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.
Do you know from cats? Take the nine-question BBC cat quiz below and report your score (click on screenshot). Trust me—this is way better than their dumb evolution quiz.
I missed one: one of the questions about ancient Egypt:
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And a Kavenaugh Kat meme from reader Merilee (you knew this was coming, didn’t you?):
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Finally, the Atlantic reports on the perennial battle of feral cats versus urban rats. Sadly, the rats win, as the article (click on screenshot) indicates. Be sure to click on the link to “Pizza Rat“.
The article is about a study of marked rats in a Brooklyn recycling plant, with the scientists intent on studying rat pheromones. But they didn’t anticipate that cats would impinge on their study, so the cats became part of the study. The first link below goes to the scientific paper in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. An excerpt from the Atlantic piece:
For scientists who try to control every possible variable in their experiments, the cats could have been a disaster. There were five to seven felines, all feral. Parsons thinks they were drawn to the pheromones the research team was using in the recycling plant. He didn’t want to scrap the research project, so he and his team decided to roll with it: They would now study how cats affect rat populations.
The answer seems like it would be obvious. For as long as humans have lived with cats, we have been using them to keep rodents in check. In severalcities inthe United States, municipal rodent-control and cat-rescue groups have put homeless cats to “work” by releasing them in rat-heavy neighborhoods. In Chicago, the program was so popular that there was a six-month waiting list to get a cat.
But the results from the Brooklyn recycling plant are far less flattering to cats: They are absolutely lousy rat-killers. Over a period of five months, the motion-triggered cameras captured just two successful kills. And this was in a place crawling with rats; the population was estimated at around 150. The cameras captured 20 other stalking attempts and one other failed attempt to kill a rat.
These results actually match what rat experts have been saying all along: Cats are not a good way of controlling city rats.
Here’s a video from the article showing a cat completely ignoring a passing rat. Oy!
My tank is very low, so do send in your good wildlife photos and videos. All the readers will appreciate it, as of course will I.
First, a video from Rick Longworth:
As fall begins the water birds have been grouping for flights south. The Canada geese (Branta canadensis) leave the river in the morning to forage and they collect again in the evening. I particularly like to watch them descending by flipping over to rapidly lose altitude. In aviation this is called “slipping”, although planes do not roll completely inverted as the geese sometimes do. Most of the smaller birds shown are American coots (Fulica americana).
Some photos from reader Liz Strahle, with her IDs:
It’s almost the end of September, which has 30 days. For it’s Caturday, September 29, 2018, and National Coffee Day. I suspect about 90% or more of us will be observing it. It’s also World Heart Day, to remind you that heart disease and stroke are still the world’s leading causes of death. Coffee ameliorates these conditions (note: I am not a doctor; I just play one in the lab).
On September 29, 1789, the first United States Congress adjourned. It was much better then than now, wasn’t it? On this day in 1864, the Treaty of Lisbon set the boundaries between Spain and Portugal, and abolished the tiny (27 km²) microstate of Couto Misto, which consisted of three villages. On this day in 1923, the British Mandate for Palestine went into effect, creating Mandatory Palestine. Optional Palestine didn’t arise until much later.
And here’s a weird event. On September 29, 1940, according to Wikipedia, “Two Avro Ansons collide in mid-air over New South Wales, Australia, remain locked together after colliding, and then land safely.” The link takes you to the weird event, with the result pictured below. Here’s a short description:
The accident was unusual in that the aircraft involved, two Avro Ansons of No. 2 Service Flying Training School RAAF, remained locked together after colliding, and then landed safely. The collision stopped the engines of the upper Anson, but those of the machine underneath continued to run, allowing the pair of aircraft to keep flying. Both navigators and the pilot of the lower Anson bailed out. The pilot of the upper Anson found that he was able to control the interlocked aircraft with his ailerons and flaps, and made an emergency landing in a nearby paddock. All four crewmen survived the incident, and the upper Anson was repaired and returned to flight service.But how did they turn off the lower engine?
But how did they turn off the engine of the lower plane?
Finally, on this day in 2013, 44 people at the College of Agriculture in Nigeria were killed by members of Boko Haram.
Notables born on this day include the Roman general Pompey (106 B.C.), Caravaggio (1571), Horatio Nelson (1758), Trofim Lysenko (1898), Enrico Fermi (1901), Gene Autry (1907), Michelangelo Antonioni (1912), Stanley Kramer (1913), Jerry Lee Lewis (1935), Lech Walesa (1943), and Suzzy Roche (1956). I count Caravaggio among the ten greatest painters of all time, and here’s a favorite, completed around 1600:
Those who died on September 29 include Émile Zola (1902), Rudolf Diesel (1913), Carson McCullers (1967), W. H. Auden (1973), Casey Stengel (1975), and Tony Curtis (2010).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants to give a spare mouse to a hedgehog, but I don’t think hedgehogs eat mice. . . .
Hili: Do you think the hedgehog is still in the garden?
Cyrus: I don’t know. Why?
Hili: I’ve caught one mouse too many and it would be a pity if it should go to waste.
In Polish:
Hili: Myślisz, że ten jeż w ogrodzie jeszcze tam jest?
Cyrus: Nie wiem, dlaczego pytasz?
Hili: Złapałam o jedną mysz za dużo, a szkoda, żeby się zmarnowała.
Tweets from Matthew: The first mashup between Kavanaugh’s testimony and Pulp Fiction is all over the Internet. It’s one of the best examples of this genre I’ve seen:
A poignant image of Guy the Gorilla in captivity at London Zoo c.1958 by Wolf Suschitzky. Taken by poking the camera through the bars. Wolf said he thought that this was his best photo. pic.twitter.com/Dhm33HZrho
If the Founders traveled forward in time and discovered we were arguing about the virginity of a Supreme Court nominee, I suspect they would beat us all.
A serious tweet, which counts to Kavanaugh’s credibility. Of course he could have been lying back then. . .
Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh was a virgin for many years after high school. But he claimed otherwise in a conversation with me during our freshman year in Lawrance Hall at Yale, in the living room of my suite.
Duck update: Honey was gone this morning, though she was here with James all day yesterday. At 7:30 a.m., James was again swimming disconsolately around the pond, and even attempting to quack, though not much of a noise came out. (Previously he’d just uttered low quack-y noises, but now he opened his bill wide and tried a real quack, with pretty dire results.) I’m convinced he was mourning Honey’s absence.
Then, at 10:30, Honey was back! Lord knows where she went; this is a real emotional roller coaster, but surely presages the Big Migration. At any rate, here’s James sitting on the “bathtub” this morning waiting for his mate. He’s standing on one leg and stretching a wing. I like this picture a lot. James is a good mate and I don’t think Honey can do better:
Let’s end the week with some humorous wildlife photos, in particular the finalists from the 2008 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. You can see all the photos here, but I’ll put up my favorite five six. Coincidentally, three of them involve bears.
This just in: the Senate Judiciary Committee voted (11-10) along party lines to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, but then Republican Senator Jeff Flake (who’s retiring after this term) said he won’t vote for Kavanaugh in the final confirmation unless there’s an FBI investigation that clears him. The NYT report is below. The vote, I suppose, was predictable, but I still don’t think Kavanaugh will wind up sitting on the Court.
One thing that bothered me about Kavanaugh’s testimony yesterday was that he was unwilling to either call for Mark Judge to appear and be questioned, or for the FBI to investigate him. If the man was innocent, why not? Those actions would, if he didn’t commit assault, only serve to help him. Despite Kavanaugh’s truculence, if there’s an FBI investigation—and now I think there should be—it might resolve both of these issues. I want to hear Judge’s testimony under oath.
I don’t know how Kavanaugh’s final vote will play out in the midterm elections; people have guessed that it would either help the Republicans if he’s voted down or hurt them if he’s confirmed, but the political season in America is so crazy that I’m taking a break from hazarding guesses.
I reported recently that John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan (UM), refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student because she was applying to study in Israel. (Cheney-Lippold adheres to the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement [BDS] against Israel).
Cheney-Lippold had originally agreed to write the student a letter, and then changed his mind when he found out the student wanted to go to Israel, so his “letter deplatforming” wasn’t a refusal based on poor qualifications. In fact, he offered to write her letters for non-Israeli programs. He just didn’t want to help her study in a country he despised.
That struck me as an unconscionable dereliction of academic duty: the injection of personal sentiments into student mentorship in a way that actually hurt the student. So I wrote a letter to the President of the University of Michigan, to Cheney-Lippold’s chairperson (copied to him), and to all the trustees of the University of Michigan. I’ve had a few responses from University officials, but the one that meant the most came just a while ago. It was from a representative of UM’s Office of Public Affairs. I won’t name the person as it’s not necessary, but the response is kosher.
The upshot is that both the UM President and the Faculty Senate have, within the last ten days, issued three statements decrying the injection of political views into student letters of recommendation. I suspect this means that Cheney-Lippold and others like him can no longer refuse to write letters for students wanting to work in one or another place that the professor doesn’t like. Of course, professors can just give a blanket refusal without tendering a reason, which is surely what will happen.
Anyway, here’s part of the letter I got from the UM representative. The emphases are mine:
At the University of Michigan, we believe that injecting personal views into a decision regarding support for our students is counter to our values and expectations as an institution. In this particular situation, the student has asked that we respect this as a private matter.
President Schlissel underscored this position during a public Board of Regents meeting Sept. 20 when he said, clearly and emphatically, “The University of Michigan strongly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.”
“The academic aspirations of our students – and their academic freedom – are fundamental to the University of Michigan, and our teaching and research missions,” the president said. “We are committed as an institution to support our students’ academic growth.
“The regents, executive officers and I have been deeply engaged in this matter. We will be taking appropriate steps to address this issue and the broader questions it has raised.”
The University of Michigan, like other institutions and employers, keeps personnel matters private. But I want to assure you that we take issues related to support for our students with the utmost seriousness.
Also, earlier this week the executive arm of our Faculty Senate approved a “Statement on Letters of Reference,” stating, in part, that “faculty should let a student’s merit be the primary guide for determining how and whether to provide such a letter.” You can read more about this action here.
The university has consistently opposed any boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education. No academic department or any other unit at the University of Michigan has taken a stance that departs from this long-held university position.
President Schlissel’s full statement on this matter as well as previous university statements opposing any boycott of Israeli academic institutions can be found on the university’s website here.
The President’s statement and the UM’s position are given below (click on screenshot if you want to go to the page):
UM has long refused to engage in academic boycotts, so the last half of the letter is old news. But the first bit about “support for students” (read: letters of recommendation) is new. And the President’s letter is clearly aimed directly at Cheney-Lippold.
As the representative mentioned, a further resolution on this issue was approved last Monday by a faculty committee; this is reported by the University Record, a UM news site, in the following article (click on screenshot):
And the new resolution (my emphasis):
The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs approved a resolution Monday declaring faculty should let a student’s merit be the primary guide for determining how and when to provide letters of recommendation.
The resolution came out of SACUA’s discussion of a U-M faculty member’s recent refusal to provide a previously promised letter of recommendation for a student because she was seeking to study abroad in Israel.
The discussion took place in executive session.
President Mark Schlissel said last week that the faculty member’s view does not reflect the position of U-M nor any department or unit on campus, and he reiterated the university strongly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
In SACUA’s statement on letters of reference, which was unanimously approved, SACUA affirmed its commitment to the American Association of University Professors’ Statement of Professional Ethics, noting the following section related to a professor’s educational responsibilities:
“As teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students,” the section reads. “They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline. Professors demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors. Professors make every reasonable effort to foster honest academic conduct and to ensure that their evaluations of students reflect each student’s true merit.
“They respect the confidential nature of the relationship between professor and student. They avoid any exploitation, harassment, or discriminatory treatment of students. They acknowledge significant academic or scholarly assistance from them. They protect their academic freedom.”
In their resolution, SACUA members said, “Within the guidelines set forth by the American Association of University Professors, and ‘demonstrate(ing) respect for students,’ faculty should let a student’s merit be the primary guide for determining how and whether to provide such a letter.”
SACUA is the nine-member executive arm of the university’s central faculty governance system, which also includes the Senate Assembly and the Faculty Senate.
So now we have a policy where there was none before. And it’s a good one.
I know that several readers of this site wrote letters or called the University, and that the school had also gotten some negative publicity in the press over Cheney-Lippold’s actions. I don’t know if our letters had any influence on the policy, but surely all the negative press publicity did. Thanks to everyone who wrote in, and realize that letters can sometimes make a difference. I suspect Cheney-Lippold’s tuchas is smarting a bit this week!
Kudos to the University of Nevada at Reno for the way it handled a sensitive issue while preserving freedom of speech on campus. The affair is described in the Inside Higher Ed (IHE) article below (click on screenshot).
In short, photos were taken of the white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville last year, and the pictures were sent around with requests to identify the people in them. One of the alt-right protestors turned out to be Peter Cvetanovic, a student at the University of Nevada at Reno (UNR). The photo was forwarded, with identification, to UNR President Marc Johnson. Here it is, with Cvetanovic at the right:
(From article): Peter Cvjetanovic (right) along with neo-Nazis, alt-right and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., last fall. Photo: Getty Images
Johnson knew what would happen when this became public: Cvjetanovic would be demonized, of course, but there would also be calls for his expulsion. And those calls began, by the gazillions. In response, as the article reports,
As thousands of social media posts, emails and phone calls began pouring in, urging the university to expel the young white supremacist, Johnson had one clear, immediate thought: Cvjetanovic must graduate.
Let there be no mistake: Cvetanovic is a white supremacist, though he later said that calling himself that was unwise. He’s called himself “pro-white” and uses the code language of racists:
In a text message to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Cvjetanovic said he went to Charlottesville “to honor the heritage of white culture here in the United States. I recognize the need to acknowledge both the good and bad of white history as it has made the nation we have now. All people have the right to their culture and their history including jews, african-americans, and white americans. I do not advocate for violence and certainly not the death of anyone.”
In an extensive video interview posted to YouTube the following week, Cvjetanovic said he had expected the Charlottesville rally “to be much more lighthearted” than it was. “I was just going to listen to them and then go home. That was all I wanted to do. I didn’t expect things to happen the way they did.”
Cvjetanovic said his plan was to march silently, listen to speakers and leave. But when the crowd started to chant, he did, too — the iconic photo, he said, was taken while marchers engaged with counterprotesters.
“I got caught in the heat of the moment,” he said, shouting loudly to be heard by the opposing group — he recalled that the chant going up at the time was roughly: “This is our home. I will fight to defend my home. We have the right to stay here as well. You can’t replace us.”
So he’s not someone I’d want to know, or whose ideology I sympathize with. Still, the University held firm in the face of widespread calls for the student’s dismissal. They consulted the university regulations, which didn’t find that Cvjetanovic violated any codes, and called the Charlottesville police to see if he’d been arrested (he hadn’t). They also offered Cvetanovic protection, as well as the opportunity to take classes online instead of in person (he refused).
President Johnson also clarified that the university wouldn’t expel Cvjetanovic or fire him from his job as a driver for the campus safe-escort service (he quit anyway). But the administration was also sensitive to concerns of the other students and faculty. The University issued a statement denouncing bigotry based on race, religion, politics, sexual orientation, national origin, and so on, and offered counseling to students who were disturbed by Cvjetanovic’s presence on campus.
As so often happens, people still asked for the student to be expelled, and on the familiar grounds that his presence made them feel “unsafe.” That, I think, is an excuse: what they mean by “unsafe” isn’t that they fear Cvjetanovic would attack them or incite violence (he promised in a statement not to threaten or harm anyone at the university), but simply that they feel threatened by his views. Here’s some of the pushback to Cvjetanovic’s presence on campus (these quotes from IHE):
That week, more than 700 protesters took part in a Black Lives Matter event that wound from the campus into downtown Reno. A Change.org petition made the rounds online, demanding that the university expel Cvjetanovic.“By Keeping Him at the School,” the petition read, “THE UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO IS AS RACIST AS WHITE SUPREMACIST PETER CVJETANOVIC.” Organizers closed it after gathering 36,579 signatures. Phi Kappa Phi revoked Cvjetanovic’s membership, saying the Charlottesville protest was “disturbing, disheartening and contrary to our values.”
Many classmates, it turned out, were not bashful about saying how uncomfortable they were to have Cvjetanovic around.“It makes it feel like the university was almost prioritizing one person’s First Amendment rights over the comfort and safety of others,” said Rachel Katz, a senior studying journalism and criminal justice. In an interview, she said, “If other kids feel like their lives are threatened, is that person’s education that important?” . . . While UNR pushed to balance free speech and tolerance, Katz said, “It’s just not enough. They’re kind of letting hate win.”
No, they’re not letting hate win; they’re supporting freedom of speech. For what is one person’s “hate” (and I freely acknowledge that Cvjetanovic is a disgusting bigot) is another person’s political ideology, and UNR was committed to not punishing students for their ideologies, no matter how reprehensible.
Note that Katz is raising the “comfort and safety of others” trope. Comfort? Well, too bad, Ms. Katz; nobody guarantees that you’ll always be comfortable in college. In fact, if you are, you’re not having your ideas challenged. As Mary Dugan, the university’s general counsel said, “You’re going to have conflicts on a college campus. If you didn’t it would frankly be a pretty protected [place] and probably the sort of atmosphere that wouldn’t prepare you for what you’re gong to find in your real life, on your first day of work.” As for Katz’s worries about her safety, that’s just a red herring. Frankly, I’m tired of the “I feel unsafe” claim, and sometimes I just don’t believe it. It’s a mantra students have learned that works well in getting your enemies to shut up.
One Twitter user, another Nevada student who passed around the image, ID’d Cvjetanovic as a Phi Kappa Phi member and urged others: “DO NOT LET HIM GO UNSHAMED.” Soon an #ExpelPeterCvjetanovic hashtag popped up.
Protests at UNR continued into the spring, when an angry crowd met Cvjetanovic at an academic building after he defended his senior thesis. The Nevada Sagebrush, UNR’s student newspaper, reported that protesters had planned to sit at the back of the lecture hall holding signs but were locked out of the session by campus police. A video of the encounter that followed shows protesters meeting him outside the session and pursing him up a flight of stairs, shouting, “Run, Nazi, run!”
To their credit, a University official commented that the meeting was okay, as Cvejetanovic had to learn that his speech has consequences. He has to take being vilified, though perhaps being chased up a flight of stairs is a bit extreme. Another professor also raised the safety issue:
. . . a group of graduate psychology students asked if they could interview him to ask how he came to believe in white supremacy.At the forums, dozens of students spoke, she said. “It made my heart sing because these were freshmen — and this is about finding your voice. ‘What do I believe?’ and getting up in front of people and owning it. That was the beginning of their education here. It was fantastic.”Paul Mitchell, an African American UNR journalism professor, remembers it differently. He said many black students “expressed an opinion of not feeling safe” on campus post-Charlottesville.“When the perception is that just because you say a name but you’re not physically harming someone, that that person is not going to be impacted — that’s completely false,” he said.
Well, yes, of course one is impacted by views you don’t like. I am “impacted” when I hear anti-Semitic remarks. But it doesn’t make me feel unsafe, nor do I feel harmed, damaged, or assaulted. But even feeling that way doesn’t give one the right to censor those who make us uncomfortable. Imagine a campus on which censorship was tolerated or approved! That would be a bland a homogeneous campus indeed.
In the end, Cvetanovic graduated cum laude and is said to be studying in London. Let’s hope his bigotry wanes. But the big lesson here is that the University of Nevada at Reno behaved exactly as it should have, and in a way that shored up the freedom of speech that should undergird a good university. Kudos to them, and to President Johnson.
