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.
by Matthew Cobb
I have no idea if this true, or how you could be confident it was (or wasn’t) correct, but it could easily be right. Jack is Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London.
Four out of every five individual animals on Earth today is a nematode worm.
There are a lot of nematode worms.[Pic by @CSIROnews] pic.twitter.com/kctr5LH53r
— Jack Ashby (@JackDAshby) October 22, 2016
Yes, we all know that Bob Dylan is weird and secretive, and we also know of people like Jean-Paul Sartre who declined a Nobel literature award. (One other person refused it—not a Literature prize—and several scientists were forced to refuse it by their totalitarian government. Can you name them?) We also know that Bob Dylan is laconic.
It’s okay for him to be weird, though, as his music was often superb (some, though, claim he doesn’t deserve a Nobel Prize for literature). And I remember what a jerk Dylan was, at least in his younger days; you can see that clearly in the 1967 movie Don’t Look Back.
But I hoped he’d grown up at least a little. Apparently not, though—at least according to many reports on his behavior after he nabbed the literature Nobel. He hasn’t acknowledged it, hasn’t mentioned it, and hasn’t even talked to the Swedish Academy, who had to give him the news through one of his friends.
A prominent member of the academy that awards the Nobel literature prize has described this year’s laureate, Bob Dylan, as arrogant, citing his total silence since the award was announced last week.
The US singer-songwriter has not responded to repeated phone calls from the Swedish Academy, nor reacted in any way in public to the news.
It’s impolite and arrogant,” said the academy member, Swedish writer Per Wastberg, in comments aired on SVT public television.
On the evening of 13 October, the day the literature prize winner was announced, Dylan played a concert in Las Vegas during which he made no comment at all to his fans.
He ended the concert with a version of the Frank Sinatra hit “Why Try To Change Me Now?”, taken to be a nod towards his longstanding aversion to the media.
Every 10 December Nobel prize winners are invited to Stockholm to receive their awards from King Carl XVI Gustaf and give a speech during a banquet.
The academy still does not know if Dylan plans to come.
“This is an unprecedented situation,” Wastberg said.
Dylan’s behavior is reprehensible. Though it may be a form of rebellion, a denigration of awards in general, an attempt to maintain his reclusive image, or all of the above, there’s nothing admirable in it. Let him refuse the Prize if he wishes, but the least he owes the Swedish Academy is either an acknowledgment or a polite refusal.
I’m on the fence about whether Dylan deserves the award (in my view, he hasn’t written anything great since a few cuts on “Blood on the Tracks”), but anybody who thinks he’s cool for not acknowledging the prize is clueless.
The leaves are beginning to turn here, and are falling from the trees into Botany Pond, right next to my building. They make the surface of the pond look like an Impressionist painting.
The vegetation in this photo is nearly all reflections in the pond. Only the branch in the center, and a bit at the top, is unreflected plant matter.
In the famous Alan Sokal hoax, now twenty years old, a physicist got a bogus, post-modern paper accepted by the pomo journal Social Text. Now the tables are turned—sort of. This time, as the Guardian reported yesterday, a non-physicist hoaxed a physics conference by submitting an abstract, immediately accepted, that was written almost completely by computer. It was complete gibberish, proving that nobody looked at the paper, and that the conference was probably just a garbage meeting designed to make money.
I didn’t know what iOS autocomplete was, but apparently it’s an Apple program that can be used to finish written text with stuff that’s generated by computer (correct me if I’m wrong). And a professor used it to write an entire paper. From the Guardian:
Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, received an email inviting him to submit a paper to the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics in the US in November.
“Since I have practically no knowledge of nuclear physics I resorted to iOS autocomplete function to help me writing the paper,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions.
“The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids,” is a sample sentence from the abstract.
It concludes: “Power is not a great place for a good time.”
Bartneck made a video, posted in his website, showing how he did it:
But wait! There’s more!
Bartneck illustrated the paper – titled, again through autocorrect, “Atomic Energy will have been made available to a single source” – with the first graphic on the Wikipedia entry for nuclear physics.
He submitted it under a fake identity: associate professor Iris Pear of the US, whose experience in atomic and nuclear physics was outlined in a biography using contradictory gender pronouns.
The nonsensical paper was accepted only three hours later, in an email asking Bartneck to confirm his slot for the “oral presentation” at the international conference.
“I know that iOS is a pretty good software, but reaching tenure has never been this close,” Bartneck commented in the blog post.
The conference itself, to be held in Georgia in mid-November (see link above), looks pretty dicey. For one thing, read its call for abstracts:
And, as the Guardian notes:
The International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics. . . is organised by ConferenceSeries: “an amalgamation of Open Access Publications and worldwide international science conferences and events”, established in 2007.
It also has a $1099 speaker registration fee.
The Guardian describes what Bartneck wrote as a paper, but it’s actually an abstract of a paper, complete with a bogus diagram and a phony photo of the author. You can see it here, and I’ve put a screenshot below:
I get invitations all the time from bogus organizations that invite me to submit papers or give talks on forestry, molecular biology, immunology, and all sorts of things for which I have no credentials at all. There are a lot of organizations out there preying on scientists who, I guess, think that going to such meetings gives them professional credibility. And it must work, or why would these meetings and journals continue to exist?
h/t: Barry
One of the world’s most beautiful cat breeds is the Maine Coon. Over at Bored Panda, photographer Robert Sijka shows some magnificent shots of these beasts. (See more of his cat photographs here.)
Sijka always saw cats as majestic, almost mystical beasts, and now he came up with a way to share that image with the rest of us: “My passions are cats and photography, I do my best to combine these two things as good as possible,” the photographer shares on his website. And he managed to combine those passions perfectly in his royal-like Maine Coon portrait series.
He got the inspiration from a “photo of Dolce Vita and De La Loo – two of the most majestic black Maine Coons… photographed beautifully on a simple black background”, Robert told Cat Behaviourist. And ever since that moment, he was creating these mesmerizing portraits himself.
There are more at the site; here are just four:
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At Boredom Therapy, the duo of Lisa Swirling and Ralph Lazar from Last Lemon show 25 panels of instructions on “How to be a cat.” (Note: there are three pages.) Here are a few panels:
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I think we’ve met the giant Samson before, but Bored Panda (a reliable source of felid amusement) has more pictures.
Meet Samson, a 28 lbs (~13 kg) Maine Coon from NYC who is larger than most bobcats. This furball is around 4 feet in length and has even been dubbed “the largest cat in NYC.” In fact, he might even be the largest cat in the world. The current Guinness World record holder passed away in 2013, and he measured at 4.04 feet.
“Samson is a very sweet but a tough cat, who fits the term gentle giant very well,” Jonathan Zurbel, Samson’s owner, told Love Meow. “He is not fat or overweight but a strong Husky sturdy cat,” the cat dad said. “He waits by my (bedroom) door and comes in first thing in the morning to sit on my belly. He is very kind and sweet and a very well behaved cat. He is a dream cat.”
h/t: Ginger K.
A year ago, reader Benjamin Taylor went on a camping trip around southern Africa (Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia) and took lots of photos. I’m continuing his series today, and his captions are indented. There are bonus kittens!
Tawny eagle (Aquila rapax). 
A white-backed vulture (Gyps africanus) on its nest.
Common impala (Aepyceros melampus), Chobe National Park, Botswana.
Camp kittens!
African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) wading in the Chobe River.
Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer), Chobe National Park, Botswana.
Nile crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus), Chobe National Park, Botswana.
It’s October 22, 2016, and National Nut Day, which I’ll following by having a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. It’s also International CAPS LOCK DAY. Finally, this is the day in 4004 BC on which, according to Archbishop James Ussher’s famous calculation, the world was created!
On October 22, 1879, Thomas Edison tested the first long-lasting incandescent light bulb, using carbonized thread as a filament. It lasted all of 13.5 hours before going dark. In 1895, an express train failed to stop at the Gare Montparnasse, producing this result:
Amazingly, only one person was killed: a woman outside the station hit by falling masonry. In 1962, John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, bringing on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest American has come to nuclear war. Two years later, Jean-Paul Sartre received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and refused it. (Do you think Bob Dylan will?).
Notables born on this day include Daniel Boone (1734), Sarah Bernhardt (1844), Curly Howard of the Three Stooges (1903), Timothy Leary (1920), Annette Funicello (1942♥), the first love of many young boys, including me, Deepak Chopra (1946; he turns 70 today, but of course he will never die because of his health regimen), and Jeff Goldblum (1952; surprisingly, several women have told me they find him very sexy). Those who died on this day include Pretty Boy Floyd (1934), Jane Dornacker (1986), Albert Szent-Györgyi (1986), and Soupy Sales (2009). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Cyrus have apparently joined the ambulatory school of philosophy:
Cyrus: Everything is very complicated.Hili: Yes, but sometimes you have to disregard what’s not essential.
Cyrus: To wszystko jest ogromnie skomplikowane.
Hili: Tak, ale czasem trzeba abstrahować od tego, co nieistotne.
And out on the wind-swept prairies of Winnipeg, Gus has been nomming his box (note the license plate on the far end, as well as the Canadian flag), as well as playing with tissue paper:
by Greg Mayer
It’s a bit late in the day, but I must announce that today is, at least in the USA, National Reptile Awareness Day. Happy Reptile Day to all! I must admit, as a herpetologist who joined all the major American herpetological societies while still in high school (1975), I had never heard of National Reptile Awareness Day before today. Reptiles Magazine, a fanciers outlet, is the only group I can find who are promoting it, although even they admit not to know how or when it started. Despite its obscurity, we’ll celebrate with a few reptile pictures.
First, a wild red-eared slider, a southern US turtle popular in the pet trade, and often released, but less often established, in places outside its native range, like Wisconsin.
Next, my ball python Vivian, whom I’ve had for about 18 years.
A snapping turtle from UW-Parkside, at the same alumni event as Vivian.
And we’ll finish up with a series of eastern massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus catenatus) pictures; I believe all the pictures were taken in Cass, Michigan. They were taken by my former student Eric Hileman, who did his Ph.D. at Northern Illinois University with Rich King. Eric successfully defended his dissertation on the population ecology of massasaugas just this past Wednesday, and I was privileged to be able to attend. So we can all take this National Reptile Awareness Day as a day to send this joyous message to Eric: “Congratulations. Now get back to work.”
h/t Alicia Hunt