get invited.

When departments or groups arrange for a speaker, invitations are usually authorized by small committees or localized administrative offices without a campus-wide discussion or debate. Student groups, and even academic and administrative departments, operate with differing degrees of autonomy. Given the number and ideological diversity of these groups, they don’t typically hold a forum about whether to invite someone; they petition the appropriate offices for approval, put together a budget, and plan the event. A handful of people make judgment calls to authorize speakers before invitations go out. Hosting groups then advertise the event, at which point the controversy—if there’s destined to be one—begins.

Understanding this sequence of events is crucial, because no-platforming is as much a function of process as of politics. Instead of community-wide discussion and debate over the merits of bringing a given speaker to campus, the debate happens after the invitation, giving the misleading impression that no-platforming is about shutting down speech.

This is a distinction without a difference. Groups are allowed to invite their own speakers precisely to foster diversity. Why on earth should there even be university-wide debate or discussion about choosing a speaker? And why does the present process mean that no-platforming is not censorship?

Here we see an academic too clever for his own good, inventing superficially clever but ultimately stupid arguments about why de-platforming or disinvitation isn’t the same thing as censorship once a speaker has been invited. So when Hanlon says this:

Though the knowledge and skills we deem essential have changed over the years, the practice of curating and prioritizing them is still crucial to the mission of a classically liberal education. No-platforming may look like censorship from certain angles, but from others it’s a consequence of a challenging, never-ending process occurring at virtually all levels of the university: deciding what educational material to present to our students and what to leave out. In this sense, de-platforming isn’t censorship; it’s a product of free expression and the foundational aims of a classically liberal education.

. . .he’s engaging in classic doublespeak: deplatforming is an expression of free speech. How obtuse can somebody be?

If that wasn’t enough, Hanlon draws a false equivalence between deciding on university speakers and deciding whose work to include on a one-semester class syllabus and whose to leave out:

For my “Age of Revolution” course I have 14 weeks to cover the English Civil Wars, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, which means it’s incumbent upon me—and every other professor—to think very carefully about what students need to know, and thus what to prioritize and what to leave out. In making that decision, I consult other scholars in the field and review other syllabi. I consider my research strengths, as well as the gaps or needs in the broader curriculum. If I end up leaving off James Madison in favor of Edmund Burke, I’m hardly “censoring” Madison. And if I deem it important to bring underrepresented voices into my course—like poet and former slave Phillis Wheatley—I’m judging Wheatley more appropriate for that platform. Such decisions aren’t about “shutting down” points of view; they’re about finding the most valuable ways to use our limited time and resources.

Now there IS a difference between Hanlon’s syllabus and campus speakers. The former allows only a limited number of readings, while campus groups can invite an essentially endless number of speakers. The former reflects the professor’s viewpoint, the latter the diverse viewpoints of college organizations. If the College Democrats invite Elizabeth Warren, the college Republicans can invite Ben Shapiro.  Choosing one doesn’t eliminate the opportunity for the other. Doesn’t Hanlon realize that?

And he doesn’t really tell us what sorts of speakers should  be allowed; only that Ann Coulter should not. Of course if you leave such choices to a consensus vote of the entire student body, you’ll never hear a speaker that goes against Lefist sentiments, or that says anything counter to received ideology.

Near the end of his piece, Hanlon has the temerity to argue that no-platforming was crucial for the success of ancient Greek and Roman society (my emphasis):

But no-platforming is better understood as the kind of value judgment that lies at heart of a liberal arts education—“liberal” referring not to politics, of course, but to the kinds of knowledge the ancient Greeks and Romans believed were necessary for the flourishing of a free person, necessary for full and effective participation in civic life. This has always meant deciding what people needed to know, but also what they don’t need to know—or at least which knowledge and skills deserved priority in one’s formal education.

To which I can reply no better than did Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette (which you should be reading):

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/856825552354689024

Here’s the miscreant. He’s an English professor, and the professor who argued for censorship in yesterday’s post was in comparative literature. These are disciplines particularly prone to postmodernism, and that’s no accident. I doubt you’ll ever see a biologist or physicist calling for censorship, for we value the clash of ideas.

Aaron Hanlon: Wants moar censorship

 

h/t: Rodney

Bats use sonar to locate cactus flowers

April 26, 2017 • 9:40 am

Many cacti bloom at night, and that’s when the bats and moths are available for pollination. But since most bats locate prey by echolocation via sonar, how do they find the flowers? This is particularly crucial when those flowers stick out of cacti, for the bats approach the flower fast and hover before it while lapping nectar; if they miss, they could get impaled. And indeed, in  a very good NYT piece by Natalie Angier, she reports that impaled bats—those who have missed their mark—can be found on cacti (see photo at very bottom).

That means there’s strong natural selection on the bats to find the flowers and home in on them accurately. How do they do this? A reference in Angier’s article led me to a piece published last year in PLoS ONE  (reference and free link below) showing that, at least at final approach, the bats use echolocation, emitting a special kind of call as they approach the flower. And apparently the flowers themselves have characteristics that help guide the bats to the nectar tube, which I suppose scientists could have realized a long time ago had they thought about it.

The authors, Tania Gonzalez-Terrazas et al., recorded the sonar calls of a group of wild-caught Lesser Long-Nosed Bats ( Leptonycteris yerbabuenae), a Central and North American species that subsists on nectar from night-blooming plants, particularly columnar cacti. Here’s a photo and a video of this species feeding:

Note that the bats hover when feeding:

To test how the bats locate flowers, they used two targets (tested separately): a flowering columnar cactus (Pachyceroeus pringlei) and the “control”, an acrylic hemisphere (set up next to a columnar but flowerless cactus) filled with sugar water (the flower was also filled with an equal amount of sugar water). The bats’ calls were recorded with an ultrasound microphone and their movements tracked with an infrared camera. Here’s the setup:

(From the paper): Setup used during the flight cage experiments with both targets. We worked with one target at a time, respectively, each fixed to a cactus branch. The flight and echolocation behavior was recorded with an ultrasound microphone and two synchronized video cameras supported by stroboscopic light. Flight cage dimensions (4m x 4m x 3m).

The results can be stated succinctly:

  • The bats approach and locate the flower and sphere differently. They use sonar to find both, emitting calls, but also emit a special “buzzlike” call, consisting of reduced interval between pulses, and reduced peak amplitude, only when approaching the flower. This may enable them to locate the flower opening accurately. That special call is not used when approaching the acrylic “flower”. This is in fact the only report of a “terminal-buzz-like phase” in a nectar-feeding bat, though similar calls are used by aerial insect-eating bats as they approach their prey.

 

  • The acrylic hemisphere, containing nectar, was never used for food; bats aborted their approach flight to it at the last second, while all the flowers were found (they may also use scent). The special call emitted when approaching flowers indicates that sonar is also important. Here’s a diagram showing how bats approach both targets (three different flight paths), with the dots indicating when the bats emit a call. The green dot shows the position of the microphone and the pink star the location of the target.

“A” is a cactus flower and “B” the acrylic hemisphere. Note that the bats never got to the hemisphere, and their calling is more variable and erratic. The top two panels are side views, the bottom two top views:

As you see, the bats have a much more uniform approach to the real flower, always coming from below and never getting above it. You can also see that all approaches to the sphere were aborted.

  • Finally, the authors suggest that the cactus flower itself has evolved to guide the bat accurately to the nectar. After all, it’s in the cactus’s reproductive interests to avoid having the bat miss the flower and get impaled! Here’s the suggestion from the paper:

“The echoes reflected from the inside of the long tube of the cactus flower might function as an acoustic guide that provides the bat with detailed information on the location of the flower opening and the orientation of the floral tube. In addition, cacti as well as many bat-pollinated flowers have particularly robust and rigid petals that may indicate the flower opening not only visually but also acoustically. Leptonycteris yerbabuenae only emitted the long terminal group while approaching the flower. We suggest that specific echo-acoustic characteristics of the flower guide the bats directly into the opening of the flower, and emission of an extended terminal group of calls at the end of the approach sequence aids this task.”

It would seem obvious that if pollination—reproduction for a cactus and a crucial factor in preserving its genes—depends on bats, then the flower itself might evolve to lure the bats as well as make sure it doesn’t get impaled on the cactus’s own spines. Well, that’s obvious in retrospect, but why wasn’t this realized until now? I can surmise only that it comes from a bias towards studying the evolution of animals compared to plants (there are a lot more zoologists than botanists). Yet even Darwin devoted several of his books to plant evolution. Let us not ignore our green relatives!

Here’s a bat that missed, impaled on a cholla cactus:

Natural selection; photo from “what I saw. . . “

_______

Gonzalez-Terrazas, T. P., Koblitz, J. C., Fleming, T. H., Medellín, R. A., Kalko, E. K. V., Schnitzler, H.-U., & Tschapka, M. (2016). How Nectar-Feeding Bats Localize their Food: Echolocation Behavior of Leptonycteris yerbabuenae Approaching Cactus Flowers. PLoS ONE, 11(9), e0163492. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0163492