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.
Hili is looking a little pear-shaped, no? And still she wheedles Andrzej for noms! As I was initially puzzled by the dialogue, I wrote to Malgorzata, who answered:
Hili is sitting in our medicine cabinet, surrounded by boxes of medicines. She discovers that modern medicine prolongs life. It is the first time in her life she has seen the medicines.
Okay, I get it now.
Hili: So this is the human way to longevity!
A: It’s just a part of the program, you have to add long walks with the cat and the dog, good food and avoiding bad company.
Hili: Which means that’s it’s time to eat something, preferably from the fridge, please.
In Polish:
Hili: I to jest sposób ludzi na długowieczność?
Ja: To tylko część programu, trzeba dodać długie spacery z kotem i psem, dobre jedzenie i unikanie złego towarzystwa.
Hili: Czyli pora coś zjeść, ale raczej z lodówki poproszę.
The long awaited rhinoceros calf has finally been born at Copenhagen Zoo – watch the footage of the birth here! Shortly after his birth the small calf stumbled onto his feet, and after a few hours he started to suckle.
I love the way the mother tenderly helps it stand up for the first time. Note: “Næsehorn” in Danish means “rhinoceros,” and the German word is “Nashorn,” both translated as “nose horn”. And “rhinoceros” itself comes from two Greek words also meaning “nose horn”.
There are 25 interesting facts about rhinos here. Guess what they call a group of them?
. . . or rather, a kitten. Faithful contributor Matthew Cobb sent me an email this morning:
You’ll be pleased to hear we have a kitten. Pics will follow. He doesn’t like Ollie and Pepper [their other cats], who ignore him. Time will tell if it’s a good idea…
Here’s the picture:
Things seem to have settled down in Manchester this afternoon, for I got an update:
He had a big wee this afternoon and cheered up enormously.
The tentative name for this cat is Harry, but I don’t like that. I asked Matthew if I could query the readers here for suggested names, and he said that was fine. But he laid down two rules:
Things we’ve already argued about – no human names (although Harry seem OK); no cutesy names (so Minou was banned, sadly.
So, leaving out human and cutesy names, suggest a name for the cat shown above. If Matthew uses one of them, I’ll send the winner an autographed copy of WEIT (after May all prize books will change to Faith vs. Fact), with the kitten drawn in it.
You can suggest up to five names, and the deadline is Friday at noon.
Let’s refresh ourselves: here’s what Ben Carson, ex-neurosurgeon, staunch creationist and Seventh-Day Adventist, and far-right Republican, said about gays at Iowa’s recent “Freedom Summit,” which is looking more and more like a confederacy of dunces. As The Hill reported, Carson said this:
“What I have a problem with is when people try to force people to act against their beliefs because they say ‘they’re discriminating against me.’ So they can go right down the street and buy a cake, but no, let’s bring a suit against this person because I want them to make my cake even though they don’t believe in it. Which is really not all that smart because they might put poison in that cake,” he said to chuckles from some of his staff and dead silence from the journalists in the room.
In this interview from Fox News, Carson’s asked about that remark, and rather than simply say he’s sorry, which would have been the smart thing to do, he says that those who were offended are “immature”:
Note how he adds that he’s not a politician, even though he’s running for President. That’s like someone telling you he’s not a plumber while he’s getting paid to fix your sink.
Let’s leave aside the quibble that the sign over the grocery-store line for the abstemious shopper should say “10 items or fewer.” (I think Pinker okays the “incorrect” version in his latest book.) I happened to be in such a line yesterday, with but three items, and the person in front of me blithely removed 16 items from her basket (I counted). I’m always tempted to say something to such people, like, “Can’t you count?”, or ask the checkout clerk if they ever refuse anybody who violates the sign, but I’m always too cowardly.
I would never get in a 10-item line with even 11 items (and no, four cartons of yogurt don’t count as one item). But presumably those signs are up there for a reason, and where is the enforcement? Do you ever call out such people? I wonder what the ever-frank Advice Goddess Amy Alkon would do?
In the last few days, two respected media outlets have published opinion pieces extolling nearly unlimited freedom of speech—including speech that denigrates or satirizes religion.
The first is by Steve Pinker in today’s Boston Globe, “Why free speech is fundamental.” It’s worth a read since Pinker, as always, clarifies controversial issues with style, panache, and thoughtfulness. He gives three reasons why free speech is indeed fundamental, and you’ll have to read the editorial (free online) to see them. I’ll just give his Reason #1, and add a few short excerpts:
The first reason is that the very thing we’re doing when we ask whether free speech is fundamental — exchanging and evaluating ideas — presupposes that we have the right to exchange and evaluate ideas. In talking about free speech (or anything else) we’re talking. We’re not settling our disagreement by arm-wrestling or a beauty contest or a pistol duel. Unless you’re willing to discredit yourself by declaring, in the words of Nat Hentoff, “free speech for me but not for thee,” then as soon as you show up to a debate to argue against free speech, you’ve lost it.
He then levels his aim at the intellectual vacuity of “other ways of knowing,” implying something dear to my heart: the incompatibility of faith and reason (or, if you will, science and religion):
Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history — one that is prior to every other discovery — is that our traditional sources of belief are in fact generators of error and should be dismissed as grounds for knowledge. These include faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophesy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, and subjective certainty.
How, then, can we know? Other than by proving mathematical theorems, which are not about the material world, the answer is the process that the philosopher Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation. We come up with ideas about the nature of reality, and test them against that reality, allowing the world to falsify the mistaken ones. The “conjecture” part of this formula, of course, depends upon the exercise of free speech. We offer these conjectures without any prior assurance they are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand attempts to refute them that we acquire knowledge.
This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of The Albatross; and I wonder how the good citizens of Boston will regard the paragraph about “traditional sources of belief, given that the primary one is religion?
Finally, accommodationists won’t take kindly to Pinker’s claim about the history of arguments about the geocentric Solar System:
Once this realization sank in during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the traditional understanding of the world was upended. Everyone knows that the discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice-versa had to overcome fierce resistance from ecclesiastical authority.
Well, not everyone knows that. Ask Ronald Numbers, Michael Ruse, or the many accommodationists who people the National Center for Science Education. To these people, who are deeply wedded to the idea that science and religion are compatible, the notion that Galileo and Copernicus’s views were anathema to the Church on religious grounds is wrong. It was, instead, culture, personal animosity, of even a clash of science versus science! I see such a stand, refusing to indict religious dogma, as intellectually dishonest: one taken to further a political tactic of not alienating the faithful. But that’s my hobbyhorse, not Pinker’s.
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The other opinion piece about free speech is in The Economist: “Freedom of Speech: First—and last—do no harm.” (As is the magazine’s custom, the author isn’t identified.) I don’t know the politics of this magazine, but their stand on free speech—with a few exceptions like child pornography and speech inciting violence—is uncompromising. And they specifically mention religion. Some excerpts:
The Economist believes the right to free speech should be almost absolute.
Begin with the obvious controversy: blasphemy. The pope last week sympathised with those who feel compelled to react to perceived slights against Islam. Disparage another’s faith, he said, and you “can expect to get punched”. Not only were his comments a little unChristian, they were also deeply mistaken. Few subjects demand scrutiny as urgently as does religion—which, erroneously or otherwise, is invoked in conflicts and disputes around the globe. Muslims themselves forcefully, sometimes lethally, debate interpretations of their creed. Any censorship regime that exempts Islam or other religions from searching commentary is perverse.
Those are strong words! The piece even opposes the many European and Canadian laws against so-called hate speech, a stand with which I agree completely:
It is, for example, understandable that denying the Holocaust is an offence in several European countries, but it is also anachronistic: the evidence requires no help from the law to overwhelm the deniers. Geert Wilders, a disreputable far-right politician, should not face prosecution, as he now does, for pledging to reduce the number of Moroccans in the Netherlands. Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a comedian, should not have been arrested for flippantly associating himself with one of the Paris killers. Likewise, Islamist zealots are entitled to exploit the West’s freedoms to decry its decadence. Free societies are strong enough to absorb and discredit these idiocies.
They wind up calling for less willingness of journalists to capitulate to religious cries of “I’m offended!”, as in the case of Muslims rioting over the Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten cartoons. That cowardly capitulation, seen in (among others) the BBC, the Guardian, and Yale University Press, leads, says the article, to a “spiral of censorship”:
Take into account every fragile sensibility or unintended consequence on the other side of the world, and public discourse will shrink to vanishing.
And that is Pinker’s First Reason. You college students who decry “hate speech” or “offensive speech,” as has happened on my own campus, pay attention!
Seventy years ago today, the Allies liberated the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp, and so today has been designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations General Assembly.
I visited those camps when I was in Cracow in September of 2013, and I am shocked to discover that I didn’t post about my visit. I suppose it’s because every time I look at my photos I get a sick feeling in my stomach. I’ll try to do a post later, but let me put up just a few photos that must stand for the eleven million exterminated in this worst of all genocides. Remember that the oft-cited figure of six million Jews represents only a bit more than half of the people murdered en masse by the Nazis: there were eleven million total, including non-Jewish Poles, gays, criminals, Communists, clerics, the mentally ill, gypsies, and so on.
If you’re ever in Cracow, Poland, by all means go to Auschwitz/Birkenau, about sixty miles away. You will see the camps, the remains of the gas chambers, the platform on which prisoners arrived (and were immediately selected for death or for a short, miserable life), the barracks (in original condition at Birkenau), and an immensely disturbing museum. You won’t be the same person after your visit. And no matter how much you’re mentally prepared, it will still hit you in a way you didn’t imagine.
I won’t say anything profound to mark the millions of voiceless victims killed by the Nazis. Others, including the survivors, have done that. Let these pictures speak for themselves:
Here are some items in the museum in Auschwitz. Below are some suitcases taken from those arriving by train, most of them immediately sent to the gas chambers and killed within half an hour after arrival. People were told that their suitcases (carefully marked with their names and often addresses) would be returned after their “shower”. They weren’t, of course: they were plundered. The suitcases on display fill an entire room (there’s also a whole room of hair shaved from women’s heads before they were killed, which was used to fill mattresses, but that’s the one thing you’re not allowed to photograph).
A collection of prosthetic limbs, crutches, braces, and other medical aids taken from those who were gassed. Any infirmity, of course, marked you immediately for the gas chamber.
The shoes of the dead:
The saddest collection: dolls and children’s clothes taken from youngsters who were killed. Nearly everyone under the age of 14 was immediately gassed upon arrival at the Birkenau platform:
Below are some photographs of those who died. When the Nazis began sending people to the camps, they photographed every prisoner who wasn’t immediately killed, making a record of the inmates. The people below were photographed immediately after having their hair shorn and donning prison garb. Their faces tell all. The captions tell you who they were and how long they lived after arrival—usually only a few months at most. (Most either died of disease or malnutrition, or were gassed.) It was only later that the Nazis decided that the photographic system was too cumbersome and began tattooing numbers on the prisoners’ arms. I show only a few of the many photographs on display. Those who were sent to the gas chambers on arrival were not photographed.
Wolf Flaster; arrived at Auschwitz December 12, 1941, died there December 16, 1941:
Herbert Guttman; arrived at Auschwitz November 28, 1941, died there December 18, 1941.
Ryszard Borghard; arrived at Auschwitz April 6, 1941, died there October 10, 1941:
Petroela Welna; arrived at Auschwitz June 17, 1942, died there September 25, 1942. Her hair has been cropped.
Pinkas Klapper; arrived at Auschwitz February 26, 1942, died there March 17, 1942.
Those eyes will haunt me forever.
Wikipedia has an informative collection of Holocaust-related photographs; just go here and scroll forward through the pictures using the right arrow.
And, showing its sensitivity to the occasion, the BBC’s “Big Questions” site put out this tw**t yesterday:
What they’re asking here is this: “Isn’t it time for people to quit whining about the Holocaust”? And by “people,” I suspect they mean “Jews,” for a common trope among Arabs—and many Westerners—is that the Jews continually paint themselves as victims by bringing up the Holocaust. Listen to Sir Ben Kinglsey’s message below, particularly the bit beginning at 5:03.
And no, BBC, it will never be time to lay the Holocaust to rest, or either of the World Wars. There is too much about human nature carried along with those memories.
I understand that it’s very difficult to see the two types of monotremes in Australia—the echidna and the platypus: the only egg-laying mammals—in the wild. But reader Dave Molloy photographed the echidna (one of four species, all called “spiny anteaters”), and sends some notes:
I found this rather robust specimen of a short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) on a dirt track south of Hanging Rock in Victoria yesterday. This species is ubiquitous in Australia and as such is represented on the ‘tails’ side of the Australian 5 cent coin. I was lucky that I had my 70-200mm ISII lens so I didn’t have to get too close this timid animal, who would bury his/her snout in the dirt for about 30 seconds and then pop up again to look around to see if the noisy human had gone.
When I was a graduate student in Cambridge, the Museum of Comparative Zoology had a captive echidna named Francis who became quite tame after I visited it daily. It would let me rub its belly, which is furry, and would nuzzle my hand. Its snout was so narrow that it could insinuate it between my finger and my ring!
Reader Phil Loubere submitted some photos taken by his wife:
Here are three photos my wife Gladys took of a Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) in our backyard here in Murfreesboro, Tennessee a couple of weeks ago. It had just caught a dove and was feeding on it. We have two bird feeders on our porch that attract a variety of birds including the doves, which the hawk periodically catches. I have seen it dive-bomb a hapless bird, which explodes in a cloud of feathers when the hawk strikes.
Finally, reader Ed Kroc sent a bunch of really lovely bird photos. I’ve saved most of them for later, but couldn’t resist putting up one now, takenat sunset at Boundary Bay in Delta, British Columbia. There’s also a “spot the. . . ” feature; see the bold bit below:
This photo shows a small part of a flock of probably several thousand Dunlins (Calidris alpina). The ambient light was very dim at the time so the sharpness is not so great, but the effect is still kind of cool. As with many other sandpipers, these guys move together in hypnotic unison, probing, running, flying, and landing in undulating bits of feathery magic. Bonus with this last shot: spot the rogue Sanderling (C. alba).
