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 planet has completed another revolution around the sun, and that means calendars change on earth today. Hili is showing off her literary stripes this morning, although if you are of a gaming persuasion you might think the Bioshock version works well here too.
Either way, hope you are surviving the morning after the night before.
2015
Hili: Little Sister is watching you.
A: You’ve been reading Orwell again.
In Polish:
Rok 2015
Hili: Mała siostra obserwuje cię.
Ja: Znowu czytałaś Orwella.
by Matthew Cobb
Jerry is in India, one the countries in the world that is most obsessed with cricket. Jerry’s New Year’s Challenge is to learn the names of all the fielding positions. Who said cricket was complicated?
NB The red positions are for a right-handed batsman. If he (or she) were to score a run, and their batting partner were to be left-handed, the positions would have to change, in the middle of the over. Compulsory positions exist for the 20:20 and one-day versions of the game. Are you still with me?
PS Despite being English and following cricket, I don’t know all these positions, though I do know the names, which is pretty useless.
They’re apparently reading more than a thousand pages out loud in Texas—and for what? Reader Larry sent this picture with an explanation:
This was shot approximately 5/3/06 on one of my many sojourns to Granbury, TX. Yes, that’s the county courthouse on the square in the background.
Yes, it’s almost the first birthday of Jerry Coyne the Cat, an orange tabby male found abandoned as a tiny kitten in a cardboard box in a petrol station in New Zealand. Thanks to the diligence and kindness of Gayle Ferguson, Jerry and His Four Sisters were saved and all adopted out. Let’s remember what Jerry looked like when he was young:
And now that he is one, when he has just begun:
Gayle is currently rearing a second brood of foundlings now, though I couldn’t importune her to name the gorgeous male (a cream tabby) “Jerry Coyne the Cat Jr.” He is, instead, called Monty.
by Matthew Cobb
What is a word that’s formed of 4 letters, but consists of 3, sometimes is written with 9, never with 5, and occasionally is made up of 12.
From @TeaAndCopy on Tw*tter.
HNY everyone.
We’re headed for Khajuraho today, the famous complex of 10th- and 11th-century Hindu temples about 600 km SE of Delhi. They constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and are most renowned for their gorgeous and erotic sculptures. It’s amazing that such carvings are so well preserved after more than a thousand years. After the 13th century the temples fell into disuse and were overgrown with jungle, and were “rediscovered” by a British surveyor in the 1830s.
You can see a panoply of the sculptures, salacious and otherwise, here.
We’ll be taking the overnight train (leaves 8 pm, arrives 6 am), so I get the experience of a sleeper car, and perhaps a “western style” toilet (I forgot to include this in my previous “sign” post):
I still have a gazillion photos that must wait until my return to Chicago (the pictures of noms are great), so bear with me. To hold you in the meantime, here’s the good Professor in the Indian clothes I wore for my birthday dinner and in the Bengal Club in Calcutta:
I had an awesome birthday dinner prepared by my host, but didn’t want to disturb the company by taking photos of the delicious Bengali viands. I couldn’t, however, resist photographing the payesh, or Bengali rice pudding on the left, which is traditionally served on birthdays. It’s liberally doused with syrup made from concentrated palm sap, which resembles maple syrup, and can be further condensed to make palm jaggery or sugar. The sweets to the left are sandesh (a milk sweet, with the ones in the center, shaped like buttocks, filled with palm sap concentrate as well.
More solipsism that I couldn’t resist. Here’s a lovely birthday present from my hosts: a shirt made from pure, heavy raw silk in its natural color. It has a roughish texture and a beautiful golden sheen. We took the material to the local tailor about ten days ago, he measured me, and today delivered this beautifully-fitting garment. I was told the price for making the shirt (exclusive of material costs) was 150 rupees: roughly two dollars!
Professor Ceiling Cat likes his new shirt!
~
I don’t use the term “misogynist” lightly, because to me it means “someone who hates women,” not simply “a sexist.” But what else can one call a group of orthodox Jews who won’t sit next to women on planes for fear they’ll be polluted?
This has happened three times in the last couple of months. First, in September, a group of Orthodox Jewish males caused an eleven-hour delay on an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv because they wouldn’t take their assigned seats next to women. As the Independent reported then:
. . . the flight did not take off on time, according to Shalom Life, after a group of Haredi Jewish passengers refused to sit next to women, believing that men and women should be segregated.
“People stood in the aisles and refused to go forward,” a passenger on board the flight, Amit Ben-Natan, told the publication.
“Although everyone had tickets with seat numbers that they purchased in advance, they asked us to trade seats with them, and even offered to pay money, since they cannot sit next to a woman. It was obvious that the plane won’t take off as long as they’re standing in the aisles,” he said.
The Haredi passengers agreed to sit in their assigned seats for take-off, but one passenger described the overall experience as an “11-hour long nightmare,” referring to the difficulty before take-off and the ensuing disturbances on board, caused by the Haredi passengers “jumping out” of their seats when the fasten-seatbelt sign was switched off.
Then on December 20, a Delta flight on the same route experienced the same trouble, though this time the flight was delayed by only half an hour. The Independent reports again:
The cabin crew on the Delta flight out of John F. Kennedy Airport tried to find seats for the men, but were met with refusal by other passengers, some of whom who took a dim view of the reasoning behind the request.
The same thing happened in October as well, and again on the same route, delaying the flight for an hour.
This is unacceptable. No passenger should be able to request not being seated next to a woman, even on religious grounds, and no passenger should be forced to move to comply with such a request. Any Jewish person causing such a disruption should be immediately booted off the plane. The scene of frenetic ultra-Orthodox men offering other people money to get a seat next to a man is simply repugnant.
Finally, lest you think this is a simple religious stricture that has nothing to do with regarding women as inferior (and you’d think this only if you knew nothing about Orthodox Jews), have a gander at what else the Independent says:
Many Haredi Jewish communities practice strict gender segregation and refrain from touching people of the opposite gender who are not close family members.
Haredi publications in Israel generally do not print pictures of women and girls. In 2009, the Israeli newspaper Yated Ne’eman famously doctored a photograph of the Israeli cabinet in order to replace two female ministers with images of men.
In the UK, the ultra-Orthadox [sic] Jewish community in Stamford Hill, north London, was recently criticised after signs requesting women to walk on a certain side of the street were erected, promoting segregation for a Torah parade.
Here’s one of those signs, and note that there’s no explanation:
This gender segregation is one way that extremist “ultra-Orthodox” Jews resemble Muslims. In their synagogues men pray on the main floor while women are restricted to the back of the temple, often upstairs behind a screen.
Further, many Orthodox Jewish women, like Hasids, are the equivalent of breeder cattle, whose duty is simply to tend the home and pump out more young Jews. They usually are forbidden to have real jobs, and must cut their hair short and wear wigs or other hair coverings because natural uncovered hair is considered “immodest.” In this way Jews also converge with Muslims. Finally, menstruation is considered unclean among the ultra-Orthodox, and women are obliged to take ritual purification baths after their periods. (Two good books on the repression of Orthodox Jewish women are Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, and Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation after my Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood.)
Finally, there’s that infamous prayer. MyJewishLearning gives the history and context of the phrase that begins the morning prayers of many Orthodox Jews:
“Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a woman.”
As the article notes, Orthodox apologists argue that this phrase merely shows gratitude that males have the privilege of performing more religious rituals, but it comes across as intolerant and sexist. And why would only men have that privilege? My own version of the prayer is “Blessed are you, O Ceiling Cat, who has not created me an Orthodox Jew.”
One of the highlights of my trip so far has been a visit to Shantiniketan, the “university” founded by the the polymathic poet/artist/novelist/playwright/songwriter/educator Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Tagore came from a wealthy family of landowners, and many of his relatives were renowned artists. But Rabrindranath was by far the most famous. He took up painting at the age of 60 (producing some marvelous art), wrote 2500 songs during his lifetime (nearly all Indians know many of them), and produced 12 volumes of poems, plays, and literature. There was no artistic endeavor, it seems, in which Tagore did not excel.
A volume of his poems, Gitanjali, fell into the hands of William Butler Yeats, who brought Tagore to the attention of the West, with the result that Tagore was the first Asian awarded a Nobel Prize—for literature in 1913.
Here’s Tagore in old age, with his characteristically piercing gaze, resembling that of a kindly Rasputin. He is still a cultural hero to many Indians, especially Bengalis:
Below is a self-portrait of Tagore. He never had any artistic training, but simply decided one day, late in life, to take up painting. His portraits show a melancholy side: although from his youth he was lionized and much admired, his wife died when he was 41; and he never remarried or—as far as I can tell—had any romantic relationships for the last forty years of his life. He confessed to being lonely and almost never expressed personal feelings in his letters.
Below is the room in his Calcutta house in which Tagore died at 80 after a botched prostate operation. It’s but one of many rooms in the huge, sprawling compound in which the extended family lived. (Tagore had 14 surviving brothers and sisters, of which he was the last.) I had to take the picture surreptitiously since photography was forbidden. Tagore’s godlike status in India is shown by the requirement that you remove your shoes when visiting his houses in Calcutta and Santiniketan.
Here’s Rabindranath’s car: a Humber, whatever that is. I’m sure a reader will suss out the age and details about this vehicle. A sign on the garage said that this car is still kept in running order.
But the foundation of Santiniketan, in a peaceful rural area about three hours by train from Calcutta, was perhaps the achievement of which Tagore was proudest. Here he wanted to put his philosophy of education into action, combining artistic instruction with practical advice, all with the aim of spiritually elevating everyone. Many famous people came to teach there or visit, and classes were held outside under the trees.
Here’s his large house in Santiniketan; my friend and host, Kunal, is to the right:
On Christmas evening we went to a concert put on by the university; Tagore held such gatherings to mark many holidays, Hindu or otherwise, and to commemorate the change of seasons. It was a lovely concert, a mixture of Western Christmas carols (okay) and Tagore’s own songs (fantastic). The musicians were drawn largely from the student body at the university, and the concert was held inside a small glass pavilion built by Tagore’s father:
Some of the women singers (excuse the blurriness; these were taken with a camera hand-held in natural light):
One of the musicians, playing a bowed instrument called the esraj. There was also a harmonium, the stringed instrument to the right (a sitar, I think), the tabla (drums) and an electric guitar.
But the point of this post, which seems to have gotten out of hand, is to let you hear one of Tagore’s many songs (he also wrote a song chosen by Nehru to be India’s national anthem). It was the second song played in the concert, and I found it ineffably beautiful and melancholy. I’ve read some of Tagore’s poems and looked at his paintings, but I find his songs to be his most moving work. He himself said that if any of his artistic endeavors lasted after his death, it would be his music.
The song, called “Tai Tomar Anando Amar Por,” expresses Tagore’s joy at being one with the Eternal Creator (his religion was a bit nebulous, but he had a deep spirituality that seems to have bordered on pantheism). This lovely version was made by the Bangladeshi singer Iffat Ara Khan; the photos accompanying the music are cheesy; just ignore them.