Meeting next week: KentPresents Ideas Festival

August 10, 2018 • 8:45 am

From August 16-18 (Thursday-Saturday of next week), I’ll be attending and speaking at the KentPresents Ideas Festival in Kent, Connecticut, a lovely area. The festival, founded by Ben and Donna Rosen, is a melange of interesting people from many fields and is dedicated to helping others: we receive no remuneration (nor do Ben and Donna), and the money from ticket sales goes to local charities.

There are both panels and speakers (list here); I’m one of the latter and will be talking about evidence for evolution and why the “theory” is hard for Americans to swallow.  On the front page you can see the lineup, and there’s several of these people I want to see and perhaps meet (I’ll be bringing my book to get it autographed for charity). Imagine a festival that includes Wynton Marsalis, Lesley Stahl, Michael Pollan, Harold Varmus, and Faye Wattleton, not to mention Henry Kissinger. Among the working scientists besides Varmus and me there will be Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll, and a number of people involved in conservation. And there’s a performance by the dance company Pilobolus.

It promises to be a good time. Tickets aren’t cheap ($2500), but the money goes to charity. You can, if you have the dosh, buy tickets for the whole event here.  I hope to report from the Festival, so stay tuned.

 

Spot the animal!

August 10, 2018 • 7:45 am

Biologist Anne Houde sent a photo with a hidden animal. She added that because this was not too difficult (I think it’s “medium hard”), she’d say only that this animal is from the New World. Can you spot it? (Click on the photo to enlarge.) Don’t give it away in the comments, though you can say whether or not you found it.

Answer at 10:30 a.m. Chicago time.

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

August 10, 2018 • 7:00 am

We’ve reached the end of the work week again: it’s Friday, August 10, 2018, National S’Mores Day: a homemade comestible produced only, I believe in the U.S. and perhaps Canada. Go to the link if you want to see it. And believe me, if somebody gave me one or three now, I’d scarf them down. It’s also International Biodiesel Day, celebrating Rudolf Diesel’s first such engine started up on August 10, 1893, and running on peanut oil.

I had a tee shirt made reflecting my statement on the Infinite Monkey Cage when the show came to Chicago four years ago. The context from my post:

. . . .we were discussing what evidence could disprove evolution, and I mentioned that if an animal had a feature that helped only members of another species (and not itself), such as a lion with teats that could be used only to suckle warthogs, that would count as evidence against natural selection, since selection (as Darwin noted) can’t build features useful only for members of another species. Julia [Sweeney] then floated a theory (which was hers) that perhaps a virus could infect lions giving them such teats, and I responded that it would be maladaptive, and that animals susceptible to that virus would be eliminated by selection. She then asked, “But why couldn’t a lion suckle both its cubs and warthogs?” My reply is in the tw**t below, which Robin [Ince] said should be put on an Infinite Monkey Cage teeshirt:

And my new shirt, which will surely baffle the general public:

In other news, we still have two ducks: Honey and her timorous daughter Phoebe. The good news is that the two have sort of reconciled and are foraging together, with Honey only occasionally pecking a bit at Phoebe at feeding time. Both are well fed, and Honey’s flight feathers are growing fast. Wings crossed that they’ll both leave in good condition, but not too soon. . .

Finally, reader Paul informs me that Steve Pinker will be on Bill Maher’s show tonight. I don’t get cable, but I’ll post any clips that appear on YouTube.

On this day in 1519, the five ships under command of Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Seville to circumnavigate the Earth. Magellan was killed in the Philippines, but one ship made it back, arriving in Spain on September 6, 1522—more than three years after departure. About 270 sailors had set out; of these, 232 died. A penguin was named after Magellan.

On this day in 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa sank in Stockholm harbor, only 20 minutes into her maiden voyage. The ship was raised in good condition in 1961, and, after restoration, is now on display in Stockholm. It’s an amazing sight; go see it if you’re in that lovely city. Here’s a view of the bow from Wikipedia.

On August 10, 1675, construction began on the Royal Greenwich Observatory near London.  And in 1793, the Musée du Louvre was officially opened in Paris.  On this day in 1948, the television show Candid Camera made its television debut. Does anybody remember it—and its creepy host Allen Funt? On August 10, 1969, one day after the Manson gang murdered Sharon Tate and four others in Los Angeles, they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. More crime news: on this day in 1977, the 24 year old David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) was arrested for a series of  8 murders in the New York City area over one year.

Notables born on this day include Henri “Chocolate” Nestlé (1814), Herbert Hoover (1874), Nobel Laureate Arne Tiselius (1902), another laureate, Wolfgang Paul (1913, not “Pauli”), Jimmy Dean (1928), Eddie Fisher (1928) and Rosanna Arquette (1959). Those who died on this day include Rin Tin Tin (1932; d*g), and Isaac Hayes (2008).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s ruminations are getting more enigmatic. Malgorzata explains this one:

This is just a nice absurdity. Sometimes you are looking around and you have a feeling that something is missing: a fork on the table, a chair which normally is in the room, etc. But you can’t really place what it is you are missing. Now, Hili is outside and she says that she has this feeling. Instead of trying to guess what it is she is missing, practical Hili says  that she will know it when it comes and she sees it.

Hili: Something is missing here.
A: What is missing?
Hili: I don’t know, but I will let you know when it comes.
In Polish:
Hili: Czegoś tu brakuje.
Ja: Czego?
Hili: Nie wiem, zobaczę jak przyjdzie.

Tweets from Heather Hastie; first, a rare melanic barn owl that looks like a monk. The species is Tyto alba, but this one isn’t “alba” (“white”):

Bookstore cats are the best cats! (Be sure to watch the video.) Hongkees (the name some from Hong Kong call themselves) love their cats!

A Goth Moth!

https://twitter.com/gothforpay/status/1026862164198543363

A tweet from Matthew:

Another owl, also from Matthew But as you may know, owls have long been Honorary Cats™ on this site.

Click on the tweet to see the full picture of a housefly doing aerobatics:

Human brian??

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1024399053201854464

Threat display of a phasmid:

Yes, the French and English still have some mutual acrimony, as evidenced by how the French labeled this box of McVitie’s biscuits: “It’s English, but it’s good!”

. . . and a big-ass moose:

https://twitter.com/Joshx13_/status/1027065766636658690

 

General of the Ducks

August 9, 2018 • 2:45 pm

I didn’t think much about ducks until last year when suddenly I became smitten, but if I had been this smitten when I was younger then this kid’s experience would be paradise: far more enticing than 72 dark-eyed virgins. General of the Ducks!!!

The YouTube caption

This toddler felt powerful as he lead an army of ducks along a trail. The wild animals followed him wherever he went and stopped whenever he stopped.

Now I’ll go feed my brood of two.

NY Times columnist defends the hiring of racist Sarah Jeong

August 9, 2018 • 12:45 pm

I suspected that the New YorkTimes would publish at least one of its regular columnists defending the hiring of tech editor Sarah Jeong, who over several years put out a hoard of racist, sexist, and anti-police tweets that, because she was Asian and her victims were SJW Approved Malefactors™ (mostly white), were excused by the Times. She was hired as their head tech columnist, yet you can bet that if her tweets were anti-immigrant or anti-black, she would have been out on her tuchas. The Times and Jeong both claimed that her racism was simply a response in kind to trolls, but there is no evidence that that was the case (see here, here, and here). Her hiring—after Quinn Norton, another writer, was fired when it was revealed she put out racist tweets—marks a new low in the history of the Regressive Left, and an ineradicable black mark on the name of the New York Times. Click on the screenshot to read the piece:

 

It is a sign of our times that columnists like Stephens, and the Times editors themselves, defended Jeong when other Times writers banded together to demonize Bari Weiss, an anti-SJW progressive who is far more sensible than is Jeong. When Weiss tweeted “Immigrants get the job done,” referring to a skater, Mirai Nagasu, who was the offspring of an immigrant (but praising Nagasu), Weiss was demonized by her fellow NYT writers for a simple error which was made in praise of an immigrant. How dare she call the daughter of immigrants an immigrant as well?

Yet when Jeong broadcasts pure hate, she is adamantly defended by both Stephens and the editors, and her racism is excused. What kind of world is this? (Weiss, by the way, hasn’t written a column since June 20, and I don’t know why. I suspect she’s lying low for fear of being fired. Weiss will never, I predict, call out Sarah Jeong, though she would if she weren’t writing for the NYT.)

In fact, Stephens says that Jeong’s tweets were indeed racist and that the Left’s defense of her is hypocritical. In fact, I have to agree with this conservative columnist when he begins his apologetics like this:

We should call many of [Jeong’s] tweets for what they are: racist. I’ve seen some acrobatic efforts to explain why Jeong’s tweets should be treated as “quasi-satirical,” hyperbolical and a function of “social context.” But the criteria for racism is either objective or it’s meaningless: If liberals get to decide for themselves who is or isn’t a racist according to their political lights, conservatives will be within their rights to ignore them.

Also worth noting is the leftist double standard when it comes to social-media transgressions. In February, my centrist colleague Bari Weiss celebrated U.S. figure skater Mirai Nagasu’s historic triple axel by tweeting a line from the musical “Hamilton”: “Immigrants: They get the job done.” Left-wing social media went berserk over this alleged “othering” of Nagasu, who was born in California to immigrant parents.

By contrast, the left has been nothing if not aggressive in its defense of Jeong. That’s the right thing to do, but it’s also rank hypocrisy coming from many of the same people who loudly demanded the ouster of Williamson, Weiss, or, well, me. The tests for who gets to work at publications like The Times or The Atlantic ought to revolve around considerations of liveliness, integrity, maturity, and talent. When ideology becomes the litmus test, we’re on the road to Pravda.

Note, though that the Times fired Quinn Norton for similar transgressions, described here in Wikipedia:

On February 13, 2018, The New York Times announced that Norton would join its editorial board as a lead opinion writer covering technology.  Within six hours, Norton stated on Twitter that she would not be joining after all. “Between the two statements,” the Times reported, “a social media storm had erupted, with Ms. Norton at the center of it, because of her use of slurs on Twitter and her friendship with Andrew Auernheimer who gained infamy as an internet troll going by the name ‘weev.'”

Norton first argued on Twitter that her use of the slur had been misconstrued, and later referred to her characterization on Twitter and in relevant press coverage, as a “bizarre doppelganger version of myself” which had nothing to do with reality. She highlighted that she herself was part of the LGBT community and words referring to gay people were covered by “in-group” referencing. She also pointed out that her friendship with Auernheimer, whom she called a “terrible person”, started when he was her journalistic source, and that her main effort with him was to discourage his racism. She pointed out that her idea was to engage racism to change it, rather than to shun racists. She noted she was not currently in contact with Auernheimer.

According to April Glaser, writing for Slate, Norton’s friendship with Auernheimer, regardless of whether she personally confronted him on his views, should be viewed as contributing to the culture of a larger group of Internet freedom activists who lionized Auernheimer for his hacking without denouncing his racism and anti-Semitism.

The Times responded to the online uproar within eight hours, claiming that this information was new to them. The firing led to debate over the ethics of free speech in the hacking community at large and the ethos of the  vis-à-vis Twitter.

So if we’re to forgive Jeong, why not Norton? And god forbid that a NYT columnist like Stephens would call out his own newspaper for hypocrisy. No, it’s the “leftist double standard,” not the New York Times‘s double standard!

So if Stephens finds Jeong an ill-intentioned racist in her tweets, and those who defend them misguided, why is he supporting her? Because of the “first stone” effect (look at the title) and his claim that Jeong has produced good journalism and that her tweets are the equivalent of losing it when you get drunk or stoned, which, he says, is what Twitter and social media do to people (my emphasis in the following):

My own misgivings about Jeong’s tweets have less to do with their substance than with their often snarky tone, occasional meanness, and sheer number: 103,000 over some nine years, averaging about 31 tweets a day. (Donald Trump only averages 11.)

But that’s the way we live now — unfiltered — and many of us, including me, have been late to appreciate Twitter’s narcotic power to bring out the worst in ourselves. Undigested thoughts. Angry retorts. Jokes that don’t land. Points made in haste. All the mental burps and inner screams that wisely used to be left unspoken — or, if spoken, little heard and seldom recorded.

That’s a reason to treat social media approximately the way we do opioids: with utmost caution. But it’s also a reason to temper our judgments about people based on the things they say on social media. The person you are drunk or stoned is not the person you are — at least not the whole person. Neither is the person you are the one who’s on Twitter.

I’ve spent the last few days reading some of Jeong’s longer-form journalism. It’s consistently smart and interesting and as distant from some of her more notorious social-media output as a brain is from a bottom. But you’ll struggle to find her articles on an internet search, because her serious work is overwhelmed by the controversy her tweets have generated.

Is it ultimately her fault for writing those ugly tweets? Yes. Does it represent the core truth of who she is? I doubt it. Anyone who has been the victim of the social-media furies knows just how distorting and dishonest those furies can be.

Note, two things. First, Quinn Norton said in her defense that she was doing exactly what Jeong was doing, producing a “doppelganger” version with “ingroup references”, and that she, Norton, was engaging with racists using their own language. To keep Jeong on for the same transgression for which Norton was fired is arrant hypocrisy.

More important: no, not everyone is a toxic Tweeter, pouring out a gaggle of racist tweets and hateful epithets. You will not find that on my site, nor, I suspect on most other people’s sites. I can cast a stone because I have no “bad” tweets of the kind hurled into the ether by Jeong. Jeong was neither drunk nor stoned on the Internet; she was just hateful.  In fact, the person you are on the internet is largely the person you suppress to get along in civil society, but the hate is still there, hidden from view. I refuse to accept that people cannot learn from others how to behave civilly on social media. If they can’t, then you know what kind of person they really are.

I don’t necessarily think that Jeong should be fired; but if they fired Quinn Norton, they should either fire Jeong or reinstate Norton. Absent either, the Times is reprehensible.

I’ll give the final word to Grania, whom I asked for her opinion:

NYT is losing the run of itself. Journalists are supposed to report the news, not be the news. This is soap opera level stuff. As for the twit who wrote “Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone.” that may actually garner a crowd larger than he likes to think. Not everyone is an arsehole on the internet. Finally, “bad tweets” is a relative term. There’s a difference between someone who is occasionally an ill-mannered or bad-tempered jerk and someone who habitually harasses and stalks those they disapprove of.

A field-trip course in England on Darwin and evolution

August 9, 2018 • 9:30 am

Every year my friend Andrew Berry, a lecturer and student advisor at Harvard, teaches a summer course at Oxford for Harvard undergrads. Its theme is Darwin and evolution, and the best part is that since the course takes place in DarwinLand, he can take the students to various historical sites and show them the science and history behind the Great Idea. I went to Down House, Darwin’s adult home, with Andrew’s course one year, and we were given a tour by none other than Janet Browne, historian of science and author of the wonderful two-volume biography of Darwin (see here and here) that I consider the best account of his life and work. Janet still takes the students to Darwin’s home, and you can see her in the penultimate photo.

Every year Andrew puts up a photo website of that summer’s course for the delectation of the students, and I thought I’d share some of them with you so you could see what the course covers. Go here to see all of the pictures. Andrew has kindly furnished captions for them giving the historical background, and his descriptions are indented. You can enlarge all the photos by clicking on them (twice if you want to eliminate the text).

The program runs for 6 weeks in Queen’s College, Oxford. It is a mix of history of science (the development of evolutionary thinking) and of science (current thinking in evolution).  This photo comes from a previous year during a more typical English summer.  The current heatwave (yes, in England) has scorched the college lawns.
Most of the students (there are 17 in this year’s class) spend the two weeks prior to the program in London, interning at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on a history of science project dedicated to creating an online archive of the writings of Joseph Dalton Hooker, Victorian botanist, director of Kew, and Darwin confidante.  Pictured is Kew’s extraordinary Palm House (1848), commissioned by Hooker’s father, the previous director, and designed by Decimus Burton.
Hooker traveled on James Clark Ross’s Erebus & Terror expedition to Antartica (1839-43) where his skills as a botanical illustrated were challenged by the local fauna.
Hooker undertook another major expedition, to the E Himalaya (1847-51).  Here is a sample of his exquisite pen-and-water color sketches of the landscape.  Among these is numbered the first known view by a European of Mt. Everest.  http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/02/first_sketch_of_everest_credit.html
Hooker’s ticket, as pall bearer, to Darwin’s funeral, 1882.
Cambridge.  Darwin was a student here (after dropping out of his medical studies at Edinburgh University), and came back here after returning from the Beagle voyage so that he could start processing the specimens he had brought back with him.
Darwin’s undergraduate room in Christ’s College, Cambridge.  This is where he lived when he was the same age as my students.
In the archives of Christ’s College is a wealth of Darwin-related material, including illustrated letters celebrating his undergraduate beetle-hunting excitements.
Christ’s College boasts a statue of the young Charles Darwin (an attempt to re-create Darwin as he was when he was at Christ’s).  He is, as such, inevitably a selfie target.
Behind the scenes in the Cambridge Zoology Museum: bird of paradise specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the course of his Malay Archipelago journey
The commonplace book of Erasmus Darwin, physician, inventor, poet, evolutionist, and grandfather of Charles Darwin.  Erasmus gave us the best ever synopsis of evolution (from his Temple of Nature, 1803):
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Erasmus Darwin lived in Lichfield’s cathedral “close” (ie the community associated with the great church).  He had to be careful in the use of his evolutionary motto, E Conchis Omnia (from shells, everything), for fear of offending his ecclesiastical neighbors
Linnean Society, London, with archivist Isabelle Charmantier.  It was at a meeting here, on 1 July 1858, that the theory of evolution by natural selection was unveiled, though neither of the paper’s authors, Darwin and Wallace, was present.
The Linnean Society possesses the papers and collections of Linneaus himself, the Swedish father of taxonomy.  Here are some of his early notes as he explores ways to categorize and organize nature.
1735: the first edition of Linneaus’s great work, Systema Naturae.  Here he has already grouped humans with primates (“Simia”), though he mistakenly includes sloths (Bradypus) in the group as well.
Revising life.  In later editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus had blank pages bound between each printed page and used these to make revisions for subsequent editions.  In his tiny, cramped hand-writing, then we are seeing Linnaeus in the process of revising the organization of living things.
Linnaeus’s specimens.  By definition, most of Linnaeus’s specimens are type specimens — ie the key specimen from which a species was originally described.
Linnaeus’s Lapland expedition note book.  Linnaeus’s reputation was established by his journey into the northern wilds of Scandinavia.  His field note book contains of wealth of biological, geographical and anthropological observation.  His drawing skills, however, left something to be desired.  This is a charming illustration of the preferred local way of carrying canoes.
The room in which Darwin was born, 12 Feb 1809.
Shrewsbury, where Darwin was born and grew up.  The family house, The Mount, built by his father Robert Darwin on a small rise overlooking the town, is now a district tax office, but they generously allow pre-arranged visits by small groups.
(Old) Shrewsbury School.  Darwin attended the local private high school (as a boarder even though the school was less than a mile from his home).  The school has since moved out of the centre of town, and the Darwin’s school building is today the town library.  Darwin’s retrospective assessment of his experience there was not especially positive: “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler’s school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught, except a little ancient geography and history. The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.”

Update: the next picture is a close-up of the statue taken by reader Al Lee and just sent along:

In the Shrewsbury School library: Presentation copy of the Origin of Species given to Darwin’s prominent opponent, Richard Owen.  Note that it is dated prior to the publication of the book (24 Nov 1859).
In Darwin’s geological footsteps.  After finishing his undergraduate degree at Cambridge, Darwin traveled to N. Wales with Adam Sedgwick, his geology professor.  Sedgwick was trying to make sense of the sequence of rocks that would later become formalized as the geological column.  In particular he was interested in finding Old Red Sandstone (from the Devonian) on his travels.  This however proved elusive. Darwin visited Cwm Idwal in Snowdonia (ie the mountainous area in the NW of Wales) twice.  First, in 1831, as part of his Sedgwick expedition.  He attempted to interpret the landscape but was defeated by the region’s complexity and his own lack of experience.  He came back after the voyage of the Beagle  when he had read Louis Agassiz’s theory of Ice Ages.  He recognized that the best place he could go to to see for himself whether or not these new fangled ideas were sound was Cwm Idwal.  He was convinced: “a house burnt down by fire does not tell its story more plainly than did this valley.”
Learning to read the landscape with our guide, Michael Roberts, geologist, historian, and vicar.
“Darwin’s Boulders” beside the lake in Cwm Idwal:
Hiking Y Garn, the mountain overlooking Cwm Idwal.
Castel Dinas Bran, above Llangollen.  Another site visited by Darwin and Sedgwick in pursuit of recognizably Devonian deposits.  The hill is crowned with the picturesque ruins of a 13th century Welsh fort.
Fossil hunting.
Oxford University Natural History Museum, June 1860: site of the famous spat between T  H Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.  The exchange is probably somewhat apocryphal, but it has entered popular consciousness as a canonical science vs. religion moment.  As recounted by historian Frank Sulloway, “Following a lengthy, pro-Darwinian paper, Samuel Wilberforce, the slickly eloquent bishop of Oxford, began a half-hour-long attack on Darwinian theory. With glib lines like “Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?,” Wilberforce’s speech met with peals of sympathetic laughter, and his rhetoric hit home. Finally he turned to Huxley, who was seated near him on the speaker’s platform, and asked him whether it was on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side that he claimed descent from an ape.”  Huxley’s supposed response: “[Asked] if I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion — I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”
Natural History Museum, London, archive.  A drawing by A R Wallace of an Amazonian fish.  That this picture still exists is remarkable.  This was part of the set of materials — specimens, notes, drawings, living animals — that Wallace had with him as he headed back to the UK after four years in the Amazon.  His ship caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic, and Wallace and the crew had to abandon ship precipitously.  Wallace had time to grab one small case of materials from his desk, and this drawing was in it.  It was ten days before Wallace and the crew were rescued.
Darwin (statue) and Wallace (portrait): side by side (OK, with a big gap between them) at the Natural History Museum.
[Photo from previous year, as we have yet to go to Down House this year].  Down House, Kent, where Darwin lived for more than half of his life and where he penned the Origin of Species, the Descent of Man, and more.
[Photo from previous year, as we have yet to go to Down House this year].  Darwin’s “thinking path”, the Sand Walk, where he would stroll and ponder.  I live in hope that my students will have correspondingly significant insights as they walk along the path, but it’s yet to happen. Here they are accompanied by Janet Browne, Darwin scholar and biographer.
Finally, Andrew sent me this photo (taken some years ago when I was a lot pudgier!), also at Down House:
Isn’t that a lovely course? I’d love to take the whole thing, but time prohibits that. Many thanks to Andrew for the photos and captions. I suspect this is the inspiration for the “Jumping at Down House” photo above.