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.
Today’s photos come from reader John Conoboy, and from Africa. His notes are indented:
February is the time of the great migration. I am told that the Serengeti ecosystem is defined by the wildebeest migration patterns. It is hard to get a single photo at eye level that gives the amazing scope of the animal movement. There were areas where we could see thousands of animals stretched along the plains for miles. Watching this amazing spectacle reminded me of accounts of early travelers on the Great Plains of the US relating how they watched a massive herd of bison taking hours to cross a stream. Wildebeest in Tanzania are the blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus).
The second most common animal taking part is the plains or Burchell’s zebra (Equus burchelli). We saw a lot of very young zebra, and one lion killed carcass very near our lodging, reminding us of why we needed an escort at night to get back to our tent.
I told our guide about the new research into zebra stripes and biting flies, but he clings to the idea that the stripes confuse predators who cannot differentiate an individual in a group. I sent him a link to your WEIT post about zebra stripes, but he has not responded. [JAC: Note that reading this site give you insights that haven’t yet reached safari guides!]
Here are a variety of pictures of wildebeest and zebras. It was common when our vehicle came up near a group of animals that they would turn away and we joked a lot about pictures of animal butts. The image of the four zebra looking toward the camera was the result of a pride of lions on the other side of our vehicle. The zebra are keeping a close watch on what the lions were doing. Also included is a picture of a zebra that has recently lost its tail, perhaps to a hyena.
Good morning on March 14, 2017—one day before I head to New Zealand. The snow abated here in late morning yesterday, leaving us with only about three inches in Chicago. We may, however, get several inches of “lake effect” snow today. But the northeast U.S. is set for a huge blizzard, with up to 18 inches of snow falling some places. In the U.S, it’s National Potato Chip Day, while everywhere else it’s “Pi Day“, celebrating the date, written American style, as 3/14: the first three digits of pi (3.14159. . . ad infinitum). Last year it was even better because it was 3/14/16. (It’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday; see below.) Here’s a lovely pi pie:
I have the sad duty to report the death of Amy Krouse Rosenthal, a well known writer of children’s books, who passed away yesterday of ovarian cancer, just ten days after the publication of her heart-wrenching piece in the New York Times, “You may want to marry my husband.” an ineffably sad farewell to her life and a paean to her husband’s virtues, perhaps in hope that she could secure him a new wife. Rosenthal was only 51. Do read her testament.
On this day in 1592, it was the “Ultimate Pi Day”, with the maximum possible correspondence between the digits of the date, 3/14/1592, and the digits of pi: 3.14159265358979323846. . . I doubt it was celebrated at the time. In 1794, Eli Whitney was granted a patent on the cotton gin, which transformed the cotton growing industry by allowing seeds to be extracted mechanically. On March 14, 1964, Jack Ruby was convicted of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s assassin. Ruby, granted a new trial three years later, died just before it of lung cancer. On March 14 three years later, JFK’s body was moved to Arlington National Cemetery.
Notables born on this day include Johann Strauss (1804), Victor Emmanuel II (1820, the first king of a united Italy), Paul Ehrlich (1854, Nobel Laureate for his work on immunology), Casey Jones (1863), Albert Einstein (1879), Sylvia Beach (1887), Hank Ketcham (1920, creator of the “Dennis the Menace” comic strip), Diane Arbus (1923), Michael Caine (1933), and Billy Crystal (1948). Those who died on this day included Jacob van Ruisdael, (1682), Karl Marx (1883), Chic Young (1973, creator of the “Blondie” comic strip), and Peter Graves (2010), Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus lets Hili know who could be the boss if he had the genes and the inclination:
Cyrus: It’s good that I like you.
Hili: Why?
Cyrus: Because if I didn’t like you I would eat you and that wouldn’t be good.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Dobrze, że cie lubię.
Hili: Dlaczego?
Cyrus: Bo jakbym cię nie lubił, to bym cię zjadł, a to byłoby nie dobrze.
And out in Winnipeg, Gus spent some time in the cold, which always turns his nose a bright pink (I’ve suggested that his staff could take pictures of the nose at various outdoor temperatures and use the color as a thermometer). This photo is called “Mr. Pink Nose wants in”. (Notice his long leash, required by local law.)
. . . and here’s the animated Google Doodle. Fortunately, I’ve never witnessed these celebrations close up, which would involve you getting your clothes permanently ruined with dye! Read more about the holiday here and here.
I’ll be in New Zealand for a month starting Wednesday, but as of tomorrow (Tuesday), posting will start becoming lighter. As I’ll be traveling a lot, and am not yet sure where I’ll be at what time, I’m not certain how often I can post updates on my travels. What I can say is that I’ll try. For sure I will be on both North and South Islands, and in Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch, Nelson, and Queenstown, as well as in smaller towns that non-Kiwis won’t recognize.
Grania will be putting up the Hili dialogues during that time, for which I’m grateful. We haven’t missed a day of these since they started. Caturday Felids and Readers’ Wildlife posts may be sparse, as will general posting.
I ask you to bear with me until I return, and to refrain from emailing me more than once every ten days or so, as my access to email will be sporadic. The one exception are New Zealanders who might want to say “hi” on my travels. To those who have offered to meet me or host me, many thanks, and I hope to see as many of you as I can.
Also, don’t unsubscribe, thinking that the site is dead, for we’re inching up on 50, 000 subscribers, which is a Big Dream of mine. (In fact, subscribe now.)
And I promise to post, with photos, as often as I can. There are fantastic landscapes, keas, kiwis, pavlovas, lamb, and all kinds of friendly people, comestibles, and animals—not to mention wine. These I will photograph. Sadly, I will almost certainly miss seeing the one animals I want to see: the kakapo—the world’s only flightless parrot. They are sequestered on an island for their own protection from predators, and they do not allow visitors.
For someone who reads this site regularly, Frank Bruni’s arguments in Saturday’s New York Times op-ed, “The dangerous safety of college“, won’t be new. But perhaps you should read the short piece anyway, if for no other reason than to show that some liberal and mainstream columnists (Bruni is openly gay as well) are recognizing that American colleges need fewer student “demands”, less shouting, and more engagement with ideas.
Bruni’s subject is Charles Murray’s “incendiary” talk at Middlebury College in Vermont on March 2. As you surely know, Murray was forced off stage by vocal protesters and then had to livestream his talk from an empty room. He and his host were then attacked by a mob while leaving the venue. He was accused of being a racist because of his old book The Bell Curve, but apparently he didn’t even talk about that. But it was too late: the Regressive Left damns you forever for ideological impurities of the past. One misstep, and nobody need pay you any heed for the rest of your life, no matter what you say. You’re put in the idelogical gulag.
Bruni, like many of us, is fearful of this type of censorship, in which arguments are shut down by yelling and demonstrating rather than counterargument. His words:
Protests aren’t the problem, not in and of themselves. They’re vital, and so is work to end racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigotry. But much of the policing of imperfect language, silencing of dissent and shaming of dissenters runs counter to that goal, alienating the very onlookers who need illumination.
It’s an approach less practical than passionate, less strategic than cathartic, and partly for that reason, both McWhorter and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have likened it to a religion.
“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions that are most likely to solve the problem,” said Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University. “We do the things that are the most ritually satisfying.”
He added that what he saw in footage of the confrontation at Middlebury “was a modern-day auto-da-fé: the celebration of a religious rite by burning the blasphemer.”
The protesters didn’t use Murray’s presence as an occasion to hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him. They swarmed and swore.
McWhorter recalled that back when “The Bell Curve” was published, there was disagreement about whether journalists should give it currency by paying it heed. But he said that it was because they engaged the material in detail, rather than just branding it sacrilegious, that he learned enough to conclude on his own that its assertions were wrong — and why.
As Bruni points out, some relevant remarks were made by Van Jones, an activist, Leftist, and fighter for social justice, when spoke last week at my own university, decrying the Snowflake Generation. Here’s a short video of Jones’s take on “safe spaces” delivered at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP; David Axelrod was the moderator and the other guest was conservative commenter S. E. Cupp). Note that the Institute was the site of student protests (and attempted censorship) a few weeks ago when Corey Lewandowski (once Trump’s campaign manager) spoke. The IOP is, however, nonpartisan. And Van Jones’s “social justice” credibility, as a man who really does something, is unimpeachable:
Here’s a bit of the transcript of Jones’s remarks (you can see the entire 1 hour, 22 minute presentation here and the Heterodox Academy’s discussion of the short video here).
There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—“you are an n-word,” or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that.
But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that “I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else including the administration.”
I think that is a terrible idea for the following reason: I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different.
I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. You can’t live on a campus where people say stuff you don’t like?! And these people can’t fire you, they can’t arrest you, they can’t beat you up, they can just say stuff you don’t like- and you get to say stuff back- and this you cannot bear?! [audience applause]
This is ridiculous BS liberals! My parents, and Monica Elizabeth Peak’s parents [points to someone in the audience and greets her] were marched, they dealt with fire hoses! They dealt with dogs! They dealt with beatings! You can’t deal with a mean tweet?! You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous. I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you in these communities. [applause]
At the end of his piece, Bruni quotes Stephen Carter, a law professor at Yale, to the effect that the Safety Bubble is damaging to students, ensuring that they won’t be prepared for “constructive engagement in a society that won’t echo their convictions the way their campuses do.” But I worry about more, for the graduates of elite private universities will become the power-mongers of the next generation, and may impose these same values on the rest of us: censorship, cries to suppress “hate speech”, and politics based on identity rather than ideas. I don’t think that’s so far fetched.
As we know, much of the Left (the “nonliberal” or “authoritarian” or “regressive” Left) has made concessions to illiberalism. When a religion whose members are mostly “people of color,” like, Islam, then it’s considered judicious to ignore the oppressive beliefs of that religion: homophobia, misogyny, censorship, demonization and calls for the murder of cartoonists, nonbelivers and apostates, corporal punishment, and so on. In other words, when pigmentation conflicts with oppression, this part of the Left favors pigmentation. The color of one’s skin takes precedence over the content of one’s character.
Here is a case in point. A 17-year-old Muslim girl was filmed with a cellphone “twerking” (dancing in a provocative manner while wiggling the butt) in the streets of Birmingham. The film was put on YouTube; have a look (it may disappear soon):
Guess what happened?
Yep, you’re right. She was vilified. As News.com.au reports:
Footage of her dancing was later uploaded online, and attracted a barrage of hateful comments.
One wrote: “That’s so disrespectful is you are wearing hijab you are representing Islam respect dignity so how to act like a fool that is a big disrespect.”
Another said: “Truly disgusting.
“Some people don’t understand the meaning of the veil.”
One even said she “needs to be killed”.
The “hijab” comment shows what we all know: it’s not just an “empowering” article of clothing, but a symbol of oppression—something that, when you wear it, mandates that you must behave in a certain way.
The comments also included these: “F*****g s**t someone give me her address I will kill her”. Another man seconded: “Stupid b****h needs to be killed”. It’s not clear how many of these comments came from Britain versus Muslim-majority countries, but given that many were in English, they certainly reflect the sentiments of some British Muslims.
Of course to avoid vilification or even murder, the twerking girl had to express contrition in public. From News.com.au:
She later gave an emotional interview to Muslim YouTube star Ali Dawah.
The teenager, who has not been named, told him during a phone interview: “To all the girls that wear hijab and wear abayah, I’m sorry for disrespecting it.
“I’ve learnt from my mistake.
“It’s gone viral and I’m just hurt, I just want everybody to leave it alone and keep everything away, I don’t want it to be how it was and I am not going to do anything like that again.
“I am sorry for disrespecting it and thank you to all of you that helped, it’s up to Allah to judge, at the end of the day I will be judged for it, not you guys.”
She also says that she has “problems”, “didn’t think straight,” and was suffering from depression that began when she was 13. No wonder she was depressed, growing up in a culture like that!
Dawah’s Video of Shame and Contrition is below; the girl’s groveling and apologies begin at 5:29, accompanied by her crying, and it’s ineffably sad. To his credit, Dawah rejects the vilification heaped on the girl, and says the video should be taken down, but he also heavily criticizes her behavior, calling it “really bad,” “inappropriate,” “sinful”, and even “the work of the devil.” He offers to put the girl in touch with “some good sisters in Birmingham” to help her. (Read: to make sure she henceforth stays in line.)
Dawah’s job here is to reinforce the standards of sharia law, and he and his co-broadcaster blame music as being partly responsible for the girl’s “grave sin”. As he says, “This is why music is harm. . . it’s the work of [inaudible, but probably the Muslim Satan].” But they express hope that the girl will shape up, get married and “wear niqab.” Niqab! (That’s a face covering, in case you’ve forgotten).
The two guys, for all their pretend compassion, are really trying to keep women in line and recommend appropriate rehabilitation. They are—and I say this without irony—instruments of the Muslim patriarchy. They’re young, but when they grow up they’ll enforce the same oppression that this woman experienced—and in Britain!
Maajid Nawaz on LBC radio (“Leading Britain’s Conversation”) didn’t pull any punches. He’s a Muslim, but abhors these threats and calls out feminists for not joining him (click on the screenshot to go to his 3½-minute video.)
“What happened next [after the video was posted] is chilling. It will freeze the blood within your very body. Amid threats in YouTube comment threads, such as ‘effing, swear word, someone give me her address I will kill her’ and ‘stupid, swear word, needs to be killed’, the young girl was dragged onto a page by a pair of religious fundamentalists, who at first posted a picture in disgust at her dancing, and in a recorded audio, was forced into an online repentance.
“A public, tearful, apology, repentance and retraction, merely for dancing. Welcome to the United Kingdom in 2017. We may have just witnessed our first online religious fundamentalist inquisition.
“Initiated, conducted, and concluded, all online. And the worst part of this? Is it happened a couple of days before International Women’s Day, and you’d be forgiven for not having heard of it.
“Not a single global, nor national, feminist movement adopted this as a cause. Not a single mainstream, left wing nor liberal, media outlet reported on this.
“And I am wondering whether feminists are too busy picking first world fights while neglecting the minorities within minority communities. Like women within Muslim communities, who face a triple threat, who are discriminated from three different directions.
“One for being people of colour. Two, for being women within patriarchal communities that tell them they can’t work, or they can’t leave the home, or they have to submit to arranged marriages, or FGM, or any other form of oppression.
“And three, because they are Muslim, they’re also suspected by the outside world. The triple threat that women within Muslim communities face is heavy as a burden.
“And I think feminists are too busy picking first world fights while under their noses, within their own country, things like this are happening.”
Nawaz is of course correct; you won’t find mention of this incident in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Jezebel, or Everyday Feminism. No, those sites are devoted to glorifying the hijab, the very symbol of this kind of oppression (see here and here, for instance). You’ll find this news only on the conservative websites and British tabloids, like the Sun, the Daily Fail, Breitbart and Heat Street. Such is the unholy agreement between true liberals and bigoted conservatives. But even conservatives can be right about things, even if for the wrong reasons.
Some people say, “There’s no such thing as the Regressive Left. It’s a fiction—a strawman.” It isn’t. The Regressive Left are those who refuse to condemn the oppression of women when it’s done by Muslims. That’s regressive by any definition, for it takes us back to the bad old days when women were considered second-class citizens and their opportunities were limited. You would think that feminists, especially in Britain, would decry this kind of oppression: amidst their own struggles and protestations of victimhood, that they could spare a word or two for their Muslim sisters. If a woman can wear what she wants, shouldn’t she be able to dance if she wants? And if she does, she shouldn’t get death threats, shouldn’t be vilified, shouldn’t be forced to apologize in tears and promise to repent. Isn’t that behavior that feminists should call out? But we know why they don’t.
One person who did is Maryam Namazie, spokesperson for Iran Solidarity, One Law for All and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.
