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.
Young emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae) at the kangaroo farm [JAC: their odd color pattern, so different from the adults, is presumed to camouflage them, but of course we don’t know for sure.]
Mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus) hiding at the Calgary Zoo:
Ground squirrel at Drumheller (near the Royal Tyrell Museum):
An elk (Cervus canadensis) near Jasper:
A squirrel near our campsite in Jasper:
It’s Sunday, September 4, but only middle of the three-day Labor Day holiday weekend in the U.S. The weather is going to warm up again in Chicago, rising into the 90s in two days or so (32°C or more, so summer hasn’t left us yet). For the first time since I’ve been in Chicago, I’ll be glad when fall and winter come. It’s Newspaper Carrier Day in the U.S., though paperboys are a dying breed, and in our building there’s a papergirl—a sign of the times. It’s also National Wildlife Day and National Macadamia Nut Day (my favorite nuts, with cashews a close second). Macadeamias, though grown largely in Hawaii, are an import from Australia.
On this day in 1957, the Ford Motor company introduced the Edsel (named after Henry Ford’s only “recognized” child). Although an innovative car, with seat belts, warning lights, and a push-button transmission on the steering wheel, the car lasted only two years, with production shutting down in 1959. There are various theories for its disappearance, and one was that it was just ugly. I remember someone saying that its grill “looked like a Mercury sucking a lemon”:
And on this day in 1998, Google was founded in California (I saw my first Google Street Imaging Car two days ago!). Notables born on this day include Max Delbrück (1906), Mitzi Gaynor (1931), and the larrikin Aussie swimmer Dawn Fraser (1937). Those who died on this day include Steve Irwin (2006; it’s been ten years since a stingray pierced his heart) and Joan Rivers (2014). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili was weighed yesterday, and she’s 4.5 kg, or a tad less then ten pounds. Today we have a rare dialogue of her and Malgorzata, with Hili struggling as she is carried across the dangerous soccer field:
M: Why were you crying so piteously, and now you are trying to get loose?Hili: Because I wanted to go in another direction and you didn’t understand anything.
Małgorzata: Czemu płakałaś, a teraz się wyrywasz?
Hili: Bo chciałam iść w inną stronę, a wy nic nie rozumiecie.
Tomorrow Mother Teresa becomes Saint Teresa, and therefore receives that Hotline to God that allows believers faster access to the deity if they go through her (just think of her as the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary as God). And all over the media there’s a big Mother Teresa LoveFest going on, with almost no journalists pointing out the darker side of Agnes Bojaxhiu.
The U.S.’s National Public Radio (NPR) is no exception. First, they had a credulous segment on the “miracles” that brought her to canonization, and then yesterday the “All Things Considered” show, with Ari Shapiro reporting, had a fulsome interview with a woman who knew Agnes, with the headline that the saint-to-be is “A saint for all of us.” (Even Jews?)
This is all part and parcel of the osculation that NPR regularly plants on the posterior of faith; and of course there was no mention of the problems with Mother Teresa, which, one would think, would be the “other side of the story” mandated by objective reporting.
The same went for Tom Wolfe’s new book, when, as I pointed out, NPR broadcast a segment by Scott Simon a week ago in which Wolfe claimed that “humans didn’t descend from animals”—without any challenge by Simon!
Well, I guess readers didn’t like the osculation of either creationism or Catholicism, and they let NPR know it. And so, on the network’s website, you can find two short segments of pushback and “other-siding”.
The five-minute bit dealing with Bojaxhiu is called “The Sainting of Mother Teresa brings up Calcuttans’ complex views of her legacy.” This one does note Christopher Hitchens’s criticism of the saint-to-be, as well as the views of two Indians that she not only failed to systematically attack poverty, but also (by Aroup Chatterjee, author of Mother Teresa: The Untold Story) that she was a “medieval ideologue” who constantly fought against abortion and birth control in one of the world’s most overpopulated nations. However, they again leaven the criticism with an ample dollop of Mother Teresa worship.
The 1.6-minute segment of reader reaction to Wolfe’s Darwin-bashing is called “We got your letters: Listeners puzzled by Tom Wolfe’s words on evolution.” As Scott Simon notes, his interview with Wolfe “sure struck a nerve” and that “we were surprised our inbox survived the onslaught.” (I did tw**t at them, but didn’t write.) Three angry listeners pull no punches in deeming Wolfe both uninformed in his pronouncement on human evolution and unqualified to discuss it. I agree!
You can find a lot more on Wolfe’s book and Mother Teresa’s sainthood on the internet, with the latter celebrated far more than the former. I doubt I’ll mention either again, at least for a while, but take a look at the online review of The Kingdom of Speech, written by Catilin Flanagan, that will appear in the hard-copy New York Times tomorrow (there’s already been a pre-review).
Sadly, Flanagan doesn’t come to grips with the book’s thesis, and her main criticisms are of Noam Chomsky’s activism and of Wolfe’s digressions, as well as that the whole topic of the evolution of language is BORRRING. But her review is just as disjointed as Wolfe’s book. She does, however, include have this zinger: “. . . but no matter, because consistent reading of this bewildering little book is rewarded by the fact that it does eventually end.”
Yes, but Flanagan’s own review ends with encomiums for Wolfe. I suspect she knows little about either evolution or linguistics, and didn’t bone up on them.
Wolfe has much in common with “Noam Charisma.” [Chomsky] Both men so deeply reshaped their fields that no one entering either profession can do so without being aware of the long shadow. One senses that Wolfe is as irritated by his omission from the roster of immortals as by Chomsky’s inclusion in it. But one also knows that a hundred years from now, the one whose work will still be read — whose work will remain imperishable in the face of any new discoveries — is Wolfe. In the long game, the kingdom belongs to him.
I doubt that The Kingdom of Speech will remain imperishable—it’s about as permanent as a mayfly.
h/t: JP
The other day I noted that M. Gail Hammer, a professor of religion at Syracuse, canceled the screening of a film on Israeli settlers because of her fear that it would incite the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) students on campus. The director of the film “The Settlers“, Simon Dotan, had been invited by a professor at Nebraska who was co-organizing a Syracuse conference on religion and film, but Hammer nixed that invite. The ironic thing was the BDS would have supported the showing, for the film apparently portrayed Israeli settlers in a negative light.
This was unique, as far as I know, because it was a disinvitation based not on any tangible dissent or opposition, but merely the fear of dissent—and a misguided fear to boot. Hammer’s behavior was reprehensible.
Fortunately, people can back down, as both Hammer and Syracuse have now done. As Syracuse.com reports, Hammer has apologized and the University of Syracuse will be showing the film after all. The Atlantic article by Conor Friedersdorf publicizing Hammer’s actions no doubt contributed to the publicity that led to this reversal:
Michele Wheatly, vice chancellor and provost at SU, emailed the campus community Friday morning to say that Hamner’s decision was not consistent with university policies. She said the university would be reaching out to the filmmaker to arrange a screening on campus.
Hamner also issued a formal apology, saying her reluctance stemmed from a fear of controversy and inexperience planning conferences.
. . . SU’s provost, Wheatly, responded to the controversy this morning [Sept. 2].
“I feel it necessary to reaffirm our commitment to intellectual and respectful debate on controversial issues,” she said in an email to the campus community.
Wheatly pointed to a letter from her predecessor, from 2014. Interim Chancellor and Provost Eric Spina said at the time that SU does not support the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, but welcomed discussion, debate and dialogue on campus concerning issues of peace and security in the Middle East.
Wheatly said she was working with Chancellor Kent Syverud and the College of Arts and Sciences to invite Dotan to screen the film on campus. No plans for the screening have been confirmed at this time.
Hammer issued her own statement through the University News Office:
Well, I’ll take that; she certainly uses the right words, and it’s not a “notapology.” What is interesting is her mentioning the “media coverage” that ultimately came from the Atlantic piece. This is a lesson for us: if you see an egregious example of censorship or suppressionof speech, call it to the attention of the media, preferably Big Media like The Atlantic.
h/t: Greg Mayer
Nick Cohen’s advice to authors includes this gem: “Never read the comments.” And I nearly always follow that dictum, except for the comments on this site. I also made an exception for my review of Tom Wolfe’s book in the Washington Post. I wanted to see how people reacted to my defense of evolution, realizing that 40% of Americans are pure young-earth creationists and another 31% theistic evolutionists.
And the Post comments demonstrated that amply—and heartbreakingly. Evolution is so well established as a scientific “fact,” and there are mountains of evidence supporting it! Yet resistance to it is everywhere. Further, the ideas of modern evolutionary theory are not hard to understand. Despite that, people either don’t understand it, make no effort to, or simply parrot arguments they took from creationists and IDers. So much ignorance, and so little time! The comments about evolution that amused me the most were the constant assertions that we don’t know anything about speciation—even though Allen Orr and I wrote a big technical book on that subject (Speciation; Sinauer 2004) showing that we understand quite a lot about the process.
I’m omitting nice comments about me as well as good comments defending evolution (I noticed some readers here making them), and present the ones showing both an ignorance of evolution and a hatred of Professor Ceiling Cat. I’ll just display the ignorant comments and a few of the nasty ones.
IGNORANT COMMENTS:
Whoever Ajax Martin is, he’s all over the comments parading his anti-evolutionism (people have responded to him, and you can see the pushback at the site. I’ll leave it to the readers to rebut, at least mentally, this first one.
This one shows a profound ignorance of how we establish that something in the past as provisionally true:
Here we see the same misconception as demonstrated above. Seriously, “nothing historical is factual?” Didn’t JFK get assassinated in 1963? Is that story telling? Didn’t the World Trade Centers topple after being hit by a plane? Fairy tale (well, to some denialists)?
This guy dominic has nothing by way of evidence, so he just attacks Darwin because he’s “the secularists’s God”:
Nobody ever said all of evolution can be completely explained by natural selection, for there are processes like genetic drift, that probably have a profound effect on the evolution of DNA sequences. And no, you can’t ignore evolution in the “causal mechanisms” in genetics, because the behavior and assortment of genes and chromosomes evolved by natural selection. Why are there complex DNA-repair mechanisms? Why do we have the complex process of meiosis involved in sex? Why are paternal and material chromosomes differentially imprinted? These are evolutionary questions, but Callicles can’t be arsed to think.
Ahhh. . . here’s the old ID trope: if we don’t yet have a fully-worked out understanding or scenario of how a complex molecule evolved, evolution couldn’t have done it. It’s the prime fallacy of Intelligent Design, and I think it should have a name. Oh, right—the God of the Gaps fallacy.
The person below needs to read Why Evolution is True. I am baffled how people can disregard the evidence as “theot581 does”, and claim that it’s “mountains of cow dung.” Does he think that all biologists, including religious ones like Francis Collins and Ken Miller are idiots who have been bamboozled into accepting cow dung? And this person, like many others in the thread, tries to draw a phony distinction between “microevolution” and “macroevolution.” There’s no hard and fast line there, and, of course, there’s plenty of evidence for extreme macroevolution, both in the fossil record (Tiktaalik, mammal-like reptiles, the progression of forms from artiodactyls to whales) and in the vestigial features that show common ancestry between, say, humans and fish, or humans and reptiles.
Here are just three NASTY COMMENTS. (There are more; I can haz Patreon now?) I wanted to find the best one, in which an irate reader called me a “child-man who uses the word ‘noms’ on his blog and posts about cowboy boots and cats”, but it eluded me. (If you find it, screenshot it and send it to me.)
These don’t bother me a bit: when people resort to name-calling, they got nothing. It just demonstrates their ignorance and incivility.
And I’ll add one FUNNY COMMENT—not about me but about Tom Wolfe. Do you get it?
I was going to refer you in this post to a 52-minute conversation that Dave Rubin had with Roseanne Barr, but it was so painful to listen to (Barr was all over the place and at times sounded almost insane) that I can’t recommend it at all. Listen at your own peril.
However, Rubin by himself is fine. If you’ve been baffled by the new term “alt-right,” as I have, here’s Rubin discussing it in an 8-minute video.
Short take: The alt-right is a diverse group of powerless “keyboard warriors and professional trolls vying for attention for people in power.” The key is the use of the Internet to amplify one’s views. Rubin claims that it’s generally associated with fascists, anti-Semites, racists, neo-Nazis, or extreme conservatives, which he despises, but of course he’s a free-speech advocate and doesn’t feel they should be censored. And he thinks the group, such as it is, is a mixture of serious wackos and those who simply want to get attention.
Rubin adds that he sees the Regressive Left as far more of a societal danger than the alt-right, and the former, he claims, gave rise to the latter. I’m not sure to what extent Trumpism and alt-rightism is truly a reaction to Regressive Leftism, for I think most of the chowderheads who support Trump don’t follow the shenanigans of regressive leftists. How many Trump supporters or neo-Nazis, for instance, even know about Brandeis’s withdrawal of an honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or about the Great Halloween Costume Fracas at Yale?
At any rate, Rubin names only one alt-rightist, and that’s Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip and apparently a fan of Trump. He’s had a conversation with Adams, which you can hear here (I haven’t yet listened).
I’m scheduled to do a show with Rubin in January, and I’m excited.
According to Minnesota Public Radio, the beloved Beatrix Potter started writing a gender-bending book about a cat—but the book was never completed (it’s now been finished and illustrated by others):
Here’s the backstory to this “new” Beatrix Potter book: Two years ago, a woman named Jo Hanks who’s an editor at Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom came upon a reference to a letter that Potter wrote in 1914. In that letter, Potter mentioned working on the manuscript of a story about “a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat who leads a rather double life.”
Hanks dug into Potter’s archives at The Victoria & Albert Museum and she found the manuscript of The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. Potter had written three drafts of the story and had done one watercolor illustration of Kitty, but for various reasons, she died in 1943 without completing the book.
Skip to the present and this lavish debut edition of The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots.
What is it with cats and boots? (Not that I mind!) Here’s that one illustration, and they even look like cowboy boots:
Kitty is apparently genderfluid, which will appeal to younger Snowflakes-to-Be:
[The] ominous tone is set in the very first story when Peter Rabbit’s mother gives him and his sisters — Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail — a warning: “Now, my dears,” said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, “you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.” In its own quaint way, Potter’s landscape is every bit as Gothic as the Brontes’.
And, sometimes, as in The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, Potter’s stories are nearly as surreal as Lewis Carroll’s. The “Kitty” in question here calls herself “Miss Catherine St. Quintin,” and she does, indeed, lead a double life. By day she’s the docile pet of a kind old lady; by night she’s a poacher who prowls the countryside armed with an air-gun and dressed in “a gentleman’s Norfolk jacket, and little fur-lined boots.”
Kitty is such a convincing gender nonconformist that she’s mistaken for “a sportsman” by Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, the hedge-hog from an earlier tale. Other recognizable furry faces include fellow feline Tabitha Twitchit, Mr. Tod the creepy fox and a much older Peter Rabbit, described as “stout” and “very fat.” Rest assured, this is the closest we come here to that dread Atticus Finch moment in which a beloved character is changed for the worse.
The book will be released in three days, and you can order it on Amazon, where it’s already #1 in Children’s Classics.
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HiHomer tells us about a gang of farm cats (they look to be in very good shape) owned by Corey Karmann of Nebraska. Here’s a video of the herd showing up at feeding time. Listen to those yowls! The owner, who goes by the name karmanno, promised on YouTube to reply to the many critical comments (you can just imagine what was said!), but I haven’t yet seen his reply.
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Finally, I’ve written before about Giant Felt Cat Heads, which can scare the bejeezus out of anyone; but there’s a new report, with new pictures, at cattime.com (see also RocketNews24).
What better way to turn heads on the street than with a head? That’s the philosophy behind these awesome new cat masks designed by Japanese wool artist Housetsu Sato, who uses wool felt to make natural-looking cats heads that fit perfectly atop a human body. The artist has been perfecting the cat head design since April 2015, after he made a two-metre tall beckoning cat for a school festival that became incredibly popular. Sato found that the cat head on its own was a hit with students, who looked like hybrid feline-human beasts when they put it on.
. . . The heads are made of wool and look incredibly realistic if you don’t consider how big they are, and the eyes look like they’re following you wherever you go. All the heads are individually handmade, and the short-haired cat heads can be completed within a month. You can even get a head of your own cat made if you send the artist a photo.
I’ll have a Hili head, please! Ten to one you’d scare the hell out of your cat if you put one on.
. . . The heads don’t come cheap, however. They sell for 648,000 yen, which is about $6,220 US dollars. You can purchase them online from the Japanese site Dwango. The cost is pretty steep, but can you really put a price on walking around with a giant cat head and creeping out everyone around you?
For lagniappe, go read “Careless Whisker” (great title!) at the Guardian, describing an album of music for cats that will be released in late October.
h/t: Merilee
