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.
Over the years I’ve written several posts (and letters to newspapers and aquaria) protesting the captivity of large marine mammals and their use in “shows” as a form of entertainment (see here, here and here, for example). SeaWorld in San Diego, California and Orlando, Florida were notorious places for this kind of captivity and entertainment, and pressure on that organization built after the release of the 2013 documentary film Blackfish, exposing SeaWorld’s inhumane treatment of orcas (killer whales; Orcinus orca).
I don’t think SeaWorld ever recovered from that movie (full disclosure: I haven’t yet seen it). And, according to yesterday’s Guardian, the “theme park” is ending its killer-whale shows in San Diego next year in response to customer complaints:
Joel Manby, SeaWorld’s chief executive, said he had listened to guests’ criticism of its Shamu stadium whale circus and it would end the “theatrical killer whale experience” in San Diego by the end of 2016.
He said the company will replace its Californian Shamu show – in which whales dive, jump and splash guests to the demands of their trainers – with “an all new orca experience focused on the natural environment [of the whales]”.
“We are listening to our guests, evolving as a company, we are always changing,” Manby said as he unveiled a new corporate strategy on Monday. “In 2017 we will launch an all new orca experience focused on natural environment [of whales]. 2016 will be the last year of our theatrical killer whale experience in San Diego.”
There are, however, two remaining problems:
[Manby] said the company will replace its Californian Shamu show – in which whales dive, jump and splash guests to the demands of their trainers – with “an all new orca experience focused on the natural environment [of the whales]”.
“We are listening to our guests, evolving as a company, we are always changing,” Manby said as he unveiled a new corporate strategy on Monday. “In 2017 we will launch an all new orca experience focused on natural environment [of whales]. 2016 will be the last year of our theatrical killer whale experience in San Diego.”
. . . The orca whale theatrical performances will continue at SeaWorld’s other killer whale parks in San Antonio, Texas, and Orlando, Florida.
Problem One, then, is that the San Diego facility will still be keeping orcas in captivity. While some readers may disagree, I feel that these creatures belong in the wild, where they roam, and were evolved to roam, over hundreds of kilometers of open sea and where they also live in social groups: something not possible when they’re in Whale Jail. Further, if the San Diego facility is closing because of customer complaints, why not the facilities in San Antonio and Orlando? Why will whales still be doing their tricks there?
Second, ending the orca shows at only one facility implies that SeaWorld is making its decision purely on the grounds of profit rather than genuine concern for the animals. And although the San Diego facility says it’s now concentrating on educating people about conservation of orcas, well, that species is not clearly endangered, and its cause isn’t helped by catching the whales and putting them in jail. If people want to learn about whales, the best thing to do is read about them and watch videos on YouTube. It’s not clear to me that whale shows and captive animals really help the species in the wild.
One more note: I’m told by some defenders of whale captivity that the animals don’t show any obvious stress in captivity, and get medical treatment and decent and reliable food. Well, imagine a Martian zoologist observing human prisoners in jail (especially if their captors were intelligent orcas). Those zoologists would draw the same conclusion.
Although this post may look like an ad, I’m actually putting it up as a public service, at least for those who live in or around Chicago. For some time now, I’ve had as my primary care physician Dr. Alex Lickerman at the University of Chicago, a doctor of enormous skill and empathy. Although I’m a healthy person, like all of us I’ve seen a number of doctors in my life, but have no hesitation in pronouncing Alex not only the best doctor I’ve ever encountered, but also the Official Website Physician™. He’s not only up on all the recent medical advances, but also a secular Buddhist who uses in his practice what he learned over years of study and meditation. And that isn’t woo but compassion: Alex spends a lot of time talking to patients—much more time than simply examining them, for he feels that proper treatment requires that he learn about their lifestyles, previous and ongoing medical treatment and medications, their concerns, other symptoms, and so on. In most appointments there’s simply no time to do this.
I’ve sent a lot of friends to Alex, and to a person they’ve pronounced him superb. His skills got him promoted (at a young age) to Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago Hospitals, but then, after 8 years, he took to bureaucracy, becoming in 2011 head of Student Health and Counseling at the University while still practicing one day a week.
Alex tells me that, after taking his recertification boards, he realized that he was still deeply in love with medicine, and decided to return to primary care practice. But at the University, like most places, he realized that he simply wasn’t given time to treat patients as he wanted, for to make a profit most medical practices and hospitals must turn patients over quickly. As he describes in a white paper on how to save primary care in America, Alex notes that the average length of a primary-care appointment in the U.S. is only 15.7 minutes. That pathetically short time leads primary care doctors to shunt patients off to specialists, or to order unnecessary tests or hospitalization—and that wastes a lot of money and time, both on the patients’ and medical system’s part.
And so Alex decided to strike out on his own, founding a “direct primary care” practice, ImagineMD, that will begin on January 1, 2016. If you’re familiar with the concept of direct primary care medicine (so called because there’s no third-party insurance), you pay out of your own pocket for access to a doctor (in this case $135/month), an amount not reimbursable by insurance. But then all tests and referrals ordered by the primary-care physician (there will be two doctors besides Alex) do fall under your normal medical insurance. What you’re paying for here—and I was the first patient to sign up—is 24/7 access to a doctor (you get their cellphone numbers to call), appointments within a day or two, and appointments that scheduled to be 1.5 hours long: six times longer than average. And you get the kind of medical care that everyone should have in an ideal world.
Alex will be limited to 350 patients: less than a quarter of the normal load (patient loads for a primary-care physician in the U.S. are between 1500 and 4000 people per doctor!). The other two physicians will each be capped at 600 patients. And while you have to pay out of your own pocket, this kind of care may also save you substantial money (co-pays and so on) for unnecessary tests, referrals, and hospitalizations often ordered by overworked and time-limited doctors.
Alex didn’t ask me to write this post: I’m doing it to give readers the chance to participate in a recently developed form of medical care and see if it’s right for them. (If it isn’t, you can stop going and paying, with no questions asked). You can sign up at the ImagineMD site, where you can read about the services, fees, see the FAQ, and read Alex’s white paper (link above). If you have questions, there’s a “Contact us” page. If you are interested but want to talk to the doctor with questions or concerns, Alex will be glad to call you if you put your phone number on the “contact us” site.
The practice will be in Chicago’s West Loop, at 10 S. Riverside Plaza Drive.
I’m not known to waste money, so believe me, it’s a high recommendation when I’m willing to pay for this kind of medicine. But having interacted with Alex over the years, I can’t imagine having any other primary care doctor, and I’m letting readers know about this before the patient panel fills up. While I’m an advocate of socialized or government-sponsored medicine (and have recently enrolled, as required. in Medicare), this isn’t what we have in the U.S., with many doctors and hospitals simply refusing to take Medicare patients because government reimbursements are low. And you all know about waiting times for appointments, a serious problem in many countries with socialized medicine.
So, if you live in or around Chicago, want a really good doctor and first-rate medical care, and can afford the $135/month for ImagineMD, I give the practice my highest recommendation. I wanted to be “Patient Zero,” but Alex told me that phrase has unsavory connotations, so I’m now Patient One.
JAC: When I heard about the campaign by Irish women to tw**t their menstrual cycles to Ireland’s prime minister, I knew there was a story, but wasn’t clear on the details. I asked Grania, who lives in the Republic of Ireland, to enlighten us:
by Grania Spingies
Sometimes Ireland has to be a direct democracy to change certain laws, for the Irish Constitution, which came into force in 1937, was heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic church and prohibited a number of rights that modern democracies enjoy—including the right to obtain a divorce. The most recent example was this year’s campaign and subsequentreferendum on same-sex marriage. But that was a relatively easy battle to win, in spite of pushback from conservative zealots. In the end, the majority of Irish citizens – and that includes Irish Catholics – saw the right to same-sex marriage as both necessary and a social good. A “Yes” vote could be celebrated loudly and with no mixed feelings.
It’s a lot harder to create the same feel-good sentiments on the contentious issue of abortion in Ireland, on which there is no consensus. Even though there appears to be majority support for the right to access abortion, there is no unanimity on whether it should be on demand, or for medical reasons or compassionate grounds only. As it stands, abortion remains illegal in Ireland (with a penalty of 14 years imprisonment) for any reason other than cases in which the mother’s life is in imminent danger.
However, recent attempts to exercise even that narrowly restricted right have produced horror stories. The current government has reiterated that it will not address the abortion issue during its term in office, and neither will the major opposition party. Both parties are largely conservative (by European standards) and god-fearing; this leaves Irish women with an unwanted pregnancy the choice of breaking the law or traveling outside of the country to obtain an abortion.
For some time there has been a concerted campaign to raise awareness about this issue and change people’s minds toward less restrictive laws on abortion. TV Writer Graham Linehan (Father Ted, The I.T. Crowd and my own personal favorite, Black Books) and his wife Helen recently joined forces with Amnesty International to highlight the issue by going public about a deeply tragic personal event in their own lives: Helen had to undergo an abortion as the baby they were expecting was diagnosed with acrania. Although this condition is invariably fatal to the baby, in Ireland the mother would be forced to carry this pregnancy to term or until she had a spontaneous miscarriage.
In October, Irish women started tweeting about their menstrual cycles to the Irish Taoiseach [prime minister] Enda Kenny. As comedian Grainne Maguire explains in The Guardian:
I thought it would be better to take the Irish state at its word. If they want to control my body, if they feel so comfortable interfering in what happens inside it, they should at least have all the details.
So, she and other women tweeted about the current state of “Ireland’s littlest embassy” using the hashtag #RepealThe8th, the 8th Amendment being the one that equates the life of a pregnant woman with that of a fetus or embryo, and criminalises abortion in Ireland.
Reactions have ranged from laughter to disgust: biology does horrify some people so. Nevertheless, people in Ireland will continue to campaign until an Irish government has the courage to bring the issue to a referendum. So far only the Labour party has committed to holding a referendum on abortion. However, the Labour Party has never won an election outright, at best being in the position of Coalition or Opposition. The current government has stayed silent.
We have a diverse set of photos today, including a dramatic rescue of a raptor by one of our regulars. First, Dave Molloy from Oz sent some photographs of the evening sky and of wombats:
I knew there was a planetary conjunction to be seen in the dawn sky for the last few weeks. However, surprisingly for the eastern seaboard of New South Wales, the weather had been uncooperative. For some reason on Saturday, I got up earlier than usual, checked out the sky from my balcony and there was the half-moon sitting bang amongst Jupiter, Mars and Venus. Couldn’t have timed it better. Must have bored my Facebook friends rigid by now with these shots. [JAC: Enlarge by clicking if you can’t see Mars].
In addition, some contrasting photos of two common wombats (Vombatus ursinus) from a camping trip west of Sydney a month ago. The first was a very solid specimen in good health, while the second sadly had rampant mange and must have been very ill as it was out and about mid-afternoon, not a good sign for a primarily nocturnal animal.
Steven Barnard rescued a raptor! Here’s his first email from Sunday:
While out photographing today I saw this Red-tailed Hawk [Buteo jamaicensis] in trouble. It couldn’t fly and was being harassed by magpies. If ravens showed up it would be game over, so I captured it. It appears to have a relatively minor injury to the right wing, perhaps a sprain. Otherwise, it’s in good condition and very feisty. It’s tucked away covered up in the garage. Tomorrow I’ll take it to a rehabber in Boise.
I asked Stephen if he gave it food or water, and he said that the rehab person said that wasn’t necessary, but he slipped the bird a few slices of elk.
And the report from yesterday (Monday)—all is well:
I dropped the hawk off with a rehabber in Boise. The prognosis is good — no broken bones. By the way, notice hole in the back of the tongue. That allows the bird to breathe when it’s swallowing large prey, which might take some time.
Stephen drove 135 miles in a snowstorm—and 135 miles back—to take this bird to the rehabber. Kudos to Stephen, and to the man who’s trying to save the hawk (it now appears to have an injury to the elbow joint).
Also on Sunday, some interlopers appeared on Stephen’s ranch:
I had a couple of visitors this morning. Deets [the border collie] sent them on their way.
It’s Tuesday, the cruellest day, and although it’s partly cloudy this morning in Chicago, the sky is predicted to clear, giving us a sunny day with a high of 55° F (13°C). The weather is still very warm for this time of year. On this day in 1989, German citizens began tearing down the Berlin Wall and, in 1793, (according to Wikipedia), “a Goddess of Reason was proclaimed by the French Convention at the suggestion of Pierre Gaspard Chaumette.” On November 10, 1483, Martin Luther was born. We won’t get into that, but it’s worth nothing that the Dutch poet Jacob Cats was born on this day in 1577. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is showing some awareness that other creatures like food that she doesn’t.
A: What’s there?
Hili: Grapes.
A: You don’t like grapes.
Hili: Others do.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam jest?
Hili: Winogrona.
Ja: Ty nie lubisz winogron.
Hili: Inni je lubią.
*******
As lagniappe, reader John C. sent a link to a video of a cat named Red, who apparently and frequently likes to sit like a human.
Potoos are some of the most cryptic birds around. This video, which isn’t on YouTube, was made by Ciro Albano and shared by Novataxa (link provided by Florian M.).
Click on the screenshot below to see a short but stunning video of a Rufous Potoo (Nyctibius bracteatus) rocking on its perch, apparently mimicking a twig or leaf blowing in the wind. The bird is not being blown itself: it’s rocking to deceive predators. This is something completely new to me, but is described in Wikipedia:
The rufous potoo is the smallest member of its genus, and extremely well-camouflaged, being almost invisible among dead leaves, trees and otherplants. Its body is, like the common name implies, rufous with white spots on the underbody. To improve their camouflage even further, they will rock back and forth while roosting to even closer resemble a dead leaf. They sing almost exclusively on full moons.
. . . This species has a unique nesting habit. They make their nest upon a broken, vertical branch and produce one egg with unerring aim into their nest. Their dead-leaf like movements make this effective camouflage for predators that would prey upon their offspring.
Now you tell me that evolution isn’t amazing, for I strongly suspect that this behavior isn’t learned, but an evolved, hard-wired trait, expressed only when the bird feels the wind.
Individuals of over 5 kilograms (11 lb) in weight and over 80 centimetres (31 in) long have been known in the past, but now, even individuals over 2 kilograms (4.4 lb) are rare. The species is only found in Tasmanian rivers flowing north into the Bass Strait below 400 metres (1,300 ft) above sea level, and is listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List. The specific epithet gouldi commemorates the Australian naturalist John Gould.
A. gouldi is very long-lived, surviving for up to 40 years. Their main predators are humans, platypus, river blackfish and rakali.
Here’s a photo. The crayfish looks bigger than it is because it’s foreshortened, but still, look at its size compared to the man’s hands. That’s a big crustacean!:
You can read about the decline of this animal at The Australian(note, you can go there only once without paying). It’s time for the Tasmanians to put some serious effort into saving this animal, and to stop eating it! Here’s a video:
If you’ve read the Old Testament, a grueling task that I actually accomplished, you’ll know about the many genocides ordered by Yahweh. Many were the tribes slain by the Israelits on God’s command, including, besides the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. Theologians have spent a lot of time trying to justify why God wiped out innocent children (and even animals), and of course they’ve succeeded. Today we’ll occupy ourselves with the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, described in Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 20:16-18.
As God said in Deuteronomy 20:16, “But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive. . ” That could imply that not only were all the Canaanites (including women and children) slaughtered en masse, but so were their animals. Or at least so some theologians have argued, forcing them to then justify why God would commit genocide of animals. But theologians are up to the task!
First, here are a few explanations for the mass slaughter of humans:
Reader John sent me this video made by the disgraced (just out of prison for tax evasion and other crimes) but still active young-earth creationist Kent Hovind. While the 35-minute video includes Hovind’s usual blather about evolution and creationism, the reader wanted us to see Hovind’s justification for the Canaanite genocide. His/her email:
“Dr.” Kent Hovind has recently been released from prison and is back online, answering emails from the public in a daily Youtube broadcast.
In his November 5th 2015 video, he put his own spin–the most monstrous I’ve yet encountered–on the fictional Yahweh’s proclivity for genocide: apparently, mass murder of the Canaanites by Yahweh’s servant Joshua was a necessary public health response to the population’s bestiality-induced infectious disease burden! According to Hovind, the extermination of the Canaanites, innocent children included, can be considered entirely analogous to a physician prescribing an antibiotic to eradicate bacterial infection!
Imagine if you or Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer said such a thing!
The relevant excerpt of the video–amongst a half-hour of inane blather–begins at 6:30 minutes in:
The following is my [John’s] transcript (verbatim by intention, or, at least, as close to verbatim as I can manage):
“As far as God telling ’em to wipe out the Midianites, well, there were nations that were so full of diseases and things like that … that God said, “Yes, they need to all be wiped out, especially, like, the Canaanites in that land”. God told Joshua, “When you go into the land, utterly annihilate them! Kill ’em all!” Well, one of the things the Canaanites did was sex with animals, and had all kinds of diseases … and … and … just endemic in the civilization, and God said, “Wipe ’em all out!” No different than a doctor saying, “Take this pill that’s gonna kill every bacteria [sic], even the little baby ones that haven’t done anything wrong. Yeah, we’re gonna kill ’em all, ’cause if you leave onebehind or one resistant one behind, the disease can come back with a vengeance!”
Well, Hovind isn’t the only one to justify the murder of all the Canaanites, including their children AND the animals that they had sex with. William Lane Craig famously justified the human genocide; you can see some of his disgusting apologetics here. An excerpt:
So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.
. . . By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
Talk about making a virtue of necessity! The children had to die because God said so, because they’d grow up to worship pagan idols and so had to be extirpated, and because it wasn’t so bad after all because the children would reap their reward in Heaven. (Why, I wonder, would these children even go to Heaven, since that’s not an Old-Testament concept?) It is a fact universally acknowledged that there is no act of cruelty that cannot be justified by theologians as an aspect of God’s beneficence. Craig’s apologetics are monstrous.
But why destroy the Canaanites’ animals, too: the passive and probably unwilling victims of bestiality? Well, Clay Jones, Associate Professor of Christian Apologetics at Biola University, has explained that away on his website:
The Lord ordered that those who have sex with animals should be put to death along with the animal (Lev. 20:15). Atheist Richard Dawkins objects that it adds “injury to insult” that “the unfortunate beast is to be killed too.” ([Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton, 2006),248.]) But, what Dawkins and others don’t grasp is that only the depraved would want to have animals around who were used to having sex with humans.
Jones goes on to describe a story by Robert Yerkes about a female gorilla who tried to press her genitals against his feet, and intimates that she had either had sex with a human or, if she hadn’t but might have in principle (although there were no gorillas in the Mideast), she’d be even more sexually demanding. That would be not only “embarrassing,” but even dangerous! And that’s why the Canaanites’ animals had to die—they were rape victims who became sluttish. It was honor killing! Jones:
Now the objection could be made that some of the animals may not have been subject to such abuse, but that’s not something that an Israelite would be able to know. Thus they all had to die.
Major takeaway: sometimes beings innocent of committing sin can be harmed and corrupted by others who misuse their free will, as seems to be the case with animals involved in bestiality. It is a tragedy that these animals had to be killed but that’s one of the big lessons about sin: Sinful beings can hurt the innocent sometimes permanently.
Can you imagine a grown person being paid to utter such idiocy? But such is theology: the post hoc rationalization of things you want to believe. The argument that God killed the Canaanites’ animals because the poor beasts were sexually abused is simply an example of theologians making stuff up. After all, we don’t even know (if the Bible were true) that the animals were even killed. And the argument is no sillier than Edward Feser’s claim that dogs and cats won’t be admitted to Heaven.
The proper response to such arguments is not respect, but mockery.
