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.
Tuesday is the cruelest day, as the whole week stretches bleakly ahead. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, the Lion in Winter, makes a pun (do you get it?):
Malgorzata: Why are you trying to get loose?
Hili: You’ve carried me in and now I can be unbearable.
Małgorzata: Czemu się wyrywasz?
Hili: Już mnie przyniosłaś, teraz mogę być nieznośna.
This is a tw**t from the Ugly Animal Preservation Society (UAPS), though the animal depicted is hardly ugly. Can you spot the gecko on this branch??
Enlarged for your searching enjoyment:
h/t: Matthew Cobb
Here’s an ermine in a tree playing peek-a-boo. Presumably most of you know that the ermine isn’t really a separate species, but the white winter color phase of the stoat, also called the short-tailed weasel (Mustela ermina). Sadly, people like to slaughter this beast in the winter so they can get an all-white fur coat: ermine coats were all the rage back in the 1920s.
The change in winter from brownish to white is a form of “adaptive plasticity” adopted by several mammals and birds, including the Arctic fox, the Arctic hare, and the ptarmigan. Some environmental cue, either temperature or shorter days (I’m sure scientists know which, but I don’t), causes a genetic switch to be thrown, changing the pigmentation from brown to white. This is of course adaptive for both prey (who are less likely to be seen) and predators (ditto).
The notes accompanying the video, by photographer Chris Cooper, say this:
This was a wild animal I found while walking in the woods. I was fortunate enough to have my phone to take this video to be able to share with everyone.
Here’s the non-winter coat of the ermine, or rather stoat. It’s cute, no? Why on earth would you want to kill these to make a coat?
For more fun with stoats, check out this amazing video of a stoat having a go at a cat. Those weasels are tenacious!
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen the movie, and don’t want to know elements of the plot, don’t read what’s below.
One of the benefits of having finished The Albatross (soon to be available in fine bookstores everywhere) is that I can now get back not only to reading stuff that isn’t theology, but can also go to movies, something I’ve sorely missed in the last year. Yesterday I treated myself to a view of “Gone Girl” at Doc Films (the University’s superb student-run movie series). I was at first dubious about going, as I’d heard the movie had mixed reviews, but I found on Rotten Tomatoes that it was in fact rated highly and fairly consistently by critics. (The New Yorker’s mixed review by Anthony Lane, one of my favorite critics, was an exception.)(
It was a very good movie, and if, like me, you favor movies that really disturb you, this one that will. I won’t give away all of the plot, which is quite contorted, except to say that it involves a woman who, in a fit of revenge for her husband’s mistreatment and infidelity, fakes her own disappearAnce and death, hoping to get her husband convicted and executed. But things go awry and she winds up back with her husband, who had already been arrested for the murder. Each hating each other, but forced to remain married by media pressure over the miraculous reappearance of Amy, which was a great story, they’re doomed to a life of misery.
The performances of Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, the husband, and Rosamund Pike as Amy, his conniving wife, are superb; Pike was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but the movie, unaccountably, was not. (Pike was also in one of my favorite unknown films, “An Education“:, which was a great coming-of-age film as well as Carey Mulligan’s first appearance onscreen. See it!) There are also creditable ancillary performances by Neil Patrick Harris as Amy’s ex lover, Tyler Perry as Nick’s lawyer, and especially Carrie Coon as Dunne’s faithful sister and Kim Dickens as the relentless detective who pursues him. Even one of my favorites, Sela Ward, makes a cameo appearance as a t.v. interviewer.
The movie is not a masterpiece that will live forever, but it has a tight, absorbing plot, good acting, excellent cinematography, and an ending that leaves you, well, feeling discombobulated. It was based on a 2012 novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, which I haven’t read.
If there’s any fault, I suppose it would be a failure to explain Nick and Amy were attracted to each other in the first place. In the beginning of the movie Nick appears suave and smart, but he transmogrifies into a bit of a doofus as the movie progresses, why Amy is consistently brilliant and seductive. But that’s trivial, for Affleck’s performance is almost as Oscar-worthy as Pike’s. At any rate, this is a movie not to miss.
Here’s one of the two official trailers:
Now, what other recent movies should I see?
On Saturday the Washington Post reported the results of a survey by the Oklahoma State University survey on how Americans feel about government regulation of food and drugs (pdf of original survey here.)
You can see the saddest result in the third bar from the bottom: 80.44% of American think that there should be mandatory labelling of foods containing DNA. You know, of course, what that would cause. The purchase of food and vegetables would drop precipitiously, as would meat, and we’d be left buying sugar and flour (or does flour have any DNA in it?). The data:
Here are my feelings on the above, which show that for nearly all of these questions I disagree with most of my fellow countrymen:
Ilya Somin, author of the Post piece, tries to apportion the blame for the scientific and political ignorance of Americans (i.e., 25% of Americans don’t realize that the Earth orbits the Sun instead of the reverse, and in 2014 only 38% of Americans realized that Republicans controlled the House or representatives). But I think his analysis is misguided:
It would be a mistake to assume that widespread political and scientific ignorance are the result of “the stupidity of the American voter,” as Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber put it. Political ignorance is not primarily the result of stupidity. For most people, it is a rational reaction to the enormous size and complexity of government and the reality that the chance that their vote will have an impact on electoral outcomes is extremely low. The same is true of much scientific ignorance. For many people, there is little benefit to understanding much about genetics or DNA. Most Americans can even go about their daily business perfectly well without knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun. Even the smartest people are inevitably ignorant of the vast majority of information out there. We all have to focus our time and energy on learning that information which is most likely to be instrumentally useful, or at least provide entertainment value. For large numbers of people, much basic political and scientific information doesn’t make the cut.
What does the complexity of government have to do with whether voters know what DNA is, and whether it’s dangerous, or whether the Earth orbits the Sun? Indeed, much of that information doesn’t help people with their daily lives, but it certainly can, as witnessed by the widespread disapprobation of GMO foods, which are not only harmless but, as in the case of golden rice, can be valuable and even lifesaving. Ditto for knowing about what homeopathic medicines are—a form of useless and watery nostrum sold to gullible yuppies in Whole Foods (shame on them both!). And besides, learning about DNA and the solar system is something that everybody should know from their school days. But what that all has to do with “the enormous size and complexity of the government” is obscure, unless the author didn’t mean it when he said “the same is true of most scientific ignorance,” in which that case he didn’t write clearly.
Regardless, the scientific ignorance of Americans does do harm—far more harm than just making a lot of people think that evolution isn’t true. There are, for example, the misguided ideas that prayer can heal, that vaccinations cause autism, and that food with DNA could hurt you.
h/t: Gregory
Let’s start off the week with something light and amusing, and by that I mean the recent lucubrations of Deepak Chopra, always good for a giggle or guffaw. This PuffHo Live video was made last November, so I’m late to the party, but I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else.
Click on the screenshot below to hear Deepak excoriate Richard Dawkins for his “militant atheism” and for calling non-militant atheists “stupid”. Chopra then talks about the things that he considers “real,” goes off on his usual tirade about “consciousness”, and argues that scientists’ concept of reality has been “bamboozled by the superstition of materialism.”
I asked Richard about Chopra’s “militant atheism” quote; he responded that “I don’t recall saying I was a militant atheist although I may have. I’m pretty sure I would never say that anybody who wasn’t a militant atheist was stupid.” Dawkins did add that it was possible he said that and just forgot, but, given Chopra’s history of distorting and misquoting New Atheists, I think the Deepakity is just making this up. I challenge Chopra to provide the source of Dawkins’s quotes.
But on to the philosophy. Chopra’s stalking horse is, as he notes in the video, the notion of “naive realism,” which, as he argues is the incredibly immature notion that there is nothing more to the world than matter and energy. That is, materialism. Chopra, of course, feels that there is a Great Numinousity above it all; that the whole fricking universe is conscious in a way that can’t be described, even in principle, by the laws of physics. Here is a precis from the PuffHo notes:
“He’s a fundamentalist,” [Chopra] told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. “His version of realities is what we call empirical realities. That if you can see it, it’s real. If you can’t see it, it’s not real.”
“But we know, you can’t see your thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, imagination, creativity, choice — and they’re real,” he continued, making a case for a non-visible God. “Your inner world is real.”
Here Chopra conflates two notions of reality, and I think he does it on purpose. Although I can’t speak for Richard, I’m pretty sure he would agree with me that “thoughts, feelings, emotions” and so on are real in one sense: they are experienced by people and described by them. If someone says his stomach hurts, his feeling is a real feeling—if he’s not lying, that is.
What I would deny are two things: first, that those emotions are not anchored in the physical substance of our brain and thus do not reflect brain activity produced by chemistry and physics. That is, I would deny that emotions and “choices” reflect something beyond and not reducible to the material. Second, I’d deny that the experience of having feelings and emotions itself says something about reality. That is, feeling the presence of God is not conclusive—or even strong—evidence that there is a God. To arrive at that conclusion one needs empirical evidence that can be supported by multiple observers: the kind of evidence that Chopra abjures. The belief may be real, but not the object of that belief.
Here’s a 7-minute clip from The Young Turks deftly demolishing Deepakity’s inanities. I like the idea that Chopra is promoting “religion for the nonreligious.” One of the convergences between Chopra’s craziness and Sophisticated Theology™ is the notion that consciousness will forever lie beyond the ken of science, and therefore provides some evidence for both nonmaterialism and the numinous.
Finally, here is one of Chopra’s tw**ts from yesterday. It could serve as the illustration of the dictionary definition of “deepity”:
Jacques Hausser sent pictures of hoverflies (syrphids) as well as his identifications. Hoverflies, in the family Syrphidae, are true flies—that is, they’re members of the insect order Diptera. Syrphids feed on nectar and pollen, and are thus sometimes called “flower flies.” Many of these harmless flies, like the four below, are Batesian mimics of more dangerous insects: bees or wasps in the order Hymenoptera (those having four wings rather than the flies’ two), probably because both frequent the same areas. The hoverflies are clearly evolved to deceive predators. Jacques’ captions and notes are indented.
Volucella zonaria – obviously trying to mimic a hornet [JAC: I’m not sure what those red sacs are attached to the thorax; you can also see them in the fourth photo.]
Helophilus pendulus:
Xanthogramma pedissequum:
Chrysotoxum bicinctus:
And reader Christi sent this photo of a rattlesnake (species unknown, but not for long, I suspect), lying cryptically in the leaves. Watch where you step!
Closeup:
And so begins another week. Although today’s a holiday in the U.S. (Martin Luther King Day), there is no rest for Professor Ceiling Cat. Nor, apparently, for the Furry Navel of the World, who wants to remain on top of current affairs.
A: And what did you jump up there for?Hili: To sit on a heap of information.
In Polish:Ja: No i po co tam wskoczyłaś?
Hili: Żeby siedzieć na kupie informacji.