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.
The great soccer player Johan Cruyff from the Netherlands died yesterday at age 68; the cause was lung cancer, as he had been a heavy smoker. One of the greats of all times, including winning the Ballon d’Or three times.
I am off on an all-day sightseeing trip, so I won’t go over his many soccer innovations and records here. I’ll just add that he was an avowed atheist, and famous for saying this when he played for Barcelona:
“I’m not religious. In Spain all 22 players make the sign of the cross before they enter the pitch. If it works all matches must therefore end in a draw.”
Indeed! Here’s a video documentary of Cruyff in action:
We have reached the end of the week, and for many of us it is a long weekend as the preparations for the arrival of the great deity Ēostre Bunny get into full swing.
Here in Ireland the weekend’s start is marked by a long dry Good Friday: no alcohol may be purchased in the Republic today, because of Reasons. It’s an archaic and deeply unpopular law, created in times when the Catholic Church got to strongly recommend what it wanted the law of the land to be. Needless to say, not even the Catholic population supports this one and the Thursday evening before Good Friday is always marked by a surge on alcohol aisles in supermarkets as everyone frantically and unabashedly stocks up in anticipation of the 24 hours ahead where the Church can stop you purchasing alcohol even if they can’t stop you drinking it.
A visiting comedian from the UK remarked on it and received a deluge of replies in response.
Over in Poland things are more seemly and sedate, but also center on godlike entities.
Hili: I am the guardian of hearth and home.
A: On the verandah?
Hili: Yes, because I’m taking leave of absence.
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem strażniczką domowego ogniska.
Ja: Na werandzie?
Hili: Tak, bo jestem na wychodnym.
Last, Jerry is in transit again, and will check in with us as soon as he can.
There are many dishes at every meal at Mr. Das’s house, but few are repeated. And there are always at least five or six desserts. I have started eating more abstemiously, avoiding much meat and trying to sample less than the largest possible number of desserts, but it isn’t easy. Here’s dinner last night, during which we watched India defeat Bangladesh in cricket on the very last ball. (All Indians are cricket mad!)
Fried bitter gourd to start:
A chicken stew:
Eggplant (brinjal) curry:
Daal:
A dish of spinach and peas cooked with an unknown crunchy topping (delicious!):
A Bengali fish dish:
Dessert (I show only three): chanar payesh, sweetened boiled-down milk mixed with “cottage cheese” (curdled milk), pistachios, and cardamon:
And my favorite Indian “dry” sweet, sonpapri, whose making we observed today on a visit to Mr. Das’s factory. It’s a fantastically complicated sweet to make, though it involves only sugar, ghee, and a bit of lentil paste. The allure of this sweet is its flaky consistency: I’ve dissected one so you can see. I have videos and photos of our visit to the sweets factory; I’ll put them up later.
Here’s a video of how it’s made, starting with the sugar syrup after it’s been boiled to thickness and then cooled a bit. Mr. Das’s procedure is far more organized, though with just as much hand labor.
And rasha madurai, spongy and moist with a sweet syrup inside:
It’s hard to be abstemious here, plus the cook and servers keep pressing you to take seconds and thirds.
Reader Barry spotted this on Twi**er via reddit. This “Atheist Test” proves only how mushbrained the creator was:
It always amazes me that some people answer “c”: scientists have an ulterior motivation for denying the obvious fact that life didn’t evolve, but was created by God. What ulterior motive could we have for that? The usual one suggested is that it helps buttress atheism, but at least half of American scientists are at least somewhat religious, and many who accept evolution, like Ken Miller and Francis Collins, are devoutly religious. I suppose the artist, in his superior wisdom, thinks that people like that are fools.
Oh, and given the way science works, if design by God really were true, great encomiums would befall the scientist who demonstrated that.
The Snowflake Students have now metastasized to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where a group of students has been deeply traumatized by seeing pro-Donald Trump slogans written in chalk in various places on campus. The multiple microaggressions occurred on Monday.
Here’s a screenshot of one taken from the New York Post:
Well, all hell broke loose. As the Emory Wheel (the student newspaper reports):
Roughly 40 students gathered shortly after 4:30 p.m. in the outdoors space between the Administration Building and Goodrich C. White Hall; many students carried signs featuring slogans such as “Stop Trump” or “Stop Hate” and an antiphonal chant addressed to University administration, led by College sophomore Jonathan Peraza, resounded “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” throughout the Quad. Peraza opened the door to the Administration Building and students moved forward towards the door, shouting “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
They’re in pain! In pain! OMG, somebody soothe them!
It goes on, of course:
After approximately ten minutes outside from the start of the demonstration, the gathered students were ushered into the Quad-facing entrance to the Administration Building and quickly filled a staircase to continue their demonstration. Pausing in the staircase, a few students shared their initial, personal reactions to the chalkings.
“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” one student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school,” she added.
Let’s put it this way: if they’re going to feel afraid at seeing a simple political slogan—or even a name—no matter how heinous the candidate, scrawled on a sidewalk, then they don’t deserve to be in a decent college. And who ever told students that college is supposed to make you feel “comfortable and safe”? (“Unsafe,” of course, is the latest college euphemism for “hearing something I don’t like”).
The President of the University noted that the chalking was against university regulations (though similar chalkings for more liberal causes have not been punished), and that the perpetrators would be tracked down and fined. He also caved in to the students a bit:
Jim Wagner, the president of the university in Atlanta, met with the protesters and later sent an email to the campus community, explaining, in part, “During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.
“After meeting with our students, I cannot dismiss their expression of feelings and concern as motivated only by political preference or over-sensitivity. Instead, the students with whom I spoke heard a message, not about political process or candidate choice, but instead about values regarding diversity and respect that clash with Emory’s own.”
This is a president who is a master of euphemisms but not of the truth. Of course the students are expressing political preference and oversensitivity! And by claiming that Trump’s values clash with those of Emory, he’s feeding directly into the students’ feelings of entitlement. He should have just shut up and said that if students defaced school property illegally, they’d be punished, as would students who wrote “Bernie Sanders 2016” on the same spots.
Of course the President Wagner’s make-nice message wasn’t good enough. The students need (and will probably soon demand) institutional change to prevent this kind of freedom of speech:
Other students asked for improving diversity in the “higher positions” of the University, including the Board of Trustees and the faculty in general who should not be simply “diversity sprinkles” to improve statistics, as one student described it.
Grievances were not restricted to shortcomings of the administration. “[Faculty] are supporting this rhetoric by not ending it,” said one student, who went on to say that “people of color are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community and focus on these issues [related to having safe spaces on campus].”
“Faculty are supporting this rhetoric by not ending it.” Think about that. If you don’t censor speech, you are tacitly supporting it.
I used to think these students are going to have a hard time when they collide with the real world after graduation. But now I’m starting to think that they’ll eventually constitute the real world, at least in the US and UK. And if they do, then it truly will be an unsafe space.
A few days ago I wrote about a new sports outfit for Afghanistan’s women soccer players. It always disappoints me bitterly when Westerners help prop up parochial norms in other societies, especially ones that have have been enforced against women without their consent or approval of those women – or of society in general . The one bright light in that story is that perhaps some girls will get to participate in a sport that they might not have been able to.
Now there’s a new example of this closer to home. Marks & Spencer in the UK now offers a swimsuit, the burkini, for sale. Their sales pitch is this:
This burkini suit covers the whole body with the exception of the face, hands and feet, without compromising on style. It’s lightweight so you can swim in comfort. [Ed. by Grania: Yeah right.]
Also doubles as a ninja suit, or possibly a waiter outfit in a themed restaurant.
Other uses include pyjamas for those afraid of earwigs.
Its other use is to avoid sunburn, and I suppose if someone wants to appear in public in a full gimp suit, that’s their own business.
Man in bondage suit for comparison. This one prevents nose sunburn too.
While some people are patting M&S on their collective heads for embracing multiculturalism–and I am sure this outfit was marketed with the very best of intentions–what they are also doing is endorsing the mindset that says that women’s bodies are shameful, and are to be regarded as the property of either their fathers or husbands. They are to be concealed under the guise of “modesty” and “virtue”, very often with the explicitly stated corollary that those women who do not cover up are immodest, dishonorable and immoral.
There is no way for any woman to win when faced with that sort of choice. You are doomed if you comply, you are damned if you refuse.
We all know that pretty much the only proponents of this point of view in the 21st century are conservative religious authorities.
Back in the 1950s it was the Catholic pope bitterly complaining about the bikini when Kiki Håkansson won the Miss World beauty pageant wearing one. History is silent on what the pope, the epitome of celibacy, was doing watching beauty pageants. We only know that he didn’t like it and felt it incumbent upon him to say so in public.
Bathing costumes in the 1890s. Practically libertine by burkini standards.
For years the Miss World pageant in all its tawdry and pointless glory treated Western religious sensibilities with the contempt they deserved. In 2013 they did a 180 degree about-face on the bikini issue. The reason? The organisers were afraid of offending Muslims in that year’s host country, Indonesia. To be clear on this, the host country had not demanded anything of the sort. This was a “proactive” decision taken unilaterally by the organisers, and in so doing they sent out a very clear message that the only the feelings of the most conservative religious people mattered. As Dr Brooke Magnanti wrote in The Telegraph:
[I]t continues to be surprising that many feminists seem to have no great problem with this. Sure, the ends some wanted have been achieved. Bikinis gone thanks to the Pope or Muslims or whoever it is this time. But at what cost? As they say where I come from (the US), ‘you got to dance with the one who brung you’. Such dirty alliances always, always, come with a hidden cost. It doesn’t take much imagination to see what outcome religious conservatives of any faith are aiming for when they order the womenfolk to cover up.
Seventy years ago your grandma was wearing this.
So why is this a problem in a cosmopolitan melting pot like the UK in 2016? When retailers in Western Europe produce these sorts of garments, they are not “helping” women. They are pandering to the whims of male ultra-conservative religious leaders, and in so doing are tacitly endorsing the misogyny contained in all such religious edicts on female clothing. Like the well-meaning fools who rushed out to don a hijab in a show of solidarity (and lack of neural activity), it betrays those Muslim women in the community who do not wish to conform to whatever the most conservative and parochial voices of self-appointed leaders have ordained acceptable. These acts endorse and promote the worldview of those who suggest that women are to be treated like children or possessions. It severely undermines the voices of women who wish to live as authors of their own lives.
Here’s a simple test: if you are promoting clothing that looks like it predates everything in the last century and at least half of the century before that, you are promoting the opposite of progress.
Many of the cartoons feature the famous “Mannekin Pis” (“little dude pees”) statue erected in Brussels in 1618/1619:
And of course many feature Tintin, the beloved reporter/detective who combed the world for malfeasance with his dog Snowy. Characteristically, Salon has objected that these cartoons are inappropriate because Tintin’s creator, Hergé, had a “reactionary and racist history,” and, indeed, I’ve seen blacks depicted as invidious stereotypes in the comic. Still . . . is this a time to carp about that? It took only a day for the Authoritarian Lefists who populate Salon to tell us who we could and could not use to memorialize the murder victims. This is virtue signalling, but of course Salon is the model for that.
It’s Thursday, March 24, and that means it’s Holi, the India festival of Spring colors. If you go to Google India today, you’ll see an animation of what happens: people throw colored powder at each other, smear each other with wet colors, or douse each other with water balloons containing dyed liquids. It’s best not to wear anything but old clothes outside today. Fortunately, though I’m going out—to visit Mr. Das’s sweet factory—Holi is not much celebrated in southern India.
On this day in history Sarah Josepha Hale published the song, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (1830), the Brooklyn Bridge was opened (1883), and, in 1935, “The first night game in Major League Baseball history is played in Cincinnati, Ohio, with the Cincinnati Reds beating the Philadelphia Phillies 2–1 at Crosley Field.” In 1943, Josef Mengele began his tenure as the Nightmare Doctor of Auschwitz, and, in 2001, a 16-year-old Sherpa, Temba Tsheri became the the youngest person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. However, in 2010 he was surpassed, as the 13-year-old Jordan Romero reached the summit. He later climbed the “seven summits”, the highest mountains on each continent, at the age of only 15!
Queen Victoria was born on this day in 1819, Tommy Chong in 1938, Bob Dylan in 1941 (making him 75 today), Patti LaBelle in 1944, and Kristin Scott Thomas in 1960. Those who died on this day include Sonny Boy Williamson (1965) and Duke Ellington (1974). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has an oblique comment about events not just in Belgium, but throughout the world.
Hili: The world can’t be left alone even for a moment.
A: That’s true, it’s utterly irresponsible.
In Polish:
Hili: Świata nie należy spuszczać z oka.
Ja: To prawda, jest kompletnie nieobliczalny.
Of course Easter is coming up, too, and Leon is requesting special noms. But seriously, boar pâté for a cat?
