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.
Well, snow has fallen in Montréal, and quite a few flights are canceled this morning because of the blizzard from the South, but mine still shows up on time. We’ll see. As I’m speaking about evolution to students at Chicago’s Lab School tomorrow morning, I hope I get out.
It’s March 2, and on this day in history the Bank of England issued the first one- and two-pound notes (1797), and, in 1836, Texas declared independence from Mexico. On March 2, 1946, Ho Chi Minh was elected president of Vietnam, in 1956 Morocco gained independence from France, and, in 1995 scientist at Chicago’s Fermilab announce the discovery of the top quark. Births on this day included Pope Pius XII (1876), who declared in 1950 that Adam and Eve were the literal ancestors of humanity, and we could not believe otherwise (what a hoser!), Kurt Weill (1900), Desi Arnaz (1917), namesake of one of Stephen Barnard’s eagles, John Irving and Lou Reed (both 1942), and KAREN CARPENTER (1950).
Deaths on this day included John Wesley (1791), D. H. Lawrence (1930), Philip K. Dick (1982), and Dusty Springfield (1999). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there was also a sudden snow, hindering the beasts on their perambulations. Hili was miffed, but her anger was soothed by a piece of sausage (in interests of equality, Cyrus got some too):
Hili: Is there any explanation for this phenomenon?
Cyrus: Yes, it is still winter.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy jest jakieś wyjaśnienie tego zjawiska?
Cyrus: Tak, to nadal jest zima.
Reader Leon sent the following set of similes. You’ve probably seen them before, but I haven’t seen them all gathered in one place. This, of course, gives you the opportunity to disagree or, better yet, create your own similes, either for these areas or other ones.
PHILOSOPHY is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
METAPHYSICS is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that is not there.
THEOLOGY is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat, that is not there, and shouting; “ I found it!”
SCIENCE is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat using a f—– flashlight.
I hadn’t heard of Bailey Lamon before reader “Discovered Joys” called an Independent piece to my attention (click on screenshot below to go Lamon’s article), but, according to the Toronto Media Coop, she’s a Canadian activist:
Mike Roy [the man who’s Lamon’s partner] and Bailey Lamon are both members of The Indignants, a media collective that covers stories relevant to the marginalized and under-represented. Mike is a founding member of The Indignants: he and Bailey have traveled far and wide covering indigenous, social, environmental and animal rights issues.
And Lamon adds a bit more about her activities in the Independent article, originally published at Medium:
I’ve been involved in activism since the Occupy Movement of 2011. Over the years this has included anti-capitalist, labour and feminist organising, as well as coordinating a local Food Not Bombs chapter, a number of direct actions against big oil (in solidarity with First Nations people), and prisoner justice campaigns.
While I will always be part of the movement and believe in creating a better world through people power, over the years I have become increasingly frustrated with modern activist culture and the way that today’s left conducts itself.
It’s a very good article, infused with anger at those keyboard warriors who pretend to be changing the world for the better, but in reality spend their time attacking the ideology of other people who are supposed to be on their side. I’d excerpt the entire article if I could, as it’s full of good stuff, but you can read it yourself at the Independent. I’ll just give a couple of quotes. The only quibble I have, and it’s completely trivial, is the phrase “lived experience” in the first paragraph below, a phrase that seems redundant.
Lamon:
Yet I witness so many “activists” who ignore the realities of oppression despite saying that they care about those at the bottom of society. They think that being offended by something is equal to experiencing prison time or living on the streets. They talk about listening, being humble and not having preconceptions. Yet they ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors, regardless of how much worse off they really are.
. . . I’m sick of the cliques, the hierarchies, the policing of others, and the power imbalances. I am exhausted by the fact that any difference of opinion will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people who are consequently deemed “unsafe”.
It’s disgusting that the left claims to be fighting for a better way of dealing with social problems, but if a person makes a mistake or says something wrong, they are not even given a chance to explain their side of what happened. This is because the process of conflict resolution is now driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts. In today’s activist circles one is lucky to be given any sort of due process at all. Meanwhile, everyone is put under social pressure to believe everything they are told, regardless of what actually occurred in a given situation.
This is not freedom. This is not social justice. There is nothing “progressive” or “radical” about it.
It goes on. One thing I’ve observed about Authoritarian Leftists—and I quickly add that this doesn’t apply to all of them—is that they claim to hold the moral high ground, and to know what’s really necessary to help society, yet few of them really engage in active work to help the oppressed people they profess to care about. Does it really help the world to churn out blog posts attacking “Rich Old White Men” who are not only atheists, but liberals and progressives? Is demonizing Sam Harris over and over again really going to change our world for the better? If your activism consists solely of writing pieces about oppression, aren’t there better targets? Or better yet—physical actions you can take to create real change?
I think so. And I don’t exempt myself from this charge. Although I used to be more engaged in helping the marginalized and oppressed (I worked in a soup kitchen and taught illiterate adults to read), now I seem to do little more than write on this site and give money to organizations like Doctors Without Borders. I’m going to try to supplement that by acting more directly. Helping one homeless person find shelter and food, or one woman leave her abusive husband, does infinitely more for the world than penning yet another misguided and faux-outraged attack on Sam Harris.
Reader Ant called my attention to a piece by Laura Kehoe in The Conversation, detailing “accumulative stone-throwing behavior” in chimpanzees living in the Republic of Guinea. Kehoe describes a behavior, caught on a camera trap, that she and others eventually wrote a paper about:
What we saw on this camera was exhilarating – a large male chimp approaches our mystery tree and pauses for a second. He then quickly glances around, grabs a huge rock and flings it full force at the tree trunk.
Nothing like this had been seen before and it gave me goose bumps. Jane Goodall first discovered wild chimps using tools in the 1960s. Chimps use twigs, leaves, sticks and some groups even use spears in order to get food. Stones have also been used by chimps to crack open nuts and cut open large fruit. Occasionally, chimps throw rocks in displays of strength to establish their position in a community.
But what we discovered during our now-published study wasn’t a random, one-off event, it was a repeated activity with no clear link to gaining food or status – it could be a ritual. We searched the area and found many more sites where trees had similar markings and in many places piles of rocks had accumulated inside hollow tree trunks – reminiscent of the piles of rocks archaeologists have uncovered in human history.
Videos poured in. Other groups working in our project began searching for trees with tell-tale markings. We found the same mysterious behaviour in small pockets of Guinea Bissau, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire but nothing east of this, despite searching across the entire chimp range from the western coasts of Guinea all the way to Tanzania.
Here’s a video of the behavior:
NOTE: The video seems to have disappeared, but you can download several videos from the paper’s supplementary information at this site.
In the article, Kehoe suggests this could be a surrogate (and louder) form of chest-thumping, or serve to mark the territory of a chimp band. But she goes further, into the territory of the numious:
Even more intriguing than this, maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at “sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections are commonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.
That, of course, is going to garner all the press. Chimps show rudiments of religion! Well, I have to confess that I haven’t yet read the multi-authored paper in Nature (link and reference below), but here’s the abstract:
The study of the archaeological remains of fossil hominins must rely on reconstructions to elucidate the behaviour that may have resulted in particular stone tools and their accumulation. Comparatively, stone tool use among living primates has illuminated behaviours that are also amenable to archaeological examination, permitting direct observations of the behaviour leading to artefacts and their assemblages to be incorporated. Here, we describe newly discovered stone tool-use behaviour and stone accumulation sites in wild chimpanzees reminiscent of human cairns. In addition to data from 17 mid- to long-term chimpanzee research sites, we sampled a further 34 Pan troglodytes communities. We found four populations in West Africa where chimpanzees habitually bang and throw rocks against trees, or toss them into tree cavities, resulting in conspicuous stone accumulations at these sites. This represents the first record of repeated observations of individual chimpanzees exhibiting stone tool use for a purpose other than extractive foraging at what appear to be targeted trees. The ritualized behavioural display and collection of artefacts at particular locations observed in chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing may have implications for the inferences that can be drawn from archaeological stone assemblages and the origins of ritual sites.
Here’s a figure from the paper(click to enlarge):
Caption (from the paper): (a) Adult male chimpanzee tossing a stone; hurling a stone (Boé, Guinea-Bissau); and banging a stone (Comoé GEPRENAF, Côte d’Ivoire). (b) Boé, Guinea-Bissau landscape: stones accumulated in a hollow tree; a chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing site; and stones accumulated in-between buttress roots (see also Supplementary Movies 1–7).
The paper describes the behavior as performed predominantly by males, which suggests that it’s an extension of male “drumming” rather than a symbolic “shrine” at “sacred trees,” as the authors suggest in the discussion. (To be fair, they don’t seem to favor one hypothesis over another.) Have a look at the video, read the short paper, and weigh in below. Is this the rudiments of religion, or some kind of appreciation of the sacred?
We have a short but macabre selection of photos today, taken by biologist Lou Jost in his Ecuadorian home (he lives in a national park).
My last submission featured spiders and scorpions from my house. Someone in the comments wrote “…basically I’m wondering, do you live in Hell?”. Well, this submission, like the last, could go either way, depending on the person.
Last night as I went into my bedroom I was surprised to see a fairly lengthy snake stretched out nonchalantly alongside my bed. First time I’ve had one in my house. It was vaguely like a coral snake, so I was cautious about it. Here in the tropics it is harder to tell real coral snakes from their mimics, because there are so many more kinds of both coral snakes and mimics. So I carefully caught it in a flower pot and kept it until today to photograph. It turns out to be a newly described species of false coral snake, Siphlophis ayauma, which was only described in 2014 and is endemic to a small area of the eastern Andes in southern Ecuador. Pretty exciting! See here.
A few weeks earlier I had another visitor, a blue-legged centipede. I do hate these things. This one walked between my feet while I was working at night. I’ve never yet been bit, but I suspect it will be just a matter of time before I roll over one in my bed, or get bit by one hiding in my shoe….
But in Dobrzyn, of course, it’s ALWAYS World Cat Day, with the World Cat being Hili. Today she’s thinking Deep Thoughts, but, as usual, they revolve around noms:
A: Hili, what is creative thinking?
Hili: It’s a broad knowledge and a courage to associate.
A: Give me an example.
Hili: The ability to combine a human with a refrigerator.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, co to jest twórcze myślenie?
Hili: Rozległa wiedza i odwaga skojarzeń.
Ja: Na przykład.
Hili: Trzeba umieć połączyć człowieka z lodówką.
(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)
Over in Wroclawek, Leon has a new black friend (?), Choco:
Leon: Come, Choco, I will introduce you to my fans and then we will fight.
And in Winnipeg, Canada, Gus continues the renovations on his Ikea box. Here’s a video of The Earless One making his window bigger:
Finally, here are between 150,000 and 250,000 King Penguins huddled together for warmth on the island of South Georgia. This photo, from the Daily Mail, is by photographer Role Galitz. Note the chicks (brown) gathered in creches. It always astounds me that a parent can find its chick in this mess. I think they do it by vocalization, but I’m not sure.
Reader Dom works at a library and thus comes across all manner of interesting literature. This story, “The Cat and the Mouse”, comes from a 1912 book, A Second Reader for Deaf Children. Click to enlarge, and be sure to look at the pictures (especially the last one), and read the story (especially the last two sentences).
And a taste, in both senses, of what’s to come: the elusive Montreal smoked meat sandwich (my dinner last night). I ate every morsel.
