Researchers: Saying the name of “Allah” while killing a chicken changes its liver and muscles

June 12, 2016 • 2:30 pm

If this paper is right, and it surely isn’t, it would be evidence not only for God, but for the Islamic god—Allah. What we have, courtesy of reader S. Krishna, is a paper from the 2013 volume of International Journal of Poultry Science (reference and link to abstract below) claiming that chickens slaughtered in halal fashion, while uttering the name of Allah, show changes in their livers and pectoral muscles that aren’t seen when slaughtered identically, but without saying the word Allah.

The authors, Kenenou Tarek et al, are from the Department of Veterinary Medicine and Laboratory of Animal Health at the University of Batna in Algeria. The short paper describes a partly controlled experiment outlined as follows:

A total of 66 broiler chickens (Ross 308) at 60 day of age were selected according to their average body weight (2600 g) from broiler chicken flock. Chickens were divided in 2 groups.

The first group (33 birds) were slaughtered according the Islamic method by severing the jugular vein, trachea and the esophagus, the name of Allah must be invoked by saying:, Bismillah-Allahu Akber.

The second group was slaughtered by the same way but the name of Allah was not pronounced. Livers and a fragments of the pectoral muscle were collected carefully set in a 10% formalin (Gridley, 1960) and sent to histological study in Agroveterinary institute of Souk Ahras (Algeria) in order to show the histological difference between the two groups levy.

Their findings are described not by any data, but only by two pictures that show what the authors claim to have found: “focal edema and congestive reactions in the blood vessels of the liver and pectoral muscles.”  Here are the muscles and livers of non-Allah chickens, with “Ca” meaning “congested areas. These areas are apparently a “rich medium for bacterial development” and causes “rapid autolysis of the chicken meat due to the intracellular enzymes of the leucocytes.”

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But if you say Allah, you get no congested areas. Voilà—a non-degrading chicken.

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The authors finish with some quotations from the Qur’an and hadith mandating that Allah’s name be pronounced at slaughter.

Why was this published in the International Journal of Poultry Science? God—sorry, Allah—only knows. This of course needs to be replicated, but in a blind fashion, so that the histologists don’t know which chicken was which (the authors make no mention of blind scoring). If it proves to be real, then we need to control for how the chickens are killed: maybe someone shouting “Allah” squeezes the chicken harder! And if it still stands up then. . . . well, I’d bet big money it wouldn’t.  And I’d call for yet other controls: when the chicken is slaughtered, someone has to shout “Jesus!” or “Shiva!”

_____________

Tarek, K., M. Mohamed, B. Omar, B. Hassina and I. Messaouda, 2013. Histological changes in liver and pectoral muscles of broiler chickens slaughtered with and without naming of Allah. International Journal of Poultry Science, 12: 550-552.

The latest on the Orlando shooting

June 12, 2016 • 1:00 pm

Just to keep people up to date, here’s the CNN bulletin I just got on email, quoted verbatim:

These are the latest developments confirmed by CNN:

  • At least 50 people are dead, police say, and 53 people were injured at the Pulse club in Orlando.
  • The shooter was Omar Saddiqui Mateen of Fort Pierce, Florida, law enforcement officials tell CNN. He was shot and killed by police at the nightclub.
  • Mateen called 911 at the time of the attack to pledge allegiance to ISIS, a U.S. official tells CNN, and mentioned the Boston bombers in the call. He had been investigated by the FBI in the past for possible ties to Islamic extremism, officials say, but there was no evidence to charge him with anything. ISIS sympathizers have praised the attack on jihadi forums.
  • The shooting began around 2 a.m. The gunman ran into the club and took hostages. Around 5 a.m. authorities used an armored vehicle to break down the door of the building and end the attack.
  • “It appears he was organized and well-prepared,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina says. The shooter had an assault-type weapon, a handgun and “some type of (other) device on him.”
  • Local and federal bomb squad personnel are currently entering Mateen’s Fort Pierce apartment, law enforcement officials say.
  • Mayor Buddy Dyer has declared a state of emergency for Orlando, and Florida Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency for Orange County.
  • President Obama is expected to speak shortly.

I’ve updated this by including the President’s statement below; you can find other statements (e.g. by the Pope), as well as the latest updated news, at the CNN liveblog.

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And this from The New York Times:

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Lindsay and Boghossian take down Trump

June 12, 2016 • 12:45 pm

My friend Peter Boghossian (a philosophy professor at Portland State) called my attention to a piece that he and James Lindsay (a mathematician and author) have published at Quillette: “The article about Trump nobody will publish.” (Quillette appears to be replacing Slate as the go-to place for secular and atheist writing.)

Their piece begins with this intriguing note from the editor:

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Who wouldn’t want to read a piece that starts that way? It could mean one of two things: either the piece is abysmal, or it’s controversial. (As I recall, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith was rejected by about a dozen publishers.) Well, it’s clearly controversial, but many of the commenters seem to think it’s abysmal, including at least one writer I respect. I don’t know what to think, as the authors’ main thesis—that Trump’s success is largely due to pushback against the Regressive Left—is emotionally appealing to me, but also lacking much evidence. And that’s a bad combination.

At any rate, their thesis is still worth pondering. They begin with the usual liberal tirade against Trump, calling him a monstrous, juvenile, and dangerous self-promoter—a cancer on the body politic. Well, who can take issue with that? What many commenters took issue with was that Boghossian and Lindsay identify another cancer, one that is supposed to explain a lot of Trump’s popularity:

Trump’s rise isn’t just explained by the failure of the GOP to get its house in order, conduct responsible politics, or find a single qualified candidate to run for the office. Trump’s rise follows directly from backlash to two words: political correctness. These two words are two of Trump’s favorites, and not arbitrarily. It is almost impossible to find a Trump supporter who doesn’t back him explicitly because of his unflinching, dismissive, even hostile stance against political correctness. “Don’t be afraid to speak your mind. Vote Trump!” could be a campaign bumper sticker. Should that not be convincing enough, cinching the case was the recent race-to-the-bottom sparring match between Trump and former GOP hopeful Ted Cruz, over which of them is to be deplored for being “more PC” than the other.

The Politically Correct Left is a cancer, too. It diagnoses societal symptoms far too simplistically and, largely just by calling them bigots, smears anyone who questions their moral pronouncements. Their assessment possesses no more nuance than accusing those on the Right of holding policy positions because they’re bigots: racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and anything else -phobic or -ist that their imaginations allow. This impolitic attitude and the concomitant name-calling prevent honest discourse about pressing issues, such as immigration policy, health care, and the global concerns orbiting around Islamist terrorism. The Politically Correct Left cannot even hear the need for such conversations, though, over the sound of its bellowing accusations of bigotry. Trump bulldozes their objections and couldn’t care less. Certainly, his policy proposals on these issues are both practically and morally repellent, but democracy demands the national-level conversation he’s forcing.

It must be noted that on almost no topic is the love of Trump’s anti-PC stand more obvious than that of radical Islam’s role in current global affairs. It doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest how clumsily he handles the topic. His supporters still lap it up. Why? The fact that our current political elites—be it for good reasons or bad—are obviously not speaking honestly about the connections between Islam and Islamism is a highly malignant lobe of the PC cancer. Trump’s recommended medicine seems hardly more sophisticated than taking a relatively dull hatchet to the afflicted, but at least he’s calling for an operation.

Much of that is true; what I question is how much it’s contributed to The Rise of Trumpism. And though the authors are clear that they despise Trump, and won’t vote for him, they suggest that his election might have one good effect, serving in the long run as “chemo” to cure both the rightward-lurching Republican party and the toxic Regressive Left:

These problems truly are cancers to our democracy, and a President Trump might be potent, if rough, medicine. There’s little question that his incompetence, inexperience, impetuousness, and incivility would cripple both the effectiveness and reputation of American politics for as long as he held office; and the embarrassment to the American citizens, if it were to elect him, would be almost unbearable. Our relationships with many, if not most, other countries would deteriorate, our economy would struggle (if it didn’t crash outright), and many of our problems would either multiply or fester. Such pains, though, may be the metaphorical equivalent of what chemotherapy does to its unfortunate patients. The question to our minds, then, isn’t whether a Trump presidency would be bad for America—it unquestionably would—but whether America might survive the medicine and come out better for the noxious treatment.

. . .Are we going to vote for Trump? No. No one should. What we’ve written constitutes the only reasonable case for supporting Trump, and it’s weak. That there’s even such an argument to be made, though, tells us a great deal about what’s going wrong in our society.

But I don’t even think there’s an argument to be made. The authors simply fail to adduce even a slightly convincing argument that America would “come out better” after Trump has served. Republicans are already repudiating him right and left, realizing what a Frankenstein their efforts have produced.  The next Republican candidate, in four years’ time, won’t be anything like Trump.

And if the authors think Trump’s wrecking the country will make a Democratic President more likely in the future, that remains to be seen. I, for one, don’t want four or eight years of a demagogue to get there. As for Trump wrecking the Regressive Left because they contributed to his election, I can’t see that at all. What will wreck that segment of the Left is its own excesses, not Trump’s success (which apparently will cause Leftists to rethink their behavior.) As I’ve said before, most Republican voters don’t even know about the Regressive Left, a phenomenon largely confined to the Internet and arguments among intellectuals. But I do accept that the failure of the Democratic party to push back against the Regressive Left has given some fodder to Trump’s supporters.

At least one commenter, whom many of us will recognize, had an even stronger aversion to the piece. Here are his two comments, and let it be noted that Orac (author of the website Respectful Insolence) is a cancer surgeon, and so may have reacted more violently than most to the invocation of cancer and “chemo”:

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Weigh in below, and I’ll call the comments to the authors’ attention.

On the denigration of science: Atul Gawande’s commencement address to Caltech

June 12, 2016 • 10:15 am

A short while ago, when we were chewing over Siddhartha Mukherjee’s distortions about epigenetics published in The New Yorker, I reproduced an email from a colleague discussing the magazine’s generally absymal and postmodernist take on science—but also singling out one author as an exception:

The New Yorker is fine with science that either serves a literary purpose (doctors’ portraits of interesting patients) or a political purpose (environmental writing with its implicit critique of modern technology and capitalism). But the subtext of most of its coverage (there are exceptions) is that scientists are just a self-interested tribe with their own narrative and no claim to finding the truth, and that science must concede the supremacy of literary culture when it comes to anything human, and never try to submit human affairs to quantification or consilience with biology. Because the magazine is undoubtedly sophisticated in its writing and editing they don’t flaunt their postmodernism or their literary-intellectual proprietariness, but once you notice it you can make sense of a lot of their material.

. . . Obviously there are exceptions – Atul Gawande is consistently superb – but as soon as you notice it, their guild war on behalf of cultural critics and literary intellectuals against scientists, technologists, and analytic scholars becomes apparent.

Gawande (born 1965) is a surgeon who also happens to be a staff writer for the New Yorker, one of the best writing gigs there is. And I agree with my correspondent: he’s very good. You can see his salubrious attitude toward science in something he just published in the magazine, a transcript of the address he gave on Friday at the Caltech (California Institute of Technology) commencement. It’s called “The mistrust of science.” (See the video below.)

I was happy to see that Gawande made several of the points I stressed in Faith Versus Fact: science is more a way of knowing than a body of facts; its methodology, honed over centuries of experience, is a reliable way to understand nature, while views based on faith or ideology are not; that “asserting the true facts of good science” is a better way to correct scientific misunderstandings or ideological opposition than is simply rebutting good science (something I tried to do in WEIT). Here’s just a bit:

Few working scientists can give a ground-up explanation of the phenomenon they study; they rely on information and techniques borrowed from other scientists. Knowledge and the virtues of the scientific orientation live far more in the community than the individual. When we talk of a “scientific community,” we are pointing to something critical: that advanced science is a social enterprise, characterized by an intricate division of cognitive labor. Individual scientists, no less than the quacks, can be famously bull-headed, overly enamored of pet theories, dismissive of new evidence, and heedless of their fallibility. (Hence Max Planck’s observation that science advances one funeral at a time.) But as a community endeavor, it is beautifully self-correcting.

Beautifully organized, however, it is not. Seen up close, the scientific community—with its muddled peer-review process, badly written journal articles, subtly contemptuous letters to the editor, overtly contemptuous subreddit threads, and pompous pronouncements of the academy— looks like a rickety vehicle for getting to truth. Yet the hive mind swarms ever forward. It now advances knowledge in almost every realm of existence—even the humanities, where neuroscience and computerization are shaping understanding of everything from free will to how art and literature have evolved over time.

Well, I’m not sure how rickety the enterprise really looks: bad writing is endemic in academia, but so long as it’s intelligible it’s no block to scientific progress (try reading some of the early papers on quantum mechanics!). Letters to the editor, which are really corrections, are useful in calling out errors or distortions. “Pompous pronouncements of the academy” (I assume Gawande means scientific bodies like the National Academy or Royal Society) have little effect on the progress of science, though they may affect public policy. And “subreddit threads” are completely irrelevant to scientists; I don’t think I’ve ever read one. But Gawande’s right: the self-correcting “hive mind”, even though motivated largely by careerism and ambition, is unique to science, and completely alien to theology and pseudoscience.

Gawande’s final words to the graduates were these:

Today, you become part of the scientific community, arguably the most powerful collective enterprise in human history. In doing so, you also inherit a role in explaining it and helping it reclaim territory of trust at a time when that territory has been shrinking.

. . . The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people—the bigger the better—pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words.

Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens.

Here’s the talk if you’d prefer to watch rather than read:

Addendum: Gawande made one statement that will rile up gun lovers (in bold):

Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).

It turns out that, indeed, you’re not safer owning a gun (see also here).

 

Terrorist attack in Orlando kills 50, injures 53

June 12, 2016 • 9:28 am

According to the New York Times and CNN, an assailant attacked an Orlando nightclub with an assault rifle and a handgun, killing about 20  50 people (updated) and injuring 42 53. The attack occurred at about 2 a.m. The assailant, who was killed in a battle with police, may also have also had explosives taped to his body.

The new death toll of 50, which may rise, makes this by far the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

My CNN news feed identifies the suspect as Omar Saddiqui Mateen, and The Jerusalem Post notes that, according to the FBI, Mateen may have had connections or leanings to ISIS.

While it’s possible this isn’t a terrorist attack, the likelihood is that it is. It may also be relevant that it was a gay nightclub.

This is a mirror of the terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv last week. There is no justification possible for either attack, though Hamas claimed credit for the latter and many Palestinians celebrated the four Israeli civilians who were killed, passing out sweets and issuing celebratory tweets. Any celebrations in the Islamic world will be more muted this time, as the organization involved was more likely to be ISIS rather than Hamas, and the targets were not Israelis but Americans.

But it’s never justified to kill innocent civilians, and I mourn for those, both Americans and Israelis, who lost their lives, as well as for the friends and relatives who remain. Our next President will have a hard row to hoe, for these attacks are not going away. We have the problem of gun control and we have the problem of terrorist Islamism. Neither has a clear solution, especially given the administration’s refusal to recognize religious motivations and Americans’ love of their weapons.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 12, 2016 • 7:30 am

Reader Mike McDowell sent photographs of butterflies, all photographed in southern Wisconson, with these notes:

All were photographed using a Nikon 1 V1 with a Tamron 60mm f2 1:1 macro lens. Compared with tiger beetles or robber flies, butterflies are a snap! Still, my approach is similar; I hold my camera in one hand, then use my other hand and knees to slowly shuffle forward, and then carefully lean toward the insect for the shot.

Striped Hairstreak, Satyrium liparops:

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Banded Hairstreak, Satyrium calanus:

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Coral Hairstreak, Satyrium titus:

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Edward’s Hairstreak, Satyrium edwardsii:

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Giant Swallowtail, Papilio cresphontes:

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Viceroy, Limenitis archippus:

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Baltimore Checkerspot, Euphydryas phaeton:

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Red-spotted Purple, Limenitis arthemis astyanax:

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Common Wood Nymph, Cercyonis pegala:

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American Copper, Lycaena phlaeas:

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Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 12, 2016 • 6:30 am

It is Sunday, June 12 (“Loving Day” in the U.S.), and all is quiet; the students have graduated, and have either left for their homes or will do so today. And the campus will undergo that annual instant and magical transformation from busy to quiet and empty. On the other hand, for three days, starting tomorrow, they’ll be filming a movie on the street outside my office, and I have no idea what it’s about. (They always keep these things quiet.) The last time this happened it involved Keanu Reeves, who had a scene sitting on a motorcycle right outside my building. All the grad students—especially the women—crowded around the windows to get a peek at him, and were told by the movie people to step back so they couldn’t be seen. So it goes.

On this day in 1942, Anne Frank received a new diary on her thirteenth birthday; the rest is history. And on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan made his plea in Berlin for Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The rest is history. Finally, it was on this day in 1994 that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered in Los Angeles, the killer almost certainly being O. J. Simpson, now in prison for other crimes. Those born on this day include Egon Schiele (1890), one of my favorite painters, who died of influenza at only 28; author Djuna Barnes (1892); and, as noted above, Anne Frank (1929). Notables who died on June 12 include Edmund Wilson (1972), Karl von Frisch (1982), and Gregory Peck (2003). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus and Hili are having their constitutional along the Vistula. I would have thought that the “best time,” however, involved noms.

Hili: What time is it?
Cyrus: The best one.
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In Polish:
Hili: Która godzina?
Cyrus: Najlepsza.
Lagnaippe: my favorite Get Fuzzy strip of all time, which I finally found:
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