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.
Reader Tara Tanaka (Vimeo site here, Flickr site here) has a beautiful new video taken at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. Although the park was closed due to The Wall Fiasco, Tara wouldn’t let a little thing like that prevent her filming.
Her notes:
All of this footage was shot in January 2019, except for the Flamingo which was shot two months earlier. The refuge is officially closed due to the government shutdown, but the wildlife appears not to notice and I was fortunate to have opportunities to capture unusually close footage of an Osprey and bobcat. All of this footage was digiscoped except for the last two clips.
Be sure to watch it on full screen with sound on, as there’s a musical accompaniment. Be sure to identify all the animals, and watch for the bird poop and bobcat piss!
It’s January 25, 2019, and we’ve reached the end of the week at last, but the weekend in Chicago should be grim, as there are predictions of very low temperatures. As I walked to work this morning, the temperature was -5°F (-21° C), but felt colder because of a stiff wind. Below is my attire before leaving: an Eddie Bauer fabric/down jacket layered atop a Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer light down jacket, a sweatshirt, heavy gloves and a balaklava. But my legs, in jeans, froze on the short walk to work. I’m parked in front of a space heater now.
Latest news: Trump’s informal advisor Roger Stone was indicted by Mueller et al. on seven criminal counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements, and witness tampering. Stone has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, which will doubtlessly amuse his fellow inmates. As CNN noted in its email:
The indictment’s wording does not say who on the campaign knew about Stone’s quest, but makes clear it was multiple people. This is the first time prosecutors have alleged they know of additional people close to the President who worked with Stone as he sought out WikiLeaksfounder Julian Assange.
It’s also a hot beverage holiday, National Irish Coffee Day (I’m not sure whether this is cultural appropriation of whether the drink is even known in Ireland). In Wales it’s Dydd Santes Dwynwen, described as the Welsh Valentine’s Day. According to Wikipedia,
A big boost for St Dwynwen’s Day came in 2003 when the Welsh Language Board (Bwrdd yr Iaith Gymraeg) teamed up with UK supermarket Tesco to distribute 50,000 free cards in 43 of its Welsh stores. One card was inserted with a special heart, the finder of which would be entitled to a prize. The board also suggested numerous ways to celebrate the feast besides sending cards, for example, organize a love-themed gig, set up a singles night, prepare a romantic meal and perhaps compose a love poem to read at the local pub.
I can only imagine the moxie it would take to read a love poem at the local pub. Dylan Thomas would be appalled!
On this day in 1533, Henry VIII secretly married his second wife, Anne Boleyn. After having failed to produce a son, she was beheaded three years later. On January 25, 1755, Moscow University was established on Tatiana Day, a Russian Orthodox religious holiday. And on this day in 1858, the famous Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn was played at the marriage between Queen Victoria’s daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia. Although it was first played 11 years earlier, its rendition at the royal wedding made it eternally popular, and it’s still played often today.
On January 25, 1890 the journalist Nellie Bly (photo below) completed her around-the-world trip in 72 days. Completed by steamer and railroad, the trip was a world record, and Bly traveled mostly by herself. Read about her; she had a fascinating life.
On January 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered the first presidential news conference that was televised live. Exactly a decade later, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel were found guilty of the Tate/LaBianca murders in 1969. On that same day in 1971, Idi Ami deposed Milton Obote in a coup, becoming Uganda’s brutal President until 1979. As Wikipedia notes, Amin’s “full self-bestowed title ultimately became: ‘His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’, in addition to his officially stated claim of being the uncrowned King of Scotland.”
On January 15, 1996, Billy Bailey became the last person to be hanged in the U.S., choosing that method of execution over lethal injection. His last meal consisted of a well-done steak, a baked potato with sour cream and butter, buttered rolls, peas, and vanilla ice cream. His mistake there was ordering the steak well done. Finally, on this day in 2011, the Egyptian revolution began in earnest with demonstrations, strikes, riots, and street fighting.
Notables born on January 25 include Robert Boyle (1627), Robert Burns (1759), W. Somerset Maugham (1874), Virginia Woolf (1882), Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900; note that Wikipedia also lists his birthday on January 24, so somebody should sort that out), Paul Nurse (1949; Nobel Laureate), Peter Tatchell (1952), and Alicia Keys (1981).
Those who died on this day include Lucas Cranach the Younger (1586), Robert Burton (1640), Al Capone (1947), Adele Astaire (1981), Ava Gardner (1990). Fanny Blankers-Koen (2004), Philip Johnson (2005), and Mary Tyler Moore (2017).
Here’s a portrait of Duke August of Saxony by LC the Y, done about 1545:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the worst possible calamity has struck Hili:
A: Your food has run out.
Hili: I will not comment.
In Polish:
Ja: Skończyła się twoja karma.
Hili: Nie będę tego komentować.
We have report on Matthew’s newest cat Harry, who is, as the Brits say, “poorly”. Matthew calls the photo below “Harry and the Cone of Shame”, adding this:
He’s had a poorly toe for 2-3 weeks, with a couple of rounds of antibiotics he stopped limping but still wasn’t right so had anaesthetic and x-rays today. Seems to be some kind of bone infection. 4 weeks of antibiotics and the cone to stop him gnawing at the paw… he is not happy!
A Tweet embodying much of what I don’t like about the Regressive Left (and no, I don’t like MAGA hats). Emotions don’t always triumph over intentions and facts. Otherwise we’re in the land of safe spaces with Play-Doh, cookies, and puppy videos. Grania deemed the woman insane, but I think she’s typical of a certain kind of authoritarian Leftist who, as Haidt and Lukianoff note, says that feelings triumph all.
Titania McGrath poetizes over the twisted incident involving the Covington Catholic boys, the Native Americans, and the Black Hebrews (oy, what a reportorial mess that was!):
Insect of the day: Someone has been telling some serious porkies. The superb rostrum of the hose-nosed weevil (Antliarhis zamiae). This South African beast uses its prodigious snout to drill through cycad cone scales to reach the eggs within 📷 Anna Eksteen pic.twitter.com/a0Nv5ZsceM
I was entranced by the sea otters (Enhydra lutris) I saw on my recent visit to the California coast, and looked up some facts about them. One thing that astonished me was the almost unbelievable thickness of their fur.
By comparison, Arctic foxes and chinchillas both have 20,000 hairs per sq cm, and a muskox has just 420 per sq cm. Clearly, the sea otter is the furriest creature on Earth.
Since 1 cm² = 0.155 inch², this means that (as confirmed by other sources), sea otters have 140,000/0.155 or a bit more than 900,000 hairs per square inch on some parts of their body. This comports with other sources, like SeaWorld, which says this:
Sea otters have the densest fur of any mammal. Hair density varies dramatically with location on the body, ranging from about 26,000 to 165,000 hairs per square centimeter (170,000-1,062,000 per square inch).
Imagine that! I can’t even conceive of it: imagine taking one square inch of sea otter skin and counting a million hairs! In comparison, Leaf notes that the average human has 2,200 hairs per square inch, or 100,000 on the entire head. That’s just 1/10 the number of hairs on one square inch of an otter’s body, so that otters have a hair density about 450 times that of humans.
Of course, the otters need them because they inhabit cold waters and rarely leave the ocean; the fur is for insulation.
The density of those hairs is also responsible for the near-extermination of sea otters for their fur, which took the population down to between 1000 and 2000 individuals in the early 1900s. Now, thanks to conservation, the species is up to about 100,000 individuals compared to the historical estimate of 150,000-300,000. They’re still classified as endangered, though.
Here are the results of yesterday’s polls about which films, directors, and stars would win this year’s Oscars. (I have to say that I’m somewhat disappointed at the paucity of votes given the number of readers). Here you go, but of course you can continue to vote as well as guess in the comments who will win. There’s a prize for the first commenter to get all six right, and if nobody does perhaps there will be a consolation prize.
As you see, “Roma” leads for best picture and director, while there’s a melange of movies whose stars garnered the other prizes. As I haven’t seen any of these movies (mea culpa), it looks as if “Roma” is the one I should see first.
On the occasion of the publication of the paperback edition of his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Steve Pinker has published a response to his critics (as well as other reflections) in Quillette. While that’s not the usual kind of place where Steve publishes, it’s all to the good because what other place would publish 10,000 words of reflection, reaction, and rebuttal? And Quillette is worth your attention.
As you probably know, Pinker’s book has been widely attacked, often for no reason I can discern than that people either didn’t read the book or have some psychological aversion to the facts that the world has progressed economically, morally, and in other aspects of well being. And no, Pinker didn’t ignore exigent threats like Trump and environmental degradation, and no, he didn’t limn a continuous rise in well being every year. I’ve defended him on this site several times against these base canards (and “canard” is an insult to ducks); he cites two of these defenses in the notes to his Quillette piece (here and here), but he hardly needs my defense. (By the way, I’ve just canceled my subscription to The New Yorker as I can no longer stand its smug antiscience attitude that motivates its own attacks on Pinker’s work. And the magazine’s quality seems to be declining.)
Regardless of my status as Pinker’s Bulldog, I still think that both Better Angels and Enlightenment Now are required reading for people who visit this site. Yes, they’re long books, and yes, some people have a limited attention span, but if you want to see the case not just for progress, but also for the three causes encapsulated in Pinker’s title, it’s a must-read. If for no other reason, you should read the pair of books as a counter to the many academics and miscreants who have faulted Pinker for no good reason. It’s beyond me why so many people go after Pinker, given that he’s a nice guy and doesn’t engage in Twitter wars or other nefarious activities. It must be his message. But the fact remains that, as documented by the 75 graphs in Enlightenment Now, the world and its population is getting better.
While this video by NonStampCollector—a videomaker previously unknown to me—may strike you as a visual comic, it really is a serious attempt to show and explain the differences between two of the canonical gospels: Mark (the first to be written) and Luke (an altered copy of the stories in Mark). Based on sources like Bart Ehrman, Dale Martin, and James Tabor, the video shows someone trying to persuade “Luke” (who of course didn’t write the eponymous gospel), to change the events of Mark to help sell the Gospels in Rome. These changes included sanitizing the role of Romans in Jesus’s crucifixion and putting more blame on the Jews. At many points in the video the discrepancies between Mark and Luke are highlighted.
This is one of NonStampCollector’s many videos deconstructing and also dispelling the Bible and the tenets of Christianity and Judaism. As the maker writes about this video (my emphasis):
. . . to pre-empt the what I predict is the most obvious surface-level objection: I know who the author of Luke is purported to be, generally, and the purpose for his writing his gospel given at its beginning (and in the beginning of Acts). I’m not attempting to assert a fact claim along the lines of that the author of Luke was simply a random rogue copyist of Mark. That’s just a plot device, like satirists often use. I don’t for a second think that the gospel of Luke arose out of a copyist’s desire to simply alter bits and pieces of the text of Mark. What I’m attempting to portray, satirically, is the dissonance between what historians can tell us about the way the gospels were authored, copied, miscopied, and deliberately changed by individuals that we of course can’t know or identify, and the view held by many modern Christians: that each and every verse of each and every gospel is actual historical truth. Far from it: we can identify the agenda and motivations behind obviously deliberate changes that have for thousands of years been passed off as unquestionably true.
This is really Biblical analysis worth watching. Thanks to readers Rob and Aneris for calling this to my attention. Aneris noted the following:
To brighten your day in the less sunny Chicago (welcome “back”), I’d like to make you aware of a humorous Bible Study. The animation short is on the Gospel of Luke (versus Mark) and unmistakably NonStampCollector, who celebrates his comeback. His crude, yet iconic style is a bit of a classic in the atheist scene on YouTube, and his return is a small event.
The older clips are still worth the watch, if you haven’t seen them (for example the Bible Quiz is in a similar vein, or the hilarious Noah’s Ark [part 1 and part 2] where they discuss whether they need extra animals to host pairs of parasites).
Today we have the last installment of reader Joe Dickinson’s photos from Alaska taken about five years ago (part 1 is here and part 2 here). Joe’s captions are indented.
We were fortunate to see a pod of five or six humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) bubble net feeding just offshore near Juneau. A local whale watch boat joined in the fun. In all the closer shots, you can easily make out the pleats in the throat area that allow huge gulps of sea water and prey and, in the much smaller upper jaw, the baleen that will filter out the good stuff. In some, you also can make out the eye just by the jaw joint.
I’ll round out this set with some more whale tails.
