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.
Out of the mouths of babes come, well, see for yourself in this grilling of a priest by two kids. It’s apparently from a British t.v. show called “Outnumbered.” Anybody know it?
They’d never allow this kind of stuff on the main commercial channels in the U.S.
h/t: Miss May
Don’t read this if you’re watching the game later. But feel free to comment below if you’re watching it.
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We suck. Germany’s controlling the ball and have had 6 attempts versus our 2. We look like rank amateurs next to the Germans. Our passes are inept and we keep hitting the ball back to our keeper. In contrast, Germany is passing like gangbusters, and accurately. The only reason the game is scoreless is because our keeper is so good.
It will be a miracle if we win. It will be a miracle if we even tie.
Reader Tom called my attention to a report in the sports section of the Sydney Morning Herald, which combines our current interest in sports with our constant interest in religion and its malfeasance. According to the report, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, captain of the Indian national cricket team, has been issued an arrest warrant for “hurting the religious sentiments of Hindus.”
Now I don’t know from cricket, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to work up any interest in it, but it is the most popular sport in one of the world’s most populous countries, as well as in much of the world. Tom called Dhoni “captain of the most influential sporting team in the world”; I don’t know what that means, exactly, but perhaps readers can enlighten me. And Dhoni is noted in his Wikipedia article as “widely regarded as one of the greatest finishers in limited-overs cricket.” I have no idea what limited-overs cricket is, or what a silly mid-on is. I’m happy to be ignorant: soccer fully fills the “sports module” in my brain.
At any rate, the Herald reported:
The case was filed last year against the 32-year-old after the cover of an Indian magazine carried a picture of him portrayed as a Hindu god.
The bailable warrant was issued after Dhoni failed to appear before the court despite three summons. The next date of hearing has been set for July 16.
Dhoni is currently touring with the Indian squad in England, where the team will play five Tests, five one-day internationals and one Twenty20 international.
Yerraguntla Shyam Sunder, a member of the right-wing Vishva Hindu Parishad party, filed the petition in March this year objecting to the picture of Dhoni.
“The court’s move was necessitated as Dhoni did not accept the summons sent previously. These warrants are only to make him accept and appear before the court,” Gopal Rao, the advocate representing Yerraguntla Shyam Sunder, told the Hindustan Times.
Roa also told the Hindustan Times that if Dhoni refused to appear before the court an arrest warrant which did not allow bail could be issued.
Here’s the offending magazine cover:
Now how can Dhoni be prosecuted for that? It surely wasn’t his decision to be portrayed that way.
Dhoni has been slurred before, in accusations of corruption. My Indian friends tell me that cricket in their country is deeply corrupt: both in the betting and in the teams themselves, who can either throw games or even mis-hit balls, since bets are placed on individual batters as well as game outcomes. Nevertheless, the man is enormously popular and rich: $30 million US is an absolute fortune in India:
A fortnight ago [Dhoni] was listed by Forbes magazine as the 22nd highest paid athlete in the world, and the only cricketer in the top 100, with earnings of $US30 million in 2013. The magazine said $26m of Dhoni’s earnings had arrived through endorsements.
The wicketkeeper-batsman is due to lead India in Australia this summer, when they will play four Tests against Michael Clarke’s No.1 ranked team and then take part in a one-day tri-series with Australia and England in the lead-up to the 2015 World Cup.
Since the rise of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its Hindu-centric philosophy, India has become more religiously intolerant, with Hindus crying about hurt feelings nearly as often as Muslims. Author Wendy Doniger, (a Chicago colleague) had her recent book about Hinduism (The Hindus: An Alternative History) pulled by Penguin from Indian booksellers and pulped (I wrote about this February) because a few Hindus complained that it presented their religion in a poor light.
And it’s not just Hindus: rationalist Sanal Edamaruku is facing arrest in his country for exposing a “miracle statue” of Jesus in Mumbai (which supposedly produced water) as a case of faulty plumbing in a nearby loo. For that he faced prosecution under India’s outdated blasphemy laws, and is now in exile in Finland, afraid to go back to India.
India is the world’s largest democracy. I love the country and its people, although the increasingly virulent strain of religious fervor scares me. If they want to keep setting an example of how a democracy can function when it encompasses such a diverse people, they need to get rid of those stupid blasphemy laws. I don’t know about Dhoni’s honesty in playing cricket, but he doesn’t deserve prosecution for being portrayed as Krishna.
From my CNN alerts:
Heavy rains in Recife, Brazil, the location of today’s World Cup match between the U.S. and Germany, has caused extensive flooding, turning roads into rivers and making access to the stadium difficult.
FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, just announced that the U.S. game will be played as scheduled at noon ET.
FIFA also announced that Luis Suarez, Uruguay’s star striker, has been suspended for the rest of the World Cup tournament for biting Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini during the game between the two soccer powers on Tuesday. He is suspended for a total of nine matches and is banned from any kind of soccer-related activity for four months.
I would have banned The Chomper for a year. Regardless of the cause of his biting, and despite my feeling that he could not have done otherwise, he needs severe punishment to deter others and to keep him from biting in the future. He also, of course, needs some kind of counseling or anger management therapy.
Note to readers: it took me 1.5 hours to write what’s below, so you’d better read it!
Somebody called this paper to my attention (I can’t recall who), and I read it even though I had to wade though prose about as tedious as I’ve ever seen in a scientific paper. I don’t know the authors, and I guess their results are somewhat interesting, but the paper is written so badly that it’s hard to distill its essence. I am talking about a new paper by P. W. Bateman and P. A. Fleming in Journal of Zoology (reference and link at bottom).
For example, have a gander at the title and then the abstract.
This is scientific writing at its most opaque. The title should be “Do squirrels run away when you’re approaching them or looking at them?” And the abstract should be this:
Both learning and natural selection predict that animals should balance their “flight” distance—the distance from which they flee an approaching animal that might be dangerous—against the benefits of remaining where they are. Animals who flee when the supposed danger is too far away risk losing food and wasting energy; those who flee only at the last second risk death. We tested this by observing squirrels at a housing project in Manhattan, New York. We found that when observers approached foraging squirrels on a well-marked footpath, the flight distance was smaller than when the observers left the footpath and walked toward the squirrels. Flight distance was also increased when the observers were looking directly at the squirrels. In other words, squirrels get freaked out when you deviate from what they consider a “normal” path and when you’re staring the little buggers down. Those are both cues that, in fact, an approaching animal might be a predator.
Well, that’s is a bit lighthearted, and I wrote it in about two minutes and could do much better with a couple of revisions, but compare that to the tangle of words above. Why not say “squirrels” instead of “successful urban exploiters,” for crying out loud?
This is the kind of writing that Steven Pinker warns against in his new book A Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which I’ve just read in galleys. It’s very good, and anyone aspiring to clear writing should order it (it’ll be out September 30). I won’t give the contents away, but it is a guide to writing in what Pinker calls “the classic style,” an easygoing style that’s like having a conversation with the reader. There is also a list of many contentious words and grammatical usages, and Pinker’s judgement on whether they’re good or verboten. It’s a great book to have if you aspire to avoid writing like the authors above, and it’s already helped me with the prose in my own book (which, by the way, will be done by July 4).
I will summarize the results briefly, and am doing so only because this paper involves my favorite rodent. The researchers did a study approaching Eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinenesis; same species as Tufty E. and his two siblings) foraging on the grounds of Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town, an apartment project in lower Manhattan. The grounds are criss-crossed by footpaths. The observers were told to walk towards foraging squirrels, walking in a way that would take them 2 meters from the squirrel when they passed by. They used two variants of this design.
The first involved staying on the footpath, and approaching squirrels within 2m of the footpath versus straying from the footpath to approach the squirrel. (Most people stay on the footpaths.) The second was to stare at the squirrel while approaching it versus pretending to ignore it and watching it only with your peripheral vision. Observers then determined what proportion of squirrels fled before they were 2 m away from it. Here is the graph showing the proportion of squirrels fleeing (height of black bar) versus staying put (white bar) for all four combinations of staying/straying on footpath and looking/not looking.
No surprise here: squirrels stay put, by and large, when you stay on the footpath, but flee readily when you deviate from the footpath. In both cases they flee a lot more often when you’re looking at them. I suppose the second bit is mildly interesting, for it shows that the squirrels are aware of the direction of your gaze.
In the second part of the study (note that the sample sizes are small–about 20 sqrlz/replicate), they measured three things in each of the four treatments: “alert distance” (AD), the distance at which the squirrels sit up and take notice; the “flight initiation distance”” (FID), the distance from the observers at which the squirrels begin to flee; and the “distance fled” (DF), the distance that the squirrel ran before it started foraging again. Here are the data. The zero point for distance is actually 2 meters, the distance that the observers calculated that they would come closest to the rodent. In other words, they were instructed to get no closer than 2 meters, so that’s called “zero distance”:
Figure 2 Alert distance (AD), flight initiation distance (FID) and distance fled (DF) for squirrels approached by a pedestrian that was either looking or not looking at them, and either remained on footpaths or approached the squirrels directly (moving off the footpaths). Letters/ numerals indicate the results of post hoc analyses for each distance measure independently.
The salient results:
The upshot is that it makes a big difference whether or not you’re looking at the squirrels, although staying on the footpaths also keeps them calmer. That’s an interesting result, so why did they bury it in contorted prose? Look how they finish the paper:
We have identified cues that are likely to be important for risk perception by an urban animal species monitoring its environment. Together with direction of attention of people, urban squirrels were more reactive to pedestrians that showed a divergence from ‘usual’ behaviour (e.g. pedestrians entering areas which are usually human-free), even when not associated with closer approach or changes in speed. In addition to being arboreal (which can include use of anthropogenic structures), which minimizes vulnerability to diurnal terrestrial ‘predators’ (see Herr, Schley & Roper, 2009), general trophic and social flexibility (Baumgartner, 1943; Don, 1983; Koprowski, 2005) may help explain why eastern grey squirrels are successful urban adapters.
Further research should consider how, despite habituation to human presence, urban taxa modulate their reactions according to subtle differences in human behaviour. Assessment of, and potentially habituation to, human activity is an important criterion for successful urban adapters and urban exploiters. In the face of increasing urbanization across the globe, the life history and behavioural attributes of those taxa that are good urban adapters.
This is how people write when they want to sound “science-y,” and it’s how we scientists are taught to write. But it needn’t be that way. In fact, when I read a paper this tedious, I tend to turn off and put it down. If you want people to read your scientific work (or anything you write), put it in clear language and, if you can, try to be a bit lively. Three people whose papers are consistently clear are David Sloan Wilson, Dick Lewontin (my Ph.D. adviser) and—in his earlier days—Stephen Jay Gould. If you know of others, name them in the comments.
But the authors of this squirrel paper need a lesson from Pinker! There is never a reason, I think, to use the kind of contorted language seen above, even in one’s most serious academic papers. You can, of course, write more formally for your colleagues (omitting, for example, contractions like “it’s”), but there’s no need to say stuff like “anthropogenic structures” or “how. . urban taxa modulate their reactions according to subtle differences in human behavior.” Academics are people, and like everyone we appreciate clear writing. The only ones who don’t are postmodernists, who use unreadable prose to hide their lack of ideas.
I won’t correct the language above as it would take forever. Let me just say that “showed a divergence from” could be changed to “altered” or “deviated from,” and “anthropogenic structures” (JEBUS!) could be “buildings” or “human constructions.”
All those words to show that squirrels pay attention to unusual human behavior and eye contact!
After all that, we need a LOLsquirrel (I wonder how this one was rescued):
Having interacted a lot with squirrels over the last two years, I can vouch that the males do indeed have prominent testicles.
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Bateman, P. W. and P. A. Fleming. 2014. Does human pedestrian behavior influence risk or assessment in a successful urban adaptor? J. Zoology. Article first published online: 12 June, 2014; DOI: 10.1111/jzo.12156
Here’s today’s schedule. Of course everybody in the U.S. is all worked up about the game with Germany, but I have no strong feelings about it. The news last night showed a bunch of people all worked up about “Team USA,” and a lot of the bars are opening early to televise the game (it’s on at 11 a.m. in Chicago, so people will be drinking early). The Chicagoans seemed were largely deluded, many saying that the U.S. was going “all the way,” i.e., we were gonna win the whole tournament.! That is a quasi-religious feeling based on faith and not fact. But I will be watching!
We won’t have a contest this time because you’ve proven completely incompetent at picking winners! But the overall contest still stands, and I think about 50% of the guesses for the championship match are now impossible. For that one, the winner gets an autographed book with a drawing of cats playing football (in your own team’s colors).
Below are the highlights of Argentina’s 3-2 victory over Nigeria yesterday. I was glad to see Messi on form, and his two goals (one on a free kick) were gorgeous. Nigeria also played very well, and their two goals were superb as well. I learned a lesson yesterday: never go make a sandwich at the beginning of the game. It took only a few minutes, but by the time I’d returned with my food, there had already been two goals! In the U.S. you can make sandwiches at any time during a baseball or (U.S.) football game and not miss anything.
Here’s this morning’s animated Google Doodle, which is boring (click on it to see, and then on the World Cup symbol at the upper right on the next page to see the schedule):
The answer is “no”. . .
A: Why are you staring at Cyrus so intently?
Hili: I’m trying to decide whether I like him yet.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu tak się przyglądasz Cyrusowi?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, czy ja go już lubię?
Well, nobody guessed all the winners and the scores of today’s matches, but we have someone—reader Susan—who got all the winners right, and also guessed that Ecuador would tie France. That was unexpected, with most guessing a victory for France. Those few who did guess a tie foundered on the Switzerland/Honduras match, with everyone thinking that the Swiss would be defeated. Only Susan got the tie and the 3 victors right. She, then, wins a Jerry Coyne the Cat keychain.
Here are today’s results, with Susan’s guesses below.
Nigeria 0 – 2 Argentina
Bosnia 1 – 0 Iran
Honduras 0 – 2 Switz
Ecuador 1 – 1 France
So, Susan, contact me by email with your mailing address, and your prize will be on its way. And you might, in the comments below, tell us how you were so prescient, particularly with the Switzerland/Honduras match. Do you perchance have a psychic octopus at your disposal?
