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.
As usual, we have three cat-releated items today, the first including the announcement from the BBC that the foreign office has employed a Chief Mouser named Palmerston. (There’s already a Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, Larry, at 10 Downing Street, but his mousing abilities are horrible. He is cute, though.
Larry, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet OfficePalmerston, Chief Mouser to the Foreign Office
As with Larry, Palmerston came from the Battersea Dogs and Cat home, and the Foreign Office sent out a nice notice of his hiring:
Palmerston will be living at one of the country’s most famous addresses among the UK’s top diplomats and ministers.
Foreign Office bosses has been quick to point out he will be no burden on the taxpayer.
“Palmerston’s domestic posting will have zero cost to the public purrse as a staff kitty will be used to pay for him and all aspects of his welfur.”
. . “Palmerston is HM Diplomatic Service’s newest arrival and in the role of FCO Chief Mouser will assist our pest controllers in keeping down the number of mice in our King Charles Street building.
“We have worked closely with Battersea Dogs and Cats Home on Palmerston’s deployment and they have inspected his new home, as they do for all pawtential new owners of their rescue cats.”
The two year old domestic short hair was found wandering the streets of London. He was hungry, underweight, and had no microchip, meaning his previous owners could not be traced.
Battersea’s Head of Catteries, Lindsey Quinlan told Newsbeat: “”He’s a very confident cat, loves being with people, and enjoys a good chin rub.
“If his behaviour at Battersea is anything to go by, we predict Palmerston will be a formidable feline, very deserving of his new name.”
You can read an interview with Palmerston at BuzzFeed, and there’s also a report on the BBC Newshour. Reader “j.j.” notes this about the BBC piece:
What makes this report noteworthy beyond other reports I’ve heard is that Lindsey Quinlan, head of the Battersea Catteries (what a job!) is interviewed about Palmerston’s history and the work at the Battersea cat rescue center (dogs, too). They actually do hire out cats as mousers — not just any rescued cat, they vet them for the job.
The video shows the “wild ancestors” of our dogs and cats meeting together in the snowy forests of the Carpathian Mountains in Poland. It was produced by the biologist and video-photographer Zenek Wojtas, who commented on this unique encounter saying:
“Observing wild lynx and wolves in their natural habitat is extremely difficult and rare. I often spend months in freezing conditions to see animals in nature. This encounter is unique as it gives us an insight into the harmony that exists in nature, where predators can live in the same habitat without harming each other. As the wolf slowly walked towards the female lynx, she arched her back to protect her kittens, as all mothers would do. It was not a fight, the wolf only wanted to play.”
Of course the cat pwns the d*g!!!:
*********
Finally, don’t you think you need one of these food dispensers? Imagine how much it can liven up your next dinner party! Sadly, they appear to be sold out for good.
Reader Lou Jost, who lives and works in Ecuador, found a really cool beetle, and a case of possible mimicry that I didn’t know about. His descriptions are indented:
Here’s another weird insect I found. This one is a translucent chrysomelid beetle larva, subfamily Cassidinae, which builds a rough likeness of another insect or spider, by carefully placing bricks of poop onto its back with its “anal turret” (that’s a real term!!). It does this by touch since it can’t see what it’s doing back there. When this creature grows up it turns into a partly-transparent beetle that also has a fake insect on its back, a fly, but this time it is just done with pigment.
JAC: The adult, with spider-like markings on its back:
The adult also has amazing feet. They are like wet mops and can stick to glass and other surfaces, and withstand enormous forces (60-100 times their own weight). The liquid is a viscous lipid. The feet are marvelous under a microscope. I think the claws might be used as levers to get the wet, flattened, divided hairs to unstick from the surface.
I must have taken many thousands of images of this thing during its life. The foot pictures shown here required about 700 pictures each. You can see the microscopic droplets of lipids on the flattened hair tips. There are more photos and info here.
Today, as many of you have no doubt seen on Google, is the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright and subject of many a Francis Bacon dunnit conspiracy theory. I’ve loved Shakespeare ever since I was a young child and my father put a copy of Macbeth into my hands, possibly as a joke – I was looking for a book with witches in it. When he returned I had already memorised Act 1. As a ‘Witch Book’, Macbeth sucks; but I found I didn’t care – I’d found a new love.
In Shakespeare’s honor, The Telegraphhas put together a list of Shakespearean insults. “Villain, I have done thy mother” needs no explanation, while others such as “I bite my thumb at you” don’t even make the list as an insult, as it loses its sting if it requires footnotes to be understood.
[JAC addendum:The New York Times has published an obituary for the bard, as if he had just died. It’s very nice and also interactive, so you can click on the words—or phrases from his plays—and learn more. There’s also a Google Doodle; click on it to show where it goes:]
Hili is verging on the blasphemous today, or as those of us in the reality biz like to say: reasonably accurate.
GOD IS ONLY A THEORY
Hili: What are we posting today?
A: Jerry’s article about a philosopher who says that God is the question.
Hili: So God is just a theory and one based on a very wobbly hypothesis?
In Polish:
BÓG JEST TYLKO TEORIĄ
Hili: Co dziś dajemy?
Ja: Artykuł Jerrego, o filozofie, który mówi, że Bóg jest pytaniem.
Hili: Czyli Bóg to tylko teoria i to oparta na hipotezie o wysokiej tolerancji rozpoznania?
An old favorite, Simon’s Cat (website here), has added some Science to the cartoons, combining the usual amusing animations (in this case, one called “Let me in”) with an expert’s explanation of cat behavior (the expert here is Nicky Trevorrow). Apparently “Simon’s Cat Logic” will be a continuing series.
Note that throughout this video, Simon Tofield, who appears in person, makes the cat noises himself. The regular animation, with an introduction by Tofield, starts at 3:00.
The explanation:
Simon’s Cat Logic is a fun new series where we speak to a Cat Behaviour Expert at Cats Protection about why cats do the silly things they do, and how we can help our cats lead happy and healthy lives.
The Big Event yesterday was my two-hour session with the 120 students in Peter Boghossian’s “Pseudoscience” class at Portland State. I lectured for an hour, and then there was a question-and-answer session. The students had some good questions. Peter also teaches an “Atheism” class and a separate “New Atheism” class, both of which are wildly popular: they have to turn students away. That’s a good sign, and most of the students are either nonbelievers, doubters, or simply want to learn more about the nature of modern nonbelief.
Peter took this photo of me lecturing (I’m showing the genetic data that refute Adam and Eve as our sole ancestors):
Afterwards we went to lunch, and I noticed, as we ate outside (it was a glorious day), that many more young people are tattooed here than in Chicago. Peter noticed that out waitress had a tattoo, too, and I asked her if I could photograph it:
Portland outfit: flannel shirt and clunky shoes:
Three archetypal Portlanders (the locals love their smartphones!):
I’m staying two nights in The Ace Hotel, a lovely old place that is a refubished old building. And, in line with Portland culture, there are drawings over my bed:
My cute sink (the shower is down the hall):
Peter took me to the hotel last evening in an Uber car—my first ride in one, and it was terrific (also prompt and much cheaper than a cab). He noticed that the final tab (you don’t tip with Uber) was the Devil’s Number—an appropriate fare for two militant atheists. Coincidence? I think not. . .
Tonight at 7 I talk on Free Will for the local Center for Inquiry. The information is here, so come if you’re in the area and have the time. I’m not sure if they’ll be selling my books, but if you bring one you’ve already bought I’ll be glad to sign it.
Is there any “progressive” organization more misguided, more Authoritarian Leftist, and yes, more bigoted, than Britain’s National Union of Students? Their pervasive policy of “no-platforming,” their authoritarian attempts to censor views they don’t like, their coddling of Muslim groups that are anti-feminist and anti-gay—all bely their claim that they’re “progressive.” In reality, the organization is fascistic, but pretending to be Leftist.
If you had any doubt about that, get a load of the bigot they’ve just elected as NUS President, Malia Bouattia. You can read about her either in the Guardian or The Jewish Chronicle (see also here; people will discount the second source so I include the first)
Here are some comments that Bouattia made in 2014—speaking in her official capacity as NUS Black Students Officer—at a Tricontinental Anti-imperialist Platform and Invent the Future conference in September 2014. The video was subsequently removed (why is that?), but was leaked and is now back online:
Here is some of what she said:
“The notion of resistance has been perhaps washed out of our understanding of how colonised people will obtain their physical emancipation…With mainstream, Zionist-led media outlets …resistance is presented as an act of terrorism.
“But instead of us remembering that this has always been the case throughout struggles against white supremacy, it’s become an accepted discourse among too many…
“Internalised Islamophobia has also enabled our obsession with convincing non-Muslims of our non-violent and peaceful nature, so we’re taking things a step further and dangerously condemning the resistance, branding groups and individuals as terrorists to disassociate from them, but at the same time supporting their liberation which is a very strange contradiction.
“There’s a need to change how we think about these things. After all, the alternative to resistance is what we’ve been observing over the last 20 years or so, which is ‘peace talks’… essentially the strengthening of the colonial project.
“To consider that Palestine will be free only by means of fundraising, non-violent protest and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is problematic… My issue is that whilst at time it’s tactically used, or presented as the non-violent option, it can be misunderstood as the alternative to resistance by the Palestinian people…
“We also need to remember the Palestinians on the ground… who are actively sustaining the fight and the resistance against occupation and perhaps there’s a need to …take orders if we are to really show some form of solidarity”.
Note the reference to the “Mainstream, Zionist-led media outlets.” Haven’t you heard that before? It’s coded anti-Semitism, just as “states rights” was American code for “segregation” in the Sixties. Bouattia is raising the trope of “Jews controlling the world,” as in the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The phrase “the resistance” is also a euphemism, often used by pro-Palestinians, to mean “the violent assault and killing of Israeli civilians.” I believe she is justifying that here, and that’s supported by her claim that non-violent resistance is ineffectual, and that we should stop branding those who kill innocents as “terrorists.”
Bouattia has a long history of not only pro-Palestinian views, but also “anti-Zionist” views, which are views that Israel has no right to exist as a state or as a homeland for displaced Jews. But arguing that Israel has no right to exist at all, as many BDS supporters do, is a non-starter: it will not facilitate a two-state solution, or help remove settlers from the occupied areas. Nor will approving the killing of civilians—the “the resistance”. Those who kill unarmed Israeli civilians, including women and children, are celebrated as heroes in Gaza. That’s reprehensible. Yet when an Israeli soldier recently killed a wounded Palestianian, he was charged with manslaughter. Why is this difference ignored? It’s the bigotry of low expectations.
Besides no-platforming, the NUS has a history of coddling Muslim organizations, even those who are homophobic and misogynistic. This is also bigotry. The NUS—or at least freedom of speech—is in for a hard time under Boutattia’s tenure,
The Chronicle also reports this (my emphasis):
The warning signs have been there for years for all to see. It was Malia Bouattia who led the charge at the NUS to block a motion that sought to condemn ISIS and show solidarity to the Kurds fighting them, because it was deemed “Islamophobic.”
At this same meeting the NUS did pass a motion to boycott UKIP, and agreed to email every student in the country on polling day telling them to do likewise. Thus, in a sign of the terrible times in which we live, Britain’s student leadership found it easier to condemn UKIP than ISIS.
. . In 2011 Ms Bouattia co-authored a blog which lists a “large Jewish society” – by which she now insists she meant “Zionists” – as being one of the challenges at Birmingham University. But she even considers the UK government’s beleaguered Prevent strategy against extremism to be a result of the ‘Zionist lobby’.
Her bid for president was endorsed by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK), a group that has been banned by the NUS since 2004 after publishing material on its website originally published on neo-Nazi and Holocaust Denial websites, as well as their own post entitled “Take your holocaust, roll it nice and tight and shove it up your (be creative)!” MPACUK’s endorsement of her candidacy would be less concerning if she hadn’t appeared to welcome it, by replying “Thank you :-))”.
The new NUS president insists her concerns revolve around Zionism, not Judaism, and that her arguments are political, not faith based. But in an atmosphere in which the far-left and far-right are competing for people’s increased anger, is it any surprise that the same conference that saw her elected president applauded a speaker who argued that the NUS should not commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, because “it’s not inclusive.”
I’ve put that video below. The message is “we should just have a day in which we condemn every genocide.”
Fine. Then if we condemn Israeli misdeeds, we should condemn Palestinian misdeeds as well. And, if we’re going to decry the oppression of Muslims, we must also decry the oppression of gays and women by Muslims—and Muslim student societies.
There’s a fat chance that the NUS will do that! I find it amusing, in the following video, that the NUS applauds a call to commemorate every genocide, but won’t extend that philosophy to condemning every form of oppression and bigotry. And really, there’s no need to condemn everything at once: you just call out all malfeasances, case by case, as they come up. The NUS, of course, doesn’t do that: they’re “selective.” They are an organization marinated in identity politics and virtue signaling: the most obstructive and useless traits of the Authoritarian Left.
As Hannah Weisfeld notes in the Guardian:
Perhaps Bouattia does not know that significant numbers of Jews in this country have friends and close family in Israel and therefore she doesn’t realise why saying that “boycott can be misunderstood as the alternative to resistance by the Palestinian people” makes many Jewish students recoil. When she says “non-violent” resistance is not enough, she is endorsing violent resistance against their friends and family. Will Jewish students want to participate in broader student politics knowing the president of their union thinks the potential killing of their friends and family is a legitimate “act of resistance”?
Bouattia is well within her rights to criticise the policies of the Israeli government. Indeed, many British Jews do. She is perfectly entitled to say she is not a Zionist. But it seems she is unable to understand why invoking antisemitic tropes and supporting armed resistance against Israelis causes deep offence. And when she says, “For me to take issue with Zionist politics, is not me taking issue with being Jewish”, she shows a deep lack of understanding of Jewish identity.
What we can expect—and what I predict—is that under Bouattia the NUS will become the poster child for the Authoritarian Left. Our proper response to its shenanigans is not only to criticize it, but to mock it and satirize it.
Malia Bouattia. Photo: NUS/PA
UPDATE: I’ll add a comment from a Spiked piece criticizing the NUS; reader Jay gave the link in the comments below. Two excerpts from the piece:
No Platform, Safe Spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings – whatever form it comes in, campus censorship is borne of a barely veiled contempt for students. The NUS’s byzantine regime of speech codes, blacklists and disciplinary policies is fuelled by a view of students as either easily upset babies or goose-steppers in-waiting. Worse still, censorship makes you dumb. Spend half an hour in the NUS echo chamber and you’ll see what I mean. To hone your ideas, you need to be free to argue and test them. To find out about new ones, you need to be free to listen.
. . . NUS politicos like to pose as radicals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from passing the odd motion condemning Israel (I’m sure that made Netanyahu blink), the NUS’s stock-in-trade is micromanaging campus life. It believes students are too delicate to deal with the world, let alone try to change it. Student politics has never been perfect. But in the past it at least provided an outlet for students’ radical ambitions. Insisting on being treated like adults is the first step toward making history. A union that harnesses that spirit, is the union that students need.
I’ve often written about the unconscionable and undeserved criticism, and even hatred, that Sam Harris gets—and not just from religious people! It’s often the nonbelievers and secularists who heap the most opprobrium on him: for supposedly being “Islamophobic,” for supposedly advocating “racial profiling” and torture, for supposedly advocating nuclear first strikes on Muslim nations, and even for daring to suggest that moral judgments may be “objective.”
I say “supposedly” in the last sentence because if there’s anything that characterizes the nastiest criticisms of Sam Harris, it’s that more often than not they’re based on either misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation of his claims. Most of us know this, but few people who engage in Harris-bashing bother to go back and read what he actually said. It’s just too easy to demonize him by name-calling or quoting, secondhand, Harrisophobes like Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan, or C. J. W*rl*man. Even Sam’s neo-utilitarian views on ethics get unwarranted criticism, I think. I myself take issue with some of his views on morality, but the ways they are criticized are all out of proportion to what was, in effect, a calm ethical treatise. After all, you don’t see philosophers going after Jeremy Bentham with the same vigor, even though Sam’s views are an updated version of Bentham’s.
I’ve long pondered why people make such vicious and unwarranted criticisms of Harris, even compared to other New Atheists like Hitchens or Dennett. I think there are two reasons.
First, Sam asks hard questions, and people don’t like to think about hard questions. Should we ever lie? Is torture ever justifiable? Is it even possible to even imagine a first strike against Islamic enemies? Is it possible that religion can really be a strong motivator for bad acts, including Islamist terrorism? Is our notion of “free will”—of agency—a complete illusion? Is it justifiable to profile people at airports based on their religious beliefs?
These questions need to be asked, not dismissed by slandering the questioner. But all too often they are dismissed, and Sam gets excoriated for even raising the question. “He’s in favor of racial profiling!”, they cry. “He’s an Islamophobe!” “He favors torture!” “He wants to nuke all Muslims!” None of these characterizations are accurate: they’re simply slanders that arise when Sam tries to make people wedded to identity politics examine their beliefs. But those people would rather do anything than question their beliefs.
The view that some questions shouldn’t be asked, that some ideas are too sacred to question, is inimical to a democratic society. It’s a valid question whether we should engage (as El Al does, and they’ve never had a terrorist incident) in profiling people based on their religious beliefs. Wouldn’t that be more efficient than examining 3 year old Finnish kids, or aged Christian priests in wheelchairs? It’s not “racist” to ask that question, and to examine its moral and practical implications. Is torture ever justifiable? I don’t know, for although it works sometimes, often it doesn’t, and we haven’t had an incident yet where I consider it justified. But it’s certainly worth discussing the issue in light of the American penchant for waterboarding and other horrible practices; and it’s worth discussing whether, even if it were justified in one case, it would have a detrimental effect on our democratic system as a whole.
When people have neither the energy nor intellectual acumen to deal with hard questions, they issue smears. They turn valid questions into violations of sacred, not-to-be-questioned tenets. And when that happens, democracy and Enlightenment values fall by the wayside. If anything is essential in an enlightened and progressive society, it’s the right—and necessity—to question accepted views and mores. That is, of course, the basis of freedom of speech. When that is prevented, as the Authoritarian Left is trying to do, then demagogues like Donald Trump step in to fill the gap.
Socrates was given hemlock for making Greek youth think about questions that were deemed dangerous. Harris has been given verbal hemlock for doing the same thing. He doesn’t deserve the opprobrium he gets, and many of his critics are guilty of willful distrortion of Sam’s views. The same thing has happened to philosopher Peter Singer for daring to even suggest that we might discuss the morality of euthanizing deformed or cognitatively disabled newborns. That is a discussion worth having, but it’s been deemed A Question That Can’t Be Asked; and, like Harris, Singer has become the object of hate and scorn.
Which brings us to the second reason people dislike Harris. It’s not a reason people like to discuss, as it shows a darker side of human nature. It’s jealousy. Sam is a public intellectual and has achieved considerable popularity (and notoriety!) in his writing about diverse religious and philosophical topics. As we know from the case of Carl Sagan and his successors, academics don’t like those who become famous by writing popular tracts in areas they see as their own bailiwick. Sam has done that for religion, and he’s done it for philosophy. The Australians call this the “Tall Poppy Syndrome”: a poppy that grows too tall has to be cut back. The Japanese equivalent is “the nail that sticks up should be hammered down.”
I think it’s undeniable that many people who criticize Sam are jealous of his success. They often imply as much, pointing with scorn at his “bestselling books,” and even saying that their own works haven’t achieved that much success. But they do this to criticize Sam, not realizing that by so doing they’re showing their own hand. If asked, they would–and do–vehemently deny that they’re jealous. But of course they would! Who would admit to such a base emotion? Regardless, I think it’s undeniable that criticism of Sam from some quarters is based largely on jealousy. If you claim that can’t possibly be true, I’d argue that you don’t know much about human nature.
At any rate, Jeff’s long article is an eloquent defense of Sam, and a telling presentation of how people have distorted Sam’s views. (There are a lot of links so you can check the claims for yourself.) I won’t reprise it as you simply have to read it. Then by all means give your reactions below. I’ll just add below three paragraphs that comprise the peroration of Jeff’s piece:
One cannot escape the impression that the attacks on Harris bear the stamp of sordid identity politics, with, under the guise of multiculturalism, truth sacrificed for the respect for retrograde customs. But perhaps what irks Harris’ detractors most of all is the methodical way in which he demonstrates the link between Islamic doctrines and terrorist violence, and disassembles the case for religion, showing, through his work, that it is nothing more than “a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance,” yet a marriage that could be annulled by “making the same evidentiary demands in religious matters that we make in all others.” (Both these quotes come from The End of Faith’s first chapter.) By extension, Harris’ arguments collide with the identities of people finding community in religion. If he were not succeeding in proving the case against faith, they and their apologists would not react to him with such vitriol.
An unwillingness to recognize the link between Islamic doctrine and terrorism in particular presages seismic political changes, with Western societies, fed up with Islamist violence and the inability of progressive governments to even speak frankly about it, lurching ever farther to the right. (This is happening in Europe today, of course.) But libeling Harris will not stop the next ISIS attack on Western soil, or slow that group’s depredations in Syria and Iraq.
Now more than ever, we need clarity on the relation between Islam and violence. And we need to stop denigrating those, like Harris, capable of bringing us that clarity.
I do notice that there are lots of supportive comments after Jeff’s piece, and that’s a good sign. Here’s one of them:
h/t: Peter Boghossian for discussing these issues with me
UPDATE: In the comments below, reader coel called attention to a new piece in the Observer asking a related question: Why do so many western liberals hate Ayaan Hirsi Ali? That’s also worth a read. In fact, I’d add this question, “Why do so many western liberals despise moderate Muslims, or ex-Muslims, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz?”
