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.
We’re having a short RWP today as I have a larger post on Dobrzyn to follow soon. Today we have two special star photos from reader Don McCrady
After a streak of great clear weather in the Seattle area I (thus far) have two new astro-images for your site. (More coming, I hope, if I can get some more clear skies and fix some technical issues I’m having.) I’ll send them in separate e-mails to avoid confusion.
First, a nebula that I will dub “The Great Wall of Mexico“, a reference that — I promise — has nothing to do with Donald Trump! This is the “Mexico” portion of the much larger North America Nebula, and the bright ridge along its western “coastline” is known informally as the Great Wall. The entire area is composed predominantly of ionized hydrogen and oxygen, but the inky dark spots and streaks are from the intervening clouds of dust that block the background glow. The combination makes for a wonderfully complex and fascinating area of the sky.
This image was taken with a Stellarvue SVS130 telescope and an SBIG STL-4020M camera, and is a combination of Hydrogen-alpha and Oxygen-III. The colours have been heavily manipulated to my aesthetic tastes, but generally the red areas correspond to Hydrogen and the blue/green areas to Oxygen. The final image was upsampled 1.5x.
Here’s the second astro photo I’ve been working on. This one is the aptly named Bubble Nebula, which really is a bubble in space. The stellar wind of an extremely hot and energetic star at the center is carving out the surrounding molecular cloud of interstellar dust and gas. The Bubble Nebula lies about 11000 light years distant in the constellation of Cassiopeia, and is nearby the beautiful open cluster M52.
This image was taken with a Stellarvue SVS130 telescope and an SBIG STL-4020M CCD camera. Hydrogen-alpha was used as the red channel, while the blue and green channels are Oxygen-III. The image was processed in MaximDL and Photoshop, and was upsampled 2x.
We’re already into the third day of August, 2016, and it’s Esther Day, commemorating the death of blogger and author Esther Earl, who succumbed to cancer at age 16 on this day in 2010. Earl was the inspiration for the bestselling book and movie The Fault In Our Stars, a movie that’s available on every flight I take, but which I can’t bear to watch.
Also on this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail with his three ships from Spain, ultimately arriving in the Caribbean islands and Cuba (he did not land in North America). In 1811, this day marked the first ascent of the Jungfrau by the Meyer brothers, and, in 1936, Jesse Owens won the 100-meter dash at the Berlin Olympics, upsetting Hitler.
Notables born on this day include Rupert Brooke (1887), Tony Bennett (1926; he’s 90 today, and still singing!), and Martin Sheen (1940). Those who died on this day include Joseph Conrad (1924), Colette (1954), Lenny Bruce (1966), Henri Cartier-Bresson (2004), and Bobby Hebb (2010). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is making jokes about my book:
Jerry: And what are we going to talk about?
Hili: Facts; there is no use talking about faith.
In Polish:
Jerry: I o czym będziemy rozmawiać?
Hili: O faktach, nie ma co mówić o wierze.
In Wroclawek, Leon is complaining that his specially ordered treats haven’t arrived. What a spoiled cat!
Leon: Oh, no! They didn’t deliver my treats from Ontario* again.
*Ontario is a Canadian firm producing cat treats which aren’t available in Poland.)
*********
In Winnipeg, Gus once again got into the catnip in the garden, and he’s baked:
And special lagniappe today: readers Gethyn and Laurie in London have named the visiting next-door cat “Jerry Coyne.” Jerry sometimes comes over to visit their own cat, the famous espresso-drinking Theo (more about Theo on August 8). Here’s Jerry showing typical cat behavior “Follow me and pet me. . . wait, no, don’t. Rub my belly. . . no, don’t!”
Listen up, Islamic apologists, especially those of you who claim that the main motivations of Islamist terrorism derive from Western colonialism rather from Islam. Listen up, Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Pape, Karen Armstrong, and Nathan Lean: ISIS has explained in very clear language that you’re just wrong. It’s religion, stupid! After reading the article summarized in the 14½-minute video below, or the article itself, you’ll have a hard time blaming Western imperialism for terrorism, or claiming that ISIS is a perversion of Islam: “not true Islam.”
You may know that ISIS has mastered social media, including the production of a slick online magazine, Dabiq. In the latest issue there’s an article called “Why we hate you & Why we fight you.” (You can find a pdf of issue 15 of Dabiq, and the article, here.) The piece explains very clearly what ISIS wants and why it fights. And if you want to reject its reasons, then you’ll have to explain why the movement’s main organ of propaganda is simply lying to the West. (I’m sure that some people will claim that.)
See (or read) for yourself. The main reason, which you could have discerned from reading Lawrence Wright’s masterful (and Pulitzer-Prize-winning) book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, is an Islamist terrorism that grew directly out of pure, unadulterated Islam: a literal interpretation of the Qur’an calling for extirpation of unbelievers, coupled with a hatred of the salaciousness and licentiousness of Western society.
Yes, among the reasons given below you’ll find colonialism and the war we’re still waging on ISIS, but they’re at the bottom of the list. As the video makes clear at 11:00, ISIS sees those reasons as secondary. Even if the bombing and colonialism stopped, they say (the latter largely has stopped), ISIS would still continue its battle, for they see foreign policy as “secondary.” What is primary is the requirement of the Qur’an to subjugate and kill nonbelievers.
This is a must-watch video—and a must-read article.
After reading or watching these, you’d be hard pressed to maintain that ISIS is “not real Islam.” I’d argue, in fact, that it is the truest form of Islam, for it’s simply interpreting literally a scripture that is meant to be taken literally, and then acting on its dictates.
Although the posts on this site go straight to Twi**er, and I occasionally post something else there, I don’t follow the tw**ts of others. That’s mainly for lack of time: I can’t write on this site and tw**t at the same time. But I still parasitize my friends and readers who sent me tw**ts, and this post is an example. Alert reader Bryan sent me a pair of tw**ts, one from the National Secular Society (NSS, referring to an article on its website), and the other a response from antitheist philosopherAnthony Grayling, who happens to be the Vice President of the British Humanist Association.
Grayling doesn’t pull any punches:
We often hear calls for 'religious literacy'. What do children actually need to leave school knowing about religion? https://t.co/urrfIuxfui
No education complete without astrology, crystal gazing, the Cabala, voodoo, Zoroaster, numerology, auguries… https://t.co/WUesJRLFdJ
— A C Grayling #FBPE 3.5% #Reform #Rejoin🐟 (@acgrayling) August 2, 2016
But that got me thinking about this question: Is it useful to have religious education in government-funded schools? By that, of course, I mean teaching about the world’s diverse religions, not indoctrinating children in faith.
In England, religious education (RE) is a required subject in all government funded schools, and of course in “faith schools” that cater to a particular religion and also get government money. (For the record, I don’t think any public funds should go to supporting religious schools.) As far as I know, RE extends from the early years right up until at least the “fifth form” (equivalent to grade 10 in the U.S., with students aged about 16).
However, English students can opt out of RE, as well as of the required daily “act of worship.” Yet RE is not evenhanded: at least half the curriculum must be Christian, and, although the High Court has ruled that atheism was unlawfully excluded from RE, the Minister of Education has said that RE must include the idea that “Britain is a Christian nation” (!) and that religion can be given priority over nonreligious views.
So, although Britain is becoming increasingly (and rapidly!) secular, the government is regressing with respect to RE. In the RSS article referred to above, by Stephen Evans: “What do pupils need to know about religion?” there’s this:
In a new report on the subject, the All-Party Parliamentary group on Religious Education calls for a return of the ‘minister for faith’ position to the cabinet in order to address society’s urgent need for greater “religious literacy”.
Without providing any evidence that religious illiteracy is a problem of any significant importance, the APPG calls on the Government to promote religious literacy by “championing RE” and making its improvement an “important educational priority”.
The problem is, when it comes to this highly contested area of the curriculum, there’s very little in the way of consensus regarding what “improvement” actually means.
Evans concludes, and I agree, that there’s really no need for RE in schools. Now there are some prominent atheists, Dan Dennett among them, who have called for obligatory religious education—on the grounds that to be considered “educated” in the world you have to know something about religion. One can, I suppose make a case for that, but I think the counterarguments are stronger. Here are some I thought of:
Considering my own education, I had no religious teaching, as is the case in American public schools. (The First Amendment effectively bans it.) Have I suffered from this? I don’t think so. The time that would have been occupied by RE can be more profitably employed in learning about other aspects of culture: art, music, and literature, of which only the last is usually offered in American public schools.
The tenets of religion are fictional, made up by humans. That’s the most important thing to know about religion, and it’s the one thing that no religious education curriculum will teach. You learn what different faiths say, but there can be no critical discussion of that dogma.
Religious education can, all too often, turn into religious proselytizing, as seems to be happening in the UK.
What you need to know about religion you can pick up in the public sphere; anybody in the U.S., for instance, is constantly exposed to faith. Thus it is unlike algebra or chemistry, which you can get only in school.
There are simply too many religions on the planet to do a decent job teaching about them all. There are, by some estimates, over 40,000 sects of Christianity alone! Who decides which to teach? Do you teach the ones only practiced in the students’ own country, or do you anthropologically cover the whole panoply of human religious belief?
A big problem: how do you teach a religion objectively? With Islam, for instance, do you teach the Shia or Sunni versions, or both? What about Sufism? You can imagine the fracas that would ensue among the parents of Muslim children no matter what is taught about Islam. There will always be concern about whether one’s own religion is being taught properly to children.
One British reader, who went to a Church of England school, wrote me this:
I remember at the age of nine/ten being taught the story of the “miracle” of the feeding of the five thousand – loaves and fishes story – and being told that we should not take it literally but that it was an allegory (although I’m sure the teacher used a different word) and perhaps was meant to tell us to share what we have.
That would never fly in an America that harbors many Biblical literalists. Imagine telling a class in the South that the first two chapters of Genesis were allegorical!
Finally, what about atheism? Surely nonbelief should also be taught, as is supposedly required in England. But how much emphasis should be given to nonbelief? And, as we learned yesterday, most people’s atheism comes from a lack of evidence for the tenets of conventional religions. How can you teach atheism without being critical of those religions?
France circumvents the whole problem by substituting a course on ethics and morality, though in some regions students can still avail themselves of RE. I see problems with the secular version as well, for teaching ethics would be difficult on the secondary-school level.
I’d prefer to see an obligatory course in critical thinking. But of course that would raise an uproar in the U.S., with parents realizing that critically-thinking children could turn their doubts on their faith!
Overall, I see RE as misguided. It should not be part of the curriculum of any secular democracy. But, of course, readers are free to disagree below. The reader who went to the Church of England school, for instance, saw benefits to his own religious education:
On a personal note, I would say that I don’t object to teaching religion in that manner. I do think that the historical input of the various religions is important and having some idea of the stories and basis for the belief systems is a good thing. My own kids have pretty much no idea about the bible – they don’t know the basic stories. They had nothing formal in elementary/high school – and living in the [U.S. South] they were surrounded by indoctrinated kids. They both had religion/philosophy prerequisites as undergrads – one did intro Hinduism and the other intro Buddhism. I told them they should do intro Christianity – but they said that was a goof-off course for the kids who knew it anyway, and they would rather compete on a more level playing field.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) was founded in 1999, with its founders expecting that it would last only ten years. But you probably know that the organization is still going strong. In fact, it’s going stronger than ever due to the rise of the Authoritarian Left and student Offense Culture, as well as Obama’s “urging” campuses to expand how Title IX, the sexual harassment regulation, is construed—an expansion that has come into conflict with First Amendment rights and thrown many campuses into a turmoil (see an example here).
In fact, only a few years ago I remember FIRE being widely regarded as a right-wing fringe organization, largely because it took on the thankless task of defending free speech and expression on campuses—something that often required them to counter liberal attempts to censor “hate speech.” And FIRE is still supported generously by right-wing groups like the Koch Foundation. That’s exactly why progressives like us should fund them, for a liberal philosophy is the traditional repository of individual rights, including the right to criticize religion! Most progressive causes in the U.S., like the civil rights and gay-liberation movements, have succeeded precisely because they were able to speak freely in ways others found offensive. A gay liberation movement would not succeed in Saudi Arabia, for its proponents would not only be censored, but killed.
It’s an indication of the Zeitgeist, then, that FIRE is now so busy that it’s the subject of a new New York Times profile, “Fighting for free speech on America’s campuses.” Greg Lukianoff, the president and chief executive of FIRE, dates the beginning of the big rise in censorship on American campuses:
“Something changed,” Mr. Lukianoff said. “I don’t entirely know why.” But he can date the shift: October 2013, at Brown University, when the New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was invited to speak but was shouted down by students over his support of stop-and-frisk practices.
“I count that as the symbolic beginning because that’s when we noticed an uptick in student press for disinvitations, trigger warnings and microaggression policing,” he said. “That doesn’t mean administrators have stopped doing goofy things, but now they can say, at least more convincingly, that they are being told by students that they need to do those things.”
Asked if colleges should have policies against slurs and other intentionally offensive language, 69 percent of students said yes, while 27 percent believed they should be able to restrict expression of potentially offensive political views. And 63 percent wanted schools to restrict costumes that stereotype racial or ethnic groups.
In other words, roughly 2/3 of students think their schools should restrict First Amendment rights they enjoy in society as a whole.
• While 76 percent agreed that students should not be able to prevent the news media from covering campus protests, nearly half supported reasons for curtailing that coverage: biased reporting (49 percent), the right to be left alone when protesting (48 percent) and the right to tell their own story on the internet and social media (44 percent). For black students, percentages are higher (66 percent, 61 percent and 54 percent).
• Black students were least sanguine about the right to peaceable assembly: 60 percent saw it as a threat, compared with 29 percent of white students.
And yet, despite the 2/3 mandate for speech and dress censorship, over half recognize that their own campuses have a climate that suppresses free speech:
• Over all, 54 percent polled said the climate on their campus “prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”
Finally, if you go to the report, you’ll find another result:
U.S. college students are highly confident about the security of each of the five First Amendment rights, particularly freedom of the press (81%), freedom to petition the government (76%) and freedom of speech (73%).
Yet these are the very rights they want to remove or restrict on their own campuses! I’m not sure what’s going on here, unless students simply don’t understand the First Amendment and its historical interpretation by courts, which includes allowing speech now largely seen as “hate speech.” We’ll get to this ignorance in a minute.
In the meantime, FIRE has been extraordinarily successful in investigating and rectifying violations of First Amendment rights on campus (my emphasis below):
A lawsuit is FIRE’s tactic of last resort, especially when it comes to speech codes. In about 90 percent of cases, it uses “persuasion,” as staff members call it, to get administrators to revise or revoke questionable parts of a code. Depending on the level of “obstinacy,” Mr. Bonilla said, “the levers of publicity” — news releases, op-eds, media appearances — kick in. Most administrators, wary of bad press or an expensive suit, eliminate the speech codes.
As Mr. Lukianoff likes to note, FIRE has not lost a speech-code legal challenge yet. (He recounts many of them in his 2014 book, “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.”)
I’ve read that book, and it’s very good as well as eye-opening. I’ll soon offer a free copy as the prize in an as-yet-undetermined contest.
The Times piece does show some criticism of FIRE by universities, but I don’t find it compelling. And the article offers up one more bit of information relevant to the Christakises Halloween Dustup at Yale University:
Katie McCleary, a Little Shell Chippewa student raised on the Crow Reservation in Montana, is a Yale junior who was active in the protests. “I would not seek out FIRE even though they say they are founded for reasons of defending students who feel their voice is lost,” she said. “It seems like a specific kind of lost voice that they are interested in. It’s usually a voice that’s racist and says things that are immoral. I’d rather speak for myself.”
This shows a profound misunderstanding of the First Amendment. The court cases and complaints do indeed often involve protecting “offensive” speech (here characterized as “immoral” or “racist”). If someone didn’t find the speech offensive, there wouldn’t be any complaints requiring interventions by FIRE. But make no mistake about it—if McCleary’s right to speak her mind was violated on campus, FIRE would be there for her. Her criticisms make no more sense than saying that because accused criminals are usually guilty, yet are entitled to a defense (one that’s free if you’re indigent), then the whole judicial system is worthless.
The ignorance of students about the Constitution is amply displayed in another article in yesterday’s Times: “Want a copy of the Constitution? Now, that’s controversial!” Apparently, students passing out the Constitution on campus is considered a subversive activity
Passing out the Constitution on campus isn’t the benign activity one might expect, especially when egged on by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The group provides a pocket-size “Student Activist Edition” of the Constitution, which includes directions on how to hand it out and what to do if you get stopped: “Refer administrators to the First Amendment (p. 43)”; “Consider taking a video of the conversation”; “Contact FIRE for further assistance.”
On Constitution Day — the day delegates signed the document, Sept. 17, 1787 — a student Army veteran at Modesto Junior College in Fresno, Calif., was prevented from distributing copies and told to make an appointment to use the “free-speech zone,” a small, remote area available only certain hours of the day (three states now prohibit public colleges from designating only certain areas as free-speech zones). Likewise, at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, student members of Young Americans for Liberty, a national libertarian group, were ordered back to their table after handing out copies.
It’s hard to imagine that such activity could rise to the level of infraction, but both are cases FIRE filed suit over, and settled for a combined $100,000.
When I put up the following video, made by a provocateur, showing students at Yale (a hive of The Perpetually Offended) signing a petition to ban the First Amendment, some commenters here chimed in saying that the video was fake, or edited to make people look bad. I’m not so sure about that! People simply don’t know what the founding document of America law really says—or means.
When the Constitution of the U.S. is regarded as subversive and worthy of banning, then we’re really in trouble.
This is from Bored Panda (via reader Debby), and the title is “There’s no way you’ll find the cat in this pic in 10 secs“. So you have ten seconds to find it. I’ve put the answer below the fold (click “read more”). You can comment on how hard it was for you, but please don’t give the location in the comments.
It took me longer than ten seconds, and I had to hold the photo up to my face before I found it. I would call this medium-hard IF you limit yourself to ten seconds:
Reader Kurt Andreas contributed photos of both flora and fauna; his notes are indented:
Flower Longhorn (Strangalia cf. luteicornis); New Paltz, NY (June 30, 2013). The Strangalia longhorns larva (roundhead borers) feed on rotting wood, and the adults visit flowers in late spring and summer, consuming nectar and pollen.
Garden Star-of-Bethlehem/Nap-at-Noon (Ornithogalum umbellatum). Glendale, NY (April 12, 2016)
A toxic, drought-tolerant beauty native to Europe, Asia and Africa, and introduced into NA.
Podabrus flavicollis, New Paltz, NY (May 23, 2014). One of the soldier beetles (Cantharidae), a poorly studied group that consume soft-bodied insects like aphids as well as pollen, nectar and honeydew.
Tenodera sp. nymphs. New Paltz, NY (May 12, 2014). I took these photos just after they hatched from their ootheca., an egg mass with a foamy protein protective coating. Tenodera comprises Narrow-winged mantis and Chinese mantis, but I didn’t get a picture of the spot between their raptorial legs, which is yellow for the Chinese mantis and orange for the Narrow-winged.
And biologist/photographer Piotr Naskrecki, who’s also in Poland now, kindly allowed me to reproduce this photo he posted on Facebook. Try to identify it before you see his notes below.
I had waited all my life to meet this amazing, ancient creature, and finally saw it last week in Poland, near my parents’ house. The modern tadpole shrimp (Triops cancriformis) is virtually indistinguishable morphologically from its Carboniferous ancestors and it is possible that animals just like this one coexisted with, and were hunted by, the trilobites.
