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 Merilee sent me a link to this video, and the machine is flipping amazing—it grinds up whole cars into fragments, glass, wheels, and engines. Be sure to watch toward the end when the Beast pulverizes a bunch of engine blocks. I don’t know how the Red Giant does it, but the YouTube video comes with this information in Polish (translations welcome):
W polsce przydałaby się taka do mielenia źle zaparkowanych samochodów
I can’t bear to watch this: like many people, I can’t stand to see myself on video or television. But I suppose I’ll have to, because when I did this segment with two other guests on Lawrence O’Donnell’s “The Last Word” show on MSNBC, I was in a tiny, soundproof room looking into a camera lens, listening through an earpiece and unable to see the other guests. So this is my chance to see the whole thing. I’m writing this without having watched it. (O’Donnell apparently found me because of my New Republic piece on the issue.)
. . .
Okay, now I’ve watched it. It’s okay, especially because O’Donnell comes down hard on the President’s “pandering to religion,” and also on Obama’s disingenuous avoidance of the word “Muslim” or “Islam” when referring to ISIS. Still, I would have appreciated it if O’Donnell had let the guests talk more, and I’m not just referring to myself. There was potential for a good debate here. Sadly, there wasn’t much time, and all we could do was emit a sound bite or two. In general, we were in agreement, but I thought Nomani was particularly good. Salbi, however, seems to think that the essence of Islam is beneficent, and if she were to admit that ISIS was really a Muslim movement, it would somehow “legitimize” their violence. She also feels that Obama’s waffling is a good strategy for “opening a dialogue” about Islam. Tell that to the Islamic State!
Nevertheless, it’s good that this kind of unpopular criticism gets on the air at all. Thank Ceiling Cat for MSNBC, the palliative for Fox News. Here are the YouTube notes; I’ve linked to the other guests so you can see their bios:
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC, 2-5-2015, with Professor Jerry Coyne, Zainab Salbi, Asra Nomani.
The right-wing site Newsbusters was predicatably outraged by the segment.
h/t: Matt
It’s a sad situation that the only newspaper in the U.S. that still has a full science section is the New York Times (it’s on Tuesday), and even much of that is devoted to “health”. Other papers seem to act as “article aggregators,” with poorly-trained science journalists simply accepting a new finding at face value based on the authors’ claims or on what the authors’ universities put out in their press release (Science Daily is notorious for uncritically regurgitating such claims.)
But, as always with striking new results, it’s caveat emptor. Remember how the papers jumped all over the findings of arsenic bacteria (i.e., bacteria using arsenic in their DNA), a finding that was later refuted? Most of the papers that heralded this bacterium as a “new form of life” didn’t devote much (or any) space to the refutation. For showing that a fancy new result is actually a flash in the pan is merely “dog bites man” stuff.
A good example of uncritical reporting is a piece by Sarah Kaplan in Wednesday’s Washington Post: “The mysterious 2-billion-year-old creature that would make Darwin smile.” It is, of course the bacterium that I wrote about the same day: a sulfur-metabolizing microbe whose morphology (and metabolic sulfur products) seem to have been unchanged for over two billion years. Kaplan’s reference to “Darwin’s smile” refers to the authors’ claim that their results supports Darwinism’s “null hypothesis”: we don’t expect evolution in an unchanging environment.
There are two problems with both the original paper by J. W. Schopf et al. and Kaplan’s summary of it. See my critique for much more information:
1. “Darwin’s null hypothesis,” as the authors and Kaplan present it, is flatly wrong: we sometimes do expect evolution in an unchanging environment; and if we found it, it certainly wouldn’t be a severe problem for evolutionary theory (see below).
2. The authors show only relative stasis (lack of change) in the appearance of the sea-floor bacteria and in the compounds they excrete. They have no way of showing whether other traits or genes have remained static over two billion years. For example, any genes affecting the efficiency of sulfur uptake, or of the rate of reproduction of the bacteria, might have changed but simply couldn’t be detected in the material examined.
But Kaplan couldn’t be bothered to dig beneath the surface of the authors’ claims; in fact, the two people she quotes about the paper were both authors of it! Here’s part of her report:
“The microbes we see in the fossils are almost identical to what we see in the ocean now,” study co-author Malcolm Walter, a professor of astrobiology at the University of New South Wales, told The Washington Post in a telephone interview. “They have similar shapes and are doing similar chemistry.”
But the fact these particular organisms successfully avoided evolving for billions of years doesn’t disprove the theory of evolution — quite the opposite.
Darwin’s theory states that species evolve through natural selection in response to environmental changes — increased threats from predators, new competition from other animals, changes in access to water or air. But the inverse is also true: If there is no change in the environment of a balanced ecosystem, the organisms that constitute it should remain similarly unchanged — a principle dubbed evolution’s “null hypothesis.”
“These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and biological environment,” the study’s lead author, University of California at Los Angeles professor William Schopf, said in a university press release. “If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed.”
(Note the reliance on the “university press release,” an organ dedicated to puffing up the results of university scientists.)
Schopf, otherwise a very good paleobiologist, is simply wrong here. I bet if you examined the genomes of the 2-billion-year-old bacterium and its modern descendants (if they are descendants), you’ve find ample genetic change, not just in “neutral” sites, but in genes that actually do something. Of course we can’t study that, for we can’t sequence the genome of an ancient bacterium; but even if we found such change, it wouldn’t violate evolutionary theory in the slightest.
It’s time for reputable newspapers to hire science reporters that do more than simply recycle press releases and do perfunctory puff-pieces based on superficial investigation. There are still some science writers who dig into papers, interviewing a variety of scientists—and not just authors of the paper at issue—who can shed light on new discoveries. These including Faye Flam, Carl Zimmer (who, along with several bloggers, called out the so-called missing link Darwinius), and Natalie Angier. Angier works for the paper, Zimmer publishes there often, and Flam has recently had a piece there. Where are the other papers?
In a world in which science is becoming ever more important, and in which vital political decisions demand scientific literacy (e.g., vaccinations, global warming, and so on), it’s shameful that newspapers are simply pruning the science out of their columns. Or, in the case of the Post, publishing fluff that will produce a serious misunderstanding of what evolutionary theory says.
Naturally the petulant Professor Ceiling Cat has left a comment on the Post site. I hope it stays up.
I thought I’d put up some of the rest of my India photos (I suspect there will be two or three more installments, one featuring d*gs). I found that I still had food pictures, and some others as well.
A sari shop at night, Kolkata:
The king of Indian yogurt sweets: misthi doi (also called mitha dahi, or “sweet yogurt” in Hindi). It is silky, creamy, and scrumptious. This was served to me at a small, unprepossessing but locally famous sweet shop—one that’s so humble that you’d never enter unless an Indian friend told you about it. Wikipedia describes this famous Bengali snack as follows;
Mitha Dahi is a popular dessert in the states of West Bengal, Odisha and Bangladesh. It is prepared by boiling milk until it is slightly thickened, sweetening it with sugar, either guda/gura (brown sugar) or khajuri guda/gura (date molasses), and allowing the milk to ferment overnight. Earthenware is always used as the container for making Mitha Dahi because the gradual evaporation of water through its porous walls not only further thickens the yoghurt, but also produces the right temperature for the growth of the culture. Very often the yoghurt is delicately seasoned with a pinch of elaichi (cardamom) for fragrance.
This portion was indeed scooped from a big earthenware pot:
Another sweet shop that we patronized. Sweets are always made on the premises. My host, Shubhra, is on the left:
One of the sweets for sale. I’m not sure what this was, as we didn’t buy it, but it’s attractively decorated with rose petals and cost 10 rupees (16 cents) each:
Lunch at a friend’s: a home cooked vegetarian meal of cauliflower, peas, and kachuri (Bengali bread filled with mashed peas). This was one of the best home-cooked meals I had, and was washed down with mango juice. There were, of course, sweets afterwards.
Offerings on sale at a nearby Hindu temple; they include food, incense, and other stuff. You buy yourself merit by offering these to the gods in a private ceremony, off limits to Western eyes. After the god (goddess in this case) “eats” the food (metaphorically) in a ceremony called darshan, they’re then offered to the poor:
South Indian food in Kolkata: medhu vadai: savory “donuts” (not sweet) made with lentil flour. Eaten as a snack, they’re dipped into the coconut chutney (on the left) and nommed with sambar, the spicy soup on the right. Here they were served in traditional fashion on a banana leaf.
Perhaps my favorite South Indian dish: an uttapam (this one with tomatoes and onions), a savory pancake made with a rice- and lentil-flour batter. You must eat it with copious lashings of the wonderful coconut chutney that’s ubiquitous in South Indian meals:
A paan shop, where various mixtures are rolled into betel leaves to act as a digestive or as a stimulant. Stalls have different reputations; this was supposedly one of the better ones in Kolkata:
Here’s the paan-maker, whpping up a bunch of mitha paans (sweet paans) for ourselves and the extended family:
A fancier paan stall at the Poush Mela fair in Santiniketan. Note the variety of ingredients you can choose:
A chaat (savory snack) stall at the same fair. Indians are very good at arraying their noms in an attractive and tempting way:
Breakfast: an Indian kedgiree, but made with non-rice grains (I have yet to suss this out) served with bananas and fresh papaya:
Jhal muri: a savory snack with puffed rice and spices that I’ve shown before:
Finally, one of the beautiful sights of India: a woman in a sari with glossy braids draped over her back. The women often anoint their hair with coconut oil:
Cat news seems to come in threes: here are this week’s Caturday news items, with an extra photo for lagniappe:
Remember Bart the Zombie cat, who was supposedly hit by a car, and then, supposedly showing no sign of life, was buried by his owner? Bart then supposedly revived, clawed his way out of his grave, and was returned to that owner.
I became a bit suspicious about it all when I found out that the cat’s owner (Ellis Hutson) and the woman who found Bart had jointly set up an online GoFundMe account asking for money for Bart’s vet bills, but that the Florida Humane Society taking care of Bart hadn’t received any money (Bart’s care is free, anyway). That smelled like a scam. (The account is now up to $6,614.)
Sure enough, an executive of the Humane Society of Tampa Bay pronounced that Bart had probably been buried alive while still moving. And now I wonder whether his injuries, too, were inflicted by his owner (he had a broken jaw, severe facial lacerations, and lost an eye). Here he is getting treatment:
KY3 reports:
Sherry Silk of the Humane Society of Tampa Bay told the The Huffington Post she thinks those who buried the cat knew Bart was breathing.
The cat’s owner, Ellis Wayne Hutson, told news outlets last month that Bart rose from the grave. Hutson said he had neighbors bury the cat after Bart was hit by a car and appeared dead. The cat showed up five days later covered in dirt and seriously injured, according to reports.
According to HuffPo, Silk is suspicious because of a YouTube video in which a woman’s voice can be heard saying that the cat might not have been dead. She also said the chronology of when Hutson sought care for Bart after his Lazarus act keeps changing.
CNN reports that the Humane Society will not return Bart to his owner:
Since the attention Bart received after he allegedly “rose from the dead,” more information has surfaced about Bart’s “home environment and the circumstances leading up to his burial,” Sherry Silk, executive director of the Tampa Humane Society said in a release.
According to Polk County, Florida, court documents, Hutson was arrested in 1998 and charged with cruelty to animals. The nature of the charges is unclear, and the charges were later thrown out.
Silk says that though the video was the first red flag, she has other reasons for not wanting to return Bart.
One point of contention is the length of time that Hutson took to seek care for Bart — whose injuries included severe head trauma, a broken jaw and a dead eye — after Bart came home. She says the owner’s timeline regarding when he found the cat and when he brought the cat in for care keeps changing.
Hutson, however, told HuffPost his story has remained the same from the get-go. He says as soon as he found Bart, he called the Humane Society, and the staff member who answered the phone told him that he should bring Bart in the next morning “if he was still alive.” Hutson says he then attempted to treat the cat’s injuries himself, and brought Bart in the next day as instructed.
Silk says there is no way that a Humane Society staffer would say this without urging Hutson to seek emergency care for Bart immediately.
She also expressed concern about Hutson’s ability to provide a home environment suited to Bart’s needs. Silk said Hutson seemed unwilling to keep Bart inside if he goes back home, which would be necessary for an animal recovering from such severe injuries. Hutson, however, told HuffPost that “Bart will be an indoor cat for the rest of his life,” and added that he has been telling Silk this from the start.
We don’t know all the details here, and perhaps never will, but this is sufficiently suspicious that I think Bart should be removed from his owner and given to a loving home. (I don’t know what can be legally done about this.) And that, I hope, is what will happen, though Hutson vows to go to court. If he doesn’t, you’ll know that there was foul play afoot.
In the meanwhile, Bart took his first bites of food four days ago, an event recorded by the Humane Society, which notes: “he will still need the feeding tube and feedings every 4 hours for the next few weeks as he is unable to eat enough on his own to sustain him.”
Good luck, Bart!
*******
The Humane Society saved Bart’s life, and here is Ceiling Cat’s reciprocation: a cat saved the life of a baby. Or so The Dodo reports:
A baby found abandoned in a box on a cold winter day in Russia is alive and well today — all thanks to one cat’s life-saving cuddles.
As Russian news outlet Pravda reports, the two-month-old baby boy was discovered near the dumpsters of an apartment complex in the city of Obinsk, after resident Nadezhda Makhovikova heard the desperate meowing of the building’s communal cat, Murka.
When Makhovikova arrived to investigate, she found the long-haired tabby cat cuddled alongside the helpless infant, sheltering him from the sub-freezing temperatures like she would her own kitten.
“One side [of the baby] was already hot — [the] cat warmed [him] in the few hours he spent in her box,” Makhovikova says, as translated by Google.
Murka remained close by, reportedly licking the baby until paramedics arrived to take him to the hospital. Fortunately, the child is said to be “completely healthy,” no doubt because of Murka’s help.
Here’s a video of Murka, and you can see that he must have had substantial warming abilities. But a “communal cat”? Is this still Soviet Russia?
*******
Reader Taskin sent a video of a cat trying to find the Door Into Summer, but discovers only more snow. He seems to have dug himself though that large drift, but gets affronted when he gets outside and finds—more snow!
The video was apparently filmed in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, and has the caption “rudiger only kind of loves the snow”, with the ancillary information, “battle cat trying to deal with the four foot snow drift.” Battle cat, indeed! Taskin added that New Brunswick got 140 cm (55 inches, or 4.5 feet) of snow in a week! And the video has garnered over 1.25 million views since it was posted four days ago.
*******
Finally, as lagniappe, Matthew Cobb reports that his new kitten, Harry, despite some initial bumps as he entered a house with two adult male cats, is finally getting comfortable with them. Here’s Harry snuggled up with one of the residents, Ollie:
Hili: Here I sit and can no other.A: I understand that you want to come inside?Hili: Yes, my paws are freezing.
Hili: Tu siedzę, inaczej nie mogę.
Ja: Rozumiem, że chcesz wejść do domu?
Hili: Tak, łapki mi zmarzły.
Trigger warning: frozen Buddhist
This is an ex-monk. He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He has joined the choir invisible:
According to the BBC News, this monk’s body (his robes are beside him in the photo) was found frozen and preserved in Mongolia. There’s no telling how long he’s been dead, but the Mongolian climate probably freeze-dried the body, explaining the remarkable preservation.
The thing is, though, that some Buddhists think he’s alive!
But Dr Barry Kerzin, a physician to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, told the Siberian Times that the monk was in a rare state of meditation called “tukdam”.
“If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha,” Dr Kerzin said.
The monk was discovered after being stolen by a man hoping to sell him on the black market.
Mongolian police have arrested the culprit and the monk is now being guarded at the National Centre of Forensic Expertise.
The Siberian Times piece adds this:
Dr Barry Kerzin, a famous Buddhist monk and a physician to the Dalai Lama, said: ‘I had the privilege to take care of some meditators who were in a tukdam state.
‘If the person is able to remain in this state for more than three weeks – which rarely happens – his body gradually shrinks, and in the end all that remains from the person is his hair, nails, and clothes. Usually in this case, people who live next to the monk see a rainbow that glows in the sky for several days. This means that he has found a ‘rainbow body’. This is the highest state close to the state of Buddha’.
He added: ‘If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha. Reaching such a high spiritual level the meditator will also help others, and all the people around will feel a deep sense of joy’.
Now perhaps you can be dead and still be in a “meditative state,” but I don’t know how that works, nor have I heard anything about that in my fragmentary readings about Buddhism.
Regardless, though, this nonsense shows that not all Buddhists are rationalists. Buddhism is often praised for not having the supernatural beliefs that cast doubt on other faiths, but even the Dalai Lama (often praised for being science-friendly) believes in reincarnation and karma—unevidenced spiritual doctrines.
In the meantime, although the doctor says that this monk is just resting and pining for the Potala, he is in fact a late monk, one who’s expired and gone to meet his maker. He’s a stiff.
UPDATE: I just received this email, which I won’t dignify with a reply save to say that here we have a fruitcake with extra brandy:
you cant leave anyone alone can you.you are absolutely sure that no form whatsoever of reincarnation takes place what is it when a ray of sunlight hits a leaf you don’t know what 90 per cent of the universe is,but you arrogantly assure the unwashed what it isn’t.pure hubris
h/t:Barry
Amid a morass of bad news, there’s also some excellent news today. According to many Canadian sources, including the Globe and Mail and the CBC, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously this morning that terminally ill adults cannot be prosecuted for having a doctor help them end their lives. Assisted suicide had previously been a criminal violation. The ruling won’t take effect for a year, but that’s only to allow the provinces to develop regulations about the procedure. Quebec already has such a law, which was in some limbo as it violated Canada’s criminal code, but now it looks kosher.
Doctors do not have to comply with these requests, either, but I suspect that many compassionate ones will. How could they not—unless they were religious? The terminally ill people.
According to the CBC, the court ruled on a suit initiated by two women who were terminally ill, but the ruling came too late for both:
The case was brought by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association on behalf of two women, Kay Carter and Gloria Taylor, both of whom have died since the legal battle began. Both women had degenerative diseases and wanted the right to have a doctor help them die.
A lawyer on behalf of Carter and Taylor argued that they were being discriminated against because their physical disabilities didn’t allow them to kill themselves the way able-bodied people could.
Carter went to Switzerland with her daughter, Lee, to die. Taylor died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2012.
There are those who object to this ruling, of course. I suspect the Anglican and Catholic churches will raise a fuss—after all, it was the Anglican Church’s refusal to give any credence to priest Eric MacDonald’s wish to help his M.S.-afflicted wife die with dignity that eventually made Eric (who used to comment here), leave the Church. And according to the Globe and Mail, an organization of Canadians with disabilities have also objected:
Critics of the ruling said it puts disabled people at risk. In a joint statement, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities and the Canadian Association for Community Living said they are “profoundly disappointed” with the ruling.
“As we each near the end of our lives, at the time when we are likely to be most vulnerable to despair and fear, we have now lost the protection of the Criminal Code,”the groups said. “Where shall we now find that protection? CCD and CACL caution that our collective response to this question must go far beyond the technical exercise of so-called ‘safeguards.’ ”
The protection, of course, will come with stringently written laws that require psychological evaluation, a terminal illness, and absolutely verified consent of the patient. It’s not as if anybody is going to pass laws allowing people to be killed willy-nilly! As far as I’m aware, places that allow assisted suicide have not had any cases of abuse, or even questions about abuse. One thing that I’ve learned from reading about assisted dying is that people who are given prescriptions that will end their lives painlessly—barbiturates—feel a great sense of relief that they have some control about how and when they die. And some don’t even use the prescriptions.
This ruling is very good news—another move upwards on the moral arc—and I hope that the U.S. courts will take notice of this, for assisted suicide is legal in only a few places in the U.S. Wikipedia lists them:
OR, WA, VT have legalized assisted suicide through the legislature or popular referendum; assisted suicide is de facto legal in Bernalillo County, NM and MT through court decisions; New Jersey’s House has passed legislation legalizing assisted suicide; bills in CT and CA are under review in the state legislatures.
That is not a lot of territory.
You can find the Canadian Supreme Court’s full decision here; I present just a few excerpts of how they nullified existing law:
Section 241(b) of the Criminal Code says that everyone who aids or abets a person in committing suicide commits an indictable offence, and s. 14 says that no person may consent to death being inflicted on them. Together, these provisions prohibit the provision of assistance in dying in Canada.
The trial judge found that the prohibition against physician‑assisted dying violates the s. 7 rights of competent adults who are suffering intolerably as a result of a grievous and irremediable medical condition and concluded that this infringement is not justified under s. 1 of the Charter. She declared the prohibition unconstitutional, granted a one‑year suspension of invalidity and provided T with a constitutional exemption.
. . . The appeal is allowed. We would issue the following declaration, which is suspended for 12 months:
Section 241(b) and s. 14 of the Criminal Code unjustifiably infringe s. 7 of theCharter and are of no force or effect to the extent that they prohibit physician-assisted death for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.
h/t: Norm