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.
The combination of somewhat overcast skies and sunrise made for a lovely view of downtown Chicago this morning. Click to enlarge, though, with a shutter speed of about 1/5 of a second, it’s not very sharp:
Good morning: we’ve reached the end of another week, which means that, without exception, we’re all another week closer to the grave. It’s June 16, 2017, and National Fudge Day (in the US), as well as Sussex Day (in Sussex), which occurs on St Richard’s Day, the feast day of Sussex’s patron Saint, St Richard of Chichester. Raise your hand if you have a Sussex connection. And, if you know your Joyce, you’ll know that it’s also Bloomsday (see below).
On this day in 1871, Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Universities absolished religious tests for student enrollment, except for theology students. Were there no Jewish or Muslim students before that, or simply no atheists? On this day in 1904 (see above), James Joyce met his future wife Nora Barnacle, and this is the precise day on which all the action in Ulysses takes place. There will be toasts and tours in Dublin on this Bloomsday; and I’ve just found out that our own Matthew Cobb is in Dublin today for a family birthday! On this day in 1904, IBM was founded in Endicott, New York under the name “The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company”. And a depressing anniversary: on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney, Jr. became the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. He was only 14 years old and the trial was a travesty. Wikipedia describes it like this:
Stinney was convicted in less than 10 minutes, during a one-day trial, by an all-white jury of the first-degree murder of two white girls: 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames. After being arrested, Stinney was said to have confessed to the crime. There was no written record of his confession apart from notes provided by an investigating deputy, and no transcript was recorded of the brief trial. He was denied appeal and executed by electric chair.
Here’s his mug shot.
Finally, on this day in 1961, dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union.
Notables born on this day include Adam Smith (1723), Edward Davy (1806), Stan Laurel (1890), two scientists, Barbara McClintock and George Gaylord Simpson (both 1902), Joyce Carol Oates (1938) and Tupac Shakur (1971). Not many notables died on this day; I have but one: George “Superman” Reeves” (1959). In honor of Joyce’s birthday, here’s a photo I snapped of her holding a Bengal cat (breeder: Anthony Hutcherson) at the Great New Yorker Cat versus Dog Debate in 2014. After meeting that Bengal (which I put into her arms), she adopted one from Anthony, and named it Cleopatra (“Cleo” for short”):
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili can’t help calling attention to her stunning beauty:
Hili: I think that our readers like pictures of poppies.A: That’s true.Hili: I hope they will notice me as well.
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że nasi czytelnicy bardzo lubią zdjęcia maków.
Ja: To prawda.
Hili: Mam nadzieję, że mnie też zauważą.
And nearby in Wloclawek, Leon is excited at the prospect of finally catching a bird:
Leon: Why is it flying around? It could land close to me!
Via Grania, here are Simon’s real cats (Simon Tofield has four of them, one named Teddy—like my last cat). Press the blue button to play.
Ever wondered what the Simon's Cats are called? 🤗 💚 pic.twitter.com/MrQs7pNryM
— Simon's Cat (@SimonsCat) June 15, 2017
And Matthew found some spiffy looking rabbits:
Note by JAC: Greg has just returned from two weeks in Japan and will be writing us several posts about his experiences there. This one features soccer, a sport Greg plays.
by Greg Mayer
Are you big in Japan? Cristiano Ronaldo is, at least as judged by the prominence of his much-larger-than-life visage on the entrance to Soccer Shop KAMO in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
I went in to the shop, on Koshu Kaido Avenue, a bustling commercial boulevard that separates Shinjuku from Shibuya in modern west Tokyo, during a recent visit to Japan.
The shop has multiple floors, but I only visited the first, which features jerseys and other branded merchandise, from local teams like FC Tokyo, but also clubs from around the world. Manchester United has long been known as an international brand, especially in Asia, but judging by the merchandise on display, Barcelona and Chelsea are the most popular (not Ronaldo’s Real Madrid).
Although best known for sumo and baseball, Japan is an up-and-coming power in world football, having co-hosted the 2002 World Cup with Korea, and with a number of players in top European leagues. I saw some fields and players at a distance on Honshu, but on Okinawa I got to see youth and adult players up close.
Especially interesting was a beach soccer team practice and scrimmage I got to watch at Araha Beach on Okinawa. Because sand is a high-friction, uneven surface, beach soccer is played largely in the air, with moving the ball off the head, chest, and thighs as important as the feet, and even passes with the foot being mostly aerial chips over defenders. This goal keeper (making a save in the photo) would receive the ball, advance it by juggling from one thigh to the other, then drop the ball from his left thigh and take a ferocious volley shot with his right foot. Because of the shorter field, this was a very productive approach for the offense, and reminded me of foosball, where the goal keeper is often the most dangerous attacking piece.
In the following short video, you can get a sense of the aerial nature of the game, as the play advances from the backfield to a shot on goal without the ball ever touching the ground.
And in this short video, you can see a player (he was one of the best) receiving a corner kick and then setting up his own bicycle kick. Bicycle kicks are very rare in regular soccer, but there were a few during this one brief scrimmage.
The fitness and skill of the players is phenomenal.
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) describes the grave of her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, who was killed in a plane crash at age 44. This is some of the most evocative prose I know (I’ve highlighted it before, I know, but you can’t read stuff like this too often). And remember, English wasn’t her first language. The last four paragraphs, and especially the last two, are ineffably beautiful.
I often drove out to Denys’s grave. In a bee-line, it was not more than five miles from my house, but round by the road it was fifteen. The grave was a thousand feet higher up than my house, the air was different here, as clear as a glass of water; light sweet winds lifted your hair when you took off your hat; over the peaks of the hills, the clouds came wandering from the East, drew their live shadow over the wide undulating land, and were dissolved and disappeared over the Rift Valley.
I bought at the dhuka a yard of the white cloth which the Natives call Americani, and Farah and I raised three tall poles in the ground behind the grave, and nailed the cloth on to them, then from my house I could distinguish the exact spot of the grave, like a little white point in the green hill.
The long rains had been heavy, and I was afraid that the grass would grow up and cover the grave so that its place would be lost. Therefore one day we took up all the whitewashed stones along my drive, the same that Karomenya had had trouble in pulling up and carrying to the front door; we loaded them into my box-body car and drove them up into the hills. We cut down the grass round the grave, and set the stones in a square to mark it; now the place could always be found.
As I went so often to the grave, and took the children of my household with me, it became a familiar place to them; they could show the way out there to the people who came to see it. They built a small bower in the bush of the hill near it. In the course of the summer, Ali bin Salim, whose friend Denys had been, came from Mombasa to go out and lie on the grave and weep, in the Arab way.
One day I found Hugh Martin by the grave, and we sat in the grass and talked for a long time. Hugh Martin had taken Denys’s death much to heart. If any human being at all had held a place in his queer seclusive existence, it would have been Denys. An ideal is a strange thing, you would never have given Hugh credit for harbouring the idea of one, neither would you have thought that the loss of it would have affected him, like, somehow, the loss of a vital organ. But since Denys’s death he had aged and changed much, his face was blotched and drawn. All the same he preserved his placid, smiling likeness to a Chinese Idol, as if he knew of something exceedingly satisfactory, that was hidden to the general. He told me now that he had, in the night, suddenly struck upon the right epitaph for Denys. I think that he had got it from an ancient Greek author, he quoted it to me in Greek, then translated it in order that I should understand it. It went: “Though in death fire be mixed with my dust yet care I not. For with me now all is well.”
Later on, Denys’s brother, Lord Winchilsea, had an obelisk set on his grave, with an inscription out of “The Ancient Mariner,” which was a poem that Denys had much admired. I myself had never heard it until Denys quoted it to me,—the first time was, I remember, as we were going to Bilea’s wedding. I have not seen the obelisk; it was put up after I had left Africa.
In England there is also a monument to Denys. His old schoolfellows, in memory of him, built a stone bridge over a small stream between two fields at Eton. On one of the balustrades is inscribed his name, and the dates of his stay at Eton, and on the other the words: “Famous in these fields and by his many friends much beloved.”
Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of his life; it is an optical illusion that it seemed to wind and swerve,—the surroundings swerved. The bow-string was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.
After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”
It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.
This is worth only a short mention, but I add it here to keep a record. If you’ve been following the Demonization of Bret Weinstein by the Assembled Authoritarians of The Evergreen State College (TESC) you’ll know that after being threatened and told by campus police that they couldn’t protect him, biology professor Bret Weinstein and his family have moved. We now learn from an article in The Olympian, the local paper, that he temporarily moved out of state for safety—and told the College that he did so. Yet the College spokesperson claims that Weinstein is back in Washington State and is on campus. This is either gross communication or a lie; Weinstein (as do I) think it’s the latter:
College spokesman Zach Powers said Weinstein already has returned to his job, and that he’s aware that the college has beefed up its security measures.
“I understand faculty member Bret Weinstein returned to campus just over a week ago to teach in his normally assigned classroom,” Powers told The Olympian on Tuesday afternoon. “He has been notified by Evergreen Police Services of additional law enforcement present on campus.”
Weinstein said Tuesday that is not true.
“If college administrators say I was on campus last week, they are lying,” he told The Olympian. “I left campus when it was evacuated on the morning of June 1. I held my afternoon class in a downtown park that day, and left the state with my family that evening. We have not been in Washington since, and some administrators know that.”
Zach Powers is rapidly becoming the Sean Spicer of Evergreen. Meanwhile, in a frighting display of Faculty Fascism, the teachers at TESC continue to claim that Weinstein’s actions have endangered them (Jebus!), and that he shouldn’t have told his story in public. Yes, I guess they think that when they and the students ostracize a man for writing a simple and reasonable email, he should just shut up and take the blows from the students wielding baseball bats. (I suspect their real motivation isn’t their safety, because they’re not in danger, but that they’re fearful of they and the College looking bad via truthful and widespread publicity.) But in taking on Weinstein, TESC bit off more than it could chew, for the man is passionate, relentless, and implacable in his criticism of the postmodern virus that infects the College. I hope Weinstein sues the hell out of them.
The Olympian reports this:
A group of Evergreen faculty members told The Olympian editorial board last week that they believe Bridges should investigate Weinstein’s actions, saying he helped escalate racial tension on campus by taking his views to Fox News, The Joe Rogan Experience and elsewhere. They said that some faculty members have gotten death threats, and are meeting with their classes off-campus, due to safety concerns.
“I don’t know how I can go back and teach given that I have been portrayed as the reason that Evergreen is in crisis,” Weinstein told Carlson.
Well, perhaps there’s some other college that wants two superb biology teachers (Weinstein’s wife Heather Heying also taught at Evergreen) who are reasonable, calm, and honest.
British writer Kenan Malik, whom I like, has just waded into shark-filled waters in his short New York Times essay: “In defense of cultural appropriation.” Most of the “appropriation” he describes isn’t repugnant to many of us: the controversy about a white woman’s painting of Emmett Till, a black teenager murdered by Southern racists; Lionel Shriver’s assertion of the right of the novelist to write from any viewpoint; and the appropriation of black music by Elvis Presley (and I could add the Beatles). In general, I favor cultural appropriation so long as appropriate attention is given to those whose work was heavily used. At this moment I’m wearing my pounamu (jade) pendant that I got in New Zealand. It’s an appropriation from Maori culture, and if anybody asks I’ll tell them what it is, but I don’t feel bad for wearing it and don’t feel I’m exploiting Maoris.
As far as writers writing about characters whose sex, class, or ethnicity they don’t share—have at it! If it doesn’t work, the marketplace will sort it out, but clearly there are many great works of literature that have involved both cultural and gender borrowing in this way.
There has been some fracas about this in Canada (see here and here), and perhaps Malik doesn’t give that enough attention, but in general I agree with his essay. What has ticked people off is his claim that those who say that authors of “foreign” background can’t write about the complainers’ community are “gatekeepers”, and can even be exercising a form of xenophobic separatism. As Malik says, “It is difficult to see how creating gated cultures helps promote social justice.” One quote about the Emmett Till painting:
In 1955, Emmett Till’s mother urged the publication of photographs of her son’s mutilated body as it lay in its coffin. Till’s murder, and the photographs, played a major role in shaping the civil rights movement and have acquired an almost sacred quality. It was from those photos that Ms. Schutz began her painting.
To suggest that she, as a white painter, should not depict images of black suffering is as troubling as the demand by some Muslims that Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” should be censored because of supposed blasphemies in its depiction of Islam. In fact, it’s more troubling because, as the critic Adam Shatz has observed, the campaign against Ms. Schutz’s work contains an “implicit disavowal that acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification, are possible across racial lines.”
Seventy years ago, racist radio stations refused to play “race music” for a white audience. Today, antiracist activists insist that white painters should not portray black subjects. To appropriate a phrase from a culture not my own: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
What is it about social media that turns people into sacks of hatred? Many of Malik’s critics clearly didn’t read his article, let alone bother to look up the skin color of the “white supremacist” who wrote it! (Malik was born in India.) 
h/t: Enrico, Bruce
Well, this time I can have unalloyed Schadenfreude, as I dislike HuffPo so intensely. Grania often asks me why I even read it, and my answer is “Why do we smell the milk in the carton even though we know it’s gone bad?” Here’s their headline (click on screenshot to see the good news):
I was surprised at this since PuffHo pays many of their contributors nothing—a form of exploiting people by promising them “exposure” while profiting from those poor wannabe writers. So much for their avowal to create more economic equity (see below).
Here’s part of the report:
HuffPost laid off over three-dozen [JAC n.b.: there is no hyphen in “three-dozen”] employees Wednesday, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, as part of broader corporate cutbacks.
The creation of a new Verizon digital unit called Oath, following the acquisition of Yahoo, is expected to result in roughly 2,100 layoffs. Verizon owns AOL, HuffPost’s parent company.
Writers Guild of America, East, HuffPost’s union, said Wednesday that they were notified of 39 members being laid off.
. . . The HuffPost layoffs come as Lydia Polgreen, who took over as editor-in-chief earlier this year, is assembling a newsroom leadership team, which includes former Daily News Editor-in-Chief Jim Rich, and charting a new editorial vision. She recently oversaw a rebranding of the site, which was co-founded by Arianna Huffington, who left the company in August.
. . . Polgreen and HuffPost CEO Jared Grusd praised outgoing employees’ “dedication and admirable passion” in an email to staff.
“We’ve spoken publicly about our mission to build HuffPost into the most impactful news brand in the world, and we are steadfast on our commitment to fulfilling that mission,” they wrote. “But today is not a day to talk about the steps we’re taking there, but to pause and reflect on our colleagues and to celebrate their contributions to HuffPost.”
As for “the most impactful news brand in the world”, well, that ain’t gonna happen so long as HuffPo reports only news that fits its ideological biases, which are resolutely anti-Trump and pro-Regressive Leftism. I, too, hate Trump, but his Presidency has driven the site literally insane, peppering article after article with gratuitous and irrelevant slurs on The Donald. And when their equivalent of an editorial writer is Samantha Bee, who’s treated as if she’s the equivalent of Rachel Maddow in political commentary, then you know something’s wrong.
I hope the rag goes under, as it’s an embarrassment to the Left. The only loss to me will be its use as a source of Islamophilic articles: the endless stream of PuffHo pieces celebrating the wonders of the Religion of Peace and the bravery of hijabis—pieces that have given me so much fodder to discuss.
As for their new mission under editor Polgreen, I’ve written about it before: it’s pure social-justice warriorism, not the dissemination of news. While the editor’s mission statement sounds good, it’s really a cover to advance a Regressive Leftist agenda, one that damages true progressives:
I think we can do better for people who feel that too much political and economic power has accrued to a very small elite. People who feel they are on the outside looking in at the prosperity created by globalization and technological transformation. That the game is rigged; that the deck is stacked against them; who feel that the house always wins. That definition includes many, many people who voted for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I suspect it also includes the majority of people who voted for Trump. It certainly encompasses voters on both sides of Brexit and the French presidential vote that took place over the weekend.
For me, the biggest divide in America, indeed across the globe, is between those who have power and those who don’t, and that doesn’t easily line up with our red and blue, left or right politics. The media has come up short in telling the story of one side of that divide ― of the people experiencing anger, voicelessness and powerlessness.
Here’s how they empower the marginalized:
HuffPo: A combination of People magazine and Salon.