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.
As my CNN news bulletins tell me, Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Court justice is in serious danger. Gorsuch needs 60 “yes” votes in the Senate for confirmation, and there are only 52 Republicans. Further, several key Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, have already said they’ll vote no on Gorsuch. So did Bernie Sanders.
My view? Given that the Republicans unconscionably and reprehensibly held up the nomination of Merrick Garland until after the election, this is not only payback, but payback that’s warranted since Gorsuch himself will tilt the court to the right for many years to come. Although I don’t like stalling the legislative process, like holding up budgets, in this case I think it’s justified. The Democrats should stick together and vote “no” on every one of Trump’s choices until he nominates a centrist to the court. Until then, the Court can proceed with eight members, which is fine by me.
And I note with approval that the “TrumpCare” bill, which will render millions more Americans unable to afford healthcare, appears deeply mired in Congress, with Republicans unable to agree on it. The conservative Republican Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives wants an extreme version of the bill that doesn’t appeal to mainstream Republicans (if that’s not an oxymoron), but won’t approve a bill that the mainstream GOP wants. No Democrat will vote for the bill. The passage of the bill, then, is stalled by an internecine war between “mainstream” and conservative Republicans.
What the Republicans are doing is madness. Their only goal is to undo Obama’s Affordable Healthcare bill—simply because it was enacted by Obama. They have no credible replacement, and the government’s own nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that under the Republican bill, 24 million fewer Americans will have healthcare than under Obama’s present plan. That is a lot of sickness, death, and disease—all to get back at Obama. In other words, Republicans, to make a political point, are willing to let many Americans die.
Well, just one, but it was a long story that almost ended in failure, with victory pulled from the flames at the last possible moment. And anyway, seeing one is sufficient. Details and more photos follow tomorrow.
Good morning (and good night to those of you in countries with their noses on the International Date Line).
Today is the birthday of the man who invented the safety elevator, Elisha Otis (1811). The invention was born out of necessity – he wanted to use hoisting platforms at his bedstead factory, but they were unreliable as the lifting cable often broke. Initially he didn’t seem to think much of his invention, he’d created other things before: a safety brake for trains and an automatic bread baking oven. However he showed it at the New York World’s Fair in 1854, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“…every differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law.”
German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun was also born today in 1912. He moved to the US after World War II, recruited through the secretive Operation Paperclip, where he worked on the Saturn V program.
Franz Schreker (1878) is a little-known Austrian composer born to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. His promising career was cut short by the Weimar Republic; rising anti-Semitism and National Socialist demonstrations irreparably damaged his reputation. He died in 1934 in relative obscurity. Since 2004 however, there has been a revival of interest his works, and they have been performed in Germany and Austria.
And so, onto Dobrzyń where Hili the cat is being obscure. Maybe she is showing off to Cyrus, or perhaps she is an astute observer of trends and weaknesses in philosophy.
A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: I’m thinking that philosophers didn’t arrive at post-existentialism yet.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Nad tym, że filozofowie nie dotarli jeszcze do postegzystencjalizmu.
They were originally arrested on charges of serving alcohol in their home and hosting mixed-gender parties. Vafadari is Zoroastrian and thus is technically not bound to these Islamic laws. Minority religions in Iran are protected in their Constitution.
“The reason must be a different one…political blackmail toward the US (of which they are also citizens), envy for their success, intimidation toward the Zoroastrian community, desire to grab their properties, [and] repression of contemporary art (the reported destruction of works of art at their home would point in this direction).”
The imprisonment of Vafadari and Nayssari also appears motivated by greed: the Islamic Republic has a long and documented history of unlawfully confiscating private property, especially that belonging to those with whom the authorities do not favor. The family of Vafadari reported continuous calls right after the couple’s arrest demanding money, and noted that the charges brought would allow the seizure of the couple’s extensive properties.
The continued inclusion of Iran among the six predominantly Muslim nations in Mr. Trump’s revised visa ban has only aggravated matters, according to Iranian-American advocates. Iran, which has described the ban as insulting, has retaliated by prohibiting most American visitors.
“The problem is that no one has a clue about Trump administration policy,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran. With the American prisoners in Iran, he said, “there is limbo, really.”
If I return without seeing one of these birds, I’ll be downhearted. Here is a kea attack on a car at Arthur’s Pass. The woman tried to feed one, which is forbidden, though I know it’s tempting.
And here’s a video showing the infectious “play call” of the kea that incites other kea to playful behavior. Read about it in National Geographic. Note that the researchers played various calls to the keas, including non-play calls and the calls of other species.
A female has been recovered from the River Thames alive but with injuries, a Port of London Authority spokesman told CNN.
Images showed a car crashed into the perimeter gate of Parliament, and witnesses later told CNN that they had seen the vehicle mow down pedestrians.
David Lidington, leader of the House of Commons, also reported a stabbing.
“It seems that a police officer has been stabbed, that the alleged assailant was shot by armed police,” he said.
____________________
There were either one or two terrorist attacks today outside Parliament and on Westminster Bridge nearby. A policeman was stabbed, not fatally, and the assailant shot and killed (apparently British police near Parliament are armed). At least one of the five pedestrians deliberately struck by a speeding car has died.
I am calling this a “terrorist attack” because a.) the British police are calling it that and b.) it’s the first anniversary of the Brussels bombings. I don’t like to rush to judgment when this kind of thing happens, but this time I’ll predict it’s the hand of Islamic terrorism. You can read the New York Times report here. An excerpt:
LONDON — Britain’s Parliament was placed on lockdown on Wednesday, plunging the country’s seat of power into turmoil, after an assailant stabbed a police officer outside the building before he was shot, and a motorist on an adjacent bridge plowed over at least five pedestrians, killing at least one.
The Metropolitan Police described the attack as a “a terrorist incident,” but many details, as well as the sequence of events, remained unclear. Security officers shot the assailant outside Parliament. But it was not yet known whether the assailant was the same person who ran over the pedestrians on the bridge. The police also responded to reports of a person in the River Thames.
. . . Ambulances and other emergency vehicles thronged the scene, and helicopters flew ahead, as one of the busiest sections of London was cordoned off and evacuated. The Westminster station on the Tube, London’s subway system, was closed. Prime Minister Theresa May was rushed into a vehicle and spirited back to her office, where her aides reported that she was safe.
You know this is going to happen in the U.S. sooner or later, and it will be awful when it does—not only for the innocent people killed or injured, but for the backlash on peaceful Muslims that will ensue when Donald Trump claims he was right all along. I have no idea how it will play out when it happens, but if you want to see true Islamophobia—bigotry against Muslims—be whipped into a frenzy by our President, that will be the time.
As for these incidents, is this the price we must ultimately pay for relatively open immigration, or is there anything we can do? I ask readers for their response. And don’t tell me that handguns kill a gazillion more people in the U.S. than do Muslim terrorists, which of course is true; that is not the issue I’m talking about, and I’ve had my say on guns. Remember, this is a problem not limited to America, not by a long shot.
The author of today’s Jesus and Mo strip apologizes for being late with the Lent humor. The strip appears to be unusual in that it’s almost straight Catskill humor without any explicit denigration of religion—unless that be criticism of how un-serious people are at giving up stuff at Lent.
I’m off to see kea (I’ve learned that the singular and plural are the same) in an hour or so! Wish me luck. Here’s a photo of one taken by my friend Andrew Berry at Arthur’s Pass several years ago. Isn’t it gorgeous? He was very close to it, too:
Tomorrow is the day I head up to Arthur’s Pass from Greymouth to look for keas, the world’s only alpine species of parrot. I’m hopeful that I’ll get to see these remarkable birds, because the pass is where they are most easily found. In preparation, today I traveled from Fox Glacier north to Greymouth, took a room in a backpacker’s hostel (but a real room: I need to spread out and clean up), and bought round-trip bus tickets to Arthur’s pass.
As I said in an earlier post, New Zealand intercity buses are like tour buses: the driver keeps up a constant and informative patter about the history, biology, and geology of the region we’re passing through, often negotiating wet hairpin curves as he does so. And there are one-lane bridges that have to be negotiated—often only a few feet wider than the bus:
A bit of the lovely scenery on the coastal road north, said to be one of the world’s ten most beautiful highways. I think those are ducks on the lake, but I have no idea which species.
The buses also make frequent stops for food, bathroom breaks, and photo opportunities. One of these was at the lovely little town of Hokitika. It’s famous for carving and selling the local nephrite jade, called “pounamu” by the Maoris and “greenstone” by the descendants of immigrants. It was much prized by the Maori for its beauty, hardness, and utility. It was made into jewelry, axes, tools, fishooks and clubs (see the Wikipedia excerpt below), and is still carved by hand to traditional Maori designs (as well as modern ones). I visited a store to see the process:
It apparently takes a lot of skill and training to carve these stones, which are found in riverine deposits are are not immediately identifiable as jade (see below; for more information about designs and the stones, go here).
Here’s a bit about greenstone from Wikipedia:
Pounamu plays a very important role in Māoriculture. It is considered a taonga (treasure) and therefore protected under the Treaty of Waitangi. Pounamu taonga increase in mana (prestige) as they pass from one generation to another. The most prized taonga are those with known histories going back many generations. These are believed to have their own mana and were often given as gifts to seal important agreements.
Pounamu taonga include tools such as toki (adzes), whao (chisels), whao whakakōka (gouges), ripi pounamu (knives), scrapers, awls, hammer stones, and drill points. Hunting tools include matau (fishing hooks) and lures, spear points, and know poria (leg rings for fastening captive birds); weapons such as mere (short handled clubs); and ornaments such as pendants (hei-tiki, hei matau and pekapeka), ear pendants (kuru and kapeu), and cloak pins. [7][8] Functional pounamu tools were widely worn for both practical and ornamental reasons, and continued to be worn as purely ornamental pendants (hei kakï) even after they were no longer used as tools.
Pounamu is found only in the South Island of New Zealand, known in Māori as Te Wai Pounamu (“The [land of] Greenstone Water”) or Te Wahi Pounamu (“The Place of Greenstone”). In 1997 the Crown handed back the ownership of all naturally occurring pounamu to the South Island tribe Ngāi Tahu, as part of the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement.
A Maori fish hook:
A Maori club:
I love the traditional design below, which requires the carver to open up spaces between the bits of jade. Some information from Global Culture:
The Maori twist or Pikorua resembles two intertwined pikopiko ferns. Pikopiko is a pale green new-growth fern frond that thrives in shady, damp areas of the New Zealand woods and Rua is the Maori word for the number two.
The entanglement has no beginning or end which refers to an eternal bond between two autonomous entities. These entities might be two persons. The pikorua symbol shows how individuals sometimes go their own way on their path of life but always come back together because of their strong bond hence the description of pikorua as “The path of love and life”. Another common description because of its meaning is ‘two person friendship pendant’.
I’ve now landed in the town of Greymouth, which I quite like. It’s an old gold and coal mining town (population about 14,000), and has a sleepy atmosphere with old buildings. Here’s part of the downtown:
Greymouth is also the terminus of one of the world’s most famous railway journeys: the 4.5-hour “TranzAlpine Service” cutting through the Southern Alps from Greymouth to Christchurch and back. A fire in the forest in February closed it for nearly six weeks, but today, as my bus was pulling in, the first train on the restored line was pulling out, and the locals were very happy. Here’s the station:
There are several large memorials made of huge blocks of pounamu:
This large stone shows that the green jade interior is hidden until the stone is cut open:
Dinner at a local cafe: turbot and chips with a local cider. The cider was about 6% alcohol, and I have to admit I was a bit tipsy after the meal. The turbot was excellent.
I am staying at the Noah’s Ark Backpackers, which, despite its Biblical name, is a fine place—not nearly as crowded and odious as my hostel in Queenstown. And I have my own room—the Zebra Room, as all the rooms are named after (and decorated like) animals. My room reminds me of a whorehouse! Sadly, none of the rooms are named after endemic fauna.
The Dog Room:
The friendly resident d*g. He came to my door but wouldn’t cross the threshold: obviously well trained.
I went to the grocery store to stock up with provisions for my all-day trip tomorrow, and found that Weetabix, the favorite cereal of my biologist friend Andrew Berry, had lost a vowel and gained a hyphen down under. Here, then, are Weet-Bix, whose photo I display for Andrew (as a Brit, he knows of this name change and mocks it). (UPDATE: Andrew tells me that the Aussie product, Weet-Bix, is actually the original and Weetabix is a copy in Blighty.)
Andrew thinks that Weetabix must be eaten in pairs, and yells at me when I visit his house and have three at a time, which seems to me the optimal number. . .
Finally, a sad ad for a lost cat, which hung at the entrance of the store. Poor kitty–I hope they find it!
Finally, my goal for tomorrow: Kea or Bust! (Several readers have sent me links to new National Geographic and Atlantic articles about how the kea has an infectious “laughter”—a play call.
Here’s an Attenborough segment on keas from BBC Earth. You’re not supposed to feed them, so I won’t. But I hope to get up close to them, as they’re fearless and inquisitive (“cheeky” is an adjective frequently applied):
Kea eating a sheep. An estimated 150,000 were killed by sheep farmers before a ban in the 1970s. Now only 1,000-5,000 of the birds remain:
