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.
Here’s a high-speed film the Apollo 11 rocket, the Saturn 5, taking off on its way to the Moon on July 16, 1969. We see 30 seconds of actual time, but it’s slowed down to last nearly 9 minutes by the filming, done at 500 frames per second. The lunar module landed on in the (British) evening four days later and then, six hours thereafter—roughly 3 a.m. UTC (formerly GMT)—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon. If you were alive then, as I was, you were watching it live.
I’m still amazed that humans could do this, but this bit, the launch, is new to me. The narration is really good.
On August 7 I reported that the Trump administration had loosened restrictions on products containing asbestos, which is totally banned in 60 countries because the material is a deadly carcinogen. According to the new rules, asbestos-containing products can be created or imported into the U.S. on a case by case basis.
Now, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group, which seems to be a bit kooky (they’re in favor big time of GMO labeling, for instance), asbestos imports are starting to rise dramatically: 2,000 percent (20 fold) between July and August (click on screenshot below). Most of them, as the graph further below shows, come from Brazil.
We don’t need to use asbestos, as there are safe substitutes. There were about 3,000 deaths per year due to asbestos in the 15 years before 2015, most from mesothelioma, a deadly form of cancer that can show up decades after a small amount of the product is inhaled. And it’s a horrible way to die: I’ve seen it at work. The EPA should ban it, but lobbyists from the chemical industry are pushing to keep a ban from being enacted.
You might be aware that Irish voters went to the polls today, among other things to elect the the president and, most important, to repeal the Irish blasphemy law that’s been around since 1937. As Quartz explains:
The Irish Constitution, written in 1937, states that “the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offense which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”
In 2009, parliament passed an act that more clearly defined the boundaries of what the law considers “blasphemous.” According to the Irish Defamation Act, the key characteristics of a blasphemous text are that it be insulting to a religion, that it offend a large number of that religion’s adherents, and that the person writing or publishing it intended to cause that offense.
Once again we have the narrowing of “hate speech” to “defamation of a religion or its adherents,” as we saw yesterday for Austria. But unlike Austria, there hasn’t been a prosecution in Ireland for blasphemy since 1855. Last year the Irish police began an investigation of Stephen Fry for his anti-theist remarks on Irish television, which you can see below. Stuff like that should NOT be a crime!
Grania has sent me the good news, though, as reported in the Irish Times (click on the screenshot):
A summary of the poll:
The referendum to remove the blasphemy provision is set to be carried by a landslide majority, the Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI exit poll suggests.
The total Yes vote is predicted to be 69 per cent for, with 31 per cent against. There is a majority for change across all ages and regions and among men and women.
However, there was a sharp drop in the Yes vote among the oldest voters.
. . . The strongest majority to remove the provision was among 18-24 year olds (82 per cent) followed by 25-24 year olds (78 per cent); 35-49 year olds (76 per cent) and 50-64 year olds (69 per cent). The oldest age group – those aged above 65 – only voted in favour of change by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent.
You go, Ireland! The country, despite the iron grip the Vatican once had on it, legalized same-sex marriage three years ago, and last year carried out a public referendum recommending (by a landslide) the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, an amendment that effectively prohibited abortion in nearly any circumstance. Last month that amendment was formally ditched, and at present a bill allowing abortion during the first trimester has been introduced.
Given that the anti-blasphemy referendum will pass, that part of the Constitution will be revoked by the legislature, rendering the 2009 anti-defamation law moot.
This story (taken from Reuters) is the only thing that HuffPo is good at. Click on screenshot to read:
Living the dream, but I think the budget should be higher:
It was an unusual job advert. Wanted: Cat chief. Location: Zelenogradsk, Russia: Duties: Tending to the town’s approximately 70 stray cats.
Some 80 applicants applied for the new role with the municipality in the small town in the Kaliningrad region, which has also erected a cat statue and added a feline to its emblem in a bid to rebrand itself as Russia’s foremost cat-loving community.
In the end, local resident Svetlana Logunova was appointed guardian of the town’s felines. To help her with the task, she was given a bicycle and uniform, including a bright green jacket, black bow tie and hat.
She has been given a budget of 5,700 roubles ($85) a month to ensure all the seaside community’s cats are happy, dishing out food, strokes and free rides in the basket on her bike.
“I alone cannot care for every single one and a helping hand would go a long way,” Logunova said.
And, of course, I found a video of Svetlana, nattily attired, going about Ceiling Cat’s work:
***********
Finally, I put up a tweet about this today, but thought I’d expand a bit more on it. It’s a post from the site Mallomaroking (click on screenshot):
Part of the report:
The cod icefish re-discovered and published in 1904 by Louis Dollo. The original caption says “Mangé par le chat de l’équipage de la Terror” or “Eaten by the Terror’s cat”!
The famous polar ships HMS Erebus and HMS terror had been in the ice long before Franklin took them to their doom in the Northwest Passage. James Clark Ross took them to the Antarctic from 1839-43 on a hugely successful voyage to find the South Magnetic Pole. Ross filled in many blanks on the map and discovered and named many places including Ross Island and Mount Erebus – one of the most spectacular volcanoes yet discovered.
Ross also took civilian experts to describe and write about their discoveries. These civilians produced vast scientific volumes to record their results.
Unfortunately the official reports show that the pathway to knowledge is sometimes more complicated than originally envisaged.
“When the ships were in the high latitude of 77°10’S., and long. 178½°, a fish was thrown up by the spray in a gale of wind, against the bows of the Terror, and frozen there. It was carefully removed … and a rough sketch was made of it by the surgeon, John Robertson, Esq., but before it could be put into spirits, a cat carried it away from his cabin, and ate it. The sketch is not sufficiently detailed [so] … we have introduced a copy of the design merely to preserve a memorial of what appears to be a novel form.”
Richardson, 1844, The zoology of the voyage of the H.M.S. Erebus & Terror
This was a tragedy as it was clearly a species new to science and it had some very unusual features including long fins and very pale flesh. Sixty years were to pass before a scientist on the expedition led by Adrien de Gerlache on the Belgica re-discovered the named the fish Robertson had drawn. Louis Dollo wrote to Joseph Dalton Hooker and received this reply
Cod icefish, found in Antarctic waters, are remarkable animals, as they are always in danger of having their blood and tissues freeze. They have a spleen that removes ice crystals from the blood, and antifreeze proteins that bind to small ice crystals to prevent them from growing.
And here’s another species taken down by cats: the flightless Stephens Island Wren (Traversia lyalli), once numerous in New Zealand but forced by predation to the small Stephens Island in the Cook Strait. While legend has it that the entire species was destroyed by Tibbles, a cat owned by the island’s lighthouse keeper, in fact the species was probably extirpated by the island’s numerous feral cats at the end of the 19th century. They were all destroyed by 1925, but by then the wren was extinct. Here’s a picture (1895 illustration by John Keulemans).
Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology has a specimen of the Stephens Island Wren, and I once asked famed evolutionist/ornithologist Ernst Mayr to show it to me. He did.
Jacques Hausser of Switzerland sent some photos of puffins, noting “I would have had time to select additional photos, but I preferred to hear Svante Pââbo’s lecture. Interesting !” So be it! His notes are below:
Earlier this summer I sent you several photos of sea birds and waders from the Shetland. Probably because of my chronic distraction, I just forgot the really iconic (and really cute) species of these islands: the Atlantic Puffin, Fratercula arctica. “Fratercula” means little brother, or little monk. Probably due to changes in the abundance and distribution of their main food, the sand eels, the species has recently strongly plummeted, but not as dramatically as shown by some papers.
Proudly sitting in front of its burrow. They mostly use abandoned rabbit holes, (somebody told me they can actually expel the real owner), but can dig it themselves if necessary. Their curious and colorful bill fades (yes! at least the superficial layer) every autumn and regrows in the spring.
Unlike the other Alcidae, the razorbill and the guillemots, the puffin walks normally and can even run. This one was running to his burrow after waiting for a while until some lady, innocently sitting over the entrance, left. You have to be careful when you visit a colony!
The short wings of the puffin are used both to fly in the air and under the water (photo by my daughter):
As we visited the Shetland early in June, we didn’t see adults bringing back sand-eels to their young. Actually, they were just preparing their nests, as shown here (photo by my daughter).
The binocular vision field doesn’t seem to be very large in this species. But it is large enough to catch swift fishes!
On October 27, 1904, the first underground New York City Subway line opened; it was the IRT Ninth Avenue line and the fare was 5¢. On this day in 1936, Mrs. Wallis Simpson got her divorce decree, which enabled her to marry King Edward VIII of England, in turn causing him to abdicate the throne on December 11. (He was head of the Church of England, which didn’t allow people to marry a divorced person if their spouse was still alive.) Here’s Edward’s abdication speech to his people:
On October 27, 1954, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. became the first black general in the United States Air Force. Exactly 13 years later (remember this?), Catholic Priest Philip Berrigan and three others poured blood on Selective Service records to protest the Vietnam War. They were all sentenced to six years in prison. You can read about Berrigan’s antiwar demonstrations here, and a photo of the blood-pouring is below:
On this day in 1997, we experienced the stock market “mini-crash”, with the Dow Jones average dropping 554.26 points to 7161.15. Finally, exactly a year ago, Catalonia declared its independence from Spain. It didn’t work; Spain removed the entire government and imprisoned 7 Catalan ministers, while the President of Catalonia fled.
Notables born on this day include Isaac Singer (1811; the sewing machine guy, not the writer), Theodore Roosevelt (1858), Dylan Thomas (1914), Sylvia Plath (1932), and John Cleese (1939). Those who died on October 27 include Squizzy Taylor (1927, shot by a fellow gangster) and Lou Reed (2013).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is asked to get back to work, but pretends not to understand.
A: Hili, end of siesta.
Hili: What? Is it already time for dinner?
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, koniec sjesty.
Hili: Co? Już pora na obiad?
Reader Nilou spotted an autobiography by a person with my name, and it’s not a happy one. Voilà: Devil’s Child, with a sad plot. Note: THIS ISN’T ME!
What’s amusing is the Amazon listing of which books were purchased by those who bought Devil’s Child:
A tweet from Reader Barry, showing The Way Things Should Be:
Matthew adds to this tweet about an Iranian skeleton, “She had good teeth, too!”
5,000-year-old prosthetic eye made from a mixture of natural tar and animal fat. This incredible object was found near the city of Zabol in Iran. The world's earliest prosthetic eye, which was once painted gold, was worn by an ancient priestess who stood 6’ tall. #goldeneyepic.twitter.com/BfvPznPPs6
Tweets from Grania who says of the first, “This guy is unwell.” That’s stating it mildly!
Fake sexual assault victims. Fake refugees. Now fake mail bombs. We are all learning how the media left are masters of distortion, deflection & deception
Another. (I’ve tried to brush my teeth with shaving cream several times.)
Was so tired after making lunch I sat down to resume watching TV. I tried to change the channel. Nothing happened because I was in fact holding a cucumber – the TV remote was in the salad drawer of the fridge
In his weekly column in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan, inexorably moving leftwards, still chastises Democrats for failing to deal with immigration—something that Trump is making hay out of as the caravan from Central American inevitably heads northwards. Sullivan notes that the Democratic failure is promoting authoritarianism in the U.S. and putting a strain on liberal democracy, but not because of the burden of immigrants. It’s because the electorate sees illegal immigration as a problem, and until the Democrats address it one way or the other, and do so explicitly, the public, thinking Dems are in favor of open borders, are going to support Trump. Here’s his piece (click on screenshot). Read the whole thing, and you’ll see that Sullivan favors humane immigration laws, despises Trump’s policies, and abhors separating children from their families.
His analysis takes national sentiment about immigration as a given, but for the time being that’s something we simply must deal with. I’ll leave you with Andrew’s words, with which I agree, especially the bit in bold:
All of it is putting unprecedented strain on liberal democracy in the West itself. The connection between mass migration and the surge in far-right parties in Europe is now indisputable. Without this issue, Donald Trump would not be president. As we can see right now in front of our eyes, elections can turn on this. Which is why Trump is hyping this caravan story to the heavens — and why, perhaps, the last few weeks have seemed less promising for a “blue wave.” David Frum is right: “If liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals will not do.” And unless the Democrats get a grip on this question, and win back the trust of the voters on it, their chance of regaining the presidency is minimal. Until one Democratic candidate declares that he or she will end illegal immigration, period, shift legal immigration toward those with skills, invest in the immigration bureaucracy, and enforce the borders strongly but humanely, Trump will continue to own this defining policy issue in 2020.
This is not a passing crisis. It is the new normal, and its optics do nothing but intensify the cultural panic that is turning much of the West to authoritarianism as a response. The porousness of the West’s borders are, in other words, becoming a guarantee of the West’s liberal democratic demise. This particular caravan will take a while to make it to the U.S. border, if it ever does. It will surely lose some followers on the way. It may peter out altogether.
But the caravan as a symbol? Its days are just beginning.
