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.
New Jesus and Mo strip called “jump”, comes with the tags generation snowflake, political correctness, Trump. And indeed, he seems to be talking about Trump as an end to “political correctness,” which it’s not.
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, November 23, and in the U.S. it’s the day before Thanksgiving, so most people will either be taking off today or working in a desultory way. And for once it’s a decent food day: National Espresso Day. I’ll celebrate by putting an extra shot into my quotidian latte. It’s also Buy Nothing Day, an American protest against the rampant consumerism that follows Thanksgiving (“Black Friday”).
On this day in 1963, according to Wikipedia, “The BBC broadcasts the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ (starring William Hartnell), the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world’s longest running science fiction drama.” Someone said yesterday that episode was broadcast on November 22, so we have a divergence of opinion. On this day in 1992, the first smartphone, the IBM Simon, debuted at COMDEX in Las Vegas. How far we’ve come since then; in my childhood I thought that phones that showed video of your caller were something of the far distant future—the Jetson Era.
Notables born on this day include José Clemente Orozco (1883), Susan Anspach (1942 ♥, one of the stars, along with Jack Nicholson, of a favorite movie of my twenties, “Five Easy Pieces”), and Bruce Hornsby (1954, known for his excellent song “The Way It Is”, which you should definitely watch here) Those who died on this day include Roald Dahl (1990) and Junior Walker (1995). Let’s remember Walker with his most famous Motown hit, “What does it take (to win your love)” (1969). I love the saxophone bits and the way Walker says, “Gonna blow for you now” before his solos. This is a great song; here’s a live version from Letterman (the original recording is here).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili Saw Something:
Hili: I have a vision.
A: And what were you eating?
In Polish:Hili: Mam wizję.
Ja: A co zjadłaś?
Here’s a video of Gus’s first foray. This one is really for the diehard Gus fan, it’s a bit long, but he’s so slow sometimes. I do like the bit when he really doesn’t want to put down his front right paw and the bit at the end when he zigzags back toward the house in my footprints.
Finally, someone made a TrumpCat by putting a ginger tabby’s collected fur on his head. It was inevitable.
I’ve sent out tons of Kelly Houle’s fantastic Darwin greeting cards, and was disappointed to learn that they were out of stock and that no more were available. Here’s what they look like: they are gorgeous, with Darwin’s famous “I think” phylogeny, and the memorable phrase from the final paragraph of The Origin—all in heavy raised gold ink. The plastic box with a gold band comes with matching heavy envelopes and a gold sticker to seal each one. (The cards are blank inside so you can write your own Darwinian message.)
Click image to enlarge:
After I hectored Kelly about this for a while, she finally contacted the printer and found out that the price has gone up, but they’ll print a run if she can get 10 boxes or more pre-ordered. You can order them at this link on eBay at Kelly’s site for $45 a box of 8 with envelopes and gold seals, along with $5 shipping, An extra: if you order one or more boxes before midnight GMT on Sunday, 11/27, you will be entered into a drawing for one of Kelly’s original paintings.
Kelly didn’t ask me to put up this post, but I think evolution people should have a chance to get these unique cards. They make an extra-special greeting to the naturalists and evolution lovers in your life. And they’re a gazillion times better than the ordinary card you’d pay $5 for in a store.
Ex-Muslim Ali Rizvi‘s new book. The Atheist Muslim, is out today, and if you click on the screenshot you can go to the Amazon link. I read the book in draft form and provided a blurb for the back cover, so I obviously think it’s worth reading. It’s an interweaving of his personal journey away from Islam combined with more theological and political arguments against the religion—from one who was an adherent. Since none of the Four Horsepersons was a Muslim, this is a good addition to the New Atheist literature—a complement to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s more personal narratives in her first two books (and her more theological/political arguments in her latest).
There’s a review at Publisher’s Weekly that is pretty much spot on. Read the book more for the arguments against Islam, which are very good, than for the personal stuff.
When Trump was elected, most of us expected that we’d see an upsurge of racist acts and words, and that indeed has happened. It’s as if suddenly the darker side of many Trump voters was given license to come out into the sun.
It’s reprehensible, but nothing is more reprehensible than what happened in Washington on Saturday, when the right-winger and white-supremacist Richard B. Spencer, described as a leader of the “alt-right” (I don’t know what that term really means) gave a display of such disgusting racism before his followers that it turns my stomach. Indeed, it was nothing more than a paean to the Nazi version of Nordic superiority, complete with Nazi words (“Lügenpresse,” or lying press, “hail Trump”), criticisms of the Jews, and even Hitler-style salutes, which Spencer incited in the 3-minute video below.
Here are a few articles from today’s New York Times article on the meeting
In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.
But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”
As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.
Have a look at this 3-minute excerpt of Spencer’s speech from The Atlantic:
More quotes:
But as the night wore on and most reporters had gone home, the language changed.
Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.
The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”
Mr. Spencer suggested that the news media had been critical of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign in order to protect Jewish interests. He mused about the political commentators who gave Mr. Trump little chance of winning.
“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews.
Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Spencer said, was “the victory of will,” a phrase that echoed the title of the most famous Nazi-era propaganda film. But Mr. Spencer then mentioned, with a smile, Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader who advocated a Jewish homeland in Israel, quoting his famous pronouncement, “If we will it, it is no dream.”
. . . “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.”
“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.
More members of the audience were on their feet as Mr. Spencer described the choice facing white people as to “conquer or die.”
If Trump is truly a leader, he will denounce this kind of odious racism, strongly, immediately, and in no uncertain terms. He did say this through a spokesman:
A spokesman for Donald Trump’s transition team sent a statement Monday night saying the president-elect condemns racism, following an “alt-right” conference over the weekend where white nationalists cheered his election.
“President-elect Trump has continued to denounce racism of any kind and he [was] elected because he will be a leader for every American,” Bryan Lanza, a spokesman for the Trump-Pence Transition said in a statement, according to CNN.
“To think otherwise is a complete misrepresentation of the movement that united Americans from all backgrounds.”
Well, that’s better than nothing, but imagine what Obama would have said. We’ll be facing a lot more of this, I suspect, and it’s now our brief to call it out, to protest to Trump, and insist that he denounce the wave of hatred that his candidacy has unleashed.
It was only a matter of time before one of the greatest Presidents and statesmen this country ever had, Thomas Jefferson, came under the Knife of Offense because he owned slaves. And indeed, that was a terrible form of oppression, one that caused Jefferson himself some cognitive dissonance, but he kept his slaves till he died, and of course fathered children by one of them. But he also called slavery an “abominable crime.” Many famous people engaged in morally repugnant activities, but I think we have to understand them, though not excuse them, as adhering to “regular behavior” at the time. And we shouldn’t, I think, let these flaws completely efface the good works such people did.
But now, as reported by The Washington Post, reason.com, and the University of Virginia (founded by Jefferson) student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, University of Virginia students have told the University’s president that they didn’t like his use of a Jefferson quotation in emails to the faculty
Several professors on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9.
In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves.
“Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes,’” Sullivan said in the email. “I encourage today’s U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility.”
The temerity of President Sullivan! And if that weren’t enough, she’d quoted Jefferson before. From the Post:
It wasn’t the first such email quoting Jefferson that Sullivan had written to the student body. As The Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga reported, a week earlier she sent one out after someone scrawled the word “terrorists” on the door of a dorm room where two Muslim students resided.
In that letter, Sullivan advocated peace on campus, writing, “Thomas Jefferson was the first American president to wrest power from an opposing party, yet he also provided a potent precedent for the peaceful transfer of power and the healing of a divided nation.”
Well, there’s nothing in either email about slavery, but merely quoting a slaveowner (who happened to have written the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom) was enough to arouse the Perpetually Offended. Noelle Hurd, an assistant professor of psychology at the University, drafted an open letter to the President, which was cosigned by 469 people:
Dear President Sullivan,
We are writing in response to the e-mails you have sent out to the university community in regards to civility in the current political climate. We appreciate you taking the time to acknowledge the issues facing our community and to encourage unity and inclusivity. We also wanted to take the opportunity to provide you with some constructive and respectful feedback regarding your messages.
We are incredibly disappointed in the use of Thomas Jefferson as a moral compass. Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. Other memorable Jefferson quotes include that Blacks are “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind,” and “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” Though we realize that some members of our university community may be inspired by quotes from Jefferson, we also realize that many of us are deeply offended by attempts on behalf of our administration to guide our moral behavior through their use.
In the spirit of inclusivity, we would like for our administration to understand that although some members of this community may have come to this university because of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, others of us came here in spite of it. For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotes undermines the messages of unity, equality, civility, and inclusivity that you are attempting to convey. We understand desires to maintain traditions at this university, but when these traditions threaten progress and reinforce notions of exclusion, it is time to rethink their utility. Thank you for your time.
I presume that means that we should no longer quote the Declaration of Independence, for it too was written largely by Jefferson. And remember that Darwin, though an abolitionist, saw blacks as inferior to whites, so we shouldn’t quote The Origin, either, should we?
As the Post further reports, at least one signer said that quoting Jefferson was sufficient to “undo progress.” I don’t believe that for a minute; it’s just cant from the Regressive left:
Politics professor Lawrie Balfour, who also signed the letter, said that a simple mention of Jefferson is enough to undo progress — a cycle that’s oft repeated during her decade and a half with the school.
“I’ve been here 15 years,” Balfour told the Cavalier Daily. “Again and again, I have found that at moments when the community needs reassurance and Jefferson appears, it undoes I think the really important work that administrators and others are trying to do.”
Here’s Sullivan’s in response to the letter (my emphasis):
In the long-standing tradition of open discourse, UVA faculty, staff, and students are free to express their opinions, as they did in a letter to me last week. I fully endorse their right to speak out on issues that matter to all of us, including the University’s complicated Jeffersonian legacy. We remain true to our values and united in our respect for one another even as we engage in vigorous debate.
Words have power. To quote any person is to acknowledge the potency of that person’s words. In my message last week, I agreed with Mr. Jefferson’s words expressing the idea that UVA students would help to lead our Republic. He believed that 200 years ago, and I believe it today. Quoting Jefferson (or any historical figure) does not imply an endorsement of all the social structures and beliefs of his time, such as slavery and the exclusion of women and people of color from the University.
We respond to the challenges of our times, and equity and inclusion are urgent leadership issues today. UVA is still producing leaders for our Republic, and from backgrounds that Mr. Jefferson could not have anticipated in 1825, when he wrote the words that I quoted. Today’s leaders are women and men, members of all racial and ethnic groups, members of the LGBTQ community, and adherents of all religious traditions. All of them belong at today’s UVA, whose founder’s most influential and most quoted words were “. . . all men are created equal.” Those words were inherently contradictory in an era of slavery, but because of their power, they became the fundamental expression of a more genuine equality today.
I think that’s a good response. Remember that morality has changed, as Steve Pinker documented so well in The Better Angels of our Nature. What is considered unacceptable by today’s lights was often acceptable in the past. That doesn’t mean that if someone thought hard and long about slavery back then, and witnessed it, that they should have been okay with it. What it means is that morality is not only biological but cultural, and the cultural part, which changes over time, is transmitted to us from our parents, peers, and other important figures. If they tell us that slavery is okay, as many did in Jefferson’s day, then we’ll be brought up thinking that it’s okay, and it would be hard to think your way out of it—just as it’s hard to think your way out of long-inculcated religious beliefs and moral strictures. Now that we’ve realized that slavery is not okay, it has become unacceptable to own slaves or speak about other groups the way Jefferson did.
We have to remember these issues before we begin demonizing figures of the past. And we have to balance their indoctrination by their milieu against the genuine good that people like Jefferson did. It’s simply unacceptable to ban any quotes by Jefferson because they undo progress. They don’t. One can hold progressive views on some issues (i.e., Jefferson’s views on religious freedom, which are now part of American law) and ones now seen as immoral on other issues. Words like those below are the crying of spoiled children, even if they be faculty; and they’re a failure to recognize that the world, especially when we consider the values of the past, is complicated.
For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotes undermines the messages of unity, equality, civility, and inclusivity that you are attempting to convey.
In connection with my lecture on religion to children at an international school in Dongguan, China (on the mainland), I was interviewed by the Dongguan HubHao, an English-language magazine that I believe is written for expats. That interview is up, and perhaps doesn’t say much to regulars here, but I’ll post it for the record.
Here I am with the students and a teacher.
We have few bird photos today, and I importune readers to send me their good wildlife photos, as I’m running a bit low.
Reader Garry VanGelderen sent this photo and a caption:
Here is a female pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) on my suet feeding log.
Stephen Barnard sent this photo of a photos of a belted kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon) some time ago
And from John Harshman:
On a recent trip to the Panoche Valley (a bit southeast of the Bay area), the most interesting bit was the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wintering mountain bluebirds (Sialia currucoides). As these birds usually do, they were feeding on insects on the ground, often hovering at low altitude or perching on plant stems to spot the next meal. For every bird visible in the first two photos there are another 10 in the grass.
