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.
Here’s an Instagram that was tw**ted by Brooke Borel (who said “I can’t stop watching this”) and then passed on to me by Matthew Cobb. The description:
A saltwater crocodile propels its entire body out of the water with the power of its tail. This video was taken for a project on crocodiles sponsored by the National Geographic Society’s Expeditions council.
Click on the white arrow to start the short video:
I was immensely pleased with the response to our “Photograph Faith versus Fact in an incongruous place” contest, which closed on August 20. We’ve wound up with six groups of entries (links below), with the prize being an autographed (and cat-drawing-illustrated) copy of the book. This is the fifth group of entries, and thanks to Grania for collating them all and making several of the pots. Here is the latest and last compilation. The winner will be declared next week. The flush-left notes below are Grania’s, while the indented bits are the readers’ explanations:
Jonathan Harvey sent us a cleverly constructed shot:
Here is the contest entry. It may win more points for imagination than idiosyncracy, and may require too much explanation. The place is already incongruous in and of itself. The shot of me reading the book there simply highlights the already existing incongruity.
I am reading FvF standing against a lamppost situated right between the very modern architectured “Contemporary Jewish Museum” and the very old world architectured St. Patrick Catholic church, both on the same block in San Francisco on the northwest side of Mission Street, between 3rd and 4th street. The camera is midblock facing East.
In the bottom right, I have placed two thumbnails. (One may or may not be able to tell from the right thumbnail that “Contemporary Jewish Museum” is currently running an exhibit on the life of Amy Winehouse.) One is of the museum and church together with the camera facing about 180 degrees in the opposite direction 100 feet or so to the East, and also Google’s aerial view of the two buildings together. My own two pictures, the big picture and the right thumbnail are taken from the top and the bottom of the Google shot respectively. (This technically involves photoshopping, but not in the sense of falsifying the contents of the picture.)
Wikipedia has articles on each of the two structures are here. Wikipedia’s shot of the Jewish Museum also shows a bit of the church in the left.
Compo’s human Sara sent us this one:
London, England. St Alban’s wiki says that Germanus brought St Alban to more prominence when on a visit to England, St Alban came to him in a dream revealing his story. This included his executioner’s eyes popping out of his head so he couldn’t rejoice over the death. Faith or fact? I wonder. . .
Drew Wright sent this in;
Although their website calls him Brother Java, the roastmaster for Mystic Monk Coffee is actually Father Michael Mary. To support themselves and their ministry, the monks offer a wide selection of caffeinated and decaf coffees as well as mugs, brewing equipment, brown hoodies and even a CD — “Mystical Chants of Carmel.”
Last month I was in Poland on a business trip, and I took the opportunity to finally read Faith vs. Fact (I bought it when it came out, but these days there’s just too much work!). Anyway, I took some time and had a very pleasant afternoon finishing your latest at a sidewalk cafe in Kazimierz, the old Jewish Quarter in Krakow. Cognac, coffee, and a helping of Jewish Double Chocolate Cake aided my concentration.
I was wondering: have you got a pair of Boulet boots?
Though late here is my entry for Toronto..too risky for selfie.. 🙂
Me and FvF in front of the 60-foot-tall “Praying Hands” sculpture on the campus of Oral Roberts University (ORU) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The sculpture is said to have been based on a cast of the hands of televangelist Oral Roberts (1918-2009), the school’s founder. Roberts was (in)famous as a practitioner of “faith healing” and a proponent of the principle of “seed faith.” The full inscription on the sculpture is:ORAL ROBERTS UNIVERSITY – Educating the whole man – “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” Luke 2:52
One of the signs of increasing secularism, and of advancing morality as well, is the recognition that people who are terminally ill and wish to end their lives to avoid a horrible “natural” death should be allowed to do so. Three U.S. states—Oregon, Washington, and Vermont—already have such laws, and the California assembly just passed a similar bill, the “End of Life Option Act “. (The bill squeaked through the Senate, the other part of the legislature, a few months ago.) Most of the opposition to these bills comes from religion, especially Catholics and, in the UK and Canada, Anglicans.
The California Act stipulates that physicians can prescribe a life-ending dose of drugs (presumably barbiturates) after patients go through a three-part procedure: presenting two oral requests (15 days apart) to an attending physician, as well as one written request, which has to be signed in front of witnesses who declare the patient compos mentis. The act has been called the Brittany Maynard Bill, after the young woman who died of cancer in November of last year at age 29. As the Los Angeles Times reports:
. . . the proposal gained momentum after Californian Brittany Maynard, 29, moved to Oregon last year so she could end her life with drugs to avoid the debilitating effects of brain cancer. Her case was covered nationwide, and in a videotaped appeal before her death Maynard urged California lawmakers to pass the assisted-death legislation.
“I am heartbroken that I had to leave behind my home, my community and my friends in California, but I am dying and refuse to lose my dignity,” Maynard says in the video. “I refuse to subject myself and my family to purposeless prolonged pain and suffering at the hands of an incurable disease.”
The bill has been strenuously opposed by the Catholic Church, of course, who see end-of-life suffering as a good because, like the odious Mother Teresa, they think it’s what God wants. “Euthanasia,” as the Vatican calls it, is considered a grave sin by the Church—for both the patient and the doctors who assist the dying. How anybody can presume to pass such judgment on another person’s rational decision is beyond me. This is one of the ways that the tenets of religion violate standards of common decency.
The California Senate, which narrowly passed the bill, must revisit it, but I suspect it will go through, and then move to to governor Jerry Brown’s desk. Brown has, I believe, refused to say whether he’ll sign the bill, which is reprehensible. If he vetoes it, there won’t be enough votes to override his veto. If he vetoes this bill I will have lost every iota of respect I ever had for the man.
And this just in from reader David, who called my attention to a tw**t emitted by Ricky Gervais three days ago. Can anyone imagine a more screwed-up attitude than that evinced on the poster?
Here’s an anecdote about Mother Teresa—told by the Mother herself at the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast:
One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, “You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus–a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.” And she joined her hands together and said, “Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.”
Did she not see the irony?
Dilbert tells Dogbert that doesn’t think we have any—at least of the contracausal, “libertarian” sort.
I like the last panel, which goes along with brain-scanning experiments that give the surprising result that you can predict (with 60-70% accuracy) the results of a binary decision up to ten seconds before the person who “makes” that decision is conscious of having made it. Of course, compatibilists and libertarian free-will advocates have found reasons to dismiss these experiments as evidence for free will. This is one of many ways that such people resemble theologians (another is that they think that belief in free will—even of the compatibilist sort—is, like belief in God, essential to keep society moral and harmonious.)
h/t: jsp
Reader Tony Eales contributed some diverse photos from the Land Down Under:
I’ve been going through some of my old photos recently and thought I might offer some as possible Reader’s Wildlife photos.
We have a Crimson Rosella (Platycercus elegans) with a few flakes of snow on it. These are common in the Snowy Mountains and look amazing against the white.
A Black Swan (Cygnus atratus), one of the things that lead early Dutch explorers to think Australia was Oppositeland:
A swarm of Eucalyptus Shield Bug (Eumecopus patruelis) nymphs:
A Purple-Necked Rock Wallaby (Petrogale purpureicollis), a species that only recently got its species status as there was scepticism that the purple colouration came from rubbing against local rocks but the wallabies actually produce it as a sort of dye, which can wash off in rain and disappears soon after death, adding to the confusion.
ABC Science noted this in 2001:
The Purple-neck Rock Wallaby has finally been given species status, after 77 years of having its distinctive pigment doubted by sceptical scientists.
Petrogale purpureicollis, which lives in the Mount Isa region of northwest Queensland, Australia, is distinguished by the band of purple fur around its neck and head.
It was first identified by biologist A S Le Souef in 1924, but the purple pigment, which is secreted by the skin of the wallaby, disappears after 24 hours – so by the time his samples arrived at museums there was no pigment, and they looked like ordinary wallabies.
Here’s Tony’s photograph:
JAC: The color, which seems most prominent in males during the breeding season, may be some kind of sexual “dye” used to attract females. I had trouble finding a good picture of the purplish color, but here’s one from Wildpedia.com.au:
And a magnificent male Scrub Turkey (Alectura lathami):
We have four—count them, four—felid features today. The first is a short video showing how cats don’t give a damn what you do for them, so long as you feed them:
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And you probably remember Didga, the famous skateboarding cat, whom we’ve featured twice before. Well, now he’s got a friend, Boomer, who happens to be a beautiful BENGAL KITTEN:
I think they’re gonna be friends!
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And here is a selection of the ten best cat commercials ever. I’ve shown some of these before, but it’s nice to have them in once place. The first two are my favorites, with the second, “cat herding,” a work of true genius that bears repeated watching (you’ll miss stuff the first time). The eighth and ninth are very good as well:
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Finally, a report from the Independent that cats are “better” than dogs—at least from an evolutionary perspective. It summarizes a recent paper showing that, in North America, felid lineages were much more resistant to extinction than were lineages of canids. Indeed, some of the felids might have driven the canids extinct. I have the paper, but haven’t yet read it, as it’s technical and paleontological (not my area):
h/t: Amy, Robin
It’s another chilly and rainy day, with a high temperature predicted to be only 63°F, though it will rise to the eighties in a few days—summer’s last gasp. In this day in history, Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning (1846), John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (1953), Haile Selassie was deposed (1974), and the Greeks defeated the Persians in the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.; I’m not sure how they know the day of the year). And, in Dobrzyn, Hili shows a rare moment of empathy rather than her usual concern for her belly:
A: Hili…
Hili: Do not disturb. I’m dreaming about peace and I’m sending greetings to all nations of the world.
Ja: Hili…
Hili: Nie przeszkadzaj, śnię o pokoju i pozdrawiam wszystkie narody świata.
I always get more felids from readers than I can use, which makes selecting the Caturday Felids a bit trying. But I try to put up a few on Friday as well, just to round out the week with Our Favorite Animal. Here are two cat-related items.
First, an update on Cleopatra (Cleo) from Joyce Carol Oates. She got a Bengal kitten from breeder Anthony Hutcherson, who has offered me one, too, so I’m watching Cleo closely to see what rearing a Bengalet is like. I already have an idea that they’re quite active—one bit of evidence is the way Joyce headed her email: “Cleopatra’s nap time is a very good time for all.”
Here’s the lovely little girl, but she doesn’t look like she’s napping very hard!
And reader Su Gould sent a “cat delivery notice”, equivalent to what UPS puts on your door:
What’s Dawkins doing in there? They already list Satan!