Tuesday: Hili dialogue

July 24, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Tuesday, the cruelest day: July 24, 2018, and National Tequila Day. I’ll pass.

Dog bites man news o’ the day: Trump is increasingly unhinged, now going into Crazy Capslock mode about Iran:

I wish he’d be found guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and then impeached. But then we’d have Pence as President, probably a marginal but unsatisfactory improvement. Seriously, my beloved readers, tell me who is a VIABLE Democratic candidate for the next Presidential election. And I mean “viable” as “someone who has a good chance of being elected.”

On this day in 1304, in the Wars of Scottish Independence, Stirling Castle fell to the English under King Edward I of England. The key to success was the amazing catapult the War Wolf (read about it at the link), a catapult called the “trebuchet”. Look at this amazing reconstruction; it was quite a feat of medieval engineering:

On this day in 1847, after 17 months on the road, Brigham young and 148 Mormon pioneers entered Salt Lake Valley, proclaimed it the Place to Be, and soon founded Salt Lake City. On July 24, 1911, Hiram Bingham rediscovered Machu Picchu in Peru.  24 years later, the heat wave that caused the Dust Bowl peaked, with temperatures reaching 109 °F (43 °C) in Chicago and 104 °F (40 °C) in Milwaukee. On this day in 1959, at the opening of the American National Exhibition, Vice-President Richard Nixon got into a rancorous “Kitchen Debate” in public. On July 24, 1969, the Moon landing mission Apollo 11 safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Five years later, the Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over the “Watergate tapes” that he had withheld from the Watergate special prosecutor. It was the beginning of the end for Tricky Dick. Finally, on this day in 1987, the American mountaineer Hulda Crooks, a 91 year old woman, climbed Mt. Fuji. She thus became the oldest person to climb Japan’s highest peak.

Notables born on this day include Simón Bolivar (1783), Alphonse Mucha (1860), Robert Graves (1895), Amelia Earhart (1897), Bella Abzug (1920), Lynda Carter (1951) and Barry Bonds (1964). Those who died on this day include Martin van Buren (1862), Peter Sellers (1980), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1991), and sexologist Virginia E. Johnson (2013). Mucha created some wonderful Art Nouveau advertising posters; here’s one selling champagne:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Elzbieta is spoiling Cyrus and Hili with treats again.

A: I’m afraid somebody here is spoiling you.
Hili: Don’t butt in, we are busy with serious matters.
In Polish:
Ja: Obawiam się, że ktoś cię rozpuszcza.
Hili: Nie wtrącaj się, zajmujemy się poważnymi sprawami.

Some tweets from Matthew:

A punctilious ferret mother:

and a friendly kingfisher:

Look at this insect! (You can get the tweet translated using your browser.)

A familiar physics demonstration:

Is this pigeon really enjoying itself?

From Grania. First, “a story in two acts”. Look at that greedy cueball; but other news suggests he wasn’t as odious as this video makes him look:

https://twitter.com/Hassel_Chris/status/1021136510110830594

And the reparations:

Oy! No Swiss rolls for the staff today!

https://twitter.com/air_blenb/status/1021299554241720320

Somebody needs to contact W.H. Smith about its “signage”:

Muhammad reportedly had a similar dilemma with his cat Muezza.

I have no idea what’s going on here except that there’s a Ninja Owl:

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1021496572004245504

Finally, a GIF sent by reader Su. Look at the athleticism of that cat!

Monday: Duck report

July 23, 2018 • 2:30 pm

All the ducks are fine, and the “ducklings” must be very close to fledging, as their wings are large and have plenty of flight feathers. Honey is still molting, and has gone off her feed, eating only mealworms and corn and spurning the duckling chow. A birder friend tells me that this is typical during a molt.

I had a bit of a duck trauma the last several days. One of the ducklings was chased by the others repeatedly, and several times I saw her sitting by herself with her head tucked by her side. Here’s an example from yesterday morning. See her at the rear, resting while the others are foraging on the lawn?

And look how big the ducklings are! They are now full-sized ducks.

Look at this poor baby! When I approached her she didn’t move, but got alert, and I didn’t want to disturb her lest she needed her rest (I think it’s a female because it quacks).

But the good news is that she’s joined the pack again and is eating well and cavorting with the others. I wonder if she’d been chased so much that she withdrew. I’ll never know, but I’m delighted that she seems in good shape now.

Honey is still in molt, but is looking a bit better and her flight feathers are growing. I try to feed her up with lots of corn and mealworms, but the damn brood keeps interrupting:

My best girl. . . .well, my best girl who is feathered:

Ducks having lunch today. Look at that crazy duckling with a leaf on its back. Honey is in the rear.

Look at that crazy duck! I think he feels humiliated:

Spot the duck!

And we mustn’t forget our turtle friends, who scarf up all the leftover duck food:

And let us remember that exactly two months ago today, the ducklings looked like this:

More evidence against pervasive “epigenetic” heritable and environmentally induced changes in DNA

July 23, 2018 • 1:30 pm

I’ve discussed at great length the lack of evidence that the environment can change the DNA in a way that is both inherited through successive generations and can also be adaptive: the view that there is a new “epigenetic” form of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. Go here to see a panoply of my pieces on this topic. The pervasive and loud claims that there is a new and non-Darwinian form of evolution afoot stand in stark contrast to the lack of evidence supporting those claims.

And it’s even worse than I thought. At the post below at the Wiring the Brain site, Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscience researcher in Dublin, takes a hard look at the claims in humans and other species—and finds them severely wanting.

Just go to the links on his post to see his earlier writings taking apart the very weak evidence for transgenerational inheritance of acquired epigenetic DNA changes, but I’ll provide some links in an excerpt:

I recently wrote a blogpost examining the supposed evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (TGEI) in humans. This focused specifically on a set of studies commonly cited as convincingly demonstrating the phenomenon whereby the experiences of one generation can have effects that are transmitted, through non-genetic means, to their offspring, and, more importantly, even to their grandchildren. Having examined what I considered to be the most prominent papers making these claims, I concluded that they do not in fact provide any evidence supporting that idea, as they are riddled with fatal methodological flaws.

While the scope of that piece was limited to studies in humans, I have also previously considered animal studies making similar claims, which suffer from similar methodological flaws (here and here). My overall conclusion is that there is effectively no evidence for TGEI in humans (contrary to widespread belief) and very little in mammals more generally (with one very specific exception).

Jill Escher (@JillEscher), who is an autism advocate and funder of autism research, recently posted a riposte, arguing that I was far too sweeping in my dismissal of TGEI in mammals, and listing 49 studies that, in her opinion, collectively represent very strong evidence for this phenomenon.

So, have I been unfair in my assessment of the field? Could it possibly be justified to dismiss such a large number of studies? What is the right level of skepticism to bring to bear here? For that matter, what level of skepticism of novel ideas should scientists have generally?

It turns out that Mitchell hasn’t been unfair in his assessment. The 49 studies cited by Escher are riddled with flaws, including un-kosher statistical analysis (p-hacking, failure to correct probability values for multiple comparisons, incorrect analyses). Further, epigenetics research has stalled at the point where mechanism is neglected: researchers using flawed methodology just report the phenomenon over and over again, with little progress being made. He also claims that there are no plausible mechanisms for this form of environmental stimulus to produce heritable behavior that persists several generations down the line, and that the possibility of epigenetic behavior being transmitted to future generations doesn’t solve any long-standing puzzles. The buzz about epigenetics is, I think, just one of those “Darwin was wrong” ideas that persists because of its revolutionary character, despite the lack of any supporting evidence.

Mitchell’s conclusion?

Ultimately, there is nothing where we can say: “We know that X happens, but we don’t know how. Maybe TGEI is a mechanism that can mediate X.” Instead, the introduction to these papers usually reads like this: “We know that TGEI [trans-generational epigenetic inheritance] can happen in X. [Narrator: we don’t know that]. Maybe it also happens in Y”.

So, until someone can show me a scenario where TGEI solves a known problem, has at least a conceivable, biologically plausible mechanism, is robust enough to provide an experimental system to work out the actual mechanism, and has convincing enough evidence of existing as a phenomenon in the first place, I will keep my skepticometer dialled to 11.

Until we have strong and repeated evidence for TGEI and, for evolutionists, evidence that it’s led to any adaptive evolution in nature, the proper attitude is firm skepticism. Caveat lector.

h/t: Matthew

Templeton-sponsored accommodationist cartoon in Nautilus

July 23, 2018 • 10:30 am

Reader Michael called my attention to a comic-book presentation of accommodationism at the website Nautilus, a site founded and apparently still funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Click on the screenshot if  you want to see this heavy-handed presentation:

The comic highlights a new venture, Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum (SRES), which is sponsored by the Templeton Religious Trust, Newman University, The University of Kent, and, God help us, both the British Library and the British Science Association. Why the latter two organizations are engaged in theology, especially in a country far less religious than the U.S., is beyond me, but British scientists should raise some objections.

As you might expect from the Templeton participation, the answer to the question is “no,” but they’re limiting the “problem” to the UK and Canada, where far fewer people have a problem with evolution than they do in the U.S. Nevertheless, there are Canadian and British creationists.

The comic is dull and pendantic, but does highlight some useful points. First, as we’re increasingly realizing, acceptance or denial of evolution is largely a matter not of accepting or adjudicating facts, but flaunting your membership in a tribe: religious people and conservatives who reject evolution, and liberals who accept it.  This is true in the U.S., too: on a questionnaire about science literacy in America, the National Science Foundation originally had a question about evolution, but discovered that it didn’t correlate with knowing truths about other areas of science, but rather was highly correlated with religiosity. In other words, the “do you accept the truth of evolution” question was a marker not of scientific literacy, but of religiosity. The question, adding nothing to the survey’s results, was dropped.

Further, the cartoon makes the obvious point that if you push evolution at the same time you call religious people “morons”, or insult them directly, you’re not going to be very effective. On the other hand, the cartoon is wrong in asserting that one can be consistently religious and accept evolution. That’s because the inconsistency becomes plain when both religion and science make truth claims, as they both do; but we see that only science has a way to examine and test those claims. In other words, the incompatibility of science and religion, the thesis of my book Faith versus Fact, is an incompatibility in how we evaluate truth claims. And believe me, virtually every religion makes truth claims, most starting with the existence of a theistic God. Of course, the cartoon doesn’t examine this incompatibility, but just trots out the old canards of showing “compatibility” because many scientists were Christians, that many laypeople accept evolution and religion at the same time, and so on. It doesn’t attack the fundamental weakness of relying on faith rather than empiricism to discover what’s true.

Here are a few panels from the cartoon. I’ve made a Word document with the whole thing in it, which you can obtain with judicious inquiry.

Here the cartoonist doesn’t understand that creationists want their lies taught in schools while believers in aliens don’t:

Have a gander at this lame attempt at showing the compatibility of science and religion.  It implies that Charles Darwin was religious, when in reality he became increasingly atheistic as he aged. As for those who lived before Darwin, well, everyone was a creationist then, since it was the only game in town. Does that mean religion is compatible with everything that happened before 1859?

Another way the cartoon touts religion is to say that science answer the “small” factual questions while religion answers the big “existential” questions, which of course it doesn’t. This is Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) view of compatibility:

The cartoon unwittingly undermines its own premise with these panels, showing that people find a way to believe what they want to believe. Similarly, accommodationists like those supporting the SRES project start with the premise that science and religion are compatible, and then confect ways to justify that conclusion:

Here’s another unwitting revelation of the conflict between faith and fact: a confused religionist who accepts evolution says that his faith is really about Jesus, not evolution. But having “faith in Jesus” means you accept the existence of Jesus, his divinity, and his crucifixion and resurrection, all empirical claims that are in principle testable. Needless to say, there’s no hard evidence for any of them:

Here’s a bit of science-dissing, implying that while science doesn’t have “unchanging ultimate truth”, religion does. Of course religion doesn’t: the different faiths can’t even agree with each other what “truth” is, while all chemists, regardless of their faith or lack thereof, accept that a molecule of benzene has six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms:

Finally, they resort again to a NOMA-ish attitude, saying that science and religion can “share the same space”, illustrating that with a picture of the “Darwin Building” next to a church or theology school. Well, my department of ecology and evolution shares the same quadrangle with the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Does that prove that science and religion are compatible? What kind of fool would claim that? On the same campus reside those postmodern scholars who assert that science has no privilege when it comes to finding truth about the universe. Surely science isn’t compatible with that form of po-mo nonsense:

There’s a lot more pablum in this jar, so ask if you want to see the whole damn thing, or just read the cartoon on the website. I guarantee that you won’t be enlightened.

This is par for the course for Templeton, but it’s horrifying to think that this project is sponsored by both the British Library and the British Science Association.

And I ask again: why are people so interested in whether science and religion are compatible rather than, say, whether business and religion are compatible, or sports and religion? Could it be that there has been a conflict between the first two areas and not the last? And if that’s where the interest lies, why? I think it has something to do with the fact that science has the ability to test claims about the universe, and has repeatedly disproven the claims of religion—starting with Genesis I and II— but religion has no reciprocal ability. Science doesn’t need religion to see whether its hypotheses are true.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

July 23, 2018 • 7:45 am

First a video from reader Rick Longworth, who added these notes: “This spider had just finished molting and was resting under its discarded exoskeleton. The whole process took about 30 minutes of drying as the sun was setting. The tight new outfit she’s wearing gets a bit of scratching at the base of the legs. The light color, I suspect will gradually darken.”

I’m not sure what species this is, but I’m sure readers can help:

And some golden ants and other insects (as well as ant-mimicking jumping spiders) from reader Tony Eales in Oz. His notes are indented:

I recently came across a nest of Polyrhachis rufifemur, which is a spectacular golden species of Tropical Spiny Ant. That lead me to this paper on the golden ant mimicry complex. Over the years I have managed to photograph several instances of this mimicry in ants, wasps, bugs and spiders. Here are a few examples.

JAC: I suspect this is an example of a Müllerian mimicry ring, in which a number of dangerous or toxic species mimic each other, although some of the mimics could be Batesian, meaning that they are harmless and enjoy protection by mimicking a dangerous model. The gold color is, to my knowledge, almost unique as a form of warning coloration, and some of these insects (particularly in the very last photo) are spectacular.)

A velvet ant (Bothriomutilla sp.), which is a wingless female wasp in the family Mutillidae:

A couple of Lygaeid Seed Bugs Daerlac sp.:

Some ant-mimicking jumping spiders Myrmarachne sp.

And ants from diverse families in the genera Camponotus, Dolichoderus, Myrmecia and Polyrhachis (in order):

Looking at the paper, I’ve still got a long way to go to get all the species in this mimicry ring.

Monday: Hili dialogue

July 23, 2018 • 6:30 am

Well, here we are at Monday again: July 23, 2018, and it’s National Vanilla Ice Cream Day. I have a half gallon of Breyer’s Vanilla in my freezer (actually the container is not as large since ice cream companies sneakily colluded to reduce the size of their cartons). But that treat is destined to lie atop a piece of Costco Apple Pie—one of the great triumphs of mass merchandising. It’s also a Rastafarian holiday: the birthday of Haile Selassie (1892).

On this day in 1829, the American William Austin Burt patented the typographer, one precursor of the typewriter. Here’s what it looked like—you moved a lever that made an inked letter contact the paper. At first it was far more cumbersome and slower than simply writing:

On July 23, 1840, the Act of Union of united Upper and Lower Canada to create the Province of Canada. On this day in 1914, according to Wikipedia, “Austria-Hungary issues a series of demands in an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia demanding Serbia to allow the Austrians to determine who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serbia accepts all but one of those demands and Austria declares war on July 28.” That was the beginning of the First World War. On July 23, 1942, the Nazis opened the Treblinka extermination camp, which ultimately killed more Jews (700,000-900,000) than any camp other than Auschwitz. Exactly a year later, the Rayleigh bath chair murder occurred in Rayleigh, England. This is a bizarre one; read about it at the link. Finally, on July 23, 1972, the U.S. launched Landsat 1, the first satellite designed to orbit the Earth to collect data on our planet, including information about agricultural and forestry resources, geology, pollution, and weather.

Notables born on this day include Haile Selassie (1892; see above), Arthur Treacher (1894; actor and later purveyor of execrable fish and chips), Pee Wee Reese (1918), Don Drysdale (1936), Justice Anthony Kennedy (1936), Theo Van Gogh (1957, stabbed to death 2004), Woody Harrelson (1961) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967). Don Drysdale still holds a major league baseball record (two, actually); can you name them? Pee Wee Reese, besides being a superb shortstop, is to be lauded for defending the hiring of Jackie Robinson, the first black to enter Major League Baseball. When the other Brooklyn Dodger players threatened to quit when Robinson was hired, Reese, a popular player, refused to go along, defusing the revolt.

Those who died on July 23 include Domenico Scarlatti (1757), Ulysses S. Grant (1885), D. W. Griffith (1948), Donald Barthelme (1989), Eudora Welty (2001), Daniel Schorr (2010), Amy Winehouse (2011), and Sally Ride (2012). Here’s Amy singing one of my favorite songs at the Isle of Wight, four years before she died:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being domineering:

Hili: A horrible mess on this table.
A: That’s inevitable when you’re baking a cheesecake.
Hili: And who needs it?
In Polish:
Hili: Straszny bałagan na tym stole.
Ja: Tak to jest przy robieniu sernika.
Hili: I komu to potrzebne?
First, a truefact cartoon from reader Su:

A tweet from reader Gethyn; be sure to watch the video:

From Heather Hastie. Here’s an Überkatze:

https://twitter.com/FluffSociety/status/1020473438673268736

. . . and a loving lion.

https://twitter.com/DAILYKlTTEN/status/1020472547853447169

Tweets from Matthew. Here’s a predatory fly that mimics a bumblebee:

Another spectacular fly. Look at those patterns!

Matthew’s apparently following the Tour de France, and here’s some nice country that the cyclists traverse. Clicking on the tweet below will take you to the original with the video:

The discovery of a 45 million year old skull weathering out of the ground:

A goat following its drill sergeant’s orders. “I can’t hear you, goat!”:

https://twitter.com/RelktntHero/status/1020088145700950017

From Grania; this is my favorite tweet of the month:

https://twitter.com/catovitch/status/1020468230614396929

How Gary Larson contributed to paleontological jargon:

More on the excavation in Ireland:

A jailbreaking kitty:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1021058577765752832

I supposed this was a drive-in waitress delivering food to a car, but it’s not. I don’t know what it is; but it’s truly impressive:

 

 

Keenan Malik’s blog also banned in Pakistan with the help of WordPress

July 22, 2018 • 2:30 pm

As you may recall, WordPress, the organization that hosts this site, got complaints from the Pakistani government that some of my posts were offensive because they hurt the sentiments of Muslims. Those posts were were ones showing Jesus and Mo cartoons, which satirize Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike. WordPress decided to cooperate with Pakistan by simply blocking my entire website from being viewed in that country, a move that, in view of WordPress’s avowed commitment to free speech, made me upset and angry.

Now Kenan Malik, a British writer and broadcaster of Indian descent, has experienced the same banning by proxy. As he describes on his own website, Pandaemonium (Malik’s words are indented):

This week WordPress received an email from the  ‘Web Analysis Team’ of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA)  ‘The webpages hosted on your platform are extremely Blasphemous and are hurting the sentiments of many Muslims around Pakistan’, it read. What particularly seemed to concern the PTA were my articles about Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine targeted by Islamist gunmen in a machinegun attack that left 12 people dead in January 2015. These articles, and the images from the magazine that I have published (in particular the one above), are, according to the PTA, ‘in violation of Section 37 of Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 and Section 19 of Constitution of Pakistan’. It ordered WordPress to block access to my website in Pakistan in order ‘to contribute towards maintaining peace and harmony in the world’. Which is why readers in Pakistan can no longer access Pandaemonium.

After criticizing those members of the writer’s organization PEN who protested its award “Freedom of Expression Courage Award” to Charlie Hebdo, Malik delves into the larger issue of the Left’s complicity in such censorship. This includes some liberals’ misguided damning of Charlie Hebdo as “racist”:

What the Pakistani action does do is provide a new perspective on the attitudes of many Western liberals towards Charlie Hebdo. When the Charlie Hebdo offices were attacked in 2015, many liberals in the West were reluctant to offer their solidarity. As I observed in the immediate aftermath of the attack (in one of the articles that caused offence to the PTA), ‘hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a ‘racist institution’ and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam’.  ‘Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Muhammad’, I added, ‘appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.’

. . . In countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, writers and cartoonists constantly risk their lives facing down blasphemy laws, standing up for equal rights and fighting for democratic freedoms. They constantly challenge the kind of censorship imposed by the PTA. They are the people whom many Western liberals betray in their refusal to support free speech and in their insistence that to mock Muhammad or to champion blasphemy is to be ‘racist’.

Such liberal critics would no doubt object to Pakistan’s decision to censor ‘blasphemous’ websites. But it’s worth asking: is there really that great a distance between their refusal to support Charlie Hebdo and the Pakistani authorities’ takedown of websites that do demonstrate solidarity?

Amen.