An open letter to Charlotte Allen, an ignorant, evolution-dissing writer

January 22, 2018 • 12:15 pm

Dear Ms. Allen,

I have become aware of your recent article, “St. Charles Darwin“, in First Things (“America’s most influential journal of religion and public life”). The point of your article appears to be twofold: to defend A. N. Wilson’s execrable hit-piece that masquerades as a book-length biography of Darwin (I reviewed his book here), and, second, to question the truth of evolution itself.  But, by your own admission, you have no expertise to do either of these things.

First, you admit that you know nothing about Darwin’s life:

I have no idea myself whether Charles Darwin was a “self-effacing” and “endearing” beetlemaniac—a Mahatma Gandhi of biology, so to speak—as his fans claim, or a cat-killing, digestive tract-obsessed egotist and plagiarist, as Wilson seems to think.

Perhaps you should read some of the Darwin scholarship by historians of science, like Janet Browne, and then you might get an idea of what the man was really like. And if you did that, you’d see that the critiques of Wilson’s biography by myself, John van Wyhe, and Adrian Woolfson—critiques that you find “hilarious”—rest on Wilson’s blatant misrepresentation of the biographical facts. Wilson simply distorted and lied about Darwin’s life (did you see that I caught him in a blatant lie about Darwin’s supposed plagiarism?).

Your claim that our criticisms of Wilson’s book stem from the fact that he is an atheist turned Christian, and that his religiosity is why his book has “gotten under the skin of people who make at least part of their living promoting Darwin”, is ludicrous. The book would remain dreadful even if Wilson had remained an atheist.

After I read Wilson’s book, I was puzzled that an apparently smart man could do such a terrible job criticizing not just Darwin, but his theory of evolution. It was then that I realized that Wilson was probably a creationist, or at least acted like one, and that suggested a plausible motivation for his execrable scholarship. But his scholarship remains bad regardless of his religion.

Further, you clearly know almost nothing about evolution, either, as seen in this paragraph:

It’s not surprising that Wilson, in his Darwin biography, finds the master’s theories wanting. Evolution, particularly evolutionary psychology, can be a useful heuristic in reminding us how similar we are to other animals, our kin, but when you go hunting through the fossil record for hard evolutionary evidence, you always come up . . . a little short. Yes, there seem to have been dinosaurs with feathers (presumably bird ancestors), but paleontologists continue to classify the extinct creatures as reptiles. There’s a “transitional” fish from the Devonian period, which artists like to draw with little legs like on the atheist bumper sticker—but the actual fossils, recovered in Nunavut, Canada, in 2004, are only of the fish’s head, whose bone structure seemed adapted to taking in air on shallow mud flats.

“Useful heuristic”? Do you know anything about evolution beyond what you’ve taken from Wilson’s book or the creationist literature? No the fossil record does not come up short. Those dinosaurs with feathers are exactly what we expect for transitional forms: they have a largely dinosaurian skeleton but birdlike feathers, and, moreover, appear well after theropod dinosaurs (the presumed ancestor) were already around—but before modern birds appeared. Further, the fossils become less dinosaurian and more birdlike as one gets to more recent strata. Whether one calls these “birds” or “dinosaurs” is a matter of taste; the important fact is that they are exactly the transitional forms we expect, and they appear at exactly the time they should have if dinosaurs evolved into birds.

And surely you know that the truth of evolution doesn’t rest solely on fossils—in fact, there was not much of a fossil record in Darwin’s time. His evidence for evolution derived from other areas like embryology, comparative morphology, vestigial organs, and biogeography. Now, of course, we do have fossil records of many transitional forms: not just those from reptiles to birds, but from reptiles to mammals, amphibians to reptiles, terrestrial mammals to whales, and—brace yourself, as you’re going to hate this!—from early hominins that had small brains, big teeth, and lived in the trees to the more cerebral and gracile species of Homo. All of these, and newer evidence from genetics as well, attest to the truth of evolution.

Your comment about Tiktaalik shows your further ignorance. It’s not just the fish’s head that we have, for crying out loud, but a substantial part of the postcranial skeleton, including its shoulder and front fins. Let me remind you by showing you the photos of the fossil:

The bony fins that might have evolved into legs:

And, as Greg Mayer reported on this site four years ago, we also have a pelvis and a partial hindlimb.

To see the significance of this fossil as the kind of “fish” that could have evolved into tetrapod amphibians, I suggest that you read Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish. Did you have a look at it? I didn’t think so.

At the end, I wondered how you—even more ignorant about Darwin and evolution than was Wilson—could do such a terrible job in your article. And I conclude that, like Wilson, you have been conditioned by your religious beliefs to attack Darwin and his ideas. I implore you to do some reading about science before you further mislead the readers of First Things. For, without doing your journalistic homework, you’ll do nothing to keep that magazine “an influential journal of religion and public life.”

Do you really want to cast in your lot with creationists? Enlightened believers accepted evolution a long time ago.  Surely you don’t want First Things to become Worst Things!

Yours sincerely,
Jerry Coyne

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I’ve posted the link to this piece as a comment after Allen’s piece. We’ll see if it appears.

Why do intellectuals avoid discussing free will and determinism?

January 22, 2018 • 9:30 am

One thing that’s struck me while interacting with various Scholars of Repute is how uncomfortable many get when they have to discuss free will. I’m not talking about Dan Dennett here, as of course he’s a compatibilist and is glad to cross swords with anybody—while admitting sotto voce that yes, we could not have chosen otherwise.  And I’m not talking about Sam Harris, who has spoken out eloquently about about our lack of free will in his eponymous book. (And, of course, Dan had a go at Sam when reviewing that book, to which Sam replied.)

No, I’m talking about other prominent thinkers, and I’ll use Richard Dawkins as an example. When I told him in Washington D.C. that, in our onstage conversation, that I would ask him about free will, he became visibly uncomfortable. But I didn’t back off, and when I reported on our discussion, I said this:

 . . . I did pin Richard down to saying something about free will (in the dualistic sense), as in his upcoming book of essays, Science in the Soul (recommended), he’d written this:

“After my public speeches I have come to dread the inevitable ‘do you believe in free will’ question and sometimes resort to quoting Christopher Hitchens’s characteristically witty answer, “I have no choice”.

Well, that’s glib, but also a non-answer, so I wanted to ask him if he accepted that all our actions are predetermined except for possible quantum events in the brain. And he did admit that, but added that he doesn’t really understand compatibilism and other attempts to give us free will. I didn’t get into those issues, and we briefly discussed the implications of pure determinism for society and the justice system.

As you see, Hitchens also avoided the question. Perhaps Steve Pinker discusses the issue in extenso somewhere in his works, but I don’t know where, and I’ve never directly asked him his opinion.

I’ve seen similar “avoidance behavior” from other scholars, too, but won’t name them here.

It’s my impression, then, that with the exception of vociferous compatibilists like Dennett, people who really are determinists often try to avoid discussing it in public. And by “it”, I don’t mean just free will, but mostly the fact that we are not able after performing a given act, to argue that we could have done otherwise. That is, people don’t like to talk about determinism. This bothers me, because, as I’ve said before, I think fully grasping the determinism of human behavior has enormous practical implications for how we punish and reward people, particularly in our broken judicial system.

Why this avoidance of determinism? I’ve thought about it a lot, and the only conclusion I can arrive at is this: espousing the notion of determinism, and emphasizing its consequences, makes people uncomfortable, and they take that out on the determinist. For instance, suppose someone said—discussing the recent case of David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin, who held their 13 children captive under horrendous circumstances in their California home (chaining them to beds, starving them, etc.—”Yes, the Turpins people did a bad thing, but they had no choice. They were simply acting on the behavioral imperatives dictated by their genes and environment, and they couldn’t have done otherwise.”

If you said that, most people would think you a monster—a person without morals who was intent on excusing their behavior. But that statement about the Turpins is true!

Now how the Turpins are treated by the law is different from saying that they had no choice in their behavior: causes and social consequences are not the same issue. As I’ve argued many times, saying that people had no choice in committing a crime is a statement about “is”s, not “oughts”, and there are very good reasons to incarcerate criminals, though in a way different from what we do now. But grasping determinism, as I, Sam, and people like Robert Sapolsky believe, would lead to recommending a complete overhaul of our justice system. Philosophers who spend their time confecting definitions of free will that still accept determinism could better spend their time working on such an overhaul. Their lucubrations on compatibilism are, I contend, a semantic endeavor that’s largely a waste of time. Why bother with semantics when you could fix severe problems in society? As Marx said, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Now you could argue that the notion of determinism of human behavior is complicated and hard to understand, and that’s why Big Thinkers avoid it. I don’t believe that. Certainly people like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Pinker have the neuronal wherewithal not only to understand determinism, but to work out its ramifications for how we treat people. It’s not rocket science. I am neuronally challenged compared to those people, but the fact is clear to me, and the ramifications seem obvious.

You could also say that some people avoid discussing determinism because they misunderstand its implications. Determinism does not, as I said, imply that criminals should go free. It does not imply that, if we grasp it, we’ll become nihilists who lie abed in an existential stupor. It does not say that we can’t change people’s minds by arguing with them. Yes, many people have such misunderstandings, but I can’t believe that the people I’ve named would share those misunderstandings.

Here’s another possible reason why the Brainy Ones avoid determinism. They may think—as Dennett has said explicitly several times—that if people believe they’re puppets controlled by the strings of their genes and environments (which they are), it will rip society asunder, for our feeling of agency, which we need to somehow confirm as real, is a potent social glue.

But for decades people said the same thing about religion: “We can’t disabuse people of their belief in God, for society would fall apart.” As we know from Scandinavia, that’s simply not true. And I really do believe that if people intellectually grasped determinism, society wouldn’t fall apart, either. For one thing, our feeling of agency is so strong that grasping determinism wouldn’t turn us into do-nothing nihilists. Although it’s an illusion, so is the notion of the “I” in our brain. Life will go on when we believe in determinism but still have our evolved feeling of agency.

That is what I have to say this morning, and I throw this out for readers’ discussion. I really don’t want to engage again in the endless fracas about whether we have “free will” or argue fruitlessly about whether we have a kind of “compatibilist” free will that is “the only type of free will worth wanting.” No, I assume that most readers here accept determinism of human behavior, with the possible exception of truly indeterminate quantum-mechanical phenomena that may affect our behavior but still don’t give us agency.  What I want to know is why many intellectuals avoid discussing determinism, which I see as one of the most important issues of our time.   

Now some readers may say that there are no practical consequences to accepting behavioral determinism. I disagree, as do people like Harris and Sapolsky, and most other determinists who aren’t at the same time compatibilists. Those people who say there are no consequences could argue, “Well, if there are no consequences, why should I bother to discuss it?” If that’s your reason for avoiding determinism, so be it. But I think you’re wrong.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and science post!)

January 22, 2018 • 7:45 am

Bruce Lyon, our professor of ecology and evolution at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has sent another installment in his continuing and engrossing series on coots. This counts not only as a photography post, but as a science post, so be sure to read his text (indented), which describes experiments to figure out why the chicks look so damn weird!

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Coot soap opera VI: Tacky colorful coot chicks

Here is one final installment about our work with American coots, Fulica americana (previous posts are here, here, here, here, and here). This installment is about the bizarrely ornamented chicks.

The following scene should be familiar to anybody who watches nature shows on TV: a colorful highly ornamented bird bows and displays to some duller individuals watching intently. Typically this description would describe a mating display, where males display to attract females. However, the scene also describes family life in coots, where highly ornamented chicks display to their rather plain parents.

My first encounter with a baby chick was rather shocking because baby birds are not supposed to look like these do. Working on a duck research project in in central British Columbia near the town of 150 Mile House, I heard sounds I did not recognize coming from the reeds in a small wetland, so I waded in to find the source. The noise was coming from a baby American coot floating in the water—an orange monstrosity unlike any baby bird I had every seen. The chick, just out of the egg, was covered in fluorescent orange plumes, a naked orange top of the head, blue eye shadow and bright red nubbins around the eyes.

Below: a highly ornamented coot chick displays to its parent.

Below: A photo of three baby coots lined up on a rock waiting to be tagged. The word extraordinary is often overused, but I think it applies to these chicks.
Below: Left. Close up of a baby coot’s face—note the funky red nubbins on the face near the beak. Right: Similar facial nubbins are found on male ruffs (Calidris pugnax), which is interesting because this sandpiper has a lek mating system. A lek is where groups of males gather in a mating arena and display to attract female. Lek mating systems often have extreme sexual selection and highly ornamented males, like ruffs or birds of paradise. We expect extreme ornaments on males in lekking species, not in baby birds.
Below: These two herring gull (Larus argentatus) chicks show what self-respecting baby birds are supposed to look like—these chicks are doing their best to resemble a rock. Baby birds are tasty and helpless, so camouflage makes sense. 

At least to the human eye, coot chicks are anything but cryptic with their crazy ornamentation and doodads. Ornamental plumage in birds is typically associated with sexual selection; in fact bird ornamentation played a key role in motivating Darwin’s sexual selection theory (three chapters of his sexual selection book were devoted to birds). He proposed that the ornamental traits are evolutionarily favored because they increase mating success (typically but not always in males), either because females prefer ornamented males or because the ornamentation helps males win fights over access to females or resources females like. Clearly this explanation does not apply to a baby coot fresh out of the egg.

Right after my first coot chick encounter, I described the bizarre chick to my friend John Eadie (now a professor at the University of California Davis) over dinner at the field house. As nerds often do, we couldn’t help brainstorming about possible explanations for the bizarre plumage. John suddenly remembered an idea by Mary Jane West-Eberhard that seemed like a perfect explanation: parental choice theory. This idea was part of West Eberhart’s broader social selection theory, theory that sought to expand aspects of Darwin’s sexual selection ideas to contexts beyond mating. West Eberhard, an evolutionary biologist who specializes on social insects, noted that mechanisms of choice and social competition occur in a variety of contexts beyond mating, and these mechanisms could in theory lead to the same types of traits produced by sexual selection. Her parental choice idea is analogous to mate choice, except that the choosy individuals are parents rather than individuals seeking mates, and the parents’ preference is for characteristics of offspring, not mates. The idea is simple: in species where parental food is essential for offspring survival, ornamented offspring might evolve if parents control food allocation among their offspring and happen to prefer to feed more ornamented offspring over less ornamented offspring. The assumptions of this theory apply to coots perfectly: as discussed in previous posts, parent coots use aggression to control which chicks are fed and food is so critical to chick survival that many chicks die because they are not fed enough. Eadie and I did not get around to testing these ideas until after I had done my PhD work on the coots, which was good because my PhD work allowed me to figure out the field methods needed for studying coot parental behavior.

Below: Ornamental coot chick feathers up close. The feather structure enabled an easy way to experimentally alter chick plumage: simply removes the orange feather tips. The ornamented body feathers have two parts: a black base with the normally downy feather structure that provides warmth to the chick and a naked orange shaft that extends beyond the down. Cutting the tip removes the color but not the fluff. The little red blobs in the upper left are the red facial nubbins—these are highly modified, have no down and are too small to be modified by trimming tips.

 
Below. It’s “haircut” time!  To test if parent coots have a preference for ornamented chicks we experimentally dulled half of the chicks in each brood by trimming the orange tips from their body feathers.  (In a later study we used electric trimmers, much faster than scissors.) The facial nubbins were left as is.
Below: In each brood, we alternated the trimmed and untrimmed chicks with hatching order because hatching order is such a strong determinant of survival within broods. A coin toss determined whether the first chick to hatch would be trimmed or not, and we then alternated the two treatments as the chicks hatched.  As this photo of an untrimmed and trimmed chick shows, trimming dramatically reduces the ornamentation and appearance of a  chick. Trimmed chicks are, however, still cute and fuzzy!
Below: Interestingly, most rails, including some species of coots, have plain black chicks so our experiments created an appearance that is not completely novel for coots and other rails generally. Moreover, a rail phylogeny shows that chick ornamentation is a derived trait (i.e., evolved more recently), so trimming chicks recreates an ancestral feature. Photo of a water rail (Rallus aquaticus) chick from Europe (photo Gunnar Pettersson):
Below: A cartoon that I use in seminars shows the key results of the experiment. Within broods, the ornamented chicks were fed far more, grew more rapidly and had much higher survival than their non-ornamented siblings. Our experiment confirmed a key aspect of West-Eberhart’s idea: coot parents have a strong preference for highly ornamented chicks and, in an experimental setting at least, this preference has a big impact on the survival of the ornamented chicks. Ethical note: on average, 50% of the chicks in natural broods die of starvation and our experiments did not increase chick mortality but simply altered which chicks lived or died.

As an aside, ornithologists normally capture chicks to weigh for growth rate data. We could not do that because within a day of hatching coot chicks are too damn good at hiding and are almost impossible to catch. I therefore developed a method of photographing recognizable individual chicks (based on their tags) from a floating blind while at the same time accurately determining the distance between the chick and camera (I turned my telephoto lens into a range finder). When photo distance is known, one can convert an object’s relative size in a photo to its actual size, using conversion factors obtained from reference photographs of known sized objects photographed at known distances. I was able to test the accuracy of this method because I raised a bunch of coot chicks in captivity and photographed chicks of known mass while they swam in a kiddie pool. The photo method turns out to be very accurate and we use it in all of our coot studies.

Below: Astute readers may realize that our experimental results could be explained by something other that parental preference for chick ornamentation. Maybe parent coots did not recognize the trimmed chicks as their own chicks, or even as coot chicks at all. Or perhaps, counter to what I claimed above, maybe trimming does actually affect chick survival by reducing their ability to keep warm or dry. Fortunately, a chance discussion with a colleague highlighted this concern before we did the study and prompted me to think about a sham control treatment that could test for the effects of trimming itself. We created two types of control broods: broods where all chicks were trimmed and broods where none of the chicks were trimmed. We found that there were no differences between these two brood types in anything we measured: average feeding rates, chick growth or survival. This shows that trimming feathers per se does not affect chick success; it only matters when parents have both ornamented and unornamented chicks to choose between. The photo below shows an all-trimmed control brood: note that none of these chicks have much color, despite being very young.

Our experiment showed that parent coots prefer ornamented chicks, but this then raises the question as to why parents have this preference in the first place. This question is much harder to answer than simply showing that they have a preference, but more recent studies I did on patterns of natural color variation suggest some possibilities (done with Dai Shizuka, my PhD student at the time). First, we looked at whether brood-parasitic chicks are more colorful than non-parasitic chicks—but in fact they are less colorful. Second, in addition to their colorful plumage, coots have bald heads that can change color fairly quickly from dull to bright and it may be that this skin color conveys useful information to the parents, for example reliable information about chick hunger or body temperature. If parents evolved a preference for feeding chicks with particularly colorful naked heads, this preference could then favor the evolution of chick traits that amplify the head signal: perhaps plumage color is a dazzle trait that mimics the brightest color of the naked head. Finally, another possibility is suggested by our discovery that within broods, later-hatched chicks tend to be more colorful (redder) than early-hatched ones. As I described in a previous post, when parents eventually take control of food allocation, they divide the brood and the parents specialize on feeding the youngest remaining chicks alive. Perhaps the orange coloration is an honest signal of chick age or size that helps the parents identify the smallest or youngest chicks still alive.

Below. A composite photo showing the plumage color and pattern of chicks of four different ages. The fluorescent orange plumage could be an honest signal of size (or age) because once the chicks hatch, they do not grow any new orange feathers. Given this, their coloration must dull as the chick grows and the orange feathers become more thinly spread over an increasingly larger surface area. Big chicks cannot lie about their size! It also seems that the feathers dull and fall out with age.

Monday: Hili dialogue

January 22, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s one of those days: I’ve got nothing to say. But it’s okay. Good morning! It’s Monday, January 22, 2018, and is pouring down rain (with lightning) in Chicago. My car will get an organic wash. And it’s warm: the temperature is 53° F (12° C). It’s National Southern Food Day, while over in Poland, it’s Grandfather’s Day.

Today’s Google Doodle honors the 120th birthday of director Sergei Eisenstein (died 1948), and is meant to emphasize his penchant for montage. You can see the film moving, and below the Doodle are some of its images. If you’re a film buff, you’ll recognize at least one of them:

 

On this day in 1901, Edward VII became King of England upon the death of his mother, Queen Victoria. Coincidentally with Eisenstein’s birthday, it was on January 22 that the 1905 revolution began in Russia on Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg.  On this day in 1924, Ramsay MacDonald became the UK’s first Labour Prime Minister.  For soccer buffs, it was on this day in 1927 that Teddy Wakelam gave the first live radio commentary of a soccer match anywhere on the planet. The teams: Arsenal FC and Sheffield United, playing at Highbury. On January 22, 1970, the world’s first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747, began regular commercial service for Pan Am airways, flying from JFK in New York to Heathrow in London.  On this day in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in the entire U.S. by handing down its decisions in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.  Finally, it was on January 22, 1984 that the Apple Macintosh personal computer was introduced—in a commercial during the Super Bowl.  I’ve always had Macs and never used anything else.

Notables born on this day include Walter Raleigh (1552), Francis Bacon (1561), John Donne (1573), Captain William Kidd (1645), Sergei Eisenstein (1898; see above), Irving Kristol (1920), Sam Cooke (1931), photographer Peter Beard (1938), and Linda Blair (1959; the “Exorcist” child is now 59!).

Here’s one of Beard’s images from Africa:

Those who expired on this day include Queen Victoria (1901; see above), Lyndon B. Johnson (1973), Craig Claiborne (2000), and Joe Paterno (2012).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is talking evolution!

Cyrus: What did you jump up there for?
Hili: If your ancestors had chosen a different evolutionary path you would be able to do it, too.
In Polish:
Cyrus: I po co tam wskoczyłaś?
Hili: Gdyby twoi przodkowie wybrali inną ścieżkę ewolucyjną też byś tak potrafił.

Here are seven tweets found by Dr. Cobb. The first shows a pretty amazing orchid:

A humpback whale in Edinburgh’s waters!

Cat purloins sock:

The Art of Feline War:

And a series of a photographers’ encounter with a beautiful spotted skunk.

There are four species of skunks in the U.S., the Striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis, most common), the Eastern spotted skunk (Spilogale putorius), the Hooded skunk (Mephitis macroura), and the Hog-nosed skunk (Conepatus leuconotus). The spotted skunk lives in the eastern part of the U.S. from the Canadian border to Florida. Although I owned a striped skunk as a pet, I’ve never even seen the spotted skunk, which is a gorgeous and aposematic animal—and even does handstands! In this encounter, the photographer escaped being sprayed:

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Here’s the handstand, from a BBC wildlife show (yes, I’ve posted this before):

It’s Squirrel Appreciation Day!

January 21, 2018 • 2:00 pm

I just discovered, almost too late, that it’s Squirrel Appreciation Day!

Squirrel Appreciation Day is observed annually on January 21. The creator, Christy Hargrove, is a wildlife rehabilitator in North Carolina and is affiliated with the Western North Carolina Nature Center.  According to Christy, “Celebration of the event itself is up to the individual or group — anything from putting out extra food for the squirrels to learning something new about the species.”

I’ve not only put out lots of tasty peanuts today, but also proffer a special tribute to my small rodential friends:

h/t: Chris

Fight Club: Jordan Peterson vs. Cathy Newman

January 21, 2018 • 1:15 pm

The first rule of Fight Club is to prepare for Fight Club.

This video, in which journalist Cathy Newman interviews psychologist Jordan B. Peterson on Britain’s Channel 4, is an object lesson in how NOT to do an interview, even though I found the exchange entertaining. Newman didn’t do her homework, and her conversation is motivated not by curiosity or an attempt to draw out the subject, but to attack him—without ammunition. Newman fails because she’s angry and invested in her narrative, leading her to ignore what Peterson says (she makes some of her arguments over and over again) and to constantly mischaracterize his views.

As I’ve said before, I don’t have a well-formed opinion about Peterson, because I haven’t spent a lot of time listening to him. I know he’s religious and doesn’t like New Atheists, which turns me off; but on other issues, like the ones in this discussion, he’s worth listening to. I’m not sure whether his sources are accurate or complete, but the point I’m making is that if you want to attack somebody’s position, you have to do your homework, or you wind up—as Newman did in this interview—looking really bad. It’s the same problem that recurs when irate Leftists or intersectionalist college students face conservative Ben Shapiro.

And this is why we need free speech. For how else will you learn the “best” arguments of your opponents?

 

Despite their rancor in this interview, both have been good sports: Peterson has decried the misogynists who attacked Newman on Twitter, while, according to the Telegraph:

Newman has since been subjected to abuse online, but has defended herself tweeting: “I thoroughly enjoyed my bout with Jordan Peterson as did hundreds of thousands of our viewers. Viva feminism, viva free speech.”

Here’s a tweet by Nicholas Christakis, who you’ll remember from the Halloween fracas at Yale

 

Here’s the leopard!

January 21, 2018 • 12:00 pm

Did you spot the Persian leopard in the tweet-picture below?

Here it is!