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.
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.
Reader Mark Sturtevant sent some nice arthropod photos taken this summer. His comments are indented.
The first two pictures show very large robber flies that were within feet of each other, and they appear to be the same species. I suspect they are Proctacanthus. The first is a male, and the second, a female, is eating a green Halictid bee.
Next is a large wasp-mimicking fly known as a thick-headed fly (Physcocephala furcillata). Thick-headed flies grow as internal parasites in various insects, and this kind is thought to parasitize large bees. I occasionally come across a dead/dying bumble bee or carpenter bee, and it is possible that these had one of these flies.
Purple aster flowers are always popular with pollinators, so I have been cultivating a large number of them in my back yard. The next picture shows a crab spider (I think Mecaphesa sp.) lurking among the flowers. The next picture was taken the day after when the spider had caught a small ichneumon wasp.
Green darners (Anax junius) are among our larger and most alert dragonflies. Mature ones will fly pretty much all day, but young ones can not fly far. The next picture shows that it is possible to get very close to these insects at this time.
Finally, the last pictures are of a paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus) that has been parasitized by several ‘twisted-winged parasites’, which are really weird insects belonging to the order Strepsiptera. These insects that have been hard to classify. They were once considered related to beetles, and more recently they were considered closer to the flies. But it looks like their affinity to other insect orders has again been thrown into disarray. In any case these insects parasitize a range of hosts, but the ones I know best go after Hymenopterans.
Male Strepsipterans emerge from their host with a weird set of wings (see here), and they fly to find a female. Females lack limbs, and they only partially emerge from their host to produce a pheromone that attracts males. This wasp was hosting several females, and at this point it was pretty weak and unable to fly. After mating, fertilized Strepsipteran eggs hatch inside the mother and the larvae burst out of her. These mobile larvae must then hunt for another host to repeat the life cycle.
On this day, one day after leaving France, William the Conqueror landed in England, and the Norman Conquest began. And on September 28, 1781, American Continental Army forces, backed by our friends the French, defeated the British forces under General Cornwallis at Yorktown. This was the beginning of the end for the Brits in America. On this day in 1899, according to Wikipedia, “The first General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) defines the length of a meter as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of an alloy of platinum with ten percent iridium, measured at the melting point of ice.” That’s inconvenient, of course, and depends on one having the “standard bar.” Today the meter is defined like this:
The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299,792,458 of a second.
Now anybody can do this! On this day in 1928, Alexander Fleming noted that a mold growing in a Petri dish had killed the bacteria around it, leading to the discovery of penicillin and the award of a Nobel Prize 17 years later to Fleming, Florey, and Chain. On this day in 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed how to divide up Poland. Poor Poland! On September 28, 1941, Ted Williams finished the baseball season with a batting average of .406, the last time a major league player hit .400 or better for the season. The story of how he did it (a “great American fable” according to the video below) is a small tale of courage:
Before the final two games on September 28, a doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics, he was batting .39955, which would have been officially rounded up to .400. Red Sox manager Joe Cronin offered him the chance to sit out the final day, but he declined. “If I’m going to be a .400 hitter”, he said at the time, “I want more than my toenails on the line.” Williams went 6-for-8 on the day, finishing the season at .406.
He was just 23 years old Williams. was then drafted, served as a naval aviator in World War II, and returned to baseball for the 1946 season. His lifetime batting average was .344. Here’s a short documentary on the .406 season.
On this day in 1970, President Gamal Nasser of Egypt died of a heart attack. Exactly 25 years later, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Finally on September 28, 2008, Falcon 1, launched by SpaceX, became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to put a payload in orbit.
Notables born on this day include Georges Clemenceau (1841), William S. Paley (1901), Max Schmeling (1905), Ethel Rosenberg (1915), Tuli Kupferberg (1923), Brigette Bardot (1934), Christina Hoff Sommers (1950), Sylvia Kristel (1952), and Mira Sorvino and Moon Zappa (both 1967).
Those who died on this day include Herman Melville (1891), Louis Pasteur (1895), Edwin Hubble (1953), Harpo Marx (1964; real name Adolph Marx), Jon Dos Passos and Gamal Nasser (both 1970), Miles Davis (1991) and Pierre Trudeau (2000).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Miss Hili is having grandiose and solipsistic notions:
Hili: Do I look like a Sphinx?
A: You look like a female cat in an orchard.
Hili: Apparently you lack imagination.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy wyglądam jak sfinks?
Ja: Wyglądasz jak kotka w sadzie.
Hili: Pewnie brak ci wyobraźni.
A tweet from reader Barry, who characterizes it in two alternative ways:
“Hey, leave the fish alone, for Chrissake. He’s just trying to live.”
or
“No effing way you’re going to own that fish. I saw it first!”
Until and unless that day arrives, you can best chart the changes in left-wing culture by looking at what isn’t said and cannot be said without risking ostracism: the new works that aren’t written; the old works that can never be revived. When I listen to modern Labour supporters, I keep remembering Destiny, David Edgar’s play from 1976. Destiny is set during a by-election in a West Midlands town close to Enoch Powell’s Wolverhampton. A neo-fascist leader, inspired by the National Front types of the time, instructs his candidate that it is not good enough to tell voters that speculators and wreckers are destroying Britain: he has to say that they are Jewish speculators and wreckers.
Then in a line that has stayed with me since I was a teenager, the fascist leader asks the candidate what he would say if a voter told him that immigrants were just as British as he was. The candidate promptly gives the approved answer:
‘Just because a cat is born in a kipper box it doesn’t make it a kipper.’
It is a sign of how deep the rot has penetrated that the modern echo of the sentiment that, even if they live here, even if they and their parents and grandparents were born here, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants can never be truly British, comes not from a fascist or a gin-soaked Tory, but from Jeremy Corbyn. He said of Jews, who had argued against him at a meeting in Parliament, that despite ‘having lived in this country for a very long time – probably all their lives – they don’t understand English irony’.
Nor, ironically, do supposedly serious and committed artists, who boast of their willingness to tackle taboo subjects, but run for cover as soon as a truly hard question arises.
This next tweet is disturbing:
I saw this very phenomenon–methane bubbling out of arctic ponds–a couple weeks ago in northeastern Siberia.
It is the worst news I know of in terms of exacerbating global warming. https://t.co/UDmYlVp8y6
Maajid Nawaz is mad, and rightly so. Really, Brits, do you want the anti-Semitic Corbyn as your PM?
WATCH: this coward got directly paid by the theocratic Iranian State’s media arm (now banned in Britain) while they paraded a tortured journalist on TV, and he refuses to even say he regrets having done so, after being asked four times. But yeah.. NEVER KISS A TORY, and all that. https://t.co/fRBQhoJ0fS
Finally, some satire relevant to yesterday’s grilling by Senators, which itself was almost satire. (I didn’t know the FBI employed veterinarians.) Don’t miss the song.
I still think Kavanaugh will withdraw his name, or will be voted down.
Even without the accusations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, I would of course have called for a vote against him, as he’s a far right-wing %)((*&^@ who will tilt the Supreme Court in the wrong direction for decades to come. But after hearing the testimony of Christine Ford and much of the testimony from Kavanaugh today, my feeling is that yes, he’s guilty and lying about it, which means he committed perjury and is absolutely disqualified from the Court. I was also appalled by his demeanor, which seemed unhinged, aggressive, and rambling. That’s reason #3: he is entitled, angry, and lacks the decorum and objectivity of a Justice.
Of course he has a right to be angry if he’s innocent, although I don’t think he is. But he could have comported himself with a bit more decorum; he did himself no favors today.
None of us know where the truth lies, of course, and an FBI investigation is unlikely to tell us more than we know now. But in fact I already knew enough before the testimony even began today. All I can say is that I hope some Republicans feel a bit like I do, and vote against the man.
That said, let us entertain no hopes that if Kavanaugh goes, as I think he will, Trump will appoint somebody less Rightish. That’s not in the cards. All he’ll do is mandate a more thorough investigation of any Roe-opposing candidate waiting in the wings.
And if Ford is telling the truth, as I think she is, then I feel bad for her and can understand why she wanted to testify against the entitled, beer-swilling git who swaggered about in prep school. Yes, the alleged crime happened several decades ago, but if he’s lying about it now, he’s a perjurer.
But of course you may feel differently. None of us know what really happened; all we can do is say how we feel about the conflicting testimony. And I am consoled by knowing that I would have voted against Kavanaugh from the very first week he was nominated.
There’s nothing to be happy about here, for another conservative loon is just offstage. Correction: I’d be a little bit pleased if some Republicans saw the light.
Reader Michael first called my attention to a video that’s all over the internet, but rightly so. After all, it shows a guy in a kayak paddling along peacefull, and all of a sudden a seal emerges from the water and slaps the guy in the face with an octopus! What the bloody hell is going on here? Is the seal mad? Why would he want to sacrifice his meal by slapping a kayaker?
This took place, by the way, off the South Island of New Zealand.
Taiyo Masuda, 23, caught the seal on video and says the group did not realise at first what the seals were doing.
“Right around lunchtime, several seals started to swim around, we just thought they were refreshing their body, yet apparently they were seeking food,” Mr Masuda told Reuters.
“One seal swims right next to us, having an octopus in his mouth, pops right up to the surface next to us, then tries to chew up the leg but ended up slapping our face!!”
It all happened when a group of people were out kayaking off the coast of Kaikōura. The group are all official content creators for GoPro and had their cameras on at the right moment.
Kiwi Kyle Mulinder told 7News in Australia that they had watched the seal have a tussle with the octopus for a while.
But they could not have predicted they would end up being involved.
“We were just sitting out in the middle of the ocean and then this huge male seal appeared with an octopus and he was thrashing him about for ages,” he told 7News.
The seal then went off with the octopus and the group thought the tussle was over. They were wrong.
Out of nowhere, the seal re-emerges from the water and slaps Mulinder right in the face with the octopus.
“I was like ‘mate, what just happened?’ It was weird because it happened so fast but I could feel all the hard parts of the octopus on my face,” he said.
The hilarious incident appeared to have put an end to the fight between the two animals as the octopus, once detached from the man’s face, clung onto the kayak for a while.
My guess: the seal was trying to kill the octopus by slapping it against a nearby object (the kayak), and the man happened to be in the way.
