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.
Reader Tony Eales from Queensland has sent “a passel of arachnids”: his notes are indented:
The first are relatively common web spinning spiders. Cyrtophera moliccensis is the Tent Spider, so called because of the dome-like structure it forms in its large tangled web. They are very common in gardens and bushland around here.
The Tetragnathid spiders are all bizarre looking things and many have reflective skin on their abdomen, some looking like a mirror. I have photos of two here, Leucauge sp and Thwaitesia nigronodosa [in order below].
Also from my leaf litter sifting I find many different spiders, most are too tiny and young to identify but the jumping spiders stand out, even if getting them down to species is impossible. There is apparently a species complex of undescribed members of the Saitis genus variously described by the patterns on their abdomen, this one is Saitis sp aff exclamation mark.
The other is just some extremely photogenic Jumping Spider.
Another leaf litter lurker belongs to the Crab Spider family, Tharpyna diademata.
Some of the more unusual arachnids I’ve come across scratching around in the dirt are Pseudoscorpions (they were the reason I first started sifting through leaf litter, I just wanted to see one in real life) and a small rainforest harvestman, order Opiliones. [Pseudoscorpion first, then harvestman.]
Yes, it’s Monday again, September 11, 2017, and thus the infamous “9/11″—the 16th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. And it’s another chilly and overcast day in Dobrzyn. Hili was out all night, but this morning we found her warmly ensconced in her “nest” (a blanket formed into a cup) on the veranda. It’s National Hot Cross Buns Day, a food rarely seen in America, and one I’ve eaten only overseas.
I am heading to Gdansk (Danzig) early tomorrow morning to give a talk, and posting will be very light after today (I return to Warsaw on Friday). Grania will be handling the Hili dialogues.
On September 11, 1296, during the Scottish Wars of Independence, the Scots, led by William “FREEDOM!” Wallace and Andrew Moray, defeated a much larger English force at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Moray was killed in the fighting and in 1305 Wallace was captured and executed—you know the grisly details. On this day in 1609, Henry Hudson discovered the island of Manhattan, inhabited by Native Americans. In 1857, September 11 marked the end of the four-day Mountain Meadows Massacre in which Mormons, with the help of Native Americans, killed 120 people in a wagon train heading for California. Only 17 people were spared, all children younger than seven. On September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende was removed from power by a coup led by Augusto Pinochet, with Allende committing suicide with a rifle.
On this day in 1985, Peter Rose broke Ty Cobb’s career record of hits in baseball, getting his 4,192nd hit—a single against the San Diego Padres. It is likely that Rose used “corked bats” (bats hollowed out and replaced with cork to make them lighter) in pursuit of this record. His total was 4,256 hits, but he was later ruled ineligible for the Hall of Fame because of his betting on baseball, and also went to prison for tax evasion. Here’s his record-breaking hit:
Finally, on this day in 2015, four Americans were killed on an attack of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, an event that was to dog the future campaigns of Hillary Clinton, who at the time was Secretary of State.
Notables born in this day include Carl Zeiss (1816), O. Henry (1862), D. H. Lawrence (1885), Mickey Hart (1943), Leo Kottke (1945) and Moby (1965; what happened to him?). Those who died on this day include four heads of state: Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1948), Jan Smuts (1950), Nikita Khrushchev (1971), and Salvador Allende (1973; see above), as well as Lorne Greene and Peter Tosh (both 1987). Finally on this day in 2001, 3996 people died in the terrorist attacks in New York, with another 6,000 people injured. Those are too many people to list here, but spare a thought for them and their families.
Meanwhile here in Dobrzyn, Hili has sniffed out something suspicious:
Hili: Could something be hiding here?
A: I doubt it.
Hili: Still, you have to check everything.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy tam mogło się coś schować?
Ja: Wątpię.
Hili: Trzeba jednak wszystko sprawdzać.
Nearby, Leon is thinking Deep Thoughts:
Leon: I have to think through a few things.
In Polish: “Muszę przemyśleć parę spraw.”
Out in Winnipeg, yesterday was “Gusday,” the day when he gets special fusses and extra ‘nip:
Jerry’s post this morning on Chicago dogs inspired me, and made me hungry, so I headed to Trolley Dogs, in downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, for lunch. (Kenosha is the first town over the northern border of Illinois).
Trolley Dogs, Kenosha , WI.
There’s a street trolley that runs east-west on the boulevard to the south of the restaurant, plus, there’s a model trolley suspended from the ceiling, that chugs around, above the diners. (It wasn’t operating at lunch today, so the trolley just stayed at one place on the track.)
The little trolley near the ceiling in Trolley Dogs. The trolley itself is at the far right hand corner.
And here’s their Chicago dog. Note that the mustard is yellow (a must; it can’t be brown), and that the green relish is an eerie sort of neon green. This, too, is required for a true Chicago dog. I make them at home with a substitute, more standard, pickle relish. If you enlarge, you will also see the celery salt on the pickle (don’t be misled by the poppy seeds). The dog is tightly wrapped in paper to keep the ingredients intact.
A Chicago dog at Trolley Dogs.
And here’s the full meal– fries with lots of skin still attached, and a soda. I had the two-dog special. (And that’s a statistics textbook to the left– some light, mealtime reading!)
Yesterday we had a welcome respite from the chill and drizzle, and, as it was warm and sunny, we went for an excursion to see Leon the Dark Tabby, his staff, and the site of their future house (not far from Dobrzyn). But first we had to retrieve Hili, who had spent the night outside and was ensconced, as she often is, on the wicker shelf on the porch, where a towel has been placed for her comfort:
A greeting meow:
Closeup with eyes and one tooth:
Before we took off, we had lunch and I fed Cyrus one of the sausages I bought for him at the local butcher’s. Let it not be said that I discriminate against dogs. The woman next to Malgorzata is Jola, who comes to clean once a week.
In the afternoon we drove about ten minutes to the site of Leon and his staff’s (Elzbieta and Andrzej II’s) future home. As I’ve mentioned, they’ve bought an old wooden house in southern Poland that will be moved up here, but first a foundation must be poured. Due to a construction boom in Poland, the staff has been unable to find a contractor to create the foundation, and so are extremely frustrated. But in the meantime they visit the property every weekend, and have planted an awesome garden of flowers and vegetables. Here’s part of it:
The property and foundations of the previous house—with Leon overlooking the scene:
After a tour we had a convivial snack of coffee, tea, rogalik (small filled pastries, same as Jewish rugelach), dates, blueberry cake, and caramel cake. Clockwise from left: Andrzej II, Elzbieta, Andrzej, Malgorzata. At the near corner of the table you can see Leon’s purple cat-head-shaped food bowl:
A closeup of the treats, with Leon to the left:
The garden is very productive. Here’s Andrzej II with a huge carrot he’d just pulled from the ground.
And what I think is a kohlrabi:
Some kind of squash or gourd:
Leon, looking suspicious:
I fed Leon some of Hiroko’s Japanese “cat’s snack”. Elzbieta took pictures (this picture is by Andrzej):
And a picture Elzbieta took, which was in this morning’s Leon Monologue on Elzbieta’s Facebook page (and my Hili dialogue post). Look at Leon scarfing that snack!
The garden was full of butterflies; and this species was especially pretty. I don’t know it, but I swear a reader has recently sent us one of these. What, pray tell, is it?
The butterflies (two species here, I think) loved these pink flowers. I don’t know the flower.
I found this individual on the house when we came home. Again, what is the species?
And now it’s Sunday, and whenI got up at 6:30 I again found the unholy conjunction of a cat sleeping with a dog. Does this presage the Apocalypse?
My old friend Steve Jones, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, writer of popular science books, and a collaborator on field work in Maryland and California, has written a review in the Times of A. N. Wilson’s new book on Darwin, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, With 46 customer reviews on Amazon UK, the book has now climbed to 1.5 stars out of five. (Note: one of the few five-star reviews calls the book “comedy gold.”)
As with all biologists and historians of science who have reviewed the book, Jones consigns it to literary perdition. He does bestow some praise on the biographical bits: “As a rattling, not to say raffish and sometimes raucous account of Darwin and his circle, this biography is extremely enjoyable (except for the repeated cod psychology), and I learnt quite a lot from it.”
Now I’m not sure what “cod psychology” is (is that a British term?), but Jones immediately launches into vituperative:
But [Wilson] is so keen to be different that his account is written with a pen dipped in vinegar. He is entitled to do that to his protagonist, but not to his science.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge,” Darwin once said. “It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” That is true of most anti-evolutionists, but Wilson does not even have the defence of ignorance. Instead, he is simply perverse in his use of knowledge.
This book is the founding volume of the Fake News School of Science Writing. It has strict rules: if a fact is inconvenient, ignore it. If it fits, exaggerate, and when fact is lacking use your imagination. Ad hominem always works, so that we learn that Darwin was a habitual liar — damned in his own words, for as a child he told a friend that he could make different coloured flowers by watering them with dyes: this, he later admitted, was “a monstrous fable”.
. . . But what about his ideas? Here, Wilson seems to glory in using his talent to be wrong, wrong and wrong again on almost every scientific topic. In the classic mould of the contrarian, he despises anything said by mainstream biology in favour of marginal and sometimes preposterous theories.
Wilson again asserts that there are no transitional forms between major groups, which makes me think that he’s a creationist. He’s also wrong about that, as I show repeatedly in Why Evolution is True: we have such forms linking fish and amphibians, amphibians are reptiles, reptiles and birds, reptiles and mammals, and earlier primates with our own species. It’s unthinkable that anybody who is able to read could say that “there are no intermediate forms in the fossil record.”
One could, I suppose, impute the absence of such forms simply to the rapidity of evolutionary transitions between groups, but I don’t think that’s what Wilson is saying. I think he’s floating some sort of “intermediates-didn’t-occur” argument—in other words, creationism. I think this because in the video of Wilson on the BBC that I posted the other day, he raised the argument that Darwinism couldn’t explain organs of extreme complexity like the eye. That’s not only an Intelligent-Design creationist argument, but a false one—one that Darwin addressed himself, and has been refuted by later work (see here and here, for instance).
Jones is baffled by Wilson’s take on genetics and neo-Darwinism, as am I:
Towards the end of the book, Wilson comes up with a simply baffling statement: “Whereas, until the 1980s, it was just about possible that evidence might some day come to light which would substantiate at least some of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the science of New Genetics delivered its death blow.”
Why then, I ask myself, do I work in a department of genetics, evolution and environment? Have we all made a terrible mistake?
I’m curious to see what this “death blow” constitutes.
The book won’t be out in the U.S. until December 7, but I’ll try to read it before then. With an Amazon UK position of nearly 74,000, the book is tanking across the pond, but it may do better in the creationism-friendly U.S., where 38% of the population are young-Earth creationists with respect to humans, and another 38% think God had a hand in human evolution. (Only 19% of Americans accept pure naturalistic evolution of our species.)
“Why do bad hurricanes happen to good people?” is the title of a PuffHo article by Rabbi Pinchas Allouche of Congregation Beth Tefillah in Scottsdale, Arizona. And indeed, one may well ask why a loving and omnipotent God would allow innocent people to die. More than that—if he’s omnipotent, then he’s actually killing them by not intervening. The “evil as byproduct of free will” argument won’t work for physical “evils’ like earthquakes and hurricanes, for the damage is not done by other humans exercising their so-called will, but by blind physical forces or microbes without free will.
The suffering or killing of innocent humans by disease or natural disasters is the Achilles heel of theology, for there is no explanation that either punts and says “we just don’t know” or confects a convoluted scenario that is risible for everyone but religionists.
Rabbi Allouche appears to choose the first alternative, quoting another rabbi:
Rabbi Yekutiel Halbershtam, of blessed memory (1905-1994), who lost his wife and all eleven of their children in the Holocaust, was asked a similar question. His response was moving:
“I too have many, many questions for G-d,” he once revealed to his students. “And I know that G-d would be glad to invite me to the heavens and give me the answers to all of the questions I have. But I prefer to stay here on earth with my questions, then to die, and go up to the heavens, to receive the answers.”
Indeed, tragedies are, almost always, inexplicable, in the realms of human understanding. Sometimes, G-d is super-rational. And, sometimes, our finite minds will never be able to comprehend the ferocious disasters conducted by the infinite Creator of the heaven and the earth.
Well, if you can’t answer that question (and the Holocaust is as good an example as any), then how do you know that “G-d” exists at all? Or that G-d is benevolent rather than malevolent?
And since when did Jews believe in Heaven anyway? It’s not mentioned in the Old Testament, though with judicious scrutiny and arduous mental labor you can barely scrape the concept out of the Talmud. But never mind. The existence of the Holocaust should turn any rational Jew into an atheist.
Instead of pondering these unanswerable questions, rabbi Allouche chooses to draw some “spiritual lessons” from hurricanes and their attendant tragedies.
Therefore, it would behoove us to replace the unanswerable question of “why” with the challenging questions of “how should we respond” and “what can we learn from this.”
These questions are diametrically opposed. Asking “why” to a question that cannot be grasped, leads to passivity and despair (even if some fools claim to know the answers to these impossible questions). Yet, asking, “how should we respond” and “what can we learn from this” propels us to take positive action, and provide direction to a world that seems to have lost it.
So what are the lessons that “provide direction to the world”? There are two:
1). “Where there is destruction, we must respond with construction.” In other words, help shelter strangers, send medical supplies to the affected areas, and tender other diverse means of help.
2) “Live a life that matters.” Here’s the good rabbi’s advice:
For when death rears its ugly head, and we are struck with the realization that life – with all of its material pursuits and possessions – is so vulnerable, we are then forced to ask ourselves:
“Am I living a life that matters, or am I wasting it on temporary activities and pleasures? Am I making the important – important, and the trivial – trivial? Am I devoting adequate time and effort to that which will live on forever: my soul, my family, and my values? And have I made a difference yet today in this world, and in someone’s life, with acts of unconditional love and kindness to my loved ones and strangers alike?”
Except for the “soul” part, this is the same lessons that many secularists can and do draw from physical tragedy: help other people who are afflicted and, realizing your life is ephemeral, make every day count. As James Taylor (not a rabbi) wrote, “Shower the people you love with love.”)
It’s telling that a rabbi, faced with the hardest questions of theodicy, retreats into pure secularism. You don’t need any god to support those answers, and you don’t need any rabbi to give them.
