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.
It’s Thursday, April 7, and I get to do a video interview with the estimable Gad Saad on his new show, which will eventually be posted (stay tuned). On this day in 1805, Beethoven premiered his Third Symphony (the odd-numbered ones are best) in Vienna, and, in 1829, Joseph Smith began his translation of the bogus “golden plates” that became the Book of Mormon. On April 7, 1994, the Rwandan genocide began, with the 100-day death toll ranging between half a million and a million citizens. Notables born on this day include William Wordsworth (1770), Billie Holiday (1915), and the great sitar player and composer (and, of course, influencer of rock music) Ravi Shankar (1920), and Jackie Chan (1954). The Google Doodle celebrates Pandit Shankar’s birthday (he died in 2012 at 92), and if you click on the Doodle screenshot below, you’ll go to an Independent article giving five little-known facts about the man:
Those who died on April 7 include El Greco (1614), P. T. Barnum (1891), Henry Ford (1947), and Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof-Cohen (2014).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pampered (as usual):
Hili: It’s great to bury onself in a still-warm bed after a night on the tiles.
A: Shall I cover you?
Hili: No, thank you, this is perfect.
In Polish:
Hili: To wspaniałe, po nocnych szaleństwach zagrzebać się w jeszcze ciepłym łóżku.
Ja: Przykryć cię?
Hili: Nie, dziękuję, jest optymalnie.
And in nearby Wroclawek, Leon is puzzled:
Leon: The birds are strangely timid.
Extra lagniappe: reader Amy sent a photo, taken from Facebook, of a snowy owl admitted to Raptor Rehab for a broken wing. Lovely, eh? (It looks a bit like Gus!)
Stressed out about Special Snowflakes? Unwind with some humor from BuzzFeed: nerdy science jokes. There are 22, but I’ll give just four. The article notes that only the “nerdiest science nerds” will understand them, but I take strong issue with that. And it’s by Tom Chivers, once a respectable journalist who appears to have now been corrupted by the BuzzFeed clickbait ethos.
ThinkStock / BuzzFeed Via @drrichjlaw.Unsplash / Will Langenberg / BuzzFeed / Via unsplash.com Via @schroedinger99.
This one’s for Brits:
ThinkStock / BuzzFeed Via @jackdeeth.Mikael Kristenson / Unsplash / BuzzFeed / Via unsplash.com
The really nerdy bit is the explanation that follows the cartoon just above:
Via @kerihw, who wishes to point out that, technically, 2D shapes don’t have faces, they have sides, so his joke doesn’t work.
Several readers alerted me to this incident, but at least one of them thought it was an April Fool’s joke. It was not. But that’s how close the actions of college students in the U.S. and U.K. come to parody. And this kind of stuff is getting so common that it’s barely worth noting. The reason I’m putting it up is not only because it’s so ludicrous, but also because it was reported (with unfavorable comments about Authoritarian Leftists) in major media outlets like Newsweek, PuffHo UK, and The Torygraph.
The story is brief. Imogen Wilson, 22, is a music student who happens to be vice-president of the Students Association at Edinburgh University (EUSA). She attended one of their meetings discussing the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), whose goal is to change Israeli policy towards Palestinians by boycotting Israeli products, meetings, and so on. The pro-BDS motion passed during that meeting by a vote of 249-153.
Wilson is opposed to BDS, believing it to be anti-Semitic, at least in part, and divisive on college campuses (you can see her published viewpoint here). At some point in the meeting, someone criticized her for failing to respond to an open letter, thereby somehow letting down handicapped students. Wilson, who says she tried to contact the letter’s writers and organize a meeting about it, then tried to raise her hand to get attention and rebut that point. That’s when the trouble started.
Here’s the troublemaker:
Imogen Wilson, in Teviot debating hall at Edinburgh University in March 2015, where she was accused of violating ‘safe space’ rules at a student council meeting on Thursday night. IMOGEN WILSON/FACEBOOK
At that point, a “safe space complaint” was made noting Wilson’s arm-waving violated the EUSA safe space policy. And indeed it did! Here’s the relevant regulation from that policy. Pay attention to sections c, e, and f:
EUSA safe space policy:
6. All members are expected to conduct themselves in a manner which is respectful and considerate of the contributions of others. This is defined as:
a. Allowing Council members to speak when called upon by the chair.
b. Refraining from speaking over, interrupting, heckling, laughing at or otherwise distracting from the speaker who holds the floor.
c. Refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement or in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made. Disagreements should only be evident through the normal course of debate.
d. Avoiding using gestures which are not generally known or accepted by Council.
e. Gestures indicating agreement are permissible, if these gestures are generally understood and not used in an intimidating manner.
f. Applause is acceptable when a motion is passed only, not if a motion fails to pass. Otherwise, agreement should be made clear within debate contributions.
The meeting was halted while the participants voted whether to expel Wilson from it for violating the policy. Fortunately, common sense prevailed, but only by a vote of 18-33.
Wilson almost got into hot water a bit later for another unsafe gesture: head shaking! As she explains in the Torygraph:
Ms Wilson said she believed that safe space rules banning gestures of disagreement, which were drawn up under the tenure of previous sabbatical officers, were “a little extreme” and had been used as a “political” tool against her after she spoke out against anti-Semitism.
“I totally do believe in safe space and the principles behind it,” she told the Telegraph. “It’s supposed to enhance free speech and not shut it down, and give everyone a chance to feel like they can contribute.“Safe space is essential for us to have a debate where everyone can speak, but it can’t become a tool for the hard left to use when they disagree with people.”
She said: “At that meeting we were discussing BDS, the movement to boycott Israel. I made a long and passionate speech against us subscribing to this, on the basis it encourages anti-Semitism on campus. It was only after I made that speech that someone made a safe space complaint. I can’t help but think it was a political move against me.
“Later on in the meeting, someone threatened me with a second complaint because I was shaking my head – but when I was addressing the room about my worries about Jewish students, there were plenty of people shaking their heads and nothing happened.”
Two points. Edinburgh University? I thought the Scots were a sober and hard-working folk, not prone to craziness like this (yes, I know that many EU students aren’t Scots). And the fact that this was reported so widely, and not with approbation, shows that people are starting to take note of, and deplore, the excesses of Authorian Leftist college students.
As for Ms. Wilson, I’m sure she can take care of herself. But I’m not so sure about the Edinburgh Snowflakes, who need dumb rules like the above (I do agree with the no-heckling and speak-when-called-upon rules) to keep their spaces “safe.”
Finally, one indicator of how fed up everyone’s getting with this nonsense is Monday’s editorial in the moderate Chicago Tribune, “Defending free speech on college campuses“. A snippet:
Free expression is not faring well on American college campuses these days. In some places, the problem is students taking grave offense at opinions that merit only minor umbrage or none at all. In others, it’s official speech codes that chill discussion. In still others, it’s administrators so intent on preventing sexual harassment that they avoid open discussion of gender-related matters.
There is a lot to be said for making people aware of the ways in which their words and deeds can do harm. No one wants to go back to the days when casual expressions of racial prejudice were common, or when women were mocked for taking places that should have gone to men, or when some professors made passes at students.
But it’s important not to go so far in protecting undergraduates that they lose the spontaneous and open interactions they need to understand the world and the society in which they live. An education that spares students from unwanted challenges to their thinking is not much of an education.
The piece then gives some examples of ludicrous safe-space policies and actions, and ends like this:
. . . . The University of Chicago has taken the lead in defending free speech on campus. Last year, a special committee issued a statement noting the importance of civility but upholding “the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”
We hope the administrators, faculty and students of other universities are listening.
Not long ago I posted about Joy Karega, who appears to be an unhinged anti-Semite, bigot and conspiracy theorist who fits right in at perhaps the most Authoritarian Leftist college in the U.S.: Oberlin (Ohio). If she had posted stuff about Muslims the way she has about Jews, she’d have been subject to far greater approprbrium. But never mind, for as I noted before, however hateful and ridiculous she is on social media, that shouldn’t impinge on her job, for it’s freedom of speech. The only issue for Oberlin is this: is she doing her job teaching as an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition? Or is she bullying, brainwashing, or censoring what her students say? Does she promulgate stuff like this (highlighted by Inside Higher Ed) in her classroom?:
Well of course what’s highlighted is a lie: ISIS is not run by the CIA and Mossad (the Israeli equivalent of the CIA). But if she wants to promulgate lies and delusions on her Facebook page, she should be able to do so without penalty. But she can’t do it in the classroom. (Note too that the spelling and style above is not exactly what one would want from a professor of rhetoric and composition!)
I have no idea about that, but I wasn’t aware what she was teaching until I saw the post above and Grania called my attention to an article about Karega in The Tablet (a Jewish website). Yes, “Social Justice Writing”!
Were I an administrator or department chair at Oberlin, I’d be just a wee bit worried about what’s going on in this classroom, for it sounds like she’s propagandizing her students. And that, as opposed to her extracurricular delusions and hate, is what could affect her professional fate. Tablet agrees:
As the New York Times reported, Karega, a professor of rhetoric and composition, teaches “social justice writing courses.” According to Oberlin’s course catalog, one such class is “RHET 204 – Writing for Social Justice.” In it, “Students will develop, negotiate, and revise their own writing strategies and ethics as they write on social justice issues relevant to their interests.”
In other words, Oberlin hired an unrepentant bigot to teach undergraduates to write about justice and guide them in their moral development.
This astounding fact suggests that the entire hiring process for social justice-related fields at Oberlin is fundamentally broken and easily gamed. After all, it’s difficult to imagine a greater or more systemic failure than Karega being chosen to teach students how to communicate about moral causes.
Seen in this light, the debate over whether Oberlin should discipline or fire Karega is a distraction from an even more serious reckoning. Because whether Karega herself leaves or stays on, Oberlin must account for itself far beyond one individual professor. It must ask how its hiring committees missed the signs that they were contracting a bigot to teach ethics. What questions did they fail to pose during the interview process? What areas of the applicant’s background and past work did they fail to investigate? Did any members of the faculty who chose Karega share her prejudices and thus allow them to slide? If Karega could slip by, who else might have?
On the other hand, if the school merely scapegoats Karega while letting off those who enabled her to come in contact with undergraduates in the first place, Oberlin will have demonstrated that it is not interested in addressing its prejudice problem, but rather suppressing its symptoms.
Now it’s not always clear what constitutes propagandizing and what constitutes a professor’s own viewpoint, one that must be justifiable. Regardless, though, in matters like ISIS, a professor must allow some dissent in the classroom. It’s not clear that Karega is doing that.
On the other hand, because she’s teaching at Oberlin, it’s entirely possible that her entire class is composed of people who think like her—though it’s hard to imagine a classroom of kids who all think ISIS is being run by Israel and the CIA. The fact that Karega is “proud” of the apparent ideological agreement among her students is something that should raise alarms.
But, as you recall, Oberlin is the home of the Great Cafeteria Scandal, in which students raised a ruckus about General Tso’s Chicken being made with steamed rather than deep-fried meat, and gustatorially incorrect banh mi sandwiches. It’s perhaps the most extreme example of what happens when virtue signalling and victimhood promotion dominate higher education.
Lord help these students when they try to get jobs! With luck they could get a sinecure like Karega’s, but it’s more likely that they’ll wind up as unemployed (and unemployable) Authoritarian Left bloggers, begging for money on Patreon.
Briggs et al. describe a Silurian fossil (about 430 million years old) from a formation in the UK, a fossil that appears to have a unique method of brood care. It was a tiny fossil, only 1 cm long, and finding out what it really was took careful preparation: grinding it away bit by bit (and of course destroying the specimen), and imaging it at each stage to produce a three-dimensional reconstruction. The animal proved (see below) to be an early arthropod.
What Briggs et al. found in the reconstruction was remarkable. Tethered to the “tergites” of the specimen (the post-cranial segments of the beast) were ten capsules, each attached by a long filament. And each of those roughly triangular, kite-shaped capsules (ranging 0.5 to 2.0 mm in size) consists of an outer shell containing a mass of tissue, some with limbs visible. The capsules are tethered to the parent specimen with long filamentous threads. Here’s what it looks like in reconstruction:
What were these weird attachments? The most likely explanation is that they’re offspring of the specimen, being carried around—perhaps for protection of the developing embryos.
Although weird, this is not completely unknown in animals. As the authors point out, the developing embryos of the freshwater crayfish Astacida are atttached to the mother by smaller stalks, and I’ve managed to find a photo of that in a paper from 2004:
However, these aren’t the long filaments (or tough embryo-containing capsules) described in the Briggs et al. paper. In that respect, what they found in this specimen, named Aquilonifer spinosus, is unique among animals. By the way, the source of the name is described by the authors:
The name of the new taxon refers to the fancied resemblance between the tethered individuals and kites, and echoes the title of the 2003 novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (aquila, eagle or kite; –fer, suffix meaning carry; thus aquilonifer, kite bearer; spinosus, spiny, referring to the long lateral spines on the tergites).
I can’t think of any other animal named after a novel, but I’m sure there must be at least one.
The authors suggest, and reject, two other possibilities for these tethered kite-like structures: they could be parasites, or they could be epizoans (nonparasitic organisms that colonize others). They rule out parasites because there doesn’t appear to be any advantage for a parasite to absorb nutrients from a host through such long threads, and because the places where the threads attach to the “host”—on its spines—aren’t a great place to suck nutrients from.
They also argue that epizoans are unlikely because none are known that attach in this way, because ten epizoans probably would have killed the specimen (which was apparently alive and healthy when preserved), and because A. spinosus could have cleaned off such epizoans with its long head appendages. I agree with the authors that these capsules, particularly because some contain tissue with legs, are likely to represent a heretofore unknown form of brood care.
Finally, where does this new species fit? As I noted above, it’s an arthropod, at least based on the cladistic analysis conducted by the authors. The cladogram based on many morphological characters puts it with the arthropods (node 1), but in particular with the Mandibulata (node 4), the subgroup that includes centipedes, millipedes, crustaceans, and “hexapods” (insects and three other and much smaller groups):
Fig. 2. Cladogram showing the phylogenetic position of A. spinosus gen. et sp. nov. Shown is a strict consensus of the 12 most parsimonious trees of 142.16612 steps (consistency index = 0.513; retention index = 0.870), produced using New Technology search options in TNT (tree analysis using new technology) and using implied character weighting with a concavity constant of three. Numbers above nodes are GC support values. 1, Euarthropoda (crown- group); 2, total-group Chelicerata; 3, Artiopoda; 4, total-group Mandibulata; 5, Mandibulata (crown-group).
The upshot: the paper doesn’t really produce new generalizations about life, but rather the discovery of a particular way of life that was completely surprising. There’s nothing wrong with such an anecdotal observations, for that’s the kind of thing—the multifarious and unexpected variety of life—that keeps our wonder alive.
h/t: Barrie
Addendum, by Greg Mayer: Jerry did not get a chance to go to hear Derek Briggs at the Field Museum yesterday but I did, and Jerry asked for a report.
Briggs talked mostly about his work on the “kite runner” (which, he noted, he named after Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel), so I won’t restate what Jerry covers admirably above. Briggs mentioned that the reviewers were less certain than he was that the ‘kites’ were juveniles, rather than parasites or something else, and that he did see the reviewers’ point, but still thinks they are juveniles. He showed a number of neat 3-dimensional rotating videos of their fossil reconstructions. For a museum audience, it was a bit wince-inducing, but understandable, to know that the method of preparation destroyed the specimen. Briggs is a also a museum guy, and is working to develop non-destructive forms of imaging, and was consulting on this trip with physicists at Argonne National Laboratory. Such imaging would also be enormously time saving, as the specimens come in nodules, and they don’t know what fossil is in a nodule till it’s ground through a considerable ways. He also quipped that PNAS (where his paper was published) stands for “Probably Not Acceptable in Science“, which is a “nerdy science joke“. (BTW, I think Jerry’s Artie O’Dactyl also eminently qualifies as a “nerdy science joke“!)
He made two other interesting points. First, the apparent extinction of many of the unusual soft-bodied forms at the end of the Cambrian seems to be a preservational artifact. There is a period from the late Cambrian into the Ordovician from which no lagerstatten are known. (Lagerstatten are deposits with unusual preservation in which soft parts are fossilized, such as the Burgess Shale of British Columbia.) Cambrian “weirdos” are now turning up in these later lagerstatten. For example, anomalocarids (well known in the Burgess Shale), are also now known from the Fezouata, Morocco, lagerstatte, which is Ordovician. There are a lot of taxa represented in the Ordovician, which is the peak of diversity origination, referred to as “GOBE” (the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event).
Second, he talked a fair amount about limb evolution in arthropods, and noted that an early horseshoe crab, Dibasterium, had an extra row of legs compared to modern Limulus. In Limulus, it turns out that important “leg genes” are also activated in the embryo in a row of small spots parallel and lateral to the actual legs– in just the places where Dibasterium‘s extra legs are! (The developmental work was done by someone else.) This reminded me of the phenomenon in vertebrates with reduced numbers of toes in which toe primordia develop a bit, and then regress.
This past Sunday, Joseph Medicine Crow, the last war chief of the Crow Nation, died at the age of 102 in Billings, Montana. His passing has been widely noted in the media, and one of the tributes I heard on Monday noted that his life and exploits ‘spanned centuries’. This might seem something obvious to say of a centenarian, but in fact he linked not just the 20th and 21st centuries, but also the 19th: raised in the traditional manner by Crow elders, he grew up steeped in the ways of the warrior culture of the second half of the 19th century, and may well have been the last living person whose knowledge of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (aka Custer’s Last Stand) came from intimate contact with participants in the battle.
Joseph Medicine Crow, last war chief of the Crow Nation, 1913-2016.
His grandfather was a Crow war chief, and his step-grandfather was the famed Crow warrior White Man Runs Him, who fought with Custer at the Little Bighorn. (This might at first seem paradoxical, but the Crow were traditional enemies of the Sioux, and generally fought with the U.S. Army against the Sioux.) He became a war chief because, while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II, he achieved all the deeds required for a Crow to be esteemed a war chief: he led a war party, he touched a living enemy in combat, disarmed an enemy in combat, and stole enemy horses. The last deed is a very improbable event in modern warfare, and, unless Crow rules change, why it is unlikely there will be another war chief. The stories are best told by Medicine Crow himself, in the following clip from Ken Burns’ film series, The War; but I must mention the most moving part. Having vanquished a German soldier in hand to hand combat, Medicine Crow was about to kill him by choking, when the German uttered what would have been his last words, “mama, mama”. “That word, ‘mama’,” said Medicine Crow, “opened my ears”; he let the German go.
But Medicine Crow was not just a warrior. He was an historian and anthropologist of academic note, studying at Linville College and the University of Southern California. He became the tribal historian, participating in many activities associated with the historic interpretation and commemoration of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2009.
Being interested in American history, and having read several books on the Battle of the Little Bighorn last winter, I am somewhat chagrined to admit that I did not know of Joseph Medicine Crow until his passing. In addition to White Man Runs Him, who was family, he also knew the Custer scout Hairy Moccasin, and the most famous of the Indians who accompanied Custer, Curley (Ashishishe). The scouts with Custer, while enlisted in the Army, were not required to participate in the fighting (although they often, by choice or force of circumstances, did so). As they approached what would become the battlefield, Custer’s Crow scouts were released by Mitch Boyer, his half French, half Sioux, guide and interpreter. Curley, however, stayed longer with the soldiers, and witnessed the opening of the fighting on the Custer battlefield. White Man Runs Him and the others headed back along the trail, and soon joined into fighting alongside the remainder of the 7th Cavalry (the group commanded by Marcus Reno that survived).
Mitch Boyer. Attached to the 7th Cavalry, he died with Custer at the Little Bighorn.
Curley had long been lauded as the only survivor of that part of the 7th Cavalry that rode with Custer, but later was discredited, even by other Crows. John Gray, in his masterful Custer’s Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed, has through careful analysis been able to make sense of the varying accounts, and has shown that Curley’s account was truthful and consistent– he was not in the battle, but stayed with Custer long enough to see its early stages and Custer’s opening disposition of his men. (Most of Curley’s reports have been gathered together by Graham [1953]).
Gray’s book, half of which is a fascinating biography of Mitch Boyer, is also a marvel of historical detective work, finding an unlikely number of contemporaneous documents, and also showing how difficult the history of that time and place can be to unravel. Up until at least the early part of the 20th century, few Indian warriors spoke English, even fewer soldiers spoke an Indian language, and translated accounts often passed through interpreters with a point of view. Careful historical analysis can help pierce the fog of incomprehension; and so, too, could fluently bilingual historians like Joseph Medicine Crow.
Graham, W.A. 1953. The Custer Myth: A Source Book of Custeriana. Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, Pa.
Gray, J.S. 1993. Custer’s Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Philbrick, N. 2010. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Viking Penguin, New York.
Scott, D.D. 2013. Uncovering History: Archaeological Investigations at the Little Bighorn. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Utley, R.S. 2001. Custer: Cavalier in Buckskin. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
The Jesus and Mo artist is “back from hols” and presents a brand-new strip. And indeed, Mo has a faux-credible argument that cartoons mocking Islam or Muhammad directly incite violence. It’s just that they do so in the reverse way:
