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 the third day of Coynezaa, my own personal holiday (everyone needs one), and three more days to go after today. This is a banner day for all biology-philes, for it was on December 27, 1831, that Charles Darwin embarked on his Beagle voyage. It was to last five years, and gave rise to the greatest revolution in human thought ever. Fourteen years later, another step forward for science: Dr. Crawford Long used ether anesthesia for the first time ever in childbirth. He had also used it 1842 to remove a tumor from a man’s neck, which was the first use of ether anesthesia ever. It’s a science-y day, this December 27, for Louis Pasteur was also born on that day in 1822 (died 1895). And we’ll leave it at that. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Furry Princess of Poland is out on the tiles for the evening:
Hili: The right doesn’t look interesting.
A: And the left?
Hili: Also somewhat dark.
In Polish:
Hili: Prawica nie wygląda interesująco.
Ja: A lewica?
Hili: Też jakaś mroczna.
And in Wroclawek (or somewhere in Poland), tabby Leon is kvetching. Look at that grumpy face!
Screwed up and forgot your Christmas presents? It’s not too late! For less than twenty bucks, you can get this swell Sneezy the Squirrel calendar, featuring a tame squirrel befriended by a Penn State Student (Sneezy’s Facebook page is here, and I’m proud to be a “friend”). And 10% of the profits go to a worthy cause.
My bolding in this description:
“Sneezy” is a wild Eastern Grey Squirrel who lives on the campus of Penn State University. In exchange for a morsel of food, Sneezy allows Penn State student Mary Krupa to place tiny, squirrel-sized hats on her head. The stylish squirrel’s “nutty” photos have wowed the world and become an internet sensation, with features by NPR, USA TODAY, Good Morning America, the London Telegraph, and many more national and global media outlets. And now, she’s coming to your wall!
This long-awaited wall calendar makes a great gift for any animal lover. It features a new Sneezy photo and a “Nutty Fact” about squirrels for each month. All photos are 100% legitimate, 100% adorable, and guaranteed to put a smile on your face! And you’ll keep smiling, because this calendar is printed in the USA on paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (Sneezy wouldn’t have it any other way).
What’s more, 10% of the proceeds from the sale of this product will benefit The ACRES Project, a nonprofit organization which is working to foster independence, self-advocacy, and entrepreneurship for individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities in Central Pennsylvania. To learn more about ACRES, please visit www.acresproject.org.
Click on the screenshot below to order your calendar now:
And here’s Miss February (the photos are all for real):
If you’re squeamish, don’t read this article in today’s New York Times, and especially don’t watch the video. There’s a lot of screaming and blood, for the video and the article detail the horrific death of Farkhunda, a 27-year-old Afghan woman and a scholar of Islam, battered to death by a vicious mob after accusations that she burned and desecrated a Qur’an.
The thing is—she didn’t. She was protesting the desecration of a holy shrine by people selling stuff like amulets, condoms, and Viagra in front of it. She was a student of Islam! Later, she may have burnt some of the amulets, and perhaps someone had burned other things, possibly including pages of the Qur’an. An illiterate custodian then accused her of having desecrated the holy book, and the rest was predictable. The police tried to wrest her from the hands of the mob, but they eventually gave up and stood by while she was slaughtered. Killed for a book!
From the NYT story:
Mr. Naeem said that a police officer had tried to lead Farkhunda away, but that, mindful of Afghan custom as well as strict Islamic teachings, she had asked the officer to bring a policewoman. The crowd broke through. In cellphone recordings, more than one person can be heard shouting, “Kill her!”
“Then she fell down on the ground and the people tried to beat her and pummel her, and the police would try to help her up, and then the people from the other side would push her down,” Mr. Naeem recalled. “They were like kids playing with a sack of flour on the floor.”
In the videos, Farkhunda seems at first to be screaming in pain from the kicks, but then her body convulses under the blows, and soon, she stops moving at all. Even when the mob pulls her into the street and gets a car to run over her, and she is dragged 300 feet, the police stand by.
By then, she was little more than a clothed mass of blood and bones. Yet still more people came to beat her. One of the most fervent was a young man, Mohammad Yaqoub, who worked at an eyeglasses shop. He heard the crowd as Farkhunda was dragged behind the car and rushed out, eager to join.
Eight months later, neatly dressed with a small beard and mustache, Mr. Yaqoub hardly looked like someone capable of violence. Yet in the videos, he is so caught up in the moment that he has a terrifying ferocity.
“People were saying, ‘If someone doesn’t hit her, he is an infidel.’ That was when I got emotional and hit her twice,” he said in an interview at Pul-i-Charkhi prison, just east of Kabul. “My third punch hit the road, and my hand got injured.”
. . . At first, the trial and convictions that followed seemed a victory in the long struggle to give Afghan women their due in a court of law. But a deeper look suggests otherwise. The fortuneteller who several investigators believe set the events in motion was found not guilty on appeal. The shrine’s custodian, who concocted the false charge of Quran burning and incited the mob, had his death sentence commuted. Police officers who failed to send help and others who stood by received slaps on the wrist, at most. Some attackers identifiable in the videos avoided capture altogether. Afghan lawyers and human rights advocates agree that most of the accused did not receive fair trials. Farkhunda’s family, fearing reprisals and despairing that the killers would be held accountable, fled the country.
It’s a long article, and some of the perpetrators were tried in what seems like a mockery of justice. Many identified people who beat Farkhunda were let off, and others sentenced to a few years of prison. Many escaped justice for a bizarre and unconscionable defense: that she may have already been dead when people were beating and stoning her, so who knows who actually killed her? After all, it’s no big deal to bash someone who’s already dead! That would never pass for a defense in an enlightened court.
It’s not irrelevant in her treatment—and that of her killers—that she was a woman. Certainly other Afghan woman saw her lynching and the exoneration of her attackers as a symbol of their cultural and religious oppression.
Women carry Farkhunda’s coffin, and a crowd accompanies the body as a sign of protest at the injustice of her death. Credit: Massoud Hossaini/Associated Press
You know what I’m going to say next: this woman would still be alive had there been no religion. And you can’t pin her death on colonialism, either: it was Afghan on Afghan, defending their Qur’an—a book that wouldn’t exist without faith. What’s horrible beyond that is how people like Mohammad Yaquoub, whom you’d think of as a normal person if you met him in the optician’s shop, can be transformed into a killer by a frothing mob mentality. As Steven Weinberg said, for good people to do bad things—that takes religion. Let us see Glenn Greenwald and C. J. W******n pin this one on the West. It won’t stay pinned, for the killer here was a “morality” driven by pure faith.
The video is at the top of the article; to access it and the article, click on the screenshot below. I’m surprised that something this graphic appeared in the NYT, but I approve of its being available. If you can stand watching this, you’ll see there is no substitute for actually witnessing what happens. Reading the description alone doesn’t come close to conveying the horror of Farkhunda’s death.
The usual rivulet of wonky readers’ comments, ones that I save for posting above the fold, has slowed lately. Perhaps even the addled take a break over the holidays. But there are still four that I’ll show below, even though the people trying to post them will never post here again.
I am an American man, and I have decided to boycott American women. In a nutshell, American women are the most likely to cheat on you, to divorce you, to get fat, to steal half of your money in the divorce courts, don’t know how to cook or clean, don’t want to have children, etc. Therefore, what intelligent man would want to get involved with American women?
American women are generally immature, selfish, extremely arrogant and self-centered, mentally unstable, irresponsible, and highly unchaste. The behavior of most American women is utterly disgusting, to say the least.
This blog is my attempt to explain why I feel American women are inferior to foreign women (non-American women), and why American men should boycott American women, and date/marry only foreign (non-American) women.
[JAC: Website URL for this blog redacted so the guy doesn’t get any traffic]
BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN!
I’d suggest that he get an inflatable doll, but those don’t cook or clean.
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A person named “gunads” (LOL) tried to put this comment on a photo of an ammo-and-pro-gun ad attached to my post “Our gun culture” . (People often post comments on picture pages rather than on the posts themselves; be careful where you comment!). At any rate, “gunads” seems to be trying to sway me toward a pro-gun view by claiming that ownership of guns is simply a result of evolution:
It’s a beautiful gun ad. Let’s think about it, you believe in evolution? Well, guns are an evolution over fists, sticks, swords, bows and arrows. Guns are the great equalizer, instead of having to be young and fit, and 89-year-old-woman in a wheelchair with a gun will be equal to a 21-year-old punk in his prime.
We the humans aren’t dirty apes that have done the same thing over centuries. We are not slaves of nature, we overcome nature everyday. When nature says, “it’s gonna rain,” we open an umbrella. When nature sends a hurricane, we hide under our hurricane-proof glass and/or shutters. When nature give us deadly diseases, we invent cures. And when face danger from burglars, rapists, and murderers, we get our guns and survive like civilized men instead of dying like dirty dogs.
Yeah, and an 89-year-old woman in a wheelchair who has a rocket-propelled grenade is equal to a tank, and if she had a nuclear weapon, she’d be equal to a whole country!
unless you can create life or unless you know of someone who can do that, you have nothing to say. This website is like a little club of like minded individuals who spend all day patting each other on the back reminding each other how smart they are.
Well, we’re savvy enough not to believe in a Big Bodiless Mind in the Sky! But seriously, would Dom be able to tell us exactly what his god is like and how he knows that? Further, my experience is that the commenters, while generally liberal and godless, are far from being like-minded. Has he read any pieces on free will? Maybe Dom should go over to one of the Intelligent Design websites and see how like minded they are!
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This is my favorite comment (responding to the same post above) for two reasons. First, it’s by someone who used the pseudonym “Jesus dided for you.” Second, it’s in CAPSLOCK:
YOU SIR, ARE A MORON.
Sadly, in his comment Mr. Jesus Dided forgot the comma after “YOU.”
Today’s video, part of the PBS/It’s Okay to Be Smart collaboration, highlights the “dumbness” of evolution: the fact that it has no foresight, and therefore devises solutions—I’m speaking metaphorically here—that are less perfect than an engineer could come up with de novo. One of the most famous jerry-rigged and imperfect “adaptations” is the mammalian recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN), which is described well in the video, along with an animation that should be useful for teaching (I discuss this as evidence for evolution in WEIT, but there’s no substitute for a good animation).
Creationists have denigrated this evidence for evolution, suggesting that the recurrent laryngeal nerve has other functions that are essential (it apparently branches off some smaller nerves that go to other places), but even that’s not convincing since bad design, like vestigial traits (e.g., the penguin’s “wing”) can be coopted later by selection to serve new functions. Only evolution can explain this circuitous route. After all, it’s only the left laryngeal nerve that makes this detour down to the aorta and back. If you’re a creationist, you have to then explain why God designed the system so that only that left nerve needed to have those functions. But that’s ad-hoc-ery, for evolution explains why only the left nerve bends this way—based on the asymmetric evolutionary displacement of the artery that the nerve is constrained to loop around. Here’s the video:
One beef: this series continues to describe natural selection as involving differential survival of individuals, although here they do correct “survival of the fittest” to “survival of the good enough.” I wish that they’d note that natural selection is actually differential reproduction of genes, and survival needn’t be involved. Now it may be too arcane to distinguish between differential reproduction of genes and differential reproduction of individuals (the genes’ vehicles), but I wish they’d take one video to make this clear. Since I haven’t yet seen the final six parts, perhaps they will.
If you haven’t seen the video below from Britain’s Channel Four show “Inside Nature’s Giants,” watch it, for Richard Dawkins actually narrates the dissection of the RLN from a giraffe during an autopsy. This is the first dissection of a giraffe’s RLN since 1838—21 years before Darwin provided the explanatory framework:
Just yesterday the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) put in place a regulation that even air passengers who opt for a pat-down security check could be required to go through the See-You-Naked Machines (SYNMs), euphemistically known as full-body scanners. (Full disclosure: they no longer see an image of your naked body.) Right now 2% of passengers opt for the pat-down as an alternative to going through the machines but now they may require the Official Peeping. Apparently this rule is in place because full-body pat-downs miss some things that the machines can detect, but I’m invariably groped (sometimes intrusively) after going through a SYNM, and they’ve never detected anything.
But do those machines really work?
No. They should, for they cost $150,000 each, and the bill so far is over $120 million dollars for the units in place.
A recent security audit found that TSA had failed to find fake explosives and weapons in 96 percent of covert tests. And members of Congress familiar with the classified details say the body scanners are to blame for much of the problem.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said that while the TSA has spent a fortune on new equipment, he is “troubled about their capability to detect and prevent dangerous materials from passing through security checkpoints.”
Johnson said that while bomb detection is obviously a complex undertaking, “these things weren’t even catching metal.”
House committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) confirmed that L-3’s body scanners were the technology fingered in the audit and said that “the technology failure was a big part of the problem.” The chairman — a former federal prosecutor who spends much of his time thumbing through secret documents in the windowless bowels of the Capitol — added that the manufacturer guarantees an accuracy far below 100 percent.
. . . Anthony Roman, a pilot and security expert who also designs management software, said probably only a small percentage of the body imaging machines’ failure rate can be chocked up to the technology itself. The rest is likely because of the TSA’s “low-paid, under-motivated, not incredibly well-trained personnel,” he said.
The TSA of course is promising to do better, including adding software “patches” to help detect contraband, but even if the failure rate goes down to 50%, one out of two people smuggling weapons or explosives onto planes will still get through.
I tend to show respect to government officials (after all, they’re representing all of us), but the TSA is an exception. Its behavior is a comedy of errors, it’s reactive rather than proactive, and my experiences with its employees have been dire. They’re rude, loud, and seem to revel in throwing their weight around and humiliating travelers. In all my interactions with them—and I travel a lot—I’ve met exactly two who I thought were trying to be nice and pleasant.
Today’s the special Christmas Caturday edition, and we’re celebrating with a great video, “Mog’s Christmas Calamity,” which happens to be the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s annual Christmas ad. It’s narrated by none other than Emma Thompson, and has already been viewed by more than 27 million people since it was posted on YouTube November 12. Watch it and see if it doesn’t make you choke up a little:
Mog the cat is the creation of bestselling children’s writer Judith Kerr, who penned an entire series of books about the lovable but clumsy feline. As The Guardian notes, this is Mog’s first appearance since 2002, when the cat died of old age in the book Goodbye, Mog. [JAC: That sounds like a sad book, though a bit of investigation suggests that Mog is given an afterlife.]
For Sainsbury’s Christmas campaign, Kerr, now 92, revived the cat’s story, penning Mog’s Christmas Calamity. She also illustrated a book of the same name to accompany the ad. It’ll be sold in Sainsbury’s stores, with all profits going to the charity Save the Children.
Has anyone read Kerr’s stories? Here’s a relevant tw**t:
And here’s a behind-the-scenes video about how the ad was made. Be sure to watch it, for it features Kerr herself as well as some background on the animation:
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Here are two other Christmas-themed cat items:
The cartoon below reminds me of Muezza, the cat supposedly owned by Muhammad. The story goes that Muhammad, heeding the call to prayer, found Muezza sleeping on his sleeve. Rather than rouse the cat, he cut off his sleeve to let it sleep.
The tank of readers’ photographs is running seriously low, even though I’ve recovered many of the lost ones, so please send in your good pictures ASAP. Otherwise we’ll run out in a week or so. Today is Insect Day, with Moon Lagniappe.
Reader Mark Sturtevant sends his always lovely photos of insects; there are three this morning, but of a single insect. I’m leaving out the identification because Mark wants the readers to take a crack at it. At least try to identify the order (all insect orders here).
Small insects can be hard to identify, but when I came across this one I was pretty baffled for a time because I was not even sure what order it belonged to. I was later able to identify the order of this insect from the pictures that I had taken, and from there I soon identified it as a member of an obscure family. That too was a pretty thrilling moment because I then learned that this insect embodied two reasons why I spend so much time outdoors stalking insects in the hot sun. I had found a bug that was both new to me and also very, very. . . weird.
The WEIT-ers might have some fun trying to identify this insect. I have no idea how well this will work, but if things bog down I can help in the comments. Here are some questions to answer, should any feel so inclined:
What is the insect order? How did you know or suspect the order? I think that if you do not have an entomology background, then reasoning this one out is an accomplishment by itself!
What is the family?
What is the weird life cycle including metamorphosis of members in this family?
On that point, the third picture shows that this insect is a female, and she is laying eggs in the unopened buds of a goldenrod flower. You can see the tip of her abdomen extending downward between the hind legs. Had I known what was going on at the time I would have tried to take better pictures that show this. But anyway, the last question is why is she laying eggs in flower buds? This is a juicy bit of the puzzle because her babies are not vegetarian!
Jacques Hausser in Switzerland sent a passel of cerambycid (“longhorn”) beetles, and I’ll show three of them:
Honor given where honor is due: Cerambyx cerdo, the great capricorn beetle, and the type species of the family. It can be up to 53 mm long. This is a male, as you can guess from his huge antennae and also the enlarged tarsa of the anterior limbs, very useful to cling onto a female. Like most species in this family, the larvae bore tunnels in unhealthy parts of trees, eating wood, in this case oak.
This one has a story: after a hard field work day, we were drinking beers at the terrace of a little cafe-bar at Malko Tarnovo, South-East Bulgaria, when he landed noisily on our table, and very quickly sipped dry a rather large puddle of beer. Of course the students offered him some more drinks, and at the end he was thoroughly drunk. So we caught him, and we were surprised to discover that he protested loudly, whining like a new-born d*g—they were actually stridulations produced by the rubbing of the edge of the thorax against specialised ridges of the abdomen. You can hear this noise in a related species here. Considering his inebriated state, we did lock him in drunk tank for the night, and released him the next morning on his preferred tree species.
Clytus arietis, the wasp beetle, enjoying the nectar of common dogwood together with some Nitidulidae (sap beetle). Another good example of Batesian mimicry; its antennae are deceptively short for a Cerambycid, but were maybe selected to improve its resemblance to a wasp.
Gaurotes virginea, a rather stocky species (for a Cerambycid). The larvae live on spruce and other coniferous trees. This one is on Arctium lappa, the greater burdock.
And the intrepid Diana MacPherson sends us a picture of the full moon on Christmas (sent yesterday)
Here is my somewhat lazy attempt at a picture of the moon. I went outside in bare feet with my Tameron 600 mm zoom lens and my Canon 5D Mk III & fired off a few shots. This is pretty much out of camera save for some cropping. It’s a bit noisy and I shot at ISO 1000. I probably could have done a better job & even used a tripod but in my defence, the full moon sucks as a subject (better to shoot a quarter moon because you get better contrast and 3D effect) and I think I’m getting a cold/flu (hence the bare feet – I felt really hot).
