Alex Honnold free-climbs El Capitan

November 29, 2018 • 2:00 pm

I haven’t yet seen the movie Free Solo about Alex Honnold, arguably the greatest rock climber in history. For Honnold is a “free soloist”, climbing without ropes or any gear beyond his shoes and chalk bag. That means if he falls, he’s dead.

This New York Times video recounts the making of that movie, which premiered in August of this year. I had no idea that the cinematographers were rock climbers (though they surely had to be!), nor how difficult it would be to film Honnold’s daring climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan, which he accomplished in just three hours and 56 minutes on June 3 of last year. It’s a stunning achievement, and I can’t even begin to fathom the mind-set of someone who can attempt that.

Here’s a nice 10-minute mini-documentary about that climb.

I actually had a chance to see this movie and didn’t get around to it, which I much regret. But I’m sure I’ll get another chance, and this time I won’t pass it up. Wikipedia summarizes the positive reviews:

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10 [JAC: the critics’ rating is now 97% and the average score 95%] . The website’s critical consensus reads, “Free Solo depicts athletic feats that many viewers will find beyond reason – and grounds the attempts in passions that are all but universal.” On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating “universal acclaim”.

Writing for Variety, Peter Debrudge said, “Apart from a slow stretch around the hour mark, the filmmakers keep things lively (with a big assist from Marco Beltrami’s pulse-quickening score, the nail-biting opposite of Tim McGraw’s soaring end-credits single, “Gravity”), featuring test runs at Zion National Park’s Moonlight Buttress and the nearly sheer limestone cliffs in Taghia, Morocco.” Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair called the film “bracingly made” and wrote, “I left the theater invigorated and rattled, in awe of this charismatic man’s accomplishment but scared that it will inspire others to attempt the same…But maybe Free Solo‘s detailed, transfixing portrait of their hero will at least show some sort of barrier to entry, communicating to those eager wannabes that very few people indeed are built quite like Alex Honnold. And thank goodness, in a way, for that.”

If anyone’s seen this movie, weigh in below.

The journal Nature conflates sex and gender, decries “pigeonholing” people even though we do—and must

November 29, 2018 • 11:30 am

Lots of sites, including three scientific societies, have rejected the new Health and Human Services guidelines that provide a classification of a person’s sex into two categories. But these sites, and now an article in the prestigious journal Nature (click on screenshot below), conflate “sex”—which I take as biological sex recognized in humans by chromosomal constitution, which gametes you produce, and secondary sex characteristics—with “gender”, which I take as “the sex that an individual identifies with, whether or not it corresponds to their biological sex”. In this construal, which seems to make biological sense, a transgender woman would be a biological male but their gender would be female. There are also genders that aren’t “male” or “female”, as I note below.

Now the editorials that have appeared in scientific journals are well-meaning: their intent is to prevent intersexes and transgender individuals (the former much rarer than the latter) from discrimination. But that can be done without conflating sex and gender. For some purposes, like sports, recognizing an individual as either “male” or “female” (or “intersex”) is not only useful, but necessary.

As far as I can see, the Trump administration’s proposal, which may indeed be motivated by a desire to discriminate against intersexes or “non-binary” genders, is a definition not of gender but sex, at least as reported by the New York Times:

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

But sex and gender are not equivalent, and if the Trump administration wants to equate them, it’s making a serious mistake and hurting people as well. Still, scientific societies do themselves (or progressivism) no favor by the constant conflation of sex and gender. Sex is a useful concept whose binary nature has served biology well for centuries.

As I’ve written before, while sex is not completely binary, in general it’s effectively so, for the vast majority of individuals can be classified as either “male” or “female”. And this dichotomy is the result of evolution, in which two sexes are the result of natural selection, while those rare individuals who are intersex result from genetic or developmental anomalies. A paper by Dr. Leonard Sax in Journal of Sex Research gives this clinical definition of “intersex”, that is, of individuals who fit in the nonbinary valley between the big frequency modes of “male” and “female”:

A more comprehensive, yet still clinically useful definition of intersex would include those conditions in which (a) the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female, or (b) chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex.

Using this definition, Sax estimates that 0.018%, or 18 individuals out of 100,000, are intersex. This is much lower than Anne Fausto-Sterling’s estimate of 1.7%, which includes many individuals who don’t fit the definition above. But it doesn’t matter. Under either construal sex is binary, or nearly so. Saying that sex is a “continuum” is palpably misleading (if technically correct), for the “continuum” includes at most 1.7% of all individuals between the two well-defined “binary” modes. As a biologist colleague of mine said, “Of course sex is binary.  No biologist in their right mind would question that.” 

The same might be largely true, though less true, for transgender individuals, estimated at about 0.6% of the U.S. population. But that figure doesn’t include individuals who identify as bisexual, polysexual, and so on, so the bimodality for gender may be a bit less pronounced than for sex.

At any rate, Nature shoots itself in the foot with this well-intentioned editorial that maintains that sex is not a binary concept (they don’t mention sex in the title but it’s in the text):

First, Nature estimates, without giving a source, that the frequency of people with “differences or disorders of sex development” can be as many as 1%, though these aren’t intersexes, nor blur the strong bimodality of sex. Most of these aren’t people who would be the subject of oppression or discrimination.

Worse, Nature conflates gender and sex several times, to wit:

The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour.

We do understand sex, and it’s for all practical purposes binary in most animal species, and certainly ours. Here’s another of Nature‘s conflations:

Political attempts to pigeonhole people have nothing to do with science and everything to do with stripping away rights and recognition from those whose identity does not correspond with outdated ideas of sex and gender.

Outdated ideas of sex? What are the updated ideas of sex? Is Nature rejecting the ideas of male and female based on the existence of biological anomalies or intersexes? If so, are they rejecting, for similar reasons, the ideas of male and females in deer, fruit flies, and most other animals?

Yes, ideas of gender may be outdated—we now know well that someone’s self-identity may not correspond to their biological sex—but not of sex. Please, Nature, stop distorting biology in the service of ideology. It’s neither seemly nor necessary, as we can protect transgender and intersexual individuals without deep-sixing the sexual binary that has served biology so well.

As for the practice of pigeonholing people being useless and having nothing to do with science and everything to do with oppression, surely Nature doesn’t really mean that. For one thing, pigeonholing by sex is necessary in two important cases: Title IX regulations, in which it’s illegal to discriminate against programs funding college education (including sports) on the basis of sex. To enforce that regulation, which is a good one based on civil rights, you have to recognize women’s opportunities and sports teams versus men’s. Individuals have to be pigeonholed, and there must be some guidelines. 

Pigeonholing is also important for sports, as in professional sports teams or the Olympics, where competitions involve either male teams or female teams, usually playing against same-sex teams. Without “pigeonholing” you simply have a mess. Does Nature advocate doing away with “men’s” and “women’s” teams? If not, then they recognize the usefulness of pigeonholing, and clearly must go along with some standard, even if it’s a somewhat arbitrary one. (How to define “male” and “female” in sports is a sticky issue, one that is above my pay grade.)

Second, does Nature oppose pigeonholing by ethnicity? Surely they don’t: they recognize the value of classifying individuals by ethnic backgrounds for the purpose of achieving either equal opportunity or equal outcome. In such cases “pigeonholing” on political grounds is generally salubrious, and certainly does not strip away people’s rights in the way the journal suggests above.

In the end, we progressives don’t need to distort biology to achieve our aims of treating people fairly. We don’t need to pretend that the idea of two distinct sexes in our species is “outdated.” It isn’t, and when Nature tries to pretend it is, they simply look silly.

 

A Williams College professor describes her school’s fight against free speech

November 29, 2018 • 10:00 am

I’ve recently heard from Dr. Luana Maroja, an evolutionary biologist at Williams College who is an associate professor of biology as well as chair of the biochemistry program. Luana wanted to describe some of the opposition she and others have faced at Williams College in trying to get it to adopt the Chicago Principles, my university’s freedom-of-expression policy that has been widely adopted by other schools.

Williams has been in the news lately because many students have opposed a faculty call for freedom of speech, with the students, as FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in this article, effectively demanding freedom from speech. Be sure to read the student response highlighted in Luana’s piece.

I’ll add that Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is described by Wikipedia as “ranked first in 2017 in the U.S. News & World Report‘s liberal arts ranking for the 15th consecutive year, and first among liberal arts colleges in the 2018 Forbes magazine ranking of America’s Top Colleges.” This year’s tuition is $55,140, with ancillary fees (room and board, etc.) adding another $14,810.

Luana described the events occurring when the faculty tried to get a free-speech policy enacted.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE: ARE THE WALLS CLOSING IN? 

Luana Maroja

Many professors at Williams have been feeling the walls closing in. I’m an evolutionary biologist, and in my classes there is increasing resistance to learning about heritability (probably fear of the “bell curve”, something I actually dismiss by contrasting Brazilian with Americans, as I am from Brazil) and even kin selection! (Using the “naturalistic fallacy” argument, students assume that by teaching kin selection I am somehow endorsing Trump hiring his family.)  The word “pregnant woman” is out: only “pregnant human” should be now used (after all, what if the pregnant individual goes by another pronoun?). In other fields the walls have closed in even more. The theater department recently dealt with two challenges: a cancellation of a show and an uproar about another show – both shows deemed offensive or overtly violent to blacks, yet both written by African-American artists.  Williams is now developing a reputation of being unfriendly to artists of color.

While several speakers have been invited to talk about free speech (recently Geoff Stone and Frederick Lawrence), and classes on the topic have been taught, discussion about college policy never really got started among faculty or students.  This is in large part because faculty sharing my concerns about the increasing censorship on campus felt afraid of speaking up, always assuming that they were an insignificant minority.

In my view, the situation became critical when Reza Aslan came for a talk in campus titled “The future of Free Speech and Intolerance”. This was supposed to have involved a panel with three speakers and a moderator, but Negin Farsad (a social-justice comedian) did not come. The panel thus consisted of Alicia Garza (co-founder of the BlackLivesMatter movement), Reza Aslan (religious scholar) and moderator Jamelle Bouie (chief political correspondent for the Slate Magazine).  Reza Aslan dominated the conversation and, in his always convoluted and self-contradictory style, started by bragging that he had once been disinvited from another venue, proceeding to say that anything that offended him should not be allowed, and finally asserting that “only factual talks” should ever be allowed in campus. This nonsense was met with intense student applause.  It was appalling.

After Reza Aslan’s talk, a group of six Williams professors started talking about getting the college to adopt the Chicago Statement. We scheduled two days for open discussion among professors (November 15 and 20), talked to the University President and steering committee, made plans for student outreach, wrote a petition, supplementary documents and a “reasons” document, and sent this material to all voting faculty.  Within days, close to half of all voting faculty had signed the petition.

However, trouble started after a professor opposed to free speech shared the petition with students, who wrongly assumed that we were voting on the issue on November 15.  While I did reach out to these students to let them know that no vote was taking place and that this was a faculty forum to discuss ideas, these efforts were in vain.  A group of about 15 students waving posters stating “free speech harms” came to our discussion on November 15.  The professor leading the meeting was extremely nice, welcoming the students in the room and reading their response aloud (the response is now a petition [JAC: they closed the Google document to non-Williams people but The Feminist Wire still has the petition online.]).

But many of the students were disruptive throughout, finally asking white male professors to sit down and admit their “privilege”.  They pointed out how horrible the college is in welcoming and including them, but then stated that they want to be protected by the president!  They equated free speech with “hate speech” and with the desire of professors to invite John Derbyshire back (Derbyshire a figure within the alt-right movement, was invited by a student group and disinvited by president Falk a couple years ago).

I explained how censorship hurts the very cause they are fighting for, noting that because I am Hispanic, people often assume that is the reason I got into Cornell, got a job, and got grants, and that students of color will face the same fate in the outside world. Thus, I added, students need to be able to defend their positions with strong reason and argumentation, not by resorting to violence or name-calling.

Disinvitations invigorate bigots; they do not suppress their message.  Furthermore you can learn a lot from arguments you disagree with—something I have learned listening to creationists, climate denialists and even some bigots.  I emphasized that the reason we want free speech is not because we want to invite bigots, but because we don’t want to see discussion shut down. The recent cancellation in theater shows how “protection” of feelings actually hurt African-Americans (the artist who wrote the play)!  Students are hurting the very cause they think they are defending.

Finally, I re-emphasized that invitation is not the same as disinvitation: the Chicago Statement has rules on what to do once someone is invited, and has no guidelines about who should be invited.  Furthermore, the guidelines allow disinvitations for extremist speakers who poses a genuine physical threat to individuals.

While most professors at the meeting were highly supportive of free speech and many sent me grateful emails, I was shocked at the behavior of some of my colleagues. For example, one professor turned to the students and said that they should read the names missing from our list of signatories, as “those were professors that were with the students” (an appalling tactic that created an “us vs them” atmosphere). Another professor stated that she was involved in creating violence in UC Berkeley for Milo Yiannopoulos’s disinvitation and would be ready to do the same at Williams.

The meeting lasted for 2.5 hours, well beyond the single hour scheduled, and, unfortunately, I think our message fell mostly on deaf ears.  After the meeting was over, I sent an email to the College Council student who was there, trying to make our points clear once more.  But that same night we noticed that a group of students and an anonymous person had accessed our petition online and that large pieces of the text had been removed.  We deleted all our names and created a timeline of events, with the intention of showing people that this was not a secret cabal and that we had meant to include students in the process since the beginning.

The Tuesday meeting (November 20) was better and very constructive.  No students were present—it was too close to Thanksgiving—and about 40 professors showed up. This was a more dynamic meeting than any I ever attended, and I’m glad that the petition started a much-needed dialogue!

This past Tuesday, our College President sent an email stating that she will form a committee composed of faculty, students and staff members to look into the free-speech issue; the committee composition will be announced in 2019.  A couple of news pieces also emerged from the event (here is a piece against the Chicago Principles and one pointing out how students at Williams are demanding freedom from speech), and more should appear next week with the publication of the student newspaper.

I truly hope reason will prevail. Being born during a dictatorship in Brazil, I dread seeing censorship in place at my own college.  It is truly sad to see freedom of speech appropriated by the Right and by Trump; I hope we can fight both the Right and censorship, and that all universities and colleges can again take leadership in the free exchange of ideas.

Dr. Luana Maroja

I had a dream

November 29, 2018 • 8:30 am

Every night I wake up in the wee hours for a short while before going back to sleep. If I’ve had a dream before that 2 a.m. awakening, I’ll often remember it vividly, but I always forget the details when I wake up for good in the morning. I usually try to impress the details of such dreams on my brain, but it doesn’t work: unless I have a dream right before I wake up for good, I forget it.

Last night I had another vivid dream, but was up for a while after having it, and while awake I tried hard to remember the details. Mirabile dictu, when I woke up this morning I did remember them! Here’s how it went (note: I have a cancer-phobia).

I was standing at one end of a long, low brick hospital, and at the other end were three guys who were yelling at me. I have no idea what the altercation was about, but I proceeded to give them the finger, whereupon they started running toward me. I was also carrying a big bag of chocolates, and I didn’t want to get beaten up or have these angry men steal my chocolates.

I ran into the hospital looking for a place to hide. It was nearly empty, and I made my way into a suite full of fancy-looking white machines. Somehow I realized that these machines were used to treat cancer. Nobody else was in the suite.

I continued running through the hospital looking for safety, and wound up in the fancy office of a hospital official: a kindly woman who said she’d give me refuge. But, she said, to do that I’d have to go with her as she dealt with three patients, all children, and one of whom had cancer.

I went into the room with the woman, and shortly thereafter the childrens’ mother came in with her offspring. They were all mutants, looking like human tadpoles, and one of them resembling the Creature from the Black Lagoon:

Then CEO of the hospital came in, and the woman explained to him that the “black lagoon” child had cancer of the head, and proceeded to demonstrate how, when she pressed on the child’s head, it created an indentation that remained indented. That, she said, was a sign that the cancer was serious.

I then woke up.

I have no idea what this dream means, if dreams mean anything. I recount it simply because it’s bizarre, and it’s one of the few dreams I remember.

If you have a recurrent dream, or have had a weird one recently, do put it in the comments below.

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 29, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Liz Strahle sent us a passel of bird photos. Her notes and IDs are indented:

Attached are some wildlife pictures I took in the last few months. I named the pictures to match the following IDs:
Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus):
Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus):
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus):
Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura):
Buffleheads (Bucephala albeola):
Buffleheads (Bucephala albeola) (Male and Female):
Mute Swan (Cygnus olor):
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) (Juvenile):
Downy Woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens):
Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):
Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura):

Thursday: Hili dialogue

November 29, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s almost December now: we’re at the penultimate day of November, i.e., the 29th of the month in the year of our Ceiling Cat (fleas be upon him), 2018. It’s National Chocolates Day, but I can’t have any as I’m fasting. It’s also the feast day of Our Lady of Beauraing, celebrating five Belgian children who saw visions of Mary in 1932-1933. Why, by the way, is it always Mary who appears in these visions? Why not Jesus, or even God? That alone shows that this is an infectious meme. After all, God did appear to Moses, to Job, and to Abraham.

This is another skimpy day in history. On November 29, 1781, a horrible event took place: the crew of the British slave ship Zong simply threw 133 Africans overboard, killing them because the ship’s water was running low and the owners could claim insurance money (they lost). Here’s J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting “The Slave Ship”, inspired by the Zong’s perfidy (click to enlarge):

On this day in 1877, Thomas Edison first demonstrated the phonograph that he’d recently patented. 22 years later, F.C. Barcelona was founded by Catalan, Spanish, and English men. It remains a great team. On November 29, 1929, Admiral Richard Byrd made the first successful flight over the South Pole. On this day in 1967, three months into my first year at college, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, beleaguered and unsure of his mission to prosecute the Vietnam war, resigned. Finally, on this day in 1972, or so Wikipedia claims, “Atari release[d] Pong, the first commercially successful video game.” I don’t know from Pong.

Notables born on this day include Amos Bronson Alcott (1799), Christian Doppler (1803), Louisa May Alcott (1832, Bronson’s famous daughter), C. S. Lewis (1898), Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1908), Jacques Chirac (1932), Felix Cavaliere (1942), and Rahm Emanuel (1959).

Cavaliere was of course the titular head of the rock group The Young Rascals (also known as The Rascals), and here’s their most famous song: “Groovin“, from 1967. It became a #1 hit for the group. First some background from Wikipedia:

Written by group members Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati and with a lead vocal from Cavaliere, it is a slow, relaxed groove, based on Cavaliere’s newfound interest in Afro-Cuban music. Instrumentation included a conga, a Cuban-influenced bass guitar line from session musician Chuck Rainey, and a harmonica part, performed first for the single version by New York session musician Michael Weinstein, and later for the album version by Gene Cornish.

The result was fairly different from the Rascals’ white soul origins, enough so that Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler did not want to release “Groovin'”. Cavaliere credits disc jockey Murray the K with intervening to encourage Atlantic to release the song. “To tell you the truth, they didn’t originally like the record because it had no drum on it,” admits Cavaliere. “We had just cut it, and he [Murray the K] came in the studio to say hello. After he heard the song, he said, ‘Man, this is a smash.’ So, when he later heard that Atlantic didn’t want to put it out, he went to see Jerry Wexler and said, ‘Are you crazy? This is a friggin’ No. 1 record.’ He was right, because it eventually became No. 1 for four straight weeks.”

And the song, which you’ll remember if you’re close to my age:

Those who died on this day include Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1530), Hans Holbein the Younger (1543), Giacomo Puccini (1924), Natalie Wood (1981), Cary Grant (1986), and Jim Nabors (2017).

Holbein, official portraitist of Henry VIII, did a famous painting from life of the king (1537) that was destroyed in a fire in 1698. Copies remain, though; here’s one from around the same time, and below that an original Holbein showing Henry:

An original portrait by Holbein (1534-1536):

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Cyrus are bantering:

Cyrus: Do you think that your shadow is afraid of my shadow?
Hili: No, they know each other.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Czy myślisz, że twój cień boi się mojego cienia?
Hili: Nie, one się znają.

A tweet from Heather; both of us would dearly love to be this guy!

https://twitter.com/StefanodocSM/status/1067719119406014464

Reader Nilou sent a tweet from the Tower of London’s Beefeater “Ravenmaster,” who is shamelessly flogging his new book:

See?

Tweets from Matthew. In the first series he expresses his disapprobation about the Chinese scientist who claims to have genetically engineered two babies using the CRISPR system, removing a gene that makes people susceptible to HIV infection (why would one even want to do that?):

Eric Topol is a well known geneticist and researching physician.

That experiment is really, really wonky, and would be illegal in the U.S. We simply don’t know enough about how to use CRISPR responsibly to justify this kind of manipulation.

More tweets from Matthew. The first one makes a strange claim. How can that bee? The thread after this tweet gives the bizarre solution:

I wonder if someone lost his job over this. . .

https://twitter.com/stiffleaf/status/1065942619228962818

Tweets from Grania. The first is the “on” button of a cat:

https://twitter.com/SoVeryAwkward/status/812478977357049856

As Grania says, “This is an outrage.” Truly!

https://twitter.com/DanRiffle/status/1066340719189786626

Nothing that Trump says surprises me any more.

 

Knickers the Giant Steer saved by his size from the abattoir

November 28, 2018 • 2:00 pm

The New York Times—and, indeed, the entire Internet—is buzzing with the story of Knickers the Giant Steer, who lives in Australia. He’s not just big; he’s HUGE!

From the Times:

It’s a very big steer.

The very big steer is, according to the nearly unanimous acclaim on social media, a hero. At 6 feet 4 inches tall and more than 1.4 tons (2,800 pounds), it is roughly the height of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson but weighs about 11 times as much.

Its enormous size — just three inches short of the Guinness World Record for tallest living steer — saved it from certain death, its owner said. No one bought it for slaughter at an auction last month because potential buyers said it wouldn’t fit in their farm equipment.

“He was always a standout steer,” said Geoff Pearson, who owns thousands of cattle in Myalup, a small town south of Perth in Western Australia.

. . . Knickers drew worldwide adoration after local news reports ignited coverage of him internationally, and his image saturated social media on Tuesday.

Get a load of this guy.

There was something familiar about him. Knickers is that guy who stands in front of you at every concert.

There was something relatable about him. Knickers looks the way you feel when you don’t know anyone at a party.

And there was something inspiring about him. Cattle don’t typically have much control over their fate. Knickers beat the system.

. . . His reward for escaping the literal chopping block will be a life of coaching other animals on how to live their lives at the farm, Mr. Pearson said. The other animals have taken to him.

Mature steer of his breed typically stand 4 feet 10 inches tall and weigh about 1,500 pounds, according to the Cattle Site.

Here’s Knickers, whose size is exaggerated a bit as he’s surrounded by small wagyu cows. But even so. . . . .

Here’s a video:

Now some people are (excuse the pun) beefing because there aren’t any photos in which Knickers is standing right next to a person, so you can get a good idea of his height. Let’s just say that if 6 foot 4 is his shoulder height, he’d be six eight inches taller than I if I were standing beside him. And that’s big!

If you want to see the record holder, here it is, certified by Guinness:

“The tallest ox is Bellino, a chianina ox who measured 2.027 m (6 ft 7 in) to the withers. He is owned by Giuseppe Sola (Italy) and was measured on the set of Lo Show dei Record in Rome, Italy, on 27 March 2010. An ox is an adult, castrated male bovine.”