On the correction and improvement of people you meet on the internet

August 11, 2016 • 10:30 am

by Grania Spingies

Elizabeth Warren tweeted about the latest Scandal Du Jour involving Donald Trump. (Don’t worry, this post is not about him or what he may or may not have meant – I personally think you would need a Ouija board to divine the true meaning and intent of his words).

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I was entertained to see male Democrat “feminists” telling Warren off for her misogyny.

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[JAC: See how lightly “misogyny”, which means “hatred of women”, is thrown around these days? Warren is certainly no misogynist!]

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Who knew that there were so many brave individuals out there, calling out dog-whistle everyday sexism of Senator Warren on the internet?

And, yes I considered that some of them were being facetious. But of them went on to elaborate at length, making it clear that they were absolutely serious. They have been told that it is Good to call out anything that could be construed—or in this case woefully misconstrued—as sexism.

I am sure that Senator Warren is now a chastened and enlightened woman. No, I’m kidding. I am sure that Senator Warren rolled her eyeballs if she even made the mistake of reading the responses to her tweet.

Rule #1: If you are going to call someone out on the internet for misogyny, make sure that they actually are a misogynist. Otherwise you are just a finger-wagging nag-bag who nitpicks language on the internet. Or as Shakespeare might have said in his play about misogyny: “Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense.”

Rule #2: If you decide you are right and they are wrong and you are going to call them out, spare two seconds of thought about what you are hoping to achieve by your action.

  • Are you going to change the hearts and minds of people? (useful)
  • Are you going to start a constructive conversation with someone about the subject? (also useful)
  • Are you just announcing your disapproval so you will feel better? (go ahead)
  • Are you signaling what a good person you are? This is called virtue-twerking1: you will get people’s attention, but they may not respect you in the morning.

All of this brings me to another somewhat related point.

Hillary supporters2 don’t always realise how badly they serve their own candidate when they feel the need to lecture anyone who doesn’t show the required deference to their preferred contender.  Clinton needs all the votes that she can get, and the November elections need as high a turnout of voters as it can get. But a percentage of Clinton supporters don’t seem to think that people are allowed to vote for her only because they concede she’s the better candidate. Instead they insist that such voters speak more respectfully and praisingly of her. This probably needs a special hashtag #NotAllHillarySupporters

There are an awful lot of comments on the internet these days addressed to people who have chosen to vote for Clinton even though she was not their ideal candidate. They tend to go a little like this:

Clap louder and put a happier smile on your face! Show more enthusiasm for the dear leader3. Your faltering and slight hesitation has been noticed!

[JAC: I, too, have been chastised on this site for failing to show sufficient enthusiasm for Hillary, and for suggesting that her political record is far from stellar, that she’s too beholden to Wall Street, and that she has a history of dissimulation. And the disapprobation for saying this comes despite my promise to vote for her.]

No wonder US politics is so polarised. The tactic is as likely to convince a potential ally to shrug and stay at home as it is to persuade them to turn up and vote the way you want them to come Election day in November.

Wanting to change people’s minds is admirable. By all means, educate those around you with facts you believe they may have missed. But your stern disapproval on the internet probably won’t win your candidate any more votes. That’s a tactic that probably only works on TV shows.

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1.  Like Virtue Signalling, only with more posing.

2. As most of you know, I am not an American. If I were an American, I would vote for Hillary Clinton, although I have reservations about some of her policy positions past and present.

3. No, I don’t think there is any resemblance between Hillary Clinton and Kim Jong-il at all.

New study suggests a single miscreant, Charles Dawson, created the “Piltdown Man” hoax

August 11, 2016 • 8:30 am

The story of the fraudulent skull known as “Piltdown Man” is well known. In 1912, lawyer and amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson turned up at the London Natural History Museum with a specimen he claimed to have found at a site in Sussex. He and Arthur Smith Woodward, the head geologist at the Museum, further excavated the site and turned up more bone fragments, including bits of a skull, teeth, jawbones, and even a piece of carved bone—an “artifact” of human devising.

Woodward reconstructed the “skull” and announced with Dawson that the skull, jawbone, and two molar teeth constituted the “missing link” between apes and humans: a 500,000-year old specimen they named Eoanthropus dawsoni. Dawson later reported finding an “intermediate” canine tooth at the site, as well as similar teeth and skull bits (“Piltdown II”) from a site 3 km away. The bones were darkly stained, matching the gravels at the site.

Here’s a reconstruction of the Piltdown Man (Piltdown I), with the original bits in brown and the rest added to fill in the gaps:

piltdown-skull_2416562b

Subsequent findings of genuine early hominins marginalized this fossil (Austalopithecus africanus was described in 1924), but many still believed that E. dawsoni was real. (There were, however, many doubters from the outset.) That lasted until 1953, when scientists showed beyond doubt that “Piltdown Man” comprised, as some had surmised, skull bits from modern humans combined with a recent ape jaw (likely an orangutan), with the ape teeth filed down to look intermediate between those of apes and humans. The jaw, as well as a modern human skull, had been artificially stained, and fossils of other species had been planted at the Sussex locality, along with a bogus “artifact” (probably an elephant bone carved with a steel knife) to give credibility to the fossils. By 1955, after a second publication, Piltdown Man was universally rejected as a hoax.

Yet some creationists still tout the early acceptance of Piltdown Man as evidence for the credulity of scientists who accepted a fake simply because they wanted to believe in human evolution. That doesn’t wash, though, in light of the doubts that accompanied the fossil’s original discovery, the subsequent uncovering of the duplicity by scientists (not creationists), and the dozens of genuine hominin fossils that have turned up since then. This is an example of the self-correcting nature of science, something not seen in the religious belief of those creationists who still tout this example.

Some questions remain. Who, exactly, was responsible for the forgery? Suggestions have included Dawson himself, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Dawson’s neighbor), Arthur Keith, and—Steve Gould’s choice—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and amateur anthropologist. At least twenty people have been named as possible hoaxers.

A new paper by Isabelle De Groote and many colleagues, just posted at the Royal Society Open Publishing site (reference and free download below), answers other questions, and suggests that the consistency of methods used for both Piltdown I and II specimens, points to a single forger. That forger was almost surely Dawson himself.

De Groote et al. raise three questions (in bold below), and tried to answer them using a combination of morphological analysis, DNA sequencing, radiocarbon dating, and inspection of the fossils. I’ll briefly give their responses below the questions.

  • (Q1)  Lowenstein [16] showed that the mandible was likely to have come from an orang-utan (Pongo sp.). Are the ape jaw, isolated canine (both Piltdown I) and molar (Piltdown II) indeed from an orang-utan? If so, are they likely to originate from the same animal?

Yes, the jaw and teeth from Piltdown I and II came from a single orangutan, as judged by both morphology and mitochondrial DNA sequencing. Carbon dating gave results ranging from 90-500 years, so the jaw and teeth may well have come from an Edwardian skull collection, though the authors couldn’t find records of missing specimens.

The organgutans themselves were likely, given their placement in the DNA phylogeny of known individuals, to have come from southwest Sarawak.

  • (Q2)  How many crania were used to produce the various fragments found at the Piltdown sites and can we assign them to a putative source population?

The authors suggest that at least two modern human skulls, whose dates could not be determined, were used to reconstruct the fossils. No putative source population could be identified, though the authors conjecture that the skulls were from medieval humans.

  • (Q3)  Is there consistency in the modus operandi (MO) used to modify the various materials, linking them to one or more forgers?

The answer to this one is yes. The bones and tooth sockets were all plugged with gravel, originating at both sites, that were mixed with putty. And the same putty was used on the human skulls, as well as to affix the molars back into the organgutan jawbones. That, and the artificial staining that was the same on all specimens, points to a single forger—most likely Dawson, who had the means, opportunity, and anthropological knowledge to create this fake. De Groote et al. summarize their reasons for a single hoaxer:

This is largely because the story originated with [Dawson], he brought the first specimens to Dr Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the British Museum (Natural History) in 1912, nothing was ever found at the site when Dawson was not there, he is the only known person directly associated with the supposed finds at the second Piltdown site, the exact whereabouts of which he never revealed, and no further significant fossils, mammal or human, were discovered in the localities after his death in 1916.

The final question is this: if it was Dawson, why did he do it? The authors tackle that question, too, and show from letters that Dawson was desperate to be elected a member of the Royal Society. Fortunately, that honor eluded him (it would have been further hay for creationists), but he might well have been elected had he lived longer.

De Groote et al. finish with a lesson: paleoanthropologists shouldn’t hoard or retain exclusive possession of their fossils, for science demands verification through independent observation. I’ll add here the words of Richard Feynman, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

h/t: Latha for the original link, also sent by several other readers
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de Groote, I. et al. 2016. New genetic and morphological evidence suggest that a single hoaxer created “Pildown man.”   R. Soc. Open Sci. 2016 3 160328; DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160328. Published 10 August 2016

HuffPo headline contest ends tomorrow

August 11, 2016 • 8:15 am

Three days ago I announced a contest in which readers were asked to make up two satirical Huffington Post headlines, with the prize being an autographed copy of Faith Versus Fact (or an audiobook) with a cat drawn on it. The deadline for the contest is tomorrow at 5 p.m. Chicago time, so this is a reminder to enter if you wish. The post gives a list of characteristic HuffPo features, which you may or may not wish to incorporate.

If there’s any flaw in many entries, it’s that they’re either too heavy-handed or too long. They should be in PuffHo style, and not so bizarre that you couldn’t conceive of them appearing on that ragsite.

Here, for example, are a couple of pretty good ones that have been entered:

Bad boy, bad girl! How you’re harming your dog by indoctrinating them into the gender binary.

Yale students demand that Economics professor rescind Final Exam; accuse him of Macro and Micro aggressions.

Ramadan is for Everyone: Genuis Ways How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation with Light Day-Eating

A selfie-stick and an iPhone: how men over 40 are doing their own colonoscopies

This one is deliciously sarcastic:

Fox Shows Bias in Hillary Coverage

Get the idea? Short, sweet, and right in line with PuffHo’s philosophy. Remember, two entries per person, please.

And, just to get your juices flowing, here’s a real one (click screenshot if you really want to read it):

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Who, exactly, is “we”? The whole U.S.? I doubt it. No, what author and Associate Editor Minou Clark means is “We privileged college-educated white women who work for slave wages at PuffHo and, as compensation, pronounce on what everyone should think.”

Imagine if a real news outfit worked this way; it’s as if the New York Times had a piece with the title, “We’re over the moon about Hillary’s economic platform.”

Readers’ wildlife photographs

August 11, 2016 • 7:30 am

Put your hands together for reader Dom, who sacrificed his very blood so that readers could learn some natural history. His words:

One Saturday a few weeks ago in Norfolk I gave blood so that WEIT readers could see a cleg [JAC: “cleg” is British argot for “horsefly”]! Haematopota pluvialis – I love green eyes – isn’t she beautiful (yes, a female) ?!

These bloodsuckers are expert at landing on you so you cannot feel them.  You are most likely to get them near livestock, but this one found me while I was photographing ringlet butterflies…

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Cleg 2

When I asked Dom whether the bite itself was painless, he answered, “Yes – painless.  They are very good at doing it so you do not notice – you get a bump & itching afterwards – in my case it took 24 hours to appear.  It is not easy using the camera with one hand!”

Cleg 4

Cleg 3

Here’s a photo of horsefly eyes that Dom found on WildGuideUK. The fly above is in the left column, second row:

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Finally, on a less sanguinary note, reader Anne-Marie sent a picture of a male American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis) feeding on the seeds of a purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).

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Thursday: Hili dialogue

August 11, 2016 • 6:30 am

Today is August 17 11 (I misread the second numeral on my watch when I woke up, so ignore everything not in bold except the Hili dialogue. The rest applies to August 17 and you’ll see it again real soon. Genuine August 11 stuff today includes:

  • In this day in 1972, the last U.S ground combat unit left Vietnam
  • Robert G. Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, was born on this day in 1833
  • Photographer and mountaineer Galen Rowell died on this day in 2002, killed in a light plane crash near Bishop California. His picture + narration book, In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, about a failed attempt to climb K2, is one of the best mountaineering books I’ve read. And here’s surely his most famous photograph, a rainbow over the Potala, the former palace of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, Tibet (Ive been there, but didn’t see a rainbow):

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Sue me over the rest, but if you have a black cat, get ready to celebrate it next Wednesday. 

[Aug. 17]officially Black Cat Appreciation Day. If you have one, as I did for 17 years, give it some extra kindness.  We have dozens of readers with black cats, so do right by your moggie.

On this day in 1908, Fantasmagorie by Émile Cohl, considered the world’s first animated cartoon, was released. I’ve put the very short video below; Wikipedia notes that;

The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.

On this day in 1932, author V.S. Naipal (now a Nobel Laureate) was born. I find his work uneven, but A House for Mr. Biswas is a true classic. And on this day in 1983, Ira Gershwin, who with his brother George composed some of the finest songs in “the American songbook,” died at 86.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus is incensed at Hili’s implication that she is walking him, and threatens to chase her in retaliation.

Hili: You are better and better walking to heel.
Cyrus: Be careful or I will check how fast you can run.
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In Polish:
Hili: Coraz lepiej chodzisz przy nodze.
Cyrus: Uważaj, bo zaraz sprawdzę jak szybko umiesz biegać.

 

Ten prize-winning illusions

August 10, 2016 • 1:15 pm

For some reason those of us here at WEIT—well, at least Matthew and I—are fascinated by optical illusions, crypsis, and other things that fool the eye. Well, we now have the Motherlode of Illusions: the ten 2016 finalists for Best Illusion of the Year Contest from the Neural Correlate Society.  You can see them all at the site, and should, but I’ll put my favorite three here along with the notes from the site:

Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion

– Kokichi Sugihara: “Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion”. Meiji University, Japan

The direct views of the objects and their mirror images generate quite different interpretations of the 3D shapes. They look like vertical cylinders, but their sections appear to be different; in one view they appear to be rectangles, while in the other view they appear to be circles. We cannot correct our interpretations although we logically know that they come from the same objects. Even if the object is rotated in front of a viewer, it is difficult to understand the true shape of the object, and thus the illusion does not disappear.

Didn’t help me much: I still don’t know what shape those damn things are!

A New Illusion at Your Elbow 

– Peter Brugger and Rebekka Meier:  “A New Illusion At Your Elbow”.  University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland

Move your finger slowly along a person’s forearm from the wrist towards the elbow crook – eyes closed, the person will anticipate touch in the elbow crook. This illusory anticipation may rest on our experience of tactile velocities that are usually much faster and make us believe we feel touch at a body location not yet reached. Neural characteristics of skin receptors specialized for slow motion may also contribute to the anticipation error. Like previously described illusions, the elbow crook illusion is larger on the non-dominant arm. Women showed a smaller illusion than men, confirming their reportedly superior cutaneous sensitivity.

You’ll surely want to try this yourself, but you can’t do it on yourself. Find a willing helper and report below. Malgorzata and I tried this on each other, and we both said “stop” 2-3 inches below the crook of the arm,

Remote controls:

– Arthur G. Shapiro : “Remote Controls ”. American University, USA

Two physically identical rectangular bars become light and dark at the same time, but in some conditions they look as if they wink in alternation.  The appearance of winking (alternating) or blinking (bars in sync) can be controlled by rectangles placed in the vicinity of the modulating bars: the bars blink when the rectangles are far away or adjacent to the bars but wink when there is a gap between the bars and the rectangles. The effect is remarkable because of the sudden change from wink to blink or vice versa, and because the change can occur across large distances.

h/t: David S.

Yale creates a “renaming committee” to sanitize history

August 10, 2016 • 11:00 am

Yes, it’s the conservative Wall Street Journal, but who else is going to report on the Authoritarian Leftist shenanigans of American universities? The author is Roger Kimball, and his article is aptly titled, “The college formerly known as Yale.” I swear this could be from either The Onion or Soviet Pravda, but it’s in America, and it’s true:

On Aug. 1, Yale University president Peter Salovey announced that he is creating a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. There has been a craze for renaming things on college campuses the last couple of years—a common passion in unsettled times.

. . . A point of contention at Yale has been the residential college named for John C. Calhoun, a congressman, senator, secretary of war and vice president. Alas, Calhoun was also an avid supporter of slavery.

Mr. Salovey is also perhaps still reeling from the Halloween Horror, the uproar last year over whether Ivy League students can be trusted to pick their own holiday costumes, which made Yale’s crybullies a national laughing stock. In the wake of that he earmarked $50 million for such initiatives as the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

He then announced that Calhoun College would not change its name. Apparently, he has reconsidered. After the Committee on Renaming has done its work to develop “clearly delineated principles,” he wrote, “we will be able to hold requests for the removal of a historical name—including that of John C. Calhoun—up to them.”

Another name for this censorious group might be the Committee for the Expurgation of History. Yes, ’tis true, and you can find the President’s announcement here. The problem is in this bit from the Committee’s charge:

The charge of the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming is to articulate a set of principles that can guide Yale in decisions about whether to remove a historical name from a building or other prominent structure or space on campus—principles that are enduring rather than specific to particular controversies. The committee will review the experience both at Yale and in other institutions and communities that have addressed the question of renaming. In doing so, it will consult with experts, communicate and coordinate with other universities that are addressing similar issues, and collaborate with other groups at Yale that have been charged with related work, such as the Committee on Art in Public Spaces. After the committee’s recommendations have been articulated, approved, and disseminated, Yale will be able to apply these principles to requests for the removal of a name.

The only criteria that can be applied here are these: how many people are offended by an existing name, who they are, and why. If 10 people are offended, should the name be changed? If someone had 20 slaves rather than 100, is it okay to keep his name?  Ultimately the debate will come down to an exercise in virtue signaling, since there are not even quasi-objective standards here. And since someone whose name is on a building, or whose portrait hangs in a dining room, obviously did something considered good, we now have to weigh good versus bad.

Of course there are no-brainer cases. We wouldn’t want a picture of Hitler, Pol Pot, or Father Coughlin, hanging in a dining hall. But most cases involve judging the past by the different moral standards of today. Many of the Founding Fathers had slaves, and those include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin (all of these have been on American currency). So did John Hancock, Patrick Henry, and James Madison.   That’s about the worst offense conceivable in modern society, and rightly so. And most men from a century or more ago were sexists as well, not even conceiving that women should have the right to vote.

As Steve Pinker has shown convincingly in The Better Angels of our Nature, morality in the West has improved over time, with reviled and oppressed minorities losing opprobrium and gaining rights. Who, two hundred years ago, could stand up to the scrutiny of modern moralizers? Even Charles Darwin, though an abolitionist, viewed blacks as an inferior group.

Who are we to discard? Surely the Founding Fathers must be expelled, so Mount Rushmore must go the way of the Bamiayan Buddhas. And we have to purge all currency of the visages of slaveholders. The Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorials, since they can’t be renamed, must be destroyed. Even Darwin should have a trigger warning pasted in his books: “Content note: written by a patriarchal bigot.”

But Yale has a bigger problem than Calhoun. It’s Elihu Yale, the man after whom the college is named. As Kimball writes:

I have unhappy news for Mr. Salovey. In the great racism sweepstakes, John Calhoun was an amateur. Far more egregious was Elihu Yale, the philanthropist whose benefactions helped found the university. As an administrator in India, he was deeply involved in the slave trade. He always made sure that ships leaving his jurisdiction for Europe carried at least 10 slaves. I propose that the committee on renaming table the issue of Calhoun College and concentrate on the far more flagrant name “Yale.”

See this article at Yale’s Digital Histories for more details on Elihu’s slave-trading.

Here’s another case. Henry Ford, who founded the philanthropic Ford Foundation with his son Edsel, was a notorious anti-Semite. He bought a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to run Ford’s anti-Semitic columns, fully worthy in their vile Jew-hatred of publication in Der Stürmer. Should we then change the name of the Ford Foundation, or even rename the company? I’m an atheistic Jew, have been taunted for a religion I don’t even accept, and I should be offended, right? But I’m not; I couldn’t care less. Ford was an odious anti-Semite but also a philanthropist and a talented industrialist; let’s move on.

The solution to this problem is not to constantly change names to keep up with current morality, but recognize that our forebears were imperfect and, by modern lights, sometimes deeply immoral. What is acceptable behavior in one century changes in the next. Even our own descendants will see us as immoral.

By all means publicize our history. But do not sanitize it by effacing names, for by so doing we’re effacing the history as well, wiping out of existence the very episodes that made us who we are. This makes us no better than those Communists who airbrushed Trotsky out of their photographs.

Those who censor the past are doomed to forget it. But maybe that’s what they want.