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.
It’s Thursday, and I won’t look up what happened in history today, but if any readers want to contribute, please do so in the comments. But we do have extra cat pictures. First, in Dobrzyn, there’s a big meeting for Listy (the website translates pieces by Ed Yong into Polish). Today, the Furry Editor has important decisions to make. (All today’s photos of Hili come from visitor Sarah Lawson, who specializes in photographing Her Highness.)
A: Editorial meeting. What are we posting next to Ed Yong?
Hili: Let me think.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
In Polish:
Ja: Zebranie redakcyjne, co dajemy obok Yonga?
Hili: Daj pomyśleć.
(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)
Here are two bonus photos of Hili:
With her hot water bottle:
And two bonus photos of Gus (“Earless but Fearless”) by reader Taskin. It’s cold and snowy in Winnipeg, so Gus spent most of yesterday sleeping in a chair.
If I read this report correctly (from a pro-Kurdish Syrian media source), ISIS fighters stoned four married women to death for adultery not because they had previously committed adultery, but because the fighters forced the women to commit adultery by raping them in their homes, and then killing them for the crime.
The ISIS-led Sharia Court issued a decision to publicly execute the four women, without mentioning any details about the men with whom the victims have supposedly committed adultery.
“The four women were stoned to death on Thursday in front of a large crowd of people in central Mosul,” Zarari reported.
Speaking to ARA News in Mosul, media activist Abdullah al-Malla said: “The four women were most likely exposed to sexual abuse at the hands of ISIS militants before being driven out of their homes and transferred to the Sharia Court.”
“The statement of the Sharia Court regarding the case of those four women has avoided mentioning the men who have been involved in the alleged adultery,” the source said. “Apparently, the victims have been raped by ISIS jihadis and then stoned to death on charges of committing adultery.”
ISLAMIC State raped four Iraqi women before stoning them to death for ‘committing adultery’, according to local news reports.
The jihadis arrested the victims after they claimed to have caught them in the act.
At an ISIS-led sharia court they were sentenced to death by stoning, without the court mentioning any details of the men they had reportedly had sex with.
We have to take this with a grain of salt because details are hazy, but given ISIS’s history of wholesale sex slavery and rape, it is not out of the question. And if the women did commit adultery, their adulterous male partners are supposed to be executed as well, but we have no indication of that.
If this is true, it just compounds the barbarity of this group, and incidents like this can certainly not be laid at the door of “colonialism.” After all, the women were judged and found guilty by a sharia court. It’s like forcing someone to shoot somebody else, and then stoning them to death for murder.
First, the Phoenix City Council laudably opted for a moment of silence, as FFRF has advocated for years (after a not-so-laudable emergency measure to avoid an invocation by the Satanic Temple). Its meeting dragged on for hours, with scores of citizens commenting passionately on the issue.
Next, the Legislature prohibited any invocations that do not call on a higher power. Arizona state Rep. Juan Mendez delivered a historic atheist invocation to the Statehouse in 2013. (FFRF presented him our Emperor Has No Clothes award for this brave act of open secularism.) Mendez gave another secular invocation in 2014. But this year, he was banned from doing so because his opening remarks would not address a higher power. This clearly violates the U.S. Supreme Court precedent (Town of Greece v. Galloway) that allows government prayer but only if minority faiths and atheists are heard, too.
Could you invoke the Universe as a “higher power”? Or is that not a “power”?
Now there’s a third episode, called to my attention by sometime reader Ben Goren. As the Daily Kos and theChino Valley Review report, this one involves a meeting of the Chino Valley (Arizona) Town Council on February 9. Many previous meetings of the Council had begun with prayers. Then, in view of objections, the local mayor, Chris Marley, announced that he would not say a prayer at that meeting, and confirmed twice thereafter that no prayers would be said at any meetings until the Council discussed the issue. (The prayers had always been Christian, invoking Jesus.)
Rabbi Adele Plotkin (notice, Catholics, that there are female rabbis!), who had protested the Christian prayers, planned to attend the February 9 meeting, and was under the impression from the Mayor that no prayers would be offered.
Well, Mayor Marley, apparently under the power of his Savior, changed his mind and offered up a Christian prayer. As the FFRF reports,
He initially read a “disclaimer,” claiming the prayer was only his personal belief. Rabbi Adele Plotkin started to complain. Marley warned she would be removed if she continued, so she stopped. After Marley ended his prayer in Jesus’ name, Plotkin stood up and loudly protested. Marley had a police officer remove the rabbi from the room. So much for free speech and petitioning the government for redress of grievances.
Indeed, and so much for a lying mayor (see below).
And, Ceiling Cat be praised, there’s a video of the whole incident, with the prayers, with the rabbi summarily ejected, and then a vigorous Pledge of Allegiance. See what we face in the U.S.? A bunch of religionists who refuse to abide by the law of the land. Have a look at this three-minute episode:
Marley sounds like Jack Nicholson, doesn’t he? I almost expected him to yell at Rabbi Plotkin, “You can’t handle Jesus!”
The one change that Marley said he would make, [sic] is he would ask the Town Clerk to post a notice outside of council chambers notifying the public that an invocation would be part of the proceedings.
Plotkin said she’s not going to let the issue go.
“I had a near-death experience, and I went through the bargaining phase, and I made a deal with God, that anything He put on my plate, I would run with,” she said. “I’m running.”
All seven members of the council spoke in favor of keeping the current tradition.
“If they don’t like it, they can vote us out,” Marley said.
Fat chance that that will happen in Arizona! Notice the Mayor’s defiance of the law. But the FFRF is on this one, and they’re tenacious.
This is the third time I’ve surveyed the ScienceTimes, or the Tuesday science section of the New York Times. It’s one of the few free-standing science sections left in American newspapers, and is important not just for that fact, but because it’s historically employed good journalists who report on “pure” science in an interesting way—people like Carl Zimmer and Natalie Angier.
Increasingly, though, the ScienceTimes, which incorporates a “Well” subsection on human health, seems to be neglecting “pure” science in favor of articles about the health and well being of our own species. In my last two posts about the issue (here and here), I showed that only about 10% of all the section’s articles, long and short, have nothing to do with the wealth, health, and well being of Homo sapiens.
Granted, this is not a random, systematic, or long-term sample. But I did it one more time yesterday, picking up the dead-tree version of the Times. I counted all the pieces in the section, omitting only two letters to the editor, both about depression in humans. Here’s the upshot:
Total articles: 20
Articles about human-related issues: 17
Articles about “pure” science: 3
These three included a nice article by Carl Zimmer on the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii, whose life cycle includes both cats (big and small) and their prey. Apparently infected prey become less wary of cats, and are thus more likely to be eaten. That, scientists speculate, is a strategy of the parasite itself, which changes the behavior of the prey it infects (e.g., rodents) to make it more likely that the parasite will be transmitted to the felid host. (Passage through a felid host is essential for the life cycle, for that’s where sexual reproduction occurs and oocysts form; see figure below.) The change in prey behavior, in other words, is an “extended phenotype” of the T. gondii genes, a phenotype evolved to help the parasite reproduce. There are intriguing experiments showing that infected chimps also become less wary of the odor of leopard urine, but not of the urine from other big cats that aren’t natural predators of chimps. (Leopards do prey on chimps in Africa.) With his usual thoroughness, Zimmer notes that scientists disagree about whether this latest observation reflects an adaptation of the parasite. You can read his story here.
The other two stories are very short: a Q&A about how dogs recognize another animal as a member of their own species, despite the variety in the appearance of dog breeds (story here), and a brief nine lines about how Verreaux’s Eagle in Africa is thriving more in agricultural areas than in wild areas, possibly because human-altered areas afford a greater variety of prey (story here).
The upshot:
Total proportion of all science stories involving “pure” (non-human) science: 3/20, or 15%.
As I said in my last post, that is PATHETIC. And if you go by percentage of lines rather than stories, the figure is even lower, for two of the three science “stories” are just a few lines long.
I’ll terminate this sample now, as I think I’ve made my point. At present, the New York Times science section is becoming a section on human health and welfare. So much the worse for good journalists like Zimmer and Angier, and also for the rest of us who occasionally like to read about species beyond our own.
President Obama announced yesterday, in no uncertain terms, that he would go forward with the process of filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court produced by the death of Antonin Scalia. Here’s the video of Obama’s press conference yesterday, with the Scalia issue beginning at 7:53 and ending at 21:38. (Note Obama’s hip lack of a tie, very unusual for a President at a press conference. He also looks very tired!)
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans, who simply want to prevent the nomination of a liberal Justice, are claiming that they will block all of Obama’s nominees, asking for the nomination to be delayed until a new President takes office next year. That would mean the likelihood of 4:4 ties on decisions, in which case the lower court decision will stand. From watching the news, I see a consensus that Obama will go ahead and nominate someone who will be confirmed. But there’s at least one person who disagrees.
That person is one of my University colleagues, Charles Lipson, who, in a short RealClear Politics essay, expresses his view that this is all a political charade. His title is “The Supreme Court vacancy explained (in 250 words),” and I reproduce the piece in its entirety below. For the captious people, I’ve counted the words and there are actually 244, okay?
Our University webpage notes that “Charles Lipson is Professor of Political Science, specializing in international relations and international political history. He is Co-Director of the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security (PIPES) and its workshop for graduate students.”
And here’s Lipson’s piece (his words are indented; mine are flush left):
No. 1: No nominee for the high court can get through the Senate before the election. No one.
The New York Times noted yesterday, with a nice historical graphic, that since 1900 the Senate has voted on eight Supreme Court nominees during an election year, and six were confirmed, though several of those were for seats that became empty the year before the election year. (The two nominees who didn’t make it were Abe Fortas and Homer Thornberry.) The last such Justice confirmed was Anthony Kennedy in 1988, but the Senate was then controlled by Democrats, and the seat had become vacant in 1987. Kennedy, a centrist and swing vote, was nominated to replace retiring Justice Lewis Powell. Ronald Reagan, who was President then, nominated two justices before Kennedy: Robert Bork, whom the Senate rejected, and Douglas Ginsburg, who withdrew his name when it was revealed (horrors!) that he had smoked marijuana.
Go to the Times site and look in the yellow box on the right to see the election-year Court nominees. The Times adds this: “The Senate has never taken more than 125 days to vote on a successor from the time of nomination; on average, a nominee has been confirmed, rejected or withdrawn within 25 days. When Justice Antonin Scalia died, 342 days remained in President Obama’s term.”
On to the rest of Lipson’s piece:
No. 2: President Obama and the Democratic candidates for president know that. So do Republicans. All God’s children know it.
No. 3: Since the nominee will not be approved, Obama will use the opportunity to advance other goals. He will propose someone who burnishes his own progressive credentials and shows why control of the court depends on the November election. Putting Senate Republicans in an awkward position would be a nice bonus. But the target is November.
I’m not sure that this action will help elect a Democratic candidate. After all, why wouldn’t Republicans, equally cognizant of the stakes for the Court, be just as motivated to elect their own candidate? All this can do is highlight the obtuseness of Senate Republicans, and their perennial desire to block anything Obama wants—just because it comes from Obama. But we all know that already.
No. 4: Obama will nominate someone whose demographic characteristics help in the contests for president and U.S. Senate. That is not just his main criterion. It is his only one. The candidate could be from a purple state. Or a Latino. Or openly gay. Having finished law school would be a plus.
This may well be the case. The problem is that anyone who helps the Democrats will also help the Republicans. For this tactic to work, the President has to nominate someone who will either swing Republican voters to the Democratic side (unlikely in my view), or, more likely, nominate someone who will bring to the polls a voting bloc that is large but historically disinclined to vote. And that would be Hispanics, who constitute 17% of U.S. voters but who, in 2012, turned out only 48% of eligible voters at the polls. My guess, then, is that if Obama is going this route, he’ll nominate a Hispanic jurist.
No. 5: The proposed candidate will not receive a Senate vote before the election or in the lame-duck session. If Mitch McConnell even considered it, he would become the former majority leader.
No. 6: Democrats and Republicans will both use the issue to show voters why it is crucial to elect them — and not the other party. Democrats will add that this again shows we have a “do nothing” Congress. Republicans will say it shows we have “do too much” judges.
No. 7: All the rest is political theater, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
As always, readers’ comments are welcome. Is Lipson right?
UPDATE: Reader Barry sent an excerpt of a piece written in 1970 by Mitch McConnell (now the Senate majority leader saying he’ll block Obama’s nominees). I guess he changed his mind!:
Here’s the branching path from then to now, covering about 3.6 billion years (not to scale). Press the arrow to watch the gif. Some of the earlier bits are somewhat guesswork, but you get the idea.
JAC: Note that this animation is misleading in that it presents our species as the culmination of evolution, which of course is not true. In that sense its progressivism is wrong. They could easily have put a squirrel or a cactus as the final step!
