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.
Because of the exciting theramin post this morning, we’ll have a truncated version of Readers’ Wildlife Photos. How about five lovely birdies from photographer Colin Franks? (To see more of his work, go to his Facebook page, his personal photography site, and his Instagram site.)
Wood Duck (Aix sponsa):
Black-bellied Plover (Pluvialis squatarola):
American Robin (Turdus migratorius):
Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia):
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronate):
Today is the 105th birthday of Clara Rockmore (1911-1988), a woman you’ve probably never heard of. But she was the greatest virtuoso of the theremin, that weird musical instrument patented by Russian Léon Theremin in 1928 (Rockmore and he were friends). Over the years, the instrument became largely a novelty and fell into disuse—remember hearing it on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”?—but was revived in 1993 by a prize-winning documentary movie. It’s still used, in a fancier electronic version, by modern musicians.
Below is a video of La Rockmore in her later years, playing the “The Swan” by Saint Saëns, from “Carnival of the Animals”. The vertical antenna controls the pitch, while the horizontal one controls the volume. Is there any other instrument that can be played without being touched? Today’s Torygraph has a really nice article on Rockmore, the theramin, and the Doodle.
There are many videos and audio clips of Clara playing the instrument; go here to see them (and don’t miss her rendition of “Summertime”).
And I couldn’t resist putting in this lovely version of “Over the Rainbow,” played by Peter Pringle on a 1929 RCA theremin:
Click on the screenshot below to go to today’s interactive Doodle, where you’ll get a chance to learn a few notes, advance through three lessons to see how well you’re doing, and, if you’re successful, hear Clara herself and get a chance to play the instrument, adjusting all its parameters.
This is what you see when you click on the arrow from above:
The first lesson:
And if you do well in all three lessons, you hear a lovely melody from Rockmore (the one from the video above):
And THEN, you can enjoy playing the theramin by yourself, adjusting the parameters (click the gear icon at lower left on screen):
Here’s Theremin himself:
and Clara in her younger days:
Clara and Theremin, younger:
Clara and Theremin, older:
It’s March 9, a Hump Day, and once again I’ve had almost no sleep—despite a strict regiment of avoiding computers, stimulation, and the like. Life is no fun when lived in exhaustion. Well, like Maru, I do my best. On this day in 1796, Napoleon married his Josephine, and, in 1831, the French Foreign Legion was established—surprisingly, it’s still around. On this day in 1954, CBS broadcast the “See It Now” episode detailing the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy, an episode that eventually brought him down. Oh, the humanity! And, in 1959, the anatomically incorrect Barbie Doll was introduced. Births on this day include Amerigo Vespucci (1454), the source of the name “America,” Vita Sackville-West (1892), Samuel Barber (1910), Ornette Coleman (1930; he died last year), Yuri Gagarin (1934; the first person to go into space), Bobby Fischer (1943), and the fabulous Juliette Binoche (1964). Those who died on this day include George Burns (1996) and The Notorious B.I.G. (1997); it is not a good day for deaths of the famous.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is demanding a fluffier pillow for her adorable head:
Hili: Do we have a bigger pillow with flowers on?
A: Does it have to be flowers?
Hili: Yes, and a bit thicker.
Hili: Czy mamy jakąś większą poduszkę w kwiatki?
Ja: A musi być w kwiatki?
Hili: Tak i trochę grubsza.
Starting at 6 p.m. EST (US), there will be a total solar eclipse broadcast live from Indonesia. Here’s the livestream:
So, about two hours from now, you might want to click on the video above and have a look.
Here are Puffho’s notes:
The eclipse begins over Indonesia (where Slooh is broadcasting from) and will travel 8,800 miles northeast over Borneo, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Ocean. At its widest point, the shadow of the eclipse will measure 97 miles across.
“The cool thing for those who are going to be in the path of totality is that they are going to be able to see the outer atmosphere of the sun called the corona,” C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist from NASA, told The New York Times. “This is only visible from the ground during a total solar eclipse.”
The spectacle will last for three hours, and at each location the eclipse will block out the sun’s light for anywhere between 90 seconds to 4 minutes.
Here’s an animation of the path, showing the area of totality:
Need I remind readers in any part of the path not to look directly at the sun without some kind of filter?
Well, Roger Cohen of the New York Times thinks so, pointing out in a new op-ed the increased blurring of lines between dislike of Israel and dislike of Jews, as well as the increasing acceptability of slurs against Jews in both British and American academia. And Cohen, like me, always has to include in his articles a caveat about the bad things that, we agree, are done by the Israeli government, including the support of illegal settlements. But the malfeasance of the Israeli government does not justify demonizing Jews, just as the perfidies of ISIS or Saudi Arabia doesn’t warrant the demonization of Muslims. Yet Jews are regularly murdered by terrorists simply for being Jewish, regardless of their views on Israel.
One can argue about Israel’s right to exist, or whether we should have a refuge state based on Judaism. (Of course, much of the Middle East comprises states not only undergirded by Islam, but where Islam is confluent with the state). But it’s too late now: the UN resolutions of 1947 and 1948 established Israel, were passed by the UN, and are faits accompli. To call for Israel’s elimination is not on the table, but to me it’s a touchstone of rationality to also favor a two-state solution, with Israel giving back the illegal settlements on the West Bank and recognizing a Palestinian state. Note, though, that the Palestinians have twice rejected that solution.
But I digress. Here’s part of Cohen’s case for the rise of Leftist anti-Semitism, and I’ve put the last sentence in bold, as I found it striking. (See also Simon Shama’s related argument archived in The Financial Times).
Last month, a co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, quit in protest at what he described as rampant anti-Semitism among members. A “large proportion” of the club “and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews,” he said in a statement.
Chalmers referred to members of the executive committee “throwing around the term ‘Zio’” — an insult used by the Ku Klux Klan; high-level expressions of “solidarity with Hamas” and explicit defense of “their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians”; and the dismissal of any concern about anti-Semitism as “just the Zionists crying wolf.”
The zeitgeist on campuses these days, on both sides of the Atlantic, is one of identity and liberation politics. Jews, of course, are a minority, but through a fashionable cultural prism they are seen as the minority that isn’t — that is to say white, privileged and identified with an “imperialist-colonialist” state, Israel. They are the anti-victims in a prevalent culture of victimhood; Jews, it seems, are the sole historical victim whose claim is dubious.
Again, Cohen’s no cheerleader for Israel:
Today, it is Palestinians in the West Bank who are dehumanized through Israeli dominion, settlement expansion and violence. The West Bank is the tomb of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Palestinians, in turn, incite against Jews and resort to violence, including random stabbings.
The oppression of Palestinians should trouble every Jewish conscience. But nothing can justify the odious “anti-Semitic anti-Zionism” (Johnson’s term) that caused Chalmers to quit and is seeping into British and American campuses.
And I agree with all of that. But equation I see forming is Israel = Jews, and really, who can deny it? When a UCLA student’s ability to be on the university’s student council is questioned simply because she’s Jewish, and therefore might be “biased”, that’s not anti-Israel sentiment; it’s anti-Semitism.
Cohen points out three signs of this creeping bigotry:
The rise of the leftist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of Britain’s opposition Labour Party appears to have empowered a far left for whom support of the Palestinians is uncritical and for whom, in the words of Alan Johnson, a British political theorist, “that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is.”
. . . Johnson, writing in Fathom Journal, outlined three components to left-wing anti-Semitic anti-Zionism. First, “the abolition of the Jewish homeland; not Palestine alongside Israel, but Palestine instead of Israel.” Second, “a demonizing intellectual discourse” that holds that “Zionism is racism” and pursues the “systematic Nazification of Israel.” Third, a global social movement to “exclude one state — and only one state — from the economic, cultural and educational life of humanity.”
Criticism of Israel is one thing; it’s needed in vigorous form. Demonization of Israel is another, a familiar scourge refashioned by the very politics — of identity and liberation — that should comprehend the millennial Jewish struggle against persecution.
I’ve had leftist critics of Israel tell me that, frankly, they don’t care if Israel is pushed into the sea—which of course is the explicit goal of Hamas. I’ve seen the wrath arise when Muslims are targets of hate crimes. (It was widely believed that the three young Muslims in North Carolina were killed by atheist Craig Hicks because of their faith, but that seems not to be the case.) But plenty of Jews are murdered simply because they are Jews, in Israel, Paris, and elsewhere. Similar bigoted violence against Muslims, based solely on their faith, is insupportable, and is “Muslimophobia,” not “Islamophobia.” But regardless of what you call it, if you decry that kind of bigotry, you must equally decry the wanton and unjustifiable murder of Jews for their faith alone.
Maybe I’m simply overly sensitive because I have a Jewish background, or maybe that background makes it easier for both Cohen and me to sense the insidious strains of anti-Semitism growing within the Left. But I agree with Cohen that they’re there, and that one component of the Authoritarian Left is its growing disdain for not just Israel, but for Jews. Why is it growing? I am not sure, but may have something to do with a bigotry born of “higher expectations.”
I love going to Texas. What’s not to like about good BBQ, good scenery, friendly people (I avoid the Republicans), and cowboy boots as an everyday item of clothing? I’ll be in Houston April 9-10 as a “keynote speaker” at the Lone Star Book Fair (see more here), discussing Faith versus Fact with Dan Barker, who’s supposed to interview me, on Saturday, April 9, at 12:30. I expect there will be Q&A as well as discussion, and I enjoy this format a lot more than simply a lecture. And it’s free!
They will of course be selling books, so if you’re in Houston, drop by; and if you say the secret word, “Puma concolor” (the scientific name of the cougar), you’ll get a cat drawn in your book.
On September 3 of last year, I described a paper by the Open Science Collaboration (OSC; reference and link below) that tried to estimate the reproducibility of studies published in high-quality psychology journals. It was a complicated paper, but its results were deemed sufficiently important to be published in Science. And those results were in the main disheartening: only about 35% of the replications of 100 studies chosen showed significant effects in the same direction as the original work, and only 39% of the scientists doing the replications agreed that their results really replicated the results of their target models. (Depending on the criteria, “replicability” could be as high as 47%, but that’s still not great.)
This was especially worrisome because the OSC authors said that they made huge efforts to replicate the original methodology and analysis of the 100 “model” studies. This led to a lot of worries about the reliability of scientific results, at least in psychology.
Now, however, a group of four researchers, three from Harvard (including first author Daniel T. Gilbert) and one from the University of Virginia, have published a “technical comment” in Science severely questioning the results of the original OSC paper (reference and free link below). Their point is largely this: there are real differences between “model studies” and “replications—largely differences in experimental populations and conditions— that would lead to a divergence in results between the two. Thus the lack of “replicability” might not represent a potential problem with studies’ original conclusions, but merely an expected difference based on divergence of subjects and experimental methods. Thus, perhaps the reliability of psychological studies isn’t as bad as the OSC implied.
Gilbert et al. make three points about the OSC study:
“An original study that measured American’s attitudes toward African-Americans (3) was replicated with Italians, who do not share the same stereotypes; an original study that asked college students to imagine being called on by a professor (4) was replicated with participants who had never been to college; and an original study that asked students who commute to school to choose between apartments that were short and long drives from campus (5) was replicated with students who do not commute to school. What’s more, many of OSC’s replication studies used procedures that differed from the original study’s procedures in substantial ways: An original study that asked Israelis to imagine the consequences of military service (6) was replicated by asking Americans to imagine the consequences of a honeymoon; an original study that gave younger children the difficult task of locating targets on a large screen (7) was replicated by giving older children the easier task of locating targets on a small screen; an original study that showed how a change in the wording of a charitable appeal sent by mail to Koreans could boost response rates (8) was replicated by sending 771,408 e-mail messages to people all over the world (which produced a response rate of essentially zero in all conditions).”
The point is that these differences could lead to lack of replicability because the studies weren’t really replications! Gilbert et al. in fact cite another set of replicated studies, the “Many Labs” project (MLP), in which some constituted real replications while others used different populations and procedures. This “infidelity” effect caused by differences in populations and procedures was responsible for 34.5% of the failures to replicate—apart from sampling error.
Gilbert et al. note that the MLP tried to replicate each study 35-36 times, and then pooled the data. This produced a replication rate much higher than that of the OSC: 85%. But if only single studies (as in the OSC) were used instead of pooled data, the MLP would have gotten a replication rate of 35%, close to that of OSC study. As Gilbert et al note, “Clearly, OSC used a method that severely underestimates the rate of replication.”
In the original OSC papers, authors of the “model” papers were asked to endorse whether or not the replication was methodologically sound as a genuine replication. 69% of those authors said “yes.” And when Gilbert et al. looked at whether or not this endorsement actually made a difference to whether a study was replicated, it did: a huge difference. As the authors said:
“This strongly suggests that the infidelities did not just introduce random error but instead biased the replication studies toward failure. If OSC had limited their analyses to endorsed studies, they would have found that 59.7% [95% confidence interval (CI): 47.5%, 70.9%] were replicated successfully. In fact, we estimate that if all the replication studies had been high enough in fidelity to earn the endorsement of the original authors, then the rate of successful replication would have been 58.6% (95% CI: 47.0%, 69.5%) when controlling for relevant covariates. Remarkably, the CIs of these estimates actually overlap the 65.5% replication rate that one would expect if every one of the original studies had reported a true effect. Although that seems rather unlikely, OSC’s data clearly provide no evidence for a “replication crisis” in psychological science.”
So perhaps things aren’t as bad as I, and many other commenters, represented. To be fair, none of us knew of the MLP (surprisingly, that study also appears to have been conducted by the Open Science Collaboration, but its results weren’t mentioned in their 2015 paper!). Further, few of us (certainly not I) compared the conditions of the “model” studies with those of the replication studies.
Now the authors of the OSC study have replied to Gilbert et al. in their own comment (Anderson et al., reference and link below), but I’ll have to admit that their response involves arcane statistical points that are above my pay grade. I urge readers, especially those who are statistically savvy, to read both Gilberr et al. and Anderson et al. But the latter authors do seem to admit that Gilbert et al. had a point:
“That said, Gilbert et al.’s analysis demonstrates that differences between laboratories and sample populations reduce reproducibility according to the CI measure.”
In their response in Science, the OSC authors go on to deny the contentions of Gilbert et al., and respond this way in a piece in The Daily Progress:
The 2015 study took four years and 270 scientists to conduct and was led by Brian Nosek, director of the Center for Open Science and a UVa psychology researcher.
Nosek, who took part in the new investigation, said Thursday night that the bottom-line message of the original undertaking was not that 60 percent of studies were wrong “but that 40 percent were reproduced, and that’s the starting point.”
As for the follow-up critique, it’s another way of looking at the data, he said. Its authors “came to an explanation that the problems were in the replication. Our explanation is that the data is inconclusive.”
Well, “data” is a plural word, but neglecting that, this doesn’t sound like a very strong defense.
Judge for yourself; the references are below. I do note, and this is not to denigrate the OSC study in the least, but merely as a point of interest, that the response of Anderson et al. (but not the original paper) had some curious funding:
I find it strange that a response to a critique, but not the original paper that was criticized, would be funded by the Templeton Foundation.
h/t: D. Taylor
_______
Open Science Collaboration. 2015. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 349:943. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4716
Gilbert, D. G. et al. 2016. Comment on “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science.” Science 351:1037. DOI: 10.1126/science.aad7243
Anderson, C. J. et al. 2016. Response to Comment on “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science.” Science 351:1037. DOI: 10.1126/science.aad9163
Stephen Barnard has sent a fair number of photos over the last few weeks, and I thought it was time to collect them here. The first one is gorgeous:
This looks like a Tundra Swan (Cygnus columbianus), but may be a Trumpeter Swan (Cygnus buccinator). They’re notoriously difficult to distinguish unless they’re mixed together. (The trumpeters are larger.) The yellow spot by the eye strongly suggests tundra, but it’s not dispositive. Other features of the head and the bill suggest trumpeter.
When I asked for DNA evidence, he added this:
Hunting tundras is allowed, but hunting trumpeters is forbidden. How a hunter could tell the difference is left as an exercise.
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). I’m pretty sure this is Desi [his mate is named Lucy]. He has the haunted eyes.
I was photographing this Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) when a Bald Eagle swooped in to attack and made off with a feather.
This cow and calf moose (Alces alces) were hanging out by the caretaker’s house. The cow was being a little aggressive.
Finally, a nice landscape (or seascape) shot from the island where Stephen just went fishing, titled “Two anglers and a guide, Kiritibati”:
As lagniappe, I give you a bizarre slug sent by reader Stuart Coyle in Oz:
Here’s a weird little mollusc found on my back deck last night. It’s a Red Triangle Slug (Triboniophorus graeffei). I have never seen one before. I leave it up to your readers to work out why wearing lipstick around its breathing pore. I’m sure I don’t want to kiss it.
