Woman and her Doppelgänger marionette feed a squirrel

November 24, 2015 • 2:00 pm

The week is effectively over for most Americans, I think: even my department is largely empty, and tomorrow will be even emptier. So, as an end-of-the-week treat, here’s a short story from Neatorama about an activist woman who had an affinity for marionettes and squirrels, resulting in this adorable photo:

woman-feeding-squirrel-with-marrionette

The whole story, and be sure to check at least the first link:

You may have seen this photo of 85-year-old civic activist Doris Diether of West Village, New York City, feeding a squirrel with a marionette that looks like herself.

The story behind the old lady and her “mini me” marionette is actually an interesting one. It all started one day at the park, where puppeteer Ricky Syers was performing with his handmade marionette, according to Nina Golgowski of NY Daily News:

“One day she comes up to me and whispers, ‘I have something for you,'” he recalled.

Opening a scrap book she revealed old newspaper clippings and articles she had written on marionettes back in 1974. Articles more recently added to her collection were ones she had seen on Syers’ work, which she cut out and saved for him.

The gesture floored him.

Syers proceeded to build Diether her own marionette, made to look just like her “featuring Diether’s short, white hair and rosy cheeks … complete with handbag, cane and floral blouse and skirt.”

“She’s … known as the woman who feeds the squirrels,” Syers said to NY Daily News, “Now, her little marionette feeds the squirrels.”

h/t: Ant

Many Americans, and even more Europeans, favor restricting speech offensive to minorities

November 24, 2015 • 12:15 pm

A brand-new poll from the Pew Research Center gives a dispiriting result: there’s widespread resistance to free speech in the U.S., and even more so in Europe. Further, within the U.S. itself, younger people favor more restrictions on speech than do their elders.

The complete report is here, and I haven’t yet read it, but the link above gives the salient results on free expression—queried as the right to utter offensive speech. First, though, the precise survey question:

We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things.

That’s not too bad, because the question is clear, and the issue of government prevention is clearly an issue of censorship and, in the U.S. of our Constitutional First-Amendment rights.

Here are the results for the U.S., broken down by age, sex, political affiliation, ethnicity, and education.

FT_15.11.19_speech

The upshot:

  • The younger the age group, the more restrictions people place on “offensive” speech. I was frankly, astounded to see that 40% of Millennials favor censorship. That drops with age, declining almost 70% in the older “silent generation.” While I’d like to think this is an age thing, and that the Millennials will accept less censorship as they mature, I’m afraid this is might reflect a real change in the Zeitgeist, a change we see in the calls among college students for censorship of views they deem offensive.
  • Democrats and Independents favor more restriction on freedom of speech than do Republicans. That’s not surprising given the new connection between censorship and liberalism. Democrats, of course, are those most likely to support minorities, and this is now translated into protecting minorities from hearing what offends them.
  • Minorities (“non-white”) are, unsurprisingly, more likely to favor the censorship of speech that offends them.
  • Finally, increased education is associated with less desire for censorship. I’m not sure why.

When you go to Europe, some of whose countries already have speech restrictions (e.g., Germany and Poland), the approval of censorship is higher—shockingly high. Given the common accusation of “Islamophobia” in some of these countries, it’s even more surprising that, say, 48% of French and 70% of Germans favor censorship of speech that offends minorities. Overall, censorship of this sort is approved by 28% of Americans and by 49% of Europeans: almost twice as many as in the U.S.! In this sense, at least, we are the “land of the free”.

One reason that Europeans may be less opposed to censorship are the laws already in place in some countries, which may make citizens think that it’s okay to restrict speech. It would be instructive to see if there’s a correlation between the existence of anti-speech laws and individuals’ responses to this question.

FT_15.11.19_speechEurope

Finally, Pew confected an “index of censorship” for the many countries it surveyed, though there are no data for many countries in the Middle East, southeast Asia and Africa. What they found is below: the greener a country, the freer expression it favors, while more orange countries favor more censorship:

Screen Shot 2015-11-24 at 11.52.22 AM

Pakistan, Jordan, and Senegal get the raspberries here, while North and South America, Europe, South Africa, and Australia are less censorious.

The full report gives many more data on things like gender equality, freedom of the press, and the effect of the Internet on feelings about free expression, but I’ll leave you to peruse this yourself.

I’ll end with a caveat: although I’m in favor of higher numbers of people opposing censorship of statements offensive to minorities, that doesn’t mean I’m in favor of offending minorities. It should be clear from what I’ve written on this site that “offensive” speech is the form of free speech that deserves the most protection, because banning speech that offends anyone is the surest way to shut down free discourse—the foundation of democracy.

Templeton’s at it again, wasting money promoting Christianity

November 24, 2015 • 10:00 am

Not long ago, an executive with the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) invited me to dinner on his dime. His aim was twofold: to discuss my latest book, which he was going to review (clearly not positively!), and, more important, to convince me that I had the Foundation all wrong: that it wasn’t really interested in advancing religion, but was becoming more scientific.  We palavered about this meeting: I insisted, for instance, that the JTF would not pay for my dinner, so this gentleman kindly offered to pay out of his own pocket. But I ultimately decided not to go, for I envisioned it as a one-way conversation in which the Templeton guy would propagandize me and ignore my own complaints about his Foundation. After all, why would a billion-dollar enterprise like the JTF listen to a tiny critic like me? I may have been wrong about what would have transpired, but I’ll never know, for I eschewed the dinner (it was at a fancy place, too!).

But what I’m not wrong about is that the JTF has NOT changed, for it continues to promote religion with one hand, science with the other, and then with both hands mix them into a toxic brew of science-y woo. Their continued conflation of science with religion merely confuses people about the relationship of these areas, yet many scientists—among them are atheists!—are eager to line up for a place at the Templeton Trough. (JTF gives millions away annually.) The World Science Festival in New York, for instance, is partly sponsored by Templeton, and always has some “Big Questions” seminars that give credibility to the JTF.

But whatever credibility the JTF gains by supporting science is eroded by their real mission, which is stated clearly on their website (my emphasis):

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.

Our vision is derived from the late Sir John Templeton’s optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation’s motto, “How little we know, how eager to learn,” exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

Before I begin, could someone explain to me what they mean by “ultimate” reality? Is there any other kind of reality? (Of course they’re talking about God—or so I think).

Just remember that everything the JTF does, including trying to burnish its image by supporting “pure” science, is ultimately aimed at acquiring “new spiritual information” through science, for Sir John believed that science could ultimately tell us stuff about the supernatural.  If you think Templeton has reformed, or if you want to take money from this Foundation, first have a look at how the JTF has just wasted £1.6 million pounds on a useless study, founding a Christian institute at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The 1.6 million pounds follows another half million pounds given earlier to the same recipient:

SCOTTISH theologians are taking the world lead in a controversial study of the existence and nature of God at a new international institute.

Experts at St Andrews University will tackle the biggest questions facing humanity, including confronting religious belief and analysing the challenges of hostility, sectarianism and terrorism.

The new Logos Institute – logos being the Greek for word or study – is being launched by a £1.6 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research relating to the major questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, and will be the centre for excellence in the study of analytic and exegetical theology.

The work of the institute was founded by father and son academics Alan Torrance, professor of systematic theology at St Mary’s College of the University of St Andrews, and Dr Andrew Torrance of the university’s School of Divinity.

. . . The new institute, which will open in the summer of 2016, builds on existing resources at St Andrews University and the funding will help pay for part-time positions of four leading international thinkers and a further full-time senior appointment.

There will also be research fellowships, six PhD scholarships and a new Masters programme as well as a series of public lectures, a blog, a website and podcasts.

What questions will this institute address? (These Black Holes of Money never answer the Big Questions, they just address them.) The Scotsman reports further:

The range of questions it will consider relate to the existence and nature of God, God’s relationship to time, the nature of the person and the conceptual and social challenges confronting religious belief, which will also look at analysing the challenges of religious hostility, sectarianism and terrorism.

. . .[Alan Torrance]: “Our primary concern will be to explore the immense explanatory power of Christian theism and its relevance for how we understand the ultimate significance of human life. We shall be doing this in dialogue with exciting new developments in contemporary Biblical scholarship. One of the key research topics will be the nature of forgiveness and what this central Christian notion might mean for how we approach religious enmity, sectarianism and terrorism.”

Well I certainly look forward to the answers they’ll provide about the existence and nature of God, and the perennial and vexing question about His relationship to time! Seriously, what progress can be made spinning one’s wheels about these unanswerable questions involving fictitious beings? It’s as if the JTF funded an institute to discover how Santa could really deliver presents to every deserving child within a single night, and about the challenges to Santa-ism. Can Santa do that because he’s outside of time?

And can we expect that JTF will fund atheists to represent “the conceptual challenges confronting Christianity”? I think not, for they’re only accepting fellow members of the asylum (see below).

And really—Christian theism has “immense explanatory power”? What power is that, exactly? What does it explain? Certainly nothing about reality, though it can explain why certain people believe the things they do. And does Christianity have more explanatory power than, say, Islam or Hinduism?

The end of the Scotsman piece shows the intellectual futility of this conference, and also how they’re limiting participation to those with similar beliefs (I’ve put the euphemism in bold). No atheists allowed!

Andrew Torrance said: “At its best, the task of theology gathers together and engages a diverse range of perspectives. Not only does it draw on the insights of biblical scholarship and philosophy, it also draws on the insights of the natural and social sciences. Further, it seeks to be attentive to the religious communities that have devoted themselves to pursuing a knowledge of God.

“Such a diverse conversation is not easy, however. For constructive conversation to take place, those at the table need to share the same language, and this requires conceptual clarity and discipline.”

I’d like to know what the task of theology really is, and how it will be aided by discoveries in natural and social sciences. I could go on, but enterprises like the Logos Institute, which coopt smart people into discussing unaswerable and silly questions, sicken me. As Hitchens insisted, they should be mocked and reviled.

I wonder how the gentleman who invited me to dinner, assuring me that the JTF has changed, can face himself in the mirror each day in light of things like the Logos Institute. Truly, Templeton is throwing away good money in a desperate attempt to meet Sir John’s aims: find out how science can tell us stuff about God. What a waste of time, money, and brainpower!

h/t: Alexander

 

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Lucy

November 24, 2015 • 8:15 am

Today’s Google Doodle is a good one for evolutionary biologists, for it celebrates “Lucy,” the largely-complete skeletal specimen of Australopithecus afarensis found 41 years ago today by Donald Johansen and his team in Ethiopia. (The story of how they found her is in chapter 8 of WEIT.)  Lucy is famous for the “intermediacy” of her skeleton, which shows features of both her apelike ancestors and of more modern humans, for the completeness of the skeleton (see below), and for the early age, about 3.2 million years. She clearly belongs to the hominins—members of subtribe Hominina, which includes all the species on the “human” side of the divide between us and the ancestor of modern chimps and bonobos. That split actually happened about 7 million years ago—four million years before Lucy.

Two beefs from yours truly. First, the figure below plays into the “evolutionary progression” scenario of a one-way march toward modern humans, which of course isn’t true (our common ancestor with chimps evolved into non-bipedal chimps as well as bipedal hominins).

41st-anniversary-of-the-discovery-of-lucy-5736109501841408-hp

Second, the Time magazine headline explaining this Doodle looks like this:

Screen Shot 2015-11-24 at 7.17.04 AM

While that’s technically correct, it should really have read “Lucy the australopithecine.” After all, there is more than one “Australopithecus: species, and she’s an A. afarensis if you want to be fully correct. Further, nobody would say, for instance, “New Google Doodle honors Charles Darwin the Homo.” (If anything, it would say “Charles Darwin the hominin”.)

Finally, there’s still a bit of controversy about whether Lucy was a fully bipedal species, though I think the evidence is quite strong that members of her species walked upright.

Here are Lucy’s remains along with a reconstruction of just the found bones in their proper position, and a then a reconstruction of the entire skeleton:

lucy-skeleton

220px-Lucy_Mexico

In the reconstruction below, the brown-colored bones are the ones we have, while the white bones are reconstrucitons. Note that this is shown in the assumed bipedal posture:

800px-Lucy_Skeleton

Readers’ wildlife photos, and a note on Darwin

November 24, 2015 • 7:30 am

We’ll have a short photo installment today (is anybody out there?), as there’s a Google Doodle I want to highlight. I found this photo from Madagascar on naturalist/photographer Piotr Naskrecki’s Facebook page (you should definitely “friend” him if you like great nature photography), and asked him for permission to reproduce it here. He kindly assented. I had no idea that assassin bugs camouflaged themselves this way.

Piotr’s notes (you can see more photographs on his own webpage):

When I first saw a termite seemingly embedded in a piece of dried up mud on the trunk of a tree I could not figure out how it got itself into this predicament. It took me a good while to notice that the “mud” was actually four assassin bugs (Reduvius sp.) who killed and were feeding on the insect. Nymphs of this genus of assassin bugs cover themselves with soil and debris, making them disappear completely. — at Gorongosa National Park.

12294851_1087900774554495_5447752767288776349_n

The superfamily Reduviidae is in the insect order Hemiptera—the “true bugs”— and most are ambush predators like the species shown above. A few species, however, are bloodsuckers, and these include the ones that carry the trypanosome parasite causing the deadly Chagas disease. It was once thought that Darwin’s lassitude and chronic illness—he was very often fatigued and ill, with a lot of vomiting and stomach problems—was due to his having contracted Chagas during the Beagle voyage.But that hypothesis was supplanted by the theory that he may have had “cyclical vomiting syndrome,” a disease caused by a mutation in the mitochondria.

The latest theory, though, is that Darwin simply may have had a chronic and severe case of lactose intolerance, and it was his ingestion of dairy products that produced his illness (see Matthew’s post, linked above, for the evidence).

Some of these conditions might be detected by exhuming Darwin’s body from Westminster Abbey and looking at his DNA (if his mitochondria could be sequenced), but that’s not going to happen. Further, we couldn’t tell if Darwin’s disease was lactose intolerance simply by sequencing at his DNA,  for although the difference between tolerant and intolerant people can be due to a gene mutation, 40-50% of British people are intolerant but almost none have it with the severity of Darwin’s disease—and some show no symptoms at all. It’s likely that Darwin’s affliction will always be a mystery. But let us remember that the man wrote 12 books and carried on a voluminous correspondence, all while being pretty seriously ill.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon lagniappe)

November 24, 2015 • 4:42 am

It’s two days until Thanksgiving, but people are already taking off for the holiday, and most won’t be back to work until next Monday. The University, of course, will be devoid of students. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows her usual solipsism, but she’s still cute:

A: Are you going for a walk with us?
Hili: No, it’s you who are going for a walk with me.

P1030620 (1)

In Polish:
Ja: Idziesz z nami na spacer?
Hili: Nie, to wy idziecie ze mną na spacer.
And another Hili and Cyrus photo, captioned, “We are back!”
12279176_10207436612260804_5924010971775365239_n

*******

Meanwhile in Wroclawek, Leon is speaking in redundancies. For when does a cat not want noms?

Leon: I would like to eat something.

12243191_1053885467965387_461862063150558192_n

Bald squirrel in Dunstable

November 23, 2015 • 2:57 pm

by Matthew Cobb

The BBC reports that a bald grey squirrel has been captured in Dunstable in the UK. The RSPCA was called in after passers-by were worried it could freeze to death (we have just had the first frosts of the year). I assumed it was just mangey, but it is clearly bald all over, not patchy. Plus it looks pretty happy, though weird. You can see  video of the beast either here or watch the version below, although the colour saturation on this stolen YouTube version has been turned up to 11 for some reason  and they have cut the autumnal soundtrack of rustling leaves.

The BBC quotes Dr Helen McRobie, a lecturer in biomedical science at the Anglia Ruskin University

“she said she had never heard of a bald squirrel before but it would “need to be kept in the warm once the temperature drops”.

“This is very rare. I have been studying squirrels for years, but I have never come across one without any hair,” she said.

“If the skin was patchy I would say that it was more likely to have been caused by a disease like mange, but the squirrel is completely bald, suggesting it is probably a genetic defect.””

Ironically, given that the damn thing was only caught because people were worried it might freeze to death, Baldy – for that must be its name – may now be facing death. Grey squirrels, introduced from the USA, are an official pest in the UK, and it has been illegal since 1981 to release them into the wild once it has been caught. Baldy may end up meeting its maker, not in a cold Dunstable park, but in the grim clinical atmosphere of the vet’s…

JAC: Don’t let this squirrel die! Is there any reader who can help the poor creature?

Student protests spread to Smith College, which bars reporters from a sit-in

November 23, 2015 • 1:45 pm

Today is an Onion kind of day, in which the whole world seems to have gone down the rabbit hole. According to MassLive.com, Smith College, a high-class women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts (I think it’s still all-female except for grad students), is experiencing a student sit-in in solidarity with the protesting students at the University of Missouri. That’s fine, but they’re trying to keep out journalists—except  for those journalists who abandon objectivity and swear fealty to the students’ cause. Get a load of this (my emphasis):

In an effort to create a safe space free from potential insensitivity from the news media, activists at Smith College barred reporters from covering a sit-in Wednesday that drew 300 to 500 students.

The demonstration, organized in solidarity with students at the University of Missouri, was held from from noon to 12 a.m. in the Smith College Student Center.

The activists’ goal was to establish a place where students — prioritizing students of color and black students — could share their thoughts, feelings, poems and songs related to a rash of racially charged episodes this fall at Mizzou, as well as personal experiences of racism.

An event that draws so many people, especially one that concerns a topic of magnitude such as civil rights, is customarily covered by media outlets. But reporters who arrived at the sit-in were met with a clear message: Keep out.

Alyssa Mata-Flores, a 21-year-old Smith College senior and one of the sit-in’s organizers, explained that the rule was born from “the way that media has historically painted radical black movements as violent and aggressive.”

“We are asking that any journalists or press that cover our story participate and articulate their solidarity with black students and students of color,” she told MassLive in the Student Center Wednesday. “By taking a neutral stance, journalists and media are being complacent in our fight.” [JAC: I’m not sure whether they mean “complicit” with the opposition or “complacent” about the students’ concerns.]

Smith organizers said journalists were welcome to cover the event if they agreed to explicitly state they supported the movement in their articles.

This is apparently the first event ever at Smith when the media was banned. What’s worse is that the administration is complicit in the ban:

Stacey Schmeidel, Smith College director of media relations, said the college supports the activists’ ban on media.

“It’s a student event, and we respect their right to do that, although it poses problems for the traditional media,” Stacey Schmeidel said.

Schmeidel went on to say that the college reserves the right to remove reporters from the Student Center because it’s a private campus.

Yes, they have that right, for reporters could be arrested for trespassing if they don’t leave when asked. But what’s invidious and reprehensible about all this is that the students ARE letting in reporters—just those reporters who “participate and articulate their solidarity with black students and students of color.” But any reporter who does this is violating her professional standards of trying to be objective.

The students are not only protesting here, but trying to control their message, so that nobody reports anything they don’t like. And that is truly Fascism of the Left: the “regressive leftism” decried by Maajid Nawaz and Nick Cohen.

Can a democracy really tolerate this kind of petulant and juvenile behavior? When black students and citizens demonstrated for civil rights in the Sixties, they asked for no such fealty from reporters. And it was the objective reporting—the mere showing of black protestors drenched with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, beaten with truncheons, and hauled off to jail—that helped America become aware of and try to rectify racial injustice.

It doesn’t work better if you don’t let journalists hear what you have to say. And who is going to trust a journalist who swears solidarity to the cause before being allowed to report on it? This is American reporting, not Pravda of the Stalin years.

Democracy is based on the presumption that transparency and the free flow of information is the best set-up for progress. Let us call these students what they are: fascists.