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.
I have returned, and for you readers who long ago sent me photos of the Galapagos and other wild places, don’t worry: I still have the photos and will put them up in time. Today, however, as the trees have leafed out in my absence, we’re going to celebrate spring and rebirth with a few photos sent when I was in South Carolina.
Apparently, Desi and Lucy, Stephen Barnard’s bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), have produced chicks at last:
I got my first glimpse of the Aubrey Spring Ranch eagle chicks today as an adult was feeding them. Didn’t get a photo where they’re recognizable.
Here are some chicks from reader Robert:
Seeing that you’re on the road and asked for photos, I thought I’d pass this one on: of the nest built in the top corner of our balcony in Pasadena, California. Looks like a pretty snug fit.
When I asked for an ID, he added, “House finch [Haemorhous mexicanus] (according to my wife, who knows more about such things than me).” Readers can verify this.
Reader Randy from Iowa also sent a photo of a nest, and of two woodpeckers:
The first photo of a nest is most likely a swallow’s nest but until I can see the builder, it is just a guess. There are several items used including a lot of moss — still green as this nest is new. A very odd location I thought, because it is under a door entrance and less than 7 feet high. I hope it gets used but have doubts that it will.
Woodpeckers are always plentiful around here and this photo includes the Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) and the Hairy Woodpecker (Picoides villosus). I sometimes wonder if the name Red-bellied was used because Red Headed was already taken. Some people around here identify the Hairy Woodpecker as the Ladder-backed or the Nuttall’s Woodpecker but I think not. Those do not live in this part of the country.
Reader Mal Morrison sends this photo from “the edge of Dartmoor”:
This is a Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) feeding on a bud.
Whoops–gotta go feed the squirrels. One is banging on my office window for nuts!
I’m back in Chicago after a fine weekend. But now it’s time to write book talks for The Albatross which, one month from today, will be in fine bookstores everywhere. Meanwhile in Dobrazyn, The Princess of Poland has begun climbing again:
Hili: I’m a cat with my head in the clouds.
A: There are no clouds today.
Hili: This was a metaphor.
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem kotem z głową w chmurach.
Ja: Nie ma dziś chmur.
Hili: To jest metafora.
Jerry’s on a roll with the issuing orders thing today, and it must have been a pretty good day considering the subject of this post and our esteemed host’s usual (dis)regard for them.
I just got an order from PCC, who is about to board his ‘plane, to post this rather fabulous video of Sid, ‘gato goleiro’, filmed by Eberti Inacio playing footie (aka soccerball) with Pedro Henrique (Eberti’s son, who does a mean celebratory dance). Jerry also gave me this instruction: “Say something clever!!!!” I can’t think of anything, so here’s Sunday’s challenge: you come up with some smart comments!
I’ve long come to think of the Internet as the thing that has turned our planet into a village. With all the benefits that it brings, it also has turned the lives of some ordinary people into living nightmares once their sometimes small and sometimes imagined transgressions go viral on social media. I’m interested to see what Ronson has to say on the subject, and what solutions he suggests; although I fear that once the damage is done it is not easily undone.
This book looks like it has a bit of everything in it, but is essentially about empiricism vs activism, based on among other things, her own experiences on both sides of activism: an activist herself as well as a target of activists. It is a somewhat sobering thought; that something could be suppressed for social or political reasons. I remember Dan Dennett thoughtfully talking about this himself in the Four Horseman chat, about whether he could ever see himself deliberately suppressing knowledge that he thought would be harmful if it became public knowledge. He said he hoped not. Indeed. (The discussion is here if you want to see it).
However, as the reviewer notes:
When a motivated group with a playbook of ugly tactics spots a scientific finding they don’t like, they can often dominate public discussion in a way that replaces a factual story with a false one. Only scientists of Galilean character can weather the storm. And even they, like Galileo, might be effectively exiled.
That is pretty disconcerting. I’m definitely looking forward to reading this one.
Please feel free to add your own reading recommendations as well.
I (and Jerry) have been quite pleased by the reaction to my post on “Why I am not a Bayesian“. Despite being “wonkish“, it has generated quite a bit of interesting, high level, and, I hope, productive, discussion. It’s been, as Diane G. put it, “like a graduate seminar.” I’ve made a few forays into the comments myself, but have not responded to all, or even the most interesting, comments– I had a student’s doctoral dissertation defense to attend to the day the post went up, plus I’m not sure that having the writer weigh in on every point is the best way to advance the discussion. But I do have a few general observations to make, and do so here.
First, I did not lay out in my post what the likelihood approach was, only giving references to key literature. No approach is without difficulties and conundrums, and I’m looking forward to finding the reader-recommended paper “Why I am not a likelihoodist.” Among the most significant problems facing a likelihood approach are those of ‘nuisance’ parameters (probability models often include quantities that must be estimated in order to use the model, but in which you’re not really interested; there are Bayesian ways of dealing with these that are quite attractive), and of how to incorporate model simplicity into inference. My own view of statistical inference is that we are torn between two desiderata: to find a model that fits the data, yet retains sufficient generality to be applicable to a wider range of phenomena than just the data observed. It is always possible to have a model of perfect fit by simply having the model restate the data. In the limit, you could have the hypothesis that an omnipotent power has arranged all phenomena always and everywhere to be exactly as it wants, which hypothesis would have a likelihood of one (the highest it can be). But such an hypothesis contains within it an exact description of all phenomena always and everywhere, and thus has minimal generality or simplicity. There are various suggestions on how to make the tradeoff between fit (maximizing the likelihood of the model) and simplicity (minimizing the number of parameters in the model), and I don’t have the solution as to how to do it (the Akaike Information Criterion is an increasingly popular approach to doing so).
Second, there are several approaches to statistical inference (not just two, or even just one, as some have said), and they differ in their logical basis and what inferences they think possible or desirable. (I mentioned likelihood, Fisherian, Neyman-Pearson, Bayesian, and textbook hodge-podge approaches in my post, and that’s not exhaustive.) But it is nonetheless the case that the various approaches often arrive at the same general (and sometimes specific) conclusion in any particular inferential analysis. Discussion often centers on cases where they differ, but this shouldn’t obscure the at times broad agreement among them. As Tony Edwards, one of the chief promoters of likelihood, has noted, the usual procedures usually lead to reasonable results, otherwise we would have been forced to give up on them and reform statistical inference long ago. One of the remarks I did make in the comments is that most scientists are pragmatists, and they use the inferential methods that are available to them, address the questions they are interested in, and give reasonable results, without too much concern for what’s going on “under the hood” of the method. So, few scientists are strict Bayesians, Fisherians, or whatever– they are opportunistic Bayesians, Fisherians, or whatever.
Third, one of the differences between Bayesian and likelihood approaches that I would reiterate is that Bayesianism is more ambitious– it wants to supply a quantitative answer (a probability) to the question “What should I believe?” (or accept). Likelihoodism is concerned with “What do the data say?”, which is a less complete question, which leads to less complete answers. It’s not that likelihoodists (or Fisherians) don’t think the further questions are interesting, but just that they don’t think they can be answered in an algorithmic fashion leading to a numerical result (unless, of course, there is a valid objective prior). Once you have a likelihood result, further considerations enter into our inferential reasoning, such as
There is good reason to doubt a proposition if it conflicts with other propositions we have good reason to believe; and
The more background information a proposition conflicts with, the more reason there is to doubt it.
(from a list I posted of principles of scientific reasoning taken from How to Think about Weird Things). Bayesians turn these considerations into a prior probability; non-Bayesians don’t.
Fourth, a number of Bayesian readers have brought attention to the development of prior probability distributions that do properly represent ignorance– uninformative priors. This is the first of the ways forward for Bayesianism that I mentioned in my original post (“First, try really hard to find an objective way of portraying ignorance.”). I should mention in this regard that someone who did a lot of good work in this area was Sir Harold Jeffreys, whose Theory of Probability is essential, and which I probably should have included in my “Further Reading” list (I was trying not to make the list too long). His book is not, as the title would suggest, an exposition of the mathematical theory of probability, but an attempt to build a complete account of scientific inference from philosophical and statistical fundamentals. Jeffreys (a Bayesian) was well-regarded by all, including Fisher (a Fisherian, who despite, or perhaps because of, his brilliance got along with scarcely anyone). These priors have left some unconvinced, but it’s certainly a worthy avenue of pursuit.
Finally, a number of readers have raised a more philosophical objection to Bayesianism, one which I had included a brief mention of in a draft of my OP, but deleted in the interest of brevity and simplicity. The objection is that scientific hypotheses are not, in general, the sorts of things that have probabilities attached to them. Along with the above-mentioned readers, we may question whether scientific hypotheses may usefully be regarded as drawn from an urn full of hypotheses, some proportion of which are true. As Edwards (1992) put it, “I believe that the axioms of probability are not relevant to the measurement of the truth of propositions unless the propositions may be regarded as having been generated by a chance set-up.” Reader Keith Douglas put it, ” “no randomness, no probability”. Even in the cases where we do have a valid objective prior probability, as in the medical diagnosis case, it’s not so much that I’m saying the patient has a 16% chance of having the disease (he either does or doesn’t have it), but rather that individuals drawn at random from the same statistical population in which the patient is situated (i.e. from the same general population and showing positive on this test) would have the disease 16% of the time.
If we can array our commitments to schools of inference along an axis from strict to opportunistic, I am nearer the opportunistic pole, but do find the likelihood approach the most promising, and most worth developing further towards resolving its anomalies and problems (which all approaches, to greater or lesser degrees, suffer from).
While accusations of Islamophobia are being bandied about, conflating dislike of Muslims with the real issue, dislike of the tenets of Islam (in particular, those tenets that are violent or oppressive), nobody’s much worried about a real phobia: “Judeophobia,” which I’ll coin as a neologism for what it really is: anti-Semitism. In terms of hate crimes in the U.S. and Europe, there are roughly five times more committed against Jews than against Muslims.
All of which is to say that while Islamophobia is used as a common epithet (especially in the atheist blogosphere), we don’t hear much about a genuine animus against individuals of another ethnic group: Jews. (This, of course, is not to justify discrimination against anyone.)
So here’s a real instance of hate speech from a college campus. The University of California at Santa Barbara’s student senate voted Friday on whether to join the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel, which aims to bring Israel to its knees—and, ultimately, to dissolve that state—with economic and social pressure. The divestment resolution barely lost (12-12, with 5 abstaining), but Margaux Gundzik, a Jewish student who attended the meeting to oppose the resolution, wrote a letter to The Bottom Line (the UCSB student newspaper) detailing her experiences. I’ll excerpt just one paragraph to show the slurs that were raised by advocates for BDS:
Furthermore, I am disgusted by the normalization of anti-Semitic language so casually thrown around at the meeting. In those eight hours, I was told that Jews control the government, that all Jews are rich, that Zionism is racism, that the marginalization of Jewish students is justified because it prevents the marginalization of other minority groups, that Israel sterilizes its Ethiopian women (this is obviously not true), and that Palestinians in America who speak out against Israel are sought out by the IDF and denied entrance into Israel (also a ridiculous conspiracy theory). I heard a senator—someone who is supposed to be my representative—say that people were only voting against this resolution because they were afraid of losing “Jew support.” I heard my peers laugh at the mention of terrorists hurling stones at the heads of Israeli civilians intending to kill them. I saw students smile and cheer enthusiastically as a woman stood up and said the words, “I am ashamed to be a Jew.” The rhetoric I heard from students opposing Israel at this meeting could easily be equated to arguments that I have only seen in quotes at museums or mentioned in textbooks for their use in the justification of historical persecution of the Jewish race.
Well, Jews are not a race but a religious group, but that’s irrelevant here. They are a minority that, it seems, are reviled even more than Muslims. Many of the slurs above, like Jews being rich, in charge of the government, and so on are old staples of anti-Semitism, and the idea that “the marginalization of Jewish students is justified because it prevents the marginalization of other minority groups” is reprehensible—but typical of the distorted thinking of today’s college Social Justice Warriors.
Of course if such talk had been aimed at Muslims, blacks, gays, or anyone else, the campus would have recoiled in outrage. Gundzik notices this:
Ironically, it was the people who made these statements who also argued that this resolution was not anti-Semitic and that my personal feelings of it being anti-Semitic were invalid.
If any other minority had voiced these same concerns regarding any other resolution, no administration would dare question the validity of their feelings. The resolution would be dismissed without question. Yet, my community is forced to stand in front of hundreds of people year after year and explain to them why something is racially offensive to us.
By all means try to boycott Israel if you want—it’s your right to frame such resolutions—but be aware that the BDS movement’s explicit goals are to completely eliminate the state of Israel. And also be aware that the kind of statements made above (and I’ll take Gundzik at her word, because these accusations are so common) are not accusations against the state of Israel, are not accusations against the tenets of Judaism, but expressions of hate against Jewish people. I heard these more often when I was a kid, but thought that they had simply vanished from my country. Apparently they haven’t: they’ve just gone underground. And nowhere outside the Middle East are they more pervasive than on American college campuses.
UPDATE: Today’s New York Times has a story about anti-Semitism among European soccer fans, something completely new to me. An excerpt:
An ugly vein of soccer fan excess — the chanting of anti-Semitic slurs — recently disgraced a Dutch soccer game, prompting officials of the home team, Utrecht, to apologize for shocking outcries from the stands like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” and “Jews burn the best!”
Anyone who has been to a European match knows how badly things can get out of hand when pushed by brutish fans in the stands. But the Utrecht outrage in a game against Ajax Amsterdam laid bare what soccer supporters say is an epidemic of anti-Semitic outbursts.
The problem is getting worse, according to Kick It Out, a British watchdog organization, which said in March that there were more than 30 instances of anti-Semitic slurs reported in the first half of the season, surpassing last year, with chants of “Yids” and “Kill the Jews” heard at games attended by Jewish fans.
Seriously, in the Netherlands? Dutch readers, please explain! “Jews to the gas?”
I realized that the hyper-Christian (and pro-creationist) Bob Jones University was close to where I was going to talk yesterday (Furman University), so I asked my hosts to take me to BJU. I did so in the fervent hope that I could at last find Jesus, for if he’s real, he’s surely at Bob Jones University. Sadly, I did not find Jesus there despite my best efforts, I guess, à la Tanya Luhrmann, I just don’t have enough practice talking to God.
Fortunately, I was able to find Darwin, and so did about 100 other people. I think the talk went well, and there were a lot of questions. Although I talked for nearly an hour about evolution, and only about 7 minutes on religion, every question in the 45-min Q&A was about religion or sociology. I’m starting to think that The Albatross might be timely.
Jerry Coyne Overflow!!!
(Two photos above by Beth Purkhiser)
Afterwards we enjoyed a BBQ dinner with members of the Piedmont Humanists and the humanist group at the local Unitarian Universalist Church—the first time I’ve been inside a church in years. It was a great meal catered by Mutt’s BBQ: chopped Carolina pork BBQ with various sauces, fried chicken, potato salad, sweet potato casserole, sweet tea, and lemonade, with a luscious peach cobbler for dessert. You can’t get more southern than that! And, at the “table of honor”, I found this place card, courtesy of reader and artist Su Gould:
At the next table there was this placecard:
As lagniappe after dessert, I was presented with this gorgeous hand-decorated tiger cookie, also courtesy of Ms. Gould. I don’t know whether to eat it or frame it!:
