I was right: the NYT is going SJW

April 4, 2018 • 1:15 pm

Reader Eli Vilker sent me the link to Joe Pompeo’s new article in Vanity Fair, which you can get by clicking on the screenshot below.  And Eli added these words with his email:

This is an excellent riposte to people who always argue about regressive Leftists on campus as “just kids who’ll grow out of it”. Now these “woke” kids are entering the workforce and undermining traditional journalistic standards of neutrality and objectivity. As quoted in the article, “this other generation has an expectation that the institution will change to accommodate them”

Now Grania and I always have the argument that Eli referred to: whether the kids will grow out of their Control-Leftism when they enter the work force. Grania’s assumption is that their elders, or the Real World, will disabuse them of some of their fantasies, as well as of their constant demands for “wokeness” and cries of being offended. But I think she’s wrong on two counts. First, much of the media actually tracks the Zeitgeist determined in colleges, because that Zeitgeist has itself filtered upwards from the students to university administrations, who are —except for mine, of course—behaving like censors, helicopter parents, or craven osculators to those who pay tuition.  Further, it’s largely those who go to college who become leaders of the next generation, and those most likely to be America’s leaders are those who agitate for change in college.

Now some of that agitation is good, of course, and #NotAllColleges are what Jon Haidt calls “Social Justice Universities” like Middlebury College, Harvard, Brown, or Amherst. But believe me, our future Presidents, tech giants, and newspaper editors are more likely to be drawn from one of these schools than from Liberty University or some forlorn ag school on the prairie.

It’s been evident to me for about a year that the New York Times is becoming more and more aligned with the Regressive Left. This likely reflects the election of Trump, but also the currents in universities that were moving even during Obama’s time.  Just look at any front page online, and you’ll see articles conditioned and prompted by intersectionalist Leftism.

So, for example, they’ve hired Lindy West as a columnist, who, to my mind, is not only absolutely predictable in what she says, but can’t write, either. True, they did hire Bari Weiss, a Leftist who condemns the Regressive Left, but she’s been demonized not just by the RL, but by her own colleagues at The Times, as I described in a recent post. The other reporters and editors, it appears, are just looking for a way to get Weiss’s tuchas fired, as she speaks uncomfortable truths about the Left, as when she called out the Chicago Dyke March for banning the Jewish (Gay) Pride flag (a sign of anti-Semitism), and—horrors—actually said some good things about cultural appropriation. The last straw was when Weiss, a young journalist, got to go on Bill Maher’s show twice, giving her a higher profile than other Times writers. You can just sense the jealousy seething among the editors who, on a backchannel discussion site, were ripping Weiss apart for an innocuous tweet about an American skater being an immigrant.

To my mind, the New York Times is converging, ever so slowly, on The Huffington Post.  You may say that’s needless alarmism on my part, but read Pompeo’s piece and see if I’m wrong. The main issue described in the piece is the tension between news reporters and op-ed writers like Weiss (described in his piece as a “conservative,” which isn’t true). The former can’t express political opinions in public or on social media, and the latter can. This has caused the schism that, to my mind, threatens to bring down the NYT as America’s best newspaper. Some quotes.

Re Trump’s election:

 The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic. But it didn’t go unnoticed that, for some in the newsroom, the journalistic mission was not exactly front of mind. “I just remember younger people with sad faces,” a person who was there told me, describing those employees as generally being in roles that are adjacent to reporting and editing. Baquet remarked to colleagues in the coming days about how surprised he was by that. “He’s thinking, We’ve got a great story on our hands,” my source said. “That was the first indication that a unified newsroom in the age of Trump was going to be a very difficult thing to achieve or maintain.”

Indeed. Journalists have to report the news, regardless of how sad it makes them. If they’re at the HuffPo, they can editorialize with the news like this (by the way, they’re right about Pruitt, but this is not news but editorializing):

or

Take the Watergate affair. While the editorial page of The Washington Post was calling out the administration’s perfidy, those who ultimately brought it down, Woodward and Bernstein, were just reporting the facts. You didn’t see either of those two going on the television to call for Nixon’s impeachment. And that’s the way it should be. Journalists give the facts (granted, they can be slanted a tad; we all know the Times has a Leftist tilt), while the op-eds give us fact-based opinions. But the younger reporters and editors at the Times don’t like that; they really want the paper to be like HuffPo. They want to merge opinion and news, and it has to be anti-Republican.

Much of this schism, as noted above, came from Trump’s election, which I think drove many liberals almost insane:

As with most hot-button topics these days, all roads seem to lead back to the real-estate mogul and erstwhile reality-television fixture who now resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “I would agree that the question of a generational divide is made more complicated by the fact that it’s happening during the presidency of Donald Trump,” said Times managing editor Joe Kahn in an interview. “If this had been the first term of Hillary Clinton, or a less divisive, less polarizing figure for many members of our own staff, some of the issues that have arisen might not have taken on quite the level of importance or urgency or alarm that they have.” At the same time, said Kahn, the Times“has made it really clear that we consider it crucial to our future that we not become an opposition-news organization. We do not see ourselves, and we do not wish to be seen, as partisan media. That means that the news and opinion divide, and things like social-media guidelines and some of our traditional restrictions on political activity by employees, may feel cumbersome to some people at this point in our evolution.”

To Kahn’s point, the country is in the midst of a unique and restive moment—not least of all for the ever-ubiquitous millennial population—characterized by empowerment and anger and, yes, “wokeness.” Against this backdrop, the Times is arguably changing more rapidly and radically than any other period in its 167-year history, including the ascension earlier this year of its first digital-native publisher, 37-year-old A.G. Sulzberger. Put simply, the Times is working through a complex and fraught makeover in order to become a place that can survive—even if there were no print edition in another 5 or 10 or 20 years. “I have been here a long time,” one veteran editor told me. “The tensions you’re referring to are not just generational. We are all trying to figure out what the Times is in the digital era.”

Given that most people read the paper digitally, and probably spend a lot less time online than on the paper edition, this is a dangerous situation. Ideally, the Times should somehow remain what it was before: a repository of thoughtful and accurate journalism. But can a newspaper keep that when everyone’s attention span is minuscule, and click-bait is what draws the eyes?

Just two more quotes and I’ll leave you to read the piece yourself:

One of the younger, newer Times employees I spoke with boiled down the conflict as follows, with the obvious caveat that there are, of course, “woke” people in the old guard and traditionalists in the younger set. “The olds,” my source said, “feel like the youngs are insufficiently respectful of long-standing journalistic norms, or don’t get that things are the way they are for a reason. The youngs feel like the olds are insufficiently willing to acknowledge the ways in which the world and media landscape have changed, and that our standards and mores should evolve to reflect that.” (Several Times sources emphasized that this dynamic has been around for decades. As Gay Talese once wrote of the 1950s-era Times: “There were philosophical differences dividing older Timesmen who feared that the paper was losing touch with its tradition and younger men who felt trapped by tradition.”)

Similarly, an institutional Times person said, “I think a lot of this younger generation were brought up to believe that it’s very important that their voices be heard, and so I think it’s a bit harder to fit into an institution where it’s less than democratic in some ways. One generation came of age where they entered this esteemed institution and tried to find a way to fit into it, and this other generation has an expectation that the institution will change to accommodate them. That’s the essence of the tension.”

Yes, call me a curmudgeon (well, not in the comments!), and get off my lawn, but I doubt that the NYT will survive if, in its attempt to enter the digital era, it becomes the HuffPo of the intellectual set. Or perhaps it will survive, but it won’t be the same paper that garnered a reputation as “the good gray Times“—one of the world’s best papers. Perhaps this is inevitable given the way people now approach reading (online, no books, nothing too long), but I mourn it. And so, apparently, does managing editor Joe Kahn, who articulates values that are the direct opposite of sites like HuffPo, Salon, BuzzFeed, and VICE (my emphasis):

As Kahn sees it, there’s no “magic-bullet solution,” and he said the Times is making progress on becoming more responsive to the concerns of a much more multi-textured staff than it had 10 years ago. But in terms of how any single employee may be processing the many difficult ramifications of the current era, there was one thing Kahn held firm on. “If you’re a media company, journalism is not about creating safe spaces for people,” he said. “It’s not about democratically reflecting the consensus of the staff about what we say on certain issues. We’re not crowd-sourcing, from our employees, a collective institutional position on Donald Trump.”

Amen!

Amanda Marcotte: “Free speech” is code for “white nationalism”

April 4, 2018 • 9:15 am

I see the termites have again munched on Amanda Marcotte, who, as a writer for Salon, holds down one of the most reprehensible jobs in journalism.  She’s perhaps best known for her erroneous rush to judgment on the Duke lacrosse team rape case as well as her firing as John Edwards’s social media maven, incidents described in her Wikipedia profile:

In January 2007, Marcotte made several controversial statements about the Duke lacrosse case including calling people who defended the accused “rape-loving scum”[6][7][8][9] and writing on her blog “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.” The post, which Marcotte later deleted, attracted criticism, was mentioned in The New York Times.[10][11] The Duke lacrosse players were eventually found to have been falsely accused. Their accuser, Crystal Mangum, was later convicted of an unrelated murder, and the prosecuting attorney, Mike Nifong, was disbarred.

On January 30, 2007, the John Edwards 2008 presidential campaign hired Marcotte to act as the campaign’s blogmaster despite the criticism,[12][13][14][15][16] responding that while Edwards was “personally offended” by some of Marcotte’s remarks, her job as their blogmaster was secure.[17]

Further controversy resulted on February 12, 2007, when the Catholic League criticized Marcotte’s review of the film Children of Men as “anti-Christian.”[18] Following the criticism Marcotte announced her resignation from the Edwards campaign. In an article for Salon a few days later, she said the reaction to her comments on the Duke lacrosse case was the first in a series of “shitstorms” that prompted her resignation.[19]

At Real Clear Politics, Cathy Young writes this in her piece “A Feminist Flare Up“:

Marcotte sarcastically asserts that one of the major “victories” of “independent feminism” was “maintaining a cultural and legal framework that made it difficult to prosecute rape.” What does this mean? Her previous writings on the subject provide some context. In 2006-2007, Marcotte emerged as a leader of the cyber-lynch mob in the Duke University rape hoax. On her blog, anyone questioning the guilt of the three lacrosse players charged with sexually assaulting an exotic dancer at a team party was branded a “rape apologist.” In a particularly vicious broadside, she sneered at syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker for arguing that “unless the victim is 9 years old and a virgin and white and blonde … rape isn’t so much a crime as a feminist plot to put all men in jail.” This wasn’t so much hyperbole as outright distortion: while Parker had deplored the “rush to judgment” in the Duke case, she had explicitly condemned the notion that the alleged victim was less deserving of sympathy because she was a stripper. (Parker is one of the “independent feminists” on Marcotte’s Slate blacklist.)

The true extent of Marcotte’s hate-filled zealotry is evident in a profanity-laced rant she posted about a CNN special report on the Duke case aired after the rape charges were dismissed. (She later deleted the post when it became an issue in the controversy over her short-lived appointment as blog coordinator for the John Edwards presidential campaign.) Slamming CNN as “pure evil,” Marcotte vented her outrage at having to “listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f***ed her against her will,” and concluded sarcastically, “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.”

It seems that, in Marcotte’s eyes, the real crime of the “independent feminists'” is helping preserve the idea that the presumption of innocence applies even in cases of rape and sexual assault. If so, that is indeed a victory. Depriving men of their civil rights is no victory for women — both as a matter of principle and because most women have men in their lives whom they would not want to see face a false charge of rape under Marcotte-style standards of justice.

Note that several of the Wikipedia links go nowhere; but the last one, “Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign”, can be found at this site. I’ve looked for a while for any admission by Marcotte that she was wrong or acted precipitately in the Duke matter, but nothing can found. The closest she got for whipping up false judgment was accusing prosecutor Nifong of “fumbling the ball.” For Marcotte is an Authoritarian Leftist, and one of their dictums is “Never apologize or admit you were wrong.” What she did is simply delete her tweets and gung-ho coverage of the rape case. I don’t think it’s unique to the Left to admit when they made a mistake, though: that’s just human nature. But to the targets of Authoritarian Leftists, admitting a mistake does not soothe their rage; as in the case of Matt Damon, they simply double down with the invective.

Don’t get me wrong, as a Leftist, I’ve often agreed with Marcotte’s published criticism of Trump and Republicans. But I don’t consider myself her “ally” in the sense that gender feminists use that word. Her tendency to get unhinged makes me wary.

This is all a long prelude to her having jumped the rails once again, so that she’s starting to become the equivalent of a female Dan Arel. Here you go:

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/980928683438432257

No, Ms. Marcotte, “Free speech” is not even primarily, much less “exclusively” used as a right wing code for white nationalism. The very idea is absurd. Yes, white nationalists may use the mantra of free speech to assert a right to promulgate their odious views, but they’re right: even white supremacy is protected under the First Amendment.  And her expansion of the term “free speech” as a synonym for “racism” is another Authoritarian tactic: the stretching of words like “violence” or “safety” to encompass mental attitudes rather than physical situations. I’d love to see her lecture the American Civil Liberties Union on the new meaning of “free speech”!

What do we do when Authoritarian Leftists start denigrating free speech because it’s a code word for racism? We push back.  And so, like defense attorney Scott Greenfield (who write the website “Simple Justice“), I once again call out Marcotte for her stupidity in defense of extremism. And do I need to remind her that, as a journalist, Marcotte depends on freedom speech to promulgate her palaver?

h/t: Grania

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 4, 2018 • 8:00 am

Reader Jacques Hausser from Switzerland. You can also see the first installment published on March 21:

These photos (of animals brought in the lab for identification) were taken during the two weeks internship on coastal ecology and faunistics we organise each spring for our master students in ecology and evolution, at the Biological Station of Roscoff in Britanny, France. The place is remarkably situated, with very diverse intertidal biotopes ranging from mud to sand to gravels to boulders to rocky cliffs and with impressive tides (up to 9 m of amplitude). We have nothing like that in Switzerland !

A pair of Idotea balthica, a detritivorous Isopod crustacean. This big greenish male holds firmly its small (and barely visible) orange female in precopulatory state until she moults, the only – and very short – period in which copulation can occur. This “mate guarding” is widespread in Isopods and amphipods, and the male can carry the female for several days. This strategy results from a strong competition among males, and induces a conflict between sexes as well: e.g. a guarded female is more prone to predation by fishes, since the motility of the pair is reduced. So she does resist to the males as late as possible, what in turn selects for the stronger males.

Leptoplana tremellaris is a Turbellarian, a 15 mm long flatworm gliding like a ghost on its ciliated underside. It is a predator eating various small invertebrates caught by its extensible mouth situated on the “belly”— approximately at the second third of the body. But look at the eyes: two clouds of very tiny ones in the front of two clusters of larger ones. They are very primitive: a mere cup of pigmented cells capping some photosensitive cells. The pigmented cells mask the light coming from behind them, what allows the animal to locate the origin of the light, which comes mostly the surface of the sea above them. There’s nothing more, but it is what they need to know: what’s up and down, and if whether they are exposed and vulnerable, or well hidden. Show that to creationists telling you that an incomplete eye is useless !

Psammechinus miliaris, a sea urchin. In addition to its spines, it bears five double arrays of tubular feet, each ending with a small sucker. They are used to hold the animal in place on the ground and to move it. What’s intriguing for us bilaterian animals, is that urchins have neither front and rear nor right and left sides. When moving, the feet can be pulling on their suckers on any orientation, while they are relaxed on the opposite side. The pulling side is anywhere the urchin detects some appealing food smell or sees an attractive spot (*). Urchins have up and down sides, however: down is where the mouth is, as well as the small algae these creatures graze on; up is where water is flowing, where they eliminate their waste and spawn their male or female gametes, directly in water. They have separate sexes, but the sentimental life of an urchin seems rather dull, limited to a pheromonal synchronisation of the spawning with its neighbors.

(*) It was shown that even without eyes, only photosensitive cells scattered across their body, urchins can see with the whole body and detect a black spot in a white arena. See e.g. Yerramilli, D & S. Johnsen, 2010: Spatial vision in the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (Echinoidea). J Exp Biol.  213(2):249-55. doi: 10.1242/jeb.033159.

 Compared to most marine snails, Euspira catena, the large necklace shell, has an enormous foot used to plough the sand. It protects its pretty and smooth shell from abrasion by covering it with a part of the foot and with a generous production of mucus. Euspira is a hunter of bivalve molluscs, first grinding a hole in their shell with its toothed tongue (the radula), helped by its acid saliva dissolving the calcium carbonate, and then introducing its proboscis to suck out the owner. It is quite common to find empty shells of its victims on the beach, with a revealing neat little rounded hole (insert picture borrowed from  here).

An Euspira bequeathed a nice second-hand house to this Hermit crab, Pagurus bernhardus. Thanks to the basic pH (about 8.15) of the sea water, the lifespan of a snail’s shell is far, far longer than the lifespan of the snail itself. Thus empty shells are extremely abundant, and this resource is heavily exploited, probably since at least the middle Jurassic: there are eighteen species of hermit crabs just in Northwest Europe. They are omnivorous opportunistic feeders and regularly choose a new shell as they grow in size, switching from one to another species of snail. It is very nice to see them carefully measuring and evaluating a new would-be apartment before deciding whether to move.

The shell used by a hermit crab also provides a mobile home to several other animals, sponges, sea anemones or other cnidarians. Here an encrusting colony of Hydractinia equinata, an athecan hydroid. It takes advantage of the water currents generated by the hermit crab and of the small particles of its food waste suspended in the water. In return, the cnidocytes (stinging cells) of Hydractinia confer some protection to the hermit crab.

In the intertidal zone, between high and low tide, burying yourself in the sand protects you from desiccation, temperature variation and predators. It is the solution “chosen” by Acrocnida brachiata, a bristlestar with incredibly long arms. At low tide, it is entirely buried; at high tide, only the distal end of its arms emerge and float in the water, allowing suspension feeding.

The tube of Lagis koreni, the trumpet worm—an annelid in the family Pectinariidae—is a real work of art: it has an elegant tusk shape, and its wall is built with exactly one layer of sand grains carefully adjusted and cemented by some mucus – looks almost like a mosaic. The tube is open at both ends, larger one down, and held vertically, half emerging from sand. The head of the worm is down, equipped with two “spades” of strong chetae (bristles) to dig the sand as well as numerous tentacles to collect the food. The feces and other waste are eliminated through the upper opening. Here you can perhaps see the pinkish worm itself through the shell’s transparency – I didn’t have the heart to demolish its construction and it didn’t want to show itself.

A striking convergence: the shell of Scaphopod molluscs, or tusk shells, specially Antalis entalis, has exactly the same look as the one above, except that it is calcareous and secreted by the animal, and the spades of chaeta are replaced by its foot. Apart from that, tusk shells and trumpet worms have a quite similar way of life.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures, but you can find one in Wikipedia under “tusk shell“.

JAC: Here’s a tusk shell:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 4, 2018 • 7:00 am

It’s Wednesday, April 4, 2018, and that means it’s the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A day after broaching the possibility of his own death (and saying that it didn’t matter to him, as he’d seen the “promised land”), he was brutally shot down by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Here’s a brief memorial (and then a documentary) to the man who stands beside Nelson Mandela as one of the two great civil rights heroes of our era. And both (Mandela after his imprisonment) abjured violence, urging peaceful resistance and civil disobedience.

In his speech the night before he died, King said this:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Longevity does have its place, and it’s ineffably sad that King didn’t get it. If he’d lived, he would be 89 this year, and I often wonder what he’d think of many modern civil rights activists who reject nonviolence as well as King’s dictum that people should be judged not by their race, but by the “content of their character.”

A short documentary on the assassination:

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) is an interactive one (clicking on the arrow at the site produces one of her poems) celebrating the 90th birthday of author Maya Angelou, who died in 2014. Most of you will know her work. Like King, she was a civil rights activist. As Refinery 29 reports:

Google gathered a star-studded cast of celebrities, including Alicia Keys, Laverne Cox, and Oprah Winfrey, to help celebrate Dr. Maya Angelou.
Today’s Doodle honoring the poet, civil rights activist, and author on what would have been her 90th birthday is nothing short of a masterpiece. When you click the homepage illustration, you’ll hear the words of Angelou’s empowering poem “Still I Rise” read aloud as drawings illustrating each line fill the screen. The recorded reading from Angelou is interspersed with sections read by Keys, Cox, Winfrey, America Ferrera, Martina McBride, and Angelou’s son, Guy Johnson.

On April 4, 1581, Francis Drake was knighted for circumnavigating the Earth.  On this day in 1721, Sir Robert Walpole became the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. Exactly five years later, at least according to Wikipedia, the French zoologist Georges Cuvier delivered the first lecture on paleontology.  On April 4, 1850, Los Angeles was incorporated as a city. On this day in 1958, the CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] peace symbol was first publicly displayed —in London. As you see below, it’s derived from the semaphore flag signals for ND: “nuclear disarmament”. Few people who wear or know of this symbol are aware of its origin (I wasn’t).

On this day in 1964, songs by the Beatles occupied the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 rock music (“pop”) chart. I don’t think that feat has been duplicated. As noted above, it was on this day 50 years ago that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Exactly one year later, Dr. Denton Cooley implanted the first temporary artificial heart, which was to act as a bridge for a heart transplant. That transplant was done, but unfortunately the recipient died from an infection only 32 hours after the operation. On April 4, 1975, Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico under the partnership of Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Notables born on April 4 include Dorothea Dix (1802), Tris Speaker (1888), Muddy Waters (1913), Maya Angelou (1928; see above), Berry Oakley (1948) and Heath Ledger (1979). Those who expired on this day include John Napier (1617), Johnny Stompanato (1958, stabbed to death by Lana Turner’s daughter), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1972), Gloria Swanson (1983) and Roger Ebert (2013).

EXTRA SPECIAL NEWS: the first Episode of Cunk on Britain is actually on YouTube. It will certainly be taken down within a day, so watch it here. (Trigger warning: profanity.)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, exhausted from her job as editor of Listy, is having a lie-down:

In Polish:

Hili: Wszystkie poranne obowiązki załatwione.
Ja: I co teraz?
Hili: Teraz się prześpię.

Grania found a tweet supporting a theory (which is mine) that even until recently—but especially in the Middle Ages—artists couldn’t draw cats. They always gave them human faces.

An especially finicky kitty:

Don’t ask me what this animal cavalcade is about, or how it was arranged, but it’s amazing. Perhaps a reader can inform us.

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/980797758746611712

I never saw this movie (I know, I’m a bad person), but it’s having its 50th anniversary:

The genuinely good uses of Twitter:

Poor dude!

Matthew sent me this great bicycle-kick goal, noting “Here’s a gab goal by Ronaldo against Juventus. The Juve fans all applauded.”

If you click on the link in the Tweet, you can read an amazing (albeit a bit long) story:

Finally, for your morning delectation, I proffer the Dark Lord Cat:

“Cunk on Britain” tonight

April 3, 2018 • 2:30 pm

Several Brits have written to inform me that the first episode of “Cunk on Britain”, Philomena’s series on her beloved land, plays tonight on BBC Two. There will be five episodes, with two scheduled. The first is this evening at 10 pm England time (don’t ask me what it’s formally called)—about an hour and a half from this posting; and the second episode is in a week:

Little do the people who wrote me know that I won’t be able to SEE this, which makes me unspeakably sad. (BBC shows are embargoed in the US.) It’s like telling me they’re giving out free glasses of 1982 Petrus at a bar in Mongolia.

Here’s one clip, which makes me want to watch it even more (click on screenshot):

Teaching Evolution: A.W.F. Edwards: The coral of life

April 3, 2018 • 1:45 pm

by Greg Mayer

Our second installment of Teaching Evolution is a paper by A.W.F. Edwards on the history and logical justification of methods of phylogenetic inference. In teaching evolution, the idea of the history of life is very important. Most students intuitively see the closer genealogical relationship between, say, a man and an ape than a dog, or among any of those as compared to a salmon. But the precise logic of doing so, especially when the degree of genealogical propinquity is less evident, is not easy to convey. I now teach this subject using a likelihood-based logic of justification, and Edwards was a pioneer in this area. Although we are accustomed now to think and speak of the phylogenetic tree as a “tree of life”, Darwin at first referred to it in his notebook as “the coral of life”, which is a more apt analogy, in that only the tips are alive, while the bases of the branches are dead.

For the first installment of what Jerry has called our “mini-MOOC” on evolution– an extract from the Origin by Darwin– I left out the title I gave to that week’s topic in my course: “Unity of type and adaptation”. I’ve now revised the title of that installment to include this in its title. Unity of type and adaptation were the two great classes of organic phenomena that Darwin sought to explain with his theory of descent with modification; with the chief means of modification– natural selection— accounting for the fit of organic beings to their conditions of existence, i.e. their adaptations. Thus Darwin proposed to solve these two great unsolved problems of biology in the first half of the 19th century with a single, unified explanatory theory.

A.W.F. Edwards in Cambridge, by Joe Felsenstein, used with permission.

Anthony William Fairbank Edwards (b. 1935) is a British statistician, geneticist, and evolutionary biologist. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and Emeritus Professor of Biometry at the University of Cambridge. An undergraduate student of R. A. Fisher, he has written several books and numerous scientific papers. He is best known for his pioneering work, with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, on quantitative methods of phylogenetic analysis, and for strongly advocating Fisher’s concept of likelihood as the proper basis for statistical and scientific inference. He has also written extensively on the history of genetics and statistics, including an analysis of whether Mendel’s results were “too good” (they were). His most influential book is Likelihood (expanded edition, 1992), in which he argues for the centrality and sufficiency of likelihood as an inferential principle, often using genetic examples to illustrate his argument.

Reading:
Edwards, A. W. F. 1996. The origin and early development of the method of minimum evolution for the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees. Systematic Biology 45:79-91.

Study Questions:
1. What was Edwards’ purpose in writing this paper?

2. What is Ockham’s razor? What is the “Darwin principle”? What is the relationship between them?

3. What are some of the various ways in which a method of minimum evolution may be used to estimate phylogeny? What, according to Edwards, is the justification for any of these methods?

[For further discussion of the history of phylogenetic methods, see chapter 10, “A digression on history and philosophy”, in Joe Felsenstein‘s Inferring Phylogenies (Sinauer, 2004).]