More reaction to A. N. Wilson’s new biography of Darwin

September 8, 2017 • 11:00 am

Yesterday A. N. Wilson‘s new debunking biography of Darwin, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, came out in the UK (it’ll be out the U.S. in December), but a while back it had already caused a fracas among reviewers. While a few reviewers liked it, most of them, including anyone who knew anything about evolution or Darwin, gave it very bad reviews for its accusations that Darwin was at once a). a plagiarist, stealing all his important ideas from other people and not giving them credit, b). a racist, devoted to white supremacy and “Social Darwinism”, and c). scientifically wrong, promoting a theory for which there was no evidence—at least no evidence for “evolution between species” (sound familiar?).

I’ve written about some of this controversy here, here, here, and here, but will review the book more formally after I’ve read it.

Below, thanks to Matthew, is a four-minute clip from BBC’s Newsnight featuring Wilson talking with the host (whose name I don’t know, but readers will supply) and Dr. Simon Underdown, identified as “Principal Lecturer in Biological Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University.”

Wilson, the laterally compressed person on the left, credits Darwin only with being a “very great naturalist”, and faults him for having ideas that produced Social Darwinism (in short, “might makes right”, something Darwin never suggested), as well as a holding racist view of “savages”. Wilson adds that “the idea that one species evolves into another is simply not demonstrated.” (Wilson has also said there’s no evidence for the existence of transitional forms, which is flatly untrue). Underdown counters by saying that Darwin’s juvenile ideas became more liberal as he aged, and that evolution is indeed a testable theory (that was, after all, the object of my first trade book).

Well, Wilson may have gotten the controversy he wanted, but not the critical or commercial esteem. The book is probably at its highest ranking on Amazon UK (1,349, though it may go higher in the creationist US), and, well, the reviews on the Amazon UK site are the worst I’ve seen for any book—ever.

Here’s the review by the esteemed science writer and presenter Adam Rutherford. Ouch!!! (I do like his last sentence.)

Here’s one that really hit me in the solar plexus:

h/t: Jeremy

Students for Justice in Palestine lump Zionists with fascists and white supremacists, urge physical violence against them

September 8, 2017 • 9:30 am

I’ve always seen Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as an anti-Semitic organization, since they’re “anti-Zionist” (that’s the euphemism for “anti-Semitic”, just as “states’ rights” was once a euphemism for “segregation”). How can you say you’re not anti-Semitic if you are against the existence of Israel as a homeland for refugee Jews? Here is the only definition of “Zionism” given my personal definition authority, the Oxford English Dictionary:

Now you can say you’re not anti-Semitic—only against some of the policies of the state of Israel—but it makes much less sense to say that you’re not anti-Semitic but are anti-Zionist. That is saying, “I have nothing against Jews, but I think their country, recognized by the UN in 1949, should be abolished.”

(Note that up until World War II, anti-Zionism was not equivalent to anti-Semitism, for there was a real debate among Jews whether they should assimilate into their home countries—the anti-Zionists—or create their own country to afford them protection from pogroms—the Zionists. The Holocaust ended that debate.)

You can confect fine distinctions here (Regressive Leftists are good at that), but watching the behavior of student organizations like SJP, it’s hard to deny that they’re largely anti-Semitic. This is supported by a new post on the SJP Facebook page from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UI).

Last Tuesday some student groups, including the SJP, sponsored a “smash Fascism” rally on the UI campus, and on that day, in response to criticism from Jewish and other groups, the SJP issued the statement below (indented).

Note that it lumps Zionism with white supremacy and fascism as movements that “destroy intersectional movements for mass liberation,” and then goes on to justify physical violence against the latter two groups (and, I claim, implicitly the first) as a response. Bolding is mine, as are comments flush left.

**For Immediate Release: Organizers’ Statement on Attacks Against Anti-Fascist Demonstration

We, the collective organizers of the “Smashing Fascism: Radical Resistance to White Supremacy” rally, are disgusted with the preemptive backlash our event has received. This opposition highlights the unholy union of American fascists, white supremacists, and Zionists which seeks to weaken and destroy intersectional movements for mass liberation. While we know these criticisms are destructive or rhetorical, we find it necessary to address them and center our narrative.

Do these people not know that the white supremacists, with Nazis among them, despise Jews and Zionists, and vice versa?That if white supremacists got their way they’d persecute Jews mercilessly—maybe even worse than SJP does now? It’s just like these uneducated students to stuff such diverse and mutually antipathetic groups into one “basket of deplorables.”

And here follows the obligatory and familiar argument why Nazis and fascists (and Zionists by implication) shouldn’t have free speech. Because speech = violence! (Along with “racism = power + prejudice”, that’s one of the two great Doublespeak Equations of our time.) Here’s what the kids and the Regressives are now espousing:

We are told that all people deserve a right to freedom of speech and expression. We are told that all have equal say in our society. This, obviously, is not the case. The white liberal establishment barely bats an eye when anti-fascist protesters are attacked by Nazis and white supremacists. The establishment is silent when it comes to the murder of black, brown, and Indigenous folks–especially queers of color, women, and femmes. The suppression and blacklisting of Palestinian voices and activism are inevitable results of the pro-Israel status quo in the West. But just as oppressed and marginalized voices are made oppressed and marginalized by unjust systems of governance and societal organization, so too do these forces seek to protect the rights and speech of literal Nazis, of white supremacists all along the political spectrum, and those who seek to implement and continue all manner of ethnic cleansing or indigenous genocide. This speech is not just expression but violence. If given the opportunity, American fascists and white supremacists would complete the settler-colonial project which enabled the founding of this country centuries ago.

No free speech for Nazis! And probably not for Zionists, either.

To begin with, I don’t see a pervasive and systematic silencing of black, Palestinian, and other marginalized voices; those voices are in fact is much of what you hear in the mainstream media these days. If you don’t believe me, read the New York Times, which had a big osculatory article about “Brooklyn homegirl in a hijab” Linda Sarsour, and just yesterday published a pro-BDS editorial by Roger Waters. On college campuses, it is pro-Palestinians, not Jews, who dominate student discourse about Israel. And it is the pro-Palestinians like SJP who shut down talks by Israeli speakers, not the other way around.

Further, the turning of “speech” into “violence” is a deliberate alteration of language designed to do two things: shut up those whose speech you don’t like, and justify your own physical violence against such people, which SJP is attempting to do in advance. To wit:

We have been attacked for “advocating violence”. Apparently the language of “smashing fascism” has connotations too severe for those who believe that being nice to Nazis may curry their favor. We do not believe there is any other option when it comes to dealing with fascists and white supremacists. Granting them any platform will only lead to further normalization of their violent ideologies. Granted, violent resistance is not always the best option. Nonviolence and peaceful civil disobedience have their places and have achieved great change throughout history. However, violent resistance–whether it is a black bloc or full-scale armed conflict–also has its place. The struggle for liberation must exist on multiple levels and scales–it cannot, and will not, be confined.

The only answer to the claim that “violent resistance to speech has its place”, at least when it comes to campus demonstrations, is “no it doesn’t, you thugs.” The statement above is part of SJP’s a priori “philosophical” attempt to justify attacks on white supremacists, Zionists, and fascists. (Note that who is a “fascist” isn’t defined: does that include all Trump supporters?)

And here we go with SJP trying desperately to show that they are not anti-Semitic:

Possibly the largest and most disingenuous charge against us is that of anti-semitism. We, the organizers of this rally, abhor anti-semitism. We see it as both an evil unto itself and another manifestation of white supremacy. Anti-semitism and Nazism have clear present and historical links. These charges of anti-semitism are toothless and based in a conflation of anti-semitism and anti-zionism. Criticism of the state of Israel and its practices is totally separate from attacks on people of the Jewish faith and heritage. The former is a political position based in opposition to state sponsored violence, apartheid, and settler-colonialism; the latter is a form of hatred that has no place in any movement for liberation.

Well, that sounds good, doesn’t it? Except that “anti-Zionism” is not the same thing as “criticism of the state of Israel and its practices.” It’s almost a cottage industry in Israel for its Jewish residents to criticize the government, but that doesn’t mean they want their country to disappear. What the SJP is saying above, which is reminiscent of what people said about segregation in the deep South, is “We abhor any mistreatment of Mr. Goldberg or Ms. Finkelstein; we just don’t think they should have their own country, which of course should be abolished, with Palestine extending ‘from the river to the sea.'” If being against the existence of Israel isn’t anti-Semitism, is being against the existence of  France not “anti-French”?

This finely mendacious parsing is a patronizingn and unconvincing way for SJP to look liberal and empathic. But let’s be clear: anti-Zionism, no matter what the mealymouthed students say, is anti-Semitism.

And so the SJP shows its hand in the next paragraph:

Additionally, pro-Israel campus groups have maintained contact with and may have requested an increased presence of campus and area police. This was not at the request of rally organizers and in reality runs counter to our ideals. The police, at all levels, represent white supremacy and the preservation of a racist, classist, and sexist society. Increased levels of policing at events like this present a clear danger to black, brown, poor, and queer and trans members of our community. Such actions show that Zionist campus groups do not have a commitment to fighting for justice and have no problem siding with and introducing oppressive forces within radical spaces.

Oh dear: how dare those fascistic Jews ask for police protection from SJP members who’ve expressed their willingness to physically attack people? Further, the notion that all cops are enforcing white supremacy and preserving inequality is ridiculous. (Tell that to Chicago’s black Superintendant of Police.) Yes, some cops may be racist, but remember who protected both Antifa and the alt-right during recent demonstrations. The cops, of course. Would the SJP prefer to run amok and have no police around at all? It would seem so, for then they’d be able to beat up anyone they wanted.

The SJP’s screed ends this way:

We will continue to defend our communities and fight for our liberation. Our struggles are linked through shared histories and experiences of oppression. Today’s rally is not a culmination of our activism, but a beginning. We will continue to resist injustices which surround us, whether it be at the hands of the US government or this University. We will fight and we will win, by any means necessary.

In solidarity,
The Co-Organizers and Sponsors of “Smashing Fascism: Radical Resistance to White Supremacy”

Yes, “by any means necessary.” And you know what that means. While piously proclaiming its sympathy for individual Jews, the SJP then lumps those favoring a Jewish state together with white supremacists, implicitly calling for violence against them all. But, pray tell me, when they’re all in the fray, how do they tell a “Jew” from a “Zionist”?

h/t: Malgorzata

New peacock spiders

September 8, 2017 • 8:00 am

Peacock spiders are not only beautiful, but great examples of sexual selection, for the males show both amazing colors and fascinating display behaviors that they use in their attempts to attract females. “Attempt”, of course, doesn’t mean they’re behaving with conscious intent, but just showing the results of sexual selection.

The only reason peacock spiders don’t get as much attention as, say, their avian counterparts—the birds of paradise—is that they’re tiny, like this (all photos by Jurgen Otto):

Like all salticids, peacock spiders are also lightning fast, as you’ll see in some of the videos below.

I’ve written about these arthropod jewels before (here and here); they are, as I said, salticids, or jumping spiders, and peacock spiders fall in the genus Maratus. All but one of the 50-odd species (there may be 60 or more) are found in Australia. Their primary popularizer and discover is Dr. Jürgen Otto, who has a video site devoted to them as well as a Facebook page and a Flickr page.

As is typical of sexually-selected species, only the males show bright colors and displays, which ultimately result from reproductively competent females being a scarce resource that must be attracted.The video below shows the amazing variety of behaviors of Maratus spiders (51 in this clip). Males frantically wave their legs and abdomens (all strikingly marked) to get a female’s attention.

Otto has a mildly disturbing habit of adding dance music to the spider videos; I prefer to turn the sound off. One can appreciate these creatures without anthropomorphizing them:

Here’s one species, Maratus volans, discovered, filmed, and narrated by Otto (at 5:21 you see an unsuccessful male eaten by a female):

Two years ago Otto described seven new species of Maratus; here’s a video showing those:

Now, according to several sources, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Otto’s found four more species, as well as a new subspecies. Annoyingly, none of the articles reporting this discovery cite or link to the scientific paper with formal descriptions (this is a flaw in a lot of science journalism). I finally found Otto’s paper in an obscure journal, Peckhamia, with a citation and free link at the bottom of this post.

If you click on the screenshot just below, you’ll go to an ABC video that shows all of the new species:

And here are the new species. First, the abstract of Otto’s paper:

Four new species of the genus Maratus are described from Western Australia: M. cristatus, M. electricus, M. gemmifer, and M. trigonus. M. electricus is compared to the closely related M. linnaei Waldock 2008. A new subspecies of M. melindae Waldock 2013, M. melindae corus, is reported from a new locality east of Cervantes. The courtship display of all six species is also documented.

Go to the paper for a lot more photos, as well as pictures of the females, which are similar and much less colorful than the males shown below:

Maratus electricus:

Maratus cristatus:

Maratus gemmifer:

Maratus trigonus:

M. melindae corus (it has not escaped my notice that this species looks very similar to M. gemmifer pictured above, but it’s identified in Otto’s paper as a subspecies of a different species, differentiated by color markings).

h/t: Phil D.

____________________

Otto, J. C. and D. E. Hill.  2017.  Five new peacock spiders from Western Australia (Araneae: Salticidae: Euophryini: Maratus Karsch 1878).  Peckhamia 152.1:  1-97

Friday: Hili dialogue

September 8, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday, September 8, 2017, and in Dobrzyn the rain has abated, we see a bit of sun, and daily high temperatures should rise to the low to mid 20s (Celsius) today and tomorrow. It’s National Date-Nut Bread Day (another superfluous hyphen), though I prefer my dates au natural, and as plump Medjools. It’s also International Literacy Day and World Physical Therapy Day (bless the PTs, who have helped my finger and shoulder).

I had two dreams last night that I remember. In the first, I was introducing an old friend to Japanese food; she’d never had any despite being an adult. After I discovered she liked sushi, I told her I knew of a place in Washington D.C., near DuPont Circle, where you could get a bento box with a cat toy in it—a Japanese version of a Happy Meal, I suppose. (No such place exists; it was produced by my slumbering brain). She didn’t know what a bento box was.

In my other dream I was watching a television documentary being filmed in which children were tested for three types of cancer, and then lined up to get their results. The man giving the results was sitting at a desk, and as each child approached, anxious to hear the outcome, the man would joke and delay giving the results to prolong the suspense for television. The kids, naturally, got very anxious. The man asked one little girl, “Have you ever had cancer before?” She said, “Yes—skin cancer.” At that moment the dream ended as I awoke. I won’t attempt to interpret either of these.

On this day in 1504, Michelangelo’s statue of David, arguably the world’s most beautiful statue, was formally unveiled in Florence. Intended for the roof of the Cathedral, it proved too heavy and was eventually moved to a piazza nearby. It took Michelangelo two years to carve the statue, beginning when he was only 26. On September 8, 1892, the American “Pledge of Allegiance”, composed by a Baptist minister, was first published in the children’s magazine The Youth’s Companion. Generations of kids recited it in school, with most of us adding the words “under God” after “one Nation”—a religious gloss added only in 1954. On this date in 1930, the MMM company first sold Scotch tape. On this date in 1935, Senator Huey Long, former governor of Louisiana, was assassinated in the Louisiana State Capitol building in Baton Rouge; the old demagogue died two days later.

Exactly six years later, the Siege of Leningrad by the German Army began; it lasted 28 months and resulted in the deaths of around a million Russians, many of starvation. One was Tanya Savicheva, who kept a notebook recording the successive deaths by starvation of her family members. Here are the contents, also displayed in the photo below:

Zhenya died on December 28th at 12 noon, 1941
Grandma died on the 25th of January at 3 o’clock, 1942
Leka died March 17th, 1942, at 5 o’clock in the morning, 1942
Uncle Vasya died on April 13th at 2 o’clock in the morning, 1942
Uncle Lesha May 10th, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, 1942
Mama on May 13th at 7:30 in the morning, 1942
The Savichevas are dead
Everyone is dead
Only Tanya is left

Tanya died of intestinal tuberculosis on 1 July, 1944. She was 14.

On this day in 1966, the first episode of the television series Star Trek (“The Man Trap”) was broadcast. On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon for any crimes committed while he was in office.

Notables born on this day include Siegfried Sassoon (1886), Sid Caesar (1922), Peter Sellers (1925), Patsy Cline (1932), Bernie Sanders (1941) and Ann Beattie (1947). Those who died on this day include Hermann von Helmholtz (1894), Richard Strauss (1949), Zero Mostel (1977), Willard Libby (1980) and Leni Riefenstahl (2003). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants OUT, something that happens many times a day:

Hili: You are neglecting your duties.
A: What duties?
Hili: I’ve been waiting for a long time to have the door opened.
 In Polish:
Hili: Zaniedbujesz swoje obowiązki!
Ja: Jakie?
Hili: Od dłuższej chwili czekam na otworzenie drzwi.
 Here’s the sight that greeted me when I woke up this morning: a cat and a dog spooning!  That’s not right!

Clever ad for Australian lamb

September 7, 2017 • 2:00 pm

Trigger warning: People eating meat

Reader Gregory Z. sent me a link to this promotional ad for Australian lamb, which is relevant not only because it’s food (I consider lamb the perfect meat to accompany a good Bordeaux), but because it features a host of deities from around the world, as well as an atheist! For reasons that will be clear, this ad could never be made in the U.S.

But even in Australia the ad caused some outrage, and, as the news story below notes, it was finally pulled (watch only the first 25 and last ten seconds; the rest is the full ad):

Dobrzyn: Thursday

September 7, 2017 • 12:30 pm

It’s still miserable weather here: cold, drizzly, and overcast. But today it was time to go to the bank and do the grocery shopping (done every day); and I also had to buy some sausages for Cyrus, as it wouldn’t be fair to stint him while giving Hili the cans of Fancy Feast I brought from the US. So we went to the local sklep (store) for groceries: first the small one (all pictures from there), then the butcher store for dog sausages, then to the big supermarket (which has driven all ten smaller shops out of business). Andrzej and Malgorzata preferentially patronize the small stores to support the locals.

Andrzej entering the small sklep:

Sunflowers on sale, bought for their seeds:

Three kinds of plums:

Flat peaches:

Celery root:

Leeks:

The obligatory selfie:

Dinner: Buckwheat groats (kasha) with roast beef and mushroom sauce, served with a salad and an extra strong beer (7%) that I bought because it is Beer Lover’s Day:

Because we are conserving the remaining cherries so I can have pies next week, Malgorzata made a cranberry pie with walnuts and apples from a jar of preserved cranberries someone gave her. Yum!

After dinner liqueurs, left to right: homemade fruit liqueur produced by the “other” Andrzej, half of Leon’s staff, a gingerbread liqueur from Torun, and a Chartreuse-like vegetal liqueur from the Czech Republic:

And, of course, a post about Dobrzyn wouldn’t be complete without a picture of Her Highness, here sitting primly on her canisters.

 

On creativity

September 7, 2017 • 11:00 am

I keep having weird dreams at night in Dobrzyn (typical of when I’m traveling), and keep forgetting them, as one is wont to do when you wake up and then go back to sleep. If I write them down, that act just keeps me awake for a long time, so I really need some kind of voice-activated recorder next to the bed.

Not that the dreams mean anything, but they’re weird enough to ponder. Last night, for instance, I dreamed that there were two types of chestnut trees, red ones and black ones, and one of them (but not the other, and I forget which one) could ensnare you by throwing their twigs around your arms or legs. Then you’d be in trouble! I woke up while trying to figure out whether a tree I’d encountered was a red or black one.

I won’t even try to interpret that—it clearly has something to do with a horse penis—but, after I woke up, and tried hard to fix that dream in my brain for the morning, I started thinking about something else: had I done anything really creative in my life? If so, what was it? Don’t ask me why that question arose: weird things emerge in the night from the adyts of your brain.

Well, even half asleep I knew how to answer that one. I did at least one creative thing, but it involved science rather than art or humanities.

It was writing half of the book Speciation (the other half was written by Allen Orr, and we tweaked each other’s sections). I recently reread the book while preparing to write a more popular version (Speciation is a technical work intended for students and professors in evolutionary biology, and you shouldn’t read it without the right background), and I was amazed at how creative I was around 2003. I kept thinking, “Damn, I was smart back then! What happened to me?”

I hasten to add that I could never write such a book now: I suppose either my brain has hardened out of a youthful suppleness, or I just no longer have the attention span to read and synthesize a gazillion papers. The book’s synthesis was, I think, truly creative, and I’ve done nothing before or after that I could say shows the same kind of creativity. (The book is now 13 years old.)

I’m not trying to brag here, but am giving this as my one example to prompt answers from readers, for as soon as I pondered the question I wanted to pose it to others. So, please, answer this question in the comments:

What is the most creative thing you’ve ever done?

Now it could be a single photograph, a book, an article, a painting or anything that show imagination out of the ordinary, like rearing a child in a creative way. Link to a photo or a post or a book, if you’d like, and don’t be modest.