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.
A: What are you doing up there?
Hili: I’m climbing moral heights.
A: What for?
Hili: So that everybody will admire my immeasurable humility.
Ja: Co tam robisz?
Hili: Wspinam się na wyżyny moralne.
Ja: W jakim celu?
Hili: Żeby wszyscy podziwiali moją niezmierzoną pokorę.
Remember that cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), although they’re large African cats, cannot roar: they chirp, as well as making a panoply of non-roaring noises. (Go here to see my recent post which shows an adult cheetah embarrassing itself when vocalizing.)
Here’s a cheetah cub making even cuter noises. The YouTube notes give some background:
This cheetah kitten named Nala was in Namibia Africa when I was visiting some friends of mine this past summer. Her mother was killed by a car, so my friends kindly took care of her. She was well fed and had 44,000 acres to roam around in and be safe. Enjoy!
Earlier today I posted reader Jeremy’s photo of a pika, both in close-up and then in the distance in its rocky environs. I looked at it for the longest time, even in the enlarged photo like the first one below, and couldn’t find the damn thing. Then I finally spotted it; it’s almost as hard as a nightjar.
I’ll put the original photo up first (click to enlarge it even more if you still want to look for the pika), and then a photo with the pika circled, sent by Jeremy (he called it “pika-boo”!). Hint: if you look at the original, the beast is just to the right of center:
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The reveal:
And an enlarged view:
From PBS (via Matthew Cobb), and inspired by Richard Dawkins’s The Magic of Reality, we get a short video explaining to non-scientists why there was no first human. Matthew tells me he’s going to show it to his students, and it’s a good didactic tool. Have a look:
Well, this bit of political theater (video below) occurred on “The Steve Malzberg Show,” a Newsmax talk show, last Thursday. Not only does Dinesh D’Souza compare the American Left’s attitude toward the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri to the behavior of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but he argues that the Obama Administration has simply decided that Darren Wilson the policeman under investigation for shooting Michael Brown, should be “put up against the wall.”
Based on the news I’ve heard, my own view is that Wilson probably did commit murder or manslaughter, but there’s simply too much prejudgment on the Internet about this affair. I’d prefer to see what evidence comes out in court and let the justice system work it through instead of convicting Wilson before a trial, which seems to be happening at some places I’ll characterize as “blogs.” I reserve judgement—as I did with the first O.J. Simpson case—to disagree with a jury’s verdict, but a jury trial guarantees that a lot of evidence that we don’t know about will be produced and vetted.
But D’Souza, as always, is simply a jerk. Of course, he’s trying to sell a new book, and controversy helps with right-wing loons like him and Ann Coulter. And, by the way, why isn’t he in jail yet?
h/t: Diana
Were Althea Gibson (1927-2003) still alive, today would be her 87th birthday. Google honors the day with this animated Doodle of Gibson playing tennis (click on screenshot to go to Doodle):
I’m old enough to have seen her play. She was not only the first black woman to hit the big time in tennis, but this didn’t represent some kind of affirmative action in sports: like another pioneer, Jackie Robinson, she was simply fantastic regardless of her ethnicity:
Wikipedia sums up her achievements:
In 1956 she became the first person of color to win a Grand Slam title (the French Open). The following year she won both Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals (precursor of the U.S. Open), then won both again in 1958, and was voted Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press in both years. In all she won 11 Grand Slam tournaments, including six doubles titles, and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame and the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. “She is one of the greatest players who ever lived,” said Robert Ryland, a tennis contemporary and former coach of Venus and Serena Williams. “Martina couldn’t touch her. I think she’d beat the Williams sisters.” In the early 1960s she also became the first black player to compete on the women’s professional golf tour.
Here’s a good six-minute video biography of Gibson:
For years I’ve been afflicted with “academic anxiety dreams,” which go like this: I have an imminent final exam in college, and either haven’t studied for it, can’t find my way to the exam room, or am late for it. These dreams aren’t as frequent as they used to be (which was almost every night) but they still recur about once a week. But their precise form is always different.
Last night, for instance, I dreamed that I had final exam in introductory biology (the courses vary from dream to dream), but had not been at two lectures and so was missing the notes. During the entire dream—who knows how long they last?—I was wandering about trying to find someone who could give me the notes for those lectures. First I encountered my old college freshman-year roommate, who said he had the notes but then couldn’t find them. I then wandered into another building, and managed to locate someone who also had taken the class, and had the notes. This person, who had fluffy hair like Liberace, had a huge box of very elaborate notes: each lecture’s notes were put in a separate file folder, and pasted on the folder ‘s front was an outline of the lecture on a large blue Post-It note (if you wake up soon after you dream, you can remember many details).
Unfortunately, this person was deeply suspicious of me; he said that he feared that if I studied his notes, I’d do better than he would, and hurt the grading curve. I managed to wheedle the notes out of him anyway, and went back to my dorm to study. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my dorm, but that’s another story. . .
I used to think that the profusion of these anxiety dreams, all connected with lectures and tests, was my own personal pathology, but over the years I’ve found that many academics have them. My old advisor Dick Lewontin, for instance, said he had the same dream—about being late for an exam—every night for decades.
Now I’m not a diehard Freudian (his Interpretation of Dreams is a real exercise in confirmation bias, as well as a real stretch), but I do think that dreams are more than just random firings of neurons. For reasons we don’t understand, but which I find fascinating, our fears, hopes, and personalities are all massaged by our brain into a coherent story while we’re asleep. Talk about the hard problem of consciousness: what about the even harder problem of where dreams come from?
At any rate, do any other readers out there have academic anxiety dreams? And, of course, if you have any recurrent dream, or simply had a really weird one recently, we’d all be delighted to hear about it.
Several readers responded to my call for photos, and most are post-worthy. There’s a diverse phylogenetic mixture today. For example, reader Jeremy sent some photos of the adorable pika in its mountain habitat, with an extra “spot the pika” feature (answer tomorrow):
I went hiking today around the Lake Louise area in the Canadian Rockies. I came across two of these little critters running around the rocks. They’re called “pikas” (Ochotona princeps). I would never have spotted them if they hadn’t been making high-pitched calls to one another across the rocky terrain.
Note: pikas are more closely related to rabbits than to rodents: they’re in the order Lagomorpha. One family of that order contains the bunnies and hares (Leporidae), and the other family the pikas (Ochotonidae). And damn if these little guys aren’t cute!:
I’ve included a shot of a pika zoomed in, and another at normal zoom to show how well these little guys blend into their surroundings. Can you spot it?
Answer later today. Try to find it!
And, across the Big Pond, from reader Elise:
If you are running low on reader wildlife pictures, here are two that you may be interested in. They are of starfish on Piha beach west of Auckland, NZ. They are on a rock that is only exposed during low tide and there are a ton of them! Piha beach is one of my favourite spots for tide pooling.
Butterflies from reader Jason:
Here are two piccies of a family Nymphalidae, Aglais io or Peacock butterfly that I took at the Harewood House stately home in Yorkshire today. I’m not a butterfly head but I managed to identify this one from the web. I could see its proboscis curling up and down into the flowers, it was amazing.
Finally, reader Chris sent a frog, with a needlessly self-deprecating caption:
Obviously not as professional as some, but in case you feel a need to include an amphibian! I believe it’s a pickerel frog (Rana palustris). [Readers?] Photo taken near Ithaca, NY with an iPhone 4S.
Frogs are lovely, and the kind of animal nobody could ever have predicted a priori would evolve. They’re an evolutionary mess: a jury-rigged amphibian.