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.
Another week gone; another week closer to the Big Sleep. But spring is stirring, and Hili is hungry:
Malgorzata: Look, how beautifull the forsythia is flowering.
Hili: Last year it was flowering with a sparrow nest inside.
Małgorzata: Patrz jak forsycja pięknie zakwitła.
Hili: W zeszłym roku kwitła z gniazdkiem wróbelka w środku.
Over at Sandwalk, Larry Moran is rightfully incensed at creationist flack Vincent Torley, and they’re having a kerfuffle: Torley’s unjustly accused Larry of not thinking that natural selection had a role in the genetic divergence between apes and humans. Torley has apparently apologized.
Now, in a new post about the flap, Moran makes the best Freudian slip I’ve seen about ID creationists. Here’s a screenshot:
I’m sure this is unintentional because Larry deliberately avoids nasty language and slurs.
And I’ll have to define Freudian slip here: “It’s when you say one thing and mean your mother.”
I’ll be here all week, folks.
h/t: Doc Bill
by Greg Mayer
The Mammal Society, a membership society devoted to the conservation and scientific study of the mammals of the British Isles, has recently released the top photos from its second annual Mammal Photographer of the Year awards, and there are quite a few absolutely fabulous photos in the competition. This year’s first-prize winner is Stuart Scott for a brown hare (Lepus europaeus).
Brown hares were introduced into Britain during Iron Age times; they generally live further south in Britain, and at lower elevations, than the native mountain hare (Lepus timidus).
My favorite finalist, which was ranked “highly commended” by the Mammal Society judges, is this vole with English oak acorns (Quercus robur; you can tell it’s English oak by the pedunculate acorns). (Voles were among my earliest interests here at WEIT; you can read up on the British ones at Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology).
I’m not sure if it’s a bank vole (Myodes glareolus) or a field vole (Microtus agrestis). The easiest way to tell the two apart is that bank voles have longer tails, which can’t be seen in this photo. Bank voles are a richer brown, and eat more seeds, which makes me lean bank, but the small ears are more “fieldy“: I hope some naturalist readers in Britain can enlighten us!
The rest of the winners, plus the winners and finalists from the 2013 competition, can all be seen on the Mammal Society’s flickr page. There are several sets, and they are quite worthwhile browsing through. The BBC also has some of the photos, including some not on the flickr page– my favorite of these is the young Sam Baylis‘s picture of a water vole (Arvicola terrestris) holding some vegetation in its ‘hands”.
Just a note: I’ve extensively rewritten my post on Jeffrey Kripal’s execrable defense of woo in The Chronicles of Higher Education (thanks to my secular pals who gave extensive feedback), and it’s just been published in The New Republic as “The latest anti-science argument comes down to ESP.” You’ll see that it’s largely a new piece, or at least has big new chunks.
If you’re so inclined, favor the New Republic site with a click or a comment, for I want to keep the message of secularism and naturalism in the public eye.
Ambrose Bierce’s famous “Devil’s Dictionary,” in which he defines words darkly and sarcastically, is online, and is well worth glancing at. He’s merciless with religion, for instance:
SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
The Duchess of Orleans relates that the irreverent old calumniator, Marshal Villeroi, who in his youth had known St. Francis de Sales, said, on hearing him called saint: “I am delighted to hear that Monsieur de Sales is a saint. He was fond of saying indelicate things, and used to cheat at cards. In other respects he was a perfect gentleman, though a fool.”
I’m going to start my own Devil’s Dictionary, I think, and my first definition is this one:
SOPHISTICATED THEOLOGIAN™, n. A theologian who uses big words and is better than other theologians at insulating religion from critical examination.
Does that sound good? I’m reading David Bentley Hart’s new book, and, halfway through, realized that people like Hart, who are regarded as the theologians who make the Best Arguments for God—the ones atheists are supposed to take on board—are precisely the ones who propose a kind of God who is so nebulous, so hard to fathom, that that God cannot be examined as a hypothesis. (And make no mistake about it: Hart does propose evidence for God, in the form of a revised Cosmological Argument. But he also argues that he’s not giving evidence for God.) I’m just throwing this out for discussion, for it seems that the theologians who are most highly regarded by intellectuals are the ones who are the most clever at insulating their god and their faith from refutation. They use not reason, but sophistry, confirmation bias, and obscurantism.
If you have a better definition, please put it in the comments!
Count on it: when you see a 5-4 decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, it means—except for rare exceptions like the “Obamacare” vote—very bad news for liberals.
And it happened again yesterday, with the court voting to eliminate the cap on the total amount of money individuals could contribute to all federal candidates in an election. The five-vote majority included all of the usual conservative suspects: Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion), Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy. Thomas wrote his own concurring opinion, and you can see the full court decision in McCutcheon et al. v. Federal Election Commission, with Breyer’s withering dissent—co-signed by Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan—here.
As the New York Times reports:
Wednesday’s decision did not affect familiar base limits on contributions from individuals to candidates, currently $2,600 per candidate in primary and general elections. But it said that overall limits of $48,600 by individuals every two years for contributions to all federal candidates violated the First Amendment, as did separate aggregate limits on contributions to political party committees, currently $74,600.
. . . Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for four justices in the controlling opinion, said the overall limits could not survive First Amendment scrutiny. “There is no right in our democracy more basic,” he wrote, “than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”
In a dissent from the bench, Justice Stephen G. Breyer called the majority opinion a disturbing development that raised the overall contribution ceiling to “the number infinity.”
“If the court in Citizens United opened a door,” he said, “today’s decision may well open a floodgate.” [JAC: In the “Citizens United” case, the Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money on election campaigns.]
In his written opinion, Justice Breyer said Wednesday’s decision would allow “a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate’s campaign.” He was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The ruling was on First Amendment grounds, with individual political contributions considered by the majority as a form of “free speech”. That’s a bizarre twist, because it isn’t immediately obvious that such donations constitute “speech”, just as it doesn’t seem obvious that corporations are people, another path the court has broken. (The previous donation caps were also also allowed in the name of “political speech,” but the limits were set low to prevent corruption.)
Although the $2,600 per candidate limit looks small, it’s deceptive. The total amount of spending per federal campaign cycle is now $3.6 million per individual, and you can put all of that, if you wish, toward a single candidate simply by directing it to that candidate through special fund-raising committees. The donations, in effect, get laundered.
The problem, of course, is that—at least in America—money talks, and money has a huge influence on the outcome of elections. That’s why candidates engage in a frenzy of fundraising, and why the sizes of candidates’ warchests are regularly reported. You can, in fact, buy elections in this country through advertising (often negative) and other forms of promotion.
This shouldn’t happen in a democracy. Those having more money should not be allowed to unduly influence the political process. Chief Justice Roberts claimed that the Court’s brief was not to level the playing field, but that in fact is what we need. Nobody, be they liberal or conservative (like the Koch brothers), should be able to disproportionately influence an election merely because they’re rich. If one needs spending caps, then they must be sensible ones, affordable by the average American.
As Justice Breyer said in his dissent:
The anticorruption interest that drives Congress to regulate campaign contributions is a far broader, more important interest than the plurality acknowledges. . . It is an interest in maintaining the integrity of our public governmental institutions.
Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.
Welcome to the plutocracy.
A spate of readers’ contributions are forming a big backlog, but that’s good as I’ll be in California most of next week, unable to contribute much beyond stored posts. But let me put up two items now. The first is a report on the famous rescue cat Butter, whose awesome technical skills (exercised under the name of “Anonypuss,” helped bring victory to the cat token in Monopoly, and allow kittens to triumph over puppies and human infants in the old Cuteness Contest).
Butter’s staff, Stephen Q. Muth, sent two photos of the fluffy puss accompanied by some commentary. Let me first add that Butter got a “lion cut” yesterday, and I’ve asked for before-and-after pictures of his summer furcut. Those will be up within the next few days. Stephen writes:
Butter’s operation was a success, after one false start… where he got a squirrel cut instead of a lion cut. (it all in the tail) I did also get some vid of Butter doing his fire safety maneuver in the dirt (stop, drop and roll) shortly after he got outside. So also sending this post-bath pic, where he is looking especially unamused. (note the ample cat detritus in the hallway).
This is one affronted cat!
Apparently Butter was taken back to the groomer to have his “squirrel cut” (no shaving on tail) converted to a “lion cut” (a puffball shaved on the tip of his tail). Here he is about to get his yearly cut:
I took him back to get the puff ball. 🙂 And there’s before and after pics. Liz (groomer) said she hadn’t seen him quite that fuzzy before. Now he’s pint-sized. (and very comfy and lovey)
Finally, reader Su, who has awesome artistic skills, sent a cartoon she made featuring not only the famous Snowball, the Famous Dancing Cockatoo, with whom she is associated, but an importuning moggie:
Well, there’s no obvious wildlife here, but we get an awesome Idaho landscape from reader/photographer Stephen Barnard. His title: “After the storm.”
