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.
Twitchy reports a series of tweets begun by Sarah Silverman when she saw some marks painted on the ground. She thought they were malformed swastikas.
Walking to get coffee saw these all over a sidewalk in the town I'm in. Is this an attempt at swastikas? Do neo nazis not have google? pic.twitter.com/A4ses1G3ru
It's a construction marker. Innocent mistake for a Jew that gets "burn in an oven!" at least weekly on twitter. Still pretty close though.. pic.twitter.com/8Gsuy3QkuE
I bow to nobody in my love for The Divine Sarah, but she jumped the gun on this one. (I should add that although I may be wrong, she seems to be becoming more of a Regressive Leftist lately.) And her explanation, below, isn’t so great, as she’s comparing the Trump administration to Hitler and the Holocaust. I’m seeing this all over the place now, with the word “Nazis” becoming a synonym for “Republicans.” Time to stop that, folks.
I'm seeing swastikas in everything fratboys. It started w Bannon's rise & festered when trump decided not 2 mention Jews re the Holocaust. https://t.co/rBqPZpAHHx
Dangerous, Milo Yiannopoulos’s new book, doesn’t come out until March 14, but it’s already #34 on Amazon, and #1 in 3 categories. On Friday, based on preorders, it had risen briefly to #1. Milo was paid $250,000 as an advance by Simon and Schuster, and stands to earn much more than that given the sales.
What’s in the book? It’s hard to tell, for there’s precious little information on the Amazon site, and even USA Today‘s article “What we know (and don’t know) about Milo Yiannopoulos’s ‘Dangerous’ book” doesn’t tell us what it’s about. I suspect it’s a combination of his views and his experiences on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour.
Those many people who have protested Milo’s appearances will be angered by the Dangerous‘s sales, and Sarah Silverman and Judd Apatow even called for boycotting of the book. What was clear to some of us, however, is that these kinds of protests against Milo merely call attention to him and his message, and are grossly counterproductive. It was after the boycott calls, for example, that the book went to Amazon’s #1 spot.
Those who oppose Milo vocally and publicly, and especially those who call for him to be “shut down”, or censored, are actually responsible for his success. If you want to see a good analysis of this, read Ryan Holiday‘s piece at the Observer, “I helped create the Milo trolling playbook. You should stop playing right into it.” Holiday, an author and marketer, wrote the book Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, about how to take advantage of the media’s penchant for controversy to sell products and books. (You can hear an interview with Holiday about Milo here.) Holiday doesn’t much like Milo’s message, but he doesn’t hate the man, either, and certainly doesn’t think he should be censored. I’ll give you Holiday’s diagnosis of the books’s sudden popularity, which I agree with, and his solution to Milo’s problematic message—a solution I largely disagree with.
The diagnosis (quotes from Holiday are indented) is twofold: 1) Milo gets publicity by being controversial and inflammatory, and that draws him new followers along with new detractors, and 2) attempts to shut him down on college campuses win him additional sympathizers by giving him the moral high ground. Emphases are as in the original piece:
Most brands and personalities try to appeal to a wide swath of the population. Niche players and polarizing personalities are only ever going to be interesting to a small subgroup. While this might seem like a disadvantage, it’s actually a huge opportunity: Because it allows them to leverage the dismissals, anger, mockery, and contempt of the population at large as proof of their credibility. Someone like Milo or Mike Cernovich doesn’t care that you hate them—they like it. It’s proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action—it creates purpose and meaning.
You’re worried about “normalizing” their behavior when in fact, that’s the one thing they don’t want to happen. The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience. Let’s say 9 out of 10 people who hear something Milo says will find it repulsive and juvenile. Because of that response rate, it’s going to be hard for someone like Milo to market himself through traditional channels. His potential audience is too spread out, and doesn’t have that much in common. He can’t advertise, he can’t find them one by one. It’s just not going to scale.
But let’s say he can acquire massive amounts of negative publicity by pissing off people in the media? Well now all of a sudden someone is absorbing the cost of this inefficient form of marketing for him. If a CNN story reaches 100,000 people, that’s 90,000 people all patting themselves on the back for how smart and decent they are. They’re just missing the fact that the 10,000 new people that just heard about Milo for the first time. The same goes for when you angrily share on Facebook some godawful thing one of these people has said. The vast majority of your friends rush to agree, but your younger cousin has a dark switch in his brain go on for the first time.
and
That’s what’s so misguided about what happened at UC Berkeley [violent protests, largely from outsiders, attempting to get the talk canceled, which were successful]. From what I understand, most of the violence was perpetrated by infiltrators who were looking to sow chaos and destruction. Yet many of the peaceful protesters and organizers have admitted that they too were attempting to shut down Milo’s talk. The last thing you ever want to do is give an opponent the moral high ground—and attempts to suppress, intimidate and revoke constitutional rights do exactly that.
There is absolutely nothing that Milo has said (and more importantly, done) that ought to revoke his First Amendment right to give a speech on a college campus. It’s profoundly hypocritical for the same activists who demanded safe spaces against microaggressions to march en masse and aggressively shut down a nerdy, gay conservative immigrant with a funny name (a minority if there ever was one) until he flees under armed guard. As much as you might dislike what he’s saying—and I personally dislike it a lot—I promise, you are not setting a good precedent by preventing him from saying it. Worse, you’re giving him more people to say it to when the ensuing media coverage explodes.
The solution: Flood his events with peaceful protestors who don’t try to get his talks canceled, and discuss the issues with Milo and his followers.
If you actually want to fight back against these trolls, here’s a strategy to consider: Organize all you want, get as many people as you can to show up at their events, but don’t try to shut them down. In fact, the only thing you should try to shut down are the instigators who try to incite violence. Regain the moral high ground by saying that you absolutely respect their right to free speech.
And then, actually listen and talk to them. To me, the most effective retorts against the alt-right were when Trevor Noah had Tomi Lahren on his show and when Elle Reeve profiled Richard Spencer for Vice. Both came off looking mostly like jokes. Tomi Lahren showed her age. Richard Spencer revealed his movement to be mostly a collection of a few thousand sad dorks. Wale’s Twitter exchange with Tomi was effective too—there was no outrage, no opposition, just teasing.
They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. But it is also what allows you to see whether the emperor has any clothes. And it’s this sad, and often pathetic reality, that the collective hysteria has beneficently covered up in those it’s trying to fight. What should be seen as farce somehow looks like real fascism.
I agree with this only in part. While I think that odious speech should be checked by counter-speech, I’m starting to think that simply ignoring Milo would be more effective than protesting him. Further, I don’t think talking to people like Milo or Spencer or their followers in private conversation will change their minds: after all, their profession is being provocative. Further, putting them on television is only partly effective. Richard Spencer may come off poorly in that medium, or in a profile (I didn’t hear that one, nor Trevor Noah’s interview with Tomi Lahren), but Milo is eloquent and charming, and I haven’t seen him bested in television interviews and debates. Perhaps the best way to deal with people like Milo and Spencer, given that you oppose their message, is just to ignore them completely.
The video below, highlighted on Everyday Feminism, came with a few words on the website:
“Yes, trans women are women, but they’re still biologically male.”
Ever thought or said something like this? You might even have good intentions by stating what you think is a simple fact – after all, gender is a social construct, while sex is biological, right?
Actually, this “simple fact” of trans women being “biologically male” is inaccurate – and this misrepresentation of the truth is being used to justify some pretty hateful things.
So if you really want the facts, and to follow through on your good intentions by being a good ally, check out Riley J. Dennis’ explanation of why trans women are not biologically male.
With Love,
The Editors at Everyday Feminism
Well, I’d like to be a good ally, but not by denying the truth. And, in fact, sex is indeed biological—not a social construct like gender. But biology doesn’t give us a reason to discriminate against trans people, for discrimination is a moral issue, and can’t be decided by biology alone.
We’ve all heard the mantra that gender is a social construct, which I take to mean that what gender you claim to be, or feel you are, should be based solely on your own perception, and will gain credence from social agreement. (Let me add, though, that some transgenderism may have a biological basis: a neurological or physiological situation that makes you feel that you don’t belong to your “assigned sex”.)
And I’m willing to agree to gender as a social construct; if someone was born biologically male but feels female, or vice versa, I’m perfectly willing to go along with that, though of course many feminists disagree (and I’ll leave them to argue it out), as do conservatives who don’t want those people going to the “wrong” restrooms. (I don’t give a rat’s patootie which bathroom they use.)
But the 7½-minute video below, by Riley J. Dennis, identified as “non-binary trans woman, writer, YouTuber, activist, and educator,” claims more: that sex itself is a social construct. That is, she claims that whether you are male or female as a condition at birth is not a biological phenomenon, but a social construct. This claim, which is insupportable if you know anything about biology, is made for one reason only: because, as the Everyday Feminism article notes, it supposedly “justifies some pretty hateful things.” As Dennis says, “Trans women are not male, and saying that they are allows some people to justify the mistreatment of trans people.”
Here, then, we have someone trying to distort the biological evidence in service of an ideological agenda. While I’m in sympathy with that agenda, I’m not sympathetic to the claim that sex itself is a social construct. Were that true, we’d have to revise hundreds of years of biology, and not just in humans. What we should do is accept the facts of biology, as well as the fact that some people feel that they’re not members of their biological sex, and then construct our social mores based on these facts—without distorting the biology.
Let me first say that if you examine newborn humans, a very small fraction won’t be assignable unambiguously to “male” or “female” based on genitalia, or even chromosomes. Sometimes “intersex” infants have ambiguous genitalia, or even both forms, and there are also XXY and XO babies who show intermediate traits. But these are extremely rare. For all practical purposes, as we know well, newborns fall neatly into the classes of “biologically male” and “biologically female”. This is similar to virtually all other animals. I have, for instance, looked at millions of fruit flies, and while there are a very few whose sex is ambiguous, I’d say those are fewer than one in several thousand. (Sex in flies is taken as a biological fact, not a social construct.) What we have in humans, as in other species, is a strong bimodality of sex with a very low frequency of ambiguous cases forming a deep valley between the male and female peaks. Although Dennis says that “sex isn’t a perfect binary,” it’s pretty damn close to perfect in separating people into two groups.
Here’s Dennis’s claim, which I quote verbatim:
I would argue that sex needs to go through the same change that gender has already gone through. It’s not a static fact; it’s a social construct. . . Sex is not a biological fact because it is determined by things that are largely changeable [by medical intervention], and the only part of it that is unchangeable [chromosomal constitution] doesn’t have any real-world effect. So it is just as much a social construct as gender is. . . Biological sex has to undergo the same paradigm shift that gender did. We have to start thinking of that as a social construct rather than as an inarguable fact.”
and the reason for this claim follows immediately:
Because when people say that a trans woman is “biologically male,” they use that as a way to attack trans people. They use it as an excuse to exclude us from bathrooms, locker rooms, and other women’s spaces.
It’s curious but telling that Dennis argues almost entirely about trans women, ignoring trans men. But that’s probably because she’s trying to defend her own gender more than the concept of transgenderism in general. Regardless, her argument is one based on wish-thinking and ideology rather than biology.
Why does Dennis argue that sex itself is a social construct? The argument is thin and weak. She argues that biological sex is based on a combination of traits, to wit:
1.) chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
2.) genitals (penis vs. vagina)
3.) gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
4.) hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
5.) secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)
I will maintain that using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two nonoverlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits are almost always coincident with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between.
Dennis’s argument against these indicators of sex are as follows:
Chromosomes aren’t usually tested, so people don’t usually know their chromosomal constitution. So what? You’re either XX, XY, or, rarely, something else, and it’s not hard to determine this. Against this, Dennis argues that sex isn’t defined entirely by chromosomes (well, it is by many biologists), and, even so, “What good does dividing people based on their chromosomes do?”
To that I’d respond, “chromosomes are correlated with a lot of other traits (that’s because they genetically produce those traits)—traits that we’ve evolved to respond to differentially. In general, someone who is XY will be attracted to someone who is XX, and that’s based on secondary sex characteristics that themselves are induced by chromosomes. Yes, there are people who are homosexual or bisexual (yet still identify as “male” or “female”), but if sex were purely a social construct, sexual selection wouldn’t work: males would look identical to females. That difference itself suggests that there’s a biological reality to sex, and that this biological reality—the correlation of chromosomal constitution with reproductive traits and with secondary sexual traits—is what has caused both behavioral and morphological differences between the sexes. If sex were purely a social construct, as Dennis says, then male deer wouldn’t have antlers, male peacocks wouldn’t have long tails, human females wouldn’t have breasts, and human males wouldn’t have greater muscle mass and upper body strength.
Hormones “aren’t visible without a test.” Again, you can make them visible with a test. Dennis argues that hormones can be altered by doctors, but that’s a recent cultural innovation that doesn’t affect my argument for sex based on chromosomal constitution that produces marked differences in the other characters. Remember: the chromosomal constitution itself, once inherited, sets off a string of genetic changes that ultimately lead to differences in the other four sets of traits.
Genitals and gonads “usually aren’t visible most of the time.” Well, not when they’re covered by clothing, and ovaries are on the inside, but that’s fatuous. Inspection of genitals and gonads will tell whether they conform to the peaks of the bimodal distribution or are rare exceptions. Dennis argues further that genitals can be changed with surgery, which is true, but that is simply a human alteration of biological sex, and those alterations are of course easily detectable. Likewise with her argument that gonads and testes can be removed when diseased, effacing an identifier of sex. But that happens later, and of course doesn’t change the chromosomes. And it didn’t happen at all before surgery came around in the last 0.005% of the span of human evolution.
Secondary sex characteristics, says Dennis, appear only after puberty, as if that’s some argument against their reality. But that’s irrelevant, for puberty is itself a biological phenomenon. Dennis adds that there is variation in these traits: they are not “perfect differentiators of sex.” Some males, for instance, develop little or no facial hair, and some women have facial hair. She also argues that some “people with vaginas” (a euphemism she uses for “woman”) develop small breasts, and some develop large breasts, but that “neither of those is more or less female”. Again, this is irrelevant to the argument against the reality of sex, for even considering fatty breasts alone, the presence of that one trait is a very good indicator of biological sex.
Dennis also argues that secondary sex characteristics militate against biological sex because “they can be changed through hormones or surgery.” But that’s again irrelevant to the argument from biological sex as a reality at birth. I could use lasers to remove the sex combs of Drosophila males (stiff tufts of bristles on the forelegs that males use to grasp females during copulation), but that doesn’t mean that sex in Drosophila is a social construct. Similarly, you can dye a female cardinal bright red to resemble a male (a secondary sexual characteristic), but that says nothing about whether sex in cardinals is a social construct. It can’t be, because cardinals don’t even have a society.
The culturally-induced malleability of biological traits does not mean that those traits aren’t real but merely social constructs; it just means that those traits can be artificially changed to resemble those of the other sex.
Dennis concludes that of the five traits listed above, four of them can’t be used to “accurately determine sex.”(Chromosomes seem to be the exception.) Well, yes, but they are accurate nearly all the time, and when combined are accurate virtually all of the time. There are of course exceptions, but as I said, they’re very rare.
Can we not accept the fact that sex is indeed a biological phenomenon, while someone can still choose to accept a gender that doesn’t correspond to their biological sex? The concept of biological sex has been extremely useful in biology—it’s a linchpin of a ton of research in evolutionary biology and other fields, and, with very few nonclassifiable cases, it’s an objective reality.
Accepting that truth may indeed give some people ammunition to discriminate against trans people, but the cure for that is not to deny biological reality: it’s to create more empathy so that trans people aren’t the victims of discrimination. Those who use the reality of biological sex to marginalize trans people are committing the naturalistic fallacy: claiming that an “ought” follows from an “is”.
I have a lot of respect for Paul Krugman; in fact, he’s my favorite New York Times columnist. He not only makes me think, but he’s usually right, and I’ve almost never seen him make a fallacious or dubious argument. His latest op-ed in the Times, “When the fire comes“, takes up an issue that many of us have thought about, but few of us have thought through: what will happen if we have a 9/11 style terrorist attack during the Trump administration? Krugman begins by stating the palpable truth:
We’re only three weeks into the Trump administration, but it’s already clear that any hopes that Mr. Trump and those around him would be even slightly ennobled by the responsibilities of office were foolish. Every day brings further evidence that this is a man who completely conflates the national interest with his personal self-interest, and who has surrounded himself with people who see it the same way. And each day also brings further evidence of his lack of respect for democratic values.
He then argues that Trump will not only mishandle such an attack, which is likely given his bellicose nature and kneejerk style, but that he also welcomes such an attack as a way to show his power. (This is the “come at me, bro” style of politics.) His example is this tweet by Trump, which, says Krugman, shows Trump’s “palpable eagerness to see an attack on America, which would show everyone the folly of constraining his power.”
Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!
Never mind the utter falsity of the claim that bad people are “pouring in,” or for that matter of the whole premise behind the ban. What we see here is the most powerful man in the world blatantly telegraphing his intention to use national misfortune to grab even more power. And the question becomes, who will stop him?
Krugman argues that we can’t count on the legislators—unless some Republicans manage to grow a spine—and the judiciary isn’t all that reliable, either. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is on Trump’s side, and although the courts have reined in Trump’s immigration order, Krugman says that Trump is busy “de-legitimizing” them. Well, I do have more hopes for the courts (but not the Republican Congress) than does Krugman, if for no other reason than federal judges don’t have to run for re-election and have more freedom to vote their conscience.
But in the end, Krugman makes a dire prediction when pondering how to stop Trump:
In the end, I fear, it’s going to rest on the people — on whether enough Americans are willing to take a public stand. We can’t handle another post-9/11-style suspension of doubt about the man in charge [he’s referring here to our misplaced trust in the Bush administration after 9/11]; if that happens, America as we know it will soon be gone.
He’s right, I think, and I believe I said something similar on Election Day. It’s up to us, and maybe even that won’t be enough. But we may get some help from the courts.
Reader Mark Sturtevant sent some nice insect photos; his captions are indented.
I have a new crop of pictures here taken last summer. I hope you enjoy them.
The first two pictures feature female Eastern amberwing dragonflies (Perithemis tenera) These are very small—and I think adorable—dragonflies with heads that look like they could go into a cartoon. Males are beautifully highlighted by solid amber wings, but like many Odonates the males are more shy about being approached. I have several close-up pictures of females as they are pretty tolerant of me, but I have so far failed to get acceptable pictures of a male.
Next is the rather weird long-tailed dance fly,Rhamphomyia longicauda. These insects have an interesting mating behavior which I would really like to see. Males entice females to mate by catching a small insect and presenting it to her as a ‘nuptial gift’. Males prefer to choose females with a lot of eggs, and I have read that females sometimes inflate their abdomen with air to entice males to choose them.
Here’s a remarkably plain and rather worn-out looking butterfly: the hackberry emperor (Astrocampa celtis).
This is the two-spotted treehopper (Enchenopa binotata). It is perhaps trying to blend in with the thorns of a wild rose.
And finally, I had been getting my feet wet last summer because I had previously neglected to take pictures of the many insects that inhabit the water surface. In truth, I had been avoiding that because I really hate hanging over or standing in water with my camera. But this water strider (Aquarius remigis) was in only a few inches of water, and I took the chance. These very familiar predatory insects are famous for skating around on the water surface tension, and they use the water much like how a spider uses its web to catch insects. If an insect falls into the water, its struggles will send out little waves that are detected by the water strider. If hungry, the strider will zip over and make a meal of it. The adults of this species are almost always wingless, but other species can have wings.
Good morning—it’s Monday, February 13, 2017. Remember that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so there’s just one shopping day left for cards, flowers, chocolates, and the like. It’s a double food holiday according to Foodimentary: both National Tortellini Day, and National “Italian Food” Day (I have no idea why they put scare quotes around “Italian Food,” unless it’s to imply that it isn’t real food). It’s also World Radio Day, which according to Wikipedia is “about celebrating radio, why we love it and why we need it today more than ever.” But do we really need it, in the age of the Internet?
On this day in 1542, Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded for adultery; she had been Queen for 16 months. And in 1633, Galileo arrived in Rome for his infamous trial by the Inquisition. (As the accommodationists always tell us, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion.) On February 13, 1935, Bruno Hauptmann was found guilty of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, and was executed the next year. Finally, in 1960, civil rights activists conducted their first lunch counter sit-in in Nashville, Tennessee. Their courage and nonviolence stands in marked contrast to today’s student protesters.
Notables born on this day include Thomas Malthus (1766), William Shockley (1910), Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919), and Chuck Yeager (1923, still with us). Those who died on this day include Benvenuto Cellini (1571), Richard Wagner (1883), Georges Rouault (1958), Waylon Jennings (2002), and Antonin Scalia (one year ago today). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cracking jokes:
Hili: Are these from our cherry trees?
A: Yes, it’s wood from our orchard.
Hili: I think I sat on this bough once.
In Polish:
Hili: To z naszych wiśni?
Ja: Tak, to drewno z naszego sadu.
Hili: Chyba siedziałam kiedyś na tej gałęzi.
As lagniappe, we have some baby Malayian tiger cubs born at the Cincinnati Zoo on February 3, and since mom wasn’t maternal, they’re being hand raised. I can’t resist showing several photos of them; just once in my life I’d like to hold one. These photos were sent by reader jsp, but I don’t know who the photographer is.
10 days old! Is there anything cuter than a tiger cub?
I thought I was through with Darwin Day, but I’ve got Chuck on the brain. It may seem odd for biologists to hold him in such esteem (creationists often say, mistakenly, that we worship him and find no flaws in his work), but the fact remains that, more than any other scientist, he got things right at the outset. Yes, his genetics was wonky, and his book doesn’t really deal with the origin of new species, but it’s remarkable how well his main ideas have held up over the last 158 years. Even Newton, his rival in the “best scientist ever” category, didn’t anticipate quantum mechanics, but Darwin did allude to genes having no differential effect on fitness; i.e., the “neutral theory” that was devised only in the 1960s.
I read The Origin about once every two years, and each time I do I’m amazed at the thoroughness and novelty of Darwin’s thinking: working out the parallel between artificial and natural selection, anticipating objections to his theory, realizing that biogeography and embryology provided strong evidence for evolution, and so on.
If you haven’t read the book yet, I recommend it highly. As I always told my students, you can hardly consider yourself educated if you haven’t read The Origin, which not only tied together all areas of biology and dispelled the myths about life that had reigned forever, but also changed our view of ourselves in a way that Newton couldn’t.
Darwin scholar John van Whye put this on Facebook: it’s Darwin’s only known depiction of himself. John’s notes:
Darwin sketched himself as this little stick man on the island of St Helena in July 1836 as the Beagle was sailing home. The sketch represents the strong winds blowing up the sea cliffs while the air on top of the cliff, where Darwin was standing, was perfectly still. Only by holding his arm out over the cliff could he detect the strong winds. The text reads “gale of wind to hand not to man”.
The sketch is in one of Darwin’s Beagle field notebooks, the Despoblado notebook, here.
See a drawing of the cliffs from a later illustrated edition of voyage of the Beagle, here.
