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.
As the New York Times reports this morning, the Nobel Prize for Peace has gone to a group that negotiated a UN treaty to ban and eventually eliminate all the world’s nuclear weapons (you can see that treaty here and here). The treaty was adopted by the UN General Assembly last December, and the details about i can, the organization that pushed the treaty, is in the NYT article below (click screenshot to go to article).
An excerpt:
In a year when threats from nuclear weapons seemed to draw closer, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to an advocacy group behind the first treaty to prohibit them.
“The organization is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement.
The choice amounted to a blunt rejoinder to the world’s nine nuclear-armed powers, which boycotted the negotiations and denounced the treaty as a naïve and dangerous diversion.
But if you look at the treaty (and I haven’t read it in detail), it’s not done and dusted—it stipulates that member nations should sign such a declaration, which would then be “legally binding” after 50 countries ratify it. It’s a great step in gathering worldwide sentiment, but the whole thing sounds like a sham to me. Really, what is the chance that the US—even if 50 countries sign the treaty—will abandon its nukes, much less Russia, Israel, the UK, or, for crying out loud, North Korea? And if you think Iran is going to forever put its nuclear weapons program on hold because of its agreement with the U.S., I fear you’ve been duped. If these countries violate the treaty, what can the UN do about it? Nada!
This seems to me to be a prize awarded for intention rather than substantive accomplishment, like giving Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho the prize in 1973 (there wasn’t even good intention there), or, for that matter, Barack Obama the prize in 2009 (what peace did he create?). What with North Korea having no intention of stopping its nuclear program, even under very tough sanctions, and Iran just waiting to get the bomb, the dream of a nuclear-free world is just that—a dream.
Reader Tony Eales from Oz sent some camouflaged arthropods. These aren’t all that hard to see, as they were specially photographed to show the beast, but the photos do underscore the wonders of natural selection. His notes are indented:
Camouflage. A series of the cryptic to the near invisible.
First is a geometrid moth caterpillar. I was very lucky to see it on the bark of this native caper tree (Capparis mitchellii):
Next is the nymph of the world’s largest leaf-hopper Ledromorpha planirostris. These are very common on the bark of blue-gum trees but because of how they are flat and cryptically coloured they are often missed. Almost worthy of a spot-the! [JAC: this is a hard one!]
Next is a type of Crab Spider (Thomisidae) Stephanopis sp. These spiders have such good patterning and hairs and knobs to break up their outline they sometimes make your eyes swim looking at them on bark and trying to make out where the spider ends and the bark begins.
I was lucky to see this caterpillar for the White Banded Plane (Phaedyma sheperdi) out on a green leaf or I would have over-looked it. As it was I thought it was a weird chrysalis but it was just the way the caterpillar holds itself.
This one is amazing:
Last is one of my favourites, the Wrap Around Spider (Dolophones conifera). The way they perfectly wrap around small twigs and just look like a small bump is extraordinary. The only way I’ve ever found them is as they flee from their orb-web as I approach because once they’re on a twig they’re pretty much invisible.
Good morning on Friday, October 6, 2016: National Noodle Day. Today the weather will be cloudy in Chicago with a chance of rain, but with a temperate high of 22° C (71° F)—still on the warm side for fall. I continue to look for my duck Honey every day, but my whistles to her are in vain. I wonder were she is. I suppose I’ll put the cup of mealworms I carry down to the pond three times a day back in the mother bag, hoping to feed her come spring.
It’s not much of a day for history. It was on this day in 1723 when Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia at age 17, having run away from his home in Boston. Legend has it that he was carrying a loaf of bread, but it wasn’t a loaf. Here’s his account:
I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there. I was in my working dress, my best cloaths being to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuff’d out with shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with travelling, rowing, and want of rest, I was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar, and about a shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people of the boat for my passage, who at first refus’d it, on account of my rowing; but I insisted on their taking it. A man being sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps thro’ fear of being thought to have but little.
Then I walked up the street, gazing about till near the market-house I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the baker’s he directed me to, in Secondstreet, and ask’d for bisket, intending such as we had in Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I made him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpriz’d at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk’d off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other.
On this day in 1927, the first famous “talkie” (talking movie) opened: The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolsen. The plot (from Wikipedia):
The film depicts the fictional story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a young man who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. After singing popular tunes in a beer garden he is punished by his father, a hazzan (cantor), prompting Jakie to run away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage.
Here’s his first song in the movie, which was only partly a “talkie”:
On October 6, 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists. Finally, on this day ten years ago, Jason Lewis became the first person to travel around the world on his own power, using kayaks, boats, bicycles, and rollerblades. It took him 13 years to complete the journey.
Notables born on October 6 include Jenny Lind (1820), George Westinghouse (1846), Le Corbusier (1887) Willy Merkl (1900, died in 1934 climbing Nanga Parbat), Carole Lombard (1908; died at 33 in a plane crash), Thor Heyerdahl (1914) and Melvyn Bragg (1939). Those who died on this day include Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1892), Elizabeth Bishop (1979), Anwar Sadat (see above), Nelson Riddle (1985), Johnny Vander Meer (1997; he holds a baseball record that has never been bested—do you know what it is?) and J. J. C. Smart (2012). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is stunned and stupefied:
Hili: OMG!
A: What’s that?
Hili: A flying saucer with cream.
In Poliah:
Hili: OMG!
Ja: Co takiego?
Hili: Latający talerz ze śmietanką.
Here’s a tw**t sent my a reader (I lost the email; my apologies), who claimed that this undoubtedly took many tries before it succeeded! I like to think it’s a one-off, but I’m probably wrong:
❤🌹❤🌹❤Thanks sooo much ❤🌹❤🌹❤ for all dearest friends, sleep well into a beautiful and peaceful new day ❤🌟🌹❤🌟🌹❤🌟🌹 pic.twitter.com/x97VbrFOye
And three tw**ts pinched from Heather Hastie. In this first one, a bear approaches a workman in Kolyma, Russia. He’s a nice man and feeds it (would you?):
Should I have called this “You won’t believe this amazing crab?”. Or maybe “Samantha Bee throws shade on haters of bubbler crabs”? Regardless, you need to know about—and see—this remarkable animal. I knew nothing about it before I came upon this video, taken from BBC’s “Blue Planet” series.
Sand bubbler crabs comprise a variety of species in two genera, and live on Indo-Pacific beaches. As you see from the video below, they form sand into lovely spherical pellets after extracting the organic matter—the “meiofauna”. Sand bubblers forage only at low tide, and then retreat to their burrows.
Now what is “meiofauna”? The answer from marbef.org:
The term “Meiofauna“ is related to microscopically small benthic invertebrates that live in both marine and fresh water environments. Meiofauna is formally defined as a group of organisms by their size, larger than microfauna but smaller than macrofauna. In practice these are metazoan (some researchers include protozoan as well) animals that can pass unharmed through a 0.5 – 1 mm mesh but will be retained by a 30 μm mesh but the exact dimensions will vary from researcher to researcher. Nowadays the term meiofauna is used interchangeably with meiobenthos. Meiofauna is mainly found in and on soft sediments, but also on underwater algae and higher plants as well as on other hard substrates. The heterogeneity of meiofaunal habitats is so large and meiobenthic taxa so diverse.
The title of this post sounds ironic, doesn’t it? But not if you share Black Lives Matter’s (BLM’s) view—and that of other Regressive Leftists—that offensive speech isn’t protected free speech and that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a hate group because it defends the civil liberties of white supremacists, Nazis, and other bigots. This incident bothers me more than usual, because it happened at my alma mater (I went to William and Mary, graduating in 1971), and because just seems to crazy to shut down a talk on free speech.
The Flat Hat, the College’s student newspaper, reports that Clair Guthrie Gastañaga, Executive Director of the ACLU of Virginia, was scheduled to talk at the College on September 27 on the topic “Students and the First Amendment.” Her talk was co-sponsored by Alma Mater Productions (AMP) and the ACLU. But Gastañaga never got to give her talk, as BLM members (actually, most of the students seem to be white), stood up with signs (most hiding their faces), and then began to disrupt the talk. BLM’s ill-considered beef against the ACLU is, I think, twofold: the ACLU defended the alt-righters’ right to assemble in Charlottesville, and the ACLU defends free speech, which BLM sees as a privileged “right” that isn’t extended to people of color. From the Flat Hat (my emphasis):
The ACLU discussion never occurred because protesters took over the stage within five minutes of Executive Director of the ACLU of Virginia Claire Guthrie Gastañaga’s entrance. Signs in hand, the protesters shouted chants such as “liberalism is white supremacy” and “the revolution will not uphold the constitution.”
Twenty minutes into the protest, AMP Director of Internal Affairs Hasini Bandara ’18 approached the group with a microphone and gave members an opportunity to read their prepared statement.
In the statement, BLM criticized the ACLU’s approach to white supremacy in regard to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, suggesting that the organization provides an unnecessary platform for white supremacists.
“When is the free speech of the oppressed protected?” a BLM group representative asked. “We know from personal experience that rights granted to wealthy, white, cis, male, straight bodies do not trickle down to marginalized groups. We face greater barriers and consequences for speaking.”
So here we have a truly gonzo claim: that liberalism is white supremacy (is any political ideology not white supremacy?), and that, comes the Revolution, we won’t need (or have) the Constitution. Further, I don’t see the oppressed being denied their freedom of speech. After all, BLM is out and loud, and, however “marginalized” they are, their speech is protected, and I don’t see that they encounter “barriers and consequences for speaking.”
This is not a good look for BLM, which started as a justifiable protest against the racist actions of some police officers. Now, without a unified message or central leadership, BLM is devolving into a bunch of authoritarian Control-Leftists who do things manifestly nonproductive to their message—at least the original one. They may be venting their feelings, but they’re not helping people of color.
The Flat Hat reports what happened: not only was the talk canceled, but when students tried to speak with Gastañaga, BLM disrupted that, too:
After reading the statement aloud, the group’s representative took her place back in line, and the protesters continued to chant.
One student who attended the event, Laith Hashem ’19, was bothered by protesters’ refusal to engage in an open, two-sided discussion.
. . . Thirty minutes into the protest, the discussion was cancelled.
“It was a collective decision from people in the AMP leadership team and our advisers,” AMP director Miguel Dayan ’19 said. “It was clear that we [were] unable to continue with the event, and it was appropriate to cancel.”
After the cancellation was announced, remaining students clustered around Gastañaga, hoping to ask questions and voice concerns. These students dispersed, however, when the protesters began circling around them, drowning out Gastañaga and chanting with increased volume.
That’s just fricking rude: even worse than interrupting a talk. They don’t even want private discourse! Here’s a video someone put up showing the melee. If you want, ignore the introductory commentary and listen from 2:33-10:46:
The last snippets of the report I want to post are these:
Although the protesters identified themselves as merely “concerned students,” the College’s BLM chapter took credit on its Facebook page through a livestream of the event, as well as a written post stating, “Tonight, we shut down an event at William & Mary where Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, was speaking. In contrast to the ACLU, we want to reaffirm our position of zero tolerance for white supremacy no matter what form it decides to masquerade in.”
Seriously, the ACLU is “white supremacy”? It’s a sad day in Williamsburg when I have to hear this kind of lunacy.
William & Mary has a powerful commitment to the free play of ideas. We have a campus where respectful dialogue, especially in disagreement, is encouraged so that we can listen and learn from views that differ from our own, so that we can freely express our own views, and so that debate can occur. Unfortunately, that type of exchange was unable to take place Wednesday night when an event to discuss a very important matter — the meaning of the First Amendment — could not be held as planned.
The event, co-sponsored by William & Mary’s student-run programming organization Alma Mater Productions (AMP) and the ACLU, was entitled “Students and the First Amendment.” The anticipated conversation never occurred when protesters refused to allow Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, to be heard. The protesters then drowned out students who gathered around Ms. Gastañaga, seeking to ask her questions, hear her responses and voice their own concerns.
Silencing certain voices in order to advance the cause of others is not acceptable in our community. This stifles debate and prevents those who’ve come to hear a speaker, our students in particular, from asking questions, often hard questions, and from engaging in debate where the strength of ideas, not the power of shouting, is the currency. William & Mary must be a campus that welcomes difficult conversations, honest debate and civil dialogue.
To me, this is (pardon my French) a lame-ass statement in one respect: what is the College going to do about this? Will they formulate a policy, as we have at the University of Chicago, to stop disruption of speakers? Will they punish those students who interrupted the talk? Nothing is said. So I’ve written Taylor Reveley about this, and if you’re a W&M alum (or anybody else interested in free speech), you can write him at taylor@wm.edu (given on his web page).
Black Lives Matter is increasingly becoming a group that doesn’t know how to accomplish its aims. It knows how to disrupt, it knows how to use Control-Left speech tropes, but it’s not going to stop the ACLU from defending everybody’s freedom of speech, no matter how offensive some people consider that speech.
. . . at least when in comes to water displacement experiments.
Via ZME Science and reader Ant, I learned of a new study trying to see if raccoons (Procyon lotor) could solve the Archimedes puzzle. This is the puzzle, formalized by Aesop in his fable “The crow and the pitcher“, that determines whether an animal can figure out how to use water displacement to fetch a treat. That is, if you have a floating treat that’s in a water-filled vessel, but the water level is too low to fetch the treat, can the animal figure out that adding stones to the water will raise the level, making the prize accessible?
It’s long been known that crows can learn this with great skill, but a group of researchers in the U.S. wanted to see if raccoons could do it, too. Their hypothesis was that yes, the beasts could. They did a study on eight raccoons (four wild-caught and later released, four reared in captivity) to see if these famously clever carnivores could also figure out water displacement. The authors’ results, published in a paper in Animal Cognition (reference below, access is free), are a mixed bag: a few raccoons could figure it out, but #NotAllRaccoons. And it was a mess, because these animals didn’t cooperate well, playing with the stones, messing about, and even overturning the heavy apparatus to get the treat.
I’ll be brief as the results, while interesting, aren’t particularly stupendous. The authors had a two-part design, with each part subdivided into sub-parts presented in succession.
A. Raccoons were given stones and a marshmallow floating in a deep, half-meter cylinder partly filled with water. If they didn’t succeed in learning to use the stones, they went on to part B.
B. Raccoons were helped out by balancing stones on the lip of the tube with food placed on top the stones. Their messing about and getting the food could cause the stones to fall into the water, perhaps helping them learn what to do.
C. Raccoons completing part B were then given stones lying about on the cage, with the aim of seeing if they’d learned how to use them after being exposed to part B.
All raccoons who learned to drop stones into the water then progressed to “Phase II”, which had four parts. As far as I can see, all raccoons in Phase II were subject to all four sub-studies:
D. Raccoons were given three big stones and three little ones. Could they preferentially use the big stones?
E. Raccoons were given two tubes with treats: one with water and one with corncob litter. Were they smart enough to realize that the stones would work only with the water?
F. Raccoons were given six tennis balls instead of stones; three of the balls were heavy and would sink, displacing water, while the other three would float and were useless. Would the raccoons be smart enough to use the heavy balls?
G. Raccoons were given a steel cup with a handle that they could use to scoop out the marshmallow bits. Could they learn to use it?
Results:
One of the eight raccoons wasn’t interested in the task, and was removed from the trials.
No raccoon succeeded in part A: figuring out on its own how to use the stones.
In part B, four raccoons accidentally knocked the stones into the tube and retrieved a treat.
In part C, just two of the five animals subject to part B learned to drop the stones into the tube, and thus progressed to Phase II. Another raccoon messed around and got the treat this way:
“During final trials, Raccoon 22 innovated a unique solution by gripping the inner rim of the apparatus with her forepaws and, while rocking her body back and forth, overturned the entire apparatus and retrieved the reward.”
So the sample size for Phase II was only two raccoons—not enough to say much.
Neither raccoon learned to use the big rather than small stones in part D.
In part E, only one raccoon preferentially dropped stones into the water; the other dumb one kept dropping stones into the corncob litter.
In part F, neither raccoon preferred the dense balls to the floating balls, and so didn’t learn to get their treats that way. But both were observed to push the floating balls down into the water, splashing up bits of marshmallow that they could retrieve.
Finally, neither raccoon learn to use the cup to scoop out marshmallow bits, though each, on just one occasion, dropped the cup into the water and fished out marshmallow bits with it before the cup sank.
The upshot: Raccoons are either dumber than crows or weren’t engaged in the task. Only two out of the eight learned to properly retrieve the marshmallows.
My alternative hypothesis (which is mine): Raccoons don’t like marshmallows all that much, and weren’t willing to go to much trouble to get them. As the researchers mention below, some raccoons “did not seem to be goal-oriented.”
The rather long discussion goes into reasons why, despite the authors’ predictions, the raccoons were recalcitrant. For some reason I found this part of the discussion hilarious (my emphasis):
The exploratory, tactile nature of raccoons may have confounded their performance in the Aesop’s Fable paradigm. For example, during Phase II the behavior of Raccoons 29 and 40 did not seem to be goal-oriented, in the sense described in many other Aesop’s Fable studies (e.g., Bird and Emery 2009 ). That is, they did not drop the exact number of stones necessary to retrieve the reward and continued dropping stones and exploring experimental materials after the reward had been retrieved. We recorded many instances where the raccoons washed the stones/objects in their water dish, buried the stones/objects in their litter box, carried the stones/objects into their den box, and seemingly played with the stones/objects for long periods of time.
In other words, perhaps they were more interested in other things than getting marshmallows, or maybe they’re less food oriented than are crows. Who knows? At any rate, I end by showing two videos taken from the paper along with the descriptions given:
Video footage from Raccoon 29’s eleventh tool use trial. He moves the cup around the opening of the tube with his paws and mouth for several seconds before releasing it into the tube. He then quickly grabs the handle of the cup before it sinks, and retrieves a piece of marshmallow as he pulls the cup out of the tube.
Video footage from Raccoon 29’s second substrate trial. He first drops a stone into the water tube, retrieves and eats a piece of marshmallow, then selects a second stone and drops it into the corncob tube. After he is unable to obtain the reward from the corncob tube, he returns to the pile of stones, makes a selection, and heads toward the water tube.
SUCCESS! (Note how skinny the tubes are!). But then this one goes over and drops tubes into the corn litter, wasting its time.
Here’s something that appeared on my Facebook feed: a tw**t by Fox Business and a response by someone pointing out the flaws. There’s one more difference between trucks, and guns, though. Trucks are not designedor built with the aim of hurting people, while assault weapons are. If we banned trucks, everything would come to a standstill. If we banned guns except for the police, we wouldn’t see much of a difference.
I’m sad because I already hear the calls for gun control dying out. They’re stimulated by mass murders, and then, after nothing happens, people go on to other things. We will not see meaningful gun control in America during my lifetime.
Finally, why haven’t they banned the sale of those devices that easily convert semiautomatic rifles into fully automatic ones (“bumps”, I think they call them). If the sale of new automatic weapons is illegal, which it is, why is it legal to sell devices that convert legal guns into illegal ones.
Here’s a bump (part of a gunstock) ordered legally for $99 from Bump Fire Systems; see how easy it is to install?
