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.
I declare this Fleetwood Mac Week, and I’ll put up some of my favorite tunes. This one, “Say you love me,” is among them, written by Christine McVie for the 1975 “Fleetwood Mac” album. Here she performs it 12 years later in one of the live tracks from “The Dance“—a recording before an audience in Burbank, California that was made into a live album. I particularly like Lindsey Buckingham’s banjo solo at the beginning and again at at 1:39.
Consider this a tribute to one of the best bands ever—on the 20th anniversary of this concert.
What a lot of music from only a banjo, a bass guitar, two drums and a cymbal, and four voices! This is one of the few live performances that equals (or betters) the original recorded songs.
Good morning on Saturday, March 4, 2017. It will be chilly in Chicago this week (right now it’s a few degrees below freezing), but the weather will begin warming up in a few days, so I’m going out on a limb to predict that the worst of winter is over. It’s National Poundcake Day, a dessert best eaten with fruit or some wet topping to cut the dryness. It’s also St. Casimir’s Day in Poland and Lithuania, celebrating arts and crafts more than religion.
On this day in 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Lisbon on his ship Niña after discovering “America,” which was actually Cuba and some islands in the Caribbean (he never set foot in what is now mainland America). And on the same day in 1519, the clever but barbaric Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico looking for wealth; he and a few men were about to topple the entire Aztec empire. On March 4, 1797, John Adams was inaugurated as the second President of the US (I can name the first 25 in order), and, in 1837, the city of CHICAGO was incorporated. On this day in 1917, Jeannete Rankin became the first woman member of the U.S. House of Representatives; she lived until 1973. Finally, in 1980 Robert Mugabe became Zimbabwe’s first black prime minister, and after 37 years the old autocrat is still in power!
Notables born on this day include Antonio Vivaldi (1678), Casimir Pulaski (1745), George Gamow (1904), Miriam Makeba (1932), Rick Perry (1950), and Patsy Kensit (1968). Those who died on this day include Saint Casimir (1484), Nikolai Gogol (1852), mountaineer Willi Unsoeld (1979, member of first American expedition to climb Mt. Everest [1963]; he later died in an avalanche), Richard Manuel of The Band (1986; they’re almost all dead now), John Candy (1994), and Minnie Pearl (1996; St. Peter greeted her with “How-DEE!”). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, today’s Hili dialogue is enigmatic. I told Malgorzata I didn’t understand it, and she replied with this:
Who does? My interpretation: Hili, full of pretenses as she is, found something, most probably a bird, and ate it. But she tried a philosophical approach to Andrzej, one that wouldn’t work if she just said that she ate a bird. But I really don’t know. Andrzej and Monika [a houseguest] went shopping and I can’t ask him.
Make of it what you will:
Hili: Today I met the Conscience of the World.
A: And?
Hili: I ate it.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
In Polish:
Hili: Spotkałam dziś Sumienie Świata.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Zjadłam.
(Foto: Sarah Lawson)
In nearby Wloclawek, Leon, who stayed up late, is sleeping in:
Leon: Last night I had to finish a fascinating book.
Finally, the new Bloom Countydeals with recent political tumult. I don’t know Berk Breathed’s politics, but I have to admit that this is hilarious:
And today’s reading: Heather Hastie’s post “SPLC lies about Maajid Nawaz. Again.” The SPLC is the once-useful Southern Poverty Law Center, which now is going full Regressive Left by listing both Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in their “Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” Watch the SPLC officials dissimulate when asked why these two people were included in the Guide.
From First We Feast, we have one of the dumbest inventions of our time: a portable pizza pouch for those who want to buy two slices but want to eat one on the go while keeping the other on hand. I can think of a gazillion reasons why this is dumb, including the fact that you have to clean it and that New Yorkers have managed the art of eating two slices at once (see the beginning of Saturday Night Fever). It’s no longer available at the site listed, but you can get one on Amazon.
John Travolta shows you what to do at 1:35. He’s the king out there, fadda!
And you can still get this other dumb invention: a portable fork and pizza cutter combined. The object is to cut your pizza into bite-sized pieces, and then eat them with your fork, but only a total wuss would do something like that.
Charles Murray is a conservative political scientist and author, perhaps most famous for his book The Bell Curve, co-written with Richard Herrnstein. I confess that I haven’t read it, but I’ve certainly read enough to about it to know that Murray and Herrnstein’s hereditarian views of IQ have been strongly attacked by some other scholars, largely on the Left. Further, from what I’ve read of the criticism from people I respect, the book seems misguided and plagued with misconceptions about genetics (this, of course, is hearsay). But Murray has written many other books and articles about other matters, and in respectable venues like the New York Times and The New Republic.
Yesterday afternoon, Murray was scheduled to speak at Vermont’s traditionally liberal Middlebury College; he was invited by the campus chapter of the American Enterprise Institute Club. That, of course, got up the nose of many, and, according to the school newspaper, over 450 alumni protested, considering Murray’s appearance at the liberal school as “immoral and unethical.” A section of their letter gives the recurrent, tiresome, and incorrect claim that “free speech” doesn’t include “hate speech”. When you read sentences like the first one below, you know that you’re about to see a justification for censorship (my emphases):
This is not an issue of freedom of speech. We think it is necessary to allow a diverse range of perspectives to be voiced at Middlebury. In college, we learned through thoughtful, compassionate and often difficult discussions inside the classroom and out — conversations in which our beliefs were questioned and our assumptions challenged. We fully support the core liberal arts principle that contact with other intellectual viewpoints and life experiences than one’s own is integral to a beneficial education. [JAC: when you see this, you know a “but” will follow immediately.]
However, in this case we find the principle does not apply, due to not only the nature, but also the quality, of Dr. Murray’s scholarship. He paints arguments for the biological and intellectual superiority of white men with a thin veneer of quantitative rhetoric and academic authority.
. . . We, the undersigned, want to make clear to Old Chapel that the decision to bring Dr. Murray to campus is unacceptable and unethical. It is a decision that directly endangers members of the community and stains Middlebury’s reputation by jeopardizing the institution’s claims to intellectual rigor and compassionate inclusivity.
Needless to say, Murray’s talk didn’t go as planned. A protesting mob showed up and began interrupting Murray the moment he started to speak (see accounts here and here):
As he took the stage in Wilson Hall, students booed, rose and turned their backs to the stage before reading a statement in unison. Students broke into chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go,” and “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!”
Murray, wearing a suit and tie, stood at the lectern and waited to be heard. The shouts continued:
“Your message is hatred; we cannot tolerate it!”
“Charles Murray, go away; Middlebury says no way!”
After about 25 minutes, and when it became clear the chants would not abate, faculty came onstage and announced plans to move the lecture to a different location. The administrators said Murray’s speech would be live-streamed so he could speak without interruption. Questions for Murray to answer could be submitted using a Twitter hashtag, they said.
But worse things happened after the talk was over, and these were confirmed by College officials:
Professor Allison Stanger was assaulted and her neck was injured when someone pulled her hair as she tried to shield Murray from the 20 or 30 people who attacked the duo outside the McCullough Student Center, said Bill Burger, a vice president of communications at Middlebury College.
Burger said people in the crowd, made up of students and “outside agitators,” wore masks as they screamed at Murray
. . . . About half an hour after the event ended, Burger said, the two, accompanied by a college administrator and two public safety officers, tried to leave the building via a back entrance and hurry to a car. But protesters had surrounded various entrances and swarmed to the fleeing Murray and Stanger as they exited, he said.
Once Murray and Stanger were inside the car — and after Stanger had been assaulted — the crowd began jumping on the hood and banging on the windows, according to Burger. The driver tried to inch out of the parking space but the angry crowd surrounded the vehicle and tried to keep it from leaving.
Burger said someone threw a stop sign attached to a heavy cement base in front of the car. It finally got free of the crowd and then left campus..
Talk about “endangering members of the community”! Murray would have offered words, not fists or metal objects, and had the mob left him alone, the only thing injured would have been some students’ feelings.
Those who consider words to be violence might ponder the actual violence that their mob behavior inspired: violence that was immediate, deliberate, and intended. Middlebury College and its students should be ashamed of themselves. Regardless of how odious Murray’s views were, the best way to deal with them is let him speak, ask him questions, or stage peaceful, non-disruptive protests or counterspeeches.
When did college students become so ignorant and twisted?
The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, and the oldest undisputed life on our planet appears as bacterial “microfossils” 3.5 billion years ago. But because bacteria are already quite complicated organisms, it’s a good bet that life (however you define it), began well before that. But how long? The seas weren’t around much before about 4 billion years (the Earth was too hot), and there was no oxygen. Life, if it existed about then, was probably adapted to extreme temperatures and was anaerobic (not requiring oxygen).
A new paper in Nature by Matthew Dodd et al. (free access, reference below) has reported what may be traces of life (iron-containing filaments and tiny tubes) that resemble the kind of life found in modern hydrothermal vents, as well as in undisputed microfossils. The age of the sediments, which are from Hudson Bay in Quebec, Canada, spans a range between 3.77 and 4.28 billion years. They can’t narrow it down much more than this large range, and of course the press is concentrating on the 4.28-billion-year date, because that’s about the earliest life could have formed given the state of the Earth then.
I won’t go into detail about the paper: it’s a hard slog even for an evolutionary biologist, for it’s largely geology and paleobiology. But one expert I asked said that the results are very interesting but not conclusive, and that the age range of course is quite large. Here are a few photographs of what may be the remnants of ancient bacteria. First are the filaments (click to enlarge pictures):
(From paper): a, Filaments from the NSB attached to a terminal knob (arrow) coated with nanoscopic haematite. b, Filaments from the Løkken jaspers coated with nanoscopic haematite and attached to terminal knobs (red arrows) and branching (orange arrows). Inset, multiple filaments attached to a terminal knob. c, Filaments from the NSB in quartz band with haematite rosettes (green arrow). Inset, branching filament (orange arrow). Green box defines d. d, Filament from the NSB enveloped in haematite (inset, same image in cross polars).
And the tubes:
(From the paper): a–f, Tubes from the NSB. a, Tubes associated with iron oxide band. b, Depth reconstruction of tubes with haematite filament (arrow). Inset, image of tubes at the surface. c, Tube showing a twisted filament (red arrow) and walls (black arrow). d, Strongly deformed tubes. e, Depth reconstruction of tubes. f, Two tubes attached to terminal knob (arrows); lower image taken in false colour. g, h, Tubes from the Løkken jaspers. g, Tube showing filament (red arrow) and walls (black arrow). h, Aligned tubes (green arrows).
These of course are not microfossils themselves, which are the fossilized remains of ancient bacteria, but simply traces of what may be ancient bacteria.
But many experts in the field were skeptical of the new study — or downright unconvinced.
Martin J. Van Kranendonk, a geologist at the University of New South Wales, called the patterns in the rocks “dubiofossils” — fossil-like structures, perhaps, but without clear proof that they started out as something alive.
. . . And if these are fossils 4.2 billion years old, then scientists will have evidence that life began quickly on Earth, not long after the oceans formed.
Yet Frances Westall, the director of research at the CNRS-Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire in Orléans, France, isn’t convinced these are fossils at all. “I am frankly dubious,” she said.
For one thing, she has argued, the filaments in the Nuvvuagittuq rocks are too big. She and her colleagues have found filaments formed by bacteria in rock dating back 3.3 billion years, and these are far smaller.
On the early Earth, bacteria were forced to stay small, Dr. Westall said, because the atmosphere did not yet have enough oxygen to fuel their growth.
From someone more enthusiastic:
“I think the authors have done a good job,” said David Wacey, who researches the origins and evolution of life at the University of Western Australia. With the new evidence, he said, “One comes up with a pretty convincing biological scenario” for the origins of the mysterious rock features.
Dr. Wacey was not surprised that the new work had drawn criticism. “It may be many years before a consensus is reached,” he said. “But this is how science progresses.”
I think the last sentence is the operative one. This is by no means evidence for early life, or even for its age, but it was certainly worth publishing and will doubtlessly lead to more work. If life really did exist 4.3 billion years ago, then it means that it didn’t take long after Earth’s conditions were “right” for carbon-based and water-requiring life to begin proliferating.
Well, I’ll be—get a load of this. Marc Manly is an American “imam at large” who seems to have considerable Islamic cred:
The last fifteen years has seen me involved in a number of ways in the Muslim community. In my early twenties, I was asked to teach Islamic studies along side Shaykh ‘Ali Sulaiman ‘Ali, of the ALIM Program, at Crescent Academy in Canton, Michigan. Since then, I have worked as a Muslim educator in subjects ranging from Arabic language, philosophy, and creed, to spirituality and self-purification. During my tenure at the University of Pennsylvania I teamed up with Adnan Zulficar, the Interfaith Fellow and Campus Minister to the Muslim Community at the University of Pennsylvania, to create and teach the Islamic Literacy Series. Notes and audio recordings can be found here.
In 2008, I completed an ijazah (license to teach/preach) with Imam Anwar Muhaimin of the Quba Institute, in Philadelphia, in the area of khutbah. Since then, I have been working as a khatib, delivering Friday sermons at a variety of locations in and around the greater Philadelphia area. In addition, I have spoken at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Hillel, Charter School, and Yale University just to name a few venues.
In August of 2011, it was my great pleasure to be appointed to the position of Muslim Chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, I worked alongside Revered Charles “Chaz” Howard in serving Muslims at Penn as well as the broader University community. 2012 also saw the pilot launch of a Muslim chaplain position at Drexel University. Both positions allowed me a wonderful learning opportunity and a chance to serve my faith community. I am grateful for the experience. In addition to my religious duties I concurrently worked full-time at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, in the IT and instruction technology fields.
So it’s particularly satisfying to see Manly pronounce the unctuous Reza Aslan, Grand Mufti of Muslim Apologetics, someone whose Islamic beliefs are not recognizable. To Manly, Aslan is “no true Muslim.” In that way Aslan is like the members of ISIS!
A few days ago, Aslan wrote a piece for CNN, “Why I am a Muslim,” It’s about as saccharine as you’d expect. Always the careerist, he touts his new CNN show “Believer“, but he also says stuff like this:
Can you have faith without religion? Of course! But as the Buddha said, if you want to strike water, you don’t dig six 1-foot wells; you dig one 6-foot well. In other words, if you want to have a deep and meaningful faith experience, it helps — though it is by no means necessary — to have a language with which to do so.
So then, pick a well.
My well is Islam, and in particular, the Sufi tradition. Let me be clear, I am Muslim not because I think Islam is “truer” than other religions (it isn’t), but because Islam provides me with the “language” I feel most comfortable with in expressing my faith. It provides me with certain symbols and metaphors for thinking about God that I find useful in making sense of the universe and my place in it.
In other words, he just likes the symbols and metaphors of Islam better than those of, say, Catholicism. Fine. But let Aslan recite that litany from the steps of the Masjid al Haram in Saudi Arabia. How long would he last before he was thrashed within an inch of his life? Metaphors, indeed! (And Sufis have long been persecuted by other Muslims.)
But he not only neglects to tell us why the symbols of Islam resonate with him the most, but then has the temerity to say that, at bottom, all religions are the same: “My goal — as a scholar, as a person of faith, and now as the host of Believer — is to be the linguist, to demonstrate that, while we may speak in different religions, we are, more often than not, often expressing the same faith.”
Well that might get Aslan not just beaten, but beheaded. No True Muslim would say that their faith is the same as that of Christians, Jews, or Hindus! How could it be? If you see Jesus as the savior, Islam damns you while Christianity lauds you. And, according to the Qur’an, you’re an infidel and should be killed. The whole story behind and the ethics undergirding different faiths—not just Islam and Christianity—diverge among religions. Whatever you can say of them, they are not the same. Of course different faiths recognize their differences, which explains the continuing violence between them: Sunni against Shia, Sunni against Ahmadi, Muslims against Sufis, Christians and Hindus, Hindus against Muslims—the list goes on forever.
And Manly recognizes these differences, saying this:
What’s most amusing about Aslan is that I can find nothing recognizable about his Islam. It’s not that it’s totally foreign, it’s more that it’s totally absent.
The first curiosity is his almost complete lack of discourse about the Prophet. More akin to a deist, Aslan talks at length about God but is awkwardly silent about the man that God revealed the codified form of Islam we know, as espoused in the Qur’an. Why is that? It seems Aslan, and those pundits like him, seem more comfortable endulging [sic] their flights of fancy about this or that abstract or esoteric theological point versus dealing with “the Walking Qur’an”: the man who was not only the recipient of Revelation, but who aslo [sic] clarified its meanings, etc. Instead, the Prophet seems to be — as far as Aslan is concerned — a mere envelope, as it were, in relation to revelation which Aslan does not, by his own account, believe the Qur’an to be true in its entirety (he rejects the story of Jesus in the Qur’an where he was not crucified let alone his outright rejection of all hadith as made up). So the question that begs answering is: By what standard is Reza Aslan Muslim? It seems rather that it’s an Islam which requires nothing of the believer other than what happens to stir his (or her) desires. Oddly enough this is the same metric by which the likes of Aslan will condone homosexuality as a lawful identity and pursuit but will in turn impugn a Muslim man for wanting to take another wife (polygyny), which is clearly outlined in the Qur’an as permissible, even if he wanted to do so only for passions or identity (heterosexual).
And indeed, you can make a far better case that Aslan espouses a perverted form of Islam than does ISIS. ISIS, after all, is following the literal words of the Qur’an, while Aslan, saying they’re mere metaphors, is almost completely abandoning the tenets of Islam—tenets that require literalism. He’s a man of all faiths, who just happens to find the label of Muslim the most expressive of his tastes. But Islam is not a taste to Muslims: it is the Final Faith, the Last Word of Allah. Most Muslims, I suspect, would see Aslan as an apostate or even an infidel.
It’s amusing to see Aslan outed in this way, the same way apologists like him go after ISIS for not adhering to “true Islam.” I wonder if Manly can formally declare him an infidel or apostate. (Aware of the possible consequences of such a fatwa, I hasten to add that I wish no harm to Aslan—just a nonviolent and titular declaration that he’s a nonbeliever.)
I have no use for Aslan, for he dissimulates in the service of his ambition, knowing full well that people want to see Islam as a religion of peace, and that liberals like nothing better than hearing that all religions are, at bottom, the same. (Well, in one sense they are: they all depend on faith—on the assertion of claims about reality with no evidence behind them.) No thinking person should admire Aslan, for he distorts reality to feed people’s confirmation bias—and to make himself famous. In fact, admiration of Aslan is a sign of soft-headedness.
Here are two items I call to your attention. The first is reader Heather Hastie’s new post, “Atheists are becoming more popular!“, reporting the heartening results of a new Pew Survey.
The other is a long and truly superb piece in The Atlantic by David Frum on what’s likely to happen under the Trump Administration, and how we can fight against it. Click on the screenshot to go to the piece:
One excerpt:
Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority. The greatest risk to all their projects and plans is the very same X factor that gave them their opportunity: Donald Trump, and his famously erratic personality. What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland. Who doubts Trump would do it? Not Paul Ryan. Not Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. For the first time since the administration of John Tyler in the 1840s, a majority in Congress must worry about their president defecting from them rather than the other way around.
After my denunciation by chiropractors and their advocates over the last few days—opprobrium that I welcome—Reader Pliny the in Between, whose website is The Far Corner Cafe, put together a series of drawings showing how spinal manipulation, such as that practiced by chiropractors, could produce a stroke. This, for instance, is what a real doctor, Orac, thinks may have caused the death of model Katie May (read his earlier post on this as well). May, 34, went to a chiropractor for a “neck adjustment” after a fall in 2016 that caused her neck pain; she had a stroke almost immediately after the adjustment, and died three days later.
Click on the screenshots to enlarge each of the five diagrams.
Here is what Orac concludes about Katie May’s death:
If you cringe when you hear the pop during the violent twist given to the neck, you’re not alone. So do I. It is that “high velocity, low amplitude” (HVLA) twist that can injure the intima of the artery, setting up the condition for a stroke. What surprises me is that the risk isn’t much higher than what studies show. The human body is more resilient than one would imagine, and, absent pre-existing atherosclerotic disease, the risk remains low. On the other hand, given that there is no benefit from HVLA chiropractic neck manipulation, the risk-benefit ratio is basically infinity, because the potential benefit is zero. Also, the risk might be small, but, as Katie May shows us, the the consequences of that risk can be catastrophic.
Another aspect I discussed was whether Katie May’s stroke could have been due to the trauma she suffered at her photo shoot a day or two before her first chiropractic manipulation. Now that we know, assuming that TMZ is accurately relaying the results of the coroner’s report, that May had a tear in her left vertebral artery, it’s almost certain that the chiropractor accidentally killed her through neck manipulation. That is what the coroner concluded, that this injury to her vertebral artery occurred during chiropractic neck manipulation.
In the end, there is no longer any reasonable doubt. Katie May’s death was unnecessary and due to her subjecting herself to the quackery that is chiropractic.
