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.
Mark Sturtevant is giving readers another chance—a harder one—to spot the cryptic insect. Click photo to enlarge. Mark’s notes are indented, and I would rate this one “very hard”.
I had recently posted a Spot the Katydid, and that one seemed far too easy for the sharp-eyed readers of WEIT. So this one is harder. Can the readers spot this katydid?
I’ll put up the reveal at 11 a.m. Chicago time.
Good morning on yet another Monday: March 6, 2017. It’s National Oreo Day (I wonder who paid for that designation?), but I have to admit that I do like those cookies. I favor regular ones–not overstuffed or mint flavored—and, unlike any other cookie, I eat them the classic way: with a glass of milk, dunking them and them washing them down. It’s also European Day of the Righteous, celebrating those who have stood up against totalitarianism. I’m sure you’re thinking what I am: we need to move that day to to America, too.
News of the day: CNN reports “The FBI asked the Justice Department on Saturday to refute President Donald Trump’s assertion that then-President Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump’s phones last year, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN.” It would be lovely if the Justice Department would confirm that Trump himself was spreading “fake news,” and it’s telling that Justice was asked to refute Trump’s claim. Our President continues to be a national embarrassment.
On March 6, 1665, the first issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was published, establishing it as the world’s first journal devoted exclusively to science (it’s still going strong). On this day in 1836, the Battle of the Alamo ended, with all Americans, including Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, killed by Mexican troops. In 1869, Mendeleev first presented his periodic table of the elements to the Russian Chemical Society, and, in 1899, the Bayer Company registered “aspirin” as a trademarked word. On March 6, 1965, Elijah Muhammad bestowed the name of Muhammad Ali on the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay. In 1981, Walter Cronkite signed off after 19 years as the anchor of CBS News. I remember that well, and here’s the short video showing him signing off for good:
Notables born on this day include Michelangelo (1475), Ring Lardner (1885), Bob Wills (1905), Lou Costello (1906), Alan Greenspan (1926), Kiri Te Kanawa (1944), Carolyn Porco (1953), and Shaquille O’Neal (1972.)
In honor of Kiri Te Kanawa’s 73rd birthday, and to inspire me for my forthcoming trip to New Zealand—where she was born to a Maori father and white mother, and given up for adoption to a couple of the same ancestry—have a listen to one of my favorite arias, “O mio babbino caro” (“Oh my dear daddy”) from Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi (1918).
Those who died on this day include, besides Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, Louisa May Alcott (1888), John Philip Sousa (1932), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1935), Pearl S. Buck (1973), Ayn Rand (1982), Georgia O’Keefe (1986), and Nancy Reagan (last year). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is doing some judicious editing of Andrzej’s new article for Listy.
A: I have to write an article about a welfare state.Hili: Do not forget about the problem of the very minimal care for cats.(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
Ja: Muszę napisać artykuł o państwie dobrobytu.
Hili: Nie zapomnij o problemie minimalnej troski o koty.
(Foto: Sarah Lawson)
Lagniappe: Sunday’s “Bloom County” strip shows Berk Breathed continuing his take on America’s Great Bathroom Battle (click to enlarge). No trans-species bathroom use!
Finally, the Countryside Baptist Church of Clearwater, Florida clearly thinks this is a clever sign:
h/t: Taskin, Blue
The title above is the header of an email sent to me by reader Christopher Moss, who enclosed a photo and a comment. (The same squirrel, by the way, won the Squirrel Appreciation Contest a while back.)
I am creating a monster, one who complains noisily when I get up in the morning and fail to put out the feeder fast enough. One of these days he will be big enough to give me a good thumping for my tardiness.
I forgot that it’s Fleetwood Mac Week, so please accept this belated live version of “The Chain” (from the concert and record The Dance, with the album celebrating its 20th anniversary). I may in fact take all the cuts from that concert, for it was superb.
“The Chain” is the only song on the Rumours album (where it first appeared in 1976—41 years ago!) whose writing was credited to everyone in the band. Some background from Wikipedia:
According to interviews on the writing of Rumours, the final section of “The Chain”—beginning with a bass progression—was created by John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Stevie Nicks had written the lyrics separately and thought they would be a good match; she and Christine McVie did some reworking to create the first section of the tune. Other elements were worked in from an early project of Christine’s called “Keep Me There”. The blues-style piano motif was removed, and the remainder combined with a bridge from yet another piece manually using a razor blade to cut and splice the tapes. To complete the song, Buckingham recycled the intro from an earlier song from a duet with Nicks, “Lola (My Love)”, originally released on their self-titled 1973 album.
Due to the spliced nature of the record (the drums and guitar were the only instruments actually recorded in each other’s company) and its sporadic composition and assembly from different rejected songs, “The Chain” is one of only a few Fleetwood Mac songs whose authorship is credited to all members of the band at the time. The finished song itself has a basic rock structure, although it has two distinct portions: the main verse and chorus, and the outro. The song shows influences of hard rock, folk, and country, using a dobro to play the guitar riff.
The version from Rumours is here.
Here’s today’s xkcd, called the “Wrong Superhero”. I had to have Matthew explain it to me, as I didn’t get it immediately. I suspect others will.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so besieged by newbie commenters as I have by chiropractors and their acolytes over the last several days. After I posted a few times on that form of quackery (here, here, here, and here), I’ve had chiropractors, students in chiropractic school, and even chiropactors’ wives try to comment on this site showing me how badly wrong I’ve gone. Chiropractic, they say, effects “miracle” cures. I’ve posted a few of their beefs, but they’re getting repetitive and tiresome, and they’re easily refuted. Here are a few of the common responses, which I’ll let readers deal with since they’re no-brainers (I can’t resist a few parenthetical comments):
But enough; I’m tiring of these people and their refuted claims. The fact that I’m suddenly inundated by would-be commenters suggest that they’re communicating with each other, saying, “Go after that Coyne guy.” But as one of my friends said when I called chiropractors “quacks”, “That is an insult to ducks!” (Besides, ducks never present inflated bills. I’ll be here all week, folks.)
Oh, one more comment before I get to the comic at hand: I haven’t heard back from the Cincinnati Zoo after I wrote them (twice) asking for an explanation of why they used a chiropractor trained on humans to adjust the cervical vertebrae of a baby tiger. I doubt they’ll ever respond.
And the comic: over at Daryl Cunningham Investigates, you can see a comic-strip version about the history and practice of chiropractic “medicine”. The strip is pretty, but the story isn’t; I’ll give just a few panels from the long but engaging strip:
and (remember that many chiros are anti-vaxxers):
Now I’m going to be even more inundated with outraged chiropractors, their wives, and their students. To which I say, “Come at me, bro!” but don’t expect that I’m going to publicize quackery on this site. You’ll see me do that when I start saying that creationists are right, for the scientific basis of chiropractic is about as sound as that of creationism.
As I reported the other day, the author and political scientist Charles Murray was attacked at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he was invited to speak by the school’s American Enterprise Institute Club. Not only did the students shout him down, so that the talk had to be moved to a sequestered room and livestreamed (even then the students pulled fire alarms to cause further disruption), but then they mobbed him and his host as they left the venue, injuring the neck of the woman who was accompanying him.
As the Boston Globe and Inside Higher Ed report, it was indeed students who protested, though some “outside agitators” could have been part of the group that mobbed Murray. The 44-minute video below (the College president gives an introduction emphasizing civility and free speech) shows how exercised the students were; Inside Higher Ed reported this:
As soon as Murray took the stage, students stood up, turned their backs to him and started various chants that were loud enough and in unison such that he could not talk over them. Chants included:
- “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away.”
- “Your message is hatred. We cannot tolerate it.”
- “Charles Murray, go away. Middlebury says no way.”
- “Who is the enemy? White supremacy.”
- “Hey hey, ho ho. Charles Murray has got to go.”
The scene was recorded and posted to YouTube. Murray appears around minute 19.
This behavior is reprehensible, and I wonder how many of these students read anything Murray ever wrote before they went wild. I suspect not very many.
I haven’t read The Bell Curve, so I’ll make no pronouncement about Murray’s topic, but I doubt that Murray was even going to talk about that old book. Regardless, I don’t have to know what he said to vehemently defend his right to speak without disruption (or physical attack!) since he was invited. IHE adds this:
Murray has said that critiques of The Bell Curve are incorrect. He issued a letter defending the book last year — at a time when some wanted Virginia Tech to call off an appearance there (it did not).
Via email Friday morning, Murray declined to comment on what took place at Middlebury, but he posted several comments on Twitter, including this one.
Report from the front: The Middlebury administration was exemplary. The students were seriously scary.
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) March 3, 2017
The good news is that the students are showing some contrition, and Middlebury’s administration has issued a strong statement in support of free speech. The Globe reports this:
Many on campus, including the college president and leaders of the student organization who invited him, disagree vehemently with Murray’s views on social welfare programs and race, but on Saturday they said the campus failed in its duty to exemplify how to debate unpopular ideas with civility.
Donald Trump’s presidency formed the backdrop for the protest, students said. The election has made people on campus dig their heels in ideologically, said Sabina Haque, a junior from Westford, Mass. They’re less willing to accept conflicting viewpoints, she said.
But you can’t blame this on Trump. Yes, he’s a narcissistic bully and a godawful President, but the students should be conducting themselves honorably, and in accordance with the First Amendment, which undergirds much of the social progress made in America. It is true, though, that Trump’s election is making many Americans not just rightfully upset and prone to activism, but actually unhinged (see HuffPo for an example). That leads to demonstrations, like those at Berkeley and Middlebury, that are counterproductive, further damaging the credibility of the Left.
Kudos for Middlebury, though, for issuing this statement:
In a statement Friday morning, Middlebury said, “We’re deeply disappointed that Charles Murray was not permitted to give his talk in the way it was intended. A large group of students took it upon themselves to disrupt the event, which forced us to move Mr. Murray and Professor Allison Stanger, the moderator of the Q&A, to another location. Thanks to some advance planning, we were able to livestream Mr. Murray’s talk and his conversation with Professor Stanger. We will make a recording of that available as soon as possible so the members of our community who came to the event wanting to hear Mr. Murray will be able to do so.”
The college is investigating the incident, and I think any students involved in the mobbing of Murray should be expelled or suspended. The rest of the College should be given some lectures on freedom of speech.
_________
UPDATE: A group of students have responded, blaming, of course, the College, Murray himself, and the security personnel. They show no contrition, and refused, like the cowards they are, to give their names. You can read their pathetic defense here; an excerpt is below:
The administration’s support of a platform for white nationalist speech was an intense act of aggression towards the most marginalized members of the Middlebury community. Though President Laurie Patton stated her disagreement with many of Murray’s views, by sharing a stage with him and designating his non-peer reviewed work as academically valuable, she effectively legitimized him. Furthermore, peaceful protest was met with escalating levels of violence by the administration and Public Safety, who continually asserted their support of a dangerous racist over the well-being of students.
Note that the “peaceful” protest included disrupting Murray’s talk and pulling the fire alarm several times during his subsequent livestreamed presentation.
UPDATE 2: Murray’s account of the scrum is here, and differs from the student account. Even for a man used to protest, Murray was surprised:
Absent an adequate disciplinary response, I fear that the Middlebury episode could become an inflection point. In the twenty-three years since The Bell Curve was published, I have had considerable experience with campus protests. Until last Thursday, all of the ones involving me have been as carefully scripted as kabuki: The college administration meets with the organizers of the protest and ground rules are agreed upon. The protesters have so many minutes to do such and such. It is agreed that after the allotted time, they will leave or desist. These negotiated agreements have always worked. At least a couple of dozen times, I have been able to give my lecture to an attentive (or at least quiet) audience despite an organized protest.
Middlebury tried to negotiate such an agreement with the protesters, but, for the first time in my experience, the protesters would not accept any time limits. If this becomes the new normal, the number of colleges willing to let themselves in for an experience like Middlebury’s will plunge to near zero. Academia is already largely sequestered in an ideological bubble, but at least it’s translucent. That bubble will become opaque.
Most of us are picky about errors that laypeople make about our fields of expertise—as I’ve learned from the many misstatements I’ve made on this website. And that goes double for linguists, whose job is often to be picky about language itself. Here’s a tw**t from Neil deGrasse Tyson that has raised the hackles of some linguists.
In the @ArrivalMovie I’d chose a Cryptographer & Astrobiologist to talk to the aliens, not a Linguist & Theoretical Physicist
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) February 26, 2017
Tyson is referring to the 2016 movie “Arrival“, which deals with the arrival of a group of friendly aliens on Earth and the desire of some humans to extirpate them. The movie stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tzi Ma, but I haven’t seen it because I’m sci-fi illiterate. (It gets a very high critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.)
Here’s the first paragraph of Wikipedia‘s plot summary so you can see what Tyson’s talking about:
In what appears to be a flashback scene, linguist Louise Banks is caring for her adolescent daughter, who dies of cancer. While she is lecturing at a university, twelve extraterrestrial spacecraft appear across the Earth. U.S. Army Colonel Weber asks Louise to join Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Ian Donnelly to decipher their language and find out why they have arrived. The team is brought to a military camp in Montana near one of the spacecraft, and makes contact with two seven-limbed aliens on board. They call the extraterrestrials “heptapods”, and Ian nicknames them Abbott and Costello. Louise discovers that they have a written language of complicated circular symbols, and she begins to learn the symbols that correspond to a basic vocabulary. As she becomes more proficient, she starts to see and dream vivid images of herself with her daughter, and of their relationship with the father.
It didn’t take long for four linguists, all from different countries, to write an open letter to Tyson at Language Log, setting him straight about the “cryptographer” and “linguist” part. I won’t reproduce it all, but here’s an excerpt:
Most importantly, a cryptanalyst would likely be much less suited to the task of communicating with aliens than a linguist would (a cryptographer even less so, since they work on encryption, not decryption). Cryptanalysis relies on decrypting coded messages from a known language. If the source language and the encryption method are both unknown, ordinary cryptanalytic methods will fail. This is why the Native American code talkers of the 20th century were so invaluable to the US in both world wars: their languages were not understood by enemy cryptanalysts, so their encrypted versions could not be cracked, unlike with well-known languages like English.
A linguist’s interactive methodology is more likely to result in successful communication with aliens. Whereas cryptanalysts generally work with a static corpus of encrypted messages and cannot obtain new ones of a particular type on demand, linguists are trained in a variety of techniques to elicit targeted utterances from speakers, as broadly demonstrated by the elicitation sessions in Arrival. These elicitation sessions are designed to bring to light subtle information about the atomic units of a language, how they are combined into longer units, what those units mean, and how they are used. These methods are used for analyzing the structure of well-known languages as well as for documenting and analyzing endangered languages that the linguist may not speak with any fluency and may be typologically quite different from widely spoken languages of the world.
I can understand why they’re a bit exercised, as Tyson has nearly four million followers on Twitter, and if I were a linguist I’d be a bit miffed at the widely-propagated misrepresentation of what linguists do.
And if you don’t know what the “code talkers” were, it’s a cool story. These were Native American soldiers, mostly Navajos, and mostly during World War II (there were other tribes of Native Americans as well as Basques), who, during battle, relayed messages to each other in their native languages—verbally. Since Navajo is a language that is unwritten, there was no reference the enemy could use to decrypt the words. This was both clever and effective, though the contribution of code talkers to the war effort—they greatly helped win the Battle of Iwo Jima, for instance—has gone largely unrecognized.
Here’s a short video about them that I recommend:
h/t: Stephan Hurtubise