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 morning: it’s Saturday, February 18, 2017. Spring, it seems, has arrived in Chicago, at least temporarily. We had record high temperatures yesterday of 62°F (17° C), which broke a 134-year old record by 2° F. The students at my university were basking in the sun wearing teeshirts and shorts, exposing acres of milk-white winter skin. And temperatures will be high like that for the entire weekend. It’s also National “Drink Wine” Day, a day I can get behind—but why the scare quotes?
On this day in 1861, Jefferson Davis became President of the Confederate States of America, and, in 1885, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published. Hemingway famously praised this book in his own novel The Green Hills of Africa, saying, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” (Hemingway’s meaning has been questioned.)
On Febraury 18, 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto from studying astronomical photographs. Is it a planet? You be the judge. On this day in 1943, Joseph Goebbels delivered his “Sportpalast speech” in Berlin, calling for totaler Krieg (“total war”)—a tacit admission that the Nazi Reich was in danger. You can hear part of the speech at the link. Goebbels, of course, died in the Führer bunker, shooting his wife Magda (who had just poisoned all of their six young children) and then himself (you can see these two scenes from the movie “Downfall” here and here). In 1954, the first Church of Scientology started operations in Los Angeles. On this day in 1970, the “Chicago Seven” were found not guilty of conspiracy to cause riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I remember that raucous trial well; how many of the Chicago Seven can you name? I could remember only five. On this day in 1972, the California Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be illegal since it constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”—a decision that, along with a Supreme Court ruling later that year, stopped executions throughout the US, but only for a time. Finally, it was on this day in 2001 that NASCAR hero Dale Earnhardt died in an accident at the Daytona 500 race.
Notables born on this day include Ernst Mach (1838), Hans Asperger (1906), Toni Morrison (1931), Cybill Shepherd (1950), John Travolta (1954), Vanna White (1957), and Molly Ringwald (1968). Those who died on this day include Martin Luther (1546), Michelangelo (1564), J. Robert Oppenheimer (1967), and Harry Caray (1998; Holy cow!). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is watching the birds eat and wanting to eat the birds:
Birdwatching
Hili: Two titmice and a sparrow.
A: Well? So?
Hili: They are eating.
In Polish:
Hili: Dwie sikorki i wróbelek.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Nic, jedzą.
Yesterday it was World Cat Day in Poland and much of Europe (I forgot to note it). Leon is aware of this, but thinks that a single day is insufficient. Two of his friends apparently agree.
Leon: Have you heard? Apparently, it’s a Cat’s Day today! I don’t know any other days.
Reader Michael is keeping tabs on the Cincinnati Zoo’s trio of tiger cubs, now two weeks old. They’re Malaysian tigers, and, rejected by their mom, they’re being hand-reared by zoo staff.
Is it too much to ask to pet one of these before I die?
Two days ago, the Washington Post ran an article warning of the dangers of theocratic incursions into American public education, “Influential conservative group: Trump, DeVos should dismantle Education Department and bring God into classrooms.” Well, we don’t want that, do we? It certainly violates the First Amendment, and even a staunch originalist, like Scalia was and Gorsuch will be, would be hard pressed to say that the First Amendment allows dragging God into the classrooms.
The Post‘s fears come from a document (removed online, but archived here) produced by The Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative group that had Steve Bannon as a member and Kellyanne Conway on its executive committee. The report is explicitly based on religion:
Here are some of its goals, which include posting the Ten Commandments, teaching Bible classes, and removing “secular sex education materials” from schools:
The document doesn’t explicitly mention evolution, but you know what would happen were these goals implemented.
There’s more religious palaver about Jesus at the end of the document, but you get the idea. This is to education as the infamous Wedge Document was to science: an embarrassing, religiously motivated plan of action that was removed from the Internet because it clearly conflicted with secular public education.
The Post wrings its hands over this a lot, but DeVos, not a known member of the Council for National Policy, has stated that she doesn’t favor elimination of the Department of Education, and in her confirmation said that she would “implement the laws as intended by Congress. That includes the provisions about the prohibition against religious instruction in schools.” Of course, she might be lying, as her history is in favor of religiously based charter schools. And although DeVos’s husband has expressed support for teaching creationism, DeVos herself has kept her nose clean on that issue. So we don’t know, and I think the Post is crying a bit of “wolf” on this one. Still, it’s worthwhile to see the aims of this group, and learn who belonged to it—just as it was worthwhile knowing about the Wedge Document.
Some have joked that the new logo for the Department of Education would be the one below, but that’s a bit premature:
A ex-soldier in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) walks into a U.S. college. . .
That could be the beginning of a joke, but it isn’t even close. Israel and the IDF are demonized on British and American campuses, and when an ex-IDF soldier, even one who was an extreme leftist, never hurt anyone and whose activities, he says, were as “an officer in an IDF COGAT unit that attends to the needs of Palestinian civilians who are not involved in the conflict and promotes Palestinian civil society” starts talking on those campuses, he’s in for trouble.
Meet Hen Mazzig, who has suffered the slings and arrows of the pervasive demonization of Israel (and of anti-Semitism as well) while bravely venturing onto campuses. His experiences are described at Europe Israël News, with some bits taken from here and here.
Typical interactions from a lecture tour Hen Mazzig made in 2013 (my emphasis):
This year, from January through May, I went to college campuses, high schools, and churches to tell people about the history of modern Israel, about my experience growing up in the Jewish state, and about my family. I also always spoke about my military service as an officer in an IDF COGAT unit that attends to the needs of Palestinian civilians who are not involved in the conflict and promotes Palestinian civil society.
At a BDS event in Portland, a professor from a Seattle university told the assembled crowd that the Jews of Israel have no national rights and should be forced out of the country. When I asked, “Where do you want them to go?” she calmly answered, “I don’t care. I don’t care if they don’t have any place else to go. They should not be there.”
When I responded that she was calling for ethnic cleansing, both she and her supporters denied it.
And during a presentation in Seattle, I spoke about my longing for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. When I was done, a woman in her 60’s stood up and yelled at me, “You are worse than the Nazis. You are just like the Nazi youth!”
A number of times I was repeatedly accused of being a killer, though I have never hurt anyone in my life.
On other occasions, anti-Israel activists called me a rapist. The claims go beyond being absurd – in one case, a professor asked me if I knew how many Palestinians have been raped by IDF forces. I answered that as far as I knew, none.
She triumphantly responded that I was right, because, she said, “You IDF soldiers don’t rape Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them that you won’t touch them.”
In fact, as that woman admitted, there’s no evidence that IDF soldiers ever raped a single Palestinian woman. But of course you can make hay out of that too if you’re sufficiently motivated to demonize Israel and its inhabitants. You can even turn non-rape into a bad thing, and even into rape itself!
The “not raping is bad” trope came in fact from a Hebrew University paper written by Tal Nitzan, a doctoral candidate (you can apparently buy it here, but it’s not on the internet for free). It’s described here, and that description is verified in several places. Want to see demonization at its worst? Read this:
A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers’ committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.
The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, notes that the paper shows that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.”
The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”
The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers’ eyes.
The paper was published by the Hebrew University’s Shaine Center, based on the recommendation of a Hebrew University professors’ committee headed by Dr. Zali Gurevitch.
You can’t win: If you rape an Arab, you’re dehumanizing them. If you don’t rape them, you’re dehumanizing them too. The alternative hypothesis, that Israeli soldiers don’t engage in rape because of professional strictures and moral scruples, isn’t even considered. The newspaper also reports this, apparently a quote from Mazzig, though I’m not sure:
According to Dr. Gurevitch, This was a very serious paper that asked two important questions: Is the relative lack of IDF rapes a noteworthy phenomenon, and if so, why is it that there are so few IDF rapes when in similar situations around the world, where rape is so much more common?
The abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Nitzan, could not find instances of rapes of Palestinian women by the IDF it sought to find, so it was decided that the paper show that “the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.” It continues, “In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”
Ergo, Nitzan could not find any cases of rape by IDF soldiers of Palestinian women even though Palestinian media constantly accuses Israeli soldiers of this. Apparently distraught over such findings, Nitzan had to twist her thesis to attribute the lack of such rapes to a governmental program instilling in IDF soldiers that the Arab women are sub-human or inferior.
This is in contrast to the behavior of Arabs, who have sexually harassed and assaulted Western and Israeli women who were engaged in protests against the West Bank settlements. In fact, a female Egyptian lawyer has called for Arab men to sexually harass Israeli women, and even, at the end, suggests that the women wouldn’t have any reason to complain even if they were raped, because, after all, Israelis are raping Arab land. This is from FrontPageMag.com, and verified by the video below (not my emphasis):
Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian lawyer Nagla Al-Imam, which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on October 31, 2008.
Interviewer: Egyptian lawyer Nagla Al-Imam has proposed that young Arab men should sexually harass Israeli girls wherever they may be and using any possible method, as a new means in the resistance against Israel.
[…]
Interviewer: We have with us the lawyer Nagla Al-Imam from Cairo. Welcome. What is the purpose of this proposal of yours?
Nagla Al-Imam: This is a form of resistance. In my opinion, they are fair game for all Arabs, and there is nothing wrong with…
Interviewer: On what grounds?
Nagla Al-Imam: First of all, they violate our rights, and they “rape” the land. Few things are as grave as the rape of land. In my view, this is a new form of resistance.
Interviewer: As a lawyer, don’t you think this might expose Arab youth to punishment for violating laws against sexual harassment?
Nagla Al-Imam: Most Arab countries… With the exception of three or four Arab countries, which I don’t think allow Israeli women to enter anyway, most Arab countries do not have sexual harassment laws. Therefore, if [Arab women] are fair game for Arab men, there is nothing wrong with Israeli women being fair game as well.
Interviewer: Does this also include rape?
Nagla Al-Imam: No. Sexual harassment… In my view, the [Israeli women] do not have any right to respond. The resistance fighters would not initiate such a thing, because their moral values are much loftier than that. However if such a thing did happen to them, the [Israeli women] have no right to make any demands, because this would put us on equal terms – leave the land so we won’t rape you. These two things are equal.
Here’s that interview:
I have no comment except to say that this form of anti-Israeli behavior goes beyond valid political protest when it calls for sexual harassment of Israeli women (with the harassed women having no right to respond) as well as leveling crazy accusations that Israeli soldiers’ failure to rape Arab women is itself some sort of moral wrong. Tell me that there’s no anti-Semitism in there!
Here’s Hen Mazzig, from an Oxford University site where he was described as “being in the IDF for almost five years. As a lieutenant in the COGAT unit, he worked as an intermediary between the Israeli Defence Forces and the Palestinian Authority, the UN and the many NGOs that work in the West Bank. During his service, he facilitated several infrastructure projects including the construction of schools, hospitals, roads and water-related infrastructure. Hen also served as an as an openly gay LGBTQ activist in the IDF.”
Well that’s certainly deserving of hatred, isn’t it? And he didn’t rape anyone—how disgusting!
If you missed Trump’s press conference yesterday, you missed one of the most bizarre behaviors of an American President I’ve ever seen. It’s matched in my memory only by Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” assertion, and Nixon’s “I am not a crook” statement.
But this went on for 74 minutes, and if James Joyce could write a press conference in the style of Ulysses, it would be this one. I’ve put the whole video of the press conference below, and reproduced in its entirety the email I got from CNN about the conference. CNN even gave its report the headline I’ve put below (click on screenshot to go to story). And I recommend you click on the link below called “Trump’s most memorable lines,” which include this gem:
Here’s CNN’s email (I have to say, I feel both revulsion and amusement when the daily bulletins called “CNN Breaking News” show up in my “in” box, for I know it will be yet another report on the progress of the Trump Clown Car):
He touted his own poll numbers, victory over Hillary Clinton and discussed cable TV ratings.
Reporters repeatedly pressed Trump on whether his campaign staff had been in contact with Russia, as a widening drama over his alleged connections with Moscow dominates news coverage.
“Nobody that I know of. How many times do I have to answer this question? Russia is a ruse,” Trump said. “Russia is fake news.”
The real story, Trump insists, are “criminal” leaks from the intelligence community that have illuminated his campaign’s ties to Russia.
On Capitol Hill, “We’re just trying to manage this s***” [JAC: This came from a Republican lawmaker who, reports CNN, “tried to keep the President’s comments in context with his overall demeanor: ‘We’re just trying to manage this s***.'”
Here’s the video: watch and weep:
People are arguing whether Trump is mentally ill or not, and HuffPo even had an confusing (and malicious) article about the issue whose title is given below (the original title was worse, as it didn’t include the word “Psychiatrist:” at the beginning). Click on screenshot to go to the article:
The main argument of that piece is this:
Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College, told the newspaper that he wrote the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder ― and Trump doesn’t meet it.
“He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder,” he wrote.
There are a few points to make about this. First, I doubt that Frances has personally examined Trump, so he has no business asserting whether or not Trump has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Second, Frances has no idea whether Trump suffers “distress” over his personality. Even if he doesn’t, he’s certainly impaired in his interpersonal relationships. Third, Frances is conflating “mental disorder,” “mentally ill” and “narcissistic personality disorder.” Some psychiatrists don’t consider personality disorder a “mental illness” because it’s not as serious as some mental problems, or doesn’t drive people into therapy. Yet NPD is still listed in version 5 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the gold-standard book mental health professionals use for formal diagnoses. (If you know about the DSM, you’ll know about its disturbing history of changing diagnoses and criteria. As a scientist, I have substantial problems with how it uses a set number of criteria to effect a diagnosis, as I see many mental “disorders” as occurring on a sliding scale with no fixed threshold.)
Is there a difference between being mentally ill and mentally disordered? Well, some people think so, but given that both are based on biological conditions of the brain and physiology that make one behave outside the norm, I think such a distinction is subjective and arbitrary.
But judge for yourself: here are the DSM-5’s criteria for NPD. Does Trump show the symptoms?
So does Trump have NPD? I’d say that based on all these criteria, “yes”; but of course I’m not a professional. But I’d also assert (see below), that I don’t really care.
Is Trump mentally ill? Well, that depends on whether you see NPD as a mental illness. It’s certainly behavior that is disturbing and outside the norm, but not as far outside the norm as severe clinical depression or schizophrenia. But you can make the case that this is an arbitrary distinction; after all, if NPD isn’t a mental illness, then a cold isn’t a physical illness, because leukemia or diabetes are more debilitating, and drive people to physicians. Again, I don’t really care whether the answer to this question is “yes” or “no.”
In the end, it doesn’t matter because what we should do is independent of the answers. Trump is not going to get therapy—personality disorders are famously resistant to therapy, anyway—and so our response to his behavior should be to intervene politically, not medically. All we can do is to stop his actions as best we can, and that’s achievable only by political opposition to what he does, not by pondering and diagnosing his psychological makeup. (Of course, if he does have NPD, and if your goal is to rile him up, then are certain things that are more effective than others, like saying that he’s not as competent as someone else, or got fewer electoral votes or smaller Inauguration crowds. To trigger someone with NPD, you impugn their grandiose claims.)
It’s like one commenter yesterday who argued that we’d be more effective at stopping the misogyny of Haredi Jews against secular women (like those on airplanes) if we understood where in religious law and custom those attitudes came from. I doubt that. We stop the misogyny by making rules and laws against it, not by trying to convince the Orthodox Jews that their interpretation of scripture is wrong. Likewise, we must use the courts and our protests, not the ministrations or diagnoses of psychiatrists, to stop Trump from wrecking our country.
Tony Eales from Queensland, Australia sent a passel of photos of natural selection in action. His notes (species weren’t identified, so I’m putting up his photo labels):
To help top up the tank I’m offering up a set of photos of arthropods eating other arthropods.
Reader Michael from the UK sent this poster, which gave him a double take. His notes:
I was in my GP’s waiting room this morning & my eyes were drawn to a poster on the noticeboard similar to the one below. Your free will posts have so thoroughly meme-iated my head that it took me a few seconds to figure out the intended meaning 🙂
As Dan Dennett might say, “This is the only form of free will worth wanting.”
Good morning: we’ve now reached the end of most people’s work week—Friday, February 17, 2017. It’s both National Indian Pudding Day and National Cafe’ Au Lait Day. Indian pudding, a baked concoction of molasses, cornmeal and other good stuff (recipe here) is best served warm with a dollop of vanilla ice cream. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I love it, and recommend that you try it if you’re in New England (I doubt you can find it outside the northeast US). Here’s what it looks like:
If you’re in Boston, try this at the Durgin-Park restaurant near Faneuil Hall; their version is very good.
On this day in 1600, Giordana Bruno was burned alive for heresy, but of course (as the scholars of science tell us) it had nothing to do with religion. On February 17, 1801, there was an electoral tie between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson for President; it was resolved by the House of Representatives, which made Jefferson our third President and Burr the Vice-President. On February 17, 1904, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly opened at La Scala in Milan, and, in 1980, the Polish mountaineers Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy made the first winter ascent of Mount Everest.
Notables born on this day include evolutionary geneticist and statistician Ronald Fisher (1890), creationist Duane Gish (1921), Alan Bates (1934), Gene Pitney (1940), Huey P. Newton (1942), and Paris Hilton (1981). Those who died on this day include, beside Bruno,Molière (1673), Jan Swammerdam (1680; one of Matthew Cobb’s heroes), Geronimo (1909), and Thelonious Monk and Lee Strasberg (both 1982). I asked Matthew to write a brief summary of Swammerdam’s life, and here it is (the Swammerdam website can be found here, though there is no authenticated portrait of the man):
Swammerdam was a pioneer microscopist and entomologist who made a number of discoveries in the 1660s and 1670s. In particular, he showed that the caterpillar and the butterfly are the same organism, and came up with an aphorism that might seem trivial today, but which was truly revolutionary at the time: all animals are born from an egg produced by a female of the same species. He died of malaria at the relatively early age of 43. He contracted the disease in Europe some time in the 1670s – malaria was finally eradicated in Europe only in the 20th century.
Ironically, one of his most striking drawings is of the mosquito, the insect which transmitted the disease that killed him:
Illustration by Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680) from his ‘Histoire Generale des Insectes’, posthumously published in 1682.
His manuscripts, which many of which are held at the University of Leiden (where he studied) or at the University of Göttingen (it’s complicated) show when he was ill – his handwriting becomes weak and scratchy. His friends, in particular his patron, the mysterious Melchisedec Thévenot (one-time ambassador, spy, inventor of the spirit level and bibliophile) tried to obtain ‘Jesuit’s bark’ (the bark of the quinine tree) to help him, but to no avail. There is a plaque marking the site of his grave in Amsterdam, but the grave has long been cleared. His birthplace – not far away – is marked by a fine stone plaque set into the wall.
