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.
Good Lord, when will places like the Guardian stop publishing the same article over and over again? Do people ever get tired of dumping on New Atheism or, in this case, the “Four Horsemen”? I haven’t heard of author Steven Poole, a British journalist and author, but here he reviews a book I’ve already read, The Four Horsemen: A Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution. And he uses his review to try to eviscerate Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. Click on the screenshot to read:
My own short review: This is a transcript of the well known “Four Horsemen” conversation that took place in Christopher Hitchens’s apartment in 2007. There is a full video that you can find here. What’s new is simply the addition of a foreword by Stephen Fry and, as I recall, short commentaries by a few Horsepeople. But the meat of the discussion is already on YouTube. If you want to buy the book, you’d be buying it for the forewords, and to me it’s not worth it. Caveat emptor.
Now about the review: well, it’s the same pap that all liberal venues put out about the New Atheists, including smarmy but untrue remarks like these:
Contrary to the book’s subtitle, the “atheist revolution” was not sparked by this cocktail-fuelled pre-dinner round of chat and backslapping, which took place in 2007. By then the participants could already salute one another for the impressive sales of their books, boast about how willing they were to cause “offence”, and reminisce about how brilliant they were when they befuddled this or that bishop with some debating point.
That’s not what these guys did, although I’ll admit that the “brights” thing was misguided. But I’ve hung around most of these guys a fair bit (Hitchens I met only once), and I’ve never heard anything like the kind of boasting and back-patting that Poole reports. Those things, like the dumb atheist-dissing in Salon, are just character assassination.
Then there’s the obligatory claim that that that 2007 discussion is “dated”, and maybe it is, but so what? To answer Poole’s title question, what happened to the New Atheism is that it won: it exposed a new generation to old arguments about atheism (and some new ones based on science), and thus helped with the increasing secularization of the West. Their books were best-sellers, and for a reason; it wasn’t the Dawkins haters who bought millions of copies of The God Delusion. Finally, none of the Horsemen write about atheism any more because they don’t need to: the ball is rolling and it’s going to suck up religion with it.
Poole then makes the familiar argument that New Atheism was not sophisticated about religion and also neglects the benefits of religion. But would we have algebra even if Islam hadn’t existed? Of course we would, although the word for it might have been different. Newton and Lemaitre: well, yes, some religious people made scientific advances, but in most cases religion had nothing to do with it, as nearly everyone in the West was religious two centuries ago (yes, I know Lemaitre is more recent). Was the Human Genome Project the result of Francis Collins’s religiosity? I doubt it, and the other contributor, Craig Ventner, is an atheist.
Poole goes on:
New Atheism’s arguments were never very sophisticated or historically informed. You will find in this conversation no acknowledgment of the progress made by medieval Islamic civilisation in medicine and mathematics – which is why, among other things, we have the word “algebra”. The Horsemen assume that religion has always been an impediment to science, dismissing famous religious scientists – such as Georges Lemaître, the Catholic priest who first proposed the big bang hypothesis, not to mention Isaac Newton et al – as inexplicable outliers. At one point Harris complains about a leading geneticist who is also a Christian. This guy seems to think, Harris spits incredulously, “that on Sunday you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give yourself to Jesus because you’re in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist”. Harris offers no reason why he can’t, except that the combination is incompatible with his own narrow-mindedness.
This is irrelevant, of course, to the point made by these four men: that religion is a melange of foolish and unsubstantiated superstitions, that it doesn’t belong in this era nor in any rational mind, and that, by and large, it is harmful. And even if it does some good things, it’s simply not TRUE and there are ways of getting those good things without having the bad things.
Poole’s review continues, with Sam getting the worst of it, as he always does, in the end being accused of flirting with the alt-right. That’s simply not true, as Sam is on the Left. He’s just not woke enough for Poole.
In the end, these men did us a big favor by acquainting a new generation with arguments about why religion is false and harmful. They are the Ingersolls of our generation; and each generation, indoctrinated with religion by parents and peers, needs to hear the arguments anew. What people like Poole are trying to do, by discrediting the Four Horsemen, is to somehow justify and vindicate religion. Even if they be nonbelievers, they somehow can’t bear to say bad things about faith. But they are on the losing side, for in two centuries religion will have waned to a small band of superstitious holdouts. Or so I think.
A trip to San Diego last month gave me the opportunity to check out the squirrel situation there. The native vegetation is coastal sage scrub and chapparal, with oaks and pines in higher and wetter areas, and desert to the south and west—very different from the deciduous woodlands of eastern North America which so many squirrels call home. The vegetation of San Diego has been greatly modified by man, however, with introduced species now dominating the cityscape– Eucalyptus (from Australia) and exotic palms (from everywhere) are omnipresent.
On the second day of our visit, we hit squirrel pay dirt in Balboa Park, a large urban park with little or nothing of its natural vegetation remaining. Appropriately enough, the squirrel was an introduced species, the fox squirrel, Sciurus niger. They were first recorded in San Diego in 1929.
Fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 16 January 2019.
This pair was just outside the park’s visitors center. In the picture below, you can see the underside of the tail clearly. In Wisconsin, the shadings of the tail are the most reliable way to tell gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) from fox squirrels– gray squirrels have white-tipped tail hairs, giving a ‘halo’ effect. Fox squirrels are very variable geographically, however, and this character may not work in all places, and I’m not sure where the San Diegan fox squirrels came from. (In a post here at WEIT a few years ago, I identified some squirrels from Texas as gray squirrels, but, given fox squirrels’ variability, I am now unsure of their identification.)
Fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 16 January 2019.
A third fox squirrel, also outside the visitors center, sat in a classic squirrel pose.
Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 16 January 2019.
On another visit to Balboa Park a couple of days later, I was able to get up close and personal with this guy, and needed to use flash, hence the red-eye.
Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 18 January 2019.
The eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) was also introduced to Balboa Park, in 1924, but has apparently disappeared. During an 8-day stay I saw fox squirrels only in Balboa Park, not in other parts of the city. The native western gray squirrel, Sciurus griseus, is found only in the mountains in San Diego County.
Cities in the eastern half of the United States often have tree squirrels as a prominent element of their urban fauna. In much of the northeastern quadrant of the country, the “city squirrel” is the eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. From personal observation, this species is the city squirrel of Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison, WI. As you head to the south and west, however, another species of tree squirrel, the somewhat larger fox squirrel, Sciurus niger, becomes a possibility. It is the city squirrel of Springfield, IL, and, quite exceptional for being so far to the north and east, Ann Arbor, MI. (On one of my first visits to that city, I remarked to someone that the city had the biggest gray squirrels I’d ever seen, and they replied, yeah, that’s because they were fox squirrels!) Both of these eastern species have been widely introduced elsewhere, the gray squirrel even overseas, including Great Britain and Ireland.
To see native squirrels, we had to go to San Ysidro, the southernmost part of the city of San Diego, on the Mexican border. As we walked to the border crossing there, we saw, on the slope to the east of the pedestrian approach, a modest colony of California ground squirrels, Spermophilus beecheyi. The white patch on the shoulder, extending somewhat in a line on the flank, is diagnostic; and in the out-of-focus individual in the background you can, paradoxically, see more clearly the dark area from the head onto the nape that separates the two shoulder patches. Note that someone seems to have thrown them a peanut (chewed on shell at left).
California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi), San Ysidro, California, 17 January 2019.
Ground squirrel tails tend to be less bushy than tree squirrel tails, but this species’ tail is fairly bushy. From the angle in the picture below, the squirrel even looks a fair amount like an eastern tree squirrel, since you can’t see its shoulder and nape.
California ground squirrel (Spermophilus beecheyi), San Ysidro, California, 17 January 2019.
In the next picture, we see a broader view of the colony, with scant, scrubby vegetation, including cactus; there were some scelrophyllous shrubs, as well. Bonus question: How many squirrels can you spot?
California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi), San Ysidro, California, 17 January 2019.
The ground squirrels also occurred just over the border in Tijuana.
California ground squirrel (Spermophilus beecheyi), Tijuana, B.C.N., Mexico, 17 January 2019, with Rock Doves (Columba livia).
There are many species of ground squirrels in western North America, but none in the east. (The easternmost is the thirteen-lined ground squirrel, which reaches the Midwest.) Many of these ground squirrels have more geographically or habitat restricted distributions. The white-tailed antelope squirrel, Ammospermophilus leucurus, is a desert species, which in San Diego County is found only in the eastern part of the county. The one below is in an exhibit hall, Coast to Cactus, at the San Diego Natural History Museum, devoted to the various biotic communities of southern California. It is a model, not an actual specimen.
White-tailed antelope squirrel (Ammospermophilus leucurus), model, at San Diego Natural History Museum.
And, to enlarge this account to include all of my encounters with incisor-enhanced critters in San Diego, here’s a Desert cottontail, (Sylvilagus audubonii), also in Balboa Park. Despite the common name, this is a common rabbit in a broad range of habitats, including urban-suburban ones, in San Diego.
Desert cottontail (Sylvilagus audubonii), Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 16 January 2019.
The San Diego Natural History Museum has been a leader in providing online access to its publications, collections, and exhibits, and for mammals there are a number of resources, and I’d point in particular to the various guides listed here, their checklist of the mammals of San Diego, and Suzanne Bond’s annotated list. They have recently published a truly excellent atlas of the mammal of San Diego, which I was able to consult while in San Diego, but not while writing this post, so if you’re interested in the exact details of the introductions and distributions of the species mentioned, you should consult the Atlas.
Bond, S.I. 1977 An annotated list of the mammals of San Diego County, California. Transactions of the San Diego Society of Natural History 18(14):229-248. pdf
Reid, F.A. 2006. A Field Guide to Mammals of North America. 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. (The Peterson series mammal guide, and an excellent one; by browsing it, you can get a good overview of mammal distributions in the U.S. and Canada.)
Tremor, S., D. Stokes, W. Spencer, J. Diffendorfer, H. Thomas, S. Chivers, and P. Unitt. 2017. San Diego County Mammal Atlas. San Diego Natural History Museum, San Diego. Museum Store
UPDATE: If religious practices promote well being, one would expect that more religious countries would have happier inhabitants. But the graph below (prepared by reader gluonspring) shows that this is not the case: the most religious countries score lowest on the UN’s “happiness index.” Of course this is a correlation and not necessarily a causal relationship, and there are other factors as well (people may turn to religion if they are poor and unhappy), but this certainly goes against DeSteno’s hypothesis.
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I’ve gotten the link to this new NYT op-ed from about a dozen readers, with some explicitly asking me to respond.
Okay, I’ll bite, though my response will be limited to this site as there’s no way in hell that the New York Times would publish a piece saying that science and religion are not mutually helpful. The writer is David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of the book Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride. More about him and his funding sources (yes, you can guess!) later.
The article manages to press all my buttons, including extolling the oleaginous Krista Tippett (I had to listen to her ask Daniel Kahneman this morning how he manages to “inhabit the space of his theories”!) and criticizing Steven Pinker. But let’s examine the arguments, which are independent of whether DeSteno loves Krista Tippett (she is, by the way, funded by Templeton).
DeSteno’s thesis is that religion has contributed to science, and that arguing for a divide between the areas “might not only be stoking needless hostility; it might also be slowing the process of scientific discovery itself.”
How does this occur? According to DeSteno, religion has found ways to control not only individual behavior, but also group behavior—and in good ways. If we study these religous methods, we could concoct hypotheses about how we can apply this behavioral control to society at large. In other words, the contribution of religion to science is that it suggests hypotheses. These hypotheses can then be tested using science to see if they work. As DeSteno says:
Religious traditions offer a rich store of ideas about what human beings are like and how they can satisfy their deepest moral and social needs. For thousands of years, people have turned to spiritual leaders and religious communities for guidance about how to conduct themselves, how to coexist with other people, how to live meaningful and fulfilled lives — and how to accomplish this in the face of the many obstacles to doing so. The biologist Richard Dawkins, a vocal critic of religion, has said that in listening to and debating theologians, he has “never heard them say anything of the smallest use.” Yet it is hubristic to assume that religious thinkers who have grappled for centuries with the workings of the human mind have never discovered anything of interest to scientists studying human behavior.
Just as ancient doesn’t always mean wise, it doesn’t always mean foolish. The only way to determine which is the case is to put an idea — a hypothesis — to an empirical test. In my own work, I have repeatedly done so. I have found that religious ideas about human behavior and how to influence it, though never worthy of blind embrace, are sometimes vindicated by scientific examination.
So what are these “religious ideas”? They include these:
1.) Meditation. The idea that meditation can reduce suffering and make people more moral has, says DeSteno, been supported by science. He also says that idea comes from Buddhism.
2.)Ritual. DeSteno says that science has found that the repetitive actions of rituals lead to greater self-control and more feelings of “affiliation and empathy”. He implies that the use of rituals originated in religion.
3.)“Religious virtues such as gratitude and kindness.” See below.
That’s about it, but one can think of other ideas as well. Whether they come from religion is debatable, and I’ll get to that in a minute. DeSteno’s conclusion?
If this view is right, religion can offer tools to bolster secular interventions of many types, such as combating addiction, increasing exercise, saving money and encouraging people to help those in need. This possibility dovetails with a parallel body of research showing that by cultivating traditional religious virtues such as gratitude and kindness, people can also improve their ability to reach personal goals like financial and educational success.
. . . My purpose here isn’t to argue that religion is inherently good or bad. As with most social institutions, its value depends on the intentions of those using it. But even in cases where religion has been used to foment intergroup conflict, to justify invidious social hierarchies or to encourage the maintenance of false beliefs, studying how it manages to leverage the mechanisms of the mind to accomplish those nefarious goals can offer insights about ourselves — insights that could be used to understand and then combat such abuses in the future, whether perpetrated by religious or secular powers.
Science and religion do not need each other to function, but that doesn’t imply that they can’t benefit from each other.
It’s clear that what DeSteno means is that science can find out stuff if they test hypotheses derived from examining religion, but that science itself doesn’t benefit. Science is, after all, a set of practices that help us find out stuff, and it isn’t and has never been helped by religion. It is society that benefits—supposedly.
DeSteno calls these testable hypotheses “spiritual technologies”, a word he got from Krista Tippett (it has shady overtones from Scientology, though). But he also says, correctly, that these practices can be separated from religious dogma, and also don’t vindicate the dogma of any religion. In response to Pinker, who, when faced with DeSteno’s ideas, said that these are cultural and not religious practices, DeSteno says that it’s hard to separate the two.
And it is, which is one of the problems of DeSteno’s thesis. Are these techniques derived from studying religion and its supposed successes, or do they come from elsewhere? I’m willing to admit that meditation comes from Zen Buddhism, though many people don’t see that as a religion. But that aside, it does seem to have value, though some people, like Dan Dennett, never feel the “mindfulness” and “out of self” experiences touted by adherents like Sam Harris. I would be interested to see if the scientific studies of meditation explicitly credit Buddhism, but I won’t carp if they did.
As for the other two, I am not so sure they come from religion. Ritual probably long preceded present-day religions, and may have had little to do with belief in divine beings. The origins of ritual are lost in the irrecoverable past of our species. Indeed, religion may have adopted rituals like singing and dancing from the teenage phase of our evolutionary history.
And, of course, there are other ways of bonding. Do soccer fans derive their chants and solidarity from observing religion? I don’t think so. There are many things that help us bond, and many rituals that facilitate that, and surely some of those don’t come from religion. I won’t go into this in detail as readers can think of these on their own. But why not write an article like “What science can learn from soccer”?
Here’s some video from that proposed article:
As for “gratitude and kindness,” I deny that these ideas derive from religion. While some religions emphasize them, many urge them on adherents to their faith but urge intolerance and dislike towards members of other faiths. That, indeed, was the situation throughout most of religious history. If you ascribe “gratitude and kindness” to religion, you must also ascribe “dislike, xenophibia, and intolerance of others” to religion as well. Here DeSteno is brandishing a double-edged sword.
There are many reasons to think that religion adopted the “gratitude and kindness” stand from secular reason and from evolution. These virtues would have arisen via experience and evolution over the long period of time when humans lived in small groups—groups of people who knew each other and thus could practice these virtues in light of the expected reciprocity from others. And, of course, secular ethics has emphasized these virtues from since forever. As Rebecca Goldstein told me, moral philosophy is a thoroughly secular enterprise. And she’s right. Religions simply took over these virtues from preexisting groups.
But there’s more to say. Religion has also had a malign influence on humanity, not, perhaps, through scientific study of religious methods of behavior control, but from secular enterprises apeing religious methods to control people. For example:
Threats as a way to control behavior. There’s nothing more compelling than making people behave than by threatening them if they don’t. Religion is excellent at doing this, especially through threats of burning in hell. Other threats have been used by dictatorships to make people conform. What are Nazism and Stalinism but oppressive ideologies that use the methods of religion, including god figures, threats, ritual, and punishment of apostasy and blasphemy?
Deprivation of freedom of expression. Religions have been suppressing heresy for centuries, a technique taken over by totalitarian regimes to ensure control.
Use of raw power to get your way. Here I’ll mention how some Catholic priests have used the cachet of their church to sexually molest young people.
Promises of reward if you give money or effort to the church. People who tithe expect rewards, often in the afterlife. But “prosperity gospel” hucksters like Creflo Dollar, as well as Scientologists, use these promises of reward to bankrupt their acolytes.
Now scientists may not have studied these religious methods to judge their efficacy. After all, who would fund a study of whether gaining religious power over someone makes them more likely to succumb to sexual molestation? But the hypotheses that these methods work can reasonably be ascribed to religion (at least as reasonably as the three ideas mentioned above), and they have been used to damage human beings. On balance, one can’t say that the existence of religions has been an overall good in making humans feel good and behave well. Likewise, we can’t say that scientific discoveries about human behavior would be less advanced if religion hadn’t existed.
When I read this article, I immediately thought, “I smell Templeton in here.” (By the way, the self-aggrandizing rat in the wonderful children’s book Charlotte’s Web is named Templeton!) And it doesn’t take much digging to find that DeSteno has been and still is amply funded by Templeton. Here are two past grants he’s had, both listed on his c.v.:
John Templeton Foundation Co-PI’s: David DeSteno and Lisa Feldman Barrett Informal Science Education via Storytelling: Teaching Scientists and Philosophers How to Communicate with the Public Funding Program: Academic Engagement November 2016 – October 2018; Total costs: $216,400. J
John Templeton Foundation PI: David DeSteno Behavioral Measures of Virtue: Moving from the Lab to the “Real World” Funding Program: Character Virtue Development June 2014 – May 2016; Total costs: $244,251
And, on January 22 of this year, Northeastern University noted that DeSteno and a colleague now have three more grants from Templeton adding up to a cool $600,000:
DeSteno and fellow Northeastern psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett recently received three grants from the John Templeton Foundation for a total of nearly $600,000, including two grants to continue offering workshops that help scientists such as Routledge communicate complex information to laypeople.
Hundreds of scientists from all over the world have applied to attend the first three workshops, and a dozen have been selected to participate in each one. According to DeSteno, several of their workshop attendees have written articles for major news outlets such as theTimes, The Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. Now they are planning a fourth workshop this fall in Boston.
Some of these grants have been to teach scholars to communicate with the public. As Templeton described the first grant above, which expired in October 2018:
Scholars yearn to provide insights into some of the big questions. Yet, too often, they are limited in their abilities to communicate findings directly to a knowledge hungry public .The result is either that scholars write mainly for one another, placing important knowledge in insular academic journals that are beyond the reach and interest of the public, or rely on intermediaries to digest and transmit knowledge. If science and philosophy are to maximally enhance well-being and benefit humanity, scholars must have a way to more easily disseminate their discoveries to the public. Success in doing so requires learning not only how to tell a good story, and how to write in different styles, but also how to approach, pitch and work with editors at prominent publications.
There’s the Big Questions trope again, which is TempletonSpeak for “osculating faith.” I see workshops like this as Templeton fostering a way to spread its own views to the public, as DeSteno does here (this article could have been written by a Templeton flack). And two of DeSteno’s new Templeton grants are for further workshops in this kind of communication.
There’s a lot of dough to be made, and public approbation to be gained, by claiming that science and religion have a lot to teach each other. Yes, science can often test religious claims (Adam and Eve, the efficacy of prayer, and so on), and these claims are always dispelled. As for religion’s contribution to science, as outlined by DeSteno in this article, well, it’s not impressive.
It’s not to the New York Times’s credit that they continue publishing religion-osculating pieces like this. Would that they gave the same space to criticisms of religion!
As many venues report (NYT article here), Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, is now the object of gazillions of calls for him to step down, all based on a photo of a person in blackface, accompanied by a person dressed in KKK robes, that appeared on Northam’s page in his medical school yearbook of 1984.
Nobody doubts, including Northam, that the photograph is racist, but although Northam previously admitted he was one of the two people in the picture, he now denies it. But he now adds that he did wear blackface once, when he played Michael Jackson in a skit that same year.
The question is not whether the photo is racist, but whether it depicts Northam. That will eventually come out. But even if it does, should he resign? Both Democrats and Republicans are calling for him to step down, and nobody has said he shouldn’t—except for Northam himself and some readers on a recent thread here.
The more I think about this, the more I think that it isn’t a cut and dried issue—at least with respect to that one photograph. The question centers on whether we should forgive someone who transgressed in this way 35 years ago (assuming it was him in the photograph), or demand their heads and a permanent ban from politics. In other words, the question is whether Northam has reformed, and is not only not a racist, but someone who favors equal rights and opportunities for all.
I don’t know the answer to that question. Northam’s actions in recent years seem to be those of an antiracist liberal. What bothers me is that he’s wobbling on this issue, first saying it was he in the picture and then denying it, while admitting that yes, he wore blackface on other occasion in that same year. Perhaps he forgot, though I’d remember if I posed for a photo like that.
I guess I’m reserving judgment until I learn more about the facts and more about the photos. What worries me are not only the instant calls for banning, which carry the assumption that nobody is capable of reformation, but the fact that they are instant, and leave no time for us to thoughtfully reflect on the issue. Was Northam in the photo? Did he express racist views at the time, or in recent years? We don’t yet know.
The offense culture often comes with an assumption that ideological impurities should carry stiff sentences—often firing, lifetime bans from jobs, and lifetime shaming. Perhaps Northam won’t be an effective governor even if he stays on, since he might be distracted by constant calls to step down or by being ignored or impeded by other lawmakers. But what seems lacking in today’s political climate is any notion of reformation and forgiveness. People can change (that is not a contradiction of determinism!), and we should take that into account in dealing with them. Should we punish a man for what he did 35 years ago if he hasn’t evinced any racism since then?
Let’s take a vote, and I’d appreciate it if you would vote, as well as weigh in if you wish. If you think, for instance, that Northam should resign not just because of the photos, but because of his changing stories about them, which might bespeak a general untrustworthiness, or because he’s lost his ability to function as a governor, put it in the comments.
We have another video from Tara Tanaka in Florida showing a variety of waterfowl, but especially ducks. This one features the hooded merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus), and note how the male displays even when his mate is laying eggs in the nest box. Tara’s notes:
I looked through the scope this morning and was thrilled to see a Hooded Merganser pair swimming toward one of our duck boxes. She looked like she had a bead on that box, so I started filming through the living room window. She landed on top, surveyed the situation, and then entered the box. While she was likely laying an egg, the male waited outside performing what I’ve always interpreted to be a courtship display. After about seven minutes she rejoined her mate in the water. An Anhinga in the background surfaced with a bream, and after briefly beating it on a log, swallowed it whole. Although a Wood Duck hen landed on top to the box after the Merganser exited – looking like she was definitely going to go in, she and her mate left without disturbing the new egg. Just a few minutes later the Merganser entered a SECOND box, likely laying another egg! I only got video of her leaving the box, greeted by a group of curious Canada Geese. I’m going to have to keep a close eye on these two boxes to see if we have any mixed Wood Duck and Merganser broods.
It’s Sunday, February 3, 2019, and National Carrot Cake Day. I like the stuff, so long as it has cream-cheese frosting.
It’s also Four Chaplains Day in the US, honoring four Army chaplains who died on February 3, 1943, when their troop ship, the Dorchester, was torpedoed by the Germans. There weren’t enough life jackets for all the troops, so Methodist Minister, George L. Fox, reform Rabbi Alexander D. Goode (PhD), Roman Catholic priest Father John P. Washington, and Reformed Church in America minister Reverend Clark V. Poling—all of whom met at Harvard—gave up their life jackets to others, linked arms, and, singing hymns and praying, went down with the ship as it sank. Yes, they were religious, and yes, even most of the wearing life jackets in the water died of hypothermia, but these chaplains did a good and heroic thing (they also guided soldiers to the lifeboats), and should be honored. Here they are:
On this day in 1690, the colony of Massachusetts issued the first paper money circulated in what Wikipedia calls “the Americas”, which, if true, would be North, Central, and South America. Well, here’s the dosh: a 20-shilling note.
On this day in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving voting rights to all men (but not women) regardless of their race, was ratified. Exactly 43 years later, the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing the Federal government to impose an income tax on Americans, was also ratified.
On February 3, 1943, the SS Dorchester, on its way to Greenland, was sunk by a U boat (see above). Of the 902 men on board, only 230 survived. And here’s something I didn’t know even though I worked on this island. On February 3, 1953, according to Wikipedia, “The Batepá massacre occurred in São Tomé when the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners unleashed a wave of violence against the native creoles known as forros.” Hundreds of workers were killed and many others were tortured. The bodies of many of the dead were thrown into the sea.
It was this day in 1959 that became “the day the music died,” as rock musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. Waylon Jennings was also on the tour, and it’s likely that he gave up his seat to The Big Bopper at the last moment. The crash is of course was immortalized in the song “American Pie” by Don McLean.
Another interesting tidbit from Wikipedia: on February 3, 1961, “The United States Air Forces begins Operation Looking Glass, and over the next 30 years, a ‘Doomsday Plane’ is always in the air, with the capability of taking direct control of the United States’ bombers and missiles in the event of the destruction of the SAC‘s command post.” Are you sleeping better now? Here’s a picture from the Federation of American Scientists showing the inside of the plane (there’s a crew of 22):
Finally, on this day in 1971, New York City Police Officer Frank Serpico was shot in the face during a drug bust; his fellow cops didn’t bother to call for assistance as Serpico was reporting police corruption. He lived, went on to testify for the Knapp Commission, and considerable reforms took place in the NYC police.
Notables born on February 3 include Felix Mendelssohn (1809), Horace Greeley (1811), Elizabeth Blackwell (1821), Gertrude Stein (1874), Norman Rockwell (1894), Pretty Boy Floyd (1904), James Michener (1907), Henry Heimlich (1920; yes that Heimlich), Blythe Danner (1943), and Maura Tierney (1965).
Although Rockwell was known for his paintings, here’s a nice charcoal sketch he made of a boy leaving home for college. It’s called Study for Breaking Home Ties, and was painted around 1954
Those who died on February 3 include John of Gaunt (1399), Woodrow Wilson (1924), The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens (all 1959; see above), Ernst Mayr (2005; see my appreciation and an obituary of this evolutionary biologist here and here), and Maria Schneider (2011).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are apparently playing hide and seek:
A: I see you under the ceiling, behind the curtain.
Hili: I, too, see you from behind the curtain, we see each other.
In Polish:
Ja: Widzę cię pod sufitem, za firanką.
Hili: Ja też cię widzę zza firanki, oboje się widzimy.
A cartoon sent by my undergraduate advisor Bruce Grant. . .
. . . and a picture I found on Facebook:
A tweet from the unsinkable Titania McGrath about the Young Adult Twitter fracas I described yesterday:
The woke community does *not* accept apologies.
The fact that you don’t know this proves that you were never woke to begin with.
A Mantisfly (Orientispa sp., Mantispidae) overlooks her levitating eggs, each attached by a near-invisible filament (typically Neuropteran). The larval life cycle entails hitching rides with spiders to parasitise their egg sacs.https://t.co/U9Ddr9c9ls#insect#China#Yunnanpic.twitter.com/Bqg6OxgXmx
Four years ago I wrote about the poems of the Jewish boy Abramek Koplowicz and reproduced one of the poems, “A Dream”, that he wrote while living in the Lodz Ghetto during World War II (he was later sent to the camps and killed). Go have a look and read the poem; it’s heartbreaking. Now Kelly Houle has, after tremendous effort, turned that poem and others by Abramek into a book.
A bit of backstory: Abramek has a living stepbrother who never met him, but who is still alive at age 94 in Israel. His name is Eliezer Lolek Grynfelt. After Abramek’s parents died, Eliezer found Abramek’s handmade pamphlet with the poems, which the father had kept. Eliezer was immensely moved, and got the poems translated into Polish and Hebrew, and also got a monument to Abramek erected in Israel as well as a street named after the lad in the Polish town where he was born. An Israeli journalist translated the poem into English, my friend Malgorzata saw it in the newspapers, and she asked to see the original manuscript (written in Polish). Malgorzata and her friend Sarah Lawson then translated the poem into English themselves.
I posted their translation on my website, Kelly Houle saw it, and she decided to make a book from the poems. Kelly’s description of the handmade and hand-printed book (just finished) is below. It’s a beautiful book (Malgorzata called it the most beautiful book she’s ever seen), and if you want a lovely and touching present for yourself or someone else, I’d urge you to buy it. Abramek, like Anne Frank, must stand for all the unknown children, and all the potential talents and accomplishments, that were snuffed out by the Nazis. Eliezer has seen the book and I’m glad he was alive to see this come to fruition. (He loves the book.) You can keep the memory of Abramek alive, too.
Here’s what Kelly wrote:
A Dream: Selected Poems by Abramek Koplowicz (1930-1944), is a collection of five poems written by the author at age fourteen, the last year of his life, in the Łódź Ghetto. This edition is the first printed publication of the English translations by Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson. Sarah also wrote a special introduction for this edition. The book is dedicated to Lolek, Abramek’s stepbrother, who also survived the Holocaust and has worked tirelessly to see his brother’s work more widely appreciated. Lolek discovered Abramek’s notebook in his family’s home after the death of his parents in the 1980’s. Thanks to Lolek’s efforts, we have Abramek’s poems and writings, which offer a rare look into the mind of a child writing during the Holocaust.
A Dream is fully illustrated by Kelly M. Houle with stippled pen and ink drawings. The entire book was typeset by hand and letterpress printed on an antique Chandler and Price platen press over a period of six months. The front cover was bound in handmade deep blue “Starry Night” Cave paper with embedded mica shards and black imitation leather that wraps around the spine and back cover. The cover and spine are stamped with shiny silver foil. The Merino wool book wrap fastens with an antique 1930’s coat button.
The print is custom matted in blue with a Nordic gold Polish coin commemorating the 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto. The coin shows a drawing by Abramek Koplowicz, which he had sketched in his journal along with his many poems and plays.
Copies of the book and print can be ordered here. [JAC: that site has additional illustrations].
Special wood blocks had to be cut to arrange the letters to fit the curves in the above illustration. The image of the vines was printed first, then the words were printed onto those pages in a second run. Each curved line of text required a complete run.
This is the type set to print the word “Blackberries.”
Here’s the wood block locked up in the chase, ready to go into the press:
