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.
Six days ago I posted a photo of the tuxedo cat Sterling from staff member and reader Ken Elliott. Confined to the Cone of Shame after being neutered, Sterling was trying to scratch his head around the cone—in vain. Now, Sterling has apparently found a way to look upwards despite the cone, giving rise to the title Ken gave this post. His comment:
I wanted to share this with you simply because this little kitten is adorable. Today was Sterling’s last day in the cone and as you can see he has gotten somewhat used to it. He’s peering up the staircase at his staff, my daughter-in-law, to whom he is majorly attached
I don’t know if a lot of us are fans of Nicholas Kristof, but I suspect many of us will agree with his column in today’s New York Times, “Preventing future mass shootings like Las Vegas.” As he implies, the National Rifle Association, which I’ve long seen as Institutional Evil, will say “In this heated climate after a shooting, it’s the wrong time to discuss gun regulation.” But if not now, when? For one thing is certain: the righteous furor about a private citizen getting an assault rifle will die down after a while, only to be roused again when the next shooting takes place. Kristof gives us this horrifying statistic:
Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (including suicides, murders and accidents) than the sum total of all the Americans who died in all the wars in American history, back to the American Revolution. Every day, some 92 Americans die from guns, and American kids are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway of Harvard.
And that’s just since 1970! Living in Chicago, one becomes acutely aware of this problem. I often see young men, mostly black, pushing themselves about in wheelchairs, and I know that many of them got that way from being shot in the spine. In Chicago this Labor Day weekend, 7 people were killed and 35 injured, all from guns; and 438 people have died this way in 2017.
Do we have to accept this? Kristof (and this is where I partly disagree) says that we’ll never get rid of gun violence in America, and so should adopt proposes some familiar—and mild—restrictions. I agree fully with these restrictions, and with Kristof’s claim that we’ll always have some guns (illegal ones are hard to stop), but why must we simply accept that guns are inevitable and just try to regulate who can get them, and what type can be sold? Why can’t we do what Australia did, and clamp down hard on guns, something they did after a mass shooting in 1996. Strict legislation was passed, including the restriction of firearms to those who have a “valid reason” for owning them. Here are those “valid reasons”:
Sport/target shooting
Hunting
Primary production
Professional hunting
Handgun or clay target shooting (including licences held on behalf of juniors)
Employment as a security and/or prison guard
Official, commercial or prescribed purpose or for a purpose authorised by an Act or Regulation.
After this passed, and after a buyback scheme was implemented, gun deaths in Australia have dropped 50%. (Yes, I know that you can argue against that for other reasons, but why not do the experiment in the U.S.?) Here are Kristof’s suggestions:
Impose universal background checks for anyone buying a gun. Four out of five Americans support this measure, to prevent criminals or terrorists from obtaining guns.
Impose a minimum age limit of 21 on gun purchases. This is already the law for handgun purchases in many states, and it mirrors the law on buying alcohol.
Enforce a ban on possession of guns by anyone subject to a domestic violence protection order. This is a moment when people are upset and prone to violence against their ex-es.
Limit gun purchases by any one person to no more than, say, two a month, and tighten rules on straw purchasers who buy for criminals. Make serial
Adopt microstamping of cartridges so that they can be traced to the gun that fired them, useful for solving gun crimes.
Invest in “smart gun” purchases by police departments or the U.S. military, to promote their use. Such guns require a PIN or can only be fired when near a particular bracelet or other device, so that children cannot misuse them and they are less vulnerable to theft. The gun industry made a childproof gun in the 1800’s but now resists smart guns.
Require safe storage, to reduce theft, suicide and accidents by children.
Invest in research to see what interventions will be more effective in reducing gun deaths. We know, for example, that alcohol and guns don’t mix, but we don’t know precisely what laws would be most effective in reducing the resulting toll. Similar investments in reducing other kinds of accidental deaths have been very effective.
To me this is a Band-Aid (I like the smart gun idea, and not just for cops but for everyone), yet one life saved is a whole world of misery prevented. I much prefer the UK system, which has a very strict system of ownership and storage, and no pistols (except for those with 24-inch barrels or muzzle loaders). Here are the comparative data:
The death rate in the US is 46 times higher than in the UK, and gun ownership 17 times higher. Some of you will be saying, “Yes, but there are cultural differences between the UK and US”, and my response is “Yes, we have a gun culture, but we can change it.” We also have the Second Amendment which, I think, has been wrongly interpreted by the courts, for the Constitution mandates gun ownership to allow for a “well regulated militia”. By what stretch does that mean that any citizen can have their own gun for any reason? What does that have to do with a “well regulated militia”? (If you disagree with this construal, read Garry Wills’s 1995 article on the Second Amendment).
To me it makes no sense to allow the proliferation of weapons, and other countries have taken far more drastic action than Kristof proposes.
I know I’m bawling down a drainspout here, given the courts’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, the nature of our present Supreme Court, and the power of the National Rifle Association, but what little optimism remains in me says that this issue—and these deaths—are not things we must live with forever.
This incident and video, which was first reported by the right-wing media and now by the Los Angeles Times, shows the extent to which college students have absorbed the toxicity of the Regressive Left. I normally wouldn’t call attention to just a single act like this one, but this student seems to instantiate all the tropes of her ideology and, more important, she had to absorb these from somewhere. Whether it was the Internet, her peers, or her teachers, one doesn’t mouth such pieties without having learned them. If I were HuffPo, and decided to write about this (don’t worry; there’s ZERO chance they will), I’d collect all the disapprobation this woman has received on Twitter and write a piece called “Twitter perfectly shuts down college student hater.”
And a hater she is: she hates Trump, she hates the guy who wears a “Make America Great” hat, she hates free speech, she hates the law, she hates America; the list of her hatreds, as expressed in this video, is long. Truly, her politics seem to have made her not only full of hate, but also unhinged.
I always argue with Grania about whether the Regressive Left is “winning” (by that I mean gradually taking over the entire Left), and she always assures me that it’s not, and this is just a temporary phenomenon, but I’m not so sure. One by one we see mainstream Leftist media, and American universities moving towards regression, and we see college students, nearly all on the Left, increasingly trying to shut down speakers they don’t like. (Trump of course isn’t a Leftist, so I’m not talking about the damage he’s doing.) The culture that demonizes those who are ideologically impure is not on the Right, but on the Left. So I’m not so sure that Regressivism isn’t growing.
But I digress. You’ll need to watch the 10-minute video below, which is enlightening, and at least read this summary from the L.A. Times piece. “UC Riverside” is the University of California at Riverside, an important branch of the state’s university system located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. It’s a good school even if it does have Reza Aslan on the staff.
Part of the article:
A UC Riverside student asked campus police Friday to arrest a fellow Highlander who allegedly grabbed his Make America Great Again hat from his head and verbally attacked him with profanity-filled accusations of promoting “genocide.”
A video of the young woman’s actions against Matthew Vitale, a senior majoring in economics, drew heavy coverage by conservative media outlets that painted it as another assault on the free speech rights of right-leaning college students. The video was first posted Thursday by Campus Reform, a conservative news site.
Many conservative students say efforts to silence them have escalated since President Trump’s election last year. Massive protests shut down campus talks by right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Davis and UC Berkeley this year and led to unprecedented security costs for other speakers, such as conservative writer Ben Shapiro.
Vitale said Friday that UC Riverside’s generally mellow campus climate has hardened in recent months.
“There has always been an undertone of liberalism and mild hostility towards conservative students, but nothing this blatant,” he said in a Facebook message.
“Free speech is under attack on campus, no question. Too many college students and other people in my generation have bought in to the lie that it’s OK to silence people or bring harm to them or their property just because they think differently.”
. . . Vitale, a member of UCR’s College Republicans, said he was attending a university meeting for student organizations Wednesday when a woman allegedly grabbed his hat and took it to the student life office. As Vitale repeatedly asked for it back, videotaping the encounter, she verbally attacked him.
When you watch the nine-minute video, which was put up by Campus Reform (but inserted in the L.A. Times piece), note that the student says that the “Make America Great” hat (Trump’s campaign motto, of course) represents “genocide”. (The exagerration of language so that Trump’s election is equivalent to “genocide” is a hallmark of the Regressive Left).
When Vitale tells her that she’s broken the law by taking his property, she says “Fuck your laws!” When he tells her he has the freedom of speech to wear the hat, she replies, “Your fucking freedom of speech is genocide, homeboy.” Later she says “Your freedom of speech is literally killing a lot of people out there.” Truly, she believes that, as do so many students who equate right-wing speech with physical violence.
When she says that the hat is calling for the genocide of “people of color”, Vitale tells her that he’s half Nicaraguan. In response, she says, “You’re WHITE, boy, you’re WHITE!”. Does that mean that President Obama is white? I guess you’re only a person of color when she decrees so.
What’s clear is that she’s bought into some idea that a Trump hat = genocide, and that Vitale has no right to wear that hat on campus.
The woman has no idea why freedom of speech is important, she has no respect for laws (even though I, too, would be and have been willing to practice civil disobedience for some political ends), and she wants to control everyone’s behavior. God forbid that she ever gets power over people’s lives. If ever there were an Antifa-ite in the making, it’s her.
Apparently her university wasn’t fully behind her actions. As the Times reports:
UC Riverside spokesman John Warren said he could not discuss any disciplinary actions because of student privacy laws. But he said campus officials did not approve of efforts to shut down free speech.
“Taking a hat off someone’s head does not conform to the university’s principle of community,” Warren said.
But notice how the staff tries to placate her, giving her a chance to blow off steam, and don’t really tell her to give Vitale back his hat. That shows a bit of consideration, since she seems unhinged, but, to my mind, they’re too considerate. If she didn’t surrender the hat immediately, I would have called the cops. It is, after all, theft.
This woman’s name has been publicized, but I’m not going to give it because she’s apparently been subject to threats. I don’t want to be part of that; I only want to show what’s happening to Left-wing college students. And I want to emphasize that the presence of this video does nothing to further progressive causes. If anything, it makes the Left look unhinged and further solidifies support for Trump. We can’t afford that.
The new school year is about to start in Turkey, and, as I’ve reported before (here and here), the government has removed evolution from the secondary-school science curriculum—supposedly because it was (according to the head of the Board of Education) “debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.”
Nobody believes that malarkey. It was removed because it contradicts the Islamic doctrine of creation, especially of humans. Far more Muslims than Christians think their scripture should be read literally, and an IPSOS poll in 2010 found that, with respect to human origins, 60% of Turks believed that humans did not evolve from other apes but were created by God. That’s nearly 20% higher than in the U.S.
Wikipedia summarizes the government’s suppression of evolution education in Turkey (I’ve omitted the references, but you can get them at the link:
Following the 1980 Turkish coup d’état, the military leadership and subsequent governments promoted Islamicism to promote national unity, which eventually included translation and distribution of materials from the US Institute for Creation Research and creationist high-school textbooks. A survey published in 2008 found that about 25% of people in Turkey accepted evolution as an explanation for how life came to exist. In 2008, Richard Dawkins’ website was banned in Turkey; the ban was lifted in July 2011. As of 2009, creationism had become the government’s official position on origins. In 2009, the Turkish government agency Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), publisher of the popular Turkish science magazine Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology), was accused of stripping a cover story about the life and work of Charles Darwin from the March 2009 issue of the Council’s publication just before it went to press. The planned portrait of Darwin for the magazine’s cover was replaced and the editor of the magazine, Çiğdem Atakuman, claims that she was removed from her post. Most of the Turkish population expressed support for the censorship. In 2012, it was found that the government’s internet content filter, designed to prevent the public having access to pornographic websites, also blocked the words ‘evolution’ and ‘Darwin’ on one mode of the filter.
This has only continued under the Erdogan regime, which not only forbade the teaching of evolution before college, but has made a number of changes in schools favoring Islam. A new article in The Economist, “The decline of Turkish schools“, reports a number of disturbing changes that go beyond merely banning evolution (their quotes):
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made clear on more than one occasion that he would like to bring up a “pious generation” of young Turks. He has made plenty of headway. The education ministry, says Feray Aytekin Aydogan, the head of a leftist teachers’ union, is working more closely than ever with Islamic NGOs and with the directorate of religious affairs. Attendance at so-called imam hatip schools, used to train Muslim preachers, has shot up from about 60,000 in 2002 to over 1.1m, or about a tenth of all public-school students. The government recently reduced the minimum population requirement for areas where such schools are allowed to open from 50,000 to 5,000. An earlier reform lowered the age at which children can enter them from 14 to ten.
From this year onwards, children as young as six will be taught the story of last summer’s abortive coup—presumably without including the mass purges and arrests that followed it. Imam hatip students, meanwhile, will study the concept of jihad. (The education ministry says the term, which can also refer to one’s personal struggle against sin, has been misused.) A module on the life of the Prophet Muhammad will teach the same pupils that Muslims should avoid marrying atheists, and that wives should obey their husbands. Schools are also becoming a target of Mr Erdogan’s mosque-building spree. A new rule requires that all new schools be equipped with prayer rooms, segregated by sex. “The interference of religion into education has never been as visible and as deep,” says Batuhan Aydagul of the Education Reform Initiative, a think-tank in Istanbul.
Last year Turkey fired 28,000 teachers supposedly linked to “terrorism,” and I’m betting that some of them were simply secularists who would teach evolution. As I’ve said repeatedly, Turkey, once a vibrant and largely secular country thanks to Atatürk, is slowly being squeezed into the Procrustean bed of Islam. Will we see it wind up like Iran, once too a country with substantial freedom of speech but now a theocracy? When will the hijab become mandatory in Turkey?
Turkey has far larger problems than creationism, of course, but it’s foolish to prevent school children from learning the truth about biology. Once again I offer to lecture in Turkey about the truth of evolution—if any schools are bold enough to have me. All I require is an air ticket and accommodation.
I am dispirited today in light of the horrors of Las Vegas (and Edmonton and Marseille), but maybe some photos can lift our spirits a bit. These are from crack insect photographer Mark Sturtevant, whose notes are indented:
Here are some more pictures of insects that were taken over this summer. We begin with a few pictures that I got with the help of using CO2 to temporarily anesthetize an active insect. This is a simple method where an Alka Seltzer tablet is immersed in water to release this gas, and the immobilized insect is then put onto a stage. When they recover, the insect is ‘mellow’ for a period of time while still looking normal, and one can take pictures. This protocol is described here in case anyone is interested.
The first insect is a small Ichneumon wasp (Messatoporus rufiventris). This one allowed me very little time before it took off (but it was more time than I would otherwise have with this super-hyper insect).
The two pictures that follow is a tiny Chalcidid wasp (Conura side). This subject just sat for a long time after it woke up, and all it wanted to do was clean itself. I rather like the interesting poses. Chalcidid wasps are parasitic, as are Ichneumon wasps. Chalcidid wasps apparently seize their prey with their large hind femora while they insert an egg into them. (Conura side).
The next two pictures are of ebony jewelwing damselflies (Calopteryx maculata), which are beautiful insects that are common along forest rivers and streams. The striking metallic green and blue colors of the males are a bit variable, as some individuals seem more metallic green while others have a lot of metallic blue. However, it is a bit tricky to capture their color accurately as they prefer shady forested areas, but use of a flash to take their picture will alter their color. I have been experimenting with ways to take pictures that preserve their natural color, and here are some results. The first was taken without a flash, so the color came out pretty accurately in this nice blue male. The damselfly and the leaf are manually combined from different pictures to get more in focus. The second picture is of the same damselfly, but here I gingerly used a bounced flash at low power to get more light on the insect. You can see that even this slight addition of artificial light changed the color, but this is still pretty accurate in the sense that many jewelwings are metallic green like this one now appears. The picture was also stitched together from different pictures.
The mysterious and rather large dragonfly in the next picture had settled on a perch high in a tree on a chilly morning after a huge thunderstorm. At the time I was trying out my new 1.4X tele-extender on an old zoom lens, and for some reason I also took out a tripod and remote shutter cable that day – something I very rarely do. I don’t think I could have gotten the shot without that equipment. An expert on a different forum identified it as a female mocha emerald (Somatochlora linearis). In later weeks I saw this one several more times patrolling the same area but she would never land.
This posting is wrapped up with some cute little grasshoppers. It took some time to figure out how to best stalk and photograph these little jumpers that were terming in tall grass, but I eventually found that all I had to do was herd them past a large dead log, and then turn around and photograph the ones that had hopped onto the log. The first two I think are differential grasshoppers (Melanoplus differentialis) Their colors are variable, and it can be hard to distinguish them from the related red-legged ‘hopper nymphs.
The last two are teeny band-winged grasshoppers. Just look at these little cuties! This field has no less than FOUR species of band-wings, but these are most likely the Carolina grasshopper, Dissosteira carolina.
Four years ago, during Nobel Prize Season, Matthew made a prediction on this site: the 2013 Prize for Medicine and Physiology would go to “Jeff Hall, Michael Rosbash and Mike Young for their work on discovering the mechanism by which ‘clock’ genes work.” Well, Matthew was wrong at the time, but, as the New York Times and other venues just announced, Matthew was, as he emailed me with pride, “four years too early.” For Hall, Roshbash, and Young are the precise triumverate who got the Prize this morning. The brief New York Times article is below, but I’ll reproduce Matthew’s post because it gives more information than does the Times (at least what I saw as I wrote this at 5:30 a.m.). The press release by the Karolinska Institut gives you a ton of information about the research on circadian rhythm genes.
The Times article:
And here’s what Matthew wrote in 2013:
It’s that time of year again. The next week will see pictures of cheerful looking middle-aged (or older) men (they will be mainly men) holding bottles of champagne and explaining work they did years ago which has just won them fame and fortune and a Nobel Prize. Some of them will have beards. Many of them will be from the USA. This much history tells us. What is more difficult to predict is WHO will win which prize, with the exception of physics which will presumably go to Higgs for his boson (pronounced bo-zon).
First up (I think) is Physiology or Medicine, which is announced tomorrow. Here is my prediction: Jeff Hall, Michael Rosbash and Mike Young for their work on discovering the mechanism by which ‘clock’ genes work. They have won a series of major prizes over the last 18 months, and it seems inevitable that the Nobel Committee will soon be honouring them, so why not this year?
These clock genes were first found in the insect Jerry and I study: Drosophila melanogaster. In 1971 Ron Konopka, working with the late Seymour Benzer, announced the discovery of a gene, which they called period, which changed the fly’s ‘circadian’ rhythm. Furthermore, Konopka and Benzer had made three mutants in this gene – one mutation made the clock tick slowly (per long) so the flies were on a 29 hour cycle, one made the clock tick fast (per short) so the flies were on a short cycle (19 hours ) and another was a null mutation in which the clock was broken and the flies had no rhythm.
Through the 1980s and 90s, Hall, Rosbash and Young worked out how the fly biological clock works, and it soon became apparent that this is not only a clock in Drosophila – many of the key elements of the fly’s clock also function in other animals, including humans.
To get a better idea of what the research entailed, here is a video in two parts explaining the research, which was made to mark the award of the Shaw Prize to the trio a few months ago. As you’ll see from the first video, Jeff Hall is an interesting character. Jeff is now retired, but even when he was active he was also a non-professional historian of the American Civil War, publishing a book about the battle of Gettysburg. He also has a reputation for being somewhat unpredictable; his Stockholm acceptance speech would no doubt be a gem.
As a reader notes in the comments, Brandeis University, home of Hall and Rosbach, hasn’t even put the award on their “Brandeis researchers in the news” webpage! Rockefeller University is more on the ball; Young’s prize (he works there) is in big letters on the University’s front page.
JAC: As the original videos posted by Matthew have been removed from YouTube, I’ll put up a short video with Mike Rosbash, and one with Rosbash and Hall, both describing the research and its history. You can see the Shaw Prize lecture, in one part, at this site.
Now: a contest. Here are the schedule of awards for the next few days, also from the NYT:
■ The Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on Tuesday in Sweden.
■ The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced on Wednesday in Sweden.
■ The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Norway.
■ The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science will be announced Oct. 9 in Sweden.
■ The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced at a later date.
Guess who will win in these five categories (you don’t have to guess for all of them. The first person to name at least one winner from two categories gets an autographed book (featuring a Nobel Prize Cat) AND a special book on ancient cat drawings. My guess is that nobody will win; people have a notoriously poor track record at guessing, especially in literature (who would have predicted Bob Dylan would win last year?). Put your guesses below (one set of guesses per customer). You are limited to three guesses for Physics and Chemistry, as the Prize can go to three people, but only one guess for Economics, Peace, and Literature, which have but one recipient.
I wake up to find that more than 20 people have been killed in Las Vegas [UPDATE: CNN now reports 50 dead] and over 200 wounded, after a lone gunman—apparently a retired American guy—holed up in a hotel room with a gun and fired on people attending a big outdoor music concert. The man was killed by police. This was apparently a “lone wolf” act of unknown motivation, save that it wasn’t a terrorist attack like those last week in Edmonton and Marseilles. On the news this morning, I heard the man was using an assault weapon; these have been legal in the U.S. for the last 13 years. I won’t start your day with pictures of the dead, which you can see at the link, but that’s at least 20 50 people who leave behind husbands, wives, parents, children, and friends, all asking “why”? One answer is “because the government and courts think people should have guns.” And now the endless and fruitless debate over gun control will start again, and peter out until the next mass murder. If we can’t ban guns—or regulate them the way the British do—can we at least stop selling automatic weapons that have no purpose except to kill lots of other people? Naaah—forget it; this is America. As in the past, I’m sure that at least one reader will justify the possession of such weapons: what would you do, they say, if five burglars invade your home at once? It’s insanity.
There’s been a Nobel Prize awarded in Medicine & Physiology today, but I’ll defer that issue till later this morning.
It’s Monday again (October 2, 2017), and though it shouldn’t matter to a retired person, I always feel the Sunday Evening Dread creeping in the night before—just like when I was in school. It’s National World Farm Animals Day, and the site gives us this inspiring fact:
Goats and sheep don’t have teeth on their upper jaw. They have a hard palate that helps them grind their food.
Well, I’ll be! That I didn’t know. In India it’s Gandhi Jayanti, one of only four national holidays, and celebrating the birthday of you know who.
On this day in 1789, George Washington sent 12 amendments to the U.S. Constitution (including the first ten: The Bill of Rights) to the States for ratification. The approval of 3/4 of the states for the first ten amendments, making them law, was secured in 1791. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson, the President of the U.S., sustained a massive stroke, leaving him partly blind and paralyzed. This news was hidden from the public for a long time, and he continued to serve as President until 1921. On October 2, 1950, the first Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz was published. Here it is:
On this day in 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African-American justice of the U. S. Supreme court, and a good justice he was.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is engaged in biological identification, but to no avail:
Hili: Do you know the name of this worm?
Cyrus: No, it’s not my area of expertise.
In Polish:
Hili: Wiesz jak się ten robak nazywa?
Cyrus: Nie, to nie moja specjalność.
Here’s one more tweet put up by Heather Hastie, showing this year’s hatch of kakapo chicks in New Zealand. They’ll all be released after they’re taught how to act like flightless parrots (kakapo parents don’t do a very good job). Note the reduced wings:
