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! We’re reached the end of the week, for it’s Friday, January 27, 2017. This means that in the U.S. it’s National Chocolate Cake Day, and most everywhere it’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day on which the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was liberated by the Russian Army in 1945.
On this day in 1302, Dante was exiled from Florence, and, in 1593, the seven-year trial (!) of Giordano Bruno for heresy began in Rome; he was burned at the stake in 1600. Exactly 13 years, later the trial of Guy Fawkes and his conspirators began; this was more expedient, with their execution taking place after only four days. On this day in 1880, Edison received a patent for his light bulb (“incandescent lamp”). Finally, in 1967, three astronauts— Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee—died in a fire during a test of the Apollo 1 spacecraft at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
Notables born on this day include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756, died in 1791), Lewis Carroll (1832), Donna Reed (1921), physicist Samuel C. C. Ting (1936), Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948), and Keith Olbermann (1959). Those who died on this day include Giuseppe Verdi (1901), Mahalia Jackson (1972), Jack Paar (2004), John Updike (2009), and the reclusive J. D. Salinger (2010). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is puffing herself up over a trivial achievement, because, after all, she’s the Princess:
Hili: I get better and better results.
A: And that means?
Hili: I run along this sofa faster than I think.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam coraz lepsze wyniki.
Ja: To znaczy?
Hili: Przebiegam wzdłuż sofy szybciej niż myślę.
And out in Winnipeg, where snow still lies thickly, Gus is warm inside, lying on the blanket that was a Christmas gift to his staff:
Finally, some lagniappe from that most reliable Twitter site, Emergency Kittens:
After Tr*mp ordered various science-related Federal agencies to undergo a social media blackout a few days ago (and forced the “rogue” Badlands National Park account, which was tweeting out climate-change announcements, to withdraw its facts), various other rogue accounts have sprung up. Now many or most of these may be bogus, not having anything to do with disaffected employees of those agencies, but I suspect at least some are real; if I find out more information I’ll post it here. The San Diego Union-Tribune counted 24, but the list compiled by Alice Stollmeyer, below, has 47.
Take these with a grain of salt. They may be hoaxes, but some may be real expressions of revolt by federal agencies.
And if you’re a scientist, remember that planning is in the works for a Scientists’ March on Washington, a science-oriented equivalent to the recent Women’s March. The date hasn’t yet been set.
There’s a new app for your phone or mobile device called “Askers“, which you can download for free (and get the details at this site). What happens is that there are “experts” in some areas whom you can ask a question, presumably about their area. If they choose to answer it (and answers, which are recorded, are limited to one minute), you pay something like five bucks, and the answerer gets a cut. But if other people listen to the answer to your question, for which they pay 33 cents, you get some money back. The more people who listen, the more you get back.
I guess for now I’m the resident evolutionary biologist, and have answered exactly one question (which I got today), but the people on board look good, including Sean Carroll and Lawrence Krauss in physics, Peter Boghossian in philosophy, and a diverse group of authors, experts in foreign policy, and so on.
For a short while listening to some of the answers is free (e.g. Krauss on “What came before the Big Bang”?, Sean Carrol on “Does loop quantum gravity hold promise?” and Peter Boghossian on “Should ‘street epistomologists’ focus their effort on educators?”). Eventually it will nearly all be pay for play.
It sounds like a good idea, which is why I agreed to participate, because all of a sudden anybody can ask you anything they want. Now, we get to choose which questions to answer, but it’s hard to imagine a juicy question on evolution I wouldn’t field. I’d suggest downloading the “Askers” app and then fire away.
Unless you’re an Allman Brothers fan, as I am (or rather, was), you probably haven’t heard of Butch Trucks, but he was one of the co-founders of—and, along with Jaimoe, a main drummer for—the greatest “southern rock” band of all time, and in the top five of my greatest bands of any kind. His real name was Claude Hudson Trucks, he was there when the band started in 1969, and he played with them (minus several members who died or left) ever since. His sound, especially paired with that of Jaimoe, was the driving force behind that locomotive rock; as Dickie Betts said, “When Butch came along, he had that freight train, meat-and-potatoes kind of thing that set Jaimoe up perfectly. He had the power thing we needed.”
Trucks had a long interest in philosophy and literature. In 2005, the New York Times Book Review published a letter from Trucks criticizing Roy Blount, Jr.’s reference to Duane Allman as “one of these churls” in a review of Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader. The letter further criticized Grover Lewis for his 1971 Rolling Stone article about the band, which Trucks wrote made the members look like uneducated characters who spoke in dialogue “taken directly from Faulkner.”
That letter’s still online; you can find it here and it is well worth reading. Here’s a brief excerpt:
First, let me state unequivocally that Duane Allman was one of the most powerful, charismatic and trustworthy men I have ever known. I would use the word ”messianic” to describe the impact he had on the people around him, and his influence on music today runs much deeper than all but a very few even begin to know. He was a man of the highest character and principles, and for Blount to refer to him as ”one of these churls” is inexcusable. Blount also quotes Lewis’s article about us: ”At my teasing suggestion . . . Duane coldly offers to punch me out on the spot.” To put things in their proper perspective, I will tell you exactly how Lewis, our ”fellow traveler,” came to be threatened.
Here’s a great clip with the original band, including Duane Allman, playing “Whipping Post” at the Fillmore East in 1970. Both Trucks and Jaimoe are on drums (Trucks appears from 1:37-150). This could be put in the dictionary to illustrate the term “smokin'”.
And a photo from the NYT obituary:
(from NYT) Butch Trucks, far right, with, from left, Jai Johanny Johanson, Dickey Betts and Gregg Allman in an undated photograph. Credit Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
UPDATE: I’m following this situation as some of those who resigned might have been asked to leave, and in cases of senior officials the distinction may be nebulous given that they might prepare letters of resignation as part of the normal transition between administrations. All I can say is that I took the Post’s report as accurate (they’re the Post!), and that report was echoed by several other reputable sources. Meanwhile, the Post also reports that the chief of the US Border Patrol resigned:
The chief of the U.S. Border Patrol has resigned after only six months on the job, one day after President Trump announced plans to ratchet up immigration enforcement and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, officials said Thursday.
It was not immediately clear why Mark Morgan — a career FBI official who was the first outsider to lead the agency responsible for securing the U.S. borders — left the agency. His resignation is effective Jan. 31, officials said.
But Morgan had clashed with the powerful Border Patrol union, which endorsed Trump for president and whose leaders were present at Trump’s announcement of his immigration crackdown at Department of Homeland Security headquarters Wednesday.
____________
So this just happened: according to the Washington Post, “The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” Some excerpts.
Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, [Undersecretary for Management Patrick] Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
In addition, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20, and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, departed the same day. That amounts to a near-complete housecleaning of all the senior officials that deal with managing the State Department, its overseas posts and its people.
“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”
. . . Ambassador Richard Boucher, who served as State Department spokesman for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said that while there’s always a lot of turnover around the time a new administration takes office, traditionally senior officials work with the new team to see who should stay on in their roles and what other jobs might be available. But that’s not what happened this time.
. . . By itself, the sudden departure of the State Department’s entire senior management team is disruptive enough. But in the context of a president who railed against the U.S. foreign policy establishment during his campaign and secretary of state with no government experience, the vacancies are much more concerning.
The rats are leaving the sinking ship, except that I wouldn’t call these people rats. The rats are the ones piloting the ship. And I’m going to start using the phrase Kurt Vonnegut made famous in Slaughterhouse Five: “So it goes.”
Yes, this is Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, but, as Steve Gould pointed out, he was very ratlike early in his career
Today’s New York Times is unusual in having five of its six op-ed pieces (including the two main editorials) about the missteps of Donald Trump. Besides a good piece on “The cost of Mr. Trump’s wall” (probably $20 billion and $500 million per year upkeep; a real loser in terms of cost-benefit analysis–and good luck in getting Mexico to pay for it), it also has a long piece on Trump’s new immigration policies, “I think Islam hates us.”
As I said recently, Trump’s proposed crackdown on immigration is hamhanded, and unlikely to improve the U.S., though arguably we should look at least a bit closer at visas issued to people from the Middle East. The “Islam” editorial is basically okay, but I wanted to point out three statements about that instantiate the liberal Left’s soft-pedaling of Islamic terrorism. Here’s one (my emphases in all excerpts):
. . . While Mr. Obama made significant progress in degrading this threat — the Islamic State has lost considerable territory in both Iraq and Syria — he did not put an end to violent extremism. Mr. Trump is now pledging to do more and better.
The problem is that his approach, as we know it, is more likely to further inflame anti-American sentiment around the world than to make the United States safer. Mr. Trump has not explained how he would destroy the terrorist danger. But his use of slogans like “radical Islam,” which echo the views of his closest advisers, implies a naïve reading of the threat from about 40,000 extremists, while demonizing and alienating many of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
Naïve reading? What, exactly, is okay with “violent extremism” and not okay about “radical Islam”? Do the 40,000 “extremists” happen to share a certain religion?
It is in fact radical Islam that is behind most of the terrorist acts in question (or does the NY Times think that religion isn’t involved?), and why would peaceful, nonviolent Muslims be demonized and alienated by referring to terrorism coming from “radical Islam”? Should peaceful Christians be demonized and alienated if “radical Christians” kill abortion doctors, which sometimes happens. What about “radical Baptists” picketing the funerals of soldiers? Does that demonize all Baptists? Or “ultra-Orthodox Jews” biting off the foreskins of children, giving them herpes? Does that demonize all Jews? No, it’s only the world’s Muslims we must fear alienating, for they have learned to play the offense card well, and are prone to retribution. It is that religion alone we mustn’t alienate, and that itself tells you something about how it’s insulated itself from criticism. And, in the end “radical Islam” simply means “extremist Islam.”
In fact, later on in the piece, the Times tells us how to defeat the Terrorism Driven by The Religion Whose Name We Cannot Speak:
The United States undoubtedly must find more effective ways to defeat terrorists, including by undermining their message. If Mr. Trump can do that, it will be to his credit. But to a great extent success will depend on long-term cooperation from Muslim leaders and allies.
But what has been the message of these terrorists? It’s an Islam-based criticism in the West. Did the Times read the article in ISIS’s magazine Dabiq, ““Why we hate you & Why we fight you”? (Article here, my post on it here.) They might start by reading that, and then see how to undermine their message without mentioning Islam—even in the mealymouthed trope that ISIS doesn’t represent “true Islam.” There’s simply no way to undermine a terrorist message by completely ignoring the religion behind it, or emphasizing that there can be a less violent version of that religion. (The latter is, of course, the message of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz.)
Finally, Trump wants to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. That is at least arguable given that it’s been designated as such by some Middle Eastern countries and that Hamas, which is a genuine terrorist organization, is simply the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. (On the other hand, the Brotherhood explicitly renounces the use of violence–though it seems to spawn it.) But the reason that the NYT gives for not going the Trump route is weird:
Some experts see the move as a chance for the Trump administration to limit Muslim political activity in the United States. But since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a NATO ally, sympathizes with the Muslim Brotherhood, such a step would further complicate that fraught alliance.
I’m sorry, but what we need to be doing now is criticizing the hell out of the Erdogan government, which is itself repressive, anti-free-speech, and poised to foist an onerous theocracy on Turkey. If you’re thinking of labeling the Muslim Brotherhood one way or the other, look at the facts, but don’t be conditioned by trying to osculate the rump of a government that itself is dismantling what democratic institutions it had in the name of Islamist autocracy.
Hemant Mehta (“the Friendly Atheist”) is all over atheist news like white on rice (or, as they say, “like ugly on a frog”), so I usually avoid posting on the same things he does. But in this case I’ll make an exception. As Hemant notes in a post from Monday, Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s candidate to be Attorney General, has some weird (or should I say “mainstream”) views on atheists. In an earlier post, Hemant noted that Sessions, during his confirmation hearings, had this exchange with Democratic Senator Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Hemant’s emphasis):
WHITEHOUSE: Does a secular attorney have anything to fear from an Attorney General Sessions in the Department of Justice?
SESSIONS: Well, no… and I use that word in the 90,000-foot level. A little concern I have that we as a nation, I believe, are reaching a level in which truth is not sufficiently respected, that the very idea of truth is not believed to be real, and that all of life is just a matter of your perspective and my perspective, which I think is contrary to the American heritage…
We are not a theocracy. Nobody should be required to believe anything. I share Thomas Jefferson’s words on the memorial over here: I swear eternal hostility over any domination of the mind of man. And I think we should respect people’s views and not demand any kind of religious test for holding office.
WHITEHOUSE: And a secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious, correct?
SESSIONS: Well… I’m not sure. [Long silence]… We’re gonna treat anybody with different views fairly and objectively.
That’s clearly ridiculous, since if anything secular people, not adhering to unevidenced superstitions, surely have a better claim to understanding the truth than do religionists.
As a student of history, no doubt Senator Sessions also knows that secular regimes, lacking any belief in laws beyond those they manufacture, alter, and violate at will, were responsible for the deaths of no less than 100 million people in the Twentieth Century alone.
That’s more than all religious wars from all previous centuries combined.
That is because atheism unquestionably exacerbates the evil in our nature. And if Christianity doesn’t make you good—strictly speaking, from a theological perspective, none of us are—it makes you better than you might otherwise be.
I am reminded of novelist Evelyn Waugh’s famous quip, made in response to someone drawing attention to his all-too-obvious faults: “Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being.”
All of this is at the heart of the Senator’s remarks: If one does not believe in a Lawgiver, how can we be sure he will acknowledge any law at all?The point isn’t that the secularly-minded cannot be morally outstanding people; the point is that there is no logically compelling reason to be anything other than entirely selfish.
I mean, if there is no God to judge you in the next life for your actions in this one, why not do preciously as you want to do?
Americans should be comforted by the knowledge that the man who might become the highest law enforcement officer in the country believes that some laws are absolute and inviolable no matter what the cultural zeitgeist of the moment is; because sometimes the zeitgeist says slavery is OK and Jews should go to concentration camps.
Comforted? We should be scared that the highest law official of the country might want us to answer to laws from the Great Lawgiver in the Sky rather than from our own legislatures. (By the way, I do believe in a Lawgiver. It’s called Congress.) God’s laws, may, for instance, differ from secular law on issue about abortion, about gays, about censorship, and so on.
Further, anyone who claims that Nazism was an atheist regime, for instance, doesn’t know what they are talking about. And really, wasn’t it a Christian view that demonized the Jews in Europe, leading to the death of six million of them? It’s extremely bizarre to blame secularism for the Holocaust, to say the least.
Finally, if you’re moral for religious reasons, that’s not logic compelling you to be moral. It’s fear—or rather, a misguided notion that if you don’t obey God, you’re going to fry. If that’s not a selfish reason, I don’t know what is.
Taunton continues.
. . . The Cultural Left’s romance with secularism is naïve at best, malicious at worst. History demonstrates where that worldview all too often leads.
The moral and intellectual sensibilities of the West are still running off of the accumulated capital of a rich Judeo-Christian heritage.
But watch out. When the fumes in that tank are spent, tyranny cannot be far away.
As T.S. Eliot rightly observed, “If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”
My response: Scandinavia. Christianity has largely gone there, but, last time I looked, there was still plenty of culture. Now of course Taunton could argue, as religionists love to do, that even the morality in nonbelieving countries is a vestigial remnant of Christianity, but I don’t believe it. Denmark has been largely without religion for several generations, and yet the morality remains. And does Taunton really think that only Christianity, as opposed to other faiths, is a guarantor of morality?
Taunton’s motivations for his odious book are clear: he hates secularism, couldn’t abide the fact that Hitchens was facing death without wavering in his atheism, and therefore made up a story to support Taunton’s preconceptions—and perhaps to make a quick buck on the side. The man is odious.
Reader Darryl Ernst sent us nothing less than a beautiful pas de deux (well, a kerfuffle) of Snowy Egrets. His notes are indented:
A few months ago my daughter, Brianna, was at Sebastian Inlet (a favorite destination of ours in Florida), when she just happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an “argument” between a pair of Snowy Egrets (Egretta thula). One of the pair was minding its own business, sniping fish, when the other flew in with an attitude. It is impressive how big these relatively small egrets can make themselves look. I am not sure which one got chased away at the end. The egret that won spent some time afterwards fluffing (a technical term) and straightening out its feathers, and then got back to sniping fish.
“Fluffing”:
And one extra. I think I’ve mentioned before the mated pair of Sandhill Cranes (Antigone canadensis) that have nested near us for years and raised several broods(?), typically two each year. Here is a picture from late November of Mom & Dad and their newest pair of children browsing through the reeds near their nesting site. Soon they will be ranging further afield. Even when the young’uns get older, the adults won’t allow me to get close to them but they allow my daughter to walk right along with them when they go foraging as if she were part of the group.
