Thursday: Hili dialogue

February 14, 2019 • 7:06 am

It’s Thursday already: February 14, 2019, and you know what that means!

h/t: Nilou

 

It’s Valentine’s Day! And here’s my valentine for all the readers:

 

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) is a lovely animation of animals in love. Be sure to see it:

And of course it’s National Cream-filled Chocolates Day, though that’s not the only kind of candy one gives on this day.

On this day in 1349, many Jews of Strasbourg, numbering several hundred, were burned to death by mobs, with some of the unburnt Jews kicked out of the city. Remember this when you hear about the “one-state solution” in the Middle East. On February 14, 1400, Richard II of England died, probably of starvation, after being deposed and imprisoned by Henry IV.  In 1556, Thomas Cranmer was declared a heretic, and was burned to death that same year.  It was also on that day in 1556 that, far away, Akbar was crowned the third Mughal emperor.  On February 14, 1779, James Cook was killed by native Hawaiians off the Big Island.

On this day in 1849, President James Knox Polk became the first sitting President to be photographed. Here’s an enhanced version of that photo, taken in New York City.

On this day in 1929 in Chicago, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in a garage, with seven people machine-gunned to death, probably on orders of Al Capone.  On February 14, 1945, the fire-bombing of Dresden by British and American planes began, the scene for Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-5. In 1966, Australian currency was decimalized on February 14.

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft took the photo of Earth that became known as the Pale Blue Dot. Here it is; can you spot the Earth?

Finally, it was on this day in 2005 that YouTube was launched by a group of college students; and, as you’ve probably heard if you’ve read the American news, it’s the first anniversary of the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida, in which a gunman, former student Nikolas Cruz, killed 15 and injuried 17. The students who survived, Ceiling Cat bless them, are still fighting for gun control, though nothing has happened at the federal level.

Notables born on this day include, appropriately, Valentine Greatrakes (1628, Irish faith healer), Frank Harris (1855), John Barrymore (1882), Jack Benny (1894), Florence Henderson (1934), Carl Bernstein (1944), Gregory Hines (1946), Renée Fleming (1959), and Meg Tilly (1960).

Those who died on Valentine’s Day include Timur (Tamerlane, 1405), James Cook (1779), William Tecumseh Sherman (1891), David Hilbert (1943), Baby Dodds (1959), Julian Huxley and P. G. Wodehouse (both 1975), James Bond (the ornithologist, 1989), and George Shearing (2011).

Here’s Shearing, whom Jack Kerouac—or rather Neal Cassady (named “Dean Moriarty”—called “Old God Shearing” in the novel On The Road. This is a performance before  “Misty” in 1992. Be sure to watch the last bit:

From the book; one long paragraph about Shearing:

George Shearing, the great jazz pianist, Dean said, was exactly like Roll Greb. Dean and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend. The place was deserted, we were the first customers, ten o’clock. Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was distinguished-looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer’s-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes. And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music I picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to “Go!” Dean was sweating; the swear poured down his collar. “There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!” And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean’s gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn’t see. “That’s right!” Dean said. “Yes!” Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. “God’s empty chair,” he said. On the piano a horn sat; its golden shadow made a strange reflection along the desert caravan painted on the wall behind the drums. God was gone; it was the silence of his departure.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having delusions of grandeur, but who better than cats to order the Universe (it would be a Hilicentric Universe, of course):

Hili: A huge responsibility is resting on cats.
A: What for?
Hili: For the order in the Universe.
In Polish:
Hili: Na kotach spoczywa ogromna odpowiedzialność.
Ja: Za co?
Hili: Za porządek we wszechświecie.

A cartoon sent by reader Jon:

Sad but true:

Trump and the wall (apparently now he’s going to get a small fence):

It’s a special Valentine’s Day Twitter edition! From reader Nilou, an otter tweet:

From Grania, a medical Valentine:

Another medical-themed Valentine, this time from Jonathan Swift:

Here’s a Valentine poem from the Bodleian Libraries; go see the whole rhyme in successive tweets:

The old ballad “The Water is Wide” has a stanza, “When love is young, then love is fine: just like a flower, when first it’s new. But love grows old, and waxes cold, and fades away, like the morning dew.” To wit:

A nerdy Valentine:

From the National Library of Scotland:

Nobby the Bear gets in on the holiday:

A Valentine’s Day menu from 137 years ago:

Tweets from Matthew, also Valentine-themed. Have a heart!

A booby poem:

There’s nothing like a good amplexus:

A heart-shaped wood!

Another Valentine from a science geek:

Matthew loves Laurel and Hardy, and here they are (also playing women) in a Valentine’s Day meal:

 

 

Hawk and owl fight over a nest

February 13, 2019 • 2:30 pm

Reader jj sent a video of an owl and a hawk fighting for a nest. The owl eventually won. jj’s notes:

Perhaps others have sent these links; in case not, here’s a link to a cool video showing a pair of Great Horned Owls displacing Red-tailed Hawks from their nest.  At the end of the time-lapse video, in which one or another of the pair of hawks makes several passes at one or another of the owls, the hawks seems to have won; but not, because now in the newly renamed “Raptor Cam”, there are owl eggs in the nest and a mother owl brooding them.
The confrontation:

The live raptor cam. Owl won!  It’s raining now, and the owl is complaining now. But she owns the nest:

RaptorCam notes:

Last year, we all watched live as a pair of Presidio Red-tailed Hawks successfully reared two chicks and the two chicks fledged the nest. This year we have an unexpected plot twist: a pair of Great Horned Owls have been seen visiting the hawks’ nest and look as though they intend to take up residence there.

This is not uncommon – this reflects the interdependence of species and the way animals in the wild often rely on each other for survival. In this case, Great Horned Owls don’t build their own nests; rather, they take over the nests of other raptors. Over the last few weeks, these owls have stopped by at night to inspect the Red-tailed Hawks’ nest while during the day the hawks, unaware of the nightly owl visits, continued to prep the nest for the season. Recently, there was a brief confrontation between the owls and the hawks where it appeared the hawks maintained the nest, but then during the early hours of February 5, the owls laid an egg in the nest, and on February 9, they laid a second egg. The incubation period for these eggs is about 30-37 days, so we should expect the eggs to hatch around the first week of March. Also, the hawks have back-up nests in the park and our wildlife ecologists are monitoring these nests to find out where they end up nesting.

Stay tuned to watch as the drama between the owls and the hawks continues to unfold.

Armed robbers apprehended at the U of C after a chase and a crash; school paper publishes photo of one suspect; students use the incident to criticize our armed cops

February 13, 2019 • 1:00 pm

We had a bit of excitement here on Monday when, sitting at my desk, I got three successive email alerts from the campus authorities that there were criminal suspects loose on campus. The final one was that they were apprehended. But the first ones, like this, were a bit scary:

Shelter in place! That sounds ominious. Eventually we got the all clear, and it turned out that, according to the Chicago Maroon, there was a crime, a crash, and a chase (click on screenshot):

Summary from the paper (it was an armed robbery):

At around 11:48 a.m., a stolen black Dodge Charger believed to have been involved in the robbery of a GameStop ran a red light on the intersection of Midway Plaisance and South Woodlawn Avenue, supposedly while chased by police. In the process, it ran into two additional cars, damaging both significantly. The driver of one of the vehicles escaped without injury but the status of the other driver is unknown.

The suspects fled their Dodge Charger, and police pursued. One of the suspects was arrested immediately after the crash, according to an e-mail sent by the University after the events at around 4:25 p.m. Around 30 police officers cornered multiple suspects in the Saieh Hall of Economics, though it is unclear whether all the remaining suspects fled inside the building.

The suspects in Saieh were later apprehended at around 12:40 p.m. Police on scene said no one was hurt inside Saieh and there was no substantial property damage.

There were five suspects, all apprehended by the University of Chicago police without a shot being fired (our campus cops are armed, which the students generally object to).

Kudos for the cops for a prompt and nonviolent response, and to the University for keeping us informed (I’m generally in my office behind a locked outer door, so I wasn’t too scared).

Isn’t this over until the trial, then? Well, no, as there’s community outrage on two counts. If you read the Maroon article above, you’ll see a picture of a UC police officer walking one of the handcuffed suspects out of the economics building. I don’t know his age, but he may be underaged (I didn’t show the photo, but it’s right below the headline above). That has caused a fight to erupt in the comments, with a lot of people demanding that the photo be taken down because the accused robber is too young to show.  There are 131 comments—unheard of for this newspaper.

The pictured suspect is also black, which I suppose is one reason why people want the photo down. I didn’t think of that at first, but there’s a petition to the paper to remove the photo that explicitly mentions how the photo could reflect poorly on African-Americans (click on screenshot):

678 people have signed the petition, which includes this language:

As many University of Chicago students, faculty, staff, and residents of Hyde Park have pointed out, the publication of such a photo can cause incredible harm to the accused individual and their loved ones. It has the potential to infringe upon their right to a fair and unbiased criminal-legal process and negates the presumption of innocence.

It also cannot go unmentioned that the young man in the photograph is Black and the publication of this image perpetuates the Myth of Black Criminality and the racist, distorted view of Black youth as less innocent, more adult-like and dangerous than their White peers. Furthermore, if the young man in the photograph is under 18, their records of arrest and court processes are automatically sealed. Illinois law recognizes that children grow and change, and as a result, provides special protections to prevent collateral consequences from youthful arrests. This photo undermines those protections.

We demand that the photo of this young man be taken down immediately.

Now I’m not sure what rules, if any, obtain in journalism about publishing the photo of underage accused perps. The accused in the photo looks about 16 or 17 to me.  I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other, but if that’s old enough so that mainstream newspapers would have published such a photo, so be it. The Maroon editors obviously aren’t bowing to public pressure, as they haven’t removed the photo. I’m not sure whether it’s illegal or unethical to publish pictures of the accused even if they are under 18 and have their records sealed.

What bothers me more is that because the suspect is black, to many that’s even more of a reason to take down the photo since it would “perpetuate the Myth of Black Criminality” and so on. If it’s unethical to publish a picture of someone under 18—and, as I said, I’m not sure it is—then it doesn’t matter what race the person is. Publish or don’t, but don’t put ethnicity into the equation.

The other consequence, reported by the right-wing site The College Fix, is that students began going after the campus police on Twitter. They have blocked their Twitter accounts, so the tweets aren’t shown, but the CF reproduces some of them:

. . . a flurry of tweets arose among students who condemned the university for not providing alerts in a timely fashion and the actions of several professors who attempted to meet for class despite the shelter in place code.

“You shouldn’t have a midterm right after a lockdown,” one student tweeted. [JAC: Midterms were, I believe, scheduled the day of the incident]

Criticism was also leveled at the Maroon, for not only advising students that it was “safe to go outside” while the police was still searching for the last suspect, but also for plastering his photo on their front page, despite clearly appearing to be a minor.

A petition has been launched demanding the paper’s editors take the photo down.

What’s more, even though no students were harmed and the suspects were arrested without a single shot being fired, some students began calling for the abolition of police.

“there were militarized cops (literally carrying assault rifles) crawling all over campus looking for armed, african-american men. a black student could’ve worn a striped shirt (like one of the robbers)… reached for a phone at the wrong time… etc. and could have been shot,” one student tweeted. “Anywho … disarm/abolish the police.:

“UCPD is absolutely worthless thank you for coming to my ted talk,” tweeted another student.

A third offered this on social media: “dear god we’re gonna have to listen to c*llege r*publicans talk about how this proves we need more cops.”

This reporter reached out to several of the commenters regarding what kind of solution they would support instead of the police, but only received the following answer from one student: “We should arm the working class, disarm the pigs.”

These are students, not thugs. Arm the working class? And I wonder whether they would have been in favor of unarmed police if the suspects had started shooting, or had taken hostages.

Thank Ceiling Cat none of that happened.  I don’t expect anybody here will align with the reaction of condemning the cops, but do weigh in on the photo, especially if you have expertise about these matters.

How not to apologize

February 13, 2019 • 10:15 am

It would seem a no-brainer to say “I’m sorry” in a way that tells people—or lets them think!—that you’re sincere, but nobody seems to get it right these days. Last night, I heard the perpetrator of another blackface episode say, “I’m sorry that I offended people.”

Now that is not an apology, and it’s obvious why not. This person was sorry not for doing something racist, but for offending people. When I hear an apology like that, I think, “What this person is really sorry for is being caught.” An alternative interpretation is “I am sorry that you were offended, but maybe you shouldn’t have been.”

What really conveys sincerity is something like, “Yes, I behaved in a racist way. It was wrong, and I’m sorry for that. And I won’t do it again.”

Now of course many people who proffer “sincere” apologies, like the last one above, don’t really mean them. But humans being who we are, we’ll feel better hearing even insincere words that sound sincere. So be it. The ideal tactic, if you really have done something offensive, is to reflect on your behavior and, if you decide it was wrong, go tell the person/people you offended that you were wrong and that you’re sorry for what you did.  (Even if you feel that you were partly right, swallow your pride and just apologize for the sake of comity.)

I don’t understand why people don’t grasp that it’s not enough to say that you’re sorry that people were offended. That conveys the idea that you regret that they became offended, not that you regret making them offended.

I don’t want to dwell too much on Ilhan Omar, who tendered the apology below when called out by senior Democrats in the House for her anti-semitic tweets, but this is not the way to apologize:

It’s wrong for several reasons:

1.) It apologizes for offending people rather than for saying something anti-semitic. Does she think what she said was anti-semitic? I doubt it.

2.) She says her intention was not to be offensive. If not, what was it?

3.) She apologizes to a limited group of people: her constituents and Jewish Americans as a whole. Well, perhaps others, including Jews who weren’t Americans, were offended.

4.) She makes it about herself with the “I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity.” You don’t make excuses for saying what you said, or try to drag your own offense into an apology.

5.) The word “unequivocal” is defused by the fact that she equivocates in the rest of the apology.

6.) The stuff about the problematic nature of lobbyists completely ruins the apology, as it’s irrelevant and apparently is some sort of excuse for what she did. That again makes the apology “equivocal”, especially in view of Omar herself taking money from lobbyists. Why is it okay for her to take money from CAIR while others take money from NRA? (AIPAC does not give money to individual politicians, by the way)

A genuine apology—one without equivocation or excuses—goes a long way with other people. Just fricking say you were wrong and that you won’t behave that way again!  It isn’t rocket science!

Scientists scrutinize just two examples in Behe’s new book; find them deeply misleading

February 13, 2019 • 9:15 am

Here’s a post by biologists Nathan Lents and Arthur Hunt (Hunt’s name isn’t under the title), examining just two cases touted by Michael Behe as showing “de-evolution” in Behe’s new ID book Darwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA That Challenges Evolution. The cases involve the loss of fur pigment and changes in fat metabolism in polar bears, whose ancestors were like brown bears eating a brown-bear diet (omnivorous) and having brown or blackish coats. When darker bears encountered cold climates, their fur evolved white coloration. Polars bears also had a much fattier diet, and so their fat-processing genes evolved as well. How did this happen? As it turns out, Behe presents the story wrongly—probably deliberately.

According to these and other reviewers, Behe’s Big Claim in the book is that since nearly all adaptations are based on “broken genes”—genes that are inactivated, either by acquiring a missense or nonsense mutation, or an amino acid substitution that makes the gene product inactive—evolution by natural selection simply involves the accumulation of one broken gene after another. In that way, says Behe, evolution is “self limiting”, since when an adaptation is based on inactive genes, it can’t be reversed (“dead genes” tend to acquire more mutations that render them even deader). In other words, by accumulating successively broken genes, evolution works its way into a corner from which it can’t extricate itself by further evolution (broken genes are hard to un-break).

Behe claims that this is true for the polar bear: that the genes that turned the ancestral coat white and changed the fat metabolism were broken genes. But when you examine the paper supposedly supporting Behe’s claim, you find, argue Lents and Hunt, that about half of them don’t seem to have any damaging mutations, and that perhaps “none of the 17 most positively selected genes in polar bears are ‘damaged’.”

In fact, we can even grant Behe a figure of 50% of genes involved in adaptation being broken, and it still doesn’t matter. For if just half of genes involved in new adaptations do new or different things and are not damaged, then his thesis doesn’t work: evolution doesn’t grind to a halt. And, as I’ve said, there are lots of genetic changes that don’t involve broken genes, including duplications, mutations that affect gene regulation, and so on.

Finally, Lents and Hunt look at one gene, APOB, that’s involved in fat metabolism and has apparently changed by selection in polar bears (you can judge the past working of selection by looking at the relative number of amino acid substitutions in a protein compared to what you’d expect if there were no selection). In Darwin Devolves, Behe claims that researchers detected multiple mutations in the polar bear’s APOB gene and concluded that the new mutations were “very likely to be damaging—that is, likely to degrade or destroy the function of the protein that the gene codes for.” (That’s a quote from Behe’s book.)

But that’s not true. It’s not what the researchers concluded. Lents and Hunt looked up the 2014 Cell paper on the population genomics of polar bears, and found that the authors actually say this (Lents’s and Hunt’s emphases):

Substantial work has been done on the functional significance of APOB mutations in other mammals. In humans and mice, genetic APOB variants associated with increased levels of apoB are also associated with unusually high plasma concentrations of cholesterol and LDL, which in turn contribute to hypercholesterolemia and heart disease in humans (Benn, 2009; Hegele, 2009). In contrast with brown bear, which has no fixed APOB mutations compared to the giant panda genome, we find nine fixed missense mutations in the polar bear (Figure 5A). Five of the nine cluster within the N-terminal ba1 domain of the APOB gene, although the region comprises only 22% of the protein (binomial test p value = 0.029). This domain encodes the surface region and contains the majority of functional domains for lipid transport. We suggest that the shift to a diet consisting predominantly of fatty acids in polar bears induced adaptive changes in APOB, which enabled the species to cope with high fatty acid intake by contributing to the effective clearance of cholesterol from the blood.

Missense mutations are mutations that change the amino acid coded for by the mutated triplet of codons; these amino acid changes do not necessarily “break” or “inactive” a protein. And in the case of APOB they apparently don’t: they likely help the protein clear cholesterol from the blood. (The clustering in a functional region is already a clue that they aren’t random “breakage” mutations.) Or, as Lents and Hunt say,

Clearly, the authors do not expect the polar bear APOB to be “broken.” Rather, a bare majority of the amino acid changes are in the most important region for the clearing of cholesterol from the blood. In other words, these mutations likely enhance the function of apoB, at least when it comes to surviving on a diet high in saturated fats.

It is also worth noting that apoB does much more than clear fatty acids from the blood. It is a very large protein that has many biochemical activities and is a central player for lipid and cholesterol transport. Even if “damaging” mutations might be beneficial in one context, they could very well be harmful or lethal in another. Moreover, mice that lack apoB are not viable.

. . . To recap: 1.) There is no evidence for Behe’s claim that APOB is degraded or diminished in polar bears and everything we know about the protein from other mammals suggests the opposite. And 2.) Behe’s claim that the most common adaptive changes in polar bears are those that degrade or destroy proteins is not supported, and the evidence suggests otherwise. Those are just the errors that we found in his first example.

And yet Behe makes this bold claim:

It seems, then, that the magnificent Ursus maritimus has adjusted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading genes its ancestors already possessed. Despite its impressive abilities, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominantly by devolving. What that portends for our conception of evolution is the principal topic of this book.

Which lay reader would contest that, not having read the technical literature?

You can read your post for the data on other proteins, but Behe is clearly counting on his readers, who aren’t scientists, to take him at his word and not dig up an arcane paper on population genetics in a technical journal.

Behe always likes to argue that if an evolutionist makes one error or misrepresentation in a presentation, then the author’s whole presentation is cast into doubt—along with evolutionary theory itself. Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the panderer. Behe’s “evolution-nearly-always-works-by-breaking-genes” claim is not supported by this example, and we know of many other examples that don’t support it, either.

But why is Behe trying to make a scientific case against evolution in a “trade book” rather than in the scientific literature? Well, you know why: scientists don’t buy his claims. He thus tries to change accepted science not by appealing to scientists, but by appealing to the scientifically uneducated public.  Now that may make creationists or those who doubt evolution feel better, but it’s not going to make intelligent design theory into “the dominant perspective in science” that was one of the 20-year goals of 1998’s infamous Wedge Document.

For a longer review by Lents, which tells you a bit more about Behe’s ideas in the book, click on this piece published at AIPT.com:

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 13, 2019 • 7:45 am

Today we have another batch of lovely photos from Mark Sturtevant, which of course means insects and other arthropods. His notes are indented:

Here is the last batch of photos taken in 2017. The first two pictures are of insects that were attracted to apples in my back yard that had been preyed upon by squirrels. First is a downy yellow jacket (Vespula flavopilosa), and the second is the very odd picture-winged fly (Delphinia picta). These flies do not seem to be able to walk without waving their wings.

A black-and-yellow “argiope” garden spider (Argiope aurantia) is shown in the next picture. Here I had just given it a red-legged grasshopper, and she was quickly wrapping it up. Note the fangs.

A weird little beetle had come to my porch light. It is a Hister beetle, belonging to the family Histeridae. These beetles are built like little tanks with interesting recesses to tuck in their legs and antennae. Many of them are rather flattened for hiding under bark and stones. This one obviously has a lot of mites which seem to be ‘phoretic’, meaning that they are using the beetle to get around and meet up with others of their kind. The mites were in constant motion and would not leave their host. I think the species of beetle is Hololepta aequalis.

Next is another spider. This is a nursery web spider (Pisaurina mira) that is a striking color variant within this species. I had never seen one that looked like this, but the link shows this color form along with other ones.

The final pictures are of velvet ants, which are actually a kind of wasp in which the females are wingless. The first two look like Sphaeropthalma pensylvanica. They are normally very restless wanders, and the females search for a hidden entrance of a burrowing bee or wasp, which they parasitize, but this one had briefly stopped for an exploratory dig. This species is fairly small, but there are significantly larger species of velvet ant that I have not seen where I currently live, and those are infamous for their exceptionally painful sting. Large velvet ants are widely named as  ‘cow killers’. Here is a video of Coyote Peterson taking one for the team to show you that these things are pretty painful. [JAC: Coyote Peterson is nuts; watch the video.]

Male velvet ants have wings that help them hunt for females. The winged male looks to be the same species as the above female, and he was exploring my backpack.

Velvet ant males are larger than females, as shown in the last picture. This mating pair landed in front of me. I had no idea what they were at first, so I quickly leaned in and got this rather bad picture before they flew off. They look to be in the genus Timula.