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.
Hili has apparently read my critique of Roger Scruton, which was translated into Polish today on Listy. She likes it!
Hili: I agree with Jerry absolutely.
A: What do you agree with him about?
Hili: That cats belong in sacrum and d*gs in profanum.
Hili: Ja się całkowicie zgadzam z Jerrym.
Ja: W czym się z nim zgadzasz?
Hili: Że koty to sacrum a psy to profanum.
Maria Sharapova won her second French Open title on Saturday, and of course her victory was accompanied by her trademarked incessant shrieking. Apparently started by Monica Seles, shrieking and grunting have been taken up by many other players, male and female. But I find Sharapova’s vocalizations particularly disturbing because they’re so loud. Here’s what it sounds like:
It’s annoying to non-shrieking opponents, it can throw them off, and it disturbs the crowds. And it’s not as if it’s necessary: even Sharapova herself has admitted that she doesn’t know why she does it, and doesn’t even know whether it helps her game. Apparently it’s just part of the “routine.” (See here starting at 2:25.)
Why do judges allow this? It’s as if a baseball batter, while waiting for a pitch, were to shriek at the pitcher. Anyone who did that would be thrown out of the game.
(Let me add out that there’s never been a controlled experiment showing the efficacy of shrieking, which would be hard to do anyway. And you can’t justify it like faitheists justify religion—because it makes the grunter feel good. Maybe it does, but it annoys the hell out of everyone else.)
[JAC note: I’m not really fond of posting pictures of death and depredation in nature, but, hey, that’s biology folks! You can’t have the squee without the squalling.] by Matthew Cobb The BBC’s annual three week-long nature extravaganza, Springwatch, is starting its final week. One of the highlights last week was the antics of Grub, a barn owl chick, who was fed a live “slow worm” (i.e., a legless lizard). I can’t find a video of this (though UK readers can watch the grisly business here – it starts at 06:00). Here are some screen grabs (they’re filmed with night vision, so are rather dim). First up, Grub (named by viewers because he is generally very grubby) starts to eat the hapless reptile:
Grub took about 10 minutes to swallow the damn thing, partly because it was still alive. Every time he took a pause for breath, it started to come out again. Presenter Chris Packham wondered what the slow worm thought about it and described it as a living endoscope…: 
Eventually, after a lot of struggle, the baby dinosaur was triumphant, if looking somewhat queasy: 
Within minutes, however, he was being stuffed full of more prey. And, as they have just announced on tonight’s programme, Grub fledged on Saturday, with a rather ungainly flight. Over the weekend, however, it seems as though the reptiles have struck back. The programme has live webcams on a number of nests, one of which is a very messy and smelly goldfinch nest (they just crap everywhere – it really is pretty foul, stinking and covered with maggots and flies). And over the weekend, an adder came to visit, with obvious consequences, nomming one of the chicks. The full horror was shown on tonight’s programme. Here’s a screen shot that was posted on Tw*tter that gave us an advance taste of what came slithering towards the goldfinch babies: https://twitter.com/matthewcobb/status/475765087022874624 Here’s another screen grab, in which you can see that the adder is very small indeed, and has to try and swallow the nestling head first (nestling head and adder head on left of picture). The reptile got away with the bird, but shortly returned to have another go. There was no tell-tale bulge in the adder, suggesting either the snake bit the prey and stashed it somewhere or it dropped it. 
Someone asked about a statement I attributed to philosopher Anthony Grayling: a statement about how all religions would be repressive if they had complete political power. I’ve found at least one Grayling quote to that effect, and I commend it to the attention of the citizens of Lebanon, Missouri. It’s from his essay “The secular and the sacred“. If those citizens find it too onerous to read it all, I’ve put the important part in bold.
The statement at issue is in the third paragraph.
. . . all the major religions in fact blaspheme one another, and ought by their principles to engage in crusade or jihad each against the others – a profoundly disturbing thought. They blaspheme each other in numerous ways. All non-Christians blaspheme Christianity by their refusal to accept the divinity of Christ, because in so doing they reject the Holy Ghost, doing which is described as the most serious of all blasphemies. The New Testament has Christ say “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me”. This places members of other faiths beyond redemption; they are damned if they know this claim but do not heed it. By an unlucky twist of theology, Protestants have to regard Catholics as blasphemers too, because the latter regard Mary as co-redemptorix with Christ, in violation of the utterance just quoted. All non-Muslims blaspheme Islam because they insult Mohammed by not accepting him as the true Prophet, and by ignoring the teachings of the Koran. Jews seem the least philosophically troubled by what people of other faiths think about their own – but Orthodox Jews regard themselves as religiously superior to others because others fail in the proper observances, for example by not respecting kosher constraints. All the religions blaspheme each other by regarding the others’ teachings, metaphysics and much of their ethics as false, and their own religion as the only true one.
It is a woolly and optimistic liberal hope that all religions can be viewed as worshipping the same god, only in different ways; but this is a nonsense, as shown by the most cursory comparison of teachings, interpretations, moral requirements, creation myths and eschatologies, in all of which the major religions differ and frequently contradict each other. History shows how clearly the religions themsevles grasped this; the motivation for Christianity’s hundreds of years of crusades against Islam, pogroms against Jews, and inquisitions against heretics, was the desire to expunge heterodoxy and ‘infidelity’ or at least to effect forcible compliance with prevailing orthodoxy. Islam’s various jihads had the same aim, and it spread half way around the world by conquest and the sword.
Where they can get away with it – as in present-day Afghanistan – devotees continue the same practices. The religious Right in America would doubtless do so too, but has to use TV, money, advertising, and political lobbying instead to impress its version of the truth on American society. It is only where religion is on the back foot, reduced to a minority practice, with an insecure tenure in society, that it presents itself as essentially peaceful and charitable.
This is the chief reason why allowing the major religions to jostle against one another in the public domain is extremely undesirable. The solution is to make the public domain wholly secular, leaving religion to the personal sphere, as a matter of private conviction and practice only. Society should be blind to religion both in the sense that it lets people believe and behave as they wish provided they do no harm to others, and in the sense that it acts as if religions do not exist, with public affairs being straightforwardly secular in character. The constitution of the USA provides exactly this, though the religious lobby is always trying to breach it, for example with prayers in schools. George W. Bush’s granting of public funds for ‘faith-based initiatives’ actually does so.
We’ve seen how peaceful and charitable Lebanon’s brand of Christianity is. Left on its own, it presents an amiable countenance. Once challenged, it turns into Godzilla.
You can find a nice free collection of Grayling’s essays here.
by Matthew Cobb
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/originals/a1/b8/90/a1b89077363dc5d5c2cc58f91f308a00.jpg
This fantastic salticid (that’s a jumping spider, bub: tiny but amazing predators) was posted recently by Sofía Gabriela (aka @sofiabiologista) on that social network that Jerry does not do, but it appears to have been around for a few months.
There is more information on this FB page which says
It’s hard to be scared of a spider that looks so gorgeous. These male jumping spiders are 4mm long, and belong to the
familygenus Simaetha. They were photographed in the Sraburi Province of Thailand last year. Male jumping spiders are often more strikingly coloured than the females, because it’s their job to perform the courtship displays.
The photo – and perhaps the discovery – are credited to Theerasak Saksritawee, aka Pupumon (the handle is the name of a ‘slime digimon’ says Google). He’s in his late 20s and clearly has a knack with macro-photography. You can find a few of his other photos here. He also took this mantis which photobombed a photo of a spider (or is it vice-versa?):
The colours of the University of Manchester, where I work, are purple and gold – we have banks of purple and yellow crocuses that flower in spring and our academic gowns, which our graduating students will soon be wearing, are black with purple and gold trim. I therefore suggest to The Powers The Be that we make this Simaetha species spider the official University of Manchester mascot.
[JAC: Can they call the school teams “The Manchester Salticids”?]
UPDATE: I’m adding one comment I found on Facebook’s “Standing strong with Kevin Lowery” page:
It’s unbelievable: these people feel uncomfortable UNLESS God is mentioned constantly—and, in this case, illegally. Sometimes I feel I’m living on a different planet from these people.
*****
Here are a couple of comments from the Fox News story on Lebanon, Missouri’s praying-principal issue, “Missouri principal wows crowd, angers atheists with guarded ‘God’ references“.
I love the last comment, with “god” in lower case. But there’s a reason why people like Davidd1975 are sometimes called “the Christian Taliban.” Imagine if they ran the country! Could we still drink and dance?
Refreshingly, though, there’s a lot of pro-secularism comments on that thread, which surprised me.
In the meantime, a few more students and residents of Lebanon have overcome their fears and written to me in support of the First Amendment and against the relentless proselytizing of Lebanon High School, its principal, and its supporters. I hope to publish the thoughts of these dissenters later today. But in the meantime, what started as a simple criticism of a legal violation has become, for me, a fascinating glimpse into a part of American society that is widespread, but one that I don’t often hear from. Fascinating, but scary.
If you’re an audio person, you can find a 37-minute video of Steve Pinker discussing his new book, and how to write well, on John Brockman’s Edge site. The talk is called “Writing in the 21st Century.”
You can also click on the screenshot below to go to the video, but scroll down a bit when you get to the page:
If you’d rather read, the whole talk is transcribed at the same site, though the transcript has errors and doesn’t completely follow the talk. An excerpt or two:
The literary scholars Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas have identified the stance that our best essayists and writers implicitly adopt, and that is a combination of vision and conversation. When you write you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.
That may sound obvious. But it’s amazing how many of the bad habits of academese and legalese and so on come from flouting that model. Bad writers don’t point to something in the world but are self-conscious about not seeming naïve about the pitfalls of their own enterprise. Their goal is not to show something to the reader but to prove that they are not a bad lawyer or a bad scientist or a bad academic. And so bad writing is cluttered with apologies and hedges and “somewhats” and reviews of the past activity of people in the same line of work as the writer, as opposed to concentrating on something in the world that the writer is trying to get someone else to see with their own eyes.
Indeed! After sweating blood learning to write in an accessible, popular style, I now find myself nearly incapable of reading papers in my own field of evolutionary biology. They are almost always verbose, stiff, and leaden. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Graduate students are taught to write in a stilted style because their professors tell them that this is how one is supposed to “write like a scientist.” Pity, that.
. . . So being a good writer depends not just on having mastered the logical rules of combination but on having absorbed tens or hundreds of thousands of constructions and idioms and irregularities from the printed page. The first step to being a good writer is to be a good reader: to read a lot, and to savor and reverse-engineer good prose wherever you find it. That is, to read a passage of writing and think to yourself, … “How did the writer achieve that effect? What was their trick?” And to read a good sentence with a consciousness of what makes it so much fun to glide through.
. . . Inevitably my own writing manual is going to be called “descriptivist,” because it questions a number of dumb rules that are routinely flouted by all the best writers and had no business being in stylebooks in the first place. These pseudo-rules violate the logic of English but get passed down as folklore from one style sheet to the next. But debunking stupid rules is not the same thing as denying the existence of rules, to say nothing of advice on writing. The Sense of Style is clearly prescriptive: it consists of 300 pages in which I boss the reader around.
There’s a lot more to watch or read. In the last ten minutes or so, he tackles the contentious issue of “scientism”: does science have anything to say about the humanities? If you’ve read Pinker, you’ll know that his answer is “yes.”
Pinker’s new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, will be out Sept. 30. I expect the literary qualities of comments on this site to improve thereafter.
Morning latte in my new cup. Gayle Ferguson will get one too.
