President of William and Mary responds after BLM disruption of ACLU talk; promises no more fracases

October 10, 2017 • 8:30 am

As I reported on October 5, the students of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization at The College of William and Mary, my undergraduate alma mater, shut down a talk by Clair Guthrie Gastañaga, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. Ironically, the topic of her talk was “Students and the First Amendment.”

The BLM students not only disrupted the talk by chanting and holding up signs in front of the room, but also prevented students from approaching Gastañaga, forming a ring around her after the talk was stopped so that nobody could approach her.

That was an unconscionable violation of free speech, and it irked me even more because it happened at my own school, a school I loved and where I benefited immensely from the give-and-take that occurred in the classroom. So I wrote the the following email to College President Taylor Reveley (I pulled rank a bit with my status, just to show that I was serious):

From: Jerry Coyne
Sent: Thursday, October 5, 2017 10:17 AM
To: Taylor Reveley
Subject: Disruption of ACLU talk at William and Mary

Dear President Reveley,

As an alum of your college (class of 71, valedictorian), I am deeply concerned that the Black Lives Matter organization at William and Mary was allowed to disrupt a speech by the ACLU, apparently without consequences.

I am a big free speech advocate, and while BLM has every right to protest peacefully, or issue counterspeech, they do not have the right to stifle speech or prevent talks from going on, as happened the other day at my school.

I see you have issued a statement in defense of the ACLU, which is good, but I am wondering if you are going to take any action to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Will the protestors, who are easily identifiable, be sanctioned? If they’re not, then this kind of thing will keep happening.

Cordially,
Jerry Coyne
Emeritus Professor
Dept. Ecology and Evolution
The University of Chicago

President Reveley responded yesterday:

Jerry, thanks for being in touch.  We are moving heaven and earth to prevent any such disruption again.  We are also making clear that a repeat performance will not be allowed to succeed, and there will be significant disciplinary consequences for anyone who attempts it.

Taylor

Well, I hope he’s doing what he said, and if he does, well, good for him!

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 10, 2017 • 7:30 am

Don’t forget to send in your good photos; I can always use more.  And don’t forget to tip your waitress!

Today’s photos come from regular Mark Sturtevant, whose words are indented:

Hello! Here is another batch of pictures taken over the summer. Enjoy.

The first two pictures are of ‘inchworms’, which is the descriptive name for the larvae of moths belonging to the family Geometridae. In a high percentage of Geometrid species, the distinctive locomotion of their larvae is reflected by a loss of up to several of the abdominal prolegs that are seen in other caterpillars. The first species is a young larva of a moth known as the half wing (Phigalia titea). The name refers to the adult female moths because they have vestigial wings as shown here.

The second Geometrid larva was expected to be unremarkable, but the picture shows that it bears an interesting feature in the form of vestigial pro-legs! This is the Fall cankerworm (Alsophila pometaria), and it is one of several Geometrid species whose larvae have not completely eliminated prolegs that have fallen into disuse. Adult females of this species are completely wingless, as shown here. Why have flightless females? I suppose it makes sense in a species that ecloses in close proximity to their food plant. The newly emerged female moths can stay put, and after being mated by the flying males they can put their energy into laying lots of eggs.

Next is a marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys), which is an invasive species not particularly liked by anyone since large numbers of them sometimes share our homes during the winter months. But seen up close, one can perhaps appreciate that they do have some interesting colors and textures. Now, do you see the little white objects scattered on the thorax of this individual? Those are the eggs of a parasitic Tachinid fly. This little stinker is doomed to be eaten alive from the inside by flesh-eating maggots.

The next picture is of a lovely pair of mating aurora damselflies (Chromagrion conditum). This species has always been too shy for my camera, but these two hadn’t a care in the world. They are the only species in their genus, and they often sit with their wings slightly spread even though they are not in the family of spread-wing damselflies.

The next picture is of a neat-looking moth that was hanging out for a couple weeks near my shed. It took several days to get a picture since it preferred to settle on the undersides of leaves close to the ground. I eventually chased it to a perch under some low hanging leaves of a tree, and there I could lay on my back under the tree to take pictures. I wound up using my shoes as a pillow, and the entire experience was… actually quite comfortable. The moth is the small magpie moth, Anania hortulata. It is in the Crambidae family, which is a family of photogenic moths that are often found perching low under leaves.

The next two are six-spotted tiger beetles (Cicindela sexguttata). These beautiful predators are easily the most common tiger beetles around here, especially in and near forests. It should be added that tiger beetle larvae are also worth looking for. The larvae are also predatory, and are found lurking at the entrance of a vertical burrow in the ground. When a small arthropod passes near, they suddenly strike out like a nightmare jack-in-the-box to snatch it. This can be seen here (although with a non-living prey).

The next picture is of a large wolf spider which is proposed to be Schizocosa ocreata.

The final picture is of a beautiful queen bald faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) who decided to start her nest early this summer in the frame of our garage. Hornets build very large nests, and these robust wasps have a reputation for being aggressive at the nest. But I soon found that the queen (who is easily twice the size of a worker) was really very tolerant of my close attentions. All she would do if alarmed was fly away, after first hovering to closely inspect me and the nest to memorize landmarks so that she could find her way back again. But I could not later have a foot wide nest full of hornets hanging down into our garage entrance, so I had to use bug spray to remove her. There really was no other option, I think, but I was remorseful about that.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

October 10, 2017 • 6:30 am

Tuesday is the cruelest day, breeding dried posts out of a dead mind. This is my 16,544th post on this site, and that’s a lot of words. I’m going to run out some day. At one post a day, that would be 45 years’ worth. Further, it’s one of those days when I arrive at work with an empty brain, having no idea what I’ll write about.

Today is Tuesday, October 10, 2017, and it’s National Tic Tac Day. That’s not even a food! But, according to Wikipedia, it’s also World Porridge Day according to Wikipedia, and in about half an hour I’m going to have a bowl of oatmeal (with raisins and cinnamon) to celebrate.

Once again, the news from history is slow, supporting my theory (which is mine) that not much happens when the weather turns colder (it’ll be about 18° C or 64° F in Chicago today, with rain arriving tomorrow). On October 10, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire came to an end, having burned for three days, killing about 300 people and leaving over 100,000 homeless after burning about 3.3 miles2 (9 km2) of Chicago, including most of the downtown. Yes, it started in a barn owned by the O’Leary family, but we’re not at all sure that the cause was a cow kicking over a lantern. Here’s a panorama of the downtown after the blaze:

On this day in 1938, several countries signed the Munich Agreement, ceding German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland) to Hitler. It was an act of unbelievable appeasement by the Allies, and propelled largely by the invertebrate prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who famously proclaimed that the agreement brought “peace for our time.” On October 10, 1973, Spiro Agnew (who reminds me a bit of Trump) resigned as Vice President of the U.S. after being charged with tax evasion. He never served time in jail, but was fined $10,000 and put on three years of unsupervised probation.

As with yesterday, not many notables were born on this day. One was Fridtjob Nansen (1861), an Arctic explorer and later an exponent of peace through the League of Nations (he won the Nobel Peace Prize). His exploits are celebrated with today’s  Google Doodle, visible in most of the Northern Hemisphere:


Others born on this day include Thelonius Monk (1917, today’s his 100th birthday), Harold Pinter (1930), Julia Sweeney (1959) and Daniel Pearl (1963). Those who died on this day include Jack Daniel (1911; yes that Jack Daniel), Edith Piaf (1963), Yul Brynner and Orson Welles (both 1985), my Chicago humanities colleague Wayne C. Booth (2005), and Joan Sutherland (2010). How do you feel about Sutherland singing a little Puccini?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili extols the evolution of felids, but I think she’s talking about herself. . .

Hili: I’m still enraptured.
A: What with?
Hili: With how wonderfully successful evolution has been with cats.
In Polish:
Hili: Ciągle mnie to zachwyca.
Ja: Co takiego?
Hili: Jak tej ewolucji wspaniale udało się z tymi kotami.
Matthew sent a physics tw**t:

From reader Barry: two cats having a chinwag:

https://twitter.com/invisibleman_17/status/917314343972286465

And a strip from “Rhymes with Orange” by Hilary Price,  courtesy of readers Jon and Diane G.

U. of Chicago prof wins economics Nobel

October 9, 2017 • 2:32 pm

This is getting monotonously regular, but it’s still a boost for our reputation. Richard Thaler, 72, a professor of behavioral science and economics at our Booth Business School, just won the Nobel Prize for Economics. He wrote the bestselling book Nudge, which I haven’t read, but I’m sure some readers have, so weigh in below. As the New York Times reports,

Richard H. Thaler was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday for incorporating a more realistic understanding of human behavior into economic theory, and for using the resulting insights to improve public policy.

Professor Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, is a pioneer of the discipline known as behavioral economics, which marries the work of psychologists with that of economists to produce better models of human decision-making.

The Nobel committee, announcing the award in Stockholm, credited Professor Thaler with taking the field from the fringe to the academic mainstream. The committee also noted that his work had driven a wide range of public policy improvements, notably a sweeping shift toward the automatic enrollment of workers in retirement savings programs.

Professor Thaler said on Monday that the basic premise of his approach to economics was that, “In order to do good economics, you have to keep in mind that people are human.”

Asked how he would spend the prize money, he replied: “This is quite a funny question.” He added: “I will try to spend it as irrationally as possible.”

Some of his work:

Professor Thaler’s academic work can be summarized as a long series of demonstrations that standard economic theories do not describe actual human behavior.

For example, he showed that people do not regard all money as created equal. When gas prices decline, standard economic theory predicts that people will use the savings for whatever they need most, which is probably not additional gasoline. In reality, people still spend much of the money on gas. They buy premium gas even if it is bad for their car. In other words:, they treat a certain slice of their budget as gas money.

He also showed that people place a higher value on their own possessions. In a famous experiment, he and two co-authors distributed coffee mugs to half the students in a classroom, and then opened a market in mugs. Students randomly given a mug regarded it as twice as valuable as did the students who were not given a mug. This pattern, which Professor Thaler labeled an “endowment effect,” has since been demonstrated in a wide range of situations. It helps to explain why real markets do not work as well as chalkboard models.

I suspect, but can’t be arsed to look it up, that the University of Chicago has more economics laureates than any other school. It’s almost a requirement for a senior economist at this school to have made the trip to Sweden.

Here’s the announcement from the Swedish Academy of Sciences. If you won the contest (and you’ll have to tell me), email me or post below; as you recall, you had to be the first person to guess one prizewinner in at least two categories.

Richard Thaler

A ten pound frog frog lived in ancient Madagascar

October 9, 2017 • 1:15 pm

A frog that could swallow a small theropod dinosaur? Well, maybe: it was large enough, and weighed in at a hefty ten pounds (4.5 kilograms). This animal, with the clever name of Beelzebufo, was first described in 2008, but a new paper in PNAS by Susan Evans et al. (reference and free link below), describes a full species, Beelzebufo ampinga, based on a larger sample of fossils from Madagascar.  The name is scientifically given and described as follows:

Etymology. The generic name is based on Beel’zebul (Greek), Devil, and Bufo (Latin), toad, in reference to the size and probable life appearance of this anuran; the specific epithet, ampinga (Malagasy), means shield, in reference to cranial hyperossification.

Here’s an artist’s reconstruction of B. ampinga next to a normal frog and a pencil. Its skull was up to eight inches wide, its length was about sixteen inches (40 cm) and it’s been described as having the size and appearance of  a “squashed beach ball.” It lived about 65-70 million years ago, and may be the largest frog that ever lived. We’ll never know for sure given the incompleteness of the fossil record and the fragility of frog bones, but it’s a big ‘un:

The animal was reconstructed from bits of its skull and vertebrae, and part of its pelvis. Here are some fragments; if you want to see what they are, go to the paper.

And the reconstruction, with the discovered fossilized parts in white and the presumed remainder stippled. The caption gives two living frogs for a size comparison:

(Fig 2 in paper): (A) Skull reconstruction showing parts preserved (white areas, Left) and distribution of pit-and-ridge ornament (stippling, Right). (B) Skeletal reconstruction and inferred body outline of average-sized (skull width, 200 mm; SVL, 425 mm) adult female B. ampinga based mainly on Lepidobatrachus asper (32). White areas indicate parts represented by fossil specimens. For size comparison, dorsal view silhouettes of Ceratophrys aurita (the largest extant ceratophryine) (C), and Mantidactylus guttulatus (the largest extant Malagasy frog) (D), are shown. cp, crista parotica; fm, foramen magnum; frp, frontoparietal; mx, maxilla; n, nasal; pmx, premaxilla; qj, quadratojugal; qu, quadrate; sq, squamosal. (Scale bars: 50 mm.)

A new article in National Geographic gives a layperson’s take (the paper itself is full of arcane vertebrate paleontology):

These largely terrestrial frogs may have been as ill-tempered and aggressive as their living relatives, the ceratophyrines of South America, scientists say. Ceratophyrines are nasty sit-and-wait predators that are eager to snap at just about anything that happens by, experts note. The ancient devil frogs may have snatched lizards, small vertebrates, and possibly even hatchling dinosaurs with their huge mouths and powerful jaws.

Scientists announced Beelzebufo in February 2008 more than a decade after the first bits of fossilized remains from the species were found. Its name is derived from Beelzebub, Greek for “devil,” and bufo, Latin for toad. Ampinga means “armored,” describing the prominent cranial shield the species had on its head.

One sidelight of interest: its closest relatives are not on Madagascar, but on the South American mainland, and it’s very different from living and fossil frogs on Madagascar. The conventional wisdom is that the land that now comprises the conglomorate of Seychelles + Madagascar + the Indian subcontinent drifted away from Antarctica/Australia/South America about 120 million years ago. But there is some evidence from other groups that there were physical links between Madagascar + India and South America up to about 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous—when this frog lived.  The fact that this frog lived at that more recent period, and has its closest affinities with frogs from South America, supports the latter hypothesis, though not strongly. Another alternative is that the ancestors of this frog were simply one-off survivors that floated away from South America over 100 million years ago and weren’t part of the radiation of other frogs on Madagascar. A third alternative, which is the least likely, is that its ancestors somehow made it over the ocean from South America about 70 million years ago, perhaps on a floating raft of vegetation. That seems unlikely, however, as salt water is deadly to amphibians.

It would be lovely to see this thing alive, but alas, the inexorable course of evolution prevents that. Maybe George Church can bring it back!

___________

Evans, S. E., M. E. H. Jones, and D. W. Krause A giant frog with South American affinities from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. PNAS 2008 105 (8) 2951-2956; published ahead of print February 19, 2008, doi:10.1073/pnas.0707599105

 

An article about Megyn Kelly to read

October 9, 2017 • 12:00 pm

As it’s such a nice day, I’m going to take a walk for an hour—retired people can do that—but I’ll return soon with an article on a giant ten-pound fossil frog that might have eaten theropod dinosaurs.

In the meantime, read the article below (click on screenshot), which is not written by a conservative but does make sense. A few excerpts:

It’s one of the bitterest ironies in television that it was at Fox News, network of blond bombshells and chronic sexual harassment, that Ms. Kelly was given the breathing room to become that most unusual of unicorns: an unlikable woman on television.

. . . With time, in fact, she assumed a style that had hitherto been the exclusive province of men: a charisma that comes from dispensing with the need to be liked. And in featuring her, Fox News was doing more to break female stereotypes than any of the more mainstream networks.

It’s true that Ms. Kelly developed her signature style while perfectly coifed, with obligatory blond streaks. And it’s true that she developed her brand of magnetic unlikability while outfitted in Fox’s ubiquitous jewel-toned dresses, her legs exposed beneath the obligatory glass table. But Megyn Kelly’s power came not from her beauty but from her sharp-wittedness, her familiarity with the issues, and her willingness to ask tough questions and demand answers — the same traits that were on full display in the infamous Republican debate when she took on Candidate Trump.

. . . Instead of unleashing her, NBC has attempted to transform Megyn Kelly into one of the nice girls of mainstream media, another Kelly Ripa, Savannah Guthrie or Katie Couric. The results have been predictably awkward. The glee at her stumble has been swift and vicious.

Why was Megyn Kelly’s transition into the mainstream accompanied by this kind of neutering? Why did Fox News have more room for this charismatic, difficult woman than NBC? It’s hard to say. Mainstream talk shows — morning shows in particular — have never had much of an appetite for difficult. And at a time when our country is so divided, it was always likely that a network like NBC would try to cast as broad a net as possible, meaning that politics would be off the table for someone like Ms. Kelly.

Whatever the reason, however, her descent into banal harmlessness operates as a cautionary tale to all women: You will have to be likable if you want to go mainstream.

Alas, ’tis true, ’tis true. I’ve watched snippets of Kelly on her new NBC show, and they’re cringe-worthy. I was never a big fan of Kelly, except at that Presidential debate when she went after Trump, but now, well, it’s embarrassing.

The NYT editorial board excoriates Trump

October 9, 2017 • 10:30 am

In a scathing but unconventional piece, which masquerades as a “guide to Presidential etiquette”, today’s New York Times editorial, written by the full board, lists the many ways that Trump has behaved badly and un-Presidentially since he took office. Click the screenshot to read it:

Here’s just a small part of a long list. When I saw Trump heaving rolls of paper towels at a crowd in Puerto Rico, I almost puked. It was if he expected plaudits for giving them a means to mop up the water.

It’s not going to get better, so how can we survive the next four (or, Ceiling Cat help us, eight) years?