The surfeit of venomous snakes in Australia

February 3, 2018 • 1:45 pm

Here, from Facebook, is a list of the world’s most venomous snakes, as measured by the LD50 (the amount of venom it take to kill 50% of a given prey type, expressed as milligrams of venom per kilogram of prey). Note that the top 11 are all from Australia, as are 21 of the top 25.

Now why are there so many venomous snakes in Australia? (I think the same holds for venomous spiders.) I can think of two or three reasons, and I’m sure it’s been discussed in the literature, but it’s Saturday and I’ll leave this for readers to think about or look up.

But I do want to mention the #1 most venomous snake: the Inland taipan. How venomous is it? Ask Wikipedia (my emphasis):

Based on the median lethal dose value in mice, its venom, drop for drop, is by far the most toxic of any snake – much more so than even sea snakes – and it has the most toxic venom of any reptile when tested on human heartcell culture. Unlike most snakes, the inland taipan is a specialist mammalhunter so its venom is specially adapted to kill warm-blooded species. It is estimated that one bite possesses enough lethality to kill at least 100 fully grown men, and, depending on the nature of the bite, it has the potential to kill someone in as little as 30 to 45 minutes if left untreated. It is an extremely fast and agile snake that can strike instantly with extreme accuracy, often striking multiple times in the same attack, and it envenoms in almost every case.

Of course that raises the question of why it’s wasting venom if its prey are smaller than humans (which they are), and it could kill even a kangaroo dozens of times over with a single bite. I’ll leave that for you to ponder as well. In the meantime, here’s a video on the critter and the overly macho man who provokes it (if you want to see Steve Irwin doing the same thing, go here):

 

Why doesn’t “free speech” allow the teaching of creationism in public schools?

February 3, 2018 • 12:45 pm

I guess I’ve given the answer to the title question before, but not explicitly. Adam Laats has raised it in a new post on his website I love you but you’re going to hell: Awkward Conversations about school and society.  The relevant post is “Does Jerry Coyne support creationism?” Laats describes himself as “an historian interested in culture and education in the United States.  He taught middle- and high school for ten years in sunny Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He now teaches at Binghamton University (State University of New York).” His profile’s at the second link.

Laat’s beef seems to be this: if I, Professor Ceiling Cat Emeritus, favor free speech on college campuses, why don’t I favor free speech in the classroom? The example he has in mind is the teaching of creationism in science classes, which I oppose. Aren’t I, then, a hypocrite (or at least inconsistent) to allow free speech by Steve Bannon about matters that could be far more harmful than the teaching of creationism in biology class? Why aren’t both “free speech”? Why do I find U of C faulty and students who want to censor Bannon “reprehensible”, but have no quarrel with those who want to keep classrooms creationism-free?

Before I answer those questions—and the answers are no-brainers—I have to say that I’m puzzled about why Laats criticizes me. For he says in his essay that he agrees with me on all counts: “almost all speakers should be allowed to speak on university campuses”, and creationism should not be taught in the classroom, even under the so-called “academic freedom” laws designed to sneak God into science class in the guise of “critical thinking.” So if we both agree, what is Laat’s beef? Why did he write that post.

I think the answer is two-fold. First, he says “maybe I’m just mad because [Coyne] poked fun at ‘humanities’ types like me.” Well, I’m not sure what kind of “humanities type” Laats is. If he’s just a regular scholar (he’s in the Department of Teaching, Learning & Educational Leadership), one engaged in decent scholarship, I have no quarrel with him or his endeavors. My love of the humanities in general is well established. But if he’s an obscurantist postmodernist who writes trivial and impenetrable stuff about the whiteness of pumpkins and the like, then, yes, I’ve poked fun at that “type.” But that, of course, is completely irrelevant to his arguments.

The other beef I discern is this (my emphasis):

When I (and maybe Prof. Coyne would join me) argue against such creationist free speech laws [the “critical thinking” bills that have been proposed in several states’, our motives and goals are not “reprehensible.” We are trying to protect a vital idea—that mainstream science and creationist alternatives are not merely equally valuable scientific understandings. Academic freedom for instructors and free speech for students doesn’t include the right to teach and preach worse science as if it were equal science. People are certainly free to speak their minds about creationism, but schools do not have to pay people to engage in that kind of speech.

Given all that, I don’t understand why Coyne is so quick to bash his Chicago colleagues. Sure, he may disagree with them, but he should recognize his own objections to some purported “free speech” claims. If he did, he would likely have a different take on the “reprehensible” actions of his Bannon-busting colleagues.

I still don’t understand. I do not recognize creationists’ desire to teach goddy stuff in the classroom as a “free speech” claim. The courts have, in fact, repeatedly recognized that teaching creationism in schools violates the very amendment that protects free speech: the First Amendment. Besides protecting public speech, that Amendment also prohibits the entanglement of government with religion. Creationism has been banned in public school classes time after time, and for the same reason: it’s the unconstitutional promulgation of particular religious views in an arm of the government (the schools). When I went after Eric Hedin, who taught Christian views in a science seminar at Ball State University (a pubic school), it was on First Amendment grounds. And, indeed, he was eventually prohibited from teaching any more creationism—a result that won me the Discovery Institute’s “Censor of the Year” award.

As for teaching other lies in the classroom, well, yes, I oppose them, but not on constitutional grounds. If someone taught alchemy in chemistry class, I’d be against that, too, but I wouldn’t call the FFRF on them, for it’s not religion. It’s just awful teaching. And the responsibility to police bad teaching (including lying) in the classroom rests with the school or university alone, not with the courts. That doesn’t mean, though, that I wouldn’t let the relevant people know about it if I thought they didn’t. I’d have to take it on a case by case basis. Hedin’s actions, however, were reported to the FFRF, which threatened Ball State with legal action.

That’s why I would fight tooth and nail to keep creationism out of a public school or university classroom (including my own University, which is private), but wouldn’t try to ban a creationist speaker hosted by my own University. When someone in physics invited William Dembski to speak here in 2014, I expressed my concern, but didn’t try to get his invitation rescinded.

In fact, when Laats ponders my so-called dichotomy of behavior, and tries to find out why I favor free speech for speakers but not teachers pushing creationism, he hits on the correct reason:

  • Professor Coyne might object that Hedin taught religious ideas as science.

But then he responds inaccurately:

Surely Prof. Coyne knows better than me how difficult it is to articulate a simple definition of “science.” Shouldn’t scholars have the freedom to explore those boundaries?

But it doesn’t matter what the definition of “science” is: the First Amendment prohibits pushing religion in the classroom, and creationism is religion. Scholars don’t have the right to “explore” the role of God in the history of life. As I said, I’d object to scholars lying to their students, but would try to take legal action only against lies that violate the Constitution. The courts have defined what “free speech” means, and it doesn’t mean pulling down the wall between church and state.

So I’m baffled by Laats’s piece, especially since we agree on all counts. I can only guess that this is some kind of confusing tirade against me for criticizing the humanities. But I only criticize one species of humanities!

So it goes.

h/t: Douglas E.

Why isn’t anti-Semitism as reviled as “Islamophobia” or anti-black racism?

February 3, 2018 • 11:15 am

Everybody knows that, among the Left, “Islamophobia” is a cardinal sin, even when it refers not to bigotry against Muslims but criticism of Muslim beliefs. Certainly real bigotry against individuals, or invidious stereotypes against groups, should be decried, as it is for anti-black racism. In fact, one characteristic of the Left is its sympathy for groups perceived to be oppressed or the target of discrimination in history.

Except for the Jews, that is, despite the fact that their demonization and oppression are common knowledge.

Here are the latest FBI date on hate crimes from the last year they’ve been reported—2016:

Just taking incidents in that year, the most frequent hate crimes were against blacks (1,739), gays (799 including lesbians), whites (720), and Jews (684).  Muslims were victims of 307 incidents, fewer than Hispanics.  Even without dividing these by the number of victims to get a per capita rate, it’s clear that anti-Semitism is manifested twice as often as “Islamophobia”. I also am not sure what an “anti-white” hate crime is, or who perpetrates them. Perhaps readers can help here.

As far as number of victims are concerned, it’s 2,220 for blacks, 933 for gays, 909 for whites, and 862 for Jews. 388 Muslims were victims of hate crimes.  To get a rough probability that an individual of a given religion or ethnicity was the victim of a hate crime, we simply divide the number of hate crimes in each class by the number of individual victims in that class. When we do that, we get this:

Blacks:  0.0051%
Gays:     0.0082%
Whites:  0.0004%
Jews:     0.014%
Muslims: 0.013%

(Data for blacks and whites taken from 2017 U.S. census estimates, LGB statistics from PBS 2016 [includes bisexuals], Jews and Muslims from the Pew Religious Landscape study.)

On a per capita basis, then, the decreasing order of probability of being a victim goes this way: Jews, Muslims, blacks, gays, and whites. Jews edge out Muslims in terms of hate crimes per capita, but you hear a lot more about the latter than the former.

Why is that? My own guess was twofold: Jews are perceived as “white” compared to blacks and Muslims, and therefore not “people of color”; and because the demonization of Israel somehow takes the sting out of anti-Semitism—perhaps because people feel that Jews somehow deserve anti-Semitism because of the actions of their religion’s “apartheid state”. (Remember, though, that these are American Jews, and Muslims are often as “white” as Jews.)

The Forward, though, has an interesting take on this. In their recent piece, “How anti-Semitism’s true origin makes it invisible to the Left,” author Jean-Paul Pagano suggests that Jews aren’t really perceived, like the other groups, as oppressed. Rather, they’re seen as a wicked but clever cabal that, through almost supernatural powers, have taken control of money, business, show business, banks, the government, and so on. That is, Jews are seen as a conspiracy rather than a subjugated group, which makes their demonization easier to swallow. A few quotes:

. . . in a key sense, regular racism — against blacks and Latinos, for example — is the opposite of anti-Semitism. While both ultimately derive from xenophobia, regular racism comes from white people believing they are superior to people of color. But the hatred of Jews stems from the belief that Jews are a cabal with supernatural powers; in other words, it stems from the models of thought that produce conspiracy theories. Where the white racist regards blacks as inferior, the anti-Semite imagines that Jews have preternatural power to afflict humankind.

This is also why the left is blind to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism differs from most forms of racism in that it purports to “punch up” against a secret society of oppressors, which has the side effect of making it easy to disguise as a politics of emancipation. If Jews have power, then punching up at Jews is a form of speaking truth to power — a form of speech of which the left is currently enamored.

In other words, it is because anti-Semitism pretends to strike at power that the left cannot see it, and is doomed to erase — and even reproduce — its tropes.

Although conspiracy theories about Jews are rife in the Middle East, they’ve also infected the U.S., though Pagano gives just a few examples (e.g.. claims that I sometimes hear that Israel is engaged in training U.S. police to kill blacks, that Israelis take the organs of Palestinian babies, etc.). A few more quotes:

Above all else, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about the maleficent Jewish elite. And it’s this that makes it easy to disguise as a politics of liberation, or, at least, to embed anti-Semitism quietly in efforts for social justice.

You can see this in the resuscitated efforts of groups like Black4Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace to portray Israel and America as bastions of capitalist white supremacy that collude to brutalize people of color.

In the early part of the decade, Ethiopian-Israeli women charged that state-mandated health providers had used shady means to depress their fertility with the contraceptive Depo-Provera. The government denied coercion, but questions remain about the validity of its probe. This was not enough for Black4Palestine, which declared that “[Israel] has sterilized Ethiopian Israelis without their knowledge or consent.”

Narrowly, the effect of alleging sterilization invokes the Nazi specter of eugenics. But more broadly, the conspiracy theory summons medieval fears of Jewish magic harming sexual function, which live on in the Arab world.

For its part, JVP launched a national effort to promote the idea that Israel teaches U.S. law enforcement how to inflict “systemic” racism on people of color, “including extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders.”

It’s critical to note that Americans are not accustomed to recognizing, let alone understanding, a sizable portion of anti-Semitism, because it typically doesn’t resemble anti-blackness — the horrific down-punching form of racism that haunts American history and reverberates into the present.

Well, it’s an interesting view, but I’m not sure I’m totally on board. I’ll just throw it out for discussion.

The “normalization” of anti-Semitism (sometimes called “anti-Zionism”, which I think is pretty much the same thing), is evidenced by this cartoon that appeared in the Daily Californian, the University of California at Berkeley student newspaper, when Alan Dershowitz spoke there last October. It reeks of “blood libel” and other anti-Semitic tropes that are the daily fare of government propaganda in the Middle East—propaganda that Western news studiously ignores. The cartoon was eventually removed when there was an outcry (see my post here).

As I said, I’m not sure how much I agree with the “cabal” theory for the normalization of anti-Semitism, but it’s an interesting thought; and I’d be glad to hear reader’s takes. What seems clear is that hate crimes against Jews aren’t publicized or recognized nearly as much as hate crimes against other groups, even though Jews are, on a per capita basis, the most frequent target.

Caturday trifecta: Cats rescued from freezing weather, people surprised with gift kittens, one-eyed cat guides his blind brother

February 3, 2018 • 9:00 am

We have three videos (and lagniappe) today. The first shows the capture, rescue, and adoption of two freezing feral cats, Clarence and Midnight.

**************

Here’s a compilation video of people getting kittens as presents (and one little girl retrieving her lost cat Cursor after it had gone missing for three years). I dare you not to tear up!

**************

Finally, a heartwarming video of two kittens, one blind and the other with only one eye. After they were adopted, the one-eyed moggie served as the companion and guide to the other:

**************

Lagniappe! A kindle of kittens, purring and rolling around. You will find this very relaxing!

Lagniappe from Grania: a lovely Latvian cat story, which you can read at the link (and see the Latvian stamp with the kitty):

h/t: Grania, Michael

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 3, 2018 • 7:45 am

Remember to send in your photos! We have some shots from a new contributor, Robert Ashton. His notes are below:

Photos taken outside Beaumaris Castle, built at the very end of the 13th century. In #1 a female mallard duck [Anas platyrhynchos] and her duckling are in the foreground.  #2 is a close-up.  #3 is a gull (don’t know species) enjoying a crab for breakfast.

4-8 are photos of what I believe are guillemots, nesting on the cliffs near the Anglesey lighthouse (photo #4).  In #5 a man standing next to me with binoculars swears there was a puffin in the area but I’m damned if I could see it.  They do have puffins in the area.

JAC: These are probably the common murre, Uria aalge, also known as the common guillemot.

After a hiatus, Stephen Barnard has sent several pictures. The first is a formal portrait of his border collie Hitch, named after you know who. Note the false eyespots, bred to deceive predators (JUST KIDDING).

 

Here’s a cat that Stephen live-trapped as a feral kitten—along with her brother—last June. They were named Jerry Coyne V and Jerry Coyne VI, and were both adopted. (There are several Jerry Coyne cats, and my goal is to populate the world with namesake cats. Free books to those who name their cat after me!)

Here’s a photo of Jerry Coyne VI, taken by Jeanine, her primary staff. Her working name is Juniper, or Juni for short. [JAC: I object to the names being changed.]

Here are the siblings Jerry Coyne V and Jerry Coyne VI, shortly after being trapped last year. How fast they grow!

Sent from Belize, where Stephen went fishing over the holidays:

Here’s a flash photo of one of the Yellow-crowned Night Herons (Nyctanassa violacea) that hang out on the back of my room.

And a landscape from Stephen’s ranch in Idaho:

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

February 3, 2018 • 6:31 am

I am worried because for the first time in many years I have not been sent a Hili dialogue. I fear that something is wrong in Dobrzyn, and I hope it’s only that the power is down, which happens sometimes.  I notice that Andrzej posted one several hours ago on his Facebook page, and I’ll use that, but the English translation is from Facebook, not Malgorzata, so it’s wonky. Perhaps a Polish reader can weigh in.

UPDATE: For some reason I’m not receiving Malgorzata’s emails. I’ll try to sort this out, but things are ok in Dobrzyn, and Malgorzata has sent an English translation

Good morning: it’s a frigid Saturday (February 3, 2018) in Chicago and we may get up to six inches of snow. It’s National Carrot Cake Day: the only cake or pie I like that’s made with a vegetable. (I can’t stand rhubarb pie or rhubarb in anything.) In Japan it’s Setsubun: a festival that marks the day before Spring begins (in February?).

The Google Doodle today honors the natal day of Elizabeth Blackwell (born February 3 1821, died 1910): the first woman to get her medical degree in the U.S.  Her parents moved to the U.S. from England when she was eleven, and she got her MD in, as you might expect, an unusual way. Wikipedia notes this:

In October 1847, Blackwell was accepted as a medical student by Hobart College, then called Geneva Medical College, located in upstate New York. Her acceptance was a near-accident. The dean and faculty, usually responsible for evaluating an applicant for matriculation, were not able to make a decision due to the special nature of Blackwell’s case. They put the issue up to a vote by the 150 male students of the class with the stipulation that if one student objected, Blackwell would be turned away. The young men voted unanimously to accept her.

Those were the bad old days! She continued her studies in Europe after graduation and then returned to America where, as you might expect in that era, she didn’t get many patients.  She did found London’s first medical school for women as well as New York’s Infirmary for Women and Children, and, retiring from medicine, was active in social and medical reform. (She also wanted to be a surgeon, but gave up that dream after she accidentally squirted some solution containing infectious conjunctivitis bacteria into her eye, and had to have her eye removed.) The Doodle is below, followed by a photo of Blackwell, a woman pioneer who persisted:

On this day in 1690, the colony of Massachusetts issued the first paper currency used in America. Two Constitutional amendments were passed on this day: the Fifteenth in 1870, guaranteeing the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race—but only males. It took another 50 years for women to get the right to vote. The Sixteenth Amendment was passed on February 3, 1913, imposing the hated Income Tax on us all.   On this day in 1933, Hitler announced the German policy of “Lebensraum” (“living space”), which would extend Germany and its culture into Eastern Europe. And on a February 3 there was trouble on the African island where I used to work. As Wikipedia notes, on this day in 1953, “The Batepá massacre occurred in São Tomé when the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners unleashed a wave of violence against the native creoles known as forros.” I had no idea that had happened.  February 3, 1959 was also The Day the Music Died: rock musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson) were killed in a plane crash in Iowa.  Finally, on this day in 1966, the Soviet Union’s spacecraft Luna 9 became the first such craft to make a soft landing on the Moon and send back photos. 

Here’s a short documentary on The Day the Music Died:

Notables born on February 3 include Felix Mendelssohn (1809), Elizabeth Blackwell (1821; see above), Gertrude Stein (1874), Norman Rockwell (1894), Pretty Boy Floyd (1904), James Michener (1907), Simone Weil (1909), Henry “The Maneuver” Heimlich (1920), Morgan Fairchild (1950), and Eric Lander (1957). Those who fell asleep on this day include John of Gaunt (1399), Woodrow Wilson (1924), the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens (1959; see above), John Cassavetes (1989), evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (2005, one of my scientific heroes; died at 100), and Maria Schneider (2011).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being solipsistic again:

Hili: Take your shadow away.
A: Why?
Hili: Nobody will recognize me.

In Polish:

Hili: Zabierz swój cień.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo nikt mnie nie pozna.

A tweet found by Grania: Look at that beautiful cat!! Ear tufts!

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/959245507607584768

A bad pun:

And another one from Grania, celebrating #NoHijabDay:

https://twitter.com/__AnoudAl_/status/959128728486993921

An illusion from Matthew. Apparently the spirals that look yellow are exactly the same color as those that look “cyan” (greeny) but the illusion of yellow comes from the white stripes. Look from a few feet away. I didn’t see the illusion at first, but Matthew explained:

The green striped spirals have white stripes in them but they look yellowish. If you enlarge you can see that those stripes are not different from the stripes in the cyan striped spirals

The yellow is not “illusory,” then: it’s cyan with white stripes.

And a similar one; the yellow stripes are not “actually white”, but black with white stripes.

More from Matthew: that tiny beetle larva crawling on the millipede’s head will actually KILL that millipede and eat some of it. Ain’t nature wonderful?

My favorite Eagles songs

February 2, 2018 • 1:45 pm

It’s the end of the week and I’m taking off early to have some fun. Here’s some music to end the day—at least for me.

The Eagles is one of those groups, like Fleetwood Mac, that I learned to appreciate only after they’d faded away. Some of their songs I like, and some I have no use for. For many years I didn’t listen to the Eagles simply because I couldn’t stand the lyrics of “Take it Easy”, which seemed pretentious; and I still hate “Hotel California.” But here are two songs I really like—both live performances.

The first is a gorgeous ballad with two great guitar solos.”I can’t tell you why” was written by Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and lead singer Timothy B. Schmit (how many rock stars used a middle initial?). It was recorded in 1978, released on their album The Long Run in 1978, and was the first Eagles song to have Schmit as the lead singer.  Sadly, while it made the top 10 in both the Billboard and Adult Contemporary charts, it didn’t get to #1 on either.

Wikipedia has some background:

Timothy B. Schmit came up with the song title and composed the nucleus of “I Can’t Tell You Why”, which he then presented to Glenn Frey and Don Henley and they completed the song together. Henley described the finished song as “straight Al Green”, and that Frey, an R&B fan as he came from Detroit and grew up with the music, was responsible for the R&B feel of the song. Frey said to Schmit: “You could sing like Smokey Robinson. Let’s not do a Richie Furay, Poco-sounding song. Let’s do an R&B song.”

Schmit describes the song as “loosely based on my own experiences”. Schmit said: “I had some writing sessions with Don and Glenn and I threw out a bunch of my ideas and that one [for “I Can’t Tell You Why”] stuck. I had [composed] a pretty good part of it, not a huge part but enough for them to think ‘That could be good’ and go with it. So Don, Glenn and I finished it over a few all night sessions.” “When it was being developed in the studio…I knew it was a great song. I [thought] ‘Yes! This is an amazing debut for me.’ When we finally mixed it, we had a little listening party at the studio. As people were hearing it, Don turned to me and said, ‘There’s your first hit.'”

Schmit sang the lead vocals on the song, with Frey and Henley singing counterpoint. Schmit also played the bass on the track, which has the distinctive bass riff believed by Schmit to have been devised by Frey. According to Henley, Frey came up with the counterpart on the song, and played the guitar solo on the song.

Be sure to enlarge this video.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxhia1

“Lyin’ Eyes” was written by Henley and Frey, and is my second favorite Eagles song, conjuring up a lot of old feelings. Recorded in 1975, it reached #2 on the Billboard charts. It’s a lovely song with a sad story, and I always picture the young guy, lying on a cot, waiting for his married inamorata to arrive. The live version below is from 1977; Schmit apparently hadn’t yet joined the band, and I don’t see Joe Walsh here, either.

More from Wikipedia:

The title and idea for the song came when Glenn Frey and Don Henley were in their favorite Los Angeles restaurant/bar Dan Tana’s which was frequented by many beautiful women, and they started talking about beautiful women who were cheating on their husbands. They saw a beautiful young woman with a fat and much older wealthy man, and Frey said: “She can’t even hide those lyin’ eyes.” According to Henley, Frey was the main writer of the song, although he had some input with the verses and the music. The song was written when Frey and Henley were sharing a house in Trousdale, Beverly Hills. Frey said of the writing of the song: “…the story had always been there. I don’t want to say it wrote itself, but once we started working on it, there were no sticking points. Lyrics just kept coming out, and that’s not always the way songs get written.” During the Eagles 2013 concert tour, Frey stated it was written in just two evenings.

“Lyin’ Eyes” is the only song in the One of These Nights album that Frey sang solo lead on (he shared lead vocals with Henley on “After the Thrill Is Gone”).

The Eagles, I hear, gave great live performances, and this is one of them (I never saw them, but I’m sure some readers have).