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.
Good morning, and welcome to the weekend, may there be pots of coffee and tea in your future.
It’s the birthday of Avicii and Pink so we get to have music videos in their honor.
It is also the birthday of US politician Bernie Sanders (1941), Swedish race car driver Stefan Johansson, (1956) and country singer Patsy Cline (1932 – 1963) who died at the tragically young age of 30 in a plane crash.
In history today, in 1974 US President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office. In 1966 Star Trek premiered with its first-aired episode, “The Man Trap” which you can watch here if you are so inclined. It isn’t the first episode filmed, the original pilot The Cage was not initially broadcast and was re-edited to fit into a later episode The Menagerie. In 1975 US Air Force Tech Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, appeared in his Air Force uniform on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “I Am A Homosexual”. He was given a general discharge, later upgraded to honorable. In 1930 3M began marketing Scotch transparent tape. In 1944 during World War II: London was hit by a V-2 rocket for the first time.
Over in Poland Hili is occupied with Deep Thoughts again.
Hili: I’m counting the Seven Deadly Sins.
A: So how many are there?
Hili: Six.
In Polish:
Hili: Liczę siedem grzechów głównych.
Ja: I ile ci wychodzi?
Hili: Sześć.
This kind of looks like the Before and After pics on the perils of not keeping up with your shaving regime.
A very strange and beautiful fresco depicting "Desert Fathers" from medieval Voroneț Monastery located in village of Voroneț, southern Bukovina, Romania. Monastery was built by Stephen the Great in 1488. https://t.co/dy3OFEl6vu@MagicalEuropepic.twitter.com/NcNCmjw5eq
For those of you who have not had a cat & dog pairing in the home before, I assure you this is just play. Dogs are very careful not to hurt their cat companions, the cats are less concerned about the rules and do occasionally draw blood.
PCC(E) here; I’ve just come back from the most awesome whale-watching trip ever: we saw dozens of humpback whales ((Megaptera novaeangliae) feeding, lunge-feeding, breaching, and slapping their tails, along with gazillions of seals helping eat the fish, as well as many species of birds. Also a pod of dolphins accompanying our boat. It couldn’t have been a better trip, and I’ll post pictures and videos when I return.
In the meantime, a quick duck report via Anna. Our pair of mallards have been skittish for a while, and yesterday they both disappeared from the pond for a whole day. As always, I was sure they’d gone for good, though the Duck Manual says they don’t head south until the first freeze or snow.
Today, however, in an email headed “They’re back! How they toy with us”, Honey and her beau James are back in the pond eating away. Here’s a photo.
This duck-related anxiety will do me in, I swear. It’s like having your kid go off to college, and then returning a few days later, and then going back, and so on.
Good morning! Welcome to the start of the weekend. There are 115 days remaining until the end of the year, the Christmas Wars are nearly upon us.
Burt Reynolds died yesterday at the age of 82. He’s probably best know for his movies Deliverance, Smokey and the Bandit and Boogie Nights.
Today in history the Berlin Victory Parade was held in 1945 which marked the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Bulgarian writer & dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by Bulgarian secret police agent Francesco Gullino by means of a ricin pellet fired from a specially-designed umbrella while walking across Waterloo Bridge in London in 1978.
In 1986 Desmond Tutu became the first black man to lead the Anglican Diocese of Cape Town, South Africa.
In 2008 the United States government took control of two mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Much of the globe was mired in the worst recession since the 1930s.
It’s the birthdays of Chrissie Hynde, American singer-songwriter and guitarist; Morris Albert, Brazilian singer-songwriter; Mark Isham, American trumpet player and composer; and Mark McCumber, American golfer; all in 1951.
From Poland today we get a little felid existential angst.
Hili: I’m pondering about passing of time.
A: And?
Hili: It’s indeed passing.
In Polish:
Hili: Kontempluję przemijanie czasu.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Faktycznie mija.
James Corden and Shaggy have teamed up to produce this bit of toe-tapping satire.
From Twitter today: (Click on the white arrows if the gifs and videos don’t automatically play for you).
Still, Trump has risen above it all and has moved on to higher things such as praising dictators who are not too squeamish about murdering family members or citizens.
About 400,000 years ago Ireland had Elks that grew to 2.1 metres (6.9 ft) tall at the shoulders and had antlers up to 3.65 m (12.0 ft) in span.
This is amazing. Tyrone fisherman Raymond McElroy caught this in his fishing net while out on Lough Neagh today…the antlers and skull of a Great Irish Elk! An animal that has been extinct for thousands of years. pic.twitter.com/0DYOoB1av2
Today is the birthday of British actor Idris Elba (1972), AKA the next James Bond if Twitter is a reliable source for anything [1] . For what it’s worth, he would be perfect in the role, but I don’t know why he’d want it – Bond is a relic of the mid-20th century. What passed for suave in 1950 will have you up as fossilised dinosaur today.
It’s also the birthday of singer Macy Gray (1967), Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan (1971), and Dutch politician Geert Wilders (think Donald Trump with an accent).
First Macy Gray singing her enchanting song I try.
Here is Dolores with The Cranberries and one of their most iconic songs Zombie which is an emotive protest at the partisan violence in Northern Ireland.
Today in 1620 the Pilgrims sailed from England on the Mayflower to North America. Eight years later Puritans settled in Salem which became part of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Life must have been particularly miserable there and the good citizens wasted no time before they started executing women for being witches, mentally ill or the wrong religion.
In 1916 the first Piggly Wiggly opened. In 1970 the Dawson’s Field hijacking was carried out, two years later the Munich Massacre at the Summer Olympics in West Germany. Finally in 1997 the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales took place in London. It was watched by an unbelievable 2.5 billion people on TV. Do watch Christopher Hitchens’ acid post mortem of the whole spectacle.
Here’s an example of a bad argument that does not make its case. This is like trotting out the two gay guys who say they are against same-sex marriage. In other words: your argument may or may not be valid, but the validity is not determined by your identity.
Channel 4 News showing BBC News how a Public Service Broadcaster should educate and inform political debate by featuring Orthodox Jews who support Corbyn and oppose IHRA Here's the clip of Jews saying quite clearly 'Israel is a racist endeavour' pic.twitter.com/dkMw9xApex
Cooling my heels at the airport, I call your attention to a new book by Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University. The book: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. (That jawbreaker of a title was obviously taken from Allan Bloom’s surprising 1987 bestseller,The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students).
The screenshot below will take you to the new book’s Amazon site:
You’ll know their views from their 2015 Atlantic piece with the same title, but they’ve expanded and revised it, as you can see from the CBS News video below. In the meantime, the New York Times has, surprisingly, given the book a good review along with a related book by William Egginton (click on screenshot below to see it):
An excerpt of the review:
Lukianoff and Haidt offer a variety of compelling explanations for the rise of the “safetyism” culture that so dominates elite colleges and, increasingly, much journalistic discourse along the lines of The Nation’s editorial note. One of the most intriguing ideas they present is the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam’s notion of “concept creep.” Haslam found that since the 1980s key concepts in clinical and social psychology, including abuse, bullying, trauma and prejudice, have expanded both “downward” and “outward” to apply to less severe circumstances and to take in novel phenomena. “By the early 2000s,” Lukianoff and Haidt write, “the concept of ‘trauma’ within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything ‘experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful.’”
. . . Lukianoff and Haidt notice something unprecedented and a lot more frightening: a generation, including its most privileged and educated members — especially these members — that has been politically and socially “stunted” by a false and deepening belief in its own fragility. This is a generation engaged in a meritocratic “arms race” of epic proportions, that has racked up the most hours of homework (and screen time) in history but also the fewest ever of something so simple as unsupervised outdoor play. If that sounds trivial, it shouldn’t. “When adult-supervised activities crowd out free play, children are less likely to develop the art of association,” Lukianoff and Haidt write, along with other social skills central to the making of good citizens capable of healthy compromise. Worse, the consequences of a generation unable or disinclined to engage with ideas and interlocutors that make them uncomfortable are dire for society, and open the door — accessible from both the left and the right — to various forms of authoritarianism.
. . . is that if we are going to beat back the regressive populism, mendacity and hyperpolarization in which we are currently mired, we are going to need an educated citizenry fluent in a wise and universal liberalism. This liberalism will neither play down nor fetishize identity grievances, but look instead for a common and generous language to build on who we are more broadly, and to conceive more boldly what we might be able to accomplish in concert. . . If the American university is not the space to cultivate this strong and supple liberalism, then we are in deep and lasting trouble.
Indeed. So don’t chew my tuchas when I keep kvetching about the ludicrous behavior that takes place on American campuses. I get a lot of comments and email saying stuff like, “Why don’t you stop writing about these trivial issues on campuses and deal with the really bad stuff that’s going on?” They mean, of course, the behavior of “President” Trump and his minions, whose perfidy is playing out just today as Brett Kavanaugh is being grilled as a potential Supreme Court justice. (He’ll get though, and if you want to make a bet that he won’t, email me.)
But liberal blogger and writers are nearly all consumed with dissing Trump, so I don’t need to; and my intense dislike (nay, hatred) for him and his cronies is amply witnessed on this site. So if you want to see Trump-dissing, just go over to HuffPo, Salon, or The New York Times. Being situated on a campus, I’m especially concerned with today’s college students, who will of course be tomorrow’s leaders. And major liberal media, such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, are already falling prey to balkanizing identity politics and the outrage culture.
Have a look at this 5-minute video in which Lukianoff and Haidt explain their thesis to interviewers at CBS News.
